By the time Stella pulled into the Parkade Elementary parking lot, the day had moved into asphalt-melting, breezeless midafternoon. The place looked to be locked down tight as a drum, but there were a few cars in the lot, and Stella figured the handful of teachers and administrators still hanging around during summer vacation had themselves barricaded in with the air-conditioning.
Over at the far end of the parking lot was a white pickup with SHAW PAINTING spelled out in a mostly straight line in black stick-on lettering. It wasn’t a bad-looking truck, maybe six or eight years old, with a recent-enough wash. A nice Dee Zee aluminum toolbox was bolted in the bed, and a utility rack had a variety of tools and ladders lashed to it, neat and orderly. Stella’s dad always said you could tell a lot about a man’s character by looking at his workshop. If he didn’t respect his tools, according to Buster Collier, then he likely didn’t respect himself either, and you could forget about him respecting anyone else.
Well, this sure as hell wasn’t Roy Dean’s truck, then.
Stella got out, lugging her water bottle—she was trying to be mindful of staying hydrated in this heat, and she figured the iced tea had worn off by now—and leaving the gun behind in the box. She took a discreet sniff under her arm: not too bad, considering that this was one of those days when you’re sweating two minutes after you get out of the shower. This meeting wasn’t any beauty contest, of course; but the morning’s encounter with the mirror had Stella in a self-conscious frame of mind.
Stella ignored the VISITORS, PLEASE CHECK IN AT THE MAIN OFFICE SIGN and started across the campus. In addition to the main building, there were several others, a two-story gymnasium and a science lab and a long, low shed labeled FUNBEARS AFTER-SCHOOL CARE.
It was around the far side of this last one that Stella found Arthur Senior, up on a ladder painting the trim a creamy color a few shades warmer than white. In contrast, the old paint looked dingy.
“That looks nice,” Stella said. “Amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do.”
Arthur set his paintbrush carefully down on the pan that was attached to the ladder, and backed his way down. Once his feet were on the ground he squinted at her and wiped his hands on a rag he kept attached to his belt, then offered it to shake.
“Stella Hardesty, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes sir. Good memory.”
“Well, you’ve had your face in the paper in the last year or two, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Oh, that.” Stella could feel a flush rise to her face. That had been a close call; she’d been hailed a hero for dragging Phil Rivka out of his burning house. In truth, she’d intended only to torch the garage and Phil’s treasured Camaro, the one he bought the day after he sent his wife, Irma, to the hospital with series of injuries requiring overnight observation.
Luckily, even Sawyer County’s crack fire investigation squad hadn’t figured out how Stella got the blaze started in the first place, which was a good thing. Stella had refined her technique since then, and there was no longer much risk of her killing herself or anyone else with a botched attempt.
Despite Stella’s protests, photos of her and a very dejected-looking Phil had appeared not only in the local papers but all the way up in The Kansas City Star. Goat himself had called to congratulate her on her heroics. And to apologize for having been out on another call during the rescue. “If I’d been there,” he’d said in that inscrutable voice of his, “maybe we’d have figured what got that fire started in the first place.”
“Guess you’re a bit of a hero,” Arthur continued, but he sounded more wary than admiring.
“No, no, not me. Hey, I was wondering if Roy Dean or Arthur Junior were working with you today.”
Arthur didn’t answer right away. He took a tin of Skoal out of his pocket and slowly opened it, then just stared at the brown-black shreds of tobacco inside. Stella stared right along with him.
Nowadays you couldn’t find many fans of chew. Every doctor’s office in the county had warnings posted—mouth cancer, throat cancer. And Lord knows the spitting and the chawing were nasty, vile habits; the black bits stuck between the teeth didn’t do much for a guy’s appeal.
But Stella had a soft spot for the stuff. Her dad used to treat himself to a chew now and then, out on the back steps where her mother wouldn’t have to watch, and Stella’s own first sweetheart kept a tin in the glove box of his truck, hidden from his parents. He’d have a chew sometimes after football practice when he and Stella went for drives in the country.
“Er, do you mind…,” Arthur said.
“No, no, go ahead.”
Arthur took a healthy pinch between his forefinger and thumb, and tucked it expertly in the pocket between his cheek and gum. For a moment he closed his eyes and concentrated on the tobacco. Then he opened his eyes and breathed a sigh that conveyed a world-weariness far beyond his fifty or so years.
“Neither of my boys is working here today,” he said.
“They take the day off?”
“Well, now, we don’t really do like that. Wish I could say different, but the boys got themselves all involved in these side businesses of theirs, and I’m lucky to have them along more than a day or two a week.”
“Side businesses? How do you mean?”
“Oh, this and that. Arthur Junior, he got on part-time at the Wal-Mart Tire Center, and he’s been doing a program up at ITT on the weekends. You know, all the electronics they got in the cars these days, you practically have to have a degree in computer science to work on them.”
“What about Roy Dean?”
Arthur didn’t look at her but gazed out across the parking lot to the fields beyond. Alfalfa, lush and low-growing, poked its purple-flowered stems toward the blistering sun. “Well, you know, Roy Dean, he’s always got some idea or other. Last year he got himself hooked up with this multilevel marketing outfit. Nothing but a pyramid scheme, really. That didn’t end up all that well, and we had words. Now he don’t much tell me what he has going on.”
Stella noted the sad note in Arthur’s voice. Recognized it all too well.
“I understand,” she said. “My daughter, Noelle and me, we don’t talk much either. We had a falling-out, I guess you’d say, after her dad passed, and now she just lives thirty miles away in Coffey, but sometimes I feel like it might as well be the moon.”
Arthur pursed his lips together and nodded slightly, and the two of them stood there in a silence that was plenty melancholy, but not uncomfortable: just two parents wondering where they’d gone wrong.
“I guess they just have to go their own way,” Arthur finally said. “How old’s your girl?”
“She just turned twenty-eight in July.”
“Arthur Junior’s thirty. Roy Dean’s twenty-seven.… You know, when we were that age, we were settled down, raising kids. I think Gemma’s about given up on having any grandkids.”
“Oh, now,” Stella said soothingly, “don’t let’s give up yet. You know the kids nowadays. They like to wait before they have children. Besides, what about little Tucker? Chrissy’s boy?”
A smile flashed across Arthur’s ruddy features, crinkling all the wrinkles around his eyes and his mouth and making him look ten years younger. “Ain’t he a pistol? Aw, Gemma and I took such a shine to him.”
“Eighteen months old, I think Chrissy told me.”
“Yeah.” The smile slipped, and the light flickered out of Arthur’s gaze. “Thing is, those two, Roy Dean and Chrissy, they don’t get on so well. I think Gemma’s trying not to get attached, you know? If Chrissy goes back to her ex, why, she’s not likely to bring the little guy around anymore, see.”
“Her ex?”
“You know, that Akers boy, from up around Sedalia.”
“But they’ve been divorced for years.”
“Uh, well, the way I hear it, he didn’t want the divorce. He’s been after her all this time. They say…” He cleared his throat but didn’t look at her directly. “They say he used to get a little rough with her.”
Stella wasn’t sure what to say to that.
“I don’t mean to speak out of turn,” Arthur said quickly, “and I know my boy’s not easy to live with. Why, if Chrissy’s been… visiting with the Akers boy, on account of Roy Dean being away from the home so much, it wouldn’t be my place to blame her.”
“Arthur,” Stella began, then stopped, not sure how to say what needed to be said. “I wonder if you’ve noticed, that is, when Chrissy comes to visit, you might have seen, well, all manner of bruises and such—”
“I have,” Arthur said, his voice going sharp. “And if it turns out that Akers boy put ’em on her, why, I’d like to reckon with him myself.”
