Wife for Hire - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,32
He’d never been to one. “It’s just your average dance, I guess. Elmo Feeley and Andy Snell and some others have a band.”
“A live band? And the dance floor, is it wood?”
“It might be.”
Hours later Maggie lay wide-eyed in bed, unable to sleep. She was in love, of course. And of course she’d never admit it to Hank because falling in love with Hank Mallone was a no-win situation.
Still, it was exciting. It was also terrifying. Not terrifying in a daredevil sort of way. That kind of danger had never bothered her. This was real terror. The kind she carried around in the pit of her stomach. The kind that gnawed at her during quiet moments when her mind was unoccupied. Hank Mallone was capable of breaking her heart, and that was much more dangerous than writing a dirty word on a grade school door.
There were slippered footsteps in the hall, and Maggie heard her doorknob turn very slowly, very carefully. There was no light in her room and no light in the hall. Nothing was visible in the dark when the door opened, but Maggie sensed it was Elsie. She was the only one who wore slippers.
“Don’t move,” Elsie whispered. “And don’t say anything. There’s a man climbing a ladder up to your window.”
“What?”
“Shhhh! I said to keep quiet. I’m gonna fix this guy’s wagon. When I get done with him, he isn’t gonna be climbing ladders for a long time.”
That was when Maggie saw the barrel of the gun glint in the blackness. Elsie was right beside her, and she was holding a gun with two hands the way Maggie had seen on the cop shows. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Elsie said. “I’ve done this before. I know just where to aim.”
A black shape appeared in the far window. A knife sliced along the perimeter of the window screen, and Maggie was able to see that it was a man, and that he was wearing something over his face. A stocking maybe. She and Elsie were hidden in the shadows of the room, but the intruder was slightly backlit from a sliver of moon. He leaned forward to enter the room, and Elsie pulled the trigger.
Maggie thought it had to be like standing next to a howitzer. The blast was deafening, there was a flash of fire from the gun barrel, the smell of smoke and gun oil stung her nostrils, and the man at the window screamed in fright and instantly disappeared. There was a solid thunk as his body hit the ground, followed by the clatter of the ladder falling on top of him.
“Dang, I got excited and shot too soon,”
Elsie said. “He wasn’t even halfway through the window. I probably only shot him in the heart.”
Hank rushed into the room, zipping his jeans. “What the devil was that?”
“Elsie shot some guy on a ladder,” Maggie said. “He was trying to get into my room.”
Hank went to the window and looked through the slashed screen. “I don’t think he’s shot too bad. I can see him taking off through the orchard. In fact, I don’t think he’s shot at all since there’s a hole the size of a grapefruit in the wall here. How many shots did you fire, Elsie?”
“Just one. He didn’t hang around long enough for me to squeeze off another.”
“Anybody get a decent look at him?”
“The big sissy was wearing panty hose on his head,” Elsie said. “I couldn’t hardly see him.”
“I didn’t see him very well either,” Maggie said. “But he seemed bigger than the last man. I think this was someone different. And his scream was different.”
“I heard him sneaking around the house,” Elsie said. “By the time I got to a window, he was already on the ladder. So I grabbed Little Leroy here and headed for Maggie’s room.”
Hank gently removed the gun from Elsie’s hand and emptied the bullets. “Little Leroy?”
“When I was living in Washington, I bought it at a yard sale. The man who sold me the gun said he called it Little Leroy because it was big and bad just like this friend of his named Leroy.”
“Maybe you’d like to leave Little Leroy with me for safekeeping,” Hank said.
Elsie retrieved the gun and tucked it into her bathrobe pocket. “I don’t go anywhere without Little Leroy. Old ladies got to protect themselves. It isn’t like I could give some guy a karate chop, you know. I don’t move as fast as I used to. Sometimes