Liberty or Death Read Free Page B

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?"
    Life forces me to be schizophrenic. These days, I often think this is simply woman's lot. At work, I am the professional fix-it person. I'm the tough troubleshooter called in to help our client schools deal with hard problems, public relations nightmares, difficult admissions, or image problems. I was the fix-it