She realized that her hair had come completely loose from its braid. She started to rebraid it when her attention was caught by something lying in the driver’s seat. She picked it up. It was the knife Tom had stuck in his pocket when he thought she wasn’t watching.
He now had no weapon upon him, and probably did not know it.
She disapproved of carrying weapons, but she most definitely approved of Tom.
No matter how she was dressed, or the fact that Tom had told her to stay in a locked car, her girl was in there, and Tom. She could not make herself sit here one second longer.
She had just unlocked the door and stepped outside when she heard two gunshots, saw an upstairs window shatter, and heard a girl scream.
Her fear for Tom and Maddy gave her bare feet wings as she raced toward that house, a prayer on her lips as she burst through the door. She didn’t notice that Rocky had leaped out of the car and was racing behind her, the new red leash trailing behind. She just ran.
• • •
Tom knew he was in trouble when he topped the staircase and saw a young man with a shaved head trying to pry open a heavy oak door.
“I told you to unlock it!” the young man shouted.
“I called some people.” The girl inside was sobbing. “They’ll be here any minute.”
“Your people?” The boy laughed. “Amish people? What do you think they’re gonna do? Hold hands and pray?”
Tom knew that there was an excellent chance that he was not going to get out of this mess without trouble. That tire iron the man was using and the muscle behind it were no joke. Hopefully the police would get here before anything happened to her or to him. Bluster and that paratrooper knife were the only weapons he had right now.
“I’m her people, boy,” he said. “And I’d thank you to leave her alone.”
The kid whirled, and his mouth dropped open in astonishment when he saw a six-foot-tall Marine standing in front of him. Tom had not planned it, but he hoped he looked enough like a soldier that the kid would decide he was more of a menace than he was.
“Where did you come from?” the kid said.
Tom kept his voice calm and deadly. “Most recently, Afghanistan.”
This kid was no Amish boy on Rumspringa. Had he been, there was a chance he might listen to reason, but there was no Germanic lilt to his voice, no telltale white line around his neckline to indicate that he had recently traded his bowl haircut for an Englisch one.
Even more worrisome was the fact that he was beginning to grasp the tire iron as though he intended to use it as a weapon.
“Do it.” A tall, skinny boy with no shirt and more tattoos than sense emerged from what had once been a bedroom. “You can take him.” Tattoo-boy leaned against the open doorjamb and crossed his arms.
“Think about what you’re doing, son,” Tom said. “An underage Amish girl who’s so frightened that she’s locked herself in a bathroom isn’t worth going to prison for. Let me take her home and you’ll never see or hear from me again.”
The boy with the tire iron hesitated and looked at the tattooed boy for direction.
Tom reached to pull out his paratrooper knife just in case . . . and discovered it wasn’t there. Somewhere between here and the car, it had managed to fall out of his pocket. The only weapon he had to protect Maddy was his damaged, bare hands.
Tattoo-boy’s eyes darted to something directly past his left shoulder.
He whirled just in time to see the low-trousered kid who had accosted him earlier point that Glock straight at him.
Adrenaline was a wonderful thing. Although his body was not strong, there was nothing wrong with his brain, and it went into overdrive. It felt as though time slowed down as he focused on how to get Maddy and him out of this alive.
The boy was a lefty, which complicated things. He grabbed the kid’s left hand, and redirected it away from his body, but before he could gain total control, the kid got off one shot that blew out the window at the end of the hallway. Tattoo-boy ducked back inside the room and tire-iron-boy hit the floor as Tom and the kid wrestled over the gun. The kid pulled the trigger one last time before Tom used his larger body and superior height to shove the kid off-balance, and then he was able to wrest the gun away. The second bullet had buried itself in the drywall beside the bathroom. With his thumb, Tom released the magazine, allowing the remaining ammunition to drop to the floor where it could do no damage. He realized at that point that he had managed to get gun-boy’s arm shoved behind his back in a position that God never intended an arm to go. Martial arts training was a wonderful thing.
“You come toward me,” Tom told the other two boys, “and your buddy will be wearing a cast tomorrow.”
He hoped the 911 operator was listening. If she had heard the gunshots, there should be multiple squad cars heading this direction.
These young men had the looks and actions of boys who had graduated from the hard-knock school of juvenile detention. Possibly they were part of a gang. If so, Tattoo-boy appeared to be the leader. All three were jazzed up on some sort of illegal pharmaceutical. His guess was cocaine. Probably selling grass and Ecstasy to the kids below, making money for their own, more expensive, habit.
He thanked God that Maddy had managed to lock herself in the bathroom and, like so many Amish teenagers on Rumspringa, had a forbidden cell phone that she was secretly spending a portion of her salary on each month. He also thanked God that the interior doors in this old place were made of solid wood with real cast-iron locks, not the hollowed-out shells that newer homes used to cut costs.
He still had the kid’s arm twisted behind his back within a hairsbreadth of exploding out of its socket. This meant that gun-boy was staying very, very still. No sudden moves. No problem. His biggest fear was that the other two young hoodlums didn’t share their friend’s aversion to pain. Especially since it was gun-boy’s pain and not their own.
