A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (10 page)

Big Johnson gave her a ghost of a smile and a twitch that might have been a wink. “Aw, we ain’t missed him much. What’re you drinking tonight?”

“Let’s see.” Stella pretended to think it over, tapping her nose with her forefinger and glancing along the shelves behind the bar. “Well now, I guess you better make it Johnnie Black with a Bud back.”

Big Johnson went off to get the drinks, and Stella glanced down the row of drinkers at the bar. There he was, and she didn’t even have to go chasing him down: Arthur Junior was keeping company with a brassy redhead, the two of them giggling over something, their noses almost touching. Interesting. Last Stella heard, Arthur Junior had hooked up with a gal from Ogden County, but she hadn’t been a redhead. Oh, well, he was known to have quite a few smooth moves; probably the
reason Gemma Shaw despaired of having any grandchildren off him anytime soon.

Any
legitimate
grandchildren, that is.

Big Johnson came back with the drinks and set them down in front of Stella. “You know,” he said, clearing his throat and looking somewhere over her shoulder, “I don’t believe I ever got your Christmas card either, now that you mention it.”

Stella raised an eyebrow. Could it be? Was Big Johnson actually
flirting
with her? Her stomach did a little back-and-forth slide, and she felt heat rise to her face. The light was mercifully low: one of life’s funny truths is that the worse the lighting in a bar, the better a lady tends to look.

“Oh.” Nice—
idiot,
she scolded herself, but couldn’t for the life of her think of what else to say.

“Yeah . . .’course, I didn’t send any myself, this year. You know, the holidays snuck up on me and what-all, had my brother’s family come stay . . .”

Big Johnson trailed off and cleared his throat again, backed off the bar, and still didn’t look her in the face.

“What I mean to say, though,” he said, grabbing a rag off the sink and taking a wild swipe at the stretch of bar in front of him, “was that if I
did
send cards, I woulda sent you one.”

Then he was off, practically jogging down the bar to where customers were hollering for him.

Well. Dang. Now that was interesting. Stella took a biggish sip of her whiskey and then a nice long cool drink of her beer, the foam tickling her upper lip. There was something going on with B.J., that was for sure.

It was nice. But it wasn’t quite exactly the mmm-hmmm-yeah that generally signaled powerful attraction to Stella.

She thought about it some more. Waited a few minutes to see if a reaction was just sneaking up on her. But no: Big Johnson, sweet as he was, didn’t light any roaring fires under her. Which was just too darn bad, because there wasn’t exactly an abundance of suitors lining up at her door.

Truth was, ever since Ollie died, Stella had been pretty reluctant even to think about men—except for the ones whose skulls she was knocking together, of course. Those thirty years of paying for a single grievous mistake in the man department had put her off her feed a bit.

But . . . it
had
been three years. Long enough for even Stella’s rusty, ill-used parts to start clamoring to get put to use again. Hell, she was a grown woman; there shouldn’t be any shame to admitting, at least to herself, that she’d started thinking about sex again. Checking out butts at the Home Depot, spotting an appealingly crooked smile or a snazzy goatee or a nice tan . . . harmless, right?

Unfortunately, there was only one man in a hundred miles in any direction that really got her engines purring, and that was—damn it—the one man who was absolutely, positively, off-limits, the one who could send her world upside down and not in a good way—the kind of way that would have her serving time at the Sawyer County jail up in Fayette.

“Hey, Mrs. Hardesty.”

Stella jerked out of her reverie and turned to face the man who had spoken to her. Well, well.

“Hello, Arthur Junior.”

“Dad said he saw you out on the job.”

“Yes—yes, I did bump into him there.” Stella turned to Arthur Junior’s companion, who was standing behind him
looking bored and teetering on her spike-heeled sandals. It appeared that Arthur Junior’s date was accustomed to deficits in his manners, but Stella believed in starting every relationship off on the right foot. “Hello, dear. I’m Stella Hardesty. My, you have lovely hair.”

That got the gal’s attention. She lifted her chin and flashed a smile. Had a darling little gap between her front teeth, nice skin, a smattering of freckles. “Hello, ma’am. I’m Silver Mason. Pleased to meet you.”

Ouch—that goddamn “ma’am.” When was that word going to ease on out of the language?

“Mason . . . would that be the Masons out Route 12? I went to school with a couple of the girls.”

