Roy Dean wore boxer shorts and a muscle T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and while there was little evidence of his having been recently dismembered and burned, he was far from a robust-looking specimen of humanity. His greasy brown hair lay flat on one side of his head and stuck straight out on the other, his pale sloped shoulders were pocked with acne scabs, and his narrow eyes were bloodshot.
“You bastard!” Chrissy yelped. “You’re supposed to be dead!”
“Don’t worry about him, just get on in there,” Stella said, giving the girl a shove, and Chrissy slipped past him into the house.
Roy Dean started to wheel in a circle toward the flames, his feet scrambling on the ground. It was kind of comical, like a cartoon of Wile E. Coyote when he ran off a cliff, legs pinwheeling for a moment in midair before he fell.
Stella took one big step toward him and raised her gun hand, realizing just in time that the trajectory of his out-stretched arm was going to connect about at her wrist, knocking the Ruger out of her grip.
She pivoted forward instead so that Roy Dean connected full on with her, his whole mass slamming into her torso at full speed. The impact knocked her back, and she could feel it in her bones, in her teeth, but it stopped him coming and he tripped and fell forward on top of her, arms flailing.
No gun.
Roy Dean had no gun—that was Stella’s thought as she rolled away from him, tipping a stone planter off its base, the broken shards cutting into her flesh as she scrambled out of the way.
Then she realized that she didn’t have a gun either as she watched the Ruger skitter across the slick patio surface toward the lawn.
For a second her eyes locked on Roy Dean’s homely face above her. There were red lines in his flesh from his pillow, and she could smell his breath and sweat, and then he pushed off her, propelling his body along the ground toward her gun. He managed to grab it and had it up and trained on her in what seemed like half a second.
“Bet you’re wishing you’d been a little nicer to me now, aintcha,” he said, leering.
Stella felt her heart lurch: she’d let Roy Dean take her gun like he was taking a lollipop from a baby. Chrissy had made it inside, but now she was on her own, and after Roy Dean shot Stella he’d go right back inside and alert everyone else.
Chrissy didn’t have a chance.
The thought pissed Stella off mightily. She got to her knees, hair escaping the ponytail holder and falling in her face, obscuring her vision. Her hands scrabbled in the dark behind her, finding the largest piece of the pot, what was left of the bottom, with a thick layer of potting soil matted to it.
“Surprise, surprise, here you are back from the dead,” she said, stalling for time. “So who did you all kill in the shed?”
“Rollieri,” he said. “Who else? Only I didn’t kill him. I ain’t no killer. Funzi done that hisself.”
Stella thought back to what Patrick told them: Reggie’d gone back to the city. Funzi and Roy Dean and Rollieri were alone in the shed while Patrick and Beez waited outside. Funzi must have shot Rollieri instead of Roy Dean. But why?
“What’d he do, anyway?”
Roy Dean snorted. “He was skimming the take on the book. Funzi figured it out a while ago, but he had to wait for Donny Calabasas to give him the go-ahead.”
“Why’d you all lie to Patrick and Beez?”
Roy Dean blinked, his brow furrowing. “How do you know Patrick?”
“We’re old friends. Quilting bees.”
“Fuck you, Stella. Anyway, we didn’t lie, we just couldn’t tell ’em until Funzi sent proof back up to Donny it was done.” Roy Dean giggled, looking like a little boy caught with a cookie. “We sent up Reggie’s hand that had the spider tattoo—that was my idea.”
“Brilliant,” Stella said. “Sure seems like there was a lot of ‘we’ in that story. How come Funzi’s trusting you all of a sudden? The way I heard it, you were skimming off your own deliveries. You were cheating Funzi, too.”
“I wasn’t.” Roy Dean reddened with anger, and the gun wavered in his hands. Stella was tempted to reach out and grab the barrel, take her chances with him getting off a wild shot, but he stood just out of reach. “I paid my debt,” he finally spat. “And that was all mostly just a misunderstanding anyway. What Rollieri did—now that was just wrong. Funzi couldn’t let that go.”
“You didn’t pay anything,” Stella protested, enraged. “You gave away a baby that wasn’t even yours. A baby. How could you do that—even a scum-sucking bottom-dweller like you?”
“Hey, Chrissy ain’t fit to be a mother,” Roy Dean said, his watery eyes narrowing, a vein throbbing on his temple. “She’s no better’n a whore. It’s her as brought this down on herself.”
That was just the reminder Stella needed of Roy Dean’s essential worthlessness. Enraged, she screwed up her face into an expression of exquisite pain—not such a stretch, given the beating her fresh stitches and recent bruises had taken.
