Eastbound traffic was good. The speed nudged a bit higher and she slammed down the clutch and popped the Cobra’s gearbox into third.

Pain. And she winced.

Goddamn it. Her knee again. If it wasn’t the knee it was the hip.

Goddamn.

The arthritis had plagued her all her adult life. Not rheumatoid—that insidious immune system disorder that works its evil in all your joints. Hers was the more common osteo, whose genesis might have been genes or the consequences of a motorcycle race at age twenty-two—or, more precisely, a spectacular landing after the Benelli decided to launch itself off the dirt track only a quarter mile from the finish line. But whatever the cause, oh, how the condition tortured her. She’d learned that aspirin and ibuprofen worked some. She’d learned that chondroitin and glucosamine didn’t—at least not for her. Sorry, shark bone lovers. She’d had hyaluronan injections, but they’d sidelined her for several days from inflammation and pain. And, of course, rooster combs could only be a temporary fix. She learned to swallow pills dry and never touch anything that had a Refill Only 3 Times label on it.

But the most important thing she’d learned was to smile and pretend the pain wasn’t there and that her joints were those of a healthy twenty-year-old.

When you move they can’t getcha…

And yet this pain, the joints breaking down, meant she couldn’t move nearly as fast as she had. Her metaphor: an emergency brake cable, slack from rusting, that wouldn’t quite disengage the shoe.

Dragging, dragging…

And the worst of all: the specter that she’d be sidelined because of the condition. She wondered again: Had Captain Bill Myers’s eyes been aimed her way that morning in the lab when a jolt nearly made her stumble? Every time she was around brass she struggled to hide the condition. Had she this morning? She believed so.

She cleared the bridge and downshifted hard into second, matched revs to protect the boisterous engine. She’d done this to prove to herself that the pain wasn’t so bad. She was blowing it out of proportion. She could shift whenever she wanted.

Except that lifting her left knee to stomp on the clutch had sent a fierce burst through her.

A reactive tear eased into one eye. She wiped it away furiously.

She drove more moderately toward her destination.

In ten minutes she was easing through a pleasant neighborhood in Queens. Tidy, tiny lawns, shrubs well trimmed, trees rising from perfect circles of mulch.

She checked house numbers. Halfway up the block she found Robert Moreno’s driver’s house. A single-story bungalow, very well maintained. In the driveway, half in the garage, half out, was a Lincoln Town Car, black and polished like a recruit’s gun for parade.