A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (22 page)

Stella got a couple of Advil, considered them for a moment,
and added two more, gulping them down with a glass of ginger ale.

“Bad?” Chrissy asked, watching her.

Stella shrugged. “I don’t feel the best I ever have,” she admitted, “but the smartin’s gone down, mostly.”

“You look good,” Chrissy said.

“You got to be kidding.”

“No. I ain’t. You look like trouble with a capital T.”

Stella wiped her mouth on her arm and burped. “Well then, I guess I can’t ask for much more, right? Let’s get this show on the road.”

She was reaching for her backpack when the doorbell sounded. Stella froze and glanced at Chrissy, who was smoothing down her T-shirt under the cross-body holster.

“Shit,” she said. “Who the hell—”

“You got to answer it, Stella,” Chrissy said urgently. “You don’t want folks wondering where you are. Plus, it could be the sheriff.”

Stella grabbed an apron off a hook on the wall and tossed it to Chrissy. It read “Your Opinion Wasn’t in the Recipe” and had been a gift from a client who’d bought herself a matching one once her husband had learned the hard way not to criticize.

As Chrissy hastily tied on the bright red apron, Stella tugged her pants legs over her ankle holster as well as she could and yanked her T-shirt low to cover the bulge across her stomach. They looked each other over and Chrissy gave Stella a thumbs-up.

Stella took a deep breath, went to the door, and peered through the peephole. A not tall, spare-built man in a shiny blue sport coat and too-long brown pants stood in the doorway,
grinning nervously. His yellowish hair had been recently slicked down but was already popping up from the attempted part. He wasn’t a whole lot to look at—neither handsome nor the least bit intimidating. Stella swung the door open and glared. “Yeah?”

“Hello,” he said a little breathlessly. “You must be Stella Hardesty. Pleased to make your acquaintance. These are for you.”

From behind his back he produced a small bunch of flowers, pink mums with a healthy puff of baby’s breath, and thrust them at her. Stella took them, too surprised to object, and was starting to express her cautious gratitude when he craned his neck around her and peered into the house.

“There you are!” he bellowed, spotting Chrissy. “Oh Good Lord in Heaven, there you are!”

As he made to sprint past Stella, her instincts kicked in and she stuck a foot out. He tripped, shiny brown shoes colliding with her hiking boots so that he splatted with considerable force, flying flat out into the small foyer on Stella’s throw rug.

He made an
oof
sound and a small box that he had been holding went flying. Stella drew her gun and had it on him in a split second, and was standing over him in an uwavering spread, the adrenaline from the afternoon coursing through her veins. Just as she was about to scream something harsh and threatening, Chrissy knelt down in front of him on her hands and knees and shook her head.

“Pitt Akers,” she said, “What
have
you done?”

What the young
man had
not
done, as it turned out, was to have kidnapped Tucker. Nor had he developed much more
hard-boiled courage in the intervening days since he’d last hid in a guest-room closet.

It was the latter that made Stella so certain of the former. After she’d interrogated Pitt for a mere five minutes or so it seemed pretty clear that his story was, in fact, the truth. When he heard—through the closet door behind which he’d barred himself—Roy Dean demanding his hibachi back, he was finally convinced that Chrissy’s relationship with Roy Dean was well and truly over. He’d gone hastily back home to pack a few things and then jumped in his car for a road trip back to his family home in Sikeston, several hours away, where he got the engagement ring she’d returned to him after their marriage ended, and which had been stored in a wad of tissue in a matchbox in his mother’s sewing caddy. He then shared the joyous news of his impending reunion with Chrissy, first with his parents over a pot roast dinner, and then with a few childhood friends. This second celebration turned into the sort of evening out at the roadhouse that tacked an extra day onto the trip for recovery purposes, but by this afternoon Pitt felt lively enough to make the drive home, where he took care of the litter box and showered and dressed in his finest duds and came over to re-propose.

It was, Stella supposed, to Chrissy’s credit that she emerged dry-eyed but kindly from the brief, private discussion she and Pitt had in the guest room—and to Pitt’s that he left without an argument, though they could hear his hiccup-sobs starting up as he cleared the door on the way back to his car.

