The Lining

The second lap is different.

The first one was a ghost. This one is a conversation.

She sits beside you with her seat belt pulled tight across her coat and the stopwatch in her fist, and when you put your foot down she doesn't grip the door or brace her feet. She leans forward, toward the windshield, toward the banking coming at you, like she wants to get there first.

"Faster," she says on the front stretch, and you laugh out loud because you were already going to.

Turn one. Turn two. The back stretch, the sedan howling, the wind a solid roar at the windows. She's laughing too, a low, astonished sound, her hair loose and her eyes huge. On the back stretch she says, "Don't brake early at three."

"I'm going to brake when I brake."

"Then brake late."

You brake late. Not reckless-late. Racing-late, the exact right moment, the one you used to feel in your spine. The sedan dips and bites and turns in, and the scorched wall slides past on your right like it's nothing, like it's just a wall, and you come out of four with the back end loose and you don't care, you just drive it, and the line comes and goes under you.

Click.

"Fifty-eight point nine," she says. She is breathing hard. You both are. "Fifty-eight point nine, Ethan."

You coast down onto the apron and stop and sit there with the engine ticking and your face aching from a grin you can't seem to switch off. Gianna is looking at you. Not at the road, not at the mirror. At you. And you're looking back, and rule one is a distant rumor from another country.

"I haven't done that in two years," you say.

"I know."

"How do you know?"

She doesn't answer. She unbuckles her seat belt, opens her door, and gets out. You watch her walk around the front of the car and crouch down by the left front wheel in her good camel coat, reach up inside the wheel well, and pull.

Something comes away in her hand with a crack of plastic. A black box the size of a deck of cards, a little red light blinking on its side. She holds it up so you can see it through the windshield. Then she pops a cover off the back with her thumbnail, takes out a battery, and the red light dies.

You get out of the car.

"My father's," she says. "GPS. Real time. It reports to a laptop in Zaro's office and a phone in Fabrizio's pocket. It's been in every car I've ridden in since I was twenty-three." She checks her watch. "If it's dead for more than ten minutes, someone notices. So listen fast."

She opens the back door of the sedan and kneels on the floor of the car with a small folding knife from her pocket. You stand behind her in the wind, and you watch Gianna Ravello cut a neat six-inch slit along the bottom seam of the leather backseat, where it tucks under. She reaches inside.

She comes out with a flat bundle wrapped in a plastic bag. She unwraps it on the seat.

A passport. Burgundy, not American. She opens it to the photo page and holds it up. It's her, hair pulled back, no makeup, looking like a schoolteacher. The first name says ANNA. Her thumb covers the last.

Under it, banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. You stop trying to count around twenty thousand.

"I sit on this every day," she says. "On top of it. Right there. Six inches from my father's microphone."

The wind moans through the empty grandstands. Pigeons lift off the roof of the press box and settle again.

"My mother left my father when I was twenty-one," she says. Her voice is very even. She's said this before, maybe only to herself. "One night in January. She took a car and drove north on the lake road, toward Wicklow Point, and someone followed her, and she went off the road at the long bend and into the lake." She folds the passport closed. "She drove herself. She wasn't fast enough. That's what I decided, at the funeral. Not that she shouldn't have run. That the car wasn't fast enough."

"Gianna."

"Six years," she says. "I've been planning this for six years. Money from the concessions, ten dollars here, two hundred there, it's amazing what nobody counts. A passport from someone who doesn't ask questions. Routes. Schedules. Which nights the house is full and which nights nobody's looking. I have all of it." She looks up at you. "All of it except one thing."

You already know. You know before she says it, the way you know in the last half second before contact.

"The driver," you say.

"The driver." She wraps the cash back up, tucks it into the seat, smooths the leather flat. "I need someone who can outdrive anything my family sends. Not good. Not brave. The best. The one person in Lakeshore who can take a sedan through three at a hundred and thirty-five with his hands shaking and come out the other side."

The wind takes her hair across her face. She doesn't move it.

"You're asking me," you say slowly, "to drive you out."

"I'm telling you what the job is. Asking comes later."

"You're telling me this because you got stuck with a burned-out driver who used to be fast, and you figured—"

"No." She stands up. She's close. Her eyes are clear and steady and a little afraid, which is the most frightening thing you've seen all morning, because you didn't think she was afraid of anything. She checks her watch once more.

"Seven minutes," she says. "So here it is. I read the Harvest 300 tapes. I read your contract. I read the bank's file when it came up for sale. I had Ravello Holdings buy it through Lakefront and then I moved it onto a ledger nobody reads but me. I told Zaro my old driver was sloppy, and I let him think hiring you was his idea."

She puts the tracker's battery back in. The red light blinks awake, small and bloody in her palm.

"I didn't get stuck with you, Ethan. I bought your debt eighteen months ago. You're the only driver fast enough to get me out."