A Bad Day for Mercy (13 page)

“I’ll never discuss what happened here with anyone as long as I live,” Doug snuffled, rubbing his wrists and wiping his nose on the shoulder of his T-shirt.

“That’s good,” Stella said. “What else?”

“No more practicing on people until I have my degree.”

“And?”

“If I come upon any information about Benton Parch or Todd Groffe, even if it seems unimportant to me, I will call you immediately and I won’t discuss it with anyone else.”

“Excellent! One more, Junior, and we can call it a day.”

Doug hesitated, staring at the table and hanging his head.

“Come on, Doug,” Stella cajoled gently, snapping the tops on her Tupperware and slipping her gun in her purse. “What’s the last thing?”

“I’m gonna give away these pants and buy a pair of Dockers,” he said miserably.

Chapter Eleven

Stella was backing out of the driveway when her phone rang. She stopped halfway into the street and got her phone out and squinted at the tiny numerals.

“It’s a 715 area code,” she muttered. “Who the hell is that?”

“Lemme see,” Chip said, taking the phone from her. “Smythe is 715, but … nope, I don’t recognize the number.”

“Who’d be calling me from around here … tell you what, go ahead and answer for me, tell ’em I’m not here,” Stella said. It was probably connected with the fake break-in, someone from the police department following up on the report, and Stella was feeling worn out from the interrogation and exhausted from a lack of sleep and dispirited enough about the state of affairs that she didn’t feel up for a lot more creative lying at the moment.

“Hello?”

Stella could hear a voice, loud and unhappy from the sound of it, but couldn’t make out any words. “Yeah, who? Oh? Oh!” Chip held the phone away from his ear in a state of great excitement. “It’s Todd, Stella, it’s your boy Todd!”

Stella screeched the truck to a halt, the sensitive brakes locking and throwing her and Chip against their shoulder restraints, and snatched the phone.

“Todd? Todd, is that you?” Her heart felt like it was going to clang out of her chest, and she gripped the steering wheel so hard that pains shot up into her wrist.
Please please please please please Big Guy,
Stella prayed, the prayer of someone who’d trade in every good moment she ever had for things to turn out right this one time.

“Stella, you got any idea how long I been hikin’ and it turns out they sent me in the wrong
direction
?” Todd, to Stella’s astonished relief, sounded irritable and frustrated but not the least bit maltreated or abused.

“Where are you?” she demanded shrilly.

Todd’s voice took on a muffled tone as he spoke to someone away from the phone. “Where’d you say I am again exactly?”

“Is that them? Is that the people that took you? Put them on!” Stella yelled. “Todd! Todd! Listen to me, put them on!”

A car passing in the other direction tapped the horn and gave Stella a what-the-fuck sort of gesture. She was vaguely aware of the fact that the truck was taking up more than one lane of traffic, and at an improper angle to boot.

“Ma’am?” a polite, female, soft-spoken voice said.

“What have you done to the boy?” Stella bellowed, almost launching herself out of the seat with anxiety.

There was a pause, in which Stella could hear Todd grumbling in the background, and then the voice said, in somewhat aggrieved tones, “Ma’am, I just found your boy in my garage about fifteen minutes ago, getting himself a root beer from the refrigerator. Wess, that’s my husband, he had the garage door up because he’s got the lawn mower out. I was fixing to drive into town and, why, there he was, your young man.”

“Wait,” Stella said. The tension had taken up residence in her forehead, splitting pains of postadrenaline agony spiking down behind her eyeballs. Todd, it seemed, was safe, so there was nowhere for all that pent-up terror on his behalf to go. “Todd’s fine, you’re telling me he’s not hurt, he’s alone, there’s no, like, other people, other kidnappers, with him?”

“Why no, ma’am, he didn’t mention any kidnappers. He just said he got dropped off and he’s been walking. Apparently he took a wrong turn because we’re about eleven miles out of Smythe down Chokeberry Road.”

Stella let a moment pass as she felt the blood rush to her face. “I, uh, am very, very sorry about the way I spoke a moment ago. It is not my habit—you see, I was just so very worried—look, can I come and get him?”

“Certainly,” the lady said, with no hesitation at all, leading Stella to imagine that she might be eager to be shut of her newfound acquaintance.