Chrissy turned to Stella the minute he was gone. “For the love of Pete,” she sighed, “I ain’t got time to wipe up any more broken hearts here. Let’s rock and roll.”

They stowed their gear in the Jeep and hit the road. Stella, feeling a little better since the Advil had kicked in, took the wheel and set her pace just a little above the speed limit. When they got close to Benning’s, Stella cut the headlights and crept along at five miles an hour. Once she could see the lights of the compound up ahead, she pulled across the road and drove onto a pull-in between two fields. The dirt ruts were nearly as weedy as the fields, but none of the vegetation was much over ankle high, and the silhouette of the Jeep would be pretty obvious from the road if anyone shone a light in their direction, but there wasn’t much to be done about that.

At least there was little moonlight tonight. It was a thin sliver of a crescent moon, and clouds scudded past it, throwing the landscape into near-total darkness.

Stella took the flashlights out of her backpack and handed one to Chrissy. “Shine just right in front of you, not ahead,” she warned. “And let’s keep ’em off as much as we can.”

They walked the field, stepping over the clumps of weeds, crunching dirt clods, and trying not to twist their ankles, staying silent. When they came almost abreast of Benning’s across the road, Stella spotted a figure on the other side of the gate, illuminated clearly by the sodium lights up on poles behind the trailer and around the sheds and between the rows of ruined cars. Two, three—she counted four lights, plus what looked like more back toward the large shed she’d spotted the other day. The light was glaring and eerily yellow; what she could see of the guard’s skin appeared unnaturally pale and waxy.

He looked young and bored, a buzz-cut, muscular guy with what looked to be a semiauto rifle across his lap, his hand
resting lightly on the stock. He sat on a camp chair with his legs splayed wide, tapping his foot and nodding to a beat Stella could feel reverberating through the ground more than she could hear it coming from the boom box at his feet.

She held up her palm and Chrissy stopped behind her. Stella touched her arm and pointed off in the direction away from the road, and dropped down on her hands and knees. Chrissy followed suit.

“I think we better crawl,” Stella whispered. “I don’t know what kind of shadow we’d cast if he looks this way.”

Chrissy murmured her agreement and before Stella could stop her, she slithered ahead on her chest with surprising strength. Stella did her best to follow suit, though when a weed stalk poked her torn and stitched cheek it was all she could do to keep from yelping with pain. In a few dozen yards she was breathing hard, and she was glad she’d ratcheted up her fitness program in January. Her old self wouldn’t have made it ten yards.

After what seemed like an hour they were a good distance past the gate, and Stella signaled for Chrissy to stand up. They walked the rest of the way to the corner of the Benning property, where the chain-link fence made a right angle.

“Here, let me,” Chrissy said, unzipping Stella’s backpack and taking out the bolt cutters.

She went to work on the fence with surprising efficiency, snipping the wire one section at a time. Stella slid the backpack off, took out the pliers, and used them to pull the fencing back as Chrissy cut. It didn’t take long to get a three-foot hole cleared.

They stopped to rest for a minute, drinking from the water
bottles. Stella put the tools back in the pack and shouldered it again.

“Ready?” Stella asked. “Guess so.”

Stella ducked down, making it through without even snagging her shirt. As she turned back to check on Chrissy she caught a blur of movement out of the corner of her eye and suddenly the two huge dogs from the other afternoon came hurtling toward her, teeth snapping in the pale moonlight. When they were twenty feet away one of them started an eerie howl and the other immediately joined in, barking viciously.

“Fuck!” Stella muttered, hoisting her flashlight and preparing to club it down on whichever dog reached her first.

Two shots cracked out and the dogs stopped in midstride and went spinning sideways, legs splayed and pinwheeling. The one that was barking switched midyowl to a high-pitched keening cry, and there was one more crack and it fell silent in the dirt, a shuddering pile of fur.

The dogs were still ten feet away.

Stella turned to Chrissy in amazement. She was standing in a perfect shooter’s stance, the Makarov still clutched in her grip and pointed toward the dogs. But as Stella tried to put together a coherent comment, Chrissy began to shake, the tremor starting in her hands and shivering its way back through the rest of her body.

Stella put a hand on her shoulder, and she could hear Chrissy take a big gulp of air.

