Mister X Read Online Free

out with him again, figuring him to be mentally inferior.
    A few people had warned Mary about living in this part of the Village. It could be dangerous. Mary didn’t take those warnings seriously. She’d dealt with thugs before, in Bennett. They were just like New York thugs, only they wore cowboy hats.
    The way she dealt with them was by showing a complete absence of fear. Mary had a sweet, heart-shaped face, a frail body, and rather sad brown eyes. A frail person who looked as if her photo belonged in an old locket. But there was something about her that strongly suggested she would hold her ground. Anything done to her would be at a cost. People with the wrong kind of thing in mind usually backed off.
    Something else about Mary was that she had a gun. A .32-caliber Taurus revolver with a checked wood grip. She’d shot targets and plunked varmints with it for years on her parents’ ranch. Brought it with her in her suitcase on the bus. The security people didn’t check bus luggage the way they checked suitcases for airline travel. Or if they had checked her suitcase, they hadn’t found the gun, rolled up in an old pair of Levi’s.
    The apartment was partially furnished, so moving in had been easy. She’d simply opened her suitcase and transferred her clothes to the dresser drawers in the tiny bedroom.
    The bedroom smelled better than the living room, so maybe the previous tenant hadn’t smoked in bed. The bed itself was a twin size, and the mattress was pretty saggy. She did always allow herself a good bed, so she would buy a better mattress and put this one in the basement storage area that went with the apartment. Her mother had advised her that a good mattress and good shoes were of prime importance. She had a new pair of Nike joggers. The mattress and a few more pieces of furniture—a table, a lamp—were all she should need. Things she’d pick out and that would make the place uniquely hers.
    She slid her empty suitcase under the bed and then turned her attention to her big vinyl portfolio that held samples of her work. Mary was a graphic designer with a degree from Happer Design College in South Dakota. Her instructors had told her she was the most talented student they’d ever taught. They said as much in letters of recommendation. She realized that wouldn’t make getting a job in New York easy, but surely it should make it possible. She wasn’t looking for an easy time here. A chance was all she wanted.
    Back in the living room, she stood with her fists propped on her slender hips and looked around.
    What have you done, Mary Bakehouse?
    The walls were painted a mottled off-white, and the gray carpet was stained and frayed. What furniture there was appeared to be a flea market hodgepodge, but some of it, like the sturdy old matching bookcases that stood side by side against a living room wall, looked to be of pretty good quality. The bookcases held a small TV, an odd assortment of vases, and even a few old books without dust jackets. Mary thought she’d put some flowers in those vases, and maybe even read some of the books.
    This will work. It has to work!
    She switched the air conditioner in the living room window on low, thinking it would partially cool that room and the bedroom while she was away running errands. There were black ornamental iron bars on some of the windows, along with a U-shaped iron horizontal bar that held the air conditioner fast in its window so it couldn’t be removed except from inside the apartment. The windows that looked out over the small courtyard outside her bedroom didn’t have bars on them, probably because that was the way to the fire escape. Still, there were bars on enough of the windows that from the inside at least, the apartment had the aspect of a prison.
    Okay, Mary thought, the real estate people who’d warned her were probably right; it was a dangerous part of town in a dangerous city. But she wasn’t the shrinking innocent they seemed to assume. Mary