Suddenly, the front door was jerked from its hinges and two men, brandishing crowbars barreled into The Golden Platter.
They did not look to Maggie in need of party planning or menu ideas! She reared back into the storeroom while quickly, and quietly, shutting the door.
Had they seen her, no doubt a wide-eyed woman crazed with fear? If she was hot before, Maggie’s body heat now approached temperatures unrecorded on any planetary thermometer.
She took deep breaths, or tried to.
One man called out, “Hey, Zecetti, come out, come out wherever you are.”
Maggie couldn’t help it, she opened the door a teensy crack, happily noting they weren’t steaming her way-yet.
“You’re late on the vig, again, TZ,” bellowed a Brit who was better dressed if six inches shorter than his companion. “Better have our dough and we don’t mean pizza.”
Their further discourse singed Maggie’s ears, surprising since after a decade driving around South Florida, she thought them pretty well asbestosized.
“Told you he’d skip this time,” the tallest one said in the dialect of a Jersey guy you wouldn’t want to meet anywhere but a very public forum.
They split up, going from room to room. The only man Maggie could now see tipped over chairs and ripped into fabric with a nasty looking knife.
Uh-oh.
He yanked open drawers in the secretary’s desk.
Oh, no! That’s where she’d temporarily stashed her purse. Inside it was her cell phone.
In seconds he’d discovered it. How long before they located her? There wasn’t a window or door in the storeroom. Without her cell phone, she couldn’t call for help. Wings of worry took flight in her chest in the form of irregular heartbeats.
Trapped, she considered her available weapons: a choice of bottled marinara or pesto sauce.
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