This time he did look at Stella, but it was only a quick glance with those troubled eyes.
It was possible the man really believed what he was saying.
It was also possible he suffered from the same disease that afflicted so many of the people Stella encountered: denial. Stella had battled denial herself long enough that she knew the pathology well, how it could really take a toll on a person as they struggled to keep believing the unbelievable.
If Arthur Shaw had convinced himself to ignore the facts in front of him, Stella wouldn’t judge him for it. They say most violent men follow paths that get set early in their own lives, that they’d been abused themselves and knew little else. Well, Stella’d bet a hundred bucks that Arthur Shaw had never raised a hand to his boys in anger.
Sometimes it just worked out that way. Sometimes you did your level best with a child, gave them all the love and direction you knew how, and things still didn’t work out the way you wanted.
Stella tried again, cautiously. “But you don’t think Roy Dean—”
“Oh, Roy Dean’s a trial,” Arthur interrupted, turning away from Stella and picking up his paintbrush again. “But he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Oh,” Stella said. “Huh.” She thought about mentioning some of the convincing details Chrissy had shared about Roy Dean, then decided Arthur had punished himself enough for one day.
“Ah, well,” Arthur said, making his way up the ladder again. “Sorry I couldn’t help you more.”
“No, you were—you helped plenty,” Stella said.
“Just one thing. It ain’t Arthur Junior causing anybody trouble,” Arthur said without looking at her, picking up his brush and dipping it carefully in the creamy paint. “He’s a good boy, just gets a little distracted sometimes.”
“I’ll remember that. You have a good day, now.”
As Stella made her way back to the car, her heart felt like it had got weighed down and rode a little lower in her chest. She hoped Arthur Junior, at least, would not give the quiet man on the ladder any more cause to live by the lies he told himself.
When Stella pulled up in front of her house, the sun was casting long shadows across the lawn, and Todd was doing skateboard tricks in her driveway.
“Hey, Stella, park out on the street,” he called. “I want to use your driveway.” He did some sort of flip that involved him leaping into the air with his skinny legs out at a comic angle while the skateboard flipped both over and around in a circle. When he landed, with a crash so loud it was miraculous the deck didn’t split in half, Todd teetered for a moment and then fell on his behind.
“Ow! Shit!”
“Watch your mouth,” Stella said, but she did as he asked and left the car in the street. Better to have him flopping around on her driveway, leaving patches of his skin on the concrete, than in the street getting run over. She walked over and glared at the boy, not bothering to offer to help him up.
Todd examined his palm, which was scraped red and crusted with old scabs.
“I reckon you ought to put some Neosporin on that,” Stella said.
“You got any?”
“I might, but am I your personal nurse? I don’t think so.”
“Aw, come on, I don’t want to have to go all the way back—”
“Todd, you live two doors down,” Stella said, pointing.
Todd shrugged and got to his feet, as graceful and light as a dancer, and jumped back on the board. He wore his hair down around his shoulders, but it looked as if he’d cut it himself, and maybe he had. His mother had more than enough on her plate.
“Well, you got anything to eat?” he asked, wiping his bloody hand on his baggy shorts.
Stella rolled her eyes. “I guess. Come on in.”
“There’s a lady in your house,” Todd said. He toed the end of his skateboard, and it flipped up into his hand. Not a bad trick, really.
“Yeah? Leave that filthy thing outside and wipe your feet. What kind of lady?”
“Kind of fat, but not too fat. Blond hair. Giant boobs.”
Chrissy.
Inside, Stella called out a hello—no sense spooking the poor girl. Found her in the same chair from the morning, but she’d fallen asleep. Startled awake, Chrissy pushed at the strands of corn-silk hair that had matted themselves to her face with sweat.
“How’d you manage the lock, sweetheart?” Stella asked.
“Oh, I showed her your key,” Todd said. “You know, under the pot on the porch.”
“Todd,” Stella said sternly. She’d shown Todd the key last winter when she hired him to water her plants during a visit to see her sister Gracellen in California. “You do not give strangers my key. You don’t let strangers into my house. Hear?”
“Yeah, well, I—”
“She could be anyone. You know, an axe murderer or something.”
Todd looked dubious. “Her?”
Stella bit down her unease. It was true that Chrissy looked about as dangerous as a toy poodle. It was also true that Stella had always managed to keep the unseemlier aspects of her work away from her home, but the day might come when some disgruntled asshole came around looking for trouble. She grabbed Todd’s arm hard and gave it a yank. He had already passed her up in height, but she had the advantage of mass and bulk.
“Hey!”
“Listen up, cupcake, or no snack. You don’t ever let anyone in here without me saying so. And if you ever see anyone hanging around, you go straight home and lock your doors and don’t be coming over here until you see me back here in person.”
“Christ! Okay, okay,” Todd said. When she released his arm he rubbed at it and glared at her. “Isn’t it almost dinnertime, anyway? Maybe we should skip the snack and have pizza or something.”
Stella stared at the boy, shaking her head slowly. “Your mom get hung up late again?”
“Yeah, she called. She’s got to pick up the twins at day care so she won’t be back for another hour at least.”
“What’s for dinner?” Chrissy said, her voice sleepy. “And did you find anything out yet?”
Stella looked at the pair of them, back and forth, and wondered why the Big Guy had seen fit to deliver these pathetic, hungry souls to her house, when all she wanted was to put her feet up and fix herself a giant Johnnie Walker Black on ice. Well, there was no rest for the weary, was there?
“Papa Martino’s,” she said. “You call ’em, Todd. Coupon’s on the fridge. Get a large. Half combo and half whatever you want. Oh, get a dozen wings too, extra spicy.”
“Fuckin’ A!”
“And watch your damn mouth!”
While they waited for the pizza, Todd went back out on the driveway to flip his lanky, awkward body over the skateboard some more.
“I believe I’ll go watch him some,” Chrissy said, rolling forward off the couch. “He’s something to see, ain’t he?”
“Hold up there just a sec, hon,” Stella said, settling down on the ottoman. “I’ve got something to ask you. Something of a personal nature.”
“Sure,” Chrissy said, bobbing her chin.
“It has to do with your ex,” Stella said carefully. “Pitt…”
“Oh,” Chrissy said, her face going a little pale. “It’s that damned Internet, ain’t it.”
“The… Internet?”
“I tol’ Pitt don’t be takin’ them dirty pictures, seein’ as they always end up on the Internet.”
“Pitt… took pictures of you?’
“Yeah, dirty ones.” Chrissy sighed. “I didn’t mention it ’cause I didn’t figure it was, you know, important. And it ain’t, neither—if I get Tucker back I guess I don’t even care what-all anyone wants to put on the Internet about me.”
“Um… were these, ah, recent pictures?”
Chrissy shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess. I mean it was like, I don’t know, March probably.”
“You’ve been seeing Pitt.”
Chrissy shrugged. “Not regular or anything. Just, you know, sometimes.”
Stella heaved a sigh. “You know, back when you first came to talk to me, I told you that I had to know everything. Remember? Don’t leave anything out, I told you, because every detail counts, even the ones that might not seem important at the time. Well, I surely wish I wasn’t only finding out about Pitt now.”
“I’m sorry,” Chrissy said, staring down at her hands. “It’s just… I didn’t want you to think I was…”
She swallowed and Stella could see her eyelashes fluttering.
“… a slut,” she finished in a whisper.
Stella’s annoyance shrank up to see the girl so remorseful. “Oh, wait, I’m not trying to judge here. I don’t think that, I really don’t. Only, it’s been suggested that, uh, Pitt was the one who hurt you.”
