Мэри Эндрюс - The Newcomer

“Hidden, where?” Rooney demanded, deliberately avoiding the question about Tanya. “I’m not fucking around here, Chuck. You try and cheat me, I promise it won’t end well for you.”

“Cheat you?” Chuck looked offended. “I would never.”

Rooney had started hatching his own plan while they were on the way to the strip club. He’d get Chuck drunk. It wouldn’t take long; the guy really couldn’t hold his booze. He’d wait until his “partner” passed out, grab the key, and leave him behind in a puddle of piss and regrets.

But he hadn’t counted on scoring coke from one of Chuck’s dancer friends. Hadn’t counted on Chuck getting in a fight with the club’s bouncer as they were leaving with the girls and pulling a knife. And he really hadn’t counted on watching his “partner” rolling away from the strip club that night in the back of a police cruiser—with the motel passkey securely in his pocket.

In the end, he’d done just what Chuck advised. He kept on driving.

The kid wriggled in Rooney’s arms. She was feisty, like her mother. He could feel her jaws working beneath his fingertips. “Shut up,” he whispered fiercely. She clamped down and bit his fingers, her sharp little baby teeth digging into his flesh.

He released his hold, only for a moment, but it was long enough. She was off, like a shot, screaming at the top of her lungs. “Stranger! Stranger! Mommy! Stranger!” She ran toward the end of the culvert, toward sunlight.

Rooney hesitated for an instant. Get the kid? Or cut his losses and get out now? He was thinking of all that money, all of it, locked up in that storage room. Fuck it. He’d come back. He was out of the culvert, heading toward his car, blinking in the sudden flood of sunlight.

A champagne-colored van with a handicap license plate was parked directly in back of Rooney’s car, blocking it in. The driver laid on the horn. Once, and then twice. The passenger-side door opened and a heavyset elderly woman wearing white surgical hose slowly climbed out. She slid the back door aside and retrieved an aluminum walker.

Rooney ran toward the woman, waving the Glock he’d taken from the efficiency. “Move the van!” he screamed. His ball cap fell off. His voice was hoarse. “Move this goddamn van, or I’ll fucking blow your head off.”

Trudi Maples turned at the sound of his voice. Her eyes narrowed as she instantly recognized the menacing blue-eyed man charging toward her. It was the man who’d cheated her, who’d bought her grandfather’s heirloom watch and cheated her out of thousands of dollars, money she’d planned to use for their fiftieth-anniversary trip. “You!”

He pointed the gun as he came closer. Trudi picked up the walker with both hands. She swung it at his head, sideways, as hard as she could, grunting with the exertion. She would never forget the look on Declan Rooney’s face; for months afterward, she would describe it in detail, to Merwin, and then her grandchildren and her bridge partners up home, anyone who would listen really.

It was a look of total astonishment, shock, turning to pain, as the aluminum walker slammed into the side of his face, the sound like the crack of a bat hitting a ripe cantaloupe, knocking him to the ground. He lay there, clutching his face, writhing in pain on the crushed-shell pavement. Blood bubbled from Rooney’s handsome, ruined mouth. She placed the pronged legs of the walker squarely over his body and leaned heavily upon it, effectively pinning the man to the ground.

Finally, Merwin put the van in park and made his way over to his wife. “Jesus, Trudi,” he said, staring down at the wounded stranger in horror. “What the hell have you done now?”

49

AT THE SOUND OF MAYA’S cries Letty broke into a panicked run, feeling the adrenaline coursing through her blood.

“Maya! Maya, baby, I’m here,” she called as she ran. “I’m coming, baby!”

She saw the small pajama-clad figure zigzagging across the parking lot toward her and held out her arms.

Maya rocketed into her embrace and Letty pressed her close to her chest. “The bad man,” the child sobbed. “The bad man got me.”

“I know, baby, I know,” Letty crooned, stroking her back. “But I’m here now. You’re safe. Okay? I won’t let you go. You’re safe.”

Doors up and down the breezeway were opening and guests, some still in their nightclothes, poked their heads out of their rooms.

“What’s going on?” Oscar Jensen stepped into the breezeway. He was dressed in a cotton bathrobe that barely skimmed his thighs and had a black satin sleep mask pushed up onto his forehead.

Ava rushed across from the office, with Ruth and Billie Feldman trailing in her wake.

“Thank God,” Ava said, folding Letty and Maya into an all-encompassing hug. “Thank God she’s safe.”

Ruth hitched up the bosom of her bathing suit. She gave Letty an awkward pat on the back. “We’re so glad,” she said. “Aren’t we, Billie?”

Billie nodded. “Ruth was about to boost me up and into the dumpster. We were afraid maybe…”

Ruth frowned. “And then we heard Maya. She was inside that big concrete pipe. She ran out and that fella came out too. He must’ve been hiding in there with her.”

“Right before that, Merwin and Trudi pulled into the parking lot. Merwin was mad because somebody else parked in that handicap spot,” Billie said.

“Yeah, Merwin thinks he owns that handicap spot, but he doesn’t,” Oscar said. “Ava even told him he can’t park there permanent. Supposed to be loading and unloading only.”

“We get it, Oscar,” Ruth said, giving him a withering glance. “Could you please let Billie finish telling what happened. We were there and you weren’t.”

“So Merwin had the other car blocked in, and he was really laying on the horn,” Billie reported.

“And then Trudi got out of the van, and that guy, the one in the baseball cap, he came running at Trudi.”

“The guy in the baseball cap? See? I told you. I told you I saw him creeping around here last night. Nobody believed me, but I saw him peeking in the window at the office.” Oscar’s pale face was pink with excitement. “It had to be the same guy. I knew he was up to no good.”

“It wasn’t that we didn’t believe you,” Ava started to say.

“He had a gun!” Ruth broke in. “And he was pointing it right at Trudi, screaming at her that if they didn’t move Merwin’s van, he’d blow her bleeping head off.”

“Trudi didn’t even blink,” Billie said. “He kept yelling and pointing the gun at her. I really thought he’d kill her. I even told Ruthie, ‘He’ll shoot her.’”

Letty began to edge away from the crowd of regulars who’d gathered in the breezeway. Maya’s arms encircled her neck. She gently rubbed the little girl’s back, crooning the verses to Maya’s favorite song in her ear. “Let it go, let it go…” Maya’s sobs slowed and she took a long, shuddering breath.

“And then Trudi picked up that walker of hers and she swung on him like A-Rod used to swing on a high fastball,” she heard Ruth say. “Ka-pow! She laid him out with one swing. Knocked him clean out of the park.”

Joe found Letty curled up in the corner of the sofa in her unit, with Maya on her lap, watching PAW Patrol on the television. Letty looked up and smiled when he walked into the room, and he wanted to collapse from relief.

“She’s okay,” Letty said, before he could ask. “Right, Maya?” She patted the sofa cushion and Joe sat down beside her.

The child turned her face toward Joe. “The bad man got me,” she said solemnly. “I was looking at the kitties. Midnight hid them. I only wanted to touch them, but then the bad man got me and put me in the cave. I kicked him and tried to get away, but he was squeezing me. So I bited him, and he let me go and I ran away as fast as I could.”