Stella could open only one eye. She could see enough to know she was in a hospital room, but the details were flickery and vague. It was her right eye that still seemed to be working, and for a moment she thought that was a good thing, her being right-handed and all. Then she realized that made no sense at all.
Her next thought was that she must have had a stroke that not only left half of her body incapacitated but also played havoc with her reasoning. Great, she thought, not just the lurching and the drooling, but embarrassing conversational gaffes, too?
And then it occurred to her that such a state wasn’t all that different from lots of the customers down at BJ’s as the evening wore on, and she felt a little more cheerful, despite a splitting pain that seemed to bisect her head as though someone had stuck a shiv in one ear and shoved until they saw the point coming out the other.
Might have to blow Big Johnson, she thought, just to celebrate if and when she got back on her feet again—and to cement her new status as a regular in his joint, since she probably wouldn’t be fit to drink anywhere else.
“That so.”
The sound of Goat’s voice—deep, rumbly, and close—gave Stella a shock that started in the gut and blasted out, causing her arms and legs to spasm and her reluctant left eye to gap open just a little. So, she could see out of both her eyes. And what she was looking at was Goat Jones’s broad, tanned face leaning in and staring at her with what appeared to be equal parts concern and amusement.
She could smell him, too, his woodsy scent that had notes of laundry softener and coffee and a faint hint of man, just sheer sweaty testosterone-y man. That final bit gave her a different sort of tremor that let her know that another quadrant of her anatomy had also pulled through.
“Goat,” she said, licking her lips, which felt sticky and crusty. It occurred to her that it was unlikely that anyone had bothered to brush her teeth, and Goat was leaning close enough she was going to have trouble talking to him and sparing him the effects of her breath at the same time. “You got any gum?”
He stared at her hard, then split into a grin. “Gum? You get the shit kicked outta you, get left to marinate in the golf pond, dragged out by a couple of stoned teenagers, and all you can think to ask for is gum?”
Ah… that. Goat’s words filled in the details on the sketchy framework of last night’s history. She’d remembered getting into a jam… oh, yeah, and there was the thing with her gun, too—and then—
The entire sequence came back to her, right up to landing that sweet kick to the asshole’s gonads. Bet he was a little worse for wear today. Probably lying on a couch with a bag of frozen peas duct-taped in his skivvies.
That made her feel a little better.
“What’s so funny, Dusty? You still thinking about goin’ down on Big Johnson?”
Stella felt her one good eye go wide. Shit. She’d said it out loud. “I didn’t say that,” she protested. “What are you talking about?”
“Yup, just a minute ago you were coming out of la la land. All these drugs they got in you for the stitchin’ up and what-not must be wearing off. And you were saying—”
“I said I got to show Big Johnson,” Stella said, feeling her face grow hot. She could also feel little itchy pinpricks of sensation, and she put her fingertips to her cheek. Felt stitches. Well, damn. Traced them from close to the bridge of her nose down to the back of her jaw on the left. And there was some sort of bandage-and-tape thing going on up on top of her skull, too. She continued her exploration and found a little nest of stitches buried in a shaved patch on the other side of her head, the skin there raised up in a sizable goose egg.
“Yeah? What-all you plan to show him?”
“Obviously not my beauty pageant sash,” Stella said, sighing. “How bad off am I?”
Goat looked at her with one corner of his mouth quirked down and the other up; like his eyebrows, his mouth appeared to have a mind of its own when it came to expressing mixed feelings.
“Well…,” he said slowly. “Considering they hit you hard enough to put you out for a few hours, I guess I’ve seen plenty worse. I mean, not on a girl… I mean, a woman… or anything… not that you look any worse than a guy who’s had the crap kicked out of him—”
“Jesus, Goat, shut the fuck up and get me a mirror.”
Goat folded his arms across his chest and stared at her with a squinty expression. “You sure that’s a good idea? You know, you’re just damn lucky you’re not in worse shape. Dr. Guevera says you’re in a lot better health than she expected. Heart like a teenager.”
Great. Better than expected… it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for her appearance. It was nice to be judged healthy, but Stella already knew she was in basically superb shape—her job required it. Under her curves were muscles she never knew existed until a few years ago. There was a reason she spent an hour every day on the stupid Bowflex and ran her ass off a few times a week. “Really? What kind of health did she expect me to be in?”
“Oh, come on, Dusty, don’t get all prickly. I’m sure she just meant—well hell, you know, we’re not spring chickens here, me and you. Be happy, you’re on top of the curve. Besides, you look fine to me. You always do.” He looked away, reddening. “How about we talk about what you were doing down at the golf course, instead? And who your little playmates were, that decided to show you such a nice time.”
Stella rolled her eyes, which turned out to be a bad decision, since it made the ache in her head turn into more of a symphony of pain. “How should I know who they were?” she demanded. “It’s not like they wrote their names in my yearbook before they took off.”
“Well, let’s back up a little then. What did you do after we talked yesterday? What kind of rocks have you been turning over, looking for beetles?”
Stella was sorely tempted to tell Goat everything that had happened: breaking into Pitt Akers’s apartment, with all that extra cat food. The trip to see Benning, his threats, spotting the shed at the back of the lot, the evidence of his living-it-up lifestyle. The call from Darla and Stella’s suspicion that Tucker might be marking time in nothing worse than a pissed-off girlfriend’s house—in which case she’d stirred up the mob pot for nothing and bought herself a mess of trouble in the bargain.
There was something about having the tar beat out of you that made a big strong man with a badge and a gun seem strangely comforting.
But the risks were too great. So far she’d seen no trace of Tucker at all, and she had to get more leverage before she could take a chance on pushing Benning any harder.
Not to mention the stakes being raised by his thugs. It had to be the guys Arthur Junior had seen in the shed that day. Stella wished she’d gotten a look at them, but the only one she’d have a chance of even recognizing again was the man on the bench. Stella would lay odds that was Funzi himself, since he seemed to be older than the other two, and a little thicker, and probably didn’t move quite as fast. Plus, he looked pretty comfortable directing the action while sitting on his ass.
If Stella told Goat everything now, he would have to act. But now that she knew how far Funzi and company were prepared to go, she was more frightened than ever of what they might do with Tucker, if for some reason the boy had ended up in their clutches. If they got wind of an AMBER Alert or a cross-county search or something, Stella didn’t doubt they would make the boy disappear forever.
She glanced at the clock on the wall and was reassured to see that it was only a little after nine o’clock. There was still time to keep her date with Darla—Roy Dean’s date, actually—if she could just find out who and where Darla was. Tucker had to be there. He had to.
“Well, let’s see,” Stella said. She’d play along now, then try to get rid of Goat so she could figure out her next move. “Chrissy and I had lunch over at Roseann’s, and then we minded the shop and sewed all afternoon. We’re making a quilt for little Tucker.”
“That so? You conveniently left out the part where you went to the beauty parlor first.”
“Where I did what?”
“Went to the beauty parlor. For a facial and a full-leg wax. Your social secretary told me.”
“My what? You mean Chrissy? When did you—”
“Hell, Stella, when you didn’t come home by midnight that gal went through your address book and called me on my cell phone, got me out of bed. Had me out driving around all night until I got the call that they hauled you out of the pond and brought you here.”