“Pitt?” The tremulous note in Chrissy’s voice gave way to a snort of disbelief. “Pitt ain’t but five foot three on a good day and a hunnert twenty. ’Sides, he wouldn’t never hurt me. He’s crazy about me. We’d prob’ly still be married if I hadn’t taken up with his boss.”
Stella nodded, trying to assimilate all these new details. “How’d Pitt feel about Roy Dean? And Tucker?”
“Well, he pretty much hated Roy Dean,” Chrissy said. “Always threatening to come to the house one day and blow him away. And Tucker—well, he thinks Tucker might be his, even though I’ve told him a million times I was seeing someone else, and besides, anyone can see Tucker’s going to grow up twice as big as Pitt. Ain’t no way they’re kin.”
Stella felt a chill along her neck. Enraged boyfriend, denied not only his woman but the child he believes is his… men had certainly committed crimes for far less.
“People see what they want to see, sometimes,” she said.
Chrissy’s expression sharpened up. “Stella,” she said dubiously, “you ain’t actually thinking it was Pitt stole Tucker, are you?”
“Well… you said he went missing right after Roy Dean was at your house so—”
“But Pitt was there too. I mean, I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you about it, but Pitt was over visiting that morning, and when Tucker fell asleep in his playpen Pitt ’n me went back to my room for a spell… and when Roy Dean came to the door, Pitt hightailed it to the guest bedroom to hide out.”
Stella bit back another scolding. Honestly, the girl tried her patience.
“Is that it? Or is there anything else you need to tell me beside the fact that there was a whole other person present when Tucker disappeared?”
“I said I was sorry,” Chrissy said.
“Yeah, okay… just… But why’d Pitt need to hide, considering that you and Roy Dean were split up? You’re free to live your life any way you want now,” Stella said.
“It’s just what we did a couple times back when Roy Dean was still living at the house and he came home unexpected. I guess Pitt was still in the habit.” Chrissy laid a hand over her heart. “Pitt’s just a little sweetie, but he ain’t the most ballsy man. He don’t like confrontation.”
Stella didn’t bother to point out that desperation occasionally moved even un-ballsy men to act. “Was his car gone when you went outside looking for Tucker and Roy Dean?”
“He didn’t have no car. He had a buddy drop ’im, and he was going to just walk back home. He’s in those apartments over by the office park.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange,” Stella mused, “that he didn’t call you later that day?”
“Well, I ain’t got a cell phone.”
“Or stop by? Just to make sure you were okay?”
“It wasn’t like that, Stella,” Chrissy said, crossly. “It was just casual.”
It sounded to Stella like Pitt might not have considered it nearly as casual as Chrissy did.
“I’ll go talk to Pitt,” Stella said.
“Suit yourself,” Chrissy said. Her mood was darkening by the moment. “But it’s a waste of time, you ask me. It’s Roy Dean we got to find. Maybe we ought to see what the sheriff thinks. Get up a search party or something.”
“That’s something to think about,” Stella said, trying to hide her exasperation.
“But Stella… about them pictures. Can you do something?”
“Well, are they in digital format? Did Pitt put them on his PC? Does either of you have an Internet connection?”
“Ain’t neither of us even got a computer, Stella. And they was Polaroids—Pitt likes watchin ’em develop.”
“Well then, I wouldn’t worry too much about them getting online. Listen, the pizza’s going to be here in a minute. Why don’t we eat—it’ll help us think clearly.”
As if on cue Todd came bursting through the door, trailing a young man in a Papa Martino’s T-shirt who was carrying a suspiciously large thermal bag.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Todd said. “I ordered an extra pizza. I was hungry. You need to pay him. Don’t forget the tip, okay?”
By the time she got the kitchen cleaned up and Todd sent home and Chrissy settled into the guest room, Stella could sense the prickles of a second wind starting along her spine.
Part of it was the whole bar thing, of course. Stella couldn’t help it: she loved bars, loved the way folks came in and shed the first three-quarters of their day and settled into the final stretch, some of them weary, some of them desperate, some on the make, some—occasionally—even happy. Stella loved to sit on the sidelines and watch the squabbling and the mating rituals and the jealousy and the preening, the lively bubbling of humanity’s stew.
She’d missed so much; Ollie never wanted her to go out at night. With his crazy jealous streak he didn’t even like to let her wait on the very occasional male customer who came into the sewing machine shop. Since he died, Stella had decided she had some catching up to do, and she took herself out a couple times a month.
Tonight was a work outing, of course, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little fun. She’d told Chrissy she was going to stop by Lovie Lee’s divorce party, just to be polite. Lovie wasn’t a client; she and Larry Lee had just grown tired of each other. Larry’d been living in the garage, which he’d fixed up with a waterbed and a couple of weight machines, for a few years. They were only making it official because Lovie had got tired of parking on the driveway. She wanted her garage back.
The party probably would have been fun, but duty came first.
Chrissy hadn’t questioned Stella’s lie—which Stella had told only because she didn’t want to have to explain why her hunt for Tucker was starting out in a bar. She was afraid Chrissy might bring up the search party idea again. But deep in her melancholy funk, the girl just nodded and said she’d be fine, that Stella should go ahead and have a nice time.
Stella pushed the hangers back and forth in her closet, finally settling on a jazzy little teal number, a tank top with straps wide enough to cover her bra, which was a serious piece of equipment with a big job to do. The top had beads sewn along the neckline, a little sparkle to set off her earrings, which were a dangly crystal pair she’d got out of the Avon catalog Gracellen sent her.
She squeezed into her favorite jeans, which had a squiggly row of stitching on the butt pockets and molded everything into a tight-looking, if generous, package. She added slip-on black sandals with just a bit of a heel, sprayed herself with White Diamonds, and she was ready to go.
Stella peeked in on Chrissy, who was reading a copy of Redbook with the sheet pulled up to her neck. The fan in the window cranked along on high, cooling the bedroom down to a tolerable temperature.
“You gonna be all right, sugar?”
“Yeah, I guess. But every time I think about Tucker…” Chrissy’s lips wobbled, and Stella was afraid she was going to bust out crying again. Earlier, it had taken half an hour to get her calmed down, and Stella needed to get on the road.
“Look here, honey,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and patting Chrissy’s arm. “I’m doing everything I know to figure out where they’ve got to. And even if Roy Dean’s a son of a bitch, you know he won’t do nothing bad to Tucker.”
Chrissy nodded, and Stella prayed hard she had just spoken the truth.
“Sheriff Jones is good at his job,” she continued. “He’ll be looking in the places I can’t. And tomorrow, we’re going to keep you busy at the shop, so now you’ve just got to put it out of your mind, and get some rest, right?”
Putting Chrissy to work had been one of Stella’s better ideas: not only would it give the girl something to do, but it would free Stella up to work on tracking down Roy Dean and Pitt Akers. She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but as the hours ticked by she was getting more and more worried about Tucker. Get a bunch of stupid assholes together and the first things they were liable to let slide was the women and children. At least women had a fighting chance.
“Thank you,” Chrissy snuffled. “I just couldn’t go back home.”
Stella understood; having to go back to the empty house, with all of Tucker’s toys on the floor, his crib, would just make her crazy. Chrissy worked part-time at an in-home day care in her neighborhood, and she didn’t want to go to work either, and Stella guessed she could understand that too. She wouldn’t be much good to the other kids, frantic with worry. A quick call to Chrissy’s employer had straightened that out.
