Hot Ice

Doug decided as he set a steady speed. “It coats the stomach so the booze neutralizes.”
    “Very droll.” She released the door handle, propped her feet on the dash, and watched the night whiz by. “It occurs to me that you’re quite aware of my family history and background. What about yours?”
    “Which story do you want?” he asked lightly. “I keep a variety, depending on the occasion.”
    “Everything from the destitute orphan to the misplaced aristocrat, I’m sure.” Whitney studied his profile. Who was he? she wondered. And why did she care? She didn’t have the first answer, but the time had passed when she could pretend she didn’t have the second. “What about the real one, just for variety?”
    He could have lied. It would have been a simple matter for him to have given her the story of a homeless little boy sleeping in alleys and running from a vicious stepfather. And he could have made her believe it. Settling back, Doug did what he did rarely. He told the unvarnished truth.
    “I grew up in Brooklyn, a nice, quiet neighborhood. Blue-collar, plain, and settled. My mother kept house and my father fixed drains. Both my sisters were cheerleaders. We had a dog named Checkers.”
    “It sounds very normal.”
    “Yeah, it was.” And sometimes, rarely, he could bring it back in focus and enjoy it. “My father belonged to the Moose and my mom made the best blueberry pie you ever tasted. They both still do.”
    “And what about young Douglas Lord?”
    “Because I was, ah, clever with my hands, my father thought I’d make a good plumber. It just didn’t seem like my idea of a good time.”
    “The hourly rate of a union plumber’s quite impressive.”
    “Yeah, well I’ve never been into working by the hour.”
    “So instead you decided to—how do you term it— freelance?”
    “A vocation’s a vocation. I had this uncle, the family always kept kind of quiet about him.”
    “A black sheep?” she asked, interested.
    “I guess you wouldn’t have called him lily white. Seems he’d done some time. Anyway, to keep it short, he came to live with us for a while and worked for my dad.” He shot Whitney a quick, appealing grin. “He was good with his hands, too.”
    “I see. So you came by your talent, dare I say, honestly.”
    “Jack was good. He was real good except he had a weakness for the bottle. When he gave in to it he got sloppy. Get sloppy, you get caught. One of the first things he taught me was never to drink on the job.”
    “I don’t imagine you’re referring to unstopping pipes.”
    “No. Jack was a second-rate plumber, but he was a first-class thief. I was fourteen when he taught me to pick a lock. Never been real sure why he took to me. One thing was I liked to read and he liked to hear stories. He wasn’t much on sitting down with a book, but he’d sit there for hours if you’d tell him the story of The Man in the Iron Mask or Don Quixote.”
    She’d been aware from the beginning of a sharp intellect and a varied kind of taste. “So young Douglas liked to read.”
    “Yeah.” He moved his shoulders and negotiated a curve. “First thing I stole was a book. We weren’t poor, really, but we couldn’t afford to stock the kind of library I wanted.” Needed, he corrected. He needed the books, the escape from the everyday the same way he’d needed food. No one had understood.
    “Anyway, Jack liked hearing stories. I remember what I read.”
    “Authors hope readers do.”
    “No, I mean I remember almost line for line. It’s just the way it is. Got me through school.”
    She thought about the ease with which he’d spouted off facts and figures from the guidebook. “You mean you have a photographic memory?”
    “I don’t see it in pictures, I just don’t forget, that’s all.” He grinned, thinking. “It got me a scholarship to Princeton.”
    Whitney sat up straight. “You went to Princeton?”
    His grin widened at her reaction. Until then, he’d never considered the truth more interesting than fiction. “No. I decided rather than college I wanted on-the-job training.”
    “You’re telling me you turned down a Princeton scholarship?”
    “Yeah. Pre-law seemed pretty cut and dried.”
    “Pre-law,” she murmured and had to laugh. “So, you might’ve been a lawyer. Ivy League at that.”
    “I’d’ve hated it just as much as I’d’ve hated unstopping johns. There was Uncle Jack. He always said he didn’t have any kids and wanted to pass on