Stella was relieved to discover that not only did Chrissy know how to handle the Makarov, she wasn’t a bad shot. They drove out to the back side of an old peach orchard, the trees so ancient and gnarled they didn’t give up much fruit anymore, and set up a row of Fresca cans on a folding table she brought from home. Then they started shooting. When Chrissy missed, it wasn’t by much.
The Ruger felt good in Stella’s hand. It had been her father’s personal firearm, and aside from target shooting, it had spent most of its days locked in Buster Collier’s gun cabinet along with his hunting rifles. Stella had always thought it was pretty, with its ivory grip. On the rare occasions that her father let her hold it, he’d cupped her hand in his bigger, stronger ones and made sure her fingers didn’t go anywhere near the trigger, even with the cylinder empty and the safety on.
Buster had died of a heart attack when he was still in his forties. He’d walked her down the aisle, but he hadn’t lived to see what a monster Ollie turned out to be. Maybe it was better that way. Buster might have killed Ollie himself, and Stella doubted whether the law would have been as lenient with him as it had been with her.
Picking off Fresca cans with her father’s gun, Stella wondered what he would have thought of the career she’d stumbled into. She was certain both her parents would have understood about Ollie. And they’d always preached a duty to lend a hand to those in need. Surely no one was more in need than Stella’s clients, the ones society couldn’t—or wouldn’t—protect, the ones who resorted to begging and promising and praying as their only weapons against the horror in their own homes.
When Stella started helping these women, she remembered how her father dressed so carefully each morning, putting on the Missouri Highway Patrol uniform shirts her mother pressed and starched, the heavy belt that contained the radio and the summons book, and finally, the gun. Buster had only drawn it twice in the line of duty, and he hadn’t fired either time. But it was a powerful symbol of order for Stella.
That gun went back to the Highway Patrol. But the Ruger was hers now. The ivory was slick-cool in her hand. She kept her arm firm against the recoil, sighted carefully, and fired over and over. The smell of the guns firing was acrid on the air, burning her nostrils, but she breathed it in hungrily anyway. Target practice had a calming effect on her, and she did it regularly, even if she’d never fired a gun into a man’s flesh and hoped she’d never have to.
She and Chrissy settled into a rhythm, without speaking, taking turns sighting down the cans and blowing them off the table, stopping to reload now and then or to stack the cans back on the table.
When the cans were nothing but shredded scraps of metal, Stella and Chrissy gathered them up in a plastic trash bag Stella had brought from home.
“Guess you’ll do,” she told Chrissy, grinning.
“You ain’t too bad either.”
For an instant they just looked at each other. Stella was praying they wouldn’t have to shoot, when it came down to it. She figured Chrissy was doing the same.
At home Stella defrosted a couple of rib eyes and microwaved some potatoes. They ate on TV trays out on the back porch, saying little as evening settled down and the sky turned pink and red.
“You probably shot people before,” Chrissy said as they dug into bowls of rainbow sherbet with Cool Whip and Nilla wafers crumbled on top.
Stella was silent for a while before answering. “Honey, I haven’t.”
“Oh.” Chrissy licked Cool Whip off her spoon, a bit of the white stuff perched on her upper lip. “ ’Cause, what they say and all, I just thought… and I wouldn’t think no less of you, either.”
“Well, thank you. That means a lot to me. But… killing a man. I mean, it changes you.” She paused—that was the first time she’d actually admitted to anyone what she’d done to Ollie. For a second she wished she could take the words back, but it seemed important for Chrissy to know. “It’s a one-way street. You come out harder. And maybe stronger. But I hate to think what would happen to a person if they made it a regular habit. I sure don’t want to find out. Especially when—so far, anyway—it seems like there’s other ways to handle men that need… handled.”
Chrissy nodded. “I imagine I understand. I mean, if we ever do find Roy Dean, I don’t need him dead, just—just really far away from me, and maybe hurtin’ a little bit, too. Or a lot, even.”
That wasn’t a bad summary of what Stella promised to deliver when she took on a new client. She was relieved that the girl got it; she didn’t need a loose cannon for a partner.
She examined Chrissy carefully. She had pulled her hair back with a pair of orange plastic barrettes that featured butterflies with sparkly wings. Her eyelids were dusted with gold eye shadow. She was wearing a scoop neck top that showed a bit of her creamy, youthful cleavage—and the edge of a fading ghost of a bruise.
Chrissy’s eyes didn’t look vulnerable, but they didn’t look bloodthirsty either. They looked alert and hard and determined.
“Tucker don’t have nobody else,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I’d tried a little harder to find out who his daddy was. You know? I mean, back then I thought I could do everything myself, and mostly I have, but right now it sure would be nice if there was some man out there who loved Tucker as much as I do. Who was willing to do anything for him.”
“I know, darlin’.” Stella did, too. She remembered sitting in church years ago, watching other men with little ones on their laps or a hand on their son’s shoulder, and cursing herself for not picking out a better father for Noelle. “But there’s nothing a man can do here in this situation that you can’t do. You and me.”
Stella prayed that was true.
Thought of Goat, of his broad shoulders and strong arms and determined jaw and—she couldn’t help it—of that heavy belt with his service revolver and cuffs, and was sorely tempted to call him. But Goat couldn’t go in the way they needed to, which was to say, sneaky and immediate.
