“Then what are you here for?” Mal asked.
“Harry’s business and if you two know what’s good for you, it will stay Harry’s business.”
“I haven’t heard anything that makes it less likely I’m going to shoot you in the face,” Mal told him. “Are you getting the hell out of here or not?”
“You can’t just shoot me.”
“I can’t?” Mal said. “Even if I do get in trouble, which I won’t, you’re still going to be dead while at worst I’m going to have to answer some questions.”
Mr. Oliver stared at Mal a second and then looked back to Margot. “I’m going.”
“Good,” Margot said as she stepped aside so he could walk out, “don’t come back.”
“Next person Mr. Lee sends probably won’t be as nice,” Mr. Oliver said before he walked off into the night.
After he was gone, Ms. Oliver emerged from the bathroom. She looked rattled and scared, but it appeared Mr. Oliver had been telling the truth when he said he didn’t hit her.
“You should have shot him,” she said to Margot.
“Maybe, but murdering people isn’t really my thing.”
She looked back at Mal. “Why didn’t you shoot him?”
“Murdering people isn’t my thing either.”
She didn’t look like she believed him but didn’t say anything.
“What would Harry Lee want with you?” Mal asked.
“I don’t even know who that is.”
“Mobster, runs contraband through the docks.”
“I’m a clerk at a convenience store that wishes it was nice enough to be a Seven-Eleven, why would some big-time mobster want to talk to me? Even better, why would he send a loser like my husband?”
“All the high-quality thugs were busy?” Mal asked.
“He’s dropping names thinking it would impress you guys. It’s what he does. He’s never met Harry Lee.”
Margot nodded; Ms. Oliver was probably right, but something still felt wrong.
“He asked about the kids,” Margot said.
“Yeah, sometimes he likes to pretend he cares.”
Margot considered pressing her on it, but it didn’t feel right to interrogate her after she’d had to lock herself in her own bathroom to avoid a beating.
Instead, she asked, “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah, can you wait a few minutes to make sure he doesn’t come back?”
“Of course.”
“Speaking of my kids, I’m guessing you didn’t find Sean.”
“I didn’t.”
“Did Steve have any ideas?”
“I didn’t find him either. I’ll keep looking though. If it’s been twenty-four hours, you can file a missing persons report.”
“Will that help?”
“It can’t hurt.”
“Do you mind if I go sit down?”
“Of course not.”
After Ms. Oliver left the two of them in the front hallway, Mal said, “Maybe I need to get going. I don’t think she’s very high on males in general right now. You should stay though. Even if he’s not coming back, she looks terrified. Plus the lock on the back door really is broken.”
“I was thinking I’d do just that. Thanks, by the way. I didn’t want to have to shoot him.”
Mal shrugged. “Glad I could help.”
“Do you think it’s possible Harry Lee sent him here?”
“Unlikely, what would Harry Lee want with a couple of punk kids?”
“They might have witnessed a murder. Maybe it was one of his people doing the killing.”
“Not impossible. Sounds like it’d be good for everybody if someone found those kids.”
“I plan to keep looking, even if they don’t know anything.”
“Me too,” Mal said as he went to the door.
“Hey, when you were on the phone, you said you had two things you wanted to tell me. What was the second one?”
“I wanted to tell you...if you wanted to go get some drinks, maybe even something to eat, I’d be buying.”
“You wanted to ask me out?”
“Yeah, though I’m not sure I could have topped an evening of facing down a wife-beating thug.”
“You make it sound like this was a date.”
“Was it?”
“No, but call me tomorrow.”
“I’ll do that.”
Margot re-joined Ms. Oliver in the living room. She was sitting on her couch crying.
“I’ve got nowhere to go,” she said. “He’ll keep coming back.”
Margot remembered what Shaw had told her earlier in the day and asked, “What if I had a safe place you could stay?”
She thought about it a second and then said, “What about the kids?”
“They could go too.”
“But I don’t know where they are. They might come home and I wouldn’t be here.”
“I could wait for them at least for tonight. Tomorrow I could put out a BOLO report and then every cop in town will know to look for them,” Margot said, even though with what happened at the shot house, the BOLO was probably already out.
“I don’t have money...”
“It’s not about money. It’s about being safe. Let me make a call.”
Chapter 4
By the time Shaw got there, Ms. Oliver was starting to have second thoughts. One look at the back door her ex-husband kicked in convinced her a night somewhere else wasn’t such a bad thing. Even though she really didn’t know Margot that well, she decided she trusted her enough to leave her in the house waiting for the kids.
Margot couldn’t decide if she really wanted Mr. Oliver to come creeping back or if she really wanted him to stay away. The part that wanted him to come back wanted to put a bullet in his head. The other part knew that, just because he might have it coming, didn’t mean it was the right thing to do.
It was probably a good thing the Olivers didn’t keep any alcohol worth drinking around the house because when she was wired like this, it was easy to overdo it trying to calm herself down.
She couldn’t fix the lock on the back door, but she found some rope and tied one end on the door handle and then opened one of the cabinets and tied the other around the wood piece separating the two cabinets. It wasn’t thick enough to stop someone determined to break in, but no one would be getting in without getting Margot’s attention.
She was trying to think of a way to get her mom into Shaw’s safehouse when exhaustion caught up with her and she dropped off