“Ohh,” she wailed, reaching a shaking hand down to her legs, which were bent beneath her. “I think you broke my ankle.”
Roy Dean danced from one foot to another. “Shut up, Stella, or I’ll waste you right here.”
But he hesitated—Stella could see him do it. Worthless human being that he was, he’d been right about one thing—he was no killer. He’d fallen for the old lady ruse, and that gave her just the fraction of a second, the opening that she needed. She gave one more weak moan for good measure and stumbled to her feet like she might collapse from the effort.
Roy Dean stutter-stepped out of the way, as though the thought of 180 pounds of AARP-eligible female falling on him was simply too much, and Stella recovered her balance at the last second and pushed off her left foot—pain shooting up into her bad hip—and swung the heavy piece of pot up around and smashed it against his forehead.
Roy Dean went down without even a grunt, collapsing into an awkward pile of splayed limbs, his head bouncing off the slate patio with a thud Stella could feel through her feet.
“Ouch,” she exclaimed. That would have hurt plenty, if Roy Dean wasn’t already out.
Stella took her gun out of his hand, his fingers twitching slightly as she pried them off the grip. She jammed the Ruger back in the holster and dusted off her knees, and then, before she straightened up, she put two fingers to Roy Dean’s neck, finding a fluttery pulse.
“You know what your mistake was,” Stella whispered, backing away. “You hesitated. You thought you had me because you’re young. But badass comes in all ages.”
She spun toward the house, her heart pounding from exertion as well as fear. How long had her encounter with Roy Dean taken? Three minutes? Four? It was miraculous that no one had come out to check on him. Stella opened the door and slipped into the house, flattening herself against the wall to the right of the door and swinging her gun arm to the left and the right, trying to adjust to the dark of the room. The only light came from under the counters in the colossal kitchen that opened up to the left of the family room.
A hall led from the far side of the family room straight through the center of the house, and Stella could see that the front door was open up ahead. Someone—Funzi or his wife or Beez—must have gone to check out front. When they didn’t find anything amiss, they would circle around to the back—and find Roy Dean laid out cold.
Stella darted down the hall toward an ornate staircase on the right, an enormous wood-railed affair that curved upward. She grabbed the rail and hauled herself up the stairs, trying to keep her steps light, but thoughts of Chrissy and Tucker propelled her forward. At the top of the stairs she could see a darkened bathroom with its door ajar, and she dove across the hallway and into the bath, skidding on the polished marble floor, and went into a crouch facing out to the hall.
Cautiously, she peered out: the hall was empty. To the left it opened into a huge loft room dominated by a big sectional sofa, the floor littered with electronics: a PlayStation and Wii controls and a plastic guitar, plus stacks of DVD cases and some crumpled soda cans.
To the right, the hall stretched twenty feet and ended at a set of carved double doors. These were open a fraction of an inch, not wide enough to see anything inside. Along the hall on either side were other doors, all closed, leading to bedrooms, no doubt, and possibly more bathrooms.
Shit. Each of those doors presented a threat. Each one of them could have someone on the other side, poised and ready to shoot. Not to mention whoever was outside, who at any moment would come tearing back up the stairs.
Sweating and hyperventilating, Stella, counted the doors to the right. Five, not including the master.
The wife was probably still in the master bedroom, Stella thought, unless she’d run to the baby when the alarm first went off. Would she do that? Would the last few days with Tucker have been enough to make her start thinking like a mother?
Stella ran that scenario through her mind. If Chrissy had managed to get up here fast enough, if she found the nursery right away, maybe got there at the same moment as Funzi’s wife—Stella had no doubt about who’d prevail in that conflict—or maybe been lucky enough to get in and out before anyone discovered her… was there any chance that Chrissy could have made her way back down the stairs and out the front door with Tucker? Could she be back at the Jeep already, putting it into gear and roaring back out onto the highway?
As Stella considered this hopeful possibility, she heard a sound from one of the doors on the right side of the hallway, a footstep or something heavy being moved. She realized her hopes were wildly unrealistic: Chrissy hadn’t got away. If she had managed to grab Tucker, Funzi and Beez would be in pursuit, the wife hysterical. Instead, they’d shut themselves in the rooms—and they had Chrissy and the baby with them.
Her instincts propelled her, and she burst out of the bathroom and across the hall and into the door, smashing into it with all her force.
It wasn’t locked, and she went flying into the room, knocking into a bed frame, her shins slamming painfully against the brass, her gut jarring against the rail. Staggering back, with nausea rocketing through her, she noticed the other person in the room.
