Page 94 of The Newcomer
“This weekend,” Wingfield repeated. “Or the deal’s off. Also, half won’t work. I’ll transfer ten thousand dollars into your account this afternoon. You’ll get the rest when I get proof.”
He hung up before she could offer any more lame objections.
Agent Hill disconnected, too. She went back to her text chain with DeCurtis and began typing.
GAME ON.
36
MELTDOWN OVER, MAYA SAT ATher red table, contentedly sucking on the cherry Popsicle Ava had fetched from her apartment above the office.
“Letty, is there any way you can go to the grocery store this morning and pick up the stuff for Bingo Night?” Ava asked. “I want to be here when the pest-control guy arrives. There are ants all over the pool patio, and the Feldman girls said they’ve seen some of those damned German roaches in their unit. I need to walk him around and point at every place I want sprayed.”
“Happy to do the shopping. I don’t want Maya around when the spraying happens anyway,” Letty said. “Anything else you want me to get while I’m out?”
Ava handed her the shopping list. “This is all for now, but I’ll call you if I think of anything else. Are you sure you don’t want to leave Maya here with me?”
At the mention of her name, Maya looked up. Her face and hands were smeared with sticky red Popsicle juice. “I go to store.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but she’s been pretty clingy all morning,” Letty said. “I’d better take her along.”
She turned and held out a hand to her niece. “Let’s go home and get you washed up before the store. Okay?”
“Okay,” Maya said.
Lettywas in the produce aisle at Publix, picking through a bin of avocados, trying to find the elusive—not hard as a rock, not on the verge of rot—when the man on the other side of the display nodded and smiled in her direction.
Letty gave him a curt nod. She chose four avocados, bagged them, and placed them in her shopping cart. Maya was sitting in the bottom of the cart, leafing through the pages of her sticker book.
“How many avocados did we choose?” Letty asked. She’d read somewhere about teachable moments, and had already gotten her niece started with counting, an activity Maya loved almost as much as spelling.
Maya touched each of the dark green fruits. “One. Two. Three. Four!”
“Good job!” The man was beside her now, smiling down at Maya. “What a smart little girl you have.”
He was in his early forties, good-looking, deeply tanned, with a square jaw and a baseball cap with the brim pulled low over his face, and in his black jeans and black pullover, he looked totally incongruous among the usual crowd of tourists, snowbirds, and retirees. His shopping cart held only a six-pack of beer and a bag of chips.
Letty instinctively moved her cart away from his. “Thanks,” she said.
“How old?” he asked, rolling his cart toward her.
“I’m four!” Maya piped up. “I’m a big girl.”
“I’ve got a little girl just your age at home,” the stranger said, staying right alongside Letty’s cart. “She likes to count and spell too. Can you spell your name?”
Maya beamed. “M—”
Letty shook her head emphatically at her niece, then lightly tapped her index finger across her lips.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Letty said, stopping in the middle of the aisle. “But I’m trying to teach her not to speak to strangers. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just move along. Okay?”
“Wow!” the man said with a smirk. “Sorry if I was trying to be pleasant. Excuse me!”
Letty felt a chill run all the way down her spine. She was sure she’d seen this man before. In fact, just the night before in the nanny-cam video, not to mention his booking photo. She rolled the cart out of the produce section, nearly running in her haste to get away from him. The store was crowded with people getting an early start to their weekend shopping, so she had to dodge and weave and swerve.
When she got to the next aisle, she turned around and saw that the stranger was at the back of the store, leaning over, pretending to examine a display of ground chuck. She whipped out her phone, snapped a couple of photos of him, then hurried to the front of the store. She left her cart outside the women’s bathroom and took Maya inside.
Her hands were shaking as she called the motel. She started speaking as soon as Ava picked up. “Ava, is Joe around?”
