Stealing Time (2 page)

"Hello, gorgeous."

She couldn't stop her eyes from registering shock. "What are you doing here?" Reflexively, she stepped back. But he moved with her, and she couldn't avoid an embrace.

"Come to see my sweetie. Any reason why I shouldn't?" Big smile on his face as he enveloped her in the Big Hug.

"Hey, not today."

"Huh?" He drew back, looked at her with mock suspicion, hugged her again, squeezed her bottom, pressed her to him again, this time tangling his fingers in her hair. The whole ritual made her weak with terror. He wasn't a good man; he didn't like her at all. Everything was a sham. She'd be found out. Someone would be murdered. All this went through her head. Finally, he moved away and looked around.

"You look great. How's the baby?"

"Sleeping," she lied, knowing he knew.

"The place looks great," he said, following her as she fled into the kitchen. "You, too."

She didn't say anything. She was wearing tights and a sweater. Her hair was a wreck and she had no makeup on. She didn't look great at all. He knew everything.

"Hey baby, I missed you," he said to her back. "How about a quickie?"

The suggestion startled her. It was the last thing she'd expected. "Absolutely not." She turned around to be sure he understood, but before she could say anything more his arms were around her again, his hands taking inventory of her body in his very practiced way. His face was in her hair. She could feel his excitement.

"No." She tried to get away.

"Hey, don't do that. You're my honey."

"Come on, come on." She struggled in his arms, trying to cajole, trying not to panic.

"You smell so great," he murmured.

"No, don't, I mean it."

"With you no is yes. You want me as much as I want you. You're dying for me, baby. I can feel it." His fingers writhed their way into her tights.

"No." It was all she could think of to say. He knew, and he was angry. She could feel it.

"Yes." He drew back and found her lips, kissed her hard on the mouth, bruisingly hard. He tasted like beer.

The beery taste meant he was mad
and
drunk. Today, however, she wouldn't take it. She pushed him away. "I said no."

For a second his arrogance was replaced by surprise. He looked at her, amazed. Then he exploded. "Who do you think you are? You can't tell me no."

"I'm telling you no." She said it so softly she could hardly hear the words herself. She was almost afraid to breathe. Her back was pressed against the counter. Behind her the knives were stacked in their block of wood. The broom was propped against the refrigerator. She could see confusion in his eyes. He hadn't expected resistance. For a second he laughed, not believing she could act like this after what she'd done. But she didn't care. That morning she had resolved to be a good person, to draw the line in the sand and stop the lies, all the bad things that had happened since she'd married Anton with such hope and excitement—and been betrayed in so many ways.

This man was the worst. She could see his expression change from laughing at her, to disbelief, to anger. He was still, very still, as he considered her.

The first punch came as a complete surprise. He punched her in the stomach. She didn't have time to scream; she just doubled over, the air knocked out of her. Her falling down that easily made him mad. He thought she was faking, so he straightened her up and punched her in the mouth, then in the eye to teach her a lesson. When she finally hit the ground, he kicked her in the ribs. Luckily for her, she'd already passed out when he tired of using his feet and his fists and then saw the broom.

This event happened on a sunny spring afternoon when the temperature hit seventy-three degrees in Central Park and the sky was the color of cornflowers. When Anton Popescu called 911, he said he'd come home from work early and found his wife of five years bloody and unconscious on the kitchen floor and their infant son gone from their exclusive Central Park South apartment. The police arrived en masse within minutes.

CHAPTER 2

A
t the same time down in Chinatown, Lin Tsing, a newcomer to America, a seventeen-year-old illegal alien, lay on an old blanket under the living room window, as far away from the other occupants of the tiny tenement apartment as they could put her. She hadn't been well, and now she was acting spooky, like a woman possessed. She had come home early from work, spoken to no one, and wouldn't answer questions. She had a glazed and empty look on her face, as if she had entered another world since morning. And they didn't like it one bit. She lay there in a stupor, listening to them argue about her.

They were afraid she was sick; they wanted to put her out. She could hear them discussing this. The men kept their distance. The women hovered around her, covering their mouths and noses to protect themselves from whatever ailed her.

It was not so easy for them to get her out, however. She had enemies and no friends. Their problem was how to go about getting rid of her without bringing trouble from many directions upon themselves. No one made any effort to hide the nature of their dilemma. Lin could feel the women huddling together, not too close to her, afraid of everything, not knowing what to do.

Mei, with the shrill voice, said Lin was bad luck and they should put her on the street. This woman was shushed by the others for being so outspoken even though everyone, except the two aunties, believed that if Lin were put out on the street, an ambulance with sirens going and lights flashing would magically come and take her to the hospital. They were sure of this because they believed that the authorities in New York did not like to have sick people on the streets. The discussions intensified during the late afternoon when Lin would not speak and get up again, even to relieve herself. She could have been deaf for all they cared. The two aunties gave her a few aspirin, but they had no other medicine to give her.

Lin let herself drift, welcoming the emptiness in her head. She had been sick before and gotten well before. In the part of her head that was still aware and could think about things, she'd decided that being sick was a good way out. If she was sick, she did not have to work. She did not have to show herself on the street or have anyone ask her questions, threaten her, or get her in trouble. Now her troubles were over. She would rest, and she would recover.