“Honey,” Stella said. “We’re going to use whatever tricks we need to until we find Tucker. Even, you know, unlawful-type tricks.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I just didn’t want you to think that I was worried about getting caught or something. I don’t mind that. I mean, I’d mind, I guess, going to jail and all that, but Tucker comes first.”
That made Chrissy smile. “Yeah, right. You’d probably love getting arrested. ’Cause then Sheriff Jones would have to frisk you and all. Prob’ly strip-search you.”
“Chrissy!” Stella exclaimed, shocked.
“Well, come on, you’re all googly when he’s around. It’s, like, obvious.”
“I am no such thing!” Stella could feel the blush creeping up her face.
“Oh, please, Stella, when he’s around your voice goes up and you twist your hair and all that. You might as well hang a sign around your neck says ‘do me now.’ Hey, it ain’t a bad thing, is it? I mean, you got to signal to the man you’re interested somehow, don’t you? I guess you could come right out and ask him out, but you probably want him to ask you first or something like that, right?”
“I can’t—I wouldn’t—Chrissy, he’s a law man, for crying out loud. I’m… not.”
“My ma’s a Baptist and my dad won’t go in a church,” Chrissy said. “She likes spicy food and he don’t. She’s itching to go on one of those RV trips and he wants to go to Branson. But they get on good. Conflict’s like the center of every good relationship, you know?”
“I’m not talking about conflict here, I’m—listen, can we drop this subject? We got to get ready, don’t we?”
Chrissy shrugged and gathered up the plates and glasses, but she had a smirky little expression that didn’t fade even as they worked side by side in the kitchen cleaning up.
Stella retired to her room to prepare for the rest of the evening. The stitches in her face itched fiercely, and any lingering effects of the pain medication had long since dissipated. She dabbed around the edges with the Betadine swabs they gave her at the hospital, and smoothed on a little antibiotic ointment. At first she tried to apply it just to the worst spots, but eventually she gave up, squeezed out a glob and rubbed it all over her face, then frowned at the result: now she was puffy, bruised, scabbed, and cursed with excess shine. She considered dabbing on a little concealer and then realized how ridiculous the idea was: pretty didn’t really play into her agenda.
Which led her to go over the plan. Essentially, there wasn’t one, other than to get close enough to Benning and Funzi and the others to find out what they were up to. Yeah. Maybe they’d be sitting in a kiddie pool unarmed, drinking root beer and talking about where they’d stashed Tucker and the best way for someone to sneak up and take him back.
Stella snorted with disgust as she pulled her hair back and secured it in a short ponytail with an elastic. It was far more likely that she and Chrissy were going to have to beat the information out of one of them. With any luck they’d be able to separate one of the losers from the rest, and somehow make him tell them everything, all without causing the others to wonder where their friend had got off to.
And that’s if Funzi and his associates were even at Benning’s. Maybe it was bowling night, or maybe they’d got tired of the local color and gone back up to Kansas City. They could try to get something out of Benning and his skinny-ass girlfriend, if that was the case, but if Roy Dean had somehow ended up bringing Tucker into the mess, and now the goons were gone, Tucker was probably gone with them. Stella didn’t like thinking about that one bit.
No, it would be better if it was another boys’ night at the play house.
She pulled on the pair of loose camo pants and black T-shirt they’d bought at the Wal-Mart, and laced up her hiking boots. She surveyed herself in the mirror: with her hair up and her mangled face, she looked like a kid who couldn’t decide what to be for Halloween, Rambo or Frankenstein.
Disgusted, she went to the garage and loaded up her backpack with supplies. In addition to a pair of powerful LED flashlights she packed a coil of nylon rope, a utility knife, a compact set of bolt cutters, pliers, her cell phone, and bottled water.
Chrissy was in the kitchen with the box she’d brought from home, strapping a shoulder holster over her own black T-shirt. It crossed in the back and bisected her generous bosom in the front. She picked up the Makarov, gave it a fond little dusting with her fingertips, and slipped it in the leather holder.
She’d tucked her camo pant legs into pink high-top Converse sneakers. Stella couldn’t help grinning at the sight of her; with her ample curves and blond ringlets spilling from her baseball hat, she looked like a demolition cherub.
Stella put on her own abdomen holster and patted the Ruger. After shooting it earlier, it had become comfortable in her hands, and she liked the feel of it close by.
“You take the big knife,” she told Chrissy, rummaging in the box for an ankle holster. She found one, a Velcro and nylon model that fit the knife as though it had been made for it.
“What about you?”
Stella thought for a moment. The other knives that Chrissy brought were small and wouldn’t have much stopping power, and there didn’t seem to be much point to bringing them, especially as she’d packed her utility knife.
Stella had a sudden thought and went to Noelle’s old room, where she stored all her sewing supplies. Since she started her second business, her sewing machine had been gathering dust, but her best Gingher scissors were in the tool caddy where she left them. They were weighty in her hand, a good pair of nine-inch trimmers.
On a whim she grabbed her rotary cutter, too. She made sure the safety was on and slipped it into her pocket.
Back in the kitchen, she found another ankle holster, an old leather one with buckles, which she fitted carefully to her leg. The scissors fit well in the sheath, their handles sticking up in easy reach.
