Liberty or Death (3 page)

"Thea, you know how much I love you. And how much respect I have for your abilities, but this is a job for the police."

I sighed. "It always is, Dom. It always is." I'd had my moment to wallow in self-pity and I would probably have more, but I was a woman of action. I had to do something besides stand around being the pathetic, abandoned bride. I had to know what was going on. "Can you go find Jack Leonard and tell him I'd like to see him?"

It was right there on the tip of Dom's tongue–the unspoken words about how Jack was busy and this was one of his men and there was a crisis going on, but to his credit, he didn't say them. Dom had some deliciously old-fashioned notions about what might be bad for a mother-to-be. Being sent into a state of uncontrollable rage was one of them. He knew my temper and he wasn't about to deny that I had a stake in this. When one of their own is threatened, the guys band together in an amazing way. They're already incredibly tight but this raises things to a higher level. You want to see male bonding, forget about sweat lodges and drumming, ropes courses and wilderness adventures. Go watch a bunch of cops when there's a threat to one of their own. But they're very protective of families, too, because a strong family is a good thing for a cop to have behind him. I was part of Andre's family.

"I'll get him," Dom said, and went out.

Only then did I rest my head on Rosie's shoulder and cry, and when Jack Leonard came up the stairs, all his dread at having to face me evident on his narrow, strained face, I abandoned the comfort of Rosie's arms and stood up. "What do we do now, Jack?" I asked. "How do we get him back?"

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

"You ever waitress before?" the woman asked, narrowing her eyes and looking me up and down like she was buying a side of beef.

I shrugged. Everyone had waitressed some time. I'd done it one summer in college. Hated it, but I wasn't telling her that. She might be desperate for help but she wasn't going to hire me if she thought I had an attitude. Besides, I wasn't looking to making it my life's work. "A couple summers," I said.

"Rosie said you were a nice girl. I hope so. I don't hold with girls who flirt with the customers or the other help. Slows things down. Makes people mad. Makes for bad feelings. You can't have people with bad feelings when you gotta run a business in a small town."

She sniffed loudly and gave me another skeptical look. "I'm not sure you ain't too pretty for the job, but that damned Mindy ran off and left me in the lurch, didn't give me notice or anything, she just ran off with that guy in the shiny new truck. Girl never did have the brains God gave a chicken. Sees the truck, thinks the guy's got money. Hell, they've all of 'em got trucks, long as they can make a couple payments."

Her narrow eyes studied me again, as if she could assess, by the intensity of her stare, whether I was a woman with a weakness for fancy trucks. "Guess I've gotta take a chance on you. It's the season, up here, such as we got. Have to make the money while we can, and them outta-staters haven't got the patience God gave a squirrel. Gotta have it right now or they're waving their arms around like one of those little spinning lawn ornaments or up at the register, complainin'. Some of 'em, you know, they'd like to just walk out..." Her smile was one of malicious delight. "...'Cept they got no other place to go."

She squinted at me and said, ominously, "You'll see," which helped me realize that she didn't think she had to persuade me to take the job, she thought the choice was all hers. Well, I was supposed to be a desperate wife on the run, wasn't I? And the truth was, if I wanted to be up here in Merchantville, reputed militia capital of Maine, where I might hope to learn something to help Andre, I
didn't
have any choice. I nodded dumbly and tried to act as though I didn't find the idea of a roomful of arm-waving, complaining customers daunting.

Smiling bravely, I said, "I'm sure I'll be..." But my inquisitor wasn't listening.

"I don't know how she stands it down there in Massachusetts. Rosie, I mean. 'Course, with her being all crippled up and everything, I don't suppose it matters much where she lives."

I bit my lip, practicing self-control. It was good for me to practice self-control. Just ask my mother. Rosie Florio had fought her way back to her feet from a wheelchair after being hit by a drunk driver. Even lame and limping, Rosie got more from life than most people. Many days I would gladly have traded my youth and dexterity for a corner of Rosie's balance or joy. But her cousin Theresa didn't need to hear this. She struck me as one of those people who take comfort in others' problems.