Stella headed first for the apartments across the street from the Prosper Industrial Park, a sad L-shaped complex of prefab buildings that had never been fully occupied in its ten-year history. The apartments had been there even before the industrial park was built, and hence had time to accumulate a nearly full complement of divorcées and down-on-their-luck entrepreneurial types and drifters and general underachievers—anyone who found the idea of a cheap, boxlike one-bedroom apartment with drafty aluminum windows appealing.
She found Pitt’s place easily enough in the last of the evening twilight. He had a ground-floor apartment on the back side, which enjoyed a fair amount of privacy on account of a bank of Dumpsters. After knocking and trying the door, Stella set down the Tupperware spaghetti tote she used to store her lock tools and shone her mini Maglite in the crack between the door and the frame, where indifferent construction had left a hair’s-breadth gap.
“Oh, didn’t your mama teach you nothing,” she breathed—Pitt hadn’t used the deadbolt. Stella was a little disappointed at the lack of a challenge; she’d spent a few recent slow afternoons at the shop making herself a set of shims using tin snips and some rinsed-out Bud cans, and she was eager to try them out.
Still, there were advantages to keeping it simple. Stella slipped her old Macy’s card—long since canceled but kept for occasions like this one—into the door jamb. Then she slid a pair of quart-size Ziplocs over her hands and let herself in.
She stood for a moment in the living room, listening for sounds and glancing around. The door to the bedroom was open, and the cramped kitchen was visible through a pass-through. A shape darted past her, nearly giving her a heart attack, but as it bolted under the couch Stella realized it was just a cat.
She snapped on the lights. Illumination did little to improve the surroundings—scuffed white walls, dingy gray carpet, tired plaid sofas—but at least Pitt kept the place clean. There was no cat smell; Stella even detected a faint scent of Clorox. “Might oughtta have kept this one, Chrissy,” Stella murmured as she started looking around. “Knows how to clean.”
If she’d planned on any serious digging, she would have splurged and used a pair of disposable latex gloves from the box she kept under her bathroom sink, but they were so danged expensive compared to the Ziplocs. Worrying about fingerprints was probably ridiculous anyway; Stella highly doubted whether the crime scene techs would be coming down from the county seat in Fayette anytime soon to go looking for Tucker. Still, anything worth doing, as her dad used to say, was worth doing right.
There was little to see. Pitt, it appeared, had been leading a monklike existence since divorcing Chrissy, aside from his Polaroid collection, which Stella found in an envelope on his bureau. One glimpse convinced her she didn’t need to see any more of that, but she slipped the packet into her pocket anyway—one less thing for Chrissy to worry about.
Other than the racy photos, scouring Pitt’s place was about as exciting as watching paint dry. A couple of Costco uniform shirts hung in the closet. Tightie whities and V-neck T-shirts and over-the-calf athletic socks were neatly folded in the drawers. Pitt owned an impressive collection of household cleaners—409 and Windex, among other things—but nothing seemed out of place.
As she turned to leave, the cat appeared, one cautious paw at a time, from under the living room sofa, and stalked imperiously into the kitchen, where it lapped at a full water bowl. Watching the cat, Stella noticed something she’d missed earlier; there was not one but two very full bowls of cat food set out on a vinyl place mat on the floor. One had a small dent, a few of the little orange triangular nuggets having spilled to the floor, but the other was mounded high and undisturbed.
“Looks like your master wanted to make sure you had plenty to eat,” Stella said, “while he was away. Where’d he go, anyway?”
No response. Typical. Stella left without saying good-bye, having confirmed that she was still a dog person; she wanted a pet that interacted a little.
So it looked like Pitt had left town for a while. Interesting.
Stella returned her spaghetti box to the back of the Jeep and hit the road, thinking that in the morning she’d have to try to find out where Pitt had gone. She made the drive to BJ’s Bar with the window rolled down, despite the damage it did to her well-sprayed hairdo. Sometimes you just had to feel the wind on your face.
On her way from the parking lot to the front door, she patted her hair back into place and hitched up her bra straps, getting everything settled where it was supposed to go.
BJ’s wasn’t a place Stella visited unless it was in the line of duty. It was a little rough even for her. It wasn’t that she was afraid; get the meanest cuss drunk, and his reflexes would go to hell and he’d be no match for her, especially with the Raven in her purse. It was just that it wasn’t all that much fun to hang out in a place where optimism was in as short supply as overtime pay, tempers were thin, and old grievances lay thick on the ground.
Things went quiet when Stella walked in. She ignored the pool tables at the far end of the long, narrow room, the few square wooden tables where customers sat in twos and threes, and headed for an empty stool at the end of the bar near the bathrooms.
BJ’s wasn’t much to look at. You could tell before you put a hand on the bar or a table that it would come away sticky. Some of the wooden chairs didn’t match, and the bar stools were popping their brass studs and losing the padding on their vinyl seats. The walls were decorated with an assortment of titty posters and neon beer signs, some lit, some busted. A single framed softball photo gave evidence that at some point Big Johnson had gotten it into his head to sponsor a team, an event that must have caused the league a fair amount of consternation.
Big Johnson himself wandered down the bar to greet Stella. There was a waitress on duty as well, but she was on the floor with a tray, plonking down pitchers and trying to avoid having her rear end pinched any more than was necessary.
“Stella,” Big Johnson said, leaning his muscular, hairy forearms on the bar in front of him. Big Johnson had moved to town and bought this place after serving in the first Iraq dustup, and he already had his nickname then. Naturally there was some talk of whether it just referred to the fact that he was a solid 240 on a six-three frame, or whether there were further reasons, but if he’d shed any light on the question, Stella hadn’t heard about it.
She might not have minded finding out for herself, actually. But there was that delicate issue of dating people in the workplace—and as long as Big Johnson kept attracting the kind of clientele that was hanging around the joint now, the bar was likely to continue to be on Stella’s professional rounds.
“B.J., good to see you. Been a while.”
“Yeah. Last time you were in here, lessee, you dragged out one of my best customers, and he don’t come around no more.”
Stella felt herself blushing, but she doubted he could tell in the dim light.
“Yes, well—I just wanted to give him his Christmas card. Forgot to mail it and I’d been carrying it around in my purse. You know how that goes. Far as him coming around here… well, I hear he’s not partying much these days.”
Big Johnson gave her a ghost of a smile and a twitch that might have been a wink. “Aw, we ain’t missed him much. What’re you drinking tonight?”
“Let’s see.” Stella pretended to think it over, tapping her nose with her forefinger and glancing along the shelves behind the bar. “Well now, I guess you better make it Johnnie Black with a Bud back.”
Big Johnson went off to get the drinks, and Stella glanced down the row of drinkers at the bar. There he was, and she didn’t even have to go chasing him down: Arthur Junior was keeping company with a brassy redhead, the two of them giggling over something, their noses almost touching. Interesting. Last Stella heard, Arthur Junior had hooked up with a gal from Ogden County, but she hadn’t been a redhead. Oh, well, he was known to have quite a few smooth moves; probably the reason Gemma Shaw despaired of having any grandchildren off him anytime soon.
Any legitimate grandchildren, that is.
Big Johnson came back with the drinks and set them down in front of Stella. “You know,” he said, clearing his throat and looking somewhere over her shoulder, “I don’t believe I ever got your Christmas card either, now that you mention it.”
Stella raised an eyebrow. Could it be? Was Big Johnson actually flirting with her? Her stomach did a little back-and-forth slide, and she felt heat rise to her face. The light was mercifully low: one of life’s funny truths is that the worse the lighting in a bar, the better a lady tends to look.
“Oh.” Nice—idiot, she scolded herself, but couldn’t for the life of her think of what else to say.
“Yeah…’course, I didn’t send any myself, this year. You know, the holidays snuck up on me and what-all, had my brother’s family come stay…”
Big Johnson trailed off and cleared his throat again, backed off the bar, and still didn’t look her in the face.