Stella got a couple of Advil, considered them for a moment, and added two more, gulping them down with a glass of ginger ale.
“Bad?” Chrissy asked, watching her.
Stella shrugged. “I don’t feel the best I ever have,” she admitted, “but the smartin’s gone down, mostly.”
“You look good,” Chrissy said.
“You got to be kidding.”
“No. I ain’t. You look like trouble with a capital T.”
Stella wiped her mouth on her arm and burped. “Well then, I guess I can’t ask for much more, right? Let’s get this show on the road.”
She was reaching for her backpack when the doorbell sounded. Stella froze and glanced at Chrissy, who was smoothing down her T-shirt under the cross-body holster.
“Shit,” she said. “Who the hell—”
“You got to answer it, Stella,” Chrissy said urgently. “You don’t want folks wondering where you are. Plus, it could be the sheriff.”
Stella grabbed an apron off a hook on the wall and tossed it to Chrissy. It read “Your Opinion Wasn’t in the Recipe” and had been a gift from a client who’d bought herself a matching one once her husband had learned the hard way not to criticize.
As Chrissy hastily tied on the bright red apron, Stella tugged her pants legs over her ankle holster as well as she could and yanked her T-shirt low to cover the bulge across her stomach. They looked each other over and Chrissy gave Stella a thumbs-up.
Stella took a deep breath, went to the door, and peered through the peephole. A not tall, spare-built man in a shiny blue sport coat and too-long brown pants stood in the doorway, grinning nervously. His yellowish hair had been recently slicked down but was already popping up from the attempted part. He wasn’t a whole lot to look at—neither handsome nor the least bit intimidating. Stella swung the door open and glared. “Yeah?”
“Hello,” he said a little breathlessly. “You must be Stella Hardesty. Pleased to make your acquaintance. These are for you.”
From behind his back he produced a small bunch of flowers, pink mums with a healthy puff of baby’s breath, and thrust them at her. Stella took them, too surprised to object, and was starting to express her cautious gratitude when he craned his neck around her and peered into the house.
“There you are!” he bellowed, spotting Chrissy. “Oh Good Lord in Heaven, there you are!”
As he made to sprint past Stella, her instincts kicked in and she stuck a foot out. He tripped, shiny brown shoes colliding with her hiking boots so that he splatted with considerable force, flying flat out into the small foyer on Stella’s throw rug.
He made an oof sound and a small box that he had been holding went flying. Stella drew her gun and had it on him in a split second, and was standing over him in an uwavering spread, the adrenaline from the afternoon coursing through her veins. Just as she was about to scream something harsh and threatening, Chrissy knelt down in front of him on her hands and knees and shook her head.
“Pitt Akers,” she said, “What have you done?”
What the young man had not done, as it turned out, was to have kidnapped Tucker. Nor had he developed much more hard-boiled courage in the intervening days since he’d last hid in a guest-room closet.
It was the latter that made Stella so certain of the former. After she’d interrogated Pitt for a mere five minutes or so it seemed pretty clear that his story was, in fact, the truth. When he heard—through the closet door behind which he’d barred himself—Roy Dean demanding his hibachi back, he was finally convinced that Chrissy’s relationship with Roy Dean was well and truly over. He’d gone hastily back home to pack a few things and then jumped in his car for a road trip back to his family home in Sikeston, several hours away, where he got the engagement ring she’d returned to him after their marriage ended, and which had been stored in a wad of tissue in a matchbox in his mother’s sewing caddy. He then shared the joyous news of his impending reunion with Chrissy, first with his parents over a pot roast dinner, and then with a few childhood friends. This second celebration turned into the sort of evening out at the roadhouse that tacked an extra day onto the trip for recovery purposes, but by this afternoon Pitt felt lively enough to make the drive home, where he took care of the litter box and showered and dressed in his finest duds and came over to re-propose.
It was, Stella supposed, to Chrissy’s credit that she emerged dry-eyed but kindly from the brief, private discussion she and Pitt had in the guest room—and to Pitt’s that he left without an argument, though they could hear his hiccup-sobs starting up as he cleared the door on the way back to his car.
Chrissy turned to Stella the minute he was gone. “For the love of Pete,” she sighed, “I ain’t got time to wipe up any more broken hearts here. Let’s rock and roll.”
They stowed their gear in the Jeep and hit the road. Stella, feeling a little better since the Advil had kicked in, took the wheel and set her pace just a little above the speed limit. When they got close to Benning’s, Stella cut the headlights and crept along at five miles an hour. Once she could see the lights of the compound up ahead, she pulled across the road and drove onto a pull-in between two fields. The dirt ruts were nearly as weedy as the fields, but none of the vegetation was much over ankle high, and the silhouette of the Jeep would be pretty obvious from the road if anyone shone a light in their direction, but there wasn’t much to be done about that.
At least there was little moonlight tonight. It was a thin sliver of a crescent moon, and clouds scudded past it, throwing the landscape into near-total darkness.
Stella took the flashlights out of her backpack and handed one to Chrissy. “Shine just right in front of you, not ahead,” she warned. “And let’s keep ’em off as much as we can.”