“No, sorry, I’m from Saint Louis. I came out here for work. I’m an intensive care nurse over at Lutheran.”

Arthur Junior frowned impatiently. “I just figured I should find out what your interest in the family was, Mrs. Hardesty.”

“Well now, Arthur Junior, I wouldn’t say it’s the whole family, exactly, just your brother Roy Dean. He seems to have gone missing, and I was wondering if there was any chance he might’ve taken something along with him that doesn’t belong to him.”

The cast of Arthur Junior’s expression shifted, and Stella could see plain as day that a variety of emotions were doing battle on his face. A twitchy little tic appeared at the edge of his jaw, and his eyes narrowed to slits. After a few moments he turned to Silver.

“Darlin’, I’m afraid this is going to take a few minutes. Just some boring business shit. Would you mind if I talked to Mrs. Hardesty alone for a bit?”

Silver gave him a sunny smile. “Oh, that’s fine. I’ll go watch the darts for a bit.”

They watched her walk away. Silver had a nice little figure, a narrow waist and ample curves; for a fleeting moment Stella felt wistful remembering the long-ago time when she could still sashay her way to a man’s attention.

“You might think about hanging on to this one,” she said. “Looks nice, talks nice, gainfully employed . . .”

“Yeah. So listen, I don’t know what my dumb-fuck brother’s gone and done now, hear? I’ve got no part of his dealings. He stopped showing up on Dad’s job about a month ago, won’t answer my calls or nothing. Hell, he hasn’t even been out for Sunday dinner, and Mom’s about to hit the roof. To be honest, Mrs. Hardesty, I ain’t seen him for two, three weeks now.”

Stella evaluated Arthur Junior. She was inclined to believe him. The criminology course said she should look for facial tics, perspiration, and fidgeting—all things that were tough to see in a dark bar.

“Now, Arthur Junior, there’s a chance you could be lying to me, sweetie, and I’d have no way of knowing it. I wonder if I mentioned that the thing Roy Dean took off with is needed in the worst way by a friend of mine. No, now, I’m not saying you know anything about this mess—and I’m not saying you don’t. You may have heard . . . when it comes to my friends, I take their needs pretty seriously.”

The faint little flicker in Arthur Junior’s eyes clued Stella in: he’d heard. She didn’t know how much he knew, but it looked like it was enough. There were days when it paid to have rumors floating around about how you’d ruined a numbskull’s day with a bit of old-fashioned violent reckoning.

“I hear you, Mrs. Hardesty.” Arthur Junior bit his lip but didn’t take his eyes off her face. “What is it you think Roy Dean took?”

Stella considered her options. She generally had a policy against revealing any of the facts of a case unless absolutely necessary. And given her new information about Pitt Akers, along with Roy Dean’s general lack of affection for Tucker, it almost didn’t seem worth stirring up a fuss over such a long shot. Still, time was critical, and she couldn’t see any reason not to get as many eyes looking out for Tucker as possible.

“A little boy,” she said. “Chrissy’s boy, Tucker.”

Arthur Junior said nothing for a moment. It clearly wasn’t the answer he expected to hear. He frowned, the lines appearing on his forehead making him look a lot like his father.

“Why would he go and do
that
?”

“I really don’t know. I’m just trying to connect with anyone who was with Tucker right before he disappeared. And your brother was there, at Chrissy’s, picking up some belongings he’d left.”

Arthur Junior took a deep breath and let it out real slow. He stared off at Silver, who was chatting with a couple of local gals over by the dartboard; then turned and looked back down the bar at the assembly of drinkers.

“Look here, maybe we better go somewhere else to talk. Let me just get rid of Silver. If I give her my keys, can you run me home after?”

The evening was shaping up to be full of surprises. “That would be no problem, Arthur Junior,” Stella said.

While he left to make his arrangements, she sucked down
the rest of the whiskey and beer. Didn’t make any sense to waste it.

“Anywhere particular you
got in mind to go?” Stella asked, once they pulled out of Big Johnson’s parking lot in the Jeep.

“Yeah. Head out Old State Road Nine.”

“You gonna clue me in where we’re headed?”

“In a bit.”

Stella nodded to herself and drove along, well within the speed limit. She was drive-safe, her BAC adequately low due to her sizable frame and the big dinner she’d had and a tolerance maintained with a healthy daily dose of Johnnie Black, but there was still no sense calling attention to herself.