*   *   *

Emily Allgaier was
a proper lady, however, endowed with enough old-fashioned courtesy that she couldn’t bring herself to let Todd go without offering everyone a glass of tea and a slice of blueberry buckle.

“That was delicious, Mrs. Allgaier,” Todd called as he leaned out of the window of the truck, waving good-bye. “Thank you!”

“Nice manners,” Stella said dryly, adding her own little wave and then accelerating to a good clip. Grateful as she was to the silver-haired Good Samaritan for delivering Todd back to her, the whole episode had left a hollow taste in her mouth, the result of terror and self-recrimination and an uncomfortably close brush with all the ways the situation could have gone terribly wrong. Todd was tired and cranky and dusty but otherwise unharmed, and while he swore he’d walked twenty miles since his captors released him on an unpopulated stretch of farm road earlier in the morning, Stella figured it was more like five. “Now you tell me everything.”

She’d gotten only a few details out of him, after the initial crushing hug in Mrs. Allgaier’s living room, when Stella had surprised herself by tearing up a little. Since she didn’t think it was wise to disabuse Mrs. Allgaier of her misbegotten notion that this was nothing more than a case of a family getting its wires crossed, dramatically so perhaps, she’d gone along with the idea that she was merely collecting the boy from a sleepover that had ended in confusion.

“How about you thank me first?” Todd demanded, leaning across Chip, who was sandwiched between them in the front bench seat.

“Thank you for what?” Stella was trying to keep a lid on her temper, but she was a little short on patience now that she knew Todd was all right.

“For not letting that lady in on the fact of what you’re up to, you’n Chip and all.”

“And what exactly would that be?”

“Well, taking out Chip’s bookie, of course, like you told me about at the Arco.”

“You told him what?” Chip demanded. “Stella, I showed you my key chain, I’m six months clean!”

“Well yes, but I didn’t know that yet,” Stella said. “And Todd, I never said anything about
killing
anyone—”

“Killing, or beating the shit out of him, I guess that’s up to you to figure out, whatever works,” Todd said placidly. “Only I don’t guess people like Mrs. Allgaier would really see it that way, even if they knew that he kidnapped me first. I mean, it’s not like they treated me terrible or whatever, so you don’t got to kill ’em on my account.”

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Stella insisted, figuring the boy’s misinformation regarding the nature of the mission could be dealt with after she had the facts.

“Well, you probably know just about as much as I do. I was just sleeping in the truck, I didn’t even know we’d stopped anywhere, and all of a sudden there’s this big crash and I wasn’t even all the way awake and someone picks me up and they’re pushing me into a car.”

“Oh, Todd. Oh, good Lord in heaven,” Stella said, her pulse going haywire just imagining the scenario, even though the boy was safe back in the truck with her now. It made her trembly through and through to consider what might have happened, the terrible things that occur when innocent children are taken, and so she didn’t; she pushed those thoughts back into the box marked
TOO AWFUL
in her mind, and resisted an urge to stop the truck just so she could hug him again.

“And first thing I thought was, this was probably one a them things you got mixed up in like what happened to Tucker.”

“That ain’t—” She wanted to say that would never happen, she would never allow it; but the memories of feeling helpless as they frantically searched for Chrissy’s son were all too fresh. Besides, she knew she couldn’t promise safety to anyone on God’s green earth—all she could promise was to keep doing her damnedest. “I’m gonna do my utmost best to make sure nothing like that happens again,” she promised, in a wobbly voice.

“Well, thing is, I know I fucked up with hiding in the back of the truck and all. But still, I was mad, you know? So I’m all kicking and yelling, even though they got some sort of hood thing on me before I could see who they were and I kept getting the fabric in my mouth. I think there must’ve was two of ’em because they got me in their car pretty easy, in the backseat, and then they stuck me with a needle and knocked me out.”

As scrawny as Todd was, Stella figured it wouldn’t take but one large and reasonably muscular bad guy to pick the boy right up and stuff him anywhere he felt like, but on the other hand the boy was tough and scrappy as they came, even if he barely crossed the hundred-pound notch on the scale.

“You felt the needle?”