They walked the field, stepping over the clumps of weeds, crunching dirt clods, and trying not to twist their ankles, staying silent. When they came almost abreast of Benning’s across the road, Stella spotted a figure on the other side of the gate, illuminated clearly by the sodium lights up on poles behind the trailer and around the sheds and between the rows of ruined cars. Two, three—she counted four lights, plus what looked like more back toward the large shed she’d spotted the other day. The light was glaring and eerily yellow; what she could see of the guard’s skin appeared unnaturally pale and waxy.
He looked young and bored, a buzz-cut, muscular guy with what looked to be a semiauto rifle across his lap, his hand resting lightly on the stock. He sat on a camp chair with his legs splayed wide, tapping his foot and nodding to a beat Stella could feel reverberating through the ground more than she could hear it coming from the boom box at his feet.
She held up her palm and Chrissy stopped behind her. Stella touched her arm and pointed off in the direction away from the road, and dropped down on her hands and knees. Chrissy followed suit.
“I think we better crawl,” Stella whispered. “I don’t know what kind of shadow we’d cast if he looks this way.”
Chrissy murmured her agreement and before Stella could stop her, she slithered ahead on her chest with surprising strength. Stella did her best to follow suit, though when a weed stalk poked her torn and stitched cheek it was all she could do to keep from yelping with pain. In a few dozen yards she was breathing hard, and she was glad she’d ratcheted up her fitness program in January. Her old self wouldn’t have made it ten yards.
After what seemed like an hour they were a good distance past the gate, and Stella signaled for Chrissy to stand up. They walked the rest of the way to the corner of the Benning property, where the chain-link fence made a right angle.
“Here, let me,” Chrissy said, unzipping Stella’s backpack and taking out the bolt cutters.
She went to work on the fence with surprising efficiency, snipping the wire one section at a time. Stella slid the backpack off, took out the pliers, and used them to pull the fencing back as Chrissy cut. It didn’t take long to get a three-foot hole cleared.
They stopped to rest for a minute, drinking from the water bottles. Stella put the tools back in the pack and shouldered it again.
“Ready?” Stella asked. “Guess so.”
Stella ducked down, making it through without even snagging her shirt. As she turned back to check on Chrissy she caught a blur of movement out of the corner of her eye and suddenly the two huge dogs from the other afternoon came hurtling toward her, teeth snapping in the pale moonlight. When they were twenty feet away one of them started an eerie howl and the other immediately joined in, barking viciously.
“Fuck!” Stella muttered, hoisting her flashlight and preparing to club it down on whichever dog reached her first.
Two shots cracked out and the dogs stopped in midstride and went spinning sideways, legs splayed and pinwheeling. The one that was barking switched midyowl to a high-pitched keening cry, and there was one more crack and it fell silent in the dirt, a shuddering pile of fur.
The dogs were still ten feet away.
Stella turned to Chrissy in amazement. She was standing in a perfect shooter’s stance, the Makarov still clutched in her grip and pointed toward the dogs. But as Stella tried to put together a coherent comment, Chrissy began to shake, the tremor starting in her hands and shivering its way back through the rest of her body.
Stella put a hand on her shoulder, and she could hear Chrissy take a big gulp of air.
“Nailed ’em, girl,” Stella said. “I didn’t even have time to draw.”
“I—they’re faster than squirrels.”
“I guess they are, huh. You did good, sugar.”
Chrissy slowly lowered her gun arm, but she didn’t reholster. Stella didn’t blame her. She reached for the Ruger.
“I think we’re getting some company,” Chrissy whispered.
Coming from the same direction as the dogs, the guard had left his chair and was walking slowly toward them, sweeping the beam of his own flashlight to the left and right. The arc would illuminate them in ten or twelve more steps.
“Move,” Stella blurted, and she ducked and ran to the dead dogs. She grabbed a hind leg and pulled as hard as she could. The thing was huge and surprisingly hard to pull as dead weight, but adrenaline socked in and powered her along. Chrissy grabbed the second dog, and they staggered toward a stand of trees and scrub. When they reached the bushes, Stella yanked Chrissy’s arm and they hit the ground and listened to the guard whistling and calling to the dogs while they tried to catch their breath.
“He’s not going to stop looking until he finds the dogs,” Chrissy whispered.
“He’s going to holler back to the rest of them when he figures out something went wrong,” Stella said. “Right now he might still think it was a rabbit or something, but—”
“Shit. What’re we gonna do?”
Stella could feel her heart pounding in her chest. What, indeed? This was far from her standard operating procedure. Her brand of ruthless usually involved an element of surprise, and an unsuspecting and unarmed target. It didn’t really take a whole lot of muscle to catch losers off guard and threaten to shoot their dicks off.
But in this dark junkyard corner, her options were shutting down fast. Unless the guard was a certified idiot, he had to figure that the dogs had run into trouble. And if he swung the light just a little wider, he’d see the hole in the fence.
In the moonlight she could make out the rifle in his arms, cradled like a baby—and a lot more tensed muscle than she’d noticed earlier when the guy had been sitting. His T-shirt, with the sleeves ripped off, revealed bulky biceps and ripped forearms. He moved with the grace of a well-oiled young machine.
She wasn’t sure that the two of them stood a chance against him, and the minute he got his buddies involved, she and Chrissy were screwed for certain.