She sighed loudly and picked up the coffeepot. "You want some?"

I shook my head. I'd given up coffee out of respect for the formation of little fingers and toes. I missed it terribly—even the smell was torture—but it was a small sacrifice.

"Well, I'd better make the rounds, then." She got up from her chair and turned toward the door that led into the restaurant. "Come along and see..." It was one big room with booths along the walls, a bunch of tables, and a long counter, with an opening in one wall that led into the bar next door. She didn't look much like Rosie, with her skinny body, her hunched shoulders, and her badly dyed dark hair. The only thing that was the same was the eyes. On Rosie they were marvelous, glowing with hope and expectation. On her cousin Theresa, they were sharp and wary and spoke of a lifetime of disappointments.

She paused just inside the door and turned. "You can start in the morning. Be here by six and I'll get you started. By six-thirty, things are really hoppin', so wear some sensible shoes and don't wear anything you mind getting' dirty, okay?"

"No uniform?"

She fingered her gray cardigan and gave me a look, like she wondered if I was too stupid to hire. "This look like a uniform? What Kalyn's wearing look like a uniform?" Kalyn must be the small woman with the bright red hair skewered on top of her head like a firecracker fuse, who seemed to be moving in and out of the kitchen at the speed of light. "You get an apron. Pockets, you know, for straws and your order pad and stuff. Just dress decent, that's all I ask. I won't have a girl goes around with her ass showing every time she bends over. Nor her tits neither."

I didn't like her, or this place, or what I was getting myself into. I didn't like being called a girl. I wanted to jump in the car and drive back home, but I wasn't here for myself and home was just another empty place without Andre. "Rosie said you might know someplace I could stay?"

She pointed toward the ceiling. "There's a room upstairs you can use. Got your own bath, if you don't mind just a shower. And you can get your meals down here, of course. It ain't nothin' fancy. Mindy took a gander and turned up her snooty little nose, but then, there wasn't much about that girl to like, now I look back at it. Give me a minute and I'll find you the keys." When she came back, the pot was empty. She made a fresh one, then opened a drawer and fished around until she found a ring with two keys. "This'll open the back door, in case the place is closed, and the shiny one's for the door upstairs. You can park out in the back there, by the Dumpster."

Parking next to a Dumpster and waiting tables in a place called "Mother Theresa's." It put me in mind of a line from
Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
"See how the mighty are fallen." My life was just one humbling experience after another, as if being left standing at the altar wasn't humbling enough. I felt perennially light-headed now. It seemed like I hadn't been able to get enough oxygen since Dom had told me about the kidnapping, even after I took off the Spanish inquisition dress. They might say that the idea of the heart as the seat of love is only a fiction, but my own heart had felt constricted ever since Saturday morning. The thought of Andre in danger had squeezed it like it lay in a giant's hand, and with every word of Jack Leonard's explanation, the giant had gripped tighter. I was getting a very good idea of what it was like to live with a chronic disability. Mine was fear.

I took the keys and put them in my pocket. "Thanks, Mrs. McGrath."

"Theresa," she corrected. "I hear Mrs. McGrath, I think you're talkin' to some old lady. You go along and get yourself settled. You look done in, you don't mind my saying so. I suppose, from what Rosie said, you haven't had an easy time of it. How'd you meet her, anyway?"

"Dom," I said. "He was kind of looking after me, when he could."

"Rosie's a lucky gal, got a good, handsome man like that to take care of her, stickin' with her after the accident and all. Lotta men, find themselves married to a cripple, they just walk out," she said. "She doesn't know how lucky."

She was wrong about that. Rosie Florio thought she was the luckiest woman in the world to have married Dom, and he thought he was the luckiest man. If anything, Rosie's accident had made them closer. If I hadn't liked them both so much, their happiness would have made me surly with jealousy. As it was, I hoped my own life would be a lot like theirs. At least, I had hoped that. I guess I still did.