“You… were looking for me?”
Stella tried to keep a dopey little grin from settling on her face, but the thought of Goat driving around town, worried about her, made her feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.
“Well Christ, it was easier than listening to that young lady carryin’ on. She’s out in the waiting room, you know. Been there ever since they brought you in, sleeping in a chair, far as I can tell.”
“She is?”
“Yup, and as soon as I’m done with you, you can visit with her. But I’m in here on police business, and so far you haven’t been giving me much, so I suggest we ramp up the confessin’ so we can both get on with things. I’ll take up where you left off, and you can just lie here and get better.”
Yeah, right, like that was going to happen. Stella intended to get herself out of the bed and back into the action as soon as it was humanly possible—but there was no sense advertising the fact. “Well, you got the story from Chrissy, you know where I was all day. Last night I got a call, around ten or so, from someone saying that he had information about Roy Dean and would I come meet him out at the golf course.”
“So you just went, eh? Didn’t think about maybe meeting him in, I don’t know, a public place? Maybe giving me a call first?” Goat leaned forward aggressively and glared at her, and Stella thought, Oh yeah, here it comes. Leave men out of the action and they can’t stand it. They just have to be the ones who do the stomping around and spitting.
“Well, how was I supposed to know what they were gonna do?” she demanded. “All I’ve done so far is give the girl a place to stay. I don’t know why anyone would get all het up over that.”
“Yeah. And you didn’t bother to take anything along to protect yourself? I don’t know, Dusty—in the past, you’ve proven yourself to be a resourceful woman in that regard.”
Any levity in Goat’s expression was gone now, and Stella felt her throat go dry as she let his words sink in. Ollie—he was talking about Ollie.
“Did you take some sort of weapon with you?” he demanded, his voice low. “ ’Cause they didn’t find anything when the EMTs went out to get you. Come on, Dusty, this isn’t about me trying to get your permit in order or give you a time-out for nonregistration. I need to know what you had on you.”
“I—nothing. I have pepper spray in my purse, but I left it in the car,” Stella said. Then she told a bigger lie. “I don’t even know how to shoot.”
Goat worked his lips, evidently trying to figure out a response, but ended up saying nothing. Stella held her breath until he eased back a little.
“So, you’re still sticking to just hand tools,” he said, irritation evident in the creases between his brows. “Maybe you ought to carry around a screwdriver or a hammer with you, at least. Maybe you could have pounded a nail into one of those guys.”
Stung, Stella said nothing at all.
She couldn’t believe Goat would make such a casual reference to the wrench she’d used to kill Ollie—even though she knew everyone in town talked about it. Made jokes, even. She’d bet that half a dozen housewives watched their husband under the sink tightening up a pipe seal and thought about the wrench he held in his hand, wondering what it had felt like when Stella, not even fully aware of what she intended to do, brought it crashing down across her husband’s forehead.
She blinked hard. That was a memory she had sealed up under the tightest security.
For the longest time, she couldn’t remember any part of it. After the funeral, she’d come home, and other than letting the ladies from church help her box up Ollie’s things for charity, she’d just gone about her days on autopilot. When she thought about that day, she remembered Sheriff Knoll taking her gently by the arm and helping her up, and she remembered looking down at Ollie, slumped on the floor, and thinking that it wouldn’t do for him to ignore their company that way.
Later—much later—little bits and pieces would come to her at the oddest times. Sitting in a hot bath the following winter, she remembered closing her hand on the wrench, picking it up from the top of the stove where Ollie left it after tightening up a loose bolt on the range hood. A few weeks after that, she was cracking eggs for an omelette and she remembered the peculiar sound he made as he crumpled to the floor, a whispered, nonsensical protestation.
Eventually, she remembered it all. Remembered it, and made her peace with it. But she still kept it tightly hidden in a corner of her mind. It shouldn’t be coming out like this—not while she was in this vulnerable state, lying here in a thin hospital nightgown with her face slashed and resewn, while the man she longed for tried to drag out her secrets.
She felt the barriers go up, the invisible ones, the walls that would keep Goat and everyone else as far away from her as she needed them to be. Chalk it up to emotional exhaustion, but she didn’t have the energy to juggle her conflicting desires. It was time to compartmentalize. There were evildoers walking the earth who badly needed to be dealt some justice, and Stella knew she was the only one who could keep dealing it until they got Chrissy’s boy back.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked, letting her eyelids slide down, setting her lower lip aquiver.
“I’ve been out to talk to Roy Dean’s parents,” he said. “They seem to think their son’s just taken the boy for a little father-son time. You know, camping, fishing, like that.”
“Funny,” Stella said, frowning as much as her stitches allowed. “He never struck me as the type.”
“Well, they say their boy’s quite the outdoorsman. They’re getting me directions to a little cabin he sometimes stays in, down near the lake.”
Had to be the trailer, Stella thought. “What else you got?”
“I’m planning to call on some people Roy Dean’s evidently been doing business with,” he said. “Evidently he’s been dealing in auto scrap. Plus I’ve got Mike and Ian out talking to Roy Dean’s neighbors, his friends, his parents. We’re on the lookout for his car, but so far nothing. We’re looking into phone records. You know—all the usual.”
Stella nodded. Just what she expected. “You must be exhausted,” she said, turning up the sweet in her voice. “Running around all night. I’m so sorry to have caused you all this trouble. I guess you best get home and get a little sleep before you start your day.”
Goat frowned. “Only one needing to rest here is you. I spoke to Dr. Guevera, by the way, Stella, and she says she’s keeping you another night to keep an eye on your head. They don’t take these concussions lightly.”
Stella nodded, keeping her expression as neutral as she could.
Dumbasses—didn’t they realize she’d taken her own concussions plenty seriously, waking up on the kitchen floor or sprawled across her bed, blood congealing from where Ollie’d split her lip or busted her ear, wondering if this would be the time she couldn’t avoid the hospital? She’d been lucky that way, if you could call it luck—it had seemed like luck at the time.
Because Ollie had never actually broken anything. She never had to go to the emergency room and make up excuses for why her arm or shin was bent at a strange angle. She never had to pretend to have fallen down the stairs or tripped over a laundry basket.
No, she dealt with all her injuries the old-fashioned way—at home, with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a stack of bandages and a hell of a lot of CoverGirl concealer.
So one more concussion didn’t scare her all that bad, thank you very much.
But there wasn’t any reason to share that information with Goat. “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” she said meekly. “I’m actually feeling pretty tired myself, to be honest. Maybe I’ll see if they’ll give me a few more of those Tylenol, and take a nap.”
“That sounds like a good plan. I’ll tell Chrissy to come on back on my way out, so you all can have a short visit.” Goat stood, then hesitated, gazing down at her. “I’ll call you later in the day, let you know what I come up with. I don’t want you worrying. We’re going to find that little boy.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Stella said.
Goat stared at her a moment longer, and then, moving so fast she couldn’t even jerk out of the way, he slid one big callused hand under the thin blankets and ran his hand up her leg, letting his touch linger somewhere north of her knee.
“Tell you what, Dusty, I think you best get your money back for that wax job. You’re about as hairy as a polecat.”
