A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (24 page)

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.

S
tella considered having Chrissy keep her gun on Patrick once they got in the car, but since it was going to have to happen eventually anyway, she decided they might as well take care of him now.

She left the car idling while they got Patrick settled into the back seat. Stella helped hoist his bad leg up on the seat, a pile of rags from the trunk spread out underneath to catch the thin stream of blood that ran from the wound.

“Sorry you have to see this,” she told him apologetically, leaning into the car. It was awkward to crawl in, her knees on the floor of the car, but she needed to get close to his face.

“See what?” Patrick asked.

“This.” Stella hit him fast and hard on the chin, the way she’d learned from watching boxing videos on YouTube, channeling Muhammad Ali from when he took Sonny Liston down. She backed her way out of the car and slipped the brass knucks off her hand and returned them to her purse, pleased to
see that Patrick was breathing well, his head leaning back against the door.

“At’s a shame,” Chrissy said, shaking her head. “I was star-tin’ to like that one a little bit.”

“Don’t like him too much. He stood by while they killed your husband.”

Chrissy snorted. “Somebody ought to give him a medal for that.”

“Well, but he watched them haul your kid out of there, didn’t he? Would have put a gun on us, too, if we hadn’t got to it first.”

“Wouldn’t a shot us, though.”

“The hell you say.”

“He didn’t have it in him, Stella. Come on, it was obvious.”

“Well, until today I wouldn’t have figured you for cold-blooded shootin’ either, but you sure nailed those two crazy mutts.”

Chrissy didn’t respond. Stella got into the driver’s seat and buckled herself in. Her body ached dully all over, and she figured it was a delayed muscular response to the beating she’d taken the night before. Well, she’d just have to power through the next hour or so and hope she had the juice for another round.

Either way, she’d be in for a long rest after this night was over. She just hoped it wasn’t permanent.

Stella made the U-turn and drove slowly back past Benning’s, glancing over at the trailer. The blue glow from the television was the only light visible inside, though the pole
lights still illuminated the grounds. If Benning or his girlfriend looked out the window, Patrick’s post, with its abandoned camp chair and boom box, would be obviously empty. The thought made her want to drive a little faster, but she waited until Benning’s was out of sight in the rearview mirror before putting the pedal down.

The inside of the Jeep was quiet as Stella made the drive back through Prosper and out to Goat’s. She slowed on the final stretch of gravel drive before pulling up in front of the house, a tidy little wood-sided foursquare that had been empty for a few years before Goat moved in.

Stella pulled the Jeep into the yard, cut the headlights and turned off the ignition, and coasted the last twenty yards, praying Goat was a heavy sleeper. Off to the side of the house, his service sedan was pulled up square next to his truck, a battered Toyota. A single light burned somewhere in the house, its soft glow pale gold in the windows. Through the gaps in the sheer curtains Stella could make out the shapes of furniture, the outline of the staircase, a picture hung on the wall.

She felt an odd tug, a longing that she couldn’t at first identify. She wanted to go inside and look around, pick up objects off the tables and hold them in her hands, examine the photographs. She wanted to look in the fridge and the medicine cabinet and the bookshelves. She wanted to know all about the man who’d taken up residence in a protected corner of her mind.

Upstairs, out of sight, Goat was undoubtedly sleeping, dreaming maybe. Stella imagined his bedside table: there would be reading glasses, of course—a person didn’t get to be their age without them—and maybe a glass of water. An alarm
clock, though Stella would bet Goat was the kind of man who woke up a minute before it went off. A book—maybe a biography, or a World War II history. The clicker—or maybe not. Maybe he didn’t like a television in the bedroom. They said it distracted—that your sex life suffered from its presence.

That was about enough of
that,
Stella chided herself. She opened the car door as quietly as she could and got out, Chrissy following suit. Then she opened the passenger door in back and stared down at Patrick.

He didn’t make for a very threatening captive, unconscious in the back seat, his lips parted and his long lashes casting moon shadows on his smooth cheeks. He looked about twelve years old, in fact.

“Well, let’s get it done,” Stella said, grabbing one of his feet and indicating that Chrissy should take the other. They pulled him out, Stella grabbing his head and barely preventing it from glancing off the door well and banging into the ground. “This fellow’s too damn big. I’m getting tired of hauling him around.”

“We can just drag him, I guess,” Chrissy said. “You clipped him pretty good. I don’t think he’s gonna wake up anytime soon.”

“Yeah. Too bad we couldn’t just put a timer on him. A pop-up timer like you stick in a turkey. I don’t want Goat finding him too soon. We need to get in there, you know—”

“Without the law,” Chrissy finished her sentence for her. “Well, we could hit him again, I guess.”

They staggered across the lawn, up the steps, and then lurched onto the porch and dropped Patrick into one of the Adirondack chairs—nice ones, looked like Goat had made
them himself—on the porch. They stretched Patrick out as comfortably as they could. Stella went back to the car for the rope and tied Patrick’s ankles together. She checked the wound, which had nearly stopped bleeding and was drying to a crust around the edges.

The ankle of the shot leg was looking pretty pale, and it felt cold to the touch. The skin had a little too much give, like chicken skin on a butcher fryer. Stella wondered if she ought to loosen the rope she’d tied above the knee.

Then she remembered Patrick—sweet baby face and all—stalking toward them with that gun slung across his body, hand caressing the trigger. And left the rope right where it was.

Chrissy stepped back and examined their handiwork. “He looks kinda funny,” she said.

“I guess maybe we ought to leave some sort of note,” Stella said. “Hang on.”

She went to the car, got her case notebook, and tore out a sheet. With the car’s dome light for illumination, she wrote a quick note:

Goat, don’t untie this boy until you got some other way to keep him down. It’s one of Alphonse Angelini’s boys—he tried to shoot us. Tell you all about it later.

She looked at what she’d written, chewed on the pen.

There was a chance that things were going to go spectacularly wrong. She and Chrissy were about to go looking for a pair of coldhearted gangsters who had a whole lot of firepower between them. Neither of whom, presumably, were chubby or beat up or schooled only in shooting squirrels—and now, of
course, dogs. As far as weapons went, Stella didn’t even want to think how outgunned they were.