The Gimlet Slip, page 1
Also by Fiona Davis
The Spectacular
The Magnolia Palace
The Lions of Fifth Avenue
The Chelsea Girls
The Masterpiece
The Address
The Dollhouse
Also by Greg Wands, written with Elizabeth Keenan under the name E. G. Scott
The Rule of Three
In Case of Emergency
The Woman Inside
The Gimlet Slip
A Novella in Four Parts
Fiona Davis and Greg Wands
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2024 by Fiona Davis and Gregory Wands
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Audio Book ISBN 9780593787397
Ebook ISBN 9780593474488
Cover design by Sarah Oberrender
Cover image of 5th Ave & Plaza Hotel by George Rinhart/Getty; woman by Lauren Rautenbach/Arcangel Images
Interior design adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Dedication
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from The Stolen Queen
Excerpt from Trust Issues
About the Authors
_147238665_
To our favorite teachers
PART ONE
Jo
Jo Hayes killed the headlamps and mouthed a silent prayer.
The lights from the vehicle hot on her tail illuminated the dirt road in front of her, the high-pitched trill of gray tree frogs just discernible over the growl of the dueling engines. She was intimately familiar with these roads—the ones she’d been driving on Chock Linden’s dime these last few years—which gave her the confidence to cut the lamps on the Ford Deuce and utter that idle appeal to God before attempting the Gimlet Slip.
She’d developed the maneuver as a way to elude coppers in hot pursuit, or—just as often—a crew of gangsters like the ones presently glued to her bumper. She’d executed the Slip to perfection dozens of times, but on this occasion, when she downshifted and whipped the wheel to the left, she cut the turn too hard. The back end of the Ford swung wide, the tires jittering anxiously along the stretch of dirt. Jo felt her stomach free-fall as the rig rolled over violently onto its side.
The girl’s earlier half-hearted prayer was, by now, little more than a reflex, a remnant of an upbringing that felt utterly foreign to her, as if it had been experienced by someone else, Jo herself present only as a passive observer. These days, she took comfort in more tangible things: the cold, mechanical logic of the flathead V8 engine under the hood of the Deuce; the glide of the gear lever through the slots in the gearbox; the intricate ballet she choreographed from the interplay between the gas and brake pedals.
It was hardly a fluke that Jo knew her way around an automobile. As a kid growing up in Montauk, a sleepy seaside town at the easternmost tip of Long Island, she’d jumped at any chance to escape the oppressive atmosphere of home. Her father—a failed preacher shunned from his parish for his harsh denunciations of the congregation’s collective sins—routinely turned his frustrated wrath on his daughter, the nearly clinical attention employed during her beatings contrasting sharply with his general indifference to all other matters parental. As the blows rained down, Jo’s mother, a meek sparrow of a woman, prayed quietly in the corner for her daughter’s soul. These outbursts of sanctioned violence served to push Jo, already rebellious by nature, squarely into the realm of lawlessness. There wasn’t a pie cooling on a windowsill or a blouse drying on a clothesline that Jo wouldn’t pinch for the sport of it.
Escape arrived in the form of a garage owned by a down-the-street neighbor of Jo’s parents. Mr. Guerin, a mechanic by trade, had an automotive business in town and used the garage built off his home to pursue hobby and restoration projects. One day, as the bored teen kicked rocks along the pavement past the open garage, she spied him inside, whistling a tune as he leaned into the gaping maw of an open car hood.
Intrigued, she edged closer to the lip of the driveway and watched as he swapped out the assortment of tools set on a folded towel atop the fender panel in a fluid rhythm, working away among the guts of the automobile like a doctor operating on a patient. Sensing her presence, he straightened up, offered a welcoming smile, and waved her over.
Mr. Guerin handed Jo a grip of tools and set about explaining the function of each one. She found that she picked up the logic quickly and fed off the passion the mechanic exhibited—an enthusiasm blessedly not rooted in any evangelical fervor, unlike her home life.
The pair fell into a routine—an unspoken mentorship of sorts—where Jo stopped by the garage and Mr. Guerin ran her through the basics: identifying the various parts of an engine, performing oil changes, and replacing spark plugs. A few weeks in, with Jo becoming increasingly sure-handed under the hood, Mr. Guerin took her out for a drive and taught her how to navigate a transmission. Not long after, he ceded the driver’s seat and gave his young charge a chance to shine.
And shine she did. While the vibration of the chassis unsettled Jo at first, it wasn’t long before she fell under the spell of the engine’s husky growl. Finally, a beast she could control. Jo’s preternatural skill behind the wheel, coupled with the utter fearlessness found exclusively in the very young or the exceedingly foolish, made her a pure driver. She spent the next couple of months refining her technique on the back roads of Montauk in Mr. Guerin’s Pontiac during afternoon hours, and in her parents’ Buick Roadster late at night after they’d turned in for bed.