Stella thought for a moment she was staring at a ghost, illuminated by a dainty ceramic lamp on a bedside table. Wearing a nightgown of sheer flower-sprigged cotton, an impossibly thin woman with lifeless blond hair hanging down past her shoulders stood hugging her arms to herself. Her eyes were rimmed red, with huge purple circles underneath. She looked terrified.
But Stella knew better—appearances could be deceiving.
She seized the woman’s arm and twisted it behind her back, doubling her over. She trained her gun on the woman’s head, pressing the barrel to her forehead. The woman made a small mewling sound, like a kicked puppy, but didn’t protest further.
“Where’s the baby?” Stella demanded.
The only sound the woman made was a strangled sob, and Stella yanked harder. She heard something pop in the area of the woman’s shoulder.
The woman screamed.
A thundering sound came from down the hall, and a bulky figure burst into the room, coming to a lurching halt in front of Stella. Funzi. The man who’d watched from the comfort of a park bench while his goons beat the shit out of her. A doughy man in his late forties, he wore striped cotton pajamas, thick black chest hair peeking out of the V neckline. His hair was slicked back on top of his head, in the style of a fifties crooner.
The gun he had trained on her made their entire cache of weapons look like toys from a cereal box. Stella figured it for a streetsweeper, a fully automatic shotgun that could shoot six hundred rounds a minute.
“I’ll shoot her,” she yelled.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Funzi said, slow and deadly. “That you’d shoot Marie here. The question is, would it be worth it, for a chance to put a bullet in your brain?”
Stella’s finger on the gun twitched involuntarily, and she realized Funzi had just unwittingly saved his wife.
She couldn’t shoot the woman now, knowing that Marie’s own husband was willing to stand there and watch her die. There was the evidence of what mattered to him. There was the balance of power. There was a drama Stella had seen played out a few times too often.
She relaxed her grip on Marie Angelini’s arm, and the woman fell to the floor, whimpering with pain and clutching her arm. Stella pointed the Ruger at Funzi.
“You’ll take me out with that thing,” she said, voice hard, “but can you be sure I won’t get off a shot, too? I’m not a bad shot, and right now I’m sighting right up your hairy nostrils.”
Funzi laughed, a horrible sound laced with what sounded like genuine mirth. “Yeah, you might. And if you do, know what’ll happen next?”
Stella said nothing, dread growing in her gut; From down the hall she heard a huffing cry: Tucker.
“Beez, come on down here,” Funzi called. “Bring our guest.”
Funzi stepped lightly aside, never taking the gun off Stella, and a second later Chrissy’s battered face appeared in the doorway. She was being shoved along by a compact, muscular dark-haired man in his twenties who was wearing a T-shirt smudged with blood and a pair of cotton lounge pants with beer cans screen-printed on them.
Chrissy’s hands were bound behind her, and she’d taken a couple of good slugs to the face. One eye was rapidly swelling shut, and as she opened her mouth to speak, Stella could see that a couple of her front teeth had been broken off.
“You look about like I feel right now,” Stella said, trying to keep her voice from wavering, but the situation was impossible now. They were doomed.
Chrissy gave her a small nod, but her eyes glinted with fury. Down, Stella thought, but not out. There was still some fight left in the girl.
“Did you nail Roy Dean?” Chrissy asked, her voice thick and slurred through the busted teeth.
“Yeah, I did,” Stella said. Though a fat lot of good it was going to do. “I knocked him out. Now I’m gonna take down this jerk.”
“You shoot me, Beez here will put a bullet in your girl’s brain and then, depending how pissed off he is, he just might go put one in the kid, too.”
Chrissy went rigid at his words, her eyes wide, her muscles straining as she worked against her restraints. Her lips moved and she spat at Funzi; the bloody glob landed on his cheek. Marie whimpered from the floor.
Gus yanked upward on Chrissy’s restraints, making her gasp with pain, but she didn’t cry out. Funzi picked up a little decorative pillow from a chintz armchair and wiped Chrissy’s saliva slowly and deliberately from his face. Then he tossed the pillow to the floor.
“I think you’ll be sorry you did that,” he said. He turned to Stella. “Okay, you ugly sack of flesh, how ’bout you give me that gun and come along like a good little girl.”
Reluctantly, Stella lowered her gun and handed it to Funzi, who stuck it in a pocket of his lounge pants. He came forward and yanked her shirt up, revealing the empty holster below. He took it off her with a vicious yank and threw the thing in the corner of the room.
“What you got here?” he demanded, reaching down to her ankle holster. He pulled out the scissors and laughed, then tossed them in the corner, too. “What were you going to do, snip me to death?”
