“More coffee, ma’am?” asked Dinah, her live-in domestic.
“No, thank you.” She laid her newspaper aside and headed upstairs to the bedroom. The house had two large master suites on the second story. Hers was on the east side, facing the bay, decorated in an airy, British Colonial style that was reminiscent of the Caribbean islands. His was on the west, a much darker room with wood-beamed ceilings and an African motif. Sally didn’t like all the dead animals on the walls, so they used his room only when he wasn’t abroad, which was about every other month for their entire eighteen months of marriage. The arrangement had lasted just long enough for her to reach the first financial milestone of an elaborate prenuptial agreement. Eighteen months equaled eighteen million dollars, plus the house-big money for Sally, chump change for Jean Luc Trudeau. Lucky for her, she’d had the foresight to take the eighteen million not in cash but in stock in her husband’s company, which promptly went public and-kaboom!-she was suddenly worth forty-six million dollars. She could have earned another quarter-million for each additional month, and there were certainly worse men to be married to than Jean Luc. He was rich, successful, reasonably handsome, and plenty generous to his third and much younger wife. But Sally wasn’t happy. People said she was never happy. She didn’t apologize for that. She had her reasons.
Sally stepped into her dressing room, draped her robe over the back of a chair, and pulled on a pair of sheer panty hose. Naked from the waist up, she stood in silence before the three-way mirror. Slowly, she raised both arms, her twenty-nine-year-old body seeming to defy the pull of gravity as she turned. In the full-length panel she saw it, still visible after all this time. A two-inch pink scar at the base of the rib cage. She felt it with the tips of her fingers, lightly at first, then touching more firmly, and finally pressing until it hurt, as if she were trying to stop the bleeding all over again. Years later, and it was still there. Cosmetic surgery could have hidden it, but that would only have destroyed her most important daily reminder that she had in fact survived the attack. Sadly, her first marriage had not survived.
Tragically, neither had her daughter.
“Anything to iron today, Miss Sally?”
Instinctively, she covered her breasts at the sound of a voice, but she was alone in the dressing room. Dinah was waiting on the other side of the closed door.
“I don’t think so,” she answered, pulling on her robe.
As the sound of Dinah’s footsteps faded away, Sally opened the door and walked to the bathroom to fix her hair and makeup. She returned to the dressing room to select an outfit, which took longer than usual, as she wanted it to be just right. She settled on a basic blue Chanel suit with a peach blouse and new Ferragamo shoes, finishing the look with a strand of pearls with matching earrings. Her platinum and diamond wedding band-two rows of stones for a total of four karats-felt like overkill, as always, but she wore it anyway. She thought she’d put it away for good with the divorce, but today it served a purpose.
Sally stepped back and took one last look in the mirror-a good, long look. For the first time in ages, she allowed herself a trace of a genuine smile.
This is your day, girl.
She grabbed her purse and headed downstairs, leaving through the front doors to the porte cochere, where her Mercedes convertible was parked and waiting with the top down. Her hair was secure in a French twist, but she nevertheless donned the Princess Grace look, a white scarf and dark sunglasses. She climbed behind the wheel, started the engine, and followed the brick driveway to the iron gate. It opened automatically, and she exited to the street.
She drove at a leisurely pace through her neighborhood, the warm south Florida sun on her face. It was a glorious day, even by Miami standards. Seventy degrees, relatively low humidity, a cloudless blue sky. Growing up as a girl, she’d always wanted to live in the Venetian Isles. They sat side by side in the bay, like four giant stepping-stones between the mainland and the larger island of Miami Beach proper. Homes on the waterfront were a boater’s dream, many with drop-dead views of cruise ships in port and the colorful skyline of downtown Miami beyond. Technically speaking, it was her dream come true to have a nine-thousand-square-foot house in the midst of this urban paradise.
Be careful what you wish for.
Sally stopped to pay the toll, then continued across the Venetian Causeway. A couple of old Cuban men were fishing on the Miami side of the bridge, right beneath the sign that read ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING.
She was just north of downtown Miami, not exactly the safest part of town, but it was an area in transition. In the not-too-distant past, she would have driven miles out of her way to avoid cutting through here.
She crossed Biscayne Boulevard, made a couple of quick turns, and stopped at the traffic light. The entrance ramp to the interstate was just ahead, the lone escape route to about a dozen east-west lanes perched directly above her. She could hear the expressway traffic, the steady drone of countless cars and noisy trucks echoing all around her.She usually timed her approach so that she could breeze through with no red lights, especially at night, but that wasn’t always possible. Like clockwork, the homeless guys emerged from their cardboard homes beneath the on-ramp. Armed with tattered rags and plastic squirt bottles filled with dirty water, they seemed determined to clean the world’s windshields. There were two of them. One came toward her, and the other went to the SUV in front of her.
The SUV burned rubber and ran the red light, leaving Sally alone at the intersection, just her and the window washers. It was mid-morning, but in the dark shadows it seemed like dusk. Interstate 395 and the ramps that fed into it crisscrossed overhead like concrete ribbons. Sally’s window washer took a different strategy than the guy with the SUV, approaching not from the side but from the front of the vehicle. She couldn’t have run the red light without running over him.
“No thanks,” she shouted.
He kept coming, smiling, taking aim with his squirt bottle. The other washer returned to his home beneath the ramp, apparently having conceded the Mercedes to his competition.
“I said, ‘No thanks.’”
He walked all the way up to the front of her car, standing close enough to snap off her hood ornament. Suddenly, the darkness seemed to break. They were surrounded by scattered beams of sunshine, as if the clouds had shifted just enough to allow patches of daylight to break through the crevices in the maze-like expressway overhead. The longest, brightest ray seemed to fix on her big diamond ring. It was sparkling like fireworks. On any other day, she might have discreetly slid her hand from atop the steering wheel and dropped it in her lap. But not today.
The man was still staring at her through the windshield. Then, slowly, he raised his arm and took aim, straight at her face. She waited for the stream of greasy water to hit the glass, but it didn’t come. A moment later, she realized that he wasn’t holding a squirt bottle.
She froze, her eyes fixed on the black hole at the end of the polished metal barrel. It lasted only a split second, but it was as if she were suddenly floating outside her own body, watching the scene unfold. In her mind’s eye, she could see the flash of powder from the barrel, see the windshield shatter, see her head snapping back, her body slumping forward, and the spray of blood on the leather seats. She could even hear the horn blasting as her face hit the steering wheel and came to rest there. And for the second time in the same day, she saw herself smiling a genuine smile.
With the lonely crack of a revolver that echoed off concrete, her living nightmare was finally over.
Three
The sun was setting as Jack Swyteck pulled into his driveway. He lived on Key Biscayne, an island practically in the shadows of downtown Miami, but a world apart. Across the bay, beyond the sprawling metropolis and somewhere over the distant Everglades, fluffy bands of pink, orange, and magenta were slowly dissolving into the darkness of night. It wasn’t until all color had vanished from the sky that it suddenly dawned on him what day it was. Exactly one year to the day that he and Cindy began the separation that ended their five-year marriage in divorce.