scraped a line of parked cars as it barreled forward. Sparks flew past the truck window like firecracker debris.
Judy glanced back at the dark car. It was only a block away. Close enough for a good shot. “No!” she heard herself screaming. She twisted forward. The truck was racing toward the intersection straight ahead. The traffic light was red. A Mayflower moving van was already nosing into the grid. In a second they would get trapped between the Coluzzis and the van. They would die unless they could beat the van. In a split second Judy read Frank’s mind. “Do it!” she hollered, and Frank floored the gas.
The truck leaped forward like a runaway bull and thundered toward the intersection. Frank threw an arm over Judy’s body, holding her back like a seat belt. “I got you,” he said, but his words vanished in the blare of the van’s horn, blowing like a Klaxon.
The truck zoomed toward the van. The van was almost all the way into the intersection. Judy was close enough to see the driver’s horrified face as he tried to stop the van. His brakes screeched. Black smoke came from his tires. His momentum was too great. The opening was narrowing. They wouldn’t make it. Judy’s heart jumped in her chest.
Frank cut the steering wheel back with a violent jerk. The truck swerved wildly around the van’s monstrous hood, then shot past. Its rear end fishtailed as it bounced onto the sidewalk but Frank yanked the wheel back. Judy reached instinctively for Frank’s arm across her body. The truck crashed into the parked cars on the opposite side of the narrow street.
“Fuck!” Frank torqued the wheel, regained control of the truck, and tore down the street. The expressway on-ramp lay just ahead. They zoomed toward it.
Judy almost cried with happiness. Safe! Tires skidded and metal crashed on the other side of the van behind them. She looked back. The van blocked the intersection completely, its driver moving and unhurt in the cab. What about the Coluzzis? Were they dead? Judy hoped so. They were killers.
“We did it!” Frank shouted as the truck swerved down the street, ran another red light, and flew onto the ramp for the expressway, eating up the fast lane out of the city. He drove with an eye on the rearview mirror and shifted quickly in his seat to get a view of the back. “Pop, you okay back there?”
“Good!” Frank checked the rearview mirror again. He turned to Judy, his brown eyes bright, and broke into a grin. “How about you?”
“I’m alive,” she said, and it felt wonderful. Relief flooded her system. Her breathing eased. Her blood pressure returned to normal, for a lawyer. She wanted to call the police. Frank’s arm felt good against her side and he showed no inclination to remove it, now that its purpose had been served. “You gonna move that arm?” she asked with a smile.
“Not unless you tell me to.”
“Since when do you listen to me anyway?”
He laughed, and they took off.
The truck traveled away from the city under a cloud-covered sky, turning to a dark, muggy evening. Pigeon Tony snoozed in the small backseat, which fit him perfectly, and Frank drove with his arm resting across Judy’s body, making her entire left side feel warm and good. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt like this, when someone’s simple touch could set her tingling, and in any event, she had never met a man like Frank. She slid out from behind his arm only to retrieve her cell phone and call the police.
This time Judy bypassed 911 and called Detective Wilkins directly, since he had made the mistake of giving her his card. Lucky for him he was in. “Detective,” she said, “I want to report an attempted murder. Of my client, of his grandson, and of a lawyer I like a lot.”
“We’re on it.” His voice sounded flat. “South Philly, right?”
“Yes. We were at the crime scene and were chased several blocks by the Coluzzis. John, we think, and a man named Jimmy Bello, who used to work for his father. They shot at us three times. They tried to kill us.”
“We have impounded the vehicle, which crashed into the van. It’s totaled. Unfortunately the perpetrators got away. How do you know it was John Coluzzi? Did you see him?”
“Wait a minute. They got away?” Judy shook her head, and Frank looked over from behind the wheel. Concrete highway walls were a blur in the background, the slabs darkened with earlier rain. “How did they get away?”
“I’m already looking into that. We moved quickly once we got the call. Residents called nine-one-one, dispatch got eleven calls, and we were at the scene not five minutes after the collision. The perpetrators had already fled the scene.”
Judy frowned. The scenery whizzed by. Frank looked pissed at the wheel. His arm was long gone. Their second fight. She couldn’t give up. “But you know who the car was registered to. You can trace that and arrest Coluzzi, right? Or at least Bello?”
“No so fast. It was a stolen car, owned by a rabbi in Melrose Park. Got pinched three months ago. Why do you keep saying it was John Coluzzi? Can you identify him?”
“I saw them,” Judy said, suddenly flashing on the man in the passenger seat with the gun. “At least one of them.”
“Was it John Coluzzi?”
She closed her eyes as the truck barreled down the highway. She couldn’t remember more. She had seen John Coluzzi only at the courthouse. It had happened so fast. “Not for sure, not yet. I saw a white male. With hair.”
“What color hair?” Detective Wilkins asked.
“Brown.”
“Anything else?”
Judy thought hard. “No,” she had to admit. “Didn’t anyone see them run away?”
“The only ID is two white males, one heavyset, but we have no suspects as yet. We have uniformed officers canvassing the neighborhood.”
“‘Nobody knows nothin’?’ Are you buying that, Detective?”
“What do you want from my life, Ms. Carrier? We’re on it. These are major crimes. We’re there. We’ll call you when we pick up the perps.” Detective Wilkins didn’t sound unconcerned, and Judy softened. He wasn’t the enemy. The policeman was your friend, right? She turned to Frank.
“Can you identify them? Did you see anything?” she asked.
“Sure. Gimme the phone.” Frank took the cell phone from Judy. It looked small in his hand. “Detective, here’s my description. Got a pen?” Frank paused a minute. “The two shooters, one was John Coluzzi and one was his man, Jimmy Bello, because Marco don’t have the balls. You go see John, you’ll see a couple guys that look even worse than usual. Those are the bad guys.” Frank handed the phone back to Judy with a smile. “Thanks, counselor.”
Judy took the phone but couldn’t manage a smile. “Detective, what if I could come down to the Roundhouse and look at some mug shots. Wouldn’t that help identify them?”
Frank shook his head over the steering wheel. “No, you’re not doing that.”
The detective was saying, “We do have some shots of members of the Coluzzi family and some associates. It would help if you came down, but I’m not promising anything.”
Judy said, “I’ll do it.”
Frank was shaking his head. “No you won’t.”
The detective was still talking. “When do you want to come down? I’m on night tour this week. I’m here all night.”
“I’ll call you later,” she said, because Frank was already reaching for the cell phone. He took it from her hand, snapped it closed, and tossed it onto the dash.
“You’re not going down there.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll get yourself killed.”
“They’re not after me. I’m just the lawyer.”
Frank snorted, resting a finely muscled forearm on the steering wheel. The truck sped west. “Those bullets they were shooting, were they going around you?”
“They were trying to hit Pigeon Tony,” Judy said, but she was barely convincing herself. “Besides, if I go down to the Roundhouse, I’d go alone. They wouldn’t come after me alone.”