“Yeah…” Todd rubbed his upper arm, then pushed up his T-shirt sleeve. There was no mark on his skin that Stella could see. “I mean it wasn’t super big or anything, more like a little pinch? Anyway, after that I woke up lying under this big old tree. And it was weird ’cause it felt like I’d been napping maybe five minutes? Except when they got me it was dark and when I woke up it wasn’t. I think I was layin’ right on a chigger nest ’cause I got them little buggers down … you know.”

By way of illustration Todd scratched vigorously around his privates, while yawning hugely. Stella felt enormously relieved that there appeared to be no lasting psychic damage, no post-traumatic stress from the encounter. Todd’s greatest discomfort seemed to be the little red mites—and Stella knew how they loved to go straight for the nethers.

“Don’t be scratchin’ like that in public,” she said automatically. “So you couldn’t say who it was got you? Man or woman, tall or short, nothing like that?”

“Nah … hey, you think they injected me with some sort of experimental mind control drug thing, like in that one movie where the old guy falls down the stairs in his wheelchair trying to prove the government was doing experiments on ’im?”

“What the … wait, are you talking about Mel Gibson? In
Conspiracy Theory
?”

“I don’t know. The
old
guy.”

“He’s not old, Todd—Mel Gibson is only a few years older than me! I mean, that’s Mad Max you’re talking about!”

Todd shrugged. “I only watched it ’cause Mom fell asleep and it was free on the On Demand. But in the movie he had to live like in a storage locker or something because the government poisoned his mind and loaded him up with all these dangerous secrets. You think that’s what they done to me?”

“I don’t know—them folks they got running things down in Madison’s pretty nefarious, for sure.”

“They aren’t that bad, they’re just a bunch of damn liberals,” Chip corrected her. “But back to the subject of who killed Benton, now we ruled out Doug, I’m starting to wonder if this whole thing was a case of crazy jealousy. I mean, look at Natalya, she’s a knockout, men can’t help themselves around her.”

“Uh … wouldn’t that make you the main suspect?”

“Not
me,
Stella, I didn’t need to kill Benton, Natalya already loved me. I’m talking about some other schmuck, someone who maybe was crazy over her and she wouldn’t even look his way.”

“Do you have someone in mind there, Chip? ’Cause from what y’all’ve told me, she didn’t have much opportunity to dazzle anyone besides the grocery checkers and the guys at the gas station, seein’ as how Benton kept her so close to home.”

“Well—there was the lawyer, he was helping them get Luka.”

“Chip, lawyers don’t generally try to steal their clients’ wives. I mean, it would really cut into their word-of-mouth business, don’t you think?”

“Well—what about Benton’s friend from work? When Natalya first came over here, they socialized together. And he’s a
single
guy. Don’t you think that’s a little bit … inappropriate?” Chip had reddened slightly, his voice going thin and agitated, and Stella realized that there certainly was a jealousy issue going on—
Chip’s.

If she had a nickel for every time she’d seen that sort of thing she could buy Todd a Corvette on his sixteenth birthday.

“Are you telling me you’re jealous because Natalya—when she was married to another man and before she ever laid eyes on you—happened to be in the same room as another man? This is your girlfriend we’re talking about, the one who makes big goo-goo eyes every time you’re in the room? That one?”

“Uh…” Chip had the good grace to look embarrassed.

“Lemme give you a little relationship advice here, Chip, free of charge. Don’t go making the same mistake with her that Benton did. How do you think he managed to turn Natalya against him? I mean, no lady likes to feel like she’s chained to a man, like she can’t go about her business without her husband freaking out because a stranger said hello.”

“Yeah…” His chin ducked lower.

“
Promise
me you’re gonna work on that.”

“I will. I know, I know. It’s just that she’s so
beautiful.
And a guy like me … I mean, what have I got to offer her?”

“Seriously? How about devotion, respect, doing your fair share of the chores, maybe takin’ her out somewhere nice now and then? How about telling her she looks pretty and askin’ her about her day and remembering her job is important, too? Oh, and maybe not burping at the dinner table, and hanging up your wet towels?”

“I’m—I can do all
that.
”

“Well, then you’re about ninety-five percent of the way there. Oh! That reminds me,” Stella said, because her list of “do’s” had brought a familiar face to mind. “Todd, I got something I need you to do real quick. Text Mr. Brodersen and tell him … tell him we’re all doing just fine, that I’m having a nice visit with my nephew and we’re uh, we’re working everything out.”