Red Velvet. Noelle Mack

      Unaccustomed as she was to pantyhose and cold to the bone, Ruth flipped the finger at Sofia, watching from inside her car. “You planning to drive around after me?” Ruth asked.

      Sofia rolled down the window. “Nah. I gotta get back in a few minutes. Lou’s making carbonara sauce. He always screws it up unless I hover.”

      “So you trust me not to skitter right back through my door, huh? Tuff, quit yanking me around!” The dog stopped pulling and gave her a who-me look, then lifted a leg and did his business on a hydrant. At least he was happy. And Bambino would be happy in a new, bigger cage. Ruth was not happy but she could always write a poem about it. She tugged down the black leather micromini her cousin had picked out and turned up the collar of the matching, tightly fitted black leather jacket. The top underneath was buttoned all the way up but it wasn’t going to keep her warm.

      “Did I say I trusted you? Walk.” Sofia pointed a fingernail. “To the end of the next block. While I watch.”

      Ruth walked. The red velvet high heels Sofia had insisted she wear had half-inch platform soles, which made her sway, then stumble, with every step. The dog, pulling hard on his leash, didn’t help.

      She swallowed a mouthful of hair, then dragged it out of her mouth. The spring breeze was whipping her long, dark hair around. Between it and the wraparound sunglasses she’d insisted on to conceal her identity, Ruth felt like a blind person. With the world’s smallest Seeing Eye dog. Who was doing his best to drag her in front of the bus coming down the center of Hughes Street. The red velvet high heels were killing her.

      But her humiliation was not complete. In the brick house next door, Mrs. Agnelli came to the picture window under the two-tone metal awning, clutching a dustcloth for the figurines she kept on the sill. Her eyes widened when she saw Ruth.

      Ruth turned around just long enough to see Sofia wave good-bye from the car at the corner. She heard her cousin take off and held her head high, shortening Tuff’s leash so she could walk quickly by the house. She wasn’t fast enough to escape the notice of Mr. Agnelli, who rustled up out of the camellia bush he was pruning in the small front yard and stared too.

      She picked up the pace, dragging Tuff for a change. This was a walk. He had peed. The sparse grass of early spring that edged the sidewalks couldn’t be that thrilling, not even to a sniffing fanatic like him. But once she got around the corner, he planted his paws and refused to budge. Oh, yeah—one of the natural wonders of her Bronx neighborhood, the World’s Most Fascinating Hedge, was just ahead. She’d meant to go the other way but the Agnellis had distracted her.

      Tuff loved that hedge, had to sniff every leaf and then lick it, the little perv. And then he had to sniff the World’s Second Most Fascinating Hedge down the next block.

      The hell with that. Sofia had driven away, and Ruth was going to get around the corner and through the alley to the back of her apartment building. Just why her cousin thought this experience would be good for her, Ruth didn’t know.

      She looked down at Tuff, then up, and did a doubletake. A white stretch limo with tinted black windows was careening toward her. On the sidewalk. She grabbed her dog, pressed herself into the scratchy hedge, and prayed. The stretch limo came to a stop about a foot away. She let out her breath.

      The guy at the wheel rolled down the back window and then popped the trunk, stabbing at unseen buttons until he got the passenger side window down. He leaned over to it and yelled at her. “Hey, Gina! Hop in!”

      “That’s not my name,” she snapped.

      He seemed taken aback. “Ain’t you Gina? They said she’d be on this street, maybe walking her dog.”

      Friggin’ idiot. All the same, she softened her tone. “What a coincidence.” She didn’t want to argue with someone who was so stupid or so drunk that he drove a limo on the sidewalk. Ruth wasn’t even sure she wanted to step out of the hedge. The dry twigs prickled her but she stayed where she was, clutching Tuff. “Lots of people have dogs,” she added, hoping he would go away.

      He didn’t. The limo door swung open and the driver got out. “Ya sure ya ain’t her? I’m s’posed to bring Gina to Brooklyn. You know, for dinner with la famiglia.” He leered at her.

      Tuff growled. Ruth wasn’t sure if her dog had ever seen a real, live goombah but he was seeing one now. The man wore a sagging, badly made black suit that pulled across his beefy shoulders and a black sweater underneath it. Ruth glanced down. Yeah, his pants were creased to kill, but too short for his thick legs. And he had on narrow, custom-made loafers that pouched out around his bunions.

      “Why’re ya in the hedge?” he asked curiously.

      “I didn’t want to get run over and I was afraid you didn’t see me.”

      The goombah laughed loudly. “No, no, I saw ya. All of ya. That itsy-bitsy skirt don’t leave nothin’ to the imagination. I was drivin’ on the sidewalk for laughs because I thought ya were Gina. Ya live around here?”

      Ruth emerged from the hedge and set Tuff down. “No. Gotta go. Nice talking to you.”

      “Hey, wait a min—” He shut up when an unmarked police car pulled up next to the limo. The car was a gleaming navy blue and it looked brand new. Maybe a hybrid. Neither of them had heard it driving down the street.

      She looked behind the wheel, hoping it was a cop she knew. Actually, it was driven by a detective she knew, although the tinted windows made it a little hard to see him. At least she thought Nicky Del Bianco had made detective. He was supersmart, a John Jay graduate with a master’s in criminal justice who’d started out as a beat cop just because he wanted to, in the Bronx neighborhood they’d all grown up in.

      And he was a total sex god. Always had been—some of the younger nuns even used to check him out on the sly in high school. Nick was unbelievably hot-looking, with dark-gold hair and tawny skin and olive green eyes with thick black lashes. From northern Italy—well, his father was. Maybe a little Swiss in the genetic mix, maybe Austrian? Ruth would have to ask Sofia, who prided herself on knowing things like that. His mother was from the south, Calabria, like practically everybody else in this neighborhood, Ruth was pretty sure.

      Her cousin still got stars in her eyes when she talked about Nick now and then, even though she’d been married forfriggin-ever to Joey Castiglia, who was almost as hot. But no one was as hot as Nicky.

      Ruth looked through the windshield at him. He was resting his large, strong, tawny hands over the steering wheel like they were lion paws. Able to break the neck of a goombah with a single blow.

      Stop thinking like Sofia, she told herself sternly. Ahead of her by a few years, her cousin had gone through Catholic school with Nicky, writing SOFIA + NICKY4EVER and Sofia Del Bianco (Mrs.) and the names she wanted for their children—Nicky Jr., Anthony Marco, and Brianna—on the inside covers of her notebooks. Hoping to get somewhere, somehow, with him, Sofia had even attended mass when his mother did, Nicky being conspicuously absent from Our Lady of Mount Carmel on most Sundays because he stayed out so late on Saturday nights. But as far as Ruth knew, Nicky had never even kissed her cousin.

      The