Free Need for Speed by Brian Kelleher Page B

mist would be released from the ceiling and would very gently rain down onto the gallery. It gave everything a golden sheen without getting anything wet, the droplets like little pieces of jewelry falling from the sky, or at least from the rafters.
    This was one of those special nights.
    The no-name space was filled to capacity. Several hundred of New York City’s rich and powerful were rubbing elbows and drinking Brut Gold champagne. An invitation to this happening had been extremely hard to get—other events in the city this night paled in comparison.
    At the stroke of midnight, those attending had their attention steered to a fantastic 3-D holographic program projected in the center of the room. Through spinning, moving drawings of mechanical designs and schematics, they were presented with the inner workings of the “last Shelby Mustang” come to life. The engine, the chassis, the interior, the wheels. Each component had not just been designed, the ghostly, disembodied narration claimed, but had been hand-sculpted in a way to fit together, altogether perfectly. And many of them were parts that were built only to exist within this fantastic machine alone, never to be made again.
    Those gathered were appropriately enthralled, but there was more. When the narration concluded, the holograph began spinning faster, and suddenly it was like something ethereal was being born right before their eyes. This birth was represented by the image of a galloping stallion slowly transforming itself into the Mustang-inspired supercar.
    The crowd applauded lustily, but still, the best was yet to come. At the same moment the horse morphed into the 3-D car, a curtain lifted, a fanfare came from nowhere and suddenly before their eyes was the magical car itself. The last Shelby Mustang. The Ford Supercar GT, displayed like a work of art, surrounded by plush velvet ropes.
    Paparazzi camera flashes lit up the crowded room—the strobes of bright light bounced off the descending mist, now transforming them into millions of tiny emeralds, floating down, silently cascading onto the Mustang below.
    It was like a psychedelic experience, without the drugs.
    As intended, the crowd was beside itself with wonder.
    * * *
    In one corner of the room, though, looking very out of place and by no means caught up in the wonderfulness of it all, were Joe Peck and Finn. Both were dressed up, sort of. Peck was wearing an overly large jacket, a too-tight dress shirt, and even a tie, though its knot was done all wrong.
    Finn looked no better. He’d borrowed a suit from a cousin, who obviously hadn’t bought a suit since the mid-eighties. He and Joe had spent an hour before the show opened figuring out how to remove its massive shoulder pads without tearing any of the outer material.
    They were extremely uncomfortable. Manhattan was like another world to them. It was a big, noisy, expensive place that they never had any reason to go to, grand as it seemed to be. As soon as they’d stepped off the Metro-North train in Penn Station earlier that day, both of them would have given anything to be somewhere else.
    Tobey and Little Pete weren’t faring much better. They were standing next to the velvet ropes surrounding the supercar, also dressed in ill-fitting suits, a sea of beautiful people swirling around them. To them, the guests were like a different kind of species altogether, graceful and flowing, but plastic—and no matter what Tobey and Pete did, no matter how they stood or how they talked, they just couldn’t blend in. They were sticking out like sore thumbs.
    Tobey in particular felt out of place and lost. While he was proud of what they had done with the Super Mustang, this was not his turf. This was where Anita lived, and that alone filled him with negative, brooding thoughts. Eight million people called New York City home, but it was knowing that just one of them was here, within the city limits, and maybe even