Foxy Roxy (36 page)

Amused, he said, “I’m tempted. I’d like to see you on your knees right now, right here. I’d like to ram myself down your throat, then come all over your face. With her watching. Forget the truck. What’s in it? Some kind of weapon? You think you can overpower me before I could shoot you?”

She shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

Henry laughed. “You’re one tough cookie, Roxy.”

“Too bad you never met my father.”

“Oh?”

“But he’s in jail now, probably for good.”

“What did he do?”

Roxy turned around and leaned her shoulders against the truck. “He killed my mother.”

Henry’s interest sharpened. “How did that happen?”

The time seemed right, so Roxy said, “He beat her up for years. No matter what she did to try to please him, something always made him mad.” Roxy felt surprisingly calm. “They weren’t married. She was one of his girlfriends, but she always hoped he’d marry her. She was the kind of misguided woman who loves her man no matter how bad he treats her. Eventually, he killed her. I happened to see it, as a matter of fact.”

Henry didn’t respond. But she had his attention now, for sure. By now, the story hardly seemed real to Roxy. She had managed to block all the details out of her mind, stripped the horror down to the bare facts.

Roxy said, “I liked him. Probably loved him in a screwed-up kind of way. I know my mother loved him—maybe worshipped him, even when he made her feel worthless. So I’ve been with tough guys all my life, Paxton. Men who think they can get away with anything. Men like him, and like Julius Hyde. Most of them don’t scare me, because nobody else can measure up to him when it comes to evil.”

“You’re saying you’re not afraid of me, either.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s okay,” Henry said. “I only need you to respect my position a little longer. See that container on top of the van?”

He pointed toward the luggage holder on the roof of the vehicle.

Roxy felt a heavy lump grow in her gut. In the open door of the cargo van, she could also see Sage helplessly trapped. “Yeah, I see it.”

“I packed it with some rags soaked in gasoline, and a small gas tank. Not too big, but enough, I think, to destroy the van and anything in it.” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket. “I’ve rigged it with this phone. A detonator is easy to put together, did you know? The directions are online.”

“Don’t do it,” Roxy said.

“I won’t. If you continue to cooperate. I know you’re a clever girl. But put all those plans to trick me out of your head, all right?”

“Okay, I promise. Just don’t hurt my daughter.”

At last they heard a vehicle approach on the rutted street outside the fence. A door slammed, and someone opened the gate. A moment later, a car pulled around the side of the building.

Roxy suppressed a groan.

Loretta climbed out of the driver’s side of her Cadillac. Nooch emerged from the passenger seat, making excuses immediately.

He said, “I told her not to come. I said you’d be mad. But I couldn’t stop her. It’s not my fault.”

Loretta marched around the hood of the car, preceded by her bosom. She wore a pair of jeans, high-heeled boots, and a figure-flattering sweater—casual clothes, but hardly suitable for heavy lifting. “What’s going on here? Roxy, are you up to something you shouldn’t be? And who’s this?”

“I’m sorry,” Roxy said to Henry. “She’s hard to control sometimes.”

Loretta stopped short before them. “You look respectable. I was afraid she was meeting some kind of criminal out here.” With one look at Henry, her demeanor softened from lawyer to matchmaker. “Hello, I’m Loretta Radziewicz.”

“Henry Paxton.” He mustered a smile, too, shaking her hand politely. “How do you do?”

“I’m delighted to meet a colleague of Roxy’s. Have you known her long?”

“Long enough,” Roxy said. “Look, Loretta, we’ve got some business to attend to. It won’t take much time, so if you’ll just wait in the car while we—”

“I can help. I’m able-bodied. Just because I’m a middle-aged woman with— Oh, I should have closed my door, I suppose.”

From Loretta’s car burst Rooney, fast as a bullet and growling like a demon on speed.

“Rooney!” Roxy called, and the dog came to her at once. To Henry, Roxy said, “He’ll obey, I swear.”

“Okay,” Henry said. “Just remember I’ve got my phone right here.” He patted his pocket.

Although Nooch missed the subtleties of the situation, Loretta’s sharp gaze traveled from Roxy’s face to Henry, and then bounced from the truck to the cargo van inside the mill. But she said nothing. She curled her fingers around Rooney’s collar.

With her heart in her throat, Roxy said, “Nooch, give us a hand.”