Later that summer—just days shy of her sixteenth birthday—Jo’s parents had awoken in the middle of the night to discover neither their car nor their daughter where they’d left them. The next day, as Jo iced her bruises, she overheard a whispered conversation between her parents. At wit’s end and bereft of ideas about how to corral their headstrong, blasphemous daughter, her mom let slip a secret. Something the couple had been harboring from Jo all these years—a secret that compelled her to finally leave behind the stifling confines of home under the cover of night and head out into the world to fend for herself.
Determined to make it on her own, Jo found a room to let in a small house outside of town and managed to parlay her recently acquired skill sets into a job transporting product for Chock Linden, a local bootlegger and associate of Mr. Guerin’s who enjoyed a direct line to Long Island’s foremost supplier, Captain Jack O’Brien. While many of the existing booze rackets opted to peddle homemade, rotgut hooch, or to water down the good stuff to stretch their profit margins, O’Brien sold authentic, premium liquor—procured from a pair of French-owned islands off the coast of Newfoundland—from his schooner along Rum Row, situated a dozen miles off the coast, just outside US jurisdiction.
Jo took to the work right off. Having spent all her life exploring the various pockets of this town, she knew every road, every dirt trail, every switchback and side street, as one might know the landscape of a lover’s body: by feel, by intuition. She was closely acquainted with the roads that swung up from Gin Beach and Oyster Pond, where the flotillas returning from the trafficking ships that made up Rum Row unloaded their bounty back onshore; the roads that carved through the undulating hills and cut between the clusters of low-slung fishing shacks; the road that led to the Island Club on Star Island, where the terms of Prohibition were gleefully ignored by those members of law enforcement on the take, and where famous writers and Hollywood actors might clink glasses with gangsters and politicians on the same evening, at the same table.
Yes, Jo knew these roads. And she’d be damned if she’d met her equal behind the wheel of a car. And yet now she’d botched the turn, rolled the Deuce, and made a spectacular mess of things.
In a daze, she groped for the door handle above her and managed to push the door open and pull herself up just in time for a pair of hands to grab her under the armpits, lift her the rest of the way out, and plop her onto the dirt beside the upturned car.
The fellow belonging to the set of hands leaned down close to Jo’s face, his acrid breath hot on her skin. He wore a tweed flat cap cocked at an unscrupulous angle. His eyes were beady and held nothing behind them that might be confused with a good humor. He grabbed the brim of her newsboy cap and yanked it from her head, a spray of lush curls tumbling out.
“Well, I’ll be.” He spoke from the side o
“Driving’s finesse work,” she said, as if the sentiment should be obvious to all. “Don’t you know that’s a lady’s domain?”
He let out a hollow laugh as he patted the undercarriage of the Ford. “You’re not tight yourself, are you, kid? Not dipping into your boss’s stash, now?” He overexaggerated a disappointed shake of the head. “Word is, you can handle yourself behind the wheel.”
“Yeah,” she retorted, “I’ve heard that same rumor.”
“Then, how do you account for this bit of mishap, little lady?”
She met his gaze with a hard look of her own. “I caught sight of your ugly mugs in the mirror, and my composure went clear out the window.”
His smirk wriggled free of its civility and became a full-blown sneer. “You got a mouth on you, huh?” He sniffed. “I’d normally not be inclined to put hands on a woman, but keep up the lip and you might make me forget my manners.”
“Piss off,” she said, and caught a quick backhand for the effort. Jo held his stare defiantly as she ran her tongue over her teeth, tasted the cold metallic tang of blood, and spit a glob of it onto his ruddy cheek.
A storm passed behind his gaze as he wiped the saliva from his face and studied his damp palm. He wheeled back in a flash and smacked Jo with a stiff open hand, the blunt force causing her teeth to click and eyes to water.
That one felt like home.
He brought his lips so close to her ear that his breath tickled the lobe. “Don’t make me close the hand, love,” he purred in a tone that bordered on the sensual, a vein of glee snaking its way through his voice.
Jo took a moment to weigh the situation. It’d do little good to give this animal an excuse to play mix-and-match with her molars, and so she fought back every last instinct and managed to hold her tongue.
He cracked a demented grin and winked at the young woman. “You’ve got some spirit there, sweetheart. I’ll give you that.” He straightened up, turned to the rest of his guys, and let out a sharp whistle that sliced through the breeze. The men approached and got to work turning the Deuce upright. They wasted no time retrieving the cases of liquor stashed behind the driver’s seat and stacked in the recessed space where the floorboards had been removed. The crates were packed in tightly enough that little seemed to have shifted in the roll, and Jo suspected that this gang would be making off with a haul of mostly intact bottles.