There really wasn’t any choice—she had to take him down. But even if she managed to surprise him, the odds weren’t great that she could overpower him—unless she somehow managed to end up sitting on him, in which case he probably would have a struggle just to breathe.
She was going to have to shoot him, and she regretted it, because hurting men was something she reserved for woman-haters, and this guy didn’t look old enough to have even developed much of a grudge against the fair sex.
Stella bit the inside of her lip, took a deep breath, and rolled up onto her knee. “Help me, Big Guy,” she prayed and then took her best shot.
Immediately the man fell down. Sideways, clutching his leg. Stella grabbed Chrissy’s arm and they lurched forward, running to where he lay on the ground, moaning and cursing. She kept the Ruger trained on him, but he’d dropped his own gun and was clutching his leg below the knee. Stella used her momentum to hit him head-on, and they tumbled together and rolled; when they came to a stop Chrissy was standing above them, pointing her gun down at the guy’s face, her look pure, fierce concentration, as though she was trying to figure out the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.
“I’ll shoot your durn head off ,” Chrissy said. “You say so much as one thing I swear to holy God you’re gonna have a hole where your face was.”
Now that they were closer, the guard looked even younger. Sixteen, seventeen, with a smooth face that didn’t look like it needed shaving too often, popping out in sweat. It was clear that he was in pain, his eyes bugging out of his head, his mouth working in fear.
Stella crawled away from him and stood up. She slid her backpack off and got out the coil of rope. “I did you a favor shootin’ you where I did,” she said. “I could’ve capped your knee. Know what happens then?”
The boy shook his head, fast.
“You don’t ever walk too good, that’s what. With this hole here, you got a good shot at healing up right. You play basketball?”
The boy looked around wildly for a moment, then gave a half nod. Stella yanked his arms hard behind him while Chrissy took out the buck knife and cut off a length of the rope and handed it to her. While Stella secured the binding, Chrissy cut a second length of rope and went to work tying off his leg above the bullet entry. It was a big, messy hole, but it seemed to have missed the bone. If Chrissy was put off by the blood it didn’t show.
“Well, that’s too bad; basketball’s a shitty sport. Still, you’ll get a chance to keep playing it if you do what I tell you.”
The boy shook his head, determination showing through his pain. “Fuck off.”
Stella raised her eyebrows. “Is that ‘fuck off, I enjoy getting shot and I hope you’ll do it again,’ or ‘fuck off, I’m out of my mind with pain and don’t know what I’m saying?’ ”
The boy just frowned and stared at the ground.
Chrissy kicked him, hard, below the hole in his leg. He made a sound that wasn’t like anything Stella had heard from a human before.
“How do you like that, dirtbag?” Chrissy said, winding up to do it again.
“Hang on there, sweetie,” Stella said, laying a hand on her shoulder. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye.
“Now I understand you got your reasons for not wanting to talk to me,” she told him. “If my boss was some kind of kingpin or what have you, I guess I’d be worried myself. I wouldn’t be in any hurry to spill the beans. In fact, you’re probably sitting there thinking your odds with us are better than with the rest of those clowns. Am I right?”
The boy didn’t say anything, but he gave the muscles around his mouth a workout.
“So that makes it our job to convince you that isn’t the case. You look at me, you probably see a wrinkly middle-aged woman your mom’s age. You think—”
She paused. At the mention of his mom, there had been something—a little blip of emotion that flashed across his eyes. Stella reconsidered her approach.
“Were you one of the ones that nailed me the other night?” Stella kept her voice pleasant as she fixed the knots in place.
When he didn’t answer, she gave Chrissy a tiny nod, and the girl toed his leg again. Not as hard, but enough to make him grunt with pain. Sweat beads had popped up along his forehead. He worked his lips a bit and then muttered, “No.”
“What’s your name?”
“Patrick.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.” His voice hitched, ending in a bit of a squeak. Hell, bound up like that he looked about as threatening as a teddy bear. “What’d you do to the dogs?”
“Killed ’em,” Chrissy said. “Shot ’em, and it didn’t bother me a bit. I think I might have got me a taste for shooting things.”
Stella glanced up at the cold steel in Chrissy’s voice.
“I am looking for a little boy,” Chrissy continued. “My son is missing. He is eighteen months old. I want him back. It’s not right, him being away from his mother. Now, do you know anything about him?”
Patrick squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced from the pain.
“You know mothers,” Stella said conversationally. “Chrissy here’s actually a nice lady most of the time. Wouldn’t swat a fly. But get between her and her boy and… whoo, I tell ya, I’m not sure I like your odds. I bet your mama’s the same way. I bet if she knew who you were working for, she’d probably hightail it out here and take old Funzi’s head off. Am I right?”
Genuine anguish seeped into the boy’s eyes. “You’re wrong. It’s a family thing. We’re related. Funzi’s her cousin. Look, my dad took off when I was little, okay? I got three little sisters. Funzi’s just helping us out.”
Stella prodded him again, a little harder. The wound, which was down to a trickle of blood, gave up a small gush. “You think your mama would appreciate this kind of help? Huh? Do you?”
Though Patrick’s face had gone chalk white, he kept to his stony silence.
“You’re telling me your mama handed you over to Funzi? Told him, forget finishing high school, forget college, I prefer you take my boy and teach him how to maim and kill, please?”