Stella focused her attention on Chrissy, never taking her eyes off the girl’s face. “How’s Tucker?” she asked quietly.
Chrissy nodded once, firmly. Good: so the boy was all right. For now.
She had to believe Funzi had been bluffing about shooting the kid, but it was too risky to try anything now. Especially given the odds: two large, armed, and muscular men against the two of them, unarmed and beat to shit.
“Get up, Marie,” Funzi growled to the woman on the floor. Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet.
Stella heard something. A faint sound, a wail that gradually got louder. A siren.
Someone had called the fire department. Or—was it possible?—maybe the next-door neighbors had been looking out their window and seen her struggle in the back of the house with Roy Dean. Maybe the cops were on their way. Suddenly, the idea of being arrested sounded pretty damn appealing, since it would mean Chrissy and Tucker’s safety.
Down the hall Tucker’s hiccuping whine escalated to a wailing cry. Chrissy bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut for a second.
“Beez,” Funzi barked. “Go see what happened to Roy Dean. I’ll deal with these two.”
Beez bolted from the room and down the stairs. Stella hoped Roy Dean had bled rivers from the gash on his forehead, a blood pool so big and wide the cops or fire rescue couldn’t miss it.
“In the room,” Funzi said to Chrissy, getting behind her and giving her a shove. The girl stumbled forward and sat down hard on the bed.
“You,” Funzi said to Stella. “Next to her.”
Stella sat down on the bed, close to Chrissy, and put her arm around the girl. “It’s okay,” she whispered fiercely.
Whether it was or not might be up in the air, but Chrissy leaned into the hug. “I know,” she whispered back. It clearly hurt to talk, given the hit she’d taken to the mouth.
“Marie, get your ass in gear and get the rope,” Funzi ordered his wife. “And the tape. Move!”
Holding her arm painfully to her side, Marie slipped past him without a word. The blood had drained from her face, leaving her skin white and lifeless, and Stella figured the shoulder was dislocated and hurting like a bitch.
Too damn bad.
Marie was back in moments with a coil of orange plastic rope looped over her good arm. She also held a roll of duct tape. Outside, the sirens had grown in volume until they were practically earsplitting; then, abruptly, they stopped. Stella heard men’s voices and the clop of heavy boots on the drive, a pounding on the front door—Beez must have shut the door when he went down to deal with Roy Dean.
Funzi took the rope from his wife and, with surprising speed, tied Stella’s hands behind her and then looped the rope through Chrissy’s arms and secured the ends of the rope to the bed frame.
“Marie, get that kid and shut him up for Christ’s sake,” Funzi said.
Marie backed out of the room, but at the doorway she hesitated.
“He has a name,” she said, her voice quiet but with a faint echo of something at the heart of it.
“Yeah. Alphonse junior. Now move your ass.”
“No,” Marie corrected him. “It’s Tucker.” And she was gone.
Stella felt Chrissy tense next to her, but before she could say anything, Funzi grabbed the roll of duct tape and tore off a huge strip. He slapped it across her mouth, winding the ends around her head a couple of times. Stella had to work hard to keep the panic from making her hyperventilate, and she breathed hard through her nose as Funzi repeated the process on Chrissy.
The pounding downstairs grew louder, and Stella willed the firefighters to break the door down, to come in primed for action—but instead she heard Beez’s voice, slightly winded, speaking calmly.
“Hey, guys. Thanks for coming out.”
“Sir, we have a report of a fire at this address.”
“Yeah. Yeah, damndest thing. I think I just got it put out. I’ve had the hose on it out back.”
Funzi stepped away from the bed and gave his handiwork a once-over. Stella glared at him as hard as she could. Funzi wiped his hands on his pants and straightened the collar of his polo shirt and shot her a thumbs-up before he disappeared around the corner.
Tucker’s cries had diminished to a cranky whimper, with a rhythmic pattern to it, and Stella figured Marie had picked him up and was bouncing him quiet, much as she’d done for Noelle all those years ago.
Of course, she’d never done it with a dislocated shoulder. Grudgingly, she raised her opinion of Marie a few notches.
“Gentlemen,” Funzi’s voice boomed heartily from downstairs. “So glad you all came out. Me’n my buddy here can’t figure out what happened out back. Why don’t you all come on this way.…”
She could hear their voices at the back of the house but couldn’t make out the words. She strained her wrists against the rope, but flexing her muscles just made it bind more tightly against her skin, cutting in painfully. She wondered if she and Chrissy could maneuver themselves so their hands touched, whether one of them might be able to free the other’s wrists. But there was no way to make the suggestion, not with their mouths taped shut.
