19 Headed for Trouble Read Online Free PDF

glasses, she turned and looked directly at Frank.
    “You don’t have much time,” she said, her voice raspy, maybe from age or from sleeping in the rain, but probably from sleeping on the street in the rain at her advanced age.
    “Not interested, ma’am.” Frank slowed down, but only to press his spare change and a few loose dollar bills into her hand.
    But she caught his wrist, running gnarled fingers across his palm. “She loves you.”
    For an old woman, she had a grip of steel. Frank could have pulled free, but not without knocking her out of her seat and dragging her down the street.
    “You just met,” the old woman—Blind Maggie, presumably—insisted. “Her eyes … She has such beautiful eyes.”
    As did nearly all the women on the planet. Frank was not impressed.
    “She sees you,” Maggie intoned. “She loves you already—and you would walk away from such a gift?”
    It was foolish. He was a fool. He should have thanked her for her advice. She would have let him go if he’d told her he believed her, and that he was going to get her five-dollar payment out from his wallet. The dead last thing he should have done was argue.
    “She deserves better,” Frank said.
    And just like that, the old woman kicked him—ow, Jesus! Right on the shin.
    “Fool!” she used the same word he’d been using tochastise himself. “What’s better than loving and being loved?”
    She’d let him go in the course of delivering a kick with that much force, and he backed away.
    For a blind woman—right—she tracked his movement with unerring accuracy as he turned and saw—thank you, Lord—the Sheraton sign. His hotel wasn’t close, but it wasn’t that far either.
    “You’ll break her heart!” Maggie shouted at him. “You’re going to break her heart!”
    Frank turned the corner, but she kept on shouting. “You love her, too, and you didn’t even kiss her goodbye!”
    And he stopped. Just like that.
Fool
. He was
such
a fool. Love her, too? He didn’t know. Was that what this was, this tight feeling in his chest, this odd grief at the idea of not seeing Rosie again, Rosie whom he barely even knew. Except …
    He knew her
.
    They’d talked for hours, as if they’d been friends for years. He’d told her secrets, things he’d never told anyone else. She’d made him laugh, made him dream of a life he’d never dared dream of before as he’d lost himself in her beautiful dark brown eyes.
    And just like that, Frank started running.
    Not toward the Sheraton. Away from it.
    Toward Rosie’s hotel.
    He was out of breath and sweating when he pushed his way into the lobby, and the clerk at the front desk looked up in alarm.
    “House phone?” Frank panted, and the man pointed to a telephone farther down the counter.
    Frank picked it up and dialed zero. “Connect me to Rosie Marchado’s room,” he said when the operator picked up.
    There was a pause. “I’m sorry, sir”—words he didn’t want to hear—“we have no guests named Marchado.”
    Perfect. She was staying with friends and had obviously registered under one of their names.
    As Frank hung up, he saw in the mirror that two of the bellhops—big, burly fellows—had come to surround him. Shit. Now he wouldn’t even be able to sit in the lobby, hoping that she’d come downstairs early, in the few minutes he had left before he had to catch his own flight out.
    “I’m not here to make trouble, boys,” Frank told them, turning around nice and slow, keeping his hands up and in sight.
    But the bigger bellhop was smiling. “Chief O’Leary?” he asked.
    Frank blinked. What the …?
    “I served twelve years in the regular Navy,” the man said. He was more overweight than muscular, Frank saw now. “I always admired you SEALs.” He cleared his throat, holding out an envelope. “Miss Rosie asked me to give this to you. She said you’d be coming by.”
    Frank took it. Opened it.
    Rosie had written him a note in her neat, clear hand.
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