“Nailed ’em, girl,” Stella said. “I didn’t even have time to draw.”

“I—they’re faster than squirrels.”

“I guess they are, huh. You did good, sugar.”

Chrissy slowly lowered her gun arm, but she didn’t reholster. Stella didn’t blame her. She reached for the Ruger.

“I think we’re getting some company,” Chrissy whispered.

Coming from the same direction as the dogs, the guard had left his chair and was walking slowly toward them, sweeping the beam of his own flashlight to the left and right. The arc would illuminate them in ten or twelve more steps.

“
Move
,” Stella blurted, and she ducked and ran to the dead dogs. She grabbed a hind leg and pulled as hard as she could. The thing was huge and surprisingly hard to pull as dead weight, but adrenaline socked in and powered her along. Chrissy grabbed the second dog, and they staggered toward a stand of trees and scrub. When they reached the bushes, Stella yanked Chrissy’s arm and they hit the ground and listened to the guard whistling and calling to the dogs while they tried to catch their breath.

“He’s not going to stop looking until he finds the dogs,” Chrissy whispered.

“He’s going to holler back to the rest of them when he figures out something went wrong,” Stella said. “Right now he might still think it was a rabbit or something, but—”

“Shit. What’re we gonna do?”

Stella could feel her heart pounding in her chest. What, indeed? This was far from her standard operating procedure. Her brand of ruthless usually involved an element of surprise, and an unsuspecting and unarmed target. It didn’t really take a whole lot of muscle to catch losers off guard and threaten to shoot their dicks off.

But in this dark junkyard corner, her options were shutting
down fast. Unless the guard was a certified idiot, he had to figure that the dogs had run into trouble. And if he swung the light just a little wider, he’d see the hole in the fence.

In the moonlight she could make out the rifle in his arms, cradled like a baby—and a lot more tensed muscle than she’d noticed earlier when the guy had been sitting. His T-shirt, with the sleeves ripped off, revealed bulky biceps and ripped forearms. He moved with the grace of a well-oiled young machine.

She wasn’t sure that the two of them stood a chance against him, and the minute he got his buddies involved, she and Chrissy were screwed for certain.

There really wasn’t any choice—she had to take him down. But even if she managed to surprise him, the odds weren’t great that she could overpower him—unless she somehow managed to end up sitting on him, in which case he probably would have a struggle just to breathe.

She was going to have to shoot him, and she regretted it, because hurting men was something she reserved for woman-haters, and this guy didn’t look old enough to have even developed much of a grudge against the fair sex.

Stella bit the inside of her lip, took a deep breath, and rolled up onto her knee. “Help me, Big Guy,” she prayed and then took her best shot.

Immediately the man fell down. Sideways, clutching his leg. Stella grabbed Chrissy’s arm and they lurched forward, running to where he lay on the ground, moaning and cursing. She kept the Ruger trained on him, but he’d dropped his own gun and was clutching his leg below the knee. Stella used her momentum to hit him head-on, and they tumbled together
and rolled; when they came to a stop Chrissy was standing above them, pointing her gun down at the guy’s face, her look pure, fierce concentration, as though she was trying to figure out the puzzle on
Wheel of Fortune
.

“I’ll shoot your durn head off ,” Chrissy said. “You say so much as one thing I swear to holy God you’re gonna have a hole where your face was.”

Now that they were closer, the guard looked even younger. Sixteen, seventeen, with a smooth face that didn’t look like it needed shaving too often, popping out in sweat. It was clear that he was in pain, his eyes bugging out of his head, his mouth working in fear.

Stella crawled away from him and stood up. She slid her backpack off and got out the coil of rope. “I did you a favor shootin’ you where I did,” she said. “I could’ve capped your knee. Know what happens then?”

The boy shook his head, fast.

“You don’t ever walk too good, that’s what. With this hole here, you got a good shot at healing up right. You play basketball?”

The boy looked around wildly for a moment, then gave a half nod. Stella yanked his arms hard behind him while Chrissy took out the buck knife and cut off a length of the rope and handed it to her. While Stella secured the binding, Chrissy cut a second length of rope and went to work tying off his leg above the bullet entry. It was a big, messy hole, but it seemed to have missed the bone. If Chrissy was put off by the blood it didn’t show.