Stella fought against the panic in her chest. Was there any way to get to the scissors? She could see them across the room, where Funzi had thrown them against the wall, but they were four feet past the end of the bed, too far away to do any good.
That’s when she remembered the rotary cutter. Rocking her hips, she worked her loose camo pants around, twisting them against the shiny bedspread, until she could touch the top of the pocket with her fingertips. She tried to communicate to Chrissy with her eyes, to let her know what she was trying to do, and though the girl looked confused, she leaned as close as she could to give Stella as much slack in the rope as possible.
She strained against the rope and managed to touch the top of the rotary cutter’s handle, but it was smooth curved plastic, and she couldn’t get a grip on it. She bent backward, forcing her shoulders back and straining her fingers as far as she could, until they slid down the handle far enough to get a grip. Stella grasped the cutter and worked it out of her pocket.
Comprehension dawned in Chrissy’s eyes, and she nodded sharply and looked down at her bound hands. Stella followed the path of her gaze and saw that she was opening and closing her fist, and realized what the girl was trying to communicate: she had more freedom of movement in her hands than Stella did. She wanted Stella to give her the cutter.
Stella didn’t hesitate. She managed to turn the tool in her hands, and pointed it toward Chrissy. She felt the girl take it from her and then she heard a beautiful sound: the snick of the safety being released.
She looked at Chrissy and for a moment their eyes held and she tried to communicate everything she was feeling: encouragement, resilience, and sheer ass-kicking vengeance. Chrissy blinked twice and then she leaned back and Stella felt the pressure of the blade against her restraints.
The blade was wicked sharp, and it spun free, making it hard to control. It was meant to be held firmly against a flat cutting surface. Used against an uneven surface like the knots, it could easily slip off, slicing into the vulnerable flesh of Stella’s hands or wrist.
She held as still as she could, but even so, twice she felt the blade slip and sink into her skin. She tried not to react, knowing that Chrissy needed all her focus for the task, but she felt blood dripping down her hands and pooling in her curled fingers. She’d cut herself with the rotary cutter before, and it was like a cut with a straight razor—so clean and so fast that you didn’t feel the pain at first.
The voices in the back yard faded and then came back louder as the men returned to the house. Stella could hear them in the downstairs hall, laughing now, all worries about the fire put to rest, and her heart sank. So Beez had managed to obliterate all her hard work with Roy Dean—the unconscious body, the puddle of blood. Well, it wouldn’t have been hard, with a few minutes’ blasting with the hose.
She felt one of the strands of rope strain against the blade, and suddenly it snapped free, the frayed end hitting her fingers. Stella made a sound in her throat, of surprise and gratitude. Chrissy murmured in response, and Stella could feel her tugging at the loosened rope.
Funzi and Beez led the firefighters to the front door, and their voices carried easily up to the bedroom. They sounded almost jovial, like a bunch of guys going to the bar after a softball game.
“I think I’ll have my wife and son go stay in a hotel for the night. You know, don’t want the little guy breathing that smoke,” Funzi said.
Chrissy paused and Stella wished she could pat her shoulder or comfort her in some way, but after a second Chrissy attacked the knots with renewed vigor.
“Not a bad idea, sir. If you call the station tomorrow they can give you the name of a couple of outfits that deal in smoke damage. You know, for the drapes and what-all.”
“Yeah, I guess the rest of it’ll keep us busy for the weekend. So much for fishing.”
“That’s a damn shame.” Another voice. “Hope to see you back on the water soon.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Just then, Stella felt Chrissy pull the loosened strands free, shoving them out of the way with her fingers, and Stella opened and closed her fists a couple of times to get the feeling back, noting with dismay that they were slick with her own blood.
She closed her fingers over the handle of the rotary cutter just as Funzi and Beez stomped up the stairs and into the room. She prayed they wouldn’t see the blood seeping under her hands, staining the bedspread beneath her and Chrissy.
Funzi stood in the doorway and leered in. He looked almost maniacal, a grin stretched across his otherwise grim features.
“Isn’t that great?” he said. “Nice to see your tax dollars at work like that, huh?”
Behind him, Beez tagged along. He didn’t look one bit happy. Stella could sympathize. The evening wasn’t exactly a smashing success for anyone so far.
“Ought to rip your head off right now,” Beez muttered.