“I can’t cross him. I don’t care what you say.” The boy’s breath was ragged. “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me slow.”
Man, it was worse than Stella thought. If Funzi’d got the kid running this scared, he must be the genuine, ruthless, bloody-handed mob article. She wasn’t sure how to convince the boy she was every bit as much of a badass threat as Funzi.
Because, in the end, she wasn’t. There was no way she was going to kill this man-child with peach fuzz growing on his upper lip.
As Stella hesitated, Chrissy shouldered her out of the way and leaned in hard on Patrick, her face just inches from his. “I don’t know if your mama’s a nice lady or not. I don’t know her, period. That’s why I can drive over there and start hurting her bad. If I knew her. I might have second thoughts, but I’m not even going to give her time to offer me a glass of tea. First thing I’m going to do is shoot her just like Stella done you, see? Except she don’t have anything useful to tell me, so I don’t know if I’ll really take the time to tie her off so she don’t bleed out. Aw, hell, I know it’ll take a long time to lose enough blood from a hole here—”she jabbed Patrick hard in the skin an inch from the bullet’s entry—“so I might just have to aim a little higher. There’s some artery in the thigh I guess pumps a lot of blood, the, what do you call it—”
“Femoral,” Stella said softly.
“Femoral, yeah,” Chrissy said. Then she drew back slowly, never taking her eyes off the boy’s face.
He gulped. Hard. And Stella knew they had him.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” he wheezed. “You stay the hell away from my mom. Funzi’s got your kid. For his wife.”
There was a moment of shocked silence.
“What are you talking about?” Chrissy demanded.
“Roy Dean gave him to Funzi, okay? He and his wife couldn’t have kids. Been trying forever. Roy Dean said you wouldn’t care.”
Chrissy’s eyes narrowed. “He said what?” she demanded, and Stella grabbed her arm before she could do the boy any more damage.
“He said you never did want that kid in the first place.” The boy squeezed his eyes shut tight, a sheen of perspiration dampening his forehead. “Said he was an accident and all. He like… said you wanted to give him up for adoption… that he was doing you a favor.”
Stella could feel Chrissy start to shake and clamped her hand down harder. “Easy there, girl,” she murmured. “Easy. Whatever’s happened, it ain’t this boy’s fault.”
Chrissy shone her flashlight directly in Patrick’s eyes, causing him to squeeze them shut. “Where’d Funzi take my Tucker?”
“I don’t know, okay, I don’t know! Probably the lake house, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there.”
“What lake house?”
“They got a place in that new development down by Camden Beach, you know? About thirty-five miles from here.”
“Tucker’s with Funzi’s wife? You’re sure?” Stella asked, thinking fast. If Patrick was telling the truth, and Funzi and his wife planned to keep the boy, it could be a stroke of luck. The woman was bound to treat him well, especially if she had started to think of him as her own.
“They—they treatin’ him good?” Chrissy said, echoing her thoughts. Her voice was thin and wavery.
“How the hell am I supposed to know? They plan on raising him—you get it? Like you know, their own son.”
“Ain’t they ever heard of adoption?” Chrissy said.
Patrick’s expression shifted for the first time from straight fear to surprise. “Who’s gonna let them adopt? Don’t you know who Funzi is? They got the whole organized crime unit up in Kansas City trying to crawl up his ass.”
Stella sighed. “So that whole thing’s true? Y’all really are mob?”
Patrick said nothing, and a single tear squeezed out of one eye and bounced down his cheek. Chrissy kicked at his bad leg, not hard this time, and Patrick’s eyelids fluttered like he was going to pass out.
“Come on, boy,” Stella said, not unkindly. “Don’t make this so hard on yourself.”
“Our family’s been connected forever,” Patrick said through clenched teeth. “Beez and Gus, they’re like his nephews or something. They been with Funzi a long time.”
“They’re the guys that nailed me,” Stella said. “Is that it? Everyone who’s down here?’
“Them… and Reggie Rollieri.”
“What’s he do?”
“He covers the casinos for Funzi. And he runs a book down along the shore. He’s only around a couple weeks a month.”
“So Funzi, Reggie, the two goons, and Roy Dean—that’s five, plus Benning is six. And counting you, seven.”
Patrick screwed up his face and drew a breath. “So you gonna kill me now?”
“Me? Nah,” Stella said. “Though Chrissy here might. She’s turning out to be a little itchy on the trigger.”
“They say you kill just about everyone who pisses you off,” Patrick mumbled.
“Who says?”
“Funzi. Benning. All of ’em.”
Interesting. So they’d asked around. Stella couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, it was flattering to know that her reputation as a cold-hearted killer was thriving. It was probably the reason they had junior here down at the gate on guard duty, though they probably didn’t think Stella was a true threat or they wouldn’t have given the job to such a greenhorn.
“Well, I don’t. I haven’t made up my mind on you yet, but you help me out here, maybe we can work it out so you can spend next summer working at Burger King like a regular kid, okay?”
He shook his head. “I’ll be dead in a week after they find out what I told you.”
“Only if they’re still around to come find you. Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said briskly. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. Fast, and you’re not going to leave anything out. Then I’m going to take you to a… friend for safekeeping. Just until we get this mess straightened out. What happens to you, that depends on how you handle yourself now. Hear?”
A single nod.