Chrissy took one look at Stella and dropped her purse on the floor. Her hands flew up to her face, and she let out a little choked gasp.
“Oh shit, Stella, look what they done to you!”
So she was frightening people now.… Stella guessed she should be grateful that Goat had handled his horror so well.
“Just give me a mirror, will you?” she demanded, not bothering to cover her crankiness.
Chrissy nodded and blinked tears away. She picked up her purse and rummaged around in it, coming up with a plastic-handled makeup mirror, but she didn’t give it to Stella right away. Instead, she sat gingerly on the side of the bed and patted Stella gently on the top of her head and then on the shoulder, so softly it practically tickled.
“I’d hug you but I’m afraid I’d just hurt you worse,” she said miserably.
“Oh, come on, Chrissy, I’ll be fine. You and I both know—well, we know we’re tougher than people give us credit for. Right?”
Chrissy paused and mulled that over, then nodded decisively and leaned down for a big hug, smashing Stella’s tender ribs and pulling at the stitches. But Stella let her, and even tried to hug back a little.
When Chrissy finally pulled away, she handed Stella her little purse mirror. It was so small that Stella couldn’t see her whole face at once, and after squinting at herself for a few minutes, she figured that was probably a blessing.
She couldn’t get over how darn colorful she was. Two black eyes—but the flesh was actually shades of purple and gray and a sort of green, a rainbow of bruising all around the sockets. The stitches were done with neat little knots in black suture thread, and the path they traced made a sweeping curve, so it almost looked like some kind of tattoo, like the ones made to look like barbed wire that the kids were so fond of.
The shaved part of her scalp was almost a perfect square, and Stella couldn’t figure out whether that was a good thing or not. She tried pushing her hair over the patch to hide it, but the curls sprung right back the way they were, leaving the bald flesh exposed. She’d have to work at that with a little gel or something.
One thing she hadn’t noticed earlier—her bottom lip was split and swollen and stuck out all puffy, like a movie-star collagen job gone terribly wrong. Jeez.
She handed the mirror back and tried for a smile, which hurt like a bitch. “Guess I’m not going to get on American Idol anytime soon.”
Chrissy shook her head slowly. Then she took a breath and leaned in. Her eyebrows lowered and a flush of pink washed over her cheeks.
“We need to get out and get those sumbitches,” she said fiercely. “Stella, if they gonna do you like this, why, I don’t think they’re just babysitting little Tucker.”
“Oh,” Stella said. “Oh. Uh… Chrissy, see, I haven’t maybe told you every last thing I’ve found out.”
“What—what do you mean?”
“No, no, calm down,” Stella said as she saw Chrissy tense up, the tendons in her jaw standing out.
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Stella, it’s my—”
“No, listen. Some of it’s, you know, maybe good news. I mean, not good but, er, not terrible.”
“Stella, you tell me and you tell me right now.” She inched over on the mattress a bit, her hip bumping painfully against Stella’s aching side.
“Well…” Where to start? With the most hopeful possibility, Stella guessed. “You know that Darla gal that called? She was talking about having something of Roy Dean’s over at her house. Wouldn’t say what it was, but the way she was carrying on, I got to thinking it might just be Tucker.”
“Tucker? She’s got my baby boy over her house?” Chrissy said, voice escalating incredulously. “What’s she done with him?”
“No, now, I didn’t say for sure he was over there, just that the way she was carrying on, saying have Roy Dean meet her there today because she didn’t want the responsibility for—um, whatever it is he left there.”
“Well shoot, let’s go!”
“But now see, the problem is, she didn’t say where she lived. Or what her last name was. I have a feeling I might have a description of her, seeing as it might be a woman somebody saw Roy Dean with the other day.”
“How do we find out?”
“Hang on, sugar, let me tell you the rest first. This Darla’s expecting Roy Dean at noon. She’s gonna get us instead. We just got to figure out where she’s at. But there’s a little more I need to tell you.”
“Like what?” Chrissy demanded.
“Well… you know how you said Pitt was visiting at your place when Roy Dean came over… and you went out in the back yard for that hibachi, and then he was gone when you got back in the house?”
“Yeah…”
“And how he thinks Tucker’s his baby and all?”
“Well sure, but like I done told you, there’s no way he’d take Tucker. He ain’t crazy that way. He’s all follow the rules and shit, he’d never—”
“Honey, I went over to his place yesterday. He wasn’t there, so I broke in. Now don’t get mad—”
“Mad? It’s a little late for mad, isn’t it, Stella? Anyway, I don’t much care what you do or who you do it to if it means we get Tucker. What-all did you see?”
“Not much, really. He sure is a neat and tidy kind of fella. There wasn’t a whole lot to look at. But I did see one thing that made me think he might have, um, taken a trip of some sort.” She told Chrissy about the cat, the huge mounded supply of food and the full water dish.
“I always hated that cat,” Chrissy wailed, as though the cat had been the one to abduct Tucker.
“Well now, we don’t know if it means anything at all,” Stella said hastily. “Maybe he just went, I don’t know, visiting a friend, or down to Branson for a few days, or something like that.”
Chrissy inhaled a big breath, let her shoulders slump, and blinked a few times. “You got any other ideas about who mighta took my boy? Any more bad news you ain’t told me yet?” she finally asked, in a subdued voice.
Only the worst news of all. Stella considered everything she’d withheld from Chrissy so far, and came to the conclusion that she’d messed up big. Keeping everything to herself had done nothing to prepare Chrissy for this moment, when she needed to hear the entire truth.
“Yes,” she said, and forced herself to look Chrissy in the eye. “These guys, the ones I think beat me up, the ones Roy Dean’s been working for… well, they’re very bad men.”
Chrissy sucked in breath. “How bad?”
Stella mulled over possible responses. Chrissy was not, as it had turned out, as dumb as Stella had first assumed. Not by a long shot. And now the girl had come within spitting distance of understanding the true dangers of the situation.
“Like… mafia bad. Drug-dealin’ bad.” Crazy stone killer bad, Stella thought, but didn’t add.
“And these guys that done this to you last night,” Chrissy demanded, “they might know where Tucker is? I mean… you think somehow they got Tucker or something?”
Stella resisted the urge to bite her busted lip and gave a little nod. “If it ain’t Darla and it ain’t Pitt that took him… then yes, I think there’s a chance they might know something, that Roy Dean might have gone to them and, I don’t know, looked for a place to stay, or, or—”
Or what? Why would Roy Dean take a baby into that mess? That was the part that made no sense at all, the part that kept Stella hopeful that answers were far more simple.
Chrissy nodded again, and Stella could tell she was thinking hard. “Did you get a good look at them?” she asked, her voice tight.
“No, dear, I’m afraid not. There was a few of them, and I was stupid. I didn’t take the precautions I should have.”
“Yeah, I’ll say. Why didn’t you tell me what you were fixing to do? Sheriff says you went over to that pond by yourself. Jiminy, Stella, I would never have let you go off on your own like that.”
“Sorry,” Stella managed. “Won’t happen again.”
“You bet your sweet petunia it won’t,” Chrissy said, and to Stella’s great surprise, she leaned over and pressed the button on the bed, so the frame started to rise electronically, pitching her forward and shifting her painfully upright.