“You nearly screwed us with what you did to Roy Dean,” Funzi said, his manic voice edging higher. “Leaving him lying out on the ground for anyone to see. Good thing Beez got down there fast. He put Roy Dean into the cushion box. Big old Rubbermaid thing we keep the cushions for the outdoor furniture in? I mean, the thing was perfect, like it was made for holding a body. Only Roy Dean started to wake up. Fucking beat that. He starts to wake up and what’s Beez supposed to do, we got the fuckin’ fire department down our shorts, can’t have Roy Dean making noise and pounding on the box, now, can we? So Beez had to put a bullet in his brain.”
Beez looked away, his face darkening, and Stella felt her face go rigid with horror. She remembered the feel of Roy Dean’s pulse under her fingers, and she couldn’t help thinking that he had been alive, he’d still been breathing when she left him lying on the patio.
She hadn’t killed him. But he was dead anyway, and he wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for her. Did that make her guilty? Did it matter? Before the night was out, more people were going to be dead. Probably her and Chrissy—but not if she had anything to say about it.
“You might as well been the one who pulled the trigger,” Funzi added, as though he were reading Stella’s thoughts. He prodded her tied ankles with a meaty hand. “You cost me one of my men. I might have to, you know, express my displeasure with you before I shoot you.”
Stella looked at the pale skin of Funzi’s stomach, a band of which hung over the elastic waist of his pajama bottoms. She imagined sinking the rotary blade in right there, rolling a nice big slice out of him. Now wasn’t the time, though, not with both of them focused on her and Chrissy. She needed to get one of them alone.
“Marie! Get down here!” Funzi hollered down the hall. His wife appeared in the doorway, holding Tucker in her good arm, with a diaper bag over her shoulder.
Chrissy strained against the ropes and grunted frantically against the tape against her mouth. The sound was heartbreaking. Tucker heard it, and his little blond head whipped around and he arched away from Marie, leaning out with his arms and screaming.
The boy recognized his mama, even with her battered face and tape over her mouth.
Stella figured her heart was going to break right there. Then she made herself take all that anguish and turn it into honed, sharp fury, pictured it swirling in her gut, ready to burst out and take down all the evil in the room.
Marie struggled to get the boy under control with her good arm, the bag slipping to her elbow and dangling there. Tucker wasn’t a dainty child. He was pink and round and big, and Stella figured it would be a miracle if he didn’t wiggle out of her one-arm grasp, Marie red-faced with the effort of hanging on to him.
Marie didn’t look toward the bed. Stella wanted to scream at her: Look here, right here, this is Tucker’s real mother. The woman your husband is going to shoot down like a dog, just so you can playact at being Mommy. She willed Marie to look, but the woman turned away.
“Jesus fuck, Marie, get him out of here,” Funzi said, pulling a set of keys out of his pocket. “Take the Escalade. Go to the town house. I’ll be there later today. Move.”
He gave his wife a perfunctory peck on the cheek and a little shove, and she staggered down the hall without a backward glance.
That peck on the cheek—noisy, brief—Ollie used to kiss Stella like that, but only if there were other people around. She’d be standing with a group of women at the Knights of Columbus barbecue and he’d come over, flush with a few beers, bringing the conversation to a halt with his lurching, leering presence. The women would all watch as he winked broadly and kissed Stella. Sometimes he’d pat her butt, too. And then he’d wander off to find his buddies and another beer, and there would be this little silence before the conversation started up again, and even though it was a matter of seconds, it was excruciating, and Stella knew what they were all thinking.
That she was a saint to put up with Ollie Hardesty. And that somebody ought to stop him from doing what they all knew he did.
And then someone would mention that her niece was having surgery for a fibroid the size of a tennis ball, and Stella would stand quietly with the trace of the kiss burning an invisible scar on her cheek.
Stella felt a little sorry for Marie. It was going to be a tough drive, wherever she was going, probably up to the city, fifty or sixty miles with her arm screaming in pain. Maybe they’d get pulled over for not having a car seat—but what would that accomplish? If she and Chrissy didn’t walk out of this place, even if Tucker somehow escaped Funzi and his wife, he’d be headed straight for social services. Foster care. The start of a whole other kind of no-good life.
There were no two ways about it: she and Chrissy had to come out of this alive.
Funzi gestured at the women. “So Beez, what do you think of taking the ladies out for a boat ride?”
“Sure,” Beez said, but he still looked pretty crabby.
“Go get the keys, I think they’re still on the cooler out in the garage. Or maybe on the hook in the game room. Somewhere down there, anyway.”
Beez left the room.
“Here’s the thing, girls,” Funzi said, going to the corner of the room where he had thrown Stella’s holster. He picked up the scissors, examined them carefully, admiring the curve of the blades. Then he came over and sat next to Stella on the bed. “You ladies are the plus-size variety. That’s a problem. Beez and I are gonna have a hard time carrying a couple of heifers like yourselves out of here, so you’re going to have to cooperate.”