When the crew had finished stripping the contents of the Ford and loading up their own vehicle, the fellow doing all the talking turned toward Jo, pinched the brim of his cap, and offered her a half-hearted bow.
“Tough break of it tonight, little lady. But please do give your boss our very best, won’t you?”
The cracked grin returned to the Irishman’s face before he straightened up and made for the booze-stocked car. With a whoop, the crew pulled off and chugged along down the road, leaving Jo in their wake.
She found herself now, alone on the dark, desolate back roads of Montauk, in something of a bind. Chock Linden was notorious for exercising a decidedly inflexible “you break it, you buy it” policy when it came to his drivers. With this load of booze pilfered, she’d be into her boss for more scratch than she could hope to cough up, and quite likely out of a job.
Jo Hayes sat in the dirt, with little more than her wits to her name, nursing a split lip and considering her next move.
* * *
• • •
The rising sun glinted off the interlaced cantilevers of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, turning it pink as the open-bed truck carrying Jo sailed into Manhattan. After the crew had left her by the roadside, she’d had two options: sit tight and wait for Chock’s men to show up and demand cash to make up for the shipment she’d lost, or get out of the South Fork, off Long Island, altogether. After wiping the blood off her face with a handkerchief, she turned her back on the past. An hour later, a weathered couple driving a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster packed with potatoes pulled over and said she could hop in back. Jo made a space for herself in between the burlap sacks and wished she’d had time to say good-bye to Mr. Guerin. It wasn’t right, running off without even a word.
The couple let her out on the East Side, and a few blocks later she stood staring up at the Plaza Hotel. Somewhere on the top floor lived a woman named Lydia Gardiner. Newspaper articles described her as a fashionable widow who had successfully expanded her husband’s real estate holdings after his untimely death, but if you asked Chock, Gardiner was a wily dame who earned her jack selling liquor to the smaller downtown establishments that the big boys couldn’t be bothered with, along with maintaining an exclusive arrangement with the Plaza. What irked the other ringleaders most was that she’d invested her profit wisely and now lived up in the clouds, hobnobbing with the elite of society, while cretins like Chock were still scrambling.
Jo had been fascinated by this woman whom Chock so actively hated. She read every article that came out, listened in when her name came up in conversation. As if she’d known this day would come.
The main entrance of the Plaza was a sea of taxis, porters, doormen, and guests. Jo plucked a hatbox off a pile of unattended trunks without breaking her stride and headed inside. One of the clerks behind the marble front desk glanced Jo’s way, but she got to the elevator bank without being questioned, her skinny frame and dusty brown suit no different from those of a hundred other delivery boys who crisscrossed the city.
Gardiner’s penthouse suite was easy to identify by the goon standing on guard.
“Delivery for Mrs. Gardiner,” said Jo.
“Hand it over.”
“No can do. She specifically asked for it to be hand delivered, in case any alterations are required.”
“For a hat?”
“Sure. In case she wants more feathers.”
The goon rubbed his chin with his hand. “Stay here, I’ll check.”
He opened the door and Jo slipped in silently behind him. A narrow hallway led to a high-ceilinged room with a chandelier that sparkled like ice in a tumbler glass, with huge windows looking out onto Central Park. A large oak desk was angled in one corner, next to a fireplace with bloodred marbling. The woman sitting behind the desk looked to be in her mid-thirties, younger than the photographs in the newspapers suggested. The grainy sepia tones on the page failed to catch the light that emanated from her pale skin, especially along her cheekbones and forehead, nor had they adequately captured the faded denim blue of her eyes.
“You got a hat, Mrs. Gardiner. Okay for the kid to come in? He says that’s what you wanted.”
The woman behind the desk glanced up. “You mean that kid right behind you?” She pointed her fountain pen at Jo. Her voice was deeper than Jo expected, rough, like her throat was coated with beach sand. She wore her hair in a chin-length bob that accentuated the long lines of her neck.
The goon turned around. “What the—! I told you to stay put.”
He batted the hatbox to the floor and grabbed Jo by the lapels, lifting her right off her feet. Two men in suits ran in from another room, hands going to their holsters.
“Take it easy,” said Jo, squirming to get free.
The goon set her down hard and then twirled her around. “Hands up.”
She did as she was told.
In a smooth motion, he ran his hands down her sides, along each leg, then back up her torso.
He stepped back, palms out, as if he’d been burned. “The kid’s got bubs!”
Jo slowly turned back, her own hands still high in the air, looking right at Mrs. Gardiner, who hadn’t moved from her seat. “You can keep the hat, consider it a gift. I’ve got news for you. About Chock.”
Mrs. Gardiner’s mouth drew into a tight line, her lips practically disappearing. That, along with her unblinking stare, made the woman suddenly appear more reptilian than human.
