A Bad Day for Pretty (3 page)

But she knew from experience that once her luck turned, it tended to stay turned. “I need to check again,” she said, adding a little ice to her voice. “Sometimes trouble comes along when you’re least expecting it.”

Goat followed her to the door and reached out like he was going to grab her arm. Stella stepped neatly out of the way; her physical therapist had recently added some tai chi moves to her daily workouts, which really boosted her agility.

“At least let me follow you over,” Goat said. “It could be dangerous out there.”

“Hey!” Brandy hollered. She set her fists on her curvy hips and pushed out her glossy bottom lip in an impressive pout. “Hello! What am I, chopped liver?”

“No, you’re not,” Goat said impatiently, “but far as I can tell, you’re warm and nearly dry and fixing to plant your butt in my house, and that makes you accounted for in my book, while Stella here seems hell-bent on going looking for trouble.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

Stella felt her face flush even as Goat stammered out several rounds of we’re-not-this-isn’t-I-don’t equivocating. At least he didn’t say no, exactly. But he sure wasn’t saying yes either.

His wife, or ex, or whatever the hell she was, was plenty short on manners, talking about Stella like she wasn’t even in the room. But she had Goat’s ticket: the question stopped him in his tracks and reduced him to a gibbering idiot.

While Brandy drilled him with a gaze that could light fires, Stella made it to the door and twisted the knob. Immediately the force of the wind and rain blasted it practically out of her hand; it was as though the storm wanted to come on in and witness Stella’s humiliation for itself. An icy draft of rainwater hit Stella sidelong in the face and sluiced down her neck, ruining, no doubt, her only 100 percent silk top.

“All righty then,” she called, and slipped out into the storm, yanking the door shut behind her with a mighty effort.

Then she waited on the porch, not even bothering to open her umbrella, since it would have immediately been blown inside out in the wind, and gave Goat a count of ten to come after her.

Make that a count of fifteen … twenty.

Hell.

She bolted for her trusty green Jeep Liberty and practically threw herself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door shut behind her. She shook the water off her head, splatting droplets all over the car’s interior, and jammed the key in the ignition. Without bothering to check what she might run over, she hit the gas hard and backed around in a tight arc before reversing and aiming the wheel toward the lane. In the pitch-black night, with rain slamming down in sheets, it was more of a guess than a certainty, her headlights picking out an undistinguished stretch of mud ahead. Her tires spun for a few seconds in the flooded gravel drive before finally catching with a vengeance.

Hurtling over the uneven road, bouncing around in the Jeep gave Stella a small measure of calm.

Once she was back on the main road, she eased up on the gas a little. Grudgingly, she snapped on her seat belt—no sense giving Goat’s ex the satisfaction of a gory death if she got in an accident tonight—and hit the CD play button. Emmylou’s voice blasted into the car, in the middle of the song Stella’d been playing at a high volume as she drove over earlier.

I want a high-powered love
got to have intensity

Well, that was when she’d thought the evening might end up with her getting a little something more than a friendly handshake. Stella snapped the sound system off with a sharp jab.

Damn
.

It was one thing to carry a torch for a man you couldn’t—shouldn’t—ever have. It was quite another to accept his dinner invitation and let all those wouldn’t-it-be-nices start turning into hopes and plans and, when you got it especially bad, a
future
. Start believing in your own luck, and soon you were having high-minded ideas about how you might tickle fate with a whispered suggestion and a lucky roll of the dice.

Stella had shaved her legs … and not just the calves and knees, but her thighs, too, an extra effort she hadn’t made in ages. Yesterday she’d suffered the indignity of a bikini wax down at Hair Lines, which entailed not just memorable pain but also Pearl, the aesthetician, whistling through her teeth and remarking, “Guess it’s been a while since you got the lawnmower out of the shed, ain’t it, Stella?”

Stella had recently patched things up with her daughter Noelle after being estranged for a few years. Noelle just happened to be in the beauty business herself, and agreed to make the half-hour drive over from her house this afternoon to touch up Stella’s color and tame her brows. It helped that Noelle didn’t have a washing machine at her house; Stella got to see her daughter at least once a week these days, when Noelle brought her brimming laundry baskets over.

