A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (16 page)

That got her a wide grin. “You think?”

Stella took care to lock the door as she left.

On the way to the golf course, she went back over what her caller had said. The thing about the hundred bucks was a joke. Stella had about fifty-five dollars in her purse, what was left from her once-a-week ATM visit. Taking out another hundred would put her a little too close to overdraft territory for comfort.

Stella had some money put away. Not a whole lot, but enough, if she was careful, to get by on as long as the store continued to bring in its usual unspectacular haul every month.

Because of the circumstances of Ollie’s death, insurance hadn’t paid out a penny. Luckily, when Stella’s mother passed, there had been enough to pay off the mortgage and the car loan and set some aside. After Ollie died, Stella used a chunk to employ herself a fancy financial adviser up in Independence. The man taught her a few things Ollie’d never seen fit to explain, and recommended a few books. Now Stella knew enough to scrape by.

The idea, of course, was to supplement her income with her little side business. And sometimes that actually happened. The bonus the Kansas coff ee importer’s wife had given her, for instance, had paid for the new dishwasher and gas range. But many of her clients had to work out payment plans, and Stella never had the heart to turn anyone away for lack of creative financing.

She had one gal who settled her account by making drapes
for every room in Stella’s house. That one was worth it: seeing the ex-girlfriend of the chief of police of a small town near the Iowa border—a woman who’d once believed that no one could help defend her from the most powerful man in town—up on a ladder installing the curtains, whistling and shimmying to an old Pointer Sisters song, was a rare privilege.

She had a couple women who sent her plain envelopes of cash every month. Sometimes it was a few twenties, sometimes more. Occasionally less.

With Chrissy, Stella hadn’t even bothered bringing up the subject of a payment plan beyond the fistful of rolled fives, tens, and twenties the girl handed over at her initial consultation. Chrissy already had too much on her mind. No matter; they’d work it out eventually.

Stella pulled into the access road that ran along the park. Bright streetlights had been installed in the parking lot, an improvement she welcomed. As she parked, she could make out a figure sitting exactly where he’d promised to be, on a bench they’d sunk in concrete across the pond. He was a heavyset man, and sat with his arms stretched out casually along the back of the bench, legs crossed.

Had it not been dark out, he could have been there to feed the ducks.

Stella patted the outline of her gun and slipped her car keys into her pocket. As she made her way around the pond, following the curvy outline of the fancy schmancy brick walk, she was relieved that the man made no move toward his pockets. When she got within twenty feet, she could see his eyes shining in the moonlight.

“Hello,” she called. “Here I am, right on time.”

“I appreciate that. Can’t stand a tardy bitch, myself,” the man said, and chuckled. His voice was slightly high-pitched and had a flat, nasal quality, and he seemed to find himself plenty amusing, which irritated Stella.

“So what is it you have to tell me?” she asked.

She heard the slightest shuffle behind her, coming from the left side of the path, away from the pond—a leaf against a rock, or maybe trash blowing—and turned to look.

At that moment something came at her from the right: a low, broad dark shape moving fast thudded into her hip and knocked her to the ground. Stella reached for the Raven, but before she could get to it her arms were yanked hard from behind. There were two of them—plus the man on the bench, who was getting up slowly, like he had all the time in the world.
Fuck me,
Stella thought, just like a damn greenhorn, not even checking her periphery first.

“Check this out,” she heard a voice say. She felt hands roving her body as the other guy held her, kicking and struggling, in place. The man searching her wore a stocking cap with eyeholes, pulled low on his face. His hands found her holster; in the next second it was yanked from her waist. For a second she was sure she was about to be shot with her own gun, a feeling that intensified when she felt its barrel pressed against the hollow behind her right ear. She scrunched up her whole face and waited for the shot.

In what she figured was her final half second on earth, Stella marveled at a new revelation: waiting to get shot was different from waiting for a man to punch you on a jaw that was still healing from the last time, or hit you on the temple with a beer bottle, or knee you in the gut.

Or maybe it was Stella herself who was different, who had changed since the last time she’d been victim to the violent reckoning that Ollie routinely dished out. Three years, sixteen days, in fact—that counter had been put in motion when Ollie slumped to the floor and bled out, a counter that would never be turned off again.

Three years, sixteen days of freedom. Of calling her own shots.

And what she felt now wasn’t anything like she used to feel. It wasn’t dull dread, a sense of the inevitable, a wish that he’d just get on with it, even a longing for the relief that would come from being knocked out.

What Stella Hardesty felt, with the barrel of her own gun jabbed a few inches from her brain, was mighty pissed off. To her surprise, it suddenly mattered a great deal to her that she not go down for the last time here, by the little mud pond on the edge of town, at the hands of two men she didn’t even know.

“You
cocksuckers
!” she screamed and tried to wrench her arms away from the man holding them behind her back. She managed to work one leg free and kicked with everything she had, connecting a solid hit to the balls of the guy in front of her.

She had the satisfaction of seeing him double over and start to vomit before she took a hit to the face that sent her sprawling.

And a second one that sent her out.

S
tella 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.