Stella glared at Funzi. He was enjoying this. Having fun at their expense. As if to confirm her suspicion, he pulled the hair away from her face, almost delicately, and put the tip of the scissors to the edge of the duct tape gag. Slowly, carefully, he worked the blade under the edge of the tape and cut through it. He was cutting into her skin, too, Stella was pretty sure, given the sharp pain she felt.
Once he got the cut started, he picked at a corner of the tape with his thumb and forefinger. He leaned in close to her face, and Stella could smell him: sweat and body odor and traces of some fruity aftershave.
There was a ripping sound and suddenly her face was a world of pain. Funzi had yanked the tape away in one furious motion, and it felt like it had taken a couple of her stitches out and opened up all her gashes again and stripped a few layers of skin as well. Her lip dribbled blood, no doubt split further than before. She gasped involuntarily and then worked her jaw back and forth, trying to get some sensation back into it.
“Not much of a looker, is she?” Funzi laughed, addressing Chrissy and pointing to Stella with the scissors. “They say she took out her husband. Poor guy, he probably wasn’t sticking it to her enough. That what got you so mad, Stella? Huh?”
He chuckled at his own humor, and Stella squeezed the rotary cutter hard, the handle sticky with her blood.
“But it’s kind of hard to blame him. I mean, even without the shit kicked out of you, it’s not like you’re gonna win the Miss World title, you know? Now you—” pointing at Chrissy with thumb and forefinger cocked, gun-style. “You got some potential. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings, calling you a heifer. You see my wife? See how damn skinny she is? Man, she ain’t had anything decent to eat in years. Drives me bat-shit. I’m like, Marie, have a fucking French fry, for Christ’s sake.”
More mirth. Funzi was able to amuse himself pretty easily. “Yeah, but I like you. I do,” Funzi said softly, letting his gaze travel up and down Chrissy. “Nice and soft, probably feel pretty good to sink into, and you’d have plenty to hang onto, you know?”
He leered suggestively, but Chrissy shot him a glance that Stella figured made it pretty clear what she thought of the idea. Good girl, she thought. Stay angry.
“You’re not her type,” Stella muttered through her bloody lips. “You ain’t anybody’s type, ’cept your own. Too bad you couldn’t just fuck yourself so you could be with someone who loves you back.”
Funzi’s eyebrows shot up, and then he was laughing, but his laughter had a hard, mean edge to it now.
“Now see, there’s that bitterness again. Woman, you are desperately in need of a good screwing, but I’m sorry, that’s just not going to happen. Maybe in your next life.”
The humorous tone was gone now. He had lost his patience; he was done playing with them, and Stella tensed, sensing the moment was near.
“You know,” he said, pointing at Chrissy again, “you ought to be thanking me. Your boy’s gonna have things you’d never have been able to give him. Private school, soccer and baseball, decent clothes, a car on his sixteenth birthday. And you know what?”
He leaned across Stella, getting as close to Chrissy’s face as he could, and it was clear that he was enjoying her pain, enjoying dishing out the cruelty.
“He won’t remember you,” he said, voice soft and silky. “Don’t fool yourself about that little episode a few minutes ago. This time next week he’ll be calling me Daddy.”
Stella found herself staring into his ear, a fleshy, large, knobby thing with hair on the inside. As she swung her arm from behind, up and over in an arc, she was able to make a detailed observation of Funzi’s ear hair—it was one of those moments that seems to stretch on forever, even though it lasted a mere fraction of a second. Evidently Funzi hadn’t done any personal grooming in a while, because the bristly black hairs were a quarter of an inch long, as though he was growing a wire brush inside his ear, and as Stella brought the rotary cutter down across his neck and blood came flying out of the severed artery in a spray whose volume surprised even Stella, Stella who’d brought forth the blood of a dozen men before, Stella who’d knocked the life blow by blow from her husband’s cruel eyes, the thought that went through her head in slow motion was that she might not be beautiful, but because of her, the world was going to be short one truly ugly son of a bitch.
Funzi jerked back, hands flying to his neck, blood pumping between his scrabbling fingers as he tried to scoop it back in. His eyes widened and his lips moved, and some of the blood splashed across Stella’s face and more of it landed on her shirt as she instinctively pulled away. There was blood on her lips, she sputtered as some of it got in her mouth, spat out the blood of the man who’d wanted to kill her, and she pulled her bound ankles in toward her body as far as she could and then kicked them hard and Funzi was shoved off the bed onto the floor, making choking sounds of horror all the way down.