“Hey—what are you doing, girl?”
“Getting you out of here. What do you think? We got to find that Darla. Come on, we only got a couple of hours.”
Stella had, as a matter of fact, been thinking along the same lines, but she hadn’t quite expected to be heaved out of the bed. “Okay, but I can’t just get up and walk out of here with this robe thing flapping around my bare butt.”
“No, Stella, I know that. Don’t be an idiot. I got you some clothes in here. I figured they might have kept your old ones, like for evidence or something. Plus I know sometimes they cut ’em off of victims.”
She dug in the gym bag and pulled out a pair of cornflower blue stretch pants and a matching short-sleeved top that had a deep V neck with embroidery around the edges. As eager as she was to be on their way, Stella regarded the clothes with dread.
“Oh shit, where did you get those things?”
“In your bottom drawer. Why?”
“My sister sent them,” Stella hedged—which Gracellen had, for her birthday, after Stella lied and told her she was a size ten. “They just shrunk in the dryer, is all.”
“Well, we don’t have time to go back,” Chrissy said, “so you might as well get dressed.”
She handed the stack of clothes, a fresh change of underwear on top, to Stella, and pulled a pair of sandals out of the bag.
Stella started tugging off her gown and eyed Chrissy carefully. “Where were you thinking we’d be going, once you bust me out of here?”
“Well, I guess we don’t have no choice but to start with what we know, now do we?”
“I can’t help noticing that I’m hearing a lot of ‘we’ here, darlin’,” Stella said. Telling the girl the truth was one thing; letting her join in the search, with all its risks and dangers, was another entirely. “Did I miss something—did you go getting your P.I. license while I was out cold?”
At that, Chrissy straightened and fixed her with a glare that practically threw sparks. “I don’t really appreciate you being all sarcastic, Stella Hardesty,” she said coldly. “Bad enough you didn’t tell me what was really going on, Tucker being my baby and all. Like I couldn’t handle it or something? Shame on you, I’m his mother. Well, cat’s out of the bag now, I guess, so you ain’t going to be able to get rid of me no more. We’re in this together. ’Sides, last time I looked, you didn’t have no license either, and plus, you done way more law-breakin’ than I plan on.”
Stella paused with the shapeless garment pulled down around her waist and looked Chrissy over carefully. The rebuke was the most impassioned speech she’d ever heard out of the girl, and it occurred to Stella that she might have been treating her more like a child than an adult. She chose her words very carefully.
“Chrissy, you’re right. I have kept things from you, and as my client, you have a right to expect better. I promise I’ll be straight with you from now on.”
“And I’m coming with you,” Chrissy said in the same no-nonsense tone. “We’ll make a plan and then I’m coming along. I want my baby back, and once I get him, I’ll help you whup these—these—devils.”
“I don’t know if—”
“I ain’t asking, Stella,” Chrissy said with an edge to her voice that made Stella take notice.
Silently, she hooked her bra on and slipped into the T-shirt, tugging it over her belly, trying to stretch the fabric a little larger.
Chrissy wasn’t asking. She wasn’t going to be denied.
Every fiber of Stella’s being resisted the idea of taking the girl along. Stella worked alone. And even more important, she didn’t risk women’s lives. Not anymore, not since Lorelle.
“I’m happy to have you come along to this Darla’s place,” she said softly. “And I don’t suppose hunting down Pitt’s really going to involve any special dangers. But this other bunch—they’re ruthless. There are at least four armed men that we know about. Maybe more. There are two of us.”
“Yeah, but we got the advantage.”
“Yeah? How do you figure?”
“First of all, they ain’t expecting us,” Chrissy said calmly. “And second—we’re moms. We’re wired special to be fearless. They have no idea what kind of hell we can raise when we get provoked. Ain’t that right, Stella?”
Stella opened her mouth to speak but realized she had little to add. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s that. I can promise you, though, this ain’t going to be any walk in the park. It’s gonna be plenty dangerous and someone might end up getting hurt even worse than this.”
“Stella,” Chrissy scolded. “You’re talking to a woman who married Roy Dean Shaw. I got myself hurt every single day. I think I can handle what a bunch of amateurs want to dish out, don’t you?”
At that, Stella couldn’t help but smile. “Sorry, you’re right,” she said. “Now get on out of my way so I can put my pants on.”
With Chrissy playing lookout they were able to slip out of the hospital room and down to the elevator without anyone noticing. Stella left a note for the nurse, written on the back of the dinner menu she hadn’t bothered to fill out: “Sorry, I had to go. I’ll be back to settle up a.s.a.p. P.S. Don’t worry, I’m feeling fine. Best regards, S. Hardesty.”
On the ground floor Stella started to gain confidence. They went out the front door without attracting any attention. In the parking lot she was surprised to see her Jeep.
“Sheriff had one of his guys bring it on home from the golf course,” Chrissy said. “They took the car keys out of your pocket. And I figured, with what all we got ahead of us, it might make more sense to bring your car than mine. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No—good thinking,” Stella said. She wondered if Goat had noticed her little lockbox. There was a reason she used a combination lock on it—a key did no good. “You go ahead and drive. I’m still a little fuzzy from them happy pills they gave me.”
Chrissy slid into the driver’s seat and turned to Stella. “Well, I guess this is my first lesson,” she said. “How do you find someone when you don’t know much about ’em? You know someone down at the courthouse or something, can look up all the Darlas in the county?”
Stella snorted. She wished—that would be a handy contact to have. “No, but I got something about as good. Head us over to the Popeyes.”
“Why—you got a hankerin’ for biscuits or something?”
“No, you’ll see.”
From the way Chrissy lurched out of the parking lot, Stella figured she was still getting used to the handling. A thought flashed through her mind—Ollie would have had a fit to see Chrissy snugging the tires over the curb—and she laughed. It hurt, but it felt good, too.
“What’s so funny?” Chrissy asked, cutting her a glance.
“Nothing. I just didn’t expect to be chauffeured around today.”
“Well, get used to it. We got to save your strength.”
Stella closed her eyes and settled back and wondered what exactly Chrissy expected her to do. “They got my gun,” she said after a moment.
“Oh, I got that took care of,” Chrissy said. She reached behind and patted a cardboard box sitting on the backseat. “Picked up a few things from my folks’ house. Go ahead, take a look.”
Stella reached for the box, the type used to hold a ream of paper, and pulled it onto her lap. It was surprisingly heavy. She lifted the lid and found herself staring at an eclectic arsenal of weapons.
Lying on a pile of old rags was a grimy, blocky old steel handgun. There was also a wicked-looking big hunting knife with a hook, two smaller knives, a couple of holsters, and three boxes of cartridges, one open and half empty.
“Holy shit, Chrissy,” Stella said. “Your folks some kind of survivalists or something? Fixing to hunker down for the big standoff with the FBI?”
Chrissy’s face hardened and she didn’t look at Stella. “I don’t appreciate that,” she said after a moment. “My family ain’t much, but they ain’t criminals. Well, I mean they get into stuff here and there, but they ain’t that kind of criminal—the crazy kind.”