She climbed up into the bed of the truck and guided the chain around the wrapped statue. With Nooch’s grunting help, she secured the load and set about running the winch. To Henry, she said, “Just put your hand up and guide it on the way down. Don’t let it bang into the truck, okay? I can’t afford the body work. And you don’t want any damage to your property.”

Nooch clambered down and helped Henry. Together, they hefted the statue onto the handcart. Henry grunted with the effort. Roxy unraveled a length of twine and wrapped it around the statue to steady the load.

“It’ll take all of us to guide the cart up the ramp,” she said.

“Let’s go.” Henry sounded jaunty.

The cart bumped over the gravel, causing the statue to sway dangerously. But they wrestled it back into place, panting against the extreme weight. By joint force, they made the turn to start up the ramp. Nooch pulled, Henry pushed. Roxy steadied the load from one side, balancing the weight with a firm grip on the upraised arm of the statue.

Loretta let go of Rooney and jumped up to steady the other side. “What in the world is this?”

The tarp slipped at that moment, giving her a glimpse of uncircumcised penis. The churchgoing Catholic lady in her reared back with a shriek.

Her cry brought the Great Dane out of the brush where he’d been digging. The big dog leaped up onto the ramp and dashed in their direction just as they reached the halfway point of the ramp. He jumped up on Loretta, knocking her into the statue.

“Hey,” Nooch cried out. He lost his grip on the handcart’s handle.

Henry braced himself against the sudden lurch of the statue. “Do something, you stupid slut.”

Nooch turned. He forgot about the handcart and swung his fist at Henry’s face.

“No!” Roxy cried. “Nooch, don’t!”

But it was too late. The statue began to slide. Henry went down as if he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.

And Rooney suddenly launched himself onto the ramp. Snarling, he made straight for Samson. The larger dog yelped, tucked his tail, and dodged behind Henry to escape Rooney’s snapping jaws.

Henry tried to get up, but lost his footing and catapulted over the Great Dane. Rooney pounced. Henry, tangled between the two dogs, cursed.

Roxy shoved her shoulder against the statue, and it righted itself. Then the cart’s tires got some traction. The handcart began to slip backward down the ramp toward the river. Roxy made a lunge for the handle, but she wasn’t fast enough. The cart gained momentum and hurtled downward—a ton of marble zooming down the ramp toward the rushing waters of the Allegheny.

Loretta made a last-ditch effort to catch it. She hurried down the ramp. But the statue was faster. It plunged down the last few yards of the ramp and was suddenly airborne—flying through the air, turning end over end over the glittering water like a championship diver.

For an instant, it seemed to hang suspended in the air. Roxy held her breath. But then gravity took over, and the statue hit the water with a gargantuan splash. It floated for the briefest of moments. But gradually the weight of the marble was too much. Slowly, Achilles disappeared into the river. The dark water closed over it, and the priceless statue was gone.

Roxy took no moment to mourn. She threw herself down into the dogfight.

Henry cursed. Rooney snarled. The Great Dane yelped with terror.

Roxy shouted for Nooch, but at the same time, she wrestled Henry Paxton’s arm against the concrete and tried to grab the cell phone from his pants pocket.

“Roxy!” Loretta cried, scandalized. “What on earth are you doing!”

If the chaos weren’t already enough, a gunshot suddenly split the air.

Roxy found the cell phone. She yanked it from Henry’s pocket and hurled it with all her strength toward the river. It arced high into the dark sky and disappeared with a distant splash.

“Police!” a voice shouted.

There was more shouting after that, and a crowd of men waving guns and issuing orders. Trouble was, the dogfight continued. Both dogs rolled in the dust, over and over, Rooney snarling and biting, the Great Dane howling. Flashlights made the fight even more of an uproar.

In the hubbub, Henry Paxton rolled clear and got to his feet. He jumped from the ramp and started running.

The lead police officer turned to Roxy. With his weapon in one hand, he pulled her to her feet. “You okay?”

It was Flynn. The men surrounding him were not cops at all, Roxy realized, but the guys from the restaurant. Carl. Dougie. Even Ray. They were dressed in their black work clothes, which made them look like a SWAT team.

“Loretta called me,” he said. “Said you needed help but didn’t want the police.”

“Go,” she said. And pointed. “Sage is in that cargo van. It’s rigged with explosives. She’s hurt. Go get her. Please, Flynn, make sure she’s safe.”