In recent weeks she had been telling herself a story about survival: She was feeling bad because being sick kept her safe from other dangers, the real dangers that terrified her even more than having a slight fever. As long as she had a fever, she was safe. After her fever left her, she would get better and then she would escape. Today, she'd seen her stupid cousin Nanci Hua, and Nanci had hurt her again, hadn't even tried to save her. Still, she would do what she had to do. If she didn't get better in a few days, she would swallow her pride. Once again, she'd call that cousin who hated her, and who was probably hating her even more now that she knew how bad Lin really was. This was Lin's plan. All this time, she had avoided telling the stuck-up Nanci Hua her troubles. Now Nanci would come to this apartment and take her away as soon as she bowed low enough and swallowed the shame. Lin wasn't stupid. In the end she would bow. She would do what she had to do to survive.

When Lin heard the women muttering about the bad luck that would come to them from keeping her, she wanted to say something to stop it. But her head was separated from her. She was in a place where speaking made no sense. In the end, she didn't have the energy, and she didn't care.

She had been in this place with Mr. and Mrs. Wang and the two aunties for ten months and had never let Nanci visit once. Other people lived there on and off—two people, three people, whole families. They went to work, came back, cooked over a hot plate in the living room because the Wangs did not allow them to use their two-burner stove. They shared a toilet and sink in a dirty cubbyhole, and a tub by the refrigerator. For two months of her stay there had been three young children in the place, bringing the number of occupants in the two-room apartment to ten. That had been the worst. The children had cried often and been scolded. The scolding reminded Lin of her mother, who had died in a country hospital in China almost two years ago. The memories of her mother made Lin want to leave the apartment and go to Nanci, but the aunties said she owed them after all they had done for her. Lin had stayed, and later when she didn't feel well, she was afraid to go to a hospital where she was sure to die, just like her mother.

Lin faded in and out. There was no doubt she felt worse than ever before. Right now she felt worse than she had on the crowded buses traveling across China a year ago, worse than when she'd nearly starved on the tossing ship crossing the ocean. On both buses and ship she'd vomited so many times from the motion that she could not hold down even a sip of water.

Last year the two Lao women from her home village who'd been traveling with her for many months, the women who insisted they were her aunties, had several times thought she would die. Every time they thought she was about to pass on, they would take for themselves her few possessions and her little supply of money, sent by her rich cousin Nanci Hua in New York. They did this so no one else could rob her when the last breath of life finally left her wasted body. In the end Lin always surprised them by showing a strength no one expected she had. She always recovered. Of course, the fact that she lived on meant they had to return to her what they had taken, but each time she survived, they gave back a little less. Some of her money was always retained by them as payment for the care they had given her and their kindness in keeping her alive.

For them, it was natural that Lin stay with the old auntie and young auntie when they moved into an apartment with the Wang family and the three other people who had been there at the time. They argued that she owed them much more than she owed her cousin whom she didn't know at all, and who had waited all these years to bring her to the golden shores and never cared for her when she was sick. The two aunties told her this so often that Lin believed them. She believed them because the fear that haunted her dreams was not of dying, but of living on and on in a foreign place where no one understood or knew her and where the cousin who was so different from her scolded and disliked her and would certainly have abandoned her altogether if she had known the truth about her.

The two aunties had been friends with her dead mother. So Lin believed the things they said about their kindness and stayed close to them, sleeping on the floor on old blankets in the worst place in the fifth-floor apartment, under the window where the cold air came in around the frame and gnawed at her all winter.

Now she could hear the aunties whispering to each other about the blood she sometimes spat up. "Too much blood."

She also heard them arguing the case for letting her stay where she was so they could care for her themselves. They said her mother had been their friend. She was like their own daughter. They had a responsibility to their dead friend to help her daughter and look after her. She'd always been a sickly girl, they explained, sick all the time. But she was a good worker. Once she'd brought home a whole ham, already cooked. At other times, she gave them expensive food. She paid the rent, and sick as she seemed, this daughter of their friend always got better in the end. Lin believed she was safe.

CHAPTER 3

W
hen Detective Sergeant April Woo, New York Police Department, reported for work at the Mid-town North precinct at four
P.M
., the last thing she expected was to catch a kidnapping case. But then nothing about that Tuesday had been routine.

At five
A.M
., she'd seen the glow of morning spread from the living room, down the hall, and into the bedroom of the twenty-second-floor Queens apartment where her boyfriend had lived for six months and where no curtains concealed the drop-dead view of the Manhattan skyline. Punched out and highlighted by the dawn, the jumble of building shapes hung as if etched in the sky, a monument to the ingenuity of man, that great magician who used the raw power of steel and concrete in bridges and glass towers to dwarf nature and hide himself. Another day, and the city beckoned even before the cop was fully conscious.

April Woo was second whip in the detective squad of the West Side precinct between Fifty-ninth and Forty-second streets, from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River. She was a boss who supervised other detectives and was in charge of the squad when her superior, Lieutenant Iriarte, was not around. She was also a person used to sleeping in her own bed. Having grown up in a Chinatown walk-up and living at the moment in a two-story house in Astoria, Queens, April was now in the highest place she'd ever spent the night. She yawned, stretched and let the soft drone of the news perpetually playing on 1010 WINS filter into her consciousness. A sharp detective listened for disaster twenty-four hours a day. Hearing a radio report of a crime in her precinct could get her out of bed even if she wasn't aware of hearing it. Now, April urgently needed a catastrophe story for her mother so she could claim she'd been working around-the-clock. She needed the story if she wanted to go home in peace.