“Sorry, hon,” Stella said hastily. “I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just, you got to admit, this is a hell of a lot of firepower, and I wasn’t exactly expecting it.”
Chrissy shrugged. “Well, the gun, that’s an old Soviet Makarov, my uncle Fred brought it back from Vietnam. Daddy used to let us kids shoot it sometimes when he took us out for rifle practice.”
“They didn’t let anyone bring these back,” Stella said, picking up the handgun. It was heavier than it looked, with a star carved in the pistol grip and a simple safety catch at the rear of the slide. There were two magazines in the box, both empty.
Chrissy snorted. “You didn’t know my uncle Fred. I don’t think he cared much what he was allowed to do or not do. He s’posedly smuggled that gun back wrapped up in a hollowed-out Bible. I think Daddy just keeps it around for sentimental reasons. It ain’t been fired in ages.”
“Yeah—it looks it, too.”
“Nothing a little solvent won’t take off. That other stuff is just mostly for fun, you know, things my brothers pick up here and there and then they get tired of ’em and leave ’em lyin’ around and they end up in Mom and Dad’s attic.”
“Your brothers have an interesting idea of fun,” Stella said, putting the gun back and hefting the biggest knife in her hand.
“I wouldn’t be talkin’ smart, Stella,” Chrissy said. “People say the same thing about you. Besides, you should see all the junk I didn’t bring.”
She lowered the knife carefully back into the box and considered Chrissy for a minute, the girl’s ramrod straight posture, the firm set of her chin.
This was a different girl from the one who’d spent most of the last two days lying on Stella’s couch. This new Chrissy had a hell of a lot more backbone and she sure seemed a lot less inclined to take any guff.
“I think I might need to apologize,” Stella said carefully.
“Thought you already did that. When we agreed how I’m going to be your partner on the rest of this thing.”
“Yeah, but—I think I need to maybe say I’m sorry for underestimating you. Chrissy, I do believe you got some iron in you.”
Chrissy said nothing for a moment, keeping her eyes fixed on the road ahead, and then she nodded. “All right. I accept your apology. You know what, I didn’t know I had it in me either. I kind of wonder now, what if I’d got this kind of determined back when Roy Dean was around? I mean, right now I’m so mad I feel like I could just beat the shit out of him myself.”
“I imagine you could,” Stella agreed softly.
Vengeance was a funny thing. You got a little taste of it, and it brought out things in you that you never knew were there. What was it they said? Vengeance is a bitter drink. Stella didn’t much mind. She drank hers straight up, and now it looked as if she’d found herself a drinking buddy.
“Hold on to all that determination,” she said. “We’re gonna need it.”
Chrissy coasted across two lanes without checking the rearview mirror when the Popeyes came into view, ignoring the outraged laying on of horns. Stella flinched, then forced herself to relax; risk was inherent in her business, after all, and she wasn’t really in a position to micromanage at the moment.
Chrissy managed to align the Jeep more or less straight in a parking spot. When they walked in the doors of the restaurant, she took one look around and smacked herself in the forehead. “Well, dang, why didn’t I think a them? Stella, you’re a genius.”
“Oh, now,” Stella said modestly. “I’ve been doing this a while. You’re just starting out—you’ll get there.”
“Yeah, but the Green Hat Ladies…”
Just then Novella Glazer spotted them and hollered out a greeting; her tablemates turned and followed suit. As Chrissy and Stella made their way over, purses of the large and floppy style favored by older ladies were moved out of the way, and the remains of the meal—plastic plates of chicken bones and a smattering of biscuit crumbs—were stacked and shoved into the trash.
“Oh Lord above, Stella, what happened to you?” Lola Brennan said, placing a hand over her heart and squinting up at Stella’s stitched and bruised face.
“Oh, nothing much—just took a tumble in the shop. I’ll be fine.”
“You ought to be home in bed,” Shirlette Castro scolded. “You must have good reason to be out and about. I don’t guess this is a social call?”
Stella had consulted with the Green Hat Ladies before when she needed information. One of them had even been a client, but that was hush-hush; her husband had needed only a light touch to be reminded that a foul mouth and ungracious commentary were not welcome in the house, and she didn’t care for anyone to know about their past troubles.
It was a funny thing about that generation, Stella reflected; they kept their own problems to themselves, but they loved to discuss everyone else’s—so much so that this bunch of septua-and octogenarians gathered for an early lunch and gossip at Popeyes nearly every day.
“I believe you all know Chrissy Shaw,” Stella said as they sat down. Greetings were exchanged.
“You ladies sure look nice today,” Chrissy said. “I do like those hats.”
The hats were bright green caps embroidered with the John Deere logo. Gracie Lewis’s husband ran a feed and supply store, and the Deere folks sent a regular supply of swag his way. When his wife and her friends caught wind of the Red Hat Ladies trend, being a thrifty type, he proposed a way to save some money and stand out in the crowded field of mature ladies’ clubs.
“I am surely glad you got shut of that Roy Dean,” Gracie said. “If you don’t mind me sayin’ so.”
“Oh, not at all,” Chrissy said. She twisted her gloss-sticky lips into a thoughtful frown and added, “I guess I might ought to have done it awhile ago. I’m not sure where my good sense went.”
The ladies made sympathetic clucking sounds. “Oh, now, we all have us a confused spell now and again,” Gracie said. “ ’Specially when it comes to the gentlemen.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to pick a rotten apple off the tree,” Novella added.
Stella laid out an assortment of facts about Roy Dean’s wandering ways as the ladies took turns patting and cooing over Chrissy. It was probably a misunderstanding, she said, but did any of the ladies know any Darlas in the surrounding area? Especially skinny youngish ones with blond ponytails?
“Oh my yes,” Lola piped up. She was a tiny thing, and her hat practically swallowed the top half of her head, nearly obscuring her eyes. “There was that one, over in Harrisonville, by the strawberry stand—”
“Ungainly thing, wasn’t she?” piped up Shirlette. “Large bust, unfortunate overbite?”
“Oh mercy no, you’re thinking of that other gal out that way. Took up with her aunt’s boyfriend. What was her name, Dora, Doreen, something—”
“It’s a shame Linda’s not here,” Novella said. “Her husband hails from Harrisonville—she’d know. She’s down with her usual unfortunate troubles,” she added in a stage whisper to Stella and Chrissy.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lola said. “You can say hemorrhoid, Novella, it ain’t a bad word.”
“Well,” Novella said primly. “I suppose that’s fine for some.”
“We could call her,” Shirlette said, pulling an iPhone out of her purse and peering at it over her eyeglasses. She tapped at it with her finger a few times and held up a finger.
“She’s not moving too quick today,” she said, “if you know what I mean. Oh, Linda? How are you, dear?”
Shirlette had the volume on the iPhone up high enough that everyone heard Linda’s voice, though Stella couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“Is that right?… Oh, I’m sorry.… Listen, guess who stopped by? Who? No, Stella Hardesty. And she brought that darling Chrissy Shaw, remember? One of the Lardner girls?… That’s right, the pretty one. Anyway, do you know a Darla out Harrisonville way? Young gal, blond… Yes, ask him.…”
Shirlette drummed her fingers on the table as all six ladies listened to the sounds of conversation on the other end of the connection. “Is that like it sounds? Here, Novella, gimme a pen.… Yeah, go ahead, Linda… mmm-hmmm… okay, I’ll tell her. No, I’ll tell you later. What?… Look, Linda, it’s Stella who’s asking, you catch my drift? She don’t have time to be waiting for this information. Yes, I’ll call you back.”