“What I mean to say, though,” he said, grabbing a rag off the sink and taking a wild swipe at the stretch of bar in front of him, “was that if I did send cards, I woulda sent you one.”
Then he was off, practically jogging down the bar to where customers were hollering for him.
Well. Dang. Now that was interesting. Stella took a biggish sip of her whiskey and then a nice long cool drink of her beer, the foam tickling her upper lip. There was something going on with B.J., that was for sure.
It was nice. But it wasn’t quite exactly the mmm-hmmm-yeah that generally signaled powerful attraction to Stella.
She thought about it some more. Waited a few minutes to see if a reaction was just sneaking up on her. But no: Big Johnson, sweet as he was, didn’t light any roaring fires under her. Which was just too darn bad, because there wasn’t exactly an abundance of suitors lining up at her door.
Truth was, ever since Ollie died, Stella had been pretty reluctant even to think about men—except for the ones whose skulls she was knocking together, of course. Those thirty years of paying for a single grievous mistake in the man department had put her off her feed a bit.
But… it had been three years. Long enough for even Stella’s rusty, ill-used parts to start clamoring to get put to use again. Hell, she was a grown woman; there shouldn’t be any shame to admitting, at least to herself, that she’d started thinking about sex again. Checking out butts at the Home Depot, spotting an appealingly crooked smile or a snazzy goatee or a nice tan… harmless, right?
Unfortunately, there was only one man in a hundred miles in any direction that really got her engines purring, and that was—damn it—the one man who was absolutely, positively, off-limits, the one who could send her world upside down and not in a good way—the kind of way that would have her serving time at the Sawyer County jail up in Fayette.
“Hey, Mrs. Hardesty.”
Stella jerked out of her reverie and turned to face the man who had spoken to her. Well, well.
“Hello, Arthur Junior.”
“Dad said he saw you out on the job.”
“Yes—yes, I did bump into him there.” Stella turned to Arthur Junior’s companion, who was standing behind him looking bored and teetering on her spike-heeled sandals. It appeared that Arthur Junior’s date was accustomed to deficits in his manners, but Stella believed in starting every relationship off on the right foot. “Hello, dear. I’m Stella Hardesty. My, you have lovely hair.”
That got the gal’s attention. She lifted her chin and flashed a smile. Had a darling little gap between her front teeth, nice skin, a smattering of freckles. “Hello, ma’am. I’m Silver Mason. Pleased to meet you.”
Ouch—that goddamn “ma’am.” When was that word going to ease on out of the language?
“Mason… would that be the Masons out Route 12? I went to school with a couple of the girls.”
“No, sorry, I’m from Saint Louis. I came out here for work. I’m an intensive care nurse over at Lutheran.”
Arthur Junior frowned impatiently. “I just figured I should find out what your interest in the family was, Mrs. Hardesty.”
“Well now, Arthur Junior, I wouldn’t say it’s the whole family, exactly, just your brother Roy Dean. He seems to have gone missing, and I was wondering if there was any chance he might’ve taken something along with him that doesn’t belong to him.”
The cast of Arthur Junior’s expression shifted, and Stella could see plain as day that a variety of emotions were doing battle on his face. A twitchy little tic appeared at the edge of his jaw, and his eyes narrowed to slits. After a few moments he turned to Silver.
“Darlin’, I’m afraid this is going to take a few minutes. Just some boring business shit. Would you mind if I talked to Mrs. Hardesty alone for a bit?”
Silver gave him a sunny smile. “Oh, that’s fine. I’ll go watch the darts for a bit.”
They watched her walk away. Silver had a nice little figure, a narrow waist and ample curves; for a fleeting moment Stella felt wistful remembering the long-ago time when she could still sashay her way to a man’s attention.
“You might think about hanging on to this one,” she said. “Looks nice, talks nice, gainfully employed…”
“Yeah. So listen, I don’t know what my dumb-fuck brother’s gone and done now, hear? I’ve got no part of his dealings. He stopped showing up on Dad’s job about a month ago, won’t answer my calls or nothing. Hell, he hasn’t even been out for Sunday dinner, and Mom’s about to hit the roof. To be honest, Mrs. Hardesty, I ain’t seen him for two, three weeks now.”
Stella evaluated Arthur Junior. She was inclined to believe him. The criminology course said she should look for facial tics, perspiration, and fidgeting—all things that were tough to see in a dark bar.
“Now, Arthur Junior, there’s a chance you could be lying to me, sweetie, and I’d have no way of knowing it. I wonder if I mentioned that the thing Roy Dean took off with is needed in the worst way by a friend of mine. No, now, I’m not saying you know anything about this mess—and I’m not saying you don’t. You may have heard… when it comes to my friends, I take their needs pretty seriously.”
The faint little flicker in Arthur Junior’s eyes clued Stella in: he’d heard. She didn’t know how much he knew, but it looked like it was enough. There were days when it paid to have rumors floating around about how you’d ruined a numbskull’s day with a bit of old-fashioned violent reckoning.
“I hear you, Mrs. Hardesty.” Arthur Junior bit his lip but didn’t take his eyes off her face. “What is it you think Roy Dean took?”
Stella considered her options. She generally had a policy against revealing any of the facts of a case unless absolutely necessary. And given her new information about Pitt Akers, along with Roy Dean’s general lack of affection for Tucker, it almost didn’t seem worth stirring up a fuss over such a long shot. Still, time was critical, and she couldn’t see any reason not to get as many eyes looking out for Tucker as possible.
“A little boy,” she said. “Chrissy’s boy, Tucker.”
Arthur Junior said nothing for a moment. It clearly wasn’t the answer he expected to hear. He frowned, the lines appearing on his forehead making him look a lot like his father.
“Why would he go and do that?”
“I really don’t know. I’m just trying to connect with anyone who was with Tucker right before he disappeared. And your brother was there, at Chrissy’s, picking up some belongings he’d left.”
Arthur Junior took a deep breath and let it out real slow. He stared off at Silver, who was chatting with a couple of local gals over by the dartboard; then turned and looked back down the bar at the assembly of drinkers.
“Look here, maybe we better go somewhere else to talk. Let me just get rid of Silver. If I give her my keys, can you run me home after?”
The evening was shaping up to be full of surprises. “That would be no problem, Arthur Junior,” Stella said.
While he left to make his arrangements, she sucked down the rest of the whiskey and beer. Didn’t make any sense to waste it.
“Anywhere particular you got in mind to go?” Stella asked, once they pulled out of Big Johnson’s parking lot in the Jeep.
“Yeah. Head out Old State Road Nine.”
“You gonna clue me in where we’re headed?”
“In a bit.”
Stella nodded to herself and drove along, well within the speed limit. She was drive-safe, her BAC adequately low due to her sizable frame and the big dinner she’d had and a tolerance maintained with a healthy daily dose of Johnnie Black, but there was still no sense calling attention to herself.
A bright slice of moon lit up the road with a soft glow.
“I’m older than Roy Dean by two years,” Arthur Junior said after a while. “Bigger, too. Taller, at any rate. But do you know, by the time I was ten Roy Dean would sneak up on me and take me down when I wasn’t lookin’.”
Stella nodded. Now the boy had decided to talk, it was best to let him unroll his story at his own pace.
“Now that’s the kind of thing you just hate when you’re a kid. Specially if your friends know about it, getting your ass kicked by your kid brother. So I made it a project to beat the crap out of him. And you know what? I never did. See here?”