Stella ran a hand through her rain-ruined hairdo, which Noelle had fussed over for what seemed like hours, dyeing it back to what the two of them remembered her natural shade to be before all that unwelcome gray showed up, and then adding a crazy halo of tinfoil highlights and lowlights. While they sat around waiting for all that beauty to take effect, Noelle painted Stella’s nails a shade called Tokyo Rose and came at the Goat question from every direction she could think of.

Stella was proud of her girl—relentless and nosy, just like her mama. But Stella didn’t give up much, nonetheless.

Which was a good thing, considering how it turned out. Next week, when Noelle came in the door with her laundry, Stella would breezily claim that she and Goat had a perfectly nice time, but the romantic attraction fizzled out and they decided to just be friends. Maybe Noelle would let it drop without a big third degree.

Yeah. Right.

Stella turned onto the old ranch road and was headed back toward town when her cell phone rang, scaring her half to death. Todd Groffe, her thirteen-year-old neighbor, had updated her ringtone again, and it sounded like a man being castrated while someone played the
White Album
backwards at 66 rpm.

“What, what,
what
?” she demanded as she fumbled for the answer button and nearly hit a cat bolting across the street in the downpour despite having reduced her speed to a mere fifteen miles per hour, the little Jeep buffeted about in the near-horizontal rain and shrieking wind.

“Phones are out.”

“Well, speak of the devil, you little monster,” Stella grumbled. “I was just thinking about how dang much I hate that—that
thing
you put on my phone.”

“What—The Thermals?” Todd’s adolescent voice cracked with incredulity. “Stella, they’re fuckin’
genius
, man!”

“Watch your mouth. And I want my old ring tone back, hear?”

Todd’s snort of disgust came across loud and clear. “Mom says tell you the power’s out over on Hickory and they say it’ll prob’ly go out here too and do you got candles and shit or are you staying over at your friend’s. What friend’s house are you at, anyway?”

Stella could hear Todd’s mother, Sherilee, in the background, hollering at Todd to watch his mouth, but with less conviction than Stella, probably because his six-year-old sisters were screaming at the tops of their lungs. Damn. Stella had forgotten she told Sherilee about the date. Or dinner, or whatever the hell it was.

For a woman whose business relied on a level of discretion matched only in the bowels of the Pentagon, Stella had sure managed to shoot her mouth off enough to guarantee herself a whole mess of regret.

“Tell your mother,” she said icily, “that dinner was fine, but I am looking forward to spending the rest of the evening
alone
.”

“Whatever—why don’t you tell her yourself. I ain’t your goddamn message service.”

“Fine. I will. Put her on. I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear about that math test you left at my house the other day.”

Silence.

Stella regularly called the boy’s bluff, but he never seemed to tire of trying to sneak one past her. “What I thought,” she said. “Okay, so whose message service are you now?”

Todd hung up before Stella could mess with him any further, and she added a note to her mental to-do list—thrash that boy within an inch of his life—before tapping the brakes and bringing her speed down barely above a crawl.

She switched on the radio and fiddled with it until she managed to get KKRN News Radio, home of the Live Super Doppler One Thousand, in addition to being the hotbed of everything newsworthy in Korn Kountry.

“…tracked west of Sedalia, winds at two hundred—”

So the second twister had materialized after all. Two hundred miles an hour—that was no autumn rain shower. This was turning out to be a hell of a weather event, to quote one of Ted Krass’s most favored turns of phrase.

“Several sightings have been reported along the border of Sawyer and Latham counties. The storm is moving north-northwest at speeds approaching thirty-three miles per hour and has taken a route south of Fairfax and through north central Prosper. Damage estimates are not known at this time.…”

Stella’s heart did a little stop-start.

The north end of town was where Hardesty Sewing Machine Repair & Sales was located. More important, it was where Chrissy Shaw and her two-year-old son, Tucker, lived.

Stella veered into the turn lane and took a sharp right onto Broadway, the fastest route to the middle of town. She was more than a little worried about Chrissy. Tucker had been kidnapped a few months back by his worse-than-deadbeat stepfather, who’d hoped to trade him for favors from the Kansas City organized crime cartel, but got himself shot dead and stuffed into a Rubbermaid storage bin instead.