She dabbed at the phone and slipped it back in her purse. “Well,” she said breathlessly, “there is a Darla over in Harrisonville, Darla Merton.”
“That’s right,” Lola said, snapping her fingers. All the ladies leaned in, and Stella found herself following suit. “That’s the one. Kind of a loose one, if I recall.”
“A regular tramp is what Linda said,” Shirlette agreed. “She might as well install a revolving door on her bedroom. She’s out on Dixon Road past the Mobil station. You take a soft right and go over a dip and there’ll be a dirt bike track on the left. She don’t know the house number, but it’s the yellow-brick ranch on the right—it’s a duplex and she’s on the right side.”
“I know where that Mobil is,” Chrissy said, gathering up her purse.
“Please thank Linda when you see her,” Stella said. “I wish we could stay and catch up.”
“But you have important work to do,” Gracie said, winking. “You don’t have to tell us. Well, God bless y’all. And Stella, get to healin’, you hear?”
After quick good-byes, they hurried back to the Jeep, Stella moving as fast as she could.
Chrissy hurtled out of the parking lot. “It’s twelve minutes to noon,” she said. “We got to haul ass!”
It was pretty much a straight shot to Harrisonville down County Road 9, and Stella gripped the dashboard most of the way as Chrissy pushed the little Jeep hard. At the Mobil she barely slowed down, and Stella was surprised the wheels didn’t lift up as Chrissy took the corner. The yellow-brick duplex came up fast on the right, and as she screeched to a stop the dash clock read 12:09.
“Now hold one second,” Stella said, slapping a hand down on Chrissy’s arm to prevent her from bolting out of the car. “You know she’s expecting Roy Dean.”
“I don’t care if she’s expecting Tim McGraw—”
“What I’m sayin’ is, we can make this easier if we start out reasonable, just stay calm and cool and help her see we’re offering a win-win all around here.”
“And then I call the bitch out, if she gives me any shit.”
“Well… okay.”
Chrissy wrenched her arm away and got out of the Jeep, and Stella had to hustle to keep up across the burned-out lawn and onto a cracked concrete porch.
Chrissy laid into the door, pounding with a clenched fist. When it suddenly burst open, a large man popped into view and Chrissy went flying inexplicably floor-wards. Only when she was laid out on the carpet with the large man sitting on her chest did Stella see the second man, more of a kid, really, who had taken Chrissy down by throwing himself at her legs and yanking them out from under her.
“Ow,” Chrissy said. “Git off me.”
“Shit, Dad, that’s a girl,” the younger man said, scuttling away crab-style before jumping to his feet.
The first attacker had apparently come to pretty much the same conclusion because he lumbered off Chrissy. “Hell,” he said, sounding more annoyed than sorry.
Stella offered Chrissy a hand and hauled her up, the effort ratcheting up the ache through her ribs. “You okay?” she asked.
Chrissy glared at the two men who, now that they were standing sheepishly side by side, could be seen to be clearly related, with the same blockish heads and thin lips and fleshy eyelids. She rubbed at the small of her back and cricked her head one way and then the other. “I’ll live,” she said sourly, before turning on her attackers. “Where’s my baby? Where you got Tucker?”
The men looked at each other.
“Huh?” asked the younger one.
“Look here,” the older one said. “You kind of got in the way of a operation in progress. There’s someone coming along any minute now that needs a major attitude adjustment, so if you don’t mind, we need to get ready for him.”
“I think that’s my ex you’re talkin’ about,” Chrissy said. “Roy Dean. He ain’t comin’.”
“He sent you in his place?” the young one said, clearly agitated at the notion. He looked like a man who had his heart set on delivering a beating.
“No, he did not. He’s done disappeared. Look, all’s I want is my boy, and then I’ll go. Where’s Darla?”
“That ain’t any of your business,” the older one said, stepping forward angrily.
“I think it is.” Stella kept her voice calm, but she drew up to her full height and glared at him. “Are you her father?”
He hesitated only for a second before saying, “Yes I am. Bill Merton.”
He turned to Chrissy and added, “Your ex has been treatin’ my girl pretty poor—he needs his ass kicked.”
Chrissy sighed. “I don’t doubt it, and I don’t much care what you do to him. But way I heard it is he mighta dropped off my little boy here and left him.”
The men glanced at each other, clearly mystified. “I don’t know anything about no baby,” Junior said.
“Call your sister,” the elder Merton demanded.
Junior pulled a phone out of his pocket and dialed.
“I’m going to go look around,” Chrissy muttered, her disappointment clear from the slumping of her shoulders.
Merton started to object.
“Let her go,” Stella snapped. “She won’t hurt nothing.”
As Chrissy made her way down the darkened, cat-smelling hall of the house, Stella listened impatiently to half a phone call for the second time in an hour.
“Darla,” the boy barked into the phone. “Roy Dean leave some kinda baby with you?… No, he ain’t been by yet. There’s these two women—I said he ain’t come by, you deaf or something? What’s her name?”
He directed the latter at Stella, jerking a thumb down the hall where Chrissy could be heard opening and closing doors.
“That’s Chrissy Shaw, Roy Dean’s ex,” Stella said.
“Chrissy Shaw, Roy Dean’s ex,” the boy repeated into the phone. “Her little boy’s gone missing, and she thinks Roy Dean had ’im.… You’re sure?… Hell, I don’t know, I’m just askin’. Well, don’t get mad at me, I didn’t do nothing!… Darla… Darla, I’m giving Dad the phone.”
He handed the phone to his father. “You talk to her. She’s goin’ all PMS on me.”
“Darla Jane,” Merton said in a voice that didn’t invite argument. “You settle down now, girl. Roy Dean apparently ain’t comin’.… No, I don’t believe they found him to tell him the message. Now you come on home, and we’ll figure out what to do. Mmm-hmmm. That’s right… love you.”
He handed the phone back to his son as Chrissy came shuffling back into the room looking like she wanted to hit somebody herself. “Tucker ain’t here.”
“Look,” Merton said. “I’m sorry we took you down like that. Just, we were expecting that no-good Roy Dean. He’s been beatin’ up on my daughter. Which I don’t take kindly to.”
“I don’t guess I blame you,” Chrissy said. “Though you could have looked out the front window or something and seen I wasn’t him.”
“We did look,” Junior protested. “We saw your car pull in. But then we had to get in ready position.”
Amateurs, Stella thought. She’d lain in wait dozens of times, in alleys, behind bushes, in cars, outside office buildings—even in a men’s room once or twice—and never had she taken down the wrong guy.
But that’s what made her the professional that she was. Fastidious planning, careful preparation, flawless execution—when you made a career out of delivering justice, there was no room for error.
She knew there were lots of folks who’d figure that, working outside the law, Stella might have flexible standards. And it was true, in some ways—but not when it came to getting the job done. She didn’t tolerate near misses or botched reconnaissance or loose ends. It made the job harder—a lot harder—but no one ever changed the world by taking the easy way out.