Stella glanced over; Arthur Junior had pushed up his short sleeve to reveal his shoulder, but Stella couldn’t make much out in the dim light in the Jeep. “Hmm,” she said anyway.
“Fucking bite marks. I got him down, got his arm pulled behind him one day, had half a mind to break it I was so mad, and he bit me. Mom wanted to take me to the hospital, but Dad said I was just going to have to learn to fight back. Now that was plenty humiliating, let me tell you. And Roy Dean just standing there grinning at me the whole time.”
“Your folks didn’t punish him?”
“Well, sure they did, but the thing was, wasn’t much you could do to Roy Dean that would make any kind of difference. I think they took him off TV for a month, but he didn’t care—he just invented new kinds of trouble to stir up. When he got bored, Roy Dean used to sit out back on this split-rail fence Dad built behind the vegetable garden, and when a rabbit or something would come by he’d shoot it with his slingshot. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he just kep’ at it and kep’ at it, and now and then he’d get lucky and hit one. Thing’d drag itself off and Roy Dean would follow, and if he caught up, he’d stomp the thing dead with his boots. I’ll say one thing for my brother—he ain’t got a lot of quit in him.”
Stella thought of little Tucker and got a very bad feeling in her gut. On the off chance that Roy Dean had taken him, she prayed he was keeping his temper under control.
“Arthur Junior, I gotta tell you, you’re not painting a very pretty picture of your brother. But what would he want with a little boy that isn’t even his?”
“I have no idea,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”
“You could have told me that back at BJ’s,” Stella pointed out. “Not to sound ungrateful, but if you don’t know where Roy Dean is, there’s other holes I could be digging in. Why exactly did you want to go for this here drive?”
“Because I believe I know where Roy Dean has been spending his time lately, and it ain’t no kindygarden, see what I’m sayin’? It’s bad news, serious bad news—no place to be haulin’ kids into. If Chrissy’s kid is with Roy Dean, then somebody needs to do something.”
“Jeez, just what is this place anyway? Some kind of strip joint?”
“I believe I’ll just show you. Turn off on Methaney there.”
Stella glanced at Arthur Junior; his arms were folded across his chest and he had an angry set to his jaw. She did as she was told.
She hadn’t driven Methaney in years. A couple of decades ago, someone still farmed soybeans out here, but the soil didn’t give up much, and the fields lay mostly unworked and fallow, sowthistle and carpetweed taking over.
“Drive slow,” Arthur Junior said, his voice a near whisper, “and don’t stop.”
After a half mile or so, they drove by a hand-painted wood sign that hung by chains from a couple of posts driven into the ground next to a gravel turnoff. In big block letters, it read BENNING SALVAGE. Five yards into the turnoff, a tall set of steel gates was locked tight with a heavy padlock.
“Oh,” Stella said. “The junkyard. That’s what you wanted to show me?”
“Ain’t just a junkyard,” Arthur Junior said, his voice low. “Drive on by, and when you get down to the T down there, turn around and come back. But don’t stop, hear? Don’t be lingerin’.”
The boy was spooked, that was for sure. Wasn’t any way anyone could hear them out here, but Stella didn’t bother to point that out. Driving past the property, she spotted lights on in a little prefab house up on a berm shaded by a couple of twisty scrub oaks. A few pickups and sedans were parked out front. Further back on the property, sodium vapor lights on blocky steel poles illuminated other buildings and sheds. And beyond that, cars—acres of cars in various states of body condition and decomposition, skeletons of wrecks and rusting carcasses whose innards were being stripped a little at a time to patch up other cars. All along the edges of the property ran a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. Nasty to look at, especially since some of the barbs caught the moonlight just right and glinted shiny and menacing.
She figured there was a mean dog or two not far off. It wasn’t just junkyards that had them—in Stella’s experience every family compound out in the sticks had a few flea-bitten curs, bred to meanness with stick beatings and fights over scraps of garbage. When one got hit by a car or lost a fight or mangled a leg on a trap or fence and had to be put down, there was always some scrawny mutt bitch around ready to deliver a new generation of hardscrabble pups.
She turned back to Arthur Junior. “I knew a Benning or two. One of ’em was just a few years behind me in school.”
“That woulda been Earl. He’s probably about forty-five—he’s owned the place since his dad passed. But he has a partner. You know—an associate. Don’t know his full name but he goes by Funzi. Comes down from Kansas City with some of his guys and stays for a few days now and then; I think he has a place down on the lake.”
“Funzi? What is that, Italian or some such?”
Arthur drilled her with that gaze again, and this time Stella did turn and look at him. In the moonlight his face looked pale as milk, his eyes deep sockets. And the boy looked scared shitless. “Uh-huh. Italian, like Alphonse. Mrs. Hardesty, you know what Italian means up in Kansas City, don’t you?”
Stella made the turn, a gentle curve on the scruffy remains of a farm road, and started back. The junkyard was on the driver’s side of the Jeep now, and she watched carefully as it rolled by. No signs of life anywhere, but the light in the windows of Benning’s house showed sheer curtains pulled shut. A blue flicker from one window probably meant a TV. Big one, no doubt—seemed like the humbler the dwelling, the fancier the TV these days.
“What are you trying to say, Arthur Junior? Benning’s mixed up with some sort of Cosa Nostra shit? The Family comin’ down here to the Ozarks for a little R and R?”
“It ain’t funny.” Arthur Junior’s voice was suddenly sharp. “You don’t mess with those boys.”
“I didn’t say it was funny, but you got to admit—I mean, I’ve never seen any godfather types around town, you know? Haven’t been any horse heads turning up in folks’ beds or anything like that.”
She could feel Arthur Junior’s gaze fixed solid on her face. “If you get to tangling with these guys, you’d damn well better be as good as they say you are,” he said coldly. “You have no notion what they’re capable of. I told Roy Dean, I begged him not to get mixed up with these guys, but he just can’t say no to a quick buck, not ever.”
Stella didn’t say anything until the junkyard was in her rearview mirror, and then she put a little steel in her voice, just like she used to when Noelle was a teenager sassing her about one thing or another.
“Now listen here, Arthur Junior. Unless Roy Dean took Tucker, there’s no reason for me to do so much as give Benning and his pals a cross-eyed glance. I’m real sorry your brother ain’t got a lick of sense, but he’s not the one that hired me, so I’m not going to go rattling any cages just for kicks.”
“I didn’t say—”
“So if you know anything about Tucker you aren’t telling me, any reason I should worry about him and Roy Dean, then you need to come clean and tell me exactly what’s going on. Won’t do anybody any good for you to keep giving me these little pieces of the picture, hear? Otherwise, your brother’s a big boy—he’s on his own.”
“I don’t know anything about Tucker, like I said,” Arthur Junior said, his voice flat and resigned. “Only… maybe you could just listen to me and, I don’t know… give Roy Dean some advice, or, or, like convince him, maybe…”
Stella glanced at the dashboard clock: after eleven already. There was no way she was hiring on to talk sense into a blockhead like Roy Dean—she knew firsthand how futile such an effort would be. Still… she was a little bit moved by Arthur Junior’s fraternal loyalty. Sticking up for a sibling like that—well, that showed character. And character was rare enough that it might merit a few more minutes of her time.
Heading back to a bar to finish this conversation didn’t make much sense, though, and that only left one place she could think of. She turned back on Old State Road 9 toward town.
If Arthur Junior was surprised to end up at Denny’s, he didn’t show it. Stella had the hostess seat them in a corner booth away from the handful of other customers. When the waitress came, Stella waved the menus away and ordered them both a Grand Slam and coffee. Any remnants of her earlier buzz were long gone, and she meant to ensure that she and Arthur Junior were alert for the rest of the conversation, and not fainting from hunger.
