Cross Roads. Fern Michaels

for the newborns. “Come along, Annie. Little Lady is just like all new mothers. She wants to show off her off-spring. Two boys and two girls. I’m relying on what Charles said, and you know how he knows everything. So, two boys and two girls. Be effusive, Annie.”

      Annie dropped to her knees and peered at the four little balls of fur all nestled together. Her eyes misted with tears as she looked at the big dog and said in a choked voice, “They’re too beautiful for words, Little Lady. You take good care of them, you hear?” She held out her arm for Myra to pull her to her feet.

      Both women watched as Little Lady stepped into the pen and lay down. “Her world is right side up, so we can go into the kitchen now. Do you want coffee, tea, a soft drink?”

      “Hell, no, Myra. I want a drink.”

      “Name your pleasure, my friend. By the way, that’s a pretty fancy set of wheels you arrived in.”

      “Bourbon on the rocks, and I’m test-driving the car. I don’t know yet if I want to buy it or not. It’s built for speed, and I’m all about speed these days.”

      “You don’t say,” Myra drawled as she poured bourbon into two squat glasses and added ice cubes. “Is this a social drink, or are we going to get schnockered?

      “Let’s just take it one drink at a time, Myra. Talk to me, tell me things,” Annie said, clinking her glass against Myra’s. She took a great gulp of the fiery liquid, her eyes watering.

      “Annie! See that dog in there? That’s my life. I am in such a funk I can’t function. Charles rags on me constantly. I have never been at such loose ends. I can’t sleep. I argue with Charles over nothing. My friends…well, the less we say about them the better. Your turn. Tell me about the trail you blazed when you left the mountain. I want to hear everything. Don’t leave a thing out.”

      “Everything?” Annie said as she finished off her drink.

      Myra poured again. “Everything.”

      Annie sucked in her breath and let it out with a loud swoosh of sound. “Well, when Fish picked me up at the airport in Raleigh, and we don’t need to discuss the fact that I was headed back to the mountain in Spain, we went to Vegas to get ready for a surprise trip. That didn’t happen for a week because Jellicoe needed him for something or other, so I hung out in the penthouse till he got back. I have a hate on for that man—Jellicoe, that is. The surprise was a trip to Tahiti. It was wonderful.

      “In my quest to set the world on fire, I had this vision of myself as a smoking-hot babe, so I took it to the casino floor, picked up one of the employees, and went on a three-day sex binge. You know, to get myself ready for Fish’s return.”

      Myra gaped at her friend and somehow managed to say, “Continue.”

      Annie sampled her second drink. “I think it’s safe to say I got out of Vegas by the skin of my teeth. I did manage to create a bit of havoc during the year and a half I was there. No one but me seemed to think my ideas were any good,” she sniffed. “That didn’t stop me, made me more determined to leave my mark.” Defensiveness rang in Annie’s voice when she said, “I own half the joint, Myra. By the way, before I forget or get too drunk to mention it, I read in the paper on the plane that there’s a bike rally going on in Florida next week for the benefit of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. I thought you and I could go, make a nice donation, and get out of this rut we’re in. What do you say? Do you want to go with me?”

      “Absolutely I want to go. What…what ideas did you have, Annie?”

      “I wanted to tone down the outfits the cocktail waitresses wore. They fought me. Skin sells, did you know that, Myra? Their outfits coincide with their tips. To prove my point, I duded up and went out on the floor. I made sixteen dollars for a six-hour shift. The girls average four to five hundred per shift. I had to back down.”

      “It’s okay to retreat now and then, Annie. You were new to the game. How could you possibly know how a place works and the rules they have right off the bat?”

      “That’s very kind of you to say, Myra. I fired a lot of people.”

      “I’m sure they deserved to be terminated,” Myra said soothingly.

      “The staff lived in fear of me, Myra. I mean that. The minute they saw me they cringed. It was like, ‘Oh, shit, here she comes.’ I did not like that one little bit. I initiated work-related fireside chats that the staff slept through. Everyone more or less loves Fish, but he hasn’t been there too much with all the work the boys have been piling on him. He thrives in a crisis, and there’s always a crisis somewhere. I was left to my own devices, so I started trouble. What would you have done, Myra?” Annie asked, peering across the table at her friend.

      “I would have done the same thing,” Myra said spiritedly. “Is there more?”

      Annie looked down into her empty glass, then at Myra’s glass. Taking the hint, Myra upended hers. “A little.”

      “Well, spit it out, Annie.”

      “They said I was too generous with the seniors who come to the casino by the busload. Too many freebies. I thought there weren’t enough. We locked horns. I fired the lot of the dissenters.”

      “Good for you! Seniors need all the help they can get, and they also deserve to have fun. I would have fired them, too.”

      “Well, we did have a slight employment problem after that. It was…eventually solved.”

      “How?”

      “I just went to the other casinos and pirated their people by offering to pay them double. It wasn’t one of my smartest moves. I will admit to that.”

      “Lesson learned,” Myra said, pouring from the bottle. “Do you have more to share?”

      “Well, there was this…incident. I was told, mind you, the key word here is told. I have absolutely no recollection of the…incident, but they said I showed my tattoo on the casino floor. At twelve thirty-six on New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day, to be precise.

      “Oh, Annie! Do you think you did that?”

      “Hell, yes, Myra. I was nuts back then. I decided to mend my ways, so I went out to the desert to see Rena Gold and visit the Institute. I wanted to be a volunteer. You remember the place down the road from Fish’s place? The one we hid out in that had all the rattlesnakes. Well, I lasted a week. They said I was too aggressive. So, with my tail between my legs, I went back to the casino. Where just the day before yesterday I had the guys rig a slot so this group of seniors could win a big jackpot. Fish was on the phone minutes after the group hit it. I knew all hell was going to break loose, so I split, and here I am. Myra, I have never been so miserable in my life.”

      “Join the club, my friend.” Myra reached across the table to take Annie’s hands in her own. “I’m in the same place you are. I am bored out of my mind. When Charles isn’t around, I cry. I miss the girls, I miss the mountain. I miss all of our missions. My God, Annie, what happened to us?”

      “We got old. We can’t accept change. No one needs us. At least you had the good sense to get a dog. You have to take care of a dog. The dog depends on you. I don’t even have a dog.”

      “But…we have Charles and Fish, so in a way that doesn’t compute,” Myra said.

      “Myra, they don’t need us. They can function on their own. We’re talking about causes and missions where we used to make a difference. No matter what you say, we got off on taking matters into our own hands and making things right. I wish to hell those damn pardons had never come through. There, I said it!” Annie cried.

      “Oh, Annie, I just said the same thing yesterday to Charles. He said he understood, but he doesn’t. He’s a man. So now what?”

      “I checked in at the Post. I’m going to take a stab at screwing that up. You want to help me? You can bring the dogs along. We’ll each have an office, and we can text back and forth. We can take