“So this thing that Roy Dean was supposed to have left here,” she said. “Was that all just a trick?”
The elder Merton snorted. “There’s a box of his clothes and shit out in the garage, but I expect what he’s missing most is them illegal drugs he left in my daughter’s home.”
He dragged out the syllables in “ill-legal” to show his distaste, even as his son rolled his eyes heavenward in a grand show of impatience. “Ain’t but a couple a nasty smoked-down blunts, Dad.”
“And that mess of para-pher-nalia,” Merton huffed, glaring at his son and Chrissy in turn, as though he suspected them of being in cahoots. “Them papers and clippers and I’m sure I don’t know what all else. My daughter ain’t got no use for that sort of thing.”
“Don’t look at me. I don’t want none of it,” Chrissy said. “Listen up, sugar,” Stella said. “Tucker isn’t here. These men don’t know where he is, and it sounds like Darla doesn’t know either. I’m afraid this might just be a dead end.”
Chrissy nodded, frowning.
“All right,” she said, never taking her eyes off the Merton men. “We’re going to leave now. But if you find out anything—and I do mean anything—about my little boy, you call me right away. ’Cause if you don’t, I will find out and I will hunt you down. Now get me something to write on.”
As Chrissy wrote their cell phone numbers on the back of a takeout menu, underlining the digits three times and circling them, Stella noted that any traces of the earlier Chrissy—the one who battled her fears with nothing stronger than Oreo cookies—were long gone.
With two avenues left to explore—Pitt and the hornet’s nest of corruption brewing in the northeast end of town—Stella made an executive decision as they got back in the Jeep and Chrissy pulled away from the curb at what was, for her, a sedate pace.
“Sweet pea, I think it might be time to let the law do its thing,” she said. “If Pitt’s got Tucker, the longer we wait, the further he could be taking him.”
“You’re saying Pitt wants to keep Tucker for himself, like that?”
“Well… I’m just saying, we got to consider all the scenarios here. That’s one of them.”
Chrissy frowned doubtfully. “I seen them tapes. What was that, England or something? Where they got that little girl in the grocery store and snipped off all her hair in the bathroom and put her in boy clothes. But Stella, that’s over there. Pitt wouldn’t ever do like that.”
“How can you be sure, Chrissy?”
“Well, I know him, is all. He’s tryin’ to court me to death.”
Stella tried to figure out a polite way to ask how sneaking over for noontime quickies counted as courting, or if there were some other romantic behaviors she wasn’t aware of. “But let’s say… I mean, here’s Pitt, wanting you to, ah, to date him again. And on the other hand, there’s a baby he thinks is his, and we know how that can get a man’s spurs up, right? So if you had to guess, sugar, and meaning no disrespect, which would you say is front and center in Pitt’s mind? You or Tucker?”
Chrissy slowed to a few miles an hour to avoid a yellow dog lying in the street, snoozing in the afternoon sun. “He wants the whole package, Stella. Me ’n Tucker and the white picket fence shit. I’d’ve been tempted too ’cause I am fond of that man, but I just know myself a little too well, you see what I mean?”
“Uh, not exactly…”
“Well, just that you know how some men scratch your itch a little but they still leave you feeling restless. And then there’s the ones that do it for you and then some, you know? Like a little bit a what they got goes a long way, they just kind of shiver you all over. Inside, outside, and twice on Sundays… see? Pitt’s the first kind of man, and that’s how I ended up steppin’ out on him when we was married, and I just know I’d do it again.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s the gift of being in your late twenties, is you get mature. You know yourself.”
“Hell, if you’ve managed that already, you must be some kind of genius,” Stella exclaimed. “It took me until I was almost fifty.”
“Well… you’re smart in other ways,” Chrissy said kindly, driving lazily across the center line as she turned to give Stella a reassuring pat on the knee. Chrissy, who’d barely let the needle drop below eighty on the way over, was negotiating the streets of Harrisonville like a blind old lady.
“But how do you explain him leaving town then?”
“What you said—he could be visiting someone or catching a show in Branson or something. Course, that was back when you were still shuttin’ me out of this here investigation, so I don’t guess you even believed them poor excuses when you said ’em.”
Ouch. The girl had a point, and Stella swallowed hard, guilt weighing heavy on her. “There still might be a logical reason…”
“Tell you what, let’s just save that for now. What I’m worried about is, you said if the law gets on this and word gets back to them Kansas City gangsters and Roy Dean is involved with all that, then it could be even more dangerous for Tucker if he’s with Roy Dean.”
“Well…” There was an uncomfortable amount of truth in what Chrissy said. Stella still couldn’t piece together a logical reason why Roy Dean would have taken Tucker, but if he’d done something stupid and pissed off the mafia, it wouldn’t matter if he’d taken the Hope Diamond or a can of pork and beans into their midst: either way, he wasn’t likely to come out again. And if that was the case, their only hope of getting the boy was to somehow get inside their inner circle and take him back themselves. “I guess… if you’re sure about this… me and you are going to have to go turn over some rocks.”
“What sort of rocks?”
“Ugly, nasty ones. The rocks rolling around at Benning’s. Only look here, Chrissy. I think there’s every chance in the world I’ve poked a mad dog in the eye that don’t have anything to do with Tucker. I mean, even if Roy Dean took him through there on his way out of town, there’s no reason those men would want anything to do with a little boy.”
“Yeah… I guess. But I know Roy Dean. He wouldn’t be able to stay away from a bunch of losers like that. Prob’ly made him feel all important. Mr. Big Man.”
Without warning, she hit the gas, and they screeched forward down the couple of blocks leading back to the state road. A man working the front of his lawn with an edger jumped out of the way just in time as she barreled past him.
“Where are we going, exactly?” Stella asked as Chrissy turned the wrong way down 9.
“Just a quick stop at Wal-Mart. We’re gonna need some supplies if we’re going to bust into that place.”
“But—but Wal-Mart’s the other way.”
“Not that Wal-Mart. We’re going to the other one, over in Casey.”
Stella’s head throbbed, and she gently massaged her temples, avoiding the bruised and stitched areas of her face as well as she could.
“I almost hate to ask, but what are we shopping for exactly?”
Chrissy glanced over at Stella, an all-business expression on her face. “Clothes for sneaking around in. I figure we got to get back over to Benning’s tonight, after dark, and look around. Best we wear black so we don’t stand out. Or camo, maybe. They make practically everything in camo these days, you know.”
“Oh.” Stella had to hand it to Chrissy for jumping right in to the details, which were still fuzzy in Stella’s own mind. Of course, Chrissy had the advantage of not having a concussion. “So… we’ll head out there tonight.”
“Yeah, well, we need to go when they’re closed, right? I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be happy to see you again, ’specially since it’s probably them as beat you up. You think we ought to get some of those night vision glasses?”
“I don’t know.… I think they’re pretty expensive.”
; “Yeah. Thanks to our stupid government,” Chrissy said, disgusted. “They pay six hundred dollars for a toilet seat, they probably want, like, a thousand bucks for those glasses.”
Stella was lost. “How does the government figure into what Wal-Mart charges?”