Chrissy hadn’t wasted too much time mourning her dead ex, but helping Stella get the boy back had gotten
her
shot, too, more seriously than Stella, who’d suffered a hit to the stomach that miraculously managed to avoid destroying anything critical, and a mostly superficial shoulder wound. Chrissy, still recovering from the bullet that tore up a lung and damaged her heart, was helping out part-time in the sewing machine shop while she followed the program of rest and therapy that would restore her to full health. While the sessions were coming along well, and the doctors had declared the girl stronger and more determined than any patient in their collective memory, Stella didn’t want Chrissy to have to worry about blown-in windows or trees falling down on the house.

Well—
house
wasn’t exactly the right word. Stella burned rubber the rest of the way to the parking lot that Hardesty Sewing Machine Sales & Repair shared with the China Paradise restaurant. Roseann Lau, China Paradise’s grumpy owner and cook, had invested in an apartment building a while back and moved into its ground-floor rooms, adding “ill-humored landlady” to her résumé and leaving the diminutive apartment at the back of the restaurant empty until Chrissy moved in.

It had been simple enough to set up a plywood ramp to the back door while Chrissy was still in a wheelchair, and now that the girl was up and about, she had begun scouring off the decade’s worth of grease and smoke that had wafted from the front restaurant back to the little apartment.

As Stella turned down Third Street toward the shop, she was relieved to see there was still power in the neighborhood. Felled branches and uprooted bushes and all manner of debris littered the streets, but so far she’d seen only a few upended trees and none, thankfully, blocked traffic. By morning, judging from the looks of this storm, there would be crews out with chain saws and chains, dragging off chopped-up tree trunks; pickups with ropes tied to their hitches extracting evergreens from picture windows; folks with their sleeves rolled up, hauling junk out of caved-in garages and sheds.

She was relieved to see that nothing worse had happened. It wasn’t rational, but tornadoes always left her unsettled and anxious, the memories from the past lodged somewhere deep where time couldn’t erase them.

Stella’s sister Gracellen had called Stella shortly after she and her husband moved to California years ago. “Stella,” she exclaimed, “they get a little three-point earthquake out here and they act like it’s the end of the world. When somebody’s china falls off the shelf, it makes the evening news!”

Stella shared her sister’s astonishment. Sure, the west coast occasionally had a genuine earthquake disaster, like Loma Prieta in ’89. But Stella and her classmates hadn’t spent their elementary school careers huddling in the school basement during tornado drills for nothing: a single Midwestern tornado season could kill more folks than several decades of earthquakes along the west coast.

In the news, they were just numbers. Three dead in eastern Ohio. Four killed in flash floods along the Mississippi.

In ’66, the tornadoes took a single victim, but Stella hadn’t forgotten.

She rounded the corner into the parking lot, and there, in all its squat cinder block glory, was Hardesty Sewing Machine Sales & Repair. China Paradise was still standing as well, though the Dumpster behind the restaurant had tipped over and garbage had blown across the lot. A broken umbrella, spines snapped and bent, was splayed against the wheels of Chrissy’s old, beat-up Celica. Stella pulled in next to it and cut the engine, and rolled her window down far enough to peer out.

A light burned in the living room of Chrissy’s apartment. Stella couldn’t make out any movement behind the sheer curtains, and she debated whether or not to bother the girl. If Chrissy and Tucker had managed to get to sleep during the storm, it might be better to let them catch up on their rest. On the other hand, if Stella went home now, she would be up all night worrying.

Go on a vengeance quest with a person, stand shoulder to shoulder battling the bad guys, go down fighting while she loses consciousness at your side—experiences like those tended to bring you mighty close to a person. And her towheaded sideways-grinning new-tooth-drooling brat, too, for that matter.

Before Stella could make up her mind whether to stay or go, the door to the apartment was flung open and Chrissy Shaw stood with her arms folded across her chest, blond curls springing out crazily around her china-pale face, lacy pink camisole incongruously pretty over baggy gray sweats with prosper h. s. panthers printed down the leg.