She dug out the fresh notebook she’d tucked into her purse before leaving the house. This one had a Hannah Montana cover, with silvery foil and sparkles on the gal’s picture. Hard to believe that Billy Ray Cyrus was old enough to have a teenage daughter; seemed like just yesterday Stella was dancing around the living room to that tune of his, laughing at Noelle as she shook her little-girl booty.
Once the waitress set their coffee down, Stella wrote the date and “Arthur Shaw, Jr.” and “Denny’s” at the top of the page and said, “I get that you’re worried about your brother… now shoot.”
Arthur Junior took a deep breath. “It’s cars, see, Mrs. Hardesty. Roy Dean jacked a car way back in high school, and he got caught and did some juvie time for it. But I guess the bug bit him good. He’s always been wanting a better ride than he’s got, even though he’s not willing to work regular to get it. Long about last January he comes to me and says some pal of his says they can make good money stealing cars from up in Independence and Kansas City and taking ’em to salvage yards to sell for parts. So I guess Roy Dean and him do this for a while and then Roy Dean comes to me and says, why don’t he and I team up? Takes two, see, because you drive up there together and then one guy watches out while the other one gets the thing started, then you got to drive your own car back along with the one you stole.”
“I thought you boys don’t get along,” Stella said. “Why would he want you to go in on this thing with him?”
“No’m, we don’t generally, but the way I figure it is, Roy Dean knew he could trust me. I’d never rat him out or anything. That ain’t the way we’re raised. Plus, I think his friend was wanting to always take the bigger half of the haul, it being his contacts and all.”
“What do you mean, contacts?”
“Well, there’s four, five salvage shops in the county. More if you’re willing to drive a ways. But not all of ’em will take a car without title, you know? And those that will, you gotta kind of build up a relationship with them, just like any other business. And if you really want to make some good money, you got to know what they’re looking for. See, there’s makes and models they need parts for more’n others.”
“Sounds like you know quite a bit about this, Arthur Junior, for a guy who didn’t want to get tangled up in it.”
Arthur Junior hung his head, looking sheepish. “Well, thing is… Roy Dean, he just wouldn’t let it drop. And you should’ve seen Mom. Roy Dean, dumbass that he is, tells her we’re going to start a fucking body shop together, fix up cars and resell ’em. Excuse my language. Sorry. And Mom was so happy, you should’ve seen her.… All she ever wanted was for Roy Dean to stay out of trouble, and here he’s got her thinking he’s gonna go straight and that I’ll be there making sure he keeps his nose clean.”
Stella remembered the weary look in Arthur Senior’s eyes when he talked about his boys. “What did your dad think of all this?”
Arthur Junior stirred his coffee with a spoon, eyes downcast. “Dad… well, I think he quit believing anything Roy Dean said back when we were kids, but you know, he just wants Mom to be happy.”
“That’s a female affliction for you,” Stella said with feeling. “Trying to believe one thing when all the evidence points in the other direction. If women weren’t so darn bent on fooling themselves… well, I guess that’s another subject. Go ahead, tell me the rest. Did you join up with Roy Dean or didn’t you?”
“I… well, I hate to admit it to you, Mrs. Hardesty, but I rode up to Independence with Roy Dean a couple times. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe that I could talk him out of it or something, but—I mean it was just so damn simple. People leave their cars right out in the open without even locking the doors, and do you know how easy it is to hot-wire them? Especially pre-ninety-five, ninety-six, all you have to do is go under the steering column and get at the wires and touch them together. It’s not hardly rocket science, and Roy Dean always was good with that stuff, and the thing is these aren’t new cars. These are like old Camrys and whatever. It’s almost like a victimless crime, because with a car that age, people are done paying it off and the insurance company writes a check and, you know, they just go and get another car.”
Stella didn’t have much to say to that, especially because breakfast arrived. “Grand Slam,” the waitress said cheerfully, sliding it under Stella’s nose, “and… Grand Slam.”
Arthur Junior stared at his plate with little interest.
“Anything else I can do for you right now?” the waitress asked.
“No, sweetie, but thanks—I think we’re set.” Stella smiled despite herself. There was nothing in the world better than eggs cooked in pools of butter, bacon finished off in the deep fryer, and pancakes swimming in puddles of syrup. Even late at night—especially late at night—breakfast was Stella’s absolute favorite meal.
“If I ever end up on death row, this is what I’m ordering for my last meal,” she said, and dug in energetically.
Arthur Junior stared at her with a look bordering on horror.
“What?” Stella mumbled around a mouthful of eggs.
“Nothing. It’s just—I mean—what I hear and all, I can’t believe you can talk that way. If they can ever pin half the stuff on you that people say you done…”
Stella swallowed and set down her fork. This was a bit delicate. She knew what people said—that there were bodies buried all over the state, men who’d met their bloody end at Stella’s hands. The truth was that despite beating, interrogating, threatening, and torturing her parolees; despite leaving them with scars, broken bones, burns, post-traumatic stress disorder, even the occasional missing limb—despite all of this, she hadn’t killed a single parolee, no matter how blackhearted and irredeemable he was. Other than Ollie, but she figured she’d earned that one.
But there was no percentage in quelling the rumors. They were, after all, largely responsible for her effectiveness: a man who believed her next visit would bring a bullet to the forehead was far more likely to behave.
“You shouldn’t go listening to everything you hear,” she said carefully. “I really lead a pretty laid-back life. You know, what with the shop, and—and my garden and all.”
“Well, if you’re going to tangle with Benning and them, I hope at least some of it’s true.”
Stella nodded. “All right. Let’s just say that maybe some of the ass-kicking part’s true.”
“And look, if you do talk to them, you can’t—I mean you really can’t bring me into this.”
“Okay. Noted. So we got you and Roy Dean making a little extra cash at the chop shops. How often were you doing this?”
“I only went a couple times, back in March, and then I told Roy Dean I was done. I’m getting my certification. I don’t want to mess that up. He got all pissed off and then he tells me we don’t have to take the whole car anymore, that Benning’s given him a list of what he wants, shit like GPSs and DVD players, speakers, xenon headlights. Says we can do two or three or more at a time, but we might have to go up to Kansas City. Man, I didn’t like that. I hate the fucking city. But Roy Dean kept on me until he talked me into going around and meeting Benning. Told me if I didn’t like it once we talked to him, I could leave off and he’d quit too, even told me he’d go back to helping Dad out. Like he’s any help to Dad. Anyway, like some kind of dumbass, I went.”
Stella wrote a few notes with one hand and forked up hash browns with the other. “Okay, so you went with Roy Dean out to the salvage yard? When was that?”
“I don’t know, maybe end of March, start of April, somewhere in there. So he wants to go over there late at night, and I ask Roy Dean why we can’t go during the day and he’s like, no, we got to go when Benning’s associates are there. How do you like that, ‘associates,’ my brother the damn fancy talker. Should’ve told me something. So anyway we get there and honest to fuckin’ God they got this guy down at the gate waitin’ for us. Comes out with a flashlight and shines it in our faces and talks to Roy Dean before he’ll open the gate, and he calls someone on his cell phone and tells us to go park up by the shed and I’m like, what shed, and Roy Dean tells me to shut up and so that’s when I realize he’s been here before, because he drives up past the main area back to this prefab storage building, but I’m telling you, it ain’t really any kind of shed. I mean you could park a couple of tractor-trailer trucks in there, but it’s pretty much empty except this one area they got done up kind of like a living room—they got a carpet scrap on the floor, some recliners and whatnot, a table… and some computer stuff. Couple of PCs and printers and faxes and all that. Mini fridge… anyway, I don’t know what to think of this whole thing, but Roy Dean walks right up to Earl Benning and high-fives him and already I’m getting scared, ’cause the other guys sitting around there, man, it’s like The Godfather or something.”