“Okay, Chrissy. Help me drag him over there.”
Chrissy and Stella hooked his shoulders and dragged. Patrick moaned as they bumped over the ground, but they got him propped up against a tree close to the fence. Stella checked his leg; it could definitely use a cleaning and dressing, but it didn’t look like he was going to bleed out tonight. Satisfied, she sat down cross-legged in front of him and motioned to Chrissy to join her. Sitting side by side, with the flashlight on its head making a circle of light on the ground between them and Patrick, reminded Stella of long-ago Girl Scout camp-fires.
“Where’s Roy Dean?”
Patrick snuck a nervous glance at Chrissy.
“Remember what I said,” Stella reminded him. “The whole truth. And fast. I’m feeling impatient.”
“He’s… uh, dead.”
Chrissy, sitting next to her, didn’t flinch.
Stella nodded. “I’m not all that surprised. Let me guess—he was ripping Funzi off, and Funzi found out.”
“He, um. Yeah.”
“Tell me how.”
Patrick licked his cracked lips. “Funzi had him driving weed up to Kansas City. He’d go pick it up from these Vietnamese guys in Bolivar that Funzi’s got growin’ the shit in their basement.”
“He start skimming, is that it?”
“Yeah… outta the bales, a little here and there, but then he took a whole brick, you know? Hard to miss that. Funzi’s not stupid.”
“What’d he want to do, sell it?”
“I guess. Thing is, he, ah…” Patrick glanced miserably at Chrissy. “I mean, I’m sorry if you didn’t know, Mrs. Shaw, Roy Dean had a girl—”
“That fucktard,” Chrissy spat. “Yeah, I knew.”
“So I guess they were gonna sell it or, I don’t know, he gave it to her or whatever but by the time Funzi had Beez and Gus mess him up, it was gone.”
“So Funzi killed him?”
“Not right then. They gave him a week to come up with a couple thousand bucks.”
Chrissy barked a short laugh.
“That was after they beat him up?” Stella asked.
“Yeah.”
Stella looked to Chrissy. “What do you think? Was Roy Dean looking for money that week?”
“Was he ever not looking for money? Shit, Stella, he’d turn over the couch cushions every time before he went to the bar. But he knew I didn’t have none, so it wasn’t like he’d ask me.”
“Arthur junior didn’t say anything about Roy Dean hitting him up either.”
“Well hell, he was fixing to trade my baby away, I guess he didn’t think he needed it,” Chrissy said. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.”
“That what happened, Patrick?” Stella asked. “Roy Dean come in here with Tucker?”
“Yeah.” If it was possible to look any more uncomfortable than he already was, with a leaking hole in his leg, Patrick did. “He was supposed to have the money Friday night, but he showed up here Saturday with the, uh, with your boy.”
“Oh!” Chrissy said. “That little… I went out to my friend Tiffany’s house Friday night to play cards, and Tucker was with me.”
“He was planning to take Tucker out to Benning’s that night,” Stella guessed.
“No shit! All along he meant to—he had it planned.” Chrissy was trembling from her fury, and Stella put her hand on her back and patted gently. Righteous anger was good, but she had to keep it under control.
“So?” she prompted Patrick.
“So, um, Benning has Roy Dean go wait in the shed and he calls Funzi, and, and Funzi was headed down to the lake house with Gus and Beez and Reggie, so they all turned around and came back up here.”
“How long did it take Funzi and them to get there?”
“Not long, maybe fifteen minutes. Me’n Roy Dean, we were kind of talking some, and the kid was on the floor playin’ with some little stuffed dog—”
“Pup-pup,” Chrissy interjected. “That’s his favorite. Oh, God—”
“Okay,” Stella said, giving Chrissy a one-arm hug, a firm one, to get her to focus. “We got to listen to the rest of this, hon.”
Chrissy gulped and nodded.
Patrick’s breathing had gone short and fast. He looked back and forth between them, his eyes unfocused. “So when Funzi and them came in the kid had shit his pants and Roy Dean couldn’t get him to shut up. Funzi’s all, Where’s the money, you got my money? And then Roy Dean tells Funzi, look here, you can have the kid and that’ll settle us up, and Funzi looks at him like he’s out of his mind and then he goes nuts. Tells Roy Dean, Is he fucking crazy?… And then he smacks him around a little, keeps asking where the fuck his money is, and then all of a sudden he just stops. He, uh, tells Gus to take the kid and drive him down to the lake house, you know, where his wife is. And Roy Dean’s looking all happy because, like, he figures Funzi went for it and all, but the second Gus walks out the door with the kid Funzi tells me and Beez, go outside and guard the place and don’t go nowhere until he comes and gets us. So we go out, and it wasn’t more than a minute or two after they locked the doors again, we heard a shot. And I knew Funzi shot Roy Dean.”
Patrick swallowed hard. Stella had a pretty good idea it was the first time Patrick had heard something like that, despite all his swagger.
“Okay,” she said gently. “He killed Roy Dean. Maybe he figured he couldn’t keep him around, knowing where the kid was. What happened to the body?”
“Well, shit, we were like—I mean, Funzi tells me, go get some plastic and a chain saw from Benning, and I, and I, I did that, and Beez stayed and guarded the shed, and when I got back I knocked on the door and gave the stuff to Funzi and then a minute later we heard them fire it up.”
