Excerpt of Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice by Elle Cosimano

Prologue

“I can’t look,” I said, clapping a hand over my eyes. I had sworn to myself there would be no more dead bodies. Not that any of the other four had been my fault (at least, not entirely), but I already had enough blood on my hands to last a lifetime—or possibly four lifetimes in a state penitentiary—and I didn’t think I could stomach one more corpse. Especially not this one.

“Tell me when it’s over.” I clutched Vero’s arm with my other hand as we stood on the shoulder of a six-lane highway. A tractor trailer whipped past us, throwing a thick wave of exhaust at our faces. When my children’s nanny didn’t answer, I peeked at her sideways between my fingers. Her long, dark ponytail blew across her eyes and she scraped it away, her attention rapt on the traffic in front of us, her neatly plucked eyebrows pinched in concentration.

“What do you think?” my mother leaned toward her and asked, both of them staring intently at my ex-husband’s back. He toed the gravel beside the white line at the edge of the highway, knees loose, shoulders hunched, hands shaking out the last of his nerves as he prepared to make what was arguably the most stupid decision of his life. And believe me, that was saying something.

“I give him twenty to one,” Vero said.

My mother’s eyes went wide. “You think?”

“It’s really more like nineteen to one,” Vero said over the whine of a crotch rocket, “but I rounded up because I’m an optimist.”

My mother nodded, too, as if this all made sense to her.

“You two are betting on Steven’s life!” I shouted over the roar of a moving truck.

“We’re not betting,” Vero said. “We’re just calculating his odds of actually making it across—”

“And back,” my mother pointed out helpfully.

Vero smirked. “I’ve got to tell you, Finn. It doesn’t look good.”

“You two are not helping!”

“You’re right,” my mother said, touching the cross at her throat.

Vero nodded. “We should probably push him.”

“Have you both lost your minds? The children are watching!”

My mother held up a finger. “That’s an excellent point. I’ll go sit with the children and cover their eyes.”

“Both of you wait in the car with the children. I will handle this.” I turned Vero around by the shoulders, back toward my mother’s SUV. My daughter’s face was pressed against the back window, her little brother wriggling against the straps of his car seat to see where we had gone.

I had tried to convince Steven to keep driving. I’d insisted we could buy our son a new nap blanket at the next shopping mall we passed, but when Zach had pushed his threadbare blanket out the narrow gap in the open window of my mother’s Buick, wailing as it flew across oncoming windshields and under speeding tires until it finally came to rest, caught on a piece of rebar in the concrete barrier in the median like a battle-worn white flag, Steven had been behind the wheel and there’d been no stopping him.

Panic had pinged through me when he’d set his jaw and put his foot down on the gas. I’d pleaded with him from the third-row seat not to do it as he’d merged onto the next exit ramp and retraced our path to Zach’s blanket, but my arguments had been drowned out by Zach’s hiccuping wails as Steven had pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway and put the SUV in park.

I shooed Vero and my mother back to the SUV to sit with the children. Steven hardly noticed when I tapped on his shoulder and repeated his name. His gaze remained fixed on Zach’s woobie as he stood beside the white line and hiked up his pants. He leaped back as a mud-spattered pickup on monster tires screamed past him, a pair of steel truck nuts swinging from its hitch. Delia shouted out the window of the van, “You can do it, Daddy!”

Vero called out, “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

My mother gave him two thumbs up through the glass, and Zach cheered.

I grabbed Steven by the back of his puffy vest as he rolled up his sleeves. “This is insane! There’s a Walmart at the next exit. We can get Zach another blanket. I’ll rub some apple juice and car grime on it. He’ll never know the difference.”

“He doesn’t want another blanket. He wants that one,” Steven said, pointing across the highway. “And I’m going to get it for him.”

“What are you trying to prove?”

He whirled on me, hot breath steaming from his lips. “What am I trying to prove?” He gaped at me as if the answer should have been obvious. “I’ll tell you what I’m trying to prove! I’m . . .” Steven’s blue eyes grew suddenly wide, focused on something behind me. I turned, my spine going ramrod straight as a state trooper eased onto the shoulder of the highway behind us, rolling to stop a few yards away. I stole a backward glance at my mother’s SUV and saw Vero sink lower in her seat.

Steven frowned at the crisp uniform of the buzz-cut police officer who strode toward us.

“Car trouble?” the trooper asked, removing his sunglasses and tucking them into his coat.

Steven crossed his arms over his chest, his lips thinning as he was forced to meet the trooper’s gaze. “No trouble.”

The officer glanced at the Virginia license plate on the back of my mother’s vehicle. “Where are you folks headed?”

“Pennsylvania,” I supplied helpfully as Steven grunted, “New Jersey.” The officer’s brows knitted, and I rushed to add, “We’re taking the scenic route through West Virginia. A road trip . . . you know, sort of a family vacation.” I took Steven’s arm in mine, pinching him through his sleeve before he could utter a word about why we’d circumnavigated the entire state of Maryland to get here. “See, our son accidentally lost his blanket out of the window as we were driving. He’s two,” I explained, gesturing to the shredded fabric snapping in the wind at the edge of the median.

The trooper planted his hands on his belt, the sides of his jacket spreading around it, revealing his holster and his handcuffs as he squinted across the highway to see Zach’s woobie. “I sure hope your husband wasn’t planning on trying to retrieve it.”

“He’s not my husband,” I corrected.

Steven turned to me with a look of disgust. “Is it really necessary to point that out?”

“And of course he wouldn’t attempt to retrieve it,” I added with a stern look at him, “because that would be a completely idiotic thing to do.”

“Not to mention illegal,” the trooper said.

“Exactly! I was just telling him the same thing, but my ex—”

“Husband,” Steven interjected.

“—can be a little bullheaded when it comes to listening to me. I told him we should just buy another blanket.”

“You can’t just replace something like that!” Steven snapped at me. “Zach doesn’t want a new blanket! That one is comfortable. It’s familiar. It has history! But apparently, history doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“The blanket isn’t worth saving, Steven. Just let it go,” I said through my teeth.

“Our children believe it’s worth saving, and so do I!”

The trooper stepped in front of him as Steven pivoted toward the highway. “Put one foot over that line, sir, and we’re going to have a problem,” he said firmly. “I understand wanting to look like a hero for your kids, but they don’t want to see their father splattered all over the highway, and I’d sure hate to have to arrest you in front of them. Your family is better off if you just let it go.”

“Would it be such a crime to let him try?” Vero called through the open window. My mother clapped a hand over her mouth.

Steven’s jaw clenched. I tugged him toward my mother’s SUV before he could give the trooper one more reason to arrest him. “Thank you for stopping to check on us, Officer. It was very kind of you. We’ll just be going.” We had a woobie to replace. Oh, and a stolen car to find, a boyfriend to rescue, a mob boss to avoid, and a painfully long road to Atlantic City still ahead of us.