Flynn didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even wait for Roxy to finish telling him to be careful. He turned and ran into the steel mill. Roxy had to trust him.

Roxy took off after Henry. Without a car, he couldn’t get far.

She ran. He had a block’s head start. Roxy ran past Bradshaw’s, and a couple of guys came out onto the street.

“What’s up?”

Roxy didn’t answer, because she was gaining on Henry.

She ran him down and tackled him like a freight train. It was very satisfying to smash his face into a pothole. For Kaylee. For Julius. For Sage.

In an instant, she was surrounded by men from Bradshaw’s, all ready to help. One sat on Henry’s legs. Another punched him in the head when he tried to get up.

She’d call for the police in a minute. First she thought she’d like to break his nose and maybe a couple of teeth before he went to jail. The guys around her didn’t hold her back.

30

On a cold but brilliantly sunny afternoon in November, Fair Weather Village held an open house to celebrate its new reflection garden. The weather was so bitter, however, that all the residents of the nursing home remained indoors to eat their coconut cake from the comfort of their wheelchairs.

Except for Dorothy Richardson-Hyde.

To attend the garden’s dedication, Dorothy lay in a wheeled hospital bed among the trees, wrapped in blankets. In a coma.

Roxy Abruzzo and her daughter Sage sat on the stone bench beside the motionless bed, admiring the centerpiece of the garden—seven feet of marble statue of a Greek gentleman who had a perfect physique and a noble, distant look in his eye. The statue stood among some newly planted bushes and a pretty reflecting pool. In the spring, flowers would bloom around his feet, and songbirds would probably poop on his magnificent shoulders.

“He doesn’t look as if he minded his bath in the river,” Roxy said. Thinking about the arduous job of locating the statue and carefully salvaging him from the river, she said a silent thank-you to Flynn and his father. They’d risked very cold temperatures and high waters to pull the treasure from his temporary resting place. Only a few nicks in the marble hinted at the statue’s short sojourn in the Allegheny. And the public had been none the wiser that the priceless antiquity even existed, let alone spent a few weeks soaking in the water.

“The river might have done him some good,” Sage agreed. “He looks cleaner. But how long do you think it will take these old folks to get upset and put a loincloth on him? To cover up his shocking parts?”

“I don’t know.” Roxy put her face up to absorb some of the meager autumn sunlight. “From the talk at the cake cutting, some of those old biddies are still frisky. They might like to leave him the way he is.”

Sage slung her arm affectionately around Roxy’s shoulders. “Do you mind too much, Mom? Giving up this statue?”

“No, I don’t mind. I’ve been broke before. Giving up the statue doesn’t feel much different.”

“Okay, thanks.” Sage smiled. “I got to thinking about all the stuff Arden said about important art going back to the country of origin. All her talk about heritage and museums and unscrupulous collectors made me worry that—well, it’s a tough decision. So Mrs. Hyde should make the choice about what happens to Achilles.”

“If she wakes up.”

“Yeah, there’s that to consider.”

They both turned to study the slack face of Dorothy Hyde. She looked peaceful. Except for a little wrinkle between her eyebrows that Roxy hadn’t noticed earlier. The rest of her lay very still, wrapped like a mummy in a swaddle of warm blankets.

“If she doesn’t wake up,” Roxy said, “I can always come back and get him, right?”

“Mom!”

Roxy grinned and patted her daughter’s leg. “What about your friend Arden? What happened to her?”

“Sad, huh? Her overdose? But I hear she’s gone into rehab with her mother. That might be a good thing.”

“Too bad her mother is getting divorced. The newspapers say Quentin Hyde is cutting her loose so he can marry his brother’s widow.”

“Monica, yes,” Sage said. “I read in the newspaper they’re going to Beijing for their honeymoon.”

“Or to invest in cell phone towers in China. Maybe I should buy some stock in that company. It’ll help pay Nooch’s legal bill for a couple more years.”

“Sorry his probation hearing didn’t go well.”

“He didn’t seem to mind. He’ll keep working for me.”

The door to the nursing home’s party room opened, and Flynn came out into the sunlight. On a Sunday afternoon, he had the day off and looked relaxed. Even a little attractive in an old-high-school-flame kinda way. He sauntered across the patio, balancing two plates of coconut cake in one hand, and Roxy wondered if it was the cake that was so appealing or maybe the way Flynn’s jeans clung to his hips.