He had his back plastered to the hallway wall now so that no one else could sneak up on him. His only hope was to keep them off-balance long enough for the cops to come.
“Does one of you own this place?” he asked, conversationally, trying to use words to distract them from the fact that he was still so weak that he was starting to tremble slightly from the effort of keeping gun-boy still.
Tattoo-boy had emerged from the bedroom now that the shooting had stopped. He didn’t look quite as tough now. In fact, he was a little pale. With the bravado gone, he seemed a lot younger than Tom had originally thought.
Tom hoped the 911 operator had sent those squad cars. Unfortunately, in Holmes County, you never knew when you might round a curve too fast to avoid colliding with a buggy. The cops couldn’t simply flick on their sirens and scream their way here, but every second he kept from getting jumped was one second closer to help arriving.
He pretended to look around. “I remember when this was a nice place. A rich guy lived here with his family.” Tire-iron-boy was slowly getting to his feet. A natural follower, he kept looking back and forth between his two friends as though wishing they’d tell him what to do.
“What do you guys do?” Tom asked. “Run drugs from here when you aren’t kidnapping little girls?”
Tire-iron-boy smiled at this. “I didn’t kidnap nobody. Maddy came with me on her own free will. She knew what she was getting into. Your sweet little Amish girl ain’t so innocent as you might think. This ain’t her first party, friend.”
“Let’s get this over with.” Tattoo-boy had managed to pull some of his confidence back together. What a waste of a life. One year with the Marine Corps, a different vision for his life, and the kid might turn into somebody. A boy with enough smarts and brass to make it as a gang leader could possibly turn out to be officer material once the Corps got him broken down and built back up.
“There are three of us up here, and only one of him,” tattoo-boy said. “We can take him, you two know we can.”
Tom could tell he was regretting his momentary show of we
akness and was trying to win back the respect of the other two.
“Why are you making this so hard?” Tom asked. “All I wanted was to come take the lady home.”
Now he actually did hear sirens in the distance, but far, far away.
Tire-iron-boy looked undecided and reluctant. Gun-boy was keeping his opinions to himself, which was wise, considering the position Tom was holding him in.
He figured he had just about two more minutes of enough strength left before he’d have to let the kid go. It was taking everything he had just to keep the kid’s arm where it was. They wouldn’t even have to call his bluff. A few more minutes of this standoff, and he would be close to collapse.
chapter TWENTY-THREE
Claire had never seen anything like it. Young people everywhere. More boys than girls. None looked familiar. All appeared to be Englisch. The thump, thump, thump of the music felt like it was thudding through her body, keeping time with the frantic beating of her heart.
It made no sense for her to go up those stairs. She was no fighter. There was nothing she could do to help, but she couldn’t stay away. A force much stronger than her common sense propelled her up the stairs.
Rocky was plunging on ahead of her, sniffing out Tom’s scent. She grabbed his leash so the dog’s feet wouldn’t get tangled in it.
There had been no more shots. No more windows breaking. But there were loud voices above her head. Very loud voices, and one of them was Tom’s.
When Rocky heard Tom’s voice, he tugged so hard against the leash, he almost jerked her off her feet.
• • •
Sweat had broken out on his brow, and he was starting to grow dizzy. The sirens were still far off. He needed help—and he needed it now. It would be ironic, after all the danger he’d come through as a pilot, to be beaten to death by three delinquents with a tire iron.
And then a vision appeared that brought a lump to his throat, even as his mind screamed at her to go away.
It was Claire and Rocky.
The minute that noble dog came up the stairs and saw what was going on, he took a wide-legged stance, ruffled his white fur, and began emitting a deep-in-the-throat snarl. It was the first time Tom had seen that behavior in Rocky. The vet had told him that Great Pyrenees had been bred to guard royalty. He believed it. At this moment, the dog had turned into a force of nature, and its attention was entirely focused on the boy with the tire iron.
Claire was directly behind the dog. At some point, her long hair had come completely undone. She had always had naturally curly hair. He remembered her fighting to keep it restrained beneath her prayer Kapp when she was a girl.
Now her fine, blond hair, frizzed by the night air, rose wildly from her head, curling in all directions. Her feet were bare, her face so pale it matched her white robe. To his astonishment, she held a wicked-looking knife in one hand while restraining a killer dog with the other hand Both were accidentally being spotlighted by a halogen light someone had rigged for the party.
Then Claire caught sight of Tom—and her eyes blazed.
It was the single most surreal thing he had ever seen in his life. She looked like an avenging angel with a supernatural guard dog standing right in front of her.
Tire-iron-boy, evidently possessing some residual Catholic training, crossed himself.
Claire had not been a mother of six for nothing. She cocked one eyebrow and with a low voice said, “How dare you threaten this good man!”
Had the situation not been so dire, he would have laughed. The Amish were most definitely pacifists, but that did not keep mothers from giving a child a good talking-to when a talking-to was warranted.
