Step On A Crack

Chapter 50

IN HER DREAM, Laura Winston, the Vogue magazine-dubbed “Fashion Queen of the New Millennium,” was out on the lake at Ralph Lauren’s estate in northern Westchester. She was lying alone in a canoe dressed in a sheet of white muslin, and she was floating beneath a sky of bright, endless blue. The boat skimmed along the shore beneath the boughs of a stand of cherry blossom trees, and a blizzard of falling white petals, fine as angel eyelids, softly landed on her face, her throat, her breasts. When she tried to sit up in the canoe, she realized that the muslin was wrapped tightly around her arms. She was dead and in her funeral boat, she realized-and she began to scream.

Laura Winston woke with a start and banged her head hard on the wooden arm of the church pew she’d propped it against.

There was a heavy clop-clop of booted feet, and two ski-masked men with bandoliers of grenades strapped across the front of their brown robes passed slowly up the center aisle of the chapel.

What an idiot, she thought. Right now, if she had wisely begged off the funeral, she’d be thirty thousand feet above the South Caribbean in a Gulf Four, banking toward her twenty-one-million-dollar French Renaissance palace in St. Bart’s to put the finishing touches on her New Year’s Eve celebration. Giorgio, Donatella, Ralph, and Miuccia had already RSVP’d.

Instead, she had ignored that little voice, her prudent inner survivor that had piped up just the night before: Hel-lo! High-profile NYC event, neon bull’s-eye terrorist target. Stay away!

And then, of course, there was that other little secret voice that was just starting to warm up its dry, agonizing pipes.

She was out of her pills.

The OxyContin had originally been prescribed for a lower-back tennis injury. A month later, after learning that her doctor was more than willing to keep prescribing, she was taking them with her multivitamins. The ultimate energy boost, the ultimate stress eraser.

Laura didn’t want to admit it, but for about the last hour or so, she’d been jonesing. It had happened once before on a shoot that had gone a day over in Morocco. The withdrawal had started out like a tiny itch in her blood. Soon the itch got much worse, and she had started throwing up. After dry heaving for an hour or so, she couldn’t stop shaking. After ten hours, she would have gladly pulled out her own hair to make it stop. She’d managed to survive that episode with half a bottle of Valium mercifully given to her by the photographer.

But now, here, she had nothing.

Maybe some of the others had something, she thought quickly. These Hollywood types were known for their Dr. Feelgood prescriptions. She could politely inquire, couldn’t she? They were all in the same boat. Share and share alike.

No! she thought, shuddering. Her “Itness” was all she had. To lose it was simply unacceptable. No one could know about her “hillbilly heroin” addiction. She had to think. Think!

Bottom line. What did the hijackers want? Either money or some political aim, she reasoned. Either way, her being alive was important to them, wasn’t it?

What if she staged some kind of illness. A heart attack? No, all they’d have to do is take her pulse to see that she was faking. What other kinds of medical emergencies did people suddenly suffer from? Diabetic fits, panic attacks?

That was it! A panic attack! Wouldn’t have to fake too hard there, either. She was already sweating; her heartbeat was elevated.

Withdrawal hidden in a panic attack. A brilliant plan that would salvage her potentially billion-dollar reputation. Worst case, she’d be separated from the rest of the celebs to vomit in peace.

Laura Winston relaxed her resistance against her shaking, and went with it.