From the other room, someone called, "Hey, Theresa, everyone die out there? Where the heck's that coffee?"

"See you in the morning," she said. "Six. And not any later or you can forget about the job. Got that?"

"I'll be here."

I trudged out to the car, got my stuff, and shuffled wearily up the stairs.

I put my bag on the narrow bed—the first single bed since college—sat down beside it, and looked around the room. The adjectives bleak and dreary came to mind, but they both did the room a kindness. Spare was good, though I had always associated spare with austere and austere with a kind of cold cleanliness. This room showed a marked absence of cleanliness. I could write my name in the dust on the dresser top and bedside stand, and the windowsills and the floor beneath them were thick with flakes of paint and the corpses of flies, spiders, and other insects who had died there, trying to escape. The wallpaper was beige on beige—toning, I believe is the current decorating term. The tufted bedspread had evidently once been white; now it was the yellow of old eyes, with occasional darker patches whose provenance I didn't want to know.

"Home sweet home," I said aloud. I needed to lie down. I hadn't slept Saturday night, except for a few nightmare-plagued hours. I ached with weariness and had the world's biggest headache, but I would not touch my body to that mattress until I'd driven down the road the twenty miles or so to Wal-Mart, and gotten some decent bedding. While I was there, I could get some dustcloths and a broom. I probably could have borrowed some from Mrs. McGrath—Theresa—but she was busy and I wasn't up for further scrutiny from those disappointed eyes. I didn't want her to think I was fussy or ungrateful.

I picked up my purse, locked the door behind me, and went down the stairs to the battered, rust-blistered heap of sorry metal I was driving. As Dom had wisely noted, if I wanted to be inconspicuous, it didn't make sense to arrive in a backwater Maine town claiming to be down and out, a battered wife on the run, and driving a shiny red Saab. The car Dom had given me was deceptive, though. Despite the hideous exterior, the seats were extremely comfortable, it had a hidden radio, and it went like a bat out of hell. He hadn't told me about that part. Heading north, I'd merged cautiously onto the highway, put my foot down expecting very little, and almost knocked myself into the backseat. For about five minutes, coming up from Boston on I-95, I'd felt like I was back at the racetrack in Connecticut, where I'd had a brief, high-speed adventure as part of an effort to rescue my mother's protégé, Julie Bass.

I didn't know how other superheroes felt, but I was getting tired of rescuing people. It was beginning to seem a lot like washing dishes. You did the dishes, put them away, and damned if there wasn't another load needing to be done. When Andre was around, he did the dishes, just like he did a lot of rescuing people. But Andre wasn't around. Only heaven and the bad guys knew where he was, and I was in Merchantville, Maine, known to be a hotbed of militia activity, hoping to be a fly on the wall and learn something that might help save him.

I'd had to fight like a tiger to get here, and once Rosie had gotten Dom to agree—a grudging, nervous agree—my instructions had been quite clear. "You're just there to listen, Goddammit, and not to act!" Dom had said. "You don't want to do anything to put yourself in danger. Andre has enough to worry about... we all do... without worrying about you, too."

Jack Leonard had made Dom sound positively benign. He had been icy with fury and resignation. Since I didn't work for him, he couldn't pull rank, he could only tell me in a dozen different ways what a fool I was being and how I risked putting Andre in greater danger. "You know what I think, Thea? I think you should stay home and take care of yourself and let us look for Andre. We've all got enough to worry about. But I could talk till I was blue in the face and not change your mind, and I've got a missing trooper to find."

Here he had held up his hand to ward off the angry words I was about to shout in his face. "...I know that there is no way we can keep you out of this. You can go off on this wild-goose chase you and Florio have cooked up, so long as all you do is make like a fly on the wall and listen. But if I hear that you're sticking even your tiniest toe into my investigation... if you do the slightest Goddamned thing to put yourself or my trooper in danger, I'm going to snatch you out of there so fast your head will spin. If necessary, I will lock you up someplace where you can't do any harm. And I won't give a damn about your so-called civil rights. You got that?"