“Funzi and Rollieri…”
“Yeah.”
“Holy mother,” Stella said. “A chain saw, didn’t that make a hell of a mess?”
“Yeah,” Patrick said, his voice a hoarse whisper. Stella noticed a smell coming off him, acrid fear mixed with blood and body odor. “Funzi, uh, didn’t make us help with the, uh, sawing. He told us to stay outside and, you know, we did. But later, when we were cleaning up… Jesus.”
“So you and Beez helped take care of the body when it was done?”
“No. Funzi gave me the chain saw and said, clean it off, and I wiped it down and all that, and Beez went and helped Benning close up and Funzi said, wait for him in the house so we… we, um, did.”
“How long did that take?”
“I don’t know… maybe like… half an hour? More maybe, we were, uh, sitting around at the house, and, and finally Funzi called on the cell. He said for me and Beez to come back up to the shed and, like, the pieces of, of Roy Dean were wrapped in plastic and Funzi told us to carry it all out to the burn barrel. Reggie had headed back to the city, so it was just me and Beez done it.”
Stella grimaced, thinking of the grisly task. Chrissy looked a little green herself. “Where’s the burn barrel?”
“Out behind the shed on the back side,” Patrick said, lifting a limp arm to point back across the property.
“Then what did you do?”
“We, uh, laid in some newspaper and shit to get it started and then we put the, uh, you know, Roy Dean in there. Plastic and all, Funzi wanted it all burned. Poured on the kerosene but we waited until dark to light it up.”
“Did it catch right off?”
“Yeah, but it took all night to burn down. The smell… it nearly killed us. In the morning, there was, there was a few pieces of bone or something with the plastic burned onto it. Gus was back by then, and Funzi made us dig, like, five or six holes and put the shit in.”
“Was it all destroyed? Other than the bone pieces?”
“There was some little bits of cloth around the barrel that must’ve come out of the flames or something. And what didn’t burn… I think there were teeth, like that.” Patrick stared miserably at the ground.
“Could you find those holes again?”
“Yeah. Since I had to do most of the digging. Funzi had me put the dirt back and drive the front loader over the top when I was done.”
“Okay.” Stella sat back on her haunches for a minute, thinking over the story. She glanced at Chrissy, whose anger seemed to have dissipated some, though she kept the gun loosely trained on Patrick. “Patrick, where exactly is Funzi on the old mob totem pole?”
“Kinda low, I guess,” Patrick said. “I mean, he’s got just Gus and Beez and Reggie. And me. He reports up to Donny Calabasas, and then after Donny, it’s Justin Frank—he’s got the whole south end of Kansas City.”
“Okay, I get the picture,” Stella said. “He’s a pissant and Gus and Beez and Reggie are little pissants and you’re just a teeny little baby pissant. That about the size of it?”
Patrick barely nodded. His eyelids were slowly sliding down, and Stella was worried he was about to pass out. “Look here, can you tell me how to get to the lake house?”
“Yeah… it’s the biggest-ass house on the north shore. It’s in that new development down past the U-Store-It where Route 4 hits the shore road.”
“On that private drive they put in?”
“Yeah, there’s maybe six, eight houses on a cul-de-sac.”
“And you’re sure that’s where they got the kid?”
Patrick looked uncertain. “Well… probably. I mean, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there, and now she’s got the kid—”
“My kid,” Chrissy interrupted, and Patrick swallowed.
“Sorry… yeah, I’m like ninety percent sure that’s where they are.”
“All of them? Funzi and Gus and Beez?”
“No, Funzi had Gus run something up to the city, some delivery for Donny Calabasas. So it’s just him and Beez.”
Stella still didn’t like those odds. Ordinarily she wouldn’t move until she was certain. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.
“How long until someone figures out you’re gone?”
Patrick shrugged. “Depends. If Benning and Larissa are partying, sometimes he don’t even come down.”
“But the rest of the time?”
“The rest of the time he’s down here around eleven, eleven thirty. Midnight maybe.”
Stella checked her watch: ten. Shit. “And where’s Funzi and them tonight?”
“At the lake house, I guess. Unless they went into town, to the bars… I don’t know. They don’t check in with me. Benning would know, but—”
“Yeah.”
For a moment Stella considered heading up to the house and scaring the crap out of Benning and his girlfriend, but that was introducing all kinds of opportunities to fuck things up.
If they left now, there was a chance they could get to the lake house and figure out how to get Tucker without Funzi knowing they were coming.
If Funzi had warning, Stella was pretty sure things would end in disaster. She and Chrissy wouldn’t stand a chance against two armed thugs. Plus Funzi’s wife. She wasn’t sure what the body count would be, or who would be left standing, but she wouldn’t put money on any kind of mother-and-child reunion.
“We gotta move,” she said decisively. “Sorry, Patrick, but you’re gonna have to haul your ass down to the road. We’ll help you, but I don’t want to hear any whining. I’ll get the car and then you’re gonna give Chrissy here the best directions you ever gave while I drive you over to my friend’s house, hear? He’ll take good care of you while Chrissy and I go get the job done.”
Patrick nodded miserably. Stella noticed with admiration that he made almost no sound at all as they helped him stagger to his one good leg and gimp his way to the road.