“Oh come on, Stella, don’t be naïve. The government doesn’t want us to defend ourselves. Or bear arms or anything like that. They put a special tax on things that it’s our constitutional right to buy, and then the money goes straight into their pockets. Or they use it for all those programs where they spy on what’s in your trash and read your mail. It’s true—I saw a special on it.”
“Uh, yeah.” Stella decided not to argue; she was still a little light-headed. “That’s too bad. I do have a good flashlight, though.”
“Good, ’cause we don’t want to buy too much. Because the checker might notice. I was kind of thinking we want to draw as little attention as we can to ourselves here. That’s why we’re driving over to the Wal-Mart in Casey, you know?”
“Good thinking, sugar,” Stella said. “Plus, there’s an Arby’s near there, isn’t there?”
Chrissy perked up and nodded. “Yes, I think there is. I sure love that roast beef, don’t you? The way they slice it up so nice and thin? My sister Sue won’t eat it because she says it’s all parts mashed up fine and then re-formed, but I say, why, that’s the same as Spam, ain’t it? And everybody likes Spam.”
“That they do,” Stella said, smiling despite the pain in her busted lip. “That they do.”
Stella figured she needed to go long on iron and protein, so she had a Super Roast Beef sandwich. It was time to quit messing around and treat the situation like what it was: serious.
Within the hour they were back in Stella’s kitchen. Stella laid old towels on the kitchen table and got down her shoebox of gun-cleaning supplies from a cabinet over the refrigerator. She had brought the Ruger in from the Jeep; it was already clean, but it felt good to break it down and go through the motions.
Across the table, Chrissy carefully disassembled the Makarov, laying the filthy parts out in a neat row. She picked up the cleaning rod and the solvent and went to work on the receiver, humming softly.
“Jesus, Chrissy, anybody ever clean their firearms over at your house?”
“Sure they do, the ones they use. But I didn’t want to take Daddy’s everyday guns, you know? On account of he might need ’em and all.”
Stella, wondering what constituted the need for an everyday handgun, remembered her pledge to be more respectful of the girl and kept her mouth shut.
“You clean guns much?” she asked instead.
“Of course,” Chrissy said, rolling her eyes. “Daddy made all us girls learn to take care of the rifles before he let us shoot squirrels. We had a couple of Marlins and they never had a speck on ’em. We used to have contests to see who could get them took apart and put back together the quickest.”
That was quite a vision; Stella imagined the little tykes lined up at the supper table waiting their turn at the guns, a row of Lardner girls with blond pigtails and rosy cheeks.
“Well then, I guess I’ll let you clean that thing up. After that we’re gonna go out and shoot a few cans. Sound all right?”
“Yeah.”
For a while they worked in silence. Stella went over the Ruger with a tiny utility brush and then polished it with a silicone cloth.
“Stella?” Chrissy said after a while.
“Mmm-hmm?”
“You got anything to snack on? I have to tell you, I’m just a little bit nervous. And when I get nervous I get hungry, you know?”
Stella knew. She was the same way. She also got hungry when she was worried or pissed off about something or bored. She smiled. “How about I make us some popcorn?”
“Oh, that’d be perfect.”
Stella got out her mother’s old soup pot. Added the oil and a good layer of kernels. Put a stick of butter in the microwave to melt and shook the pot when the corn started popping inside.
She tossed the popcorn with the butter and a few good shakes of salt and set the bowl in the middle of the table. As the two of them sat munching on the popcorn and sipping ginger ale and cleaning the guns, Stella noticed she was feeling something that she hadn’t felt for a long time.
The scent of gun oil mingled with the buttery popcorn aroma, and the silence between her and Chrissy was companionable. Stella closed her eyes for a moment and remembered other times she’d sat around this very same table.
It had been her parents’ kitchen table. On Sundays, Stella liked to sit with her dad while he shined his shoes before church, handing him the rags and the tins of polish and the big brush, happy to be his assistant in such an important chore.
Later, her parents got a new table and gave the old one to Stella and Ollie. Noelle used to sit at the table for her after-school snack, coloring with her crayons, her little legs swinging, not long enough to touch the floor.
When Noelle was in high school, Stella waited up for her to come back from dates with Schooner, the high school boyfriend Stella wished she’d held on to, the one Noelle liked before she developed a taste for losers. They would sit at the table and sip tea and Noelle would describe every little detail of the pizza they’d shared or the movie they saw and Stella would listen and try to hold on to every moment, knowing her baby was growing up.
Now she was at this same table with Chrissy, and as much as she missed her own daughter, she was happy to have the girl’s company.
The thought that she was dragging Chrissy into the midst of a bunch of crazed, armed criminals hit her in the gut—followed fast by a memory of Lorelle. Or rather, of Lorelle’s feet, white and bloodless and puckered from all that time in the water, floating just below the murky surface in the rain barrel.
“You know,” she said, voice shaky, as Chrissy scoured out the spare magazine with a cotton patch. “You don’t have to come along tonight. I can do this by myself.”
Chrissy snorted. “Like hell. I’m not staying here.”
“It’s just—you know. There’s a chance things could blow up. You should think about what you’re getting into.”
“I guess I know enough. Roy Dean’s done something stupider than I ever thought he could. Got himself involved with guys mean enough that they’ll beat up an old lady. Oh, I mean, not old old, but… you know.”
“Jeez, Chrissy, I’m fifty, not eighty.”
“You are?” Chrissy whistled, and Stella felt a little better. “No kidding. My mom’s like forty-eight and you’re in way better shape than her. She can’t probably even run two blocks without sitting down to rest.”
“Well… thanks.” Stella brightened a little. The first time she’d gone jogging, in an old pair of Keds and baggy leggings, she’d made it halfway around the block before she had to stop and walk home, wheezing the entire way. Now she was up to ten-mile runs through town and out dusty farm roads. She might not look it, but she was in the best shape of her life, which was a good thing, since she was planning to take on a bunch of guys who were a lot more fresh-minted.
“Yeah, so, what do you think it is anyway? Drugs? Prob’ly drugs; seems like that’s what people get craziest over.”
Stella considered whether she ought to tell Chrissy everything she knew. She owed it to the girl, really; it wasn’t right to leave her in the dark.
“Listen, honey. When I went over to talk to Benning yesterday, I had a little more than a feeling about what-all he was up to. See, the night before… when I said I was going to Lovie Lee’s divorce party?”
“You didn’t,” Chrissy said. “I should have figured.”
Stella told Chrissy what Arthur Junior had said about the car theft. Chrissy, who had finished cleaning and wiping off all the gun parts and was working on putting them back together, stopped working and listened with her head shaking slowly back and forth.
“Figures, don’t it? Do you know Roy Dean still had all his Matchbox cars in this big old paint bucket in the garage? Threw out my box of bridesmaid dresses because he said we didn’t have room, but we got to keep those stupid cars.”
“Boys will be boys, I guess,” Stella shrugged.
“Boys will be assholes, more like,” Chrissy said. She held up the reassembled gun and turned it this way and that, gleaming under the kitchen light.
“Okay, Stella,” she said. “I’m locked and loaded. Show me something I can shoot the shit out of.”