“What do you mean? These guys… they were Italian? They were armed? They were wearing tuxedos?” Stella was fascinated, despite herself.
“No, just—well, I’m pretty sure they all had guns. Some in plain sight and I figure some hid. Roy Dean ’n me, all we got’s my .22 in the rack in the truck, and we didn’t bring it. This guy standing with his hand on the table, I figure him for in charge, and sure enough, later I find out it’s Funzi, even though none of ’em ever talked direct to me or Roy Dean.”
“How long were you there?”
“Not long. I was trying to signal Roy Dean, you know, like let’s get outta here, but he’s acting like some kind of hotshot, won’t even look at me. So Benning’s all, you’ve done some good work for us, and Roy Dean’s just pleased as shit to hear it. Like he’s a fuckin’ big dog, you know? And he starts saying that’s nothing, he and me can do double, triple that kind of turnaround, and I’m starting to sweat but I don’t want to say anything because, like, you argue with these guys you end up regretting it, right?”
“Yeah. Swimming with the fishes in the East River,” Stella said. She was dubious.
“Huh? Whatever. Roy Dean says he feels like he’s ready for more responsibility, and isn’t there some sort of work for us? Says he’s willing to relocate. I mean, beat that! So then I’m like, come on, Roy Dean, we need to get going and Benning’s like, you got some sort of curfew? And Roy Dean laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard, but when we’re back out in the car, out through the gates with that guard guy locking the whole thing up behind us, he nearly rips me a new one. Tells me I just blew our chance to get somewhere in the organization, and I tell him he’s full of shit and to make a long story short he dumped me out a mile from home and I had to walk and that’s the second-to-last time I seen him since.”
“So you told him you didn’t want anything to do with his… activities.”
“Yeah. I mean, I got this ITT course and once I get my certificate I’ll be making good money anyway, and I don’t have to go to the city or break any laws to do it.”
“Straight and narrow,” Stella agreed, spreading jelly on her toast, which had gone cold. “Not the worst idea in the world, when you get down to it. So what do you think, Roy Dean went back with these Mafia goons or whatever they are and got busy doing their errand-boy work? Or what?”
Arthur Junior shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I was freaked out enough I asked around. You know, a couple guys I know that are into… some shit. And Benning’s name came up a few times. Guess he’s got his fingers in drugs, least that’s the rumor, except it’s hard to know because he’s the—what do you call it?—the middleman. He isn’t selling at the street level or anything.”
“What kind of stuff?” Stella asked, her apprehension growing. “Pot? Prescription?”
“Mostly pot,” Arthur Junior said. “I guess there’s a bunch of Vietnamese down south Ozarks as are growing it indoors. Them Vietnamese know the hydroponics and all that shit. But far as I can tell it’s not getting resold around here. Somehow it goes up through Benning and disappears, up to the city or who knows where. I mean, if Funzi and them really are mob, it could be Saint Louis or Chicago or who the hell knows—they’re all connected.”
“Hmm,” Stella said. As little as she knew about organized crime, she had trouble believing that Arthur Junior knew much more. But the thought that the mob could have its tentacles here in rural Missouri—it was a possibility she’d never considered. “What else?”
“Well… I don’t know about this one, but this guy I know works on one of the riverboats. He says they’re running a skim operation on a lot of the mom-and-pop slots. You know, you got your low-end casino hotels, like that? Not a lot of oversight. Supposedly these guys, not Benning but some of Funzi’s guys, they come around and take a regular payout, and I guess that goes up through the organization, too.”
“So you’re telling me that Benning’s place is, what, like some kind of mob playhouse?”
Arthur Junior frowned. He’d barely touched his food. The eggs were congealing, and the bacon grease had solidified. “Mrs. Hardesty, all due respect, I think you’re not taking this serious enough. I think Benning’s place is kind of like the conduit for all their local operations. You know, out all over the county—maybe up along the river, where the gambling is—through Funzi, up to Kansas City and then who knows.”
Stella thought that through. Conduit—now there was a ten-dollar word. Much as she hesitated to admit it, Arthur Junior was a shinier penny than she’d expected. Which made his anxiety that much more striking. A dumbass gets scared, you can chalk it up to cowardice or sheer stupidity. But a guy like this…
“Tell me, Arthur Junior,” she said, voice low and serious. “What do you think has happened to your brother? I mean, leave off for a minute whether he took Tucker or not.”
Arthur Junior shook his head. “I think he figured he could outsmart Benning. Roy Dean’s played both sides of everything since we were in grade school. Hell, he double-dealt me out of my allowance more times’n I can remember. So I guess he probably talked them into giving him some sort of job, running packages—”
“By which you mean drugs,” Stella interrupted.
“Drugs, sure, or maybe those stolen car parts, load ’em into a truck or something, drive them to some central location. Or money—it’s not like they deposit all that cash down at Sawyer County Bank, you know? Roy Dean can be convincing. So if he started that in April, that’s a couple of months he could have been trying to work his way up until one day he figures he’ll just keep a little for himself or hold back some of the load to resell or something. I mean, if there’s an angle, Roy Dean’d find it.”
“But—what then? What are you thinking?”
“Mrs. Hardesty,” Arthur Junior said miserably, pushing his coffee cup in a circle on the table, “I’m thinking it’s possible he got himself killed, the dumb shit.”
Stella sat with that a minute, considered the angles. Sure, she’d read lots of crime novels; they were her favorite. But that was the kind of thing that happened in L.A. or New York—if it really ever happened at all. Would anyone bother to kill a local loser over a few hundred bucks worth of swag?
“Seems kind of… ruthless. You know: overkill.”
Arthur Junior was silent a moment, but then he looked Stella in the eye and said, “Some might say the same about your methods, Mrs. Hardesty. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.”
Well. Now that was saying a mouthful. Stella resisted the urge to protest, and wondered. Was it really possible the mob had taken up residence here, not ten miles from where she was born and raised, without her knowing?
She had to talk to Goat. If anyone knew anything about it, he would. But how was she going to pull that off without tipping him off to everything else?
“Go back to the Tucker thing for a second,” she said. “You can’t think of any reason—any at all—he might have had for taking him? Getting back at Chrissy, maybe?”
“No, that’s just crazy,” Arthur Junior said. “It’s not like he was all that fond of the kid. I never saw Roy Dean give him a second look, anytime they were over at Mom and Dad’s. I just don’t think he’d go in for the inconvenience, diapers and feeding him and all, when there’s other ways he could’ve messed up Chrissy’s life easier.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you, but Chrissy thinks Roy Dean might’ve took Tucker with him. He came over to the house on Saturday morning, and there was a, call it a short discussion, and then Chrissy got called away for a bit, and when she got back they were both gone, and Roy Dean’s car, too. And the diaper bag.” Stella didn’t mention the fact that another, equally viable suspect had hidden naked on the premises during this exchange, before making a stealthy and unexplained exit. No need to cloud the issue.
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe Roy Dean figured, if he was in trouble, they wouldn’t off him in front of the kid, or something.”
“Damn it all,” Stella said, with conviction. “Look, Arthur Junior, this has been a lovely meal, but I’m afraid we got to hit the road here. Tomorrow’s gonna start early, and at my age, it takes a while to get my beauty sleep in.”
She threw some money down on the table and stood up.
“Yeah,” Arthur Junior said, giving his untouched meal a forlorn glance as he followed her. “Only I don’t think beauty sleep’s gonna help this time.”