Her appearance as an avenging angel intensified as she and Rocky waded farther into the hallway. Tire-iron-boy stumbled backward to get away from her.
“Leave this man alone.” She pointed the knife at them, sweeping all of their faces in one grand gesture. “And don’t you ever bother my Maddy again!”
At that moment, Tom’s strength finally gave way and he loosed his hold on gun-boy.
The three boys looked at one another, confused. The sirens were getting loud now, and he could see a blue light flashing through the window.
One minute the boys were there, the next minute they were gone, stumbling down the stairs, practically pushing one another down as they tried to get away.
Tom slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Adrenaline could take a man only so far.
Claire held Rocky back from chasing after the boys. This was not at all what Rocky wanted. Then they heard a bolt being drawn and Maddy came out. It was obvious that the girl had been drinking.
“Maddy.” Claire pulled the wayward girl into her arms. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“They tried,” Maddy said. “But the Lord helped me.”
“He certainly did,” Claire agreed.
“No, I mean He really did. He was here. He spoke to me.”
“I don’t understand.” Claire frowned. “How did He ‘speak’ to you?”
“He spoke to me in our language. He said, ‘Get in the bathtub, Maddy.’ ”
“He said this in German?”
“Clear as a bell.”
Uh-oh. Any second now, Claire was going to figure out that it was Tom speaking German to Maddy, not the Lord. He was far too drained to explain it. He wasn’t even sure he understood it himself. He had no idea he had reverted to their common language when he shouted a warning to her.
“Let me get this straight,” Claire said. “God spoke to you directly and told you to get in the bathtub?”
“Right before the bullet came through the wall.”
Claire looked at Tom in alarm. “A bullet went through the wall?” All other thoughts had evidently been knocked from her mind by that one statement, and Tom was grateful.
“Yes,” Maddy said. “It came through the wall right where I had been sitting. But I’d already jumped in the bathtub like God told me to do and I was okay.”
“Do you know anything about this, Tom?” Claire asked.
Tom shrugged and rested the back of his head against the wall. Claire and Maddy were safe, that was all that mattered. He heard shouts downstairs and knew that the cops were handling things.
“It had to be God,” Maddy insisted. “The only people out here were those guys and Tom. There was no one here who spoke the language, and only God would have known that a bullet would hit right where I was sitting. I think God saved me for a purpose, Claire.”
Rocky whined and licked his face. He gathered the great dog into his arms and buried his face in its fur while relief washed over him. If Maddy wanted to believe that the Lord, Himself, had spoken directly to her in her own language—so be it. He did not remember shouting those words—but he did remember thinking them. The minute he saw the gun, he knew the bathtub would be the safest place for her. For all he knew, God had put it in his mind to yell those words to her. Because of the danger, he had evidently automatically reverted to his childhood language. His mind had done stranger things under pressure. The important thing was that Maddy was alive—and she’d come very close to not being so. If her fear-muddled mind wanted to attribute it to a direct communication with God—who was he to argue?
Besides, he was too weak to argue. It was hard being a warrior when you had no strength. Now that he knew Maddy was okay, the only thing he wanted was to get home and climb into bed.
The one thing he still had to do, though, was talk to the police. He knew Claire should not have to do it. Her people stayed as far away from the police as possible. It was practically bred into their DNA.
“Nice dog you have there,” the police officer said after he’d gotten the information he needed. “I never saw that breed before.”
“Great Pyrenees and shepherd mix. He was a stray.”
“How do you know the Amish woman?”
How did he know Claire? There were so many things he could say. Instead, he gave the simplest answer he knew. �
��I rent an apartment from her.”
• • •
Maddy climbed into the backseat, shivering so badly from fright, her teeth were chattering. Claire was beginning to think that raising teenage girls was a whole lot more complicated than she’d ever dreamed.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Maddy said. “He told me we were going to a party. He named names that I knew. I thought it was safe to go.”
“You would have been safe in your own bed, where you belonged!” Claire was wrestling with such a tumult of feelings. Part of her wanted to hug Maddy, the other part wanted to smack her.
“I am sixteen,” Maddy said with a small show of defiance.
“And how did being sixteen help you tonight?” Claire said. “Was it sixteen who rescued you?” She made a sound of disgust. “Sixteen does not give a girl the sense of a goose! I thought better of you than this.”
“Did you never do anything wrong when you were my age, Claire?”
Claire’s mind skittered back to a forbidden movie she had watched with Englisch friends, and her one night with Matthew . . .
“Of course I did.” Claire knew her voice sounded irritated. Tonight had gotten on her last nerve. “That’s why I can tell you that girls your age should not be let loose without a keeper!”
She did not want to talk to Maddy about this anymore. She wanted to hear what had happened between Tom and the police. She had been half afraid they would take Tom away to jail for some incomprehensible Englisch reason. “What did the police say?”
“They said that Maddy was a very lucky girl to have gotten away with no more than a good fright,” Tom said, grimly. “Those two—the one with the tattoo and the one with the tire iron—are bad news.”
“How bad?” Claire asked.
Hidden Mercies Page 21