A bright slice of moon lit up the road with a soft glow.

“I’m older than Roy Dean by two years,” Arthur Junior said after a while. “Bigger, too. Taller, at any rate. But do you know, by the time I was ten Roy Dean would sneak up on me and take me down when I wasn’t lookin’.”

Stella nodded. Now the boy had decided to talk, it was best to let him unroll his story at his own pace.

“Now that’s the kind of thing you just hate when you’re a kid. Specially if your friends know about it, getting your ass kicked by your kid brother. So I made it a project to beat the crap out of him. And you know what? I never did. See here?”

Stella glanced over; Arthur Junior had pushed up his short sleeve to reveal his shoulder, but Stella couldn’t make much out in the dim light in the Jeep. “Hmm,” she said anyway.

“Fucking
bite
marks. I got him down, got his arm pulled
behind him one day, had half a mind to break it I was so mad, and he bit me. Mom wanted to take me to the hospital, but Dad said I was just going to have to learn to fight back. Now that was plenty humiliating, let me tell you. And Roy Dean just standing there grinning at me the whole time.”

“Your folks didn’t punish him?”

“Well, sure they did, but the thing was, wasn’t much you could do to Roy Dean that would make any kind of difference. I think they took him off TV for a month, but he didn’t care—he just invented new kinds of trouble to stir up. When he got bored, Roy Dean used to sit out back on this split-rail fence Dad built behind the vegetable garden, and when a rabbit or something would come by he’d shoot it with his slingshot. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he just kep’ at it and kep’ at it, and now and then he’d get lucky and hit one. Thing’d drag itself off and Roy Dean would follow, and if he caught up, he’d stomp the thing dead with his boots. I’ll say one thing for my brother—he ain’t got a lot of quit in him.”

Stella thought of little Tucker and got a very bad feeling in her gut. On the off chance that Roy Dean
had
taken him, she prayed he was keeping his temper under control.

“Arthur Junior, I gotta tell you, you’re not painting a very pretty picture of your brother. But what would he want with a little boy that isn’t even his?”

“I have no idea,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”

“You could have told me that back at BJ’s,” Stella pointed out. “Not to sound ungrateful, but if you don’t know where Roy Dean is, there’s other holes I could be digging in. Why exactly did you want to go for this here drive?”

“Because I believe I know where Roy Dean has been spending
his time lately, and it ain’t no kindygarden, see what I’m sayin’? It’s bad news, serious bad news—no place to be haulin’ kids into. If Chrissy’s kid
is
with Roy Dean, then somebody needs to do something.”

“Jeez, just what is this place anyway? Some kind of strip joint?”

“I believe I’ll just show you. Turn off on Methaney there.”

Stella glanced at Arthur Junior; his arms were folded across his chest and he had an angry set to his jaw. She did as she was told.

She hadn’t driven Methaney in years. A couple of decades ago, someone still farmed soybeans out here, but the soil didn’t give up much, and the fields lay mostly unworked and fallow, sowthistle and carpetweed taking over.

“Drive slow,” Arthur Junior said, his voice a near whisper, “and don’t stop.”

After a half mile or so, they drove by a hand-painted wood sign that hung by chains from a couple of posts driven into the ground next to a gravel turnoff. In big block letters, it read
BENNING SALVAGE
. Five yards into the turnoff, a tall set of steel gates was locked tight with a heavy padlock.

“Oh,” Stella said. “The junkyard. That’s what you wanted to show me?”

“Ain’t just a junkyard,” Arthur Junior said, his voice low. “Drive on by, and when you get down to the T down there, turn around and come back. But don’t stop, hear? Don’t be lingerin’.”

The boy was spooked, that was for sure. Wasn’t any way anyone could hear them out here, but Stella didn’t bother to point that out. Driving past the property, she spotted lights on
in a little prefab house up on a berm shaded by a couple of twisty scrub oaks. A few pickups and sedans were parked out front. Further back on the property, sodium vapor lights on blocky steel poles illuminated other buildings and sheds. And beyond that, cars—acres of cars in various states of body condition and decomposition, skeletons of wrecks and rusting carcasses whose innards were being stripped a little at a time to patch up other cars. All along the edges of the property ran a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. Nasty to look at, especially since some of the barbs caught the moonlight just right and glinted shiny and menacing.