From her peripheral vision Stella saw Beez burst into the room, watched his glance fly from her to Chrissy, who was struggling to get up off the bed, and Funzi on the floor in his bath of blood, twitching now, fingers extended out stiffly, eyes rolled back in his head.
Beez had his gun up and got off a shot before Stella could react, and Chrissy jerked back against the headboard. A neat hole blossomed red in her chest and then she started to tilt slowly to the side.
Stella dove off the bed on top of Funzi, reaching for the scissors that had fallen from his grasp onto the white carpet. Her fingers brushed against the blades as the sound of another shot exploded way too close. As she grasped the handles there was another shot and she felt a giant wallop in her left shoulder and thought holy shit he got me—but she palmed the scissors, rolling over onto her back on top of Funzi as Beez seemed to fly through the air toward her. She grabbed the handle with both her bloody hands and held the scissors in front of her.
For a fraction of a second she saw Beez’s eyes widen as he flew toward her, and then he crashed on top of her as the gun went off once more and the scissor handles jabbed hard into her sternum and knocked the wind out of her. Stella struggled against his weight, trying to figure out if that last shot had connected, but she was still moving, her shoulder burned but she was moving, she was kicking and clawing and holy mother she wanted to be out from under him, and then she was, crab-scuttling away on her one good arm and only then did she see that the scissors were sunk into his throat and blood was leaking out fast, Beez lying now halfway on top of his boss, on Funzi, the two of them going still and cold even as their blood continued to leak out.
If they weren’t dead yet they would be soon but what good was it going to do with Chrissy dead and Stella shot twice shot twice oh shit how had she been so lucky for so long how had it worked out that a washed-up fucked-over dried-out shell of a disappointed woman had managed to keep it going as long as she had -
- and as her hands found the holes in her flesh, felt her own blood leaking out, heard her own whimpering, Stella knew the answer, knew it as sure as she’d known anything in her entire life:
- she’d had the luck of someone who just didn’t care, who didn’t much give a damn if she lived another day, who didn’t believe life had any more gifts to give her, who believed that death would be every bit as satisfying as rattling around that empty house, as waking up in the early morning hours and feeling loneliness like a huge weight pressing on her chest—
- and then she’d gone and done the one thing that she’d never thought she could do again—she had cared.
And caring was what had got her dead.
Sweet fucking irony. Stella fell down in degrees, feeling her strength ebb out as she grabbed for the bed frame, felt it slip out of her fingers, unable to hold on. She felt woozy, circling clouds of hot red in the outskirts of her vision.
There was no more movement from the men on the floor. With an effort that felt like it took about a year, Stella forced herself away from them, catching sight of Funzi’s staring eyes, no longer mean, just empty.
Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself to her forearms and looked over the bed.
Chrissy lay on her side, turned toward the wall away from Stella. Her cap had come off and her pale, curly hair spilled out prettily. Stella couldn’t see the wound from here. Couldn’t see the blood.
Stella dragged herself the rest of the way up, until she was almost sitting. The crime scene guys were going to have a field day in here—four bodies, all bleeding out. By the time the cops came, no one would be left to tell what happened. And Goat—would they call him? Was he going to have to see her like this, banged up and wearing the blood of too many other people? Was that going to be what he remembered years from now when somebody happened to mention her name in passing?
From somewhere in the vicinity of her heart, Stella thought no.
It was a small notion, but as she sat on Funzi’s floor with a couple of holes in her, it bloomed and grew until the word itself crowded out all her other thoughts and rang in her ears: No. It was too much. It was just too damn much. NO.
She’d been humiliated, beaten, taunted, and now shot, but no one, not even the entire Kansas City mob, was going to leave little Tucker motherless and take away Stella’s chance to get her hands on Sheriff Goat Jones on the same day.
“God… damn…,” she mouthed as she edged her way along the bed, pulling at the frame with her fingers, until the side-table phone was in reach.
It took a couple of tries to get the receiver off the base, and then Stella sank back down on the floor, exhausted from the effort of trying to stay upright. She brought the phone close to her face, and as the numbers swam blurrily, she tried to remember where the hell she’d left her reading glasses this time.
But she could see just well enough to press the buttons. It took a while, and she went slow, because she wasn’t sure she had the energy to do it twice if she messed up, but then she heard Goat’s voice, Goat’s sleepy deep sweet voice saying hello, and Stella closed her eyes and breathed through a smile:
“Come and get me, big boy.”
And then she let the clouds swirl on in.