by Unknown
“Good, ’cause we don’t want to buy too much. Because the checker might notice. I was kind of thinking we want to draw as little attention as we can to ourselves here. That’s why we’re driving over to the Wal-Mart in Casey, you know?”
“Good thinking, sugar,” Stella said. “Plus, there’s an Arby’s near there, isn’t there?”
Chrissy perked up and nodded. “Yes, I think there is. I sure love that roast beef, don’t you? The way they slice it up so nice and thin? My sister Sue won’t eat it because she says it’s all parts mashed up fine and then re-formed, but I say, why, that’s the same as Spam, ain’t it? And everybody likes Spam.”
“That they do,” Stella said, smiling despite the pain in her busted lip. “That they do.”
Stella figured she needed to go long on iron and protein, so she had a Super Roast Beef sandwich. It was time to quit messing around and treat the situation like what it was: serious.
Within the hour they were back in Stella’s kitchen. Stella laid old towels on the kitchen table and got down her shoebox of gun-cleaning supplies from a cabinet over the refrigerator. She had brought the Ruger in from the Jeep; it was already clean, but it felt good to break it down and go through the motions.
Across the table, Chrissy carefully disassembled the Makarov, laying the filthy parts out in a neat row. She picked up the cleaning rod and the solvent and went to work on the receiver, humming softly.
“Jesus, Chrissy, anybody ever clean their firearms over at your house?”
“Sure they do, the ones they use. But I didn’t want to take Daddy’s everyday guns, you know? On account of he might need ’em and all.”
Stella, wondering what constituted the need for an everyday handgun, remembered her pledge to be more respectful of the girl and kept her mouth shut.
“You clean guns much?” she asked instead.
“Of course,” Chrissy said, rolling her eyes. “Daddy made all us girls learn to take care of the rifles before he let us shoot squirrels. We had a couple of Marlins and they never had a speck on ’em. We used to have contests to see who could get them took apart and put back together the quickest.”
That was quite a vision; Stella imagined the little tykes lined up at the supper table waiting their turn at the guns, a row of Lardner girls with blond pigtails and rosy cheeks.
“Well then, I guess I’ll let you clean that thing up. After that we’re gonna go out and shoot a few cans. Sound all right?”
“Yeah.”
For a while they worked in silence. Stella went over the Ruger with a tiny utility brush and then polished it with a silicone cloth.
“Stella?” Chrissy said after a while.
“Mmm-hmm?”
“You got anything to snack on? I have to tell you, I’m just a little bit nervous. And when I get nervous I get hungry, you know?”
Stella knew. She was the same way. She also got hungry when she was worried or pissed off about something or bored. She smiled. “How about I make us some popcorn?”
“Oh, that’d be perfect.”
Stella got out her mother’s old soup pot. Added the oil and a good layer of kernels. Put a stick of butter in the microwave to melt and shook the pot when the corn started popping inside.
She tossed the popcorn with the butter and a few good shakes of salt and set the bowl in the middle of the table. As the two of them sat munching on the popcorn and sipping ginger ale and cleaning the guns, Stella noticed she was feeling something that she hadn’t felt for a long time.
The scent of gun oil mingled with the buttery popcorn aroma, and the silence between her and Chrissy was companionable. Stella closed her eyes for a moment and remembered other times she’d sat around this very same table.
It had been her parents’ kitchen table. On Sundays, Stella liked to sit with her dad while he shined his shoes before church, handing him the rags and the tins of polish and the big brush, happy to be his assistant in such an important chore.
Later, her parents got a new table and gave the old one to Stella and Ollie. Noelle used to sit at the table for her after-school snack, coloring with her crayons, her little legs swinging, not long enough to touch the floor.
When Noelle was in high school, Stella waited up for her to come back from dates with Schooner, the high school boyfriend Stella wished she’d held on to, the one Noelle liked before she developed a taste for losers. They would sit at the table and sip tea and Noelle would describe every little detail of the pizza they’d shared or the movie they saw and Stella would listen and try to hold on to every moment, knowing her baby was growing up.
Now she was at this same table with Chrissy, and as much as she missed her own daughter, she was happy to have the girl’s company.
The thought that she was dragging Chrissy into the midst of a bunch of crazed, armed criminals hit her in the gut—followed fast by a memory of Lorelle. Or rather, of Lorelle’s feet, white and bloodless and puckered from all that time in the water, floating just below the murky surface in the rain barrel.
“You know,” she said, voice shaky, as Chrissy scoured out the spare magazine with a cotton patch. “You don’t have to come along tonight. I can do this by myself.”
Chrissy snorted. “Like hell. I’m not staying here.”
“It’s just—you know. There’s a chance things could blow up. You should think about what you’re getting into.”
“I guess I know enough. Roy Dean’s done something stupider than I ever thought he could. Got himself involved with guys mean enough that they’ll beat up an old lady. Oh, I mean, not old old, but . . . you know.”
“Jeez, Chrissy, I’m fifty, not eighty.”
“You are?” Chrissy whistled, and Stella felt a little better. “No kidding. My mom’s like forty-eight and you’re in way better shape than her. She can’t probably even run two blocks without sitting down to rest.”
“Well . . . thanks.” Stella brightened a little. The first time she’d gone jogging, in an old pair of Keds and baggy leggings, she’d made it halfway around the block before she had to stop and walk home, wheezing the entire way. Now she was up to ten-mile runs through town and out dusty farm roads. She might not look it, but she was in the best shape of her life, which was a good thing, since she was planning to take on a bunch of guys who were a lot more fresh-minted.
“Yeah, so, what do you think it is anyway? Drugs? Prob’ly drugs; seems like that’s what people get craziest over.”
Stella considered whether she ought to tell Chrissy everything she knew. She owed it to the girl, really; it wasn’t right to leave her in the dark.
“Listen, honey. When I went over to talk to Benning yesterday, I had a little more than a feeling about what-all he was up to. See, the night before . . . when I said I was going to Lovie Lee’s divorce party?”
“You didn’t,” Chrissy said. “I should have figured.”
Stella told Chrissy what Arthur Junior had said about the car theft. Chrissy, who had finished cleaning and wiping off all the gun parts and was working on putting them back together, stopped working and listened with her head shaking slowly back and forth.
“Figures, don’t it? Do you know Roy Dean still had all his Matchbox cars in this big old paint bucket in the garage? Threw out my box of bridesmaid dresses because he said we didn’t have room, but we got to keep those stupid cars.”
“Boys will be boys, I guess,” Stella shrugged.
“Boys will be assholes, more like,” Chrissy said. She held up the reassembled gun and turned it this way and that, gleaming under the kitchen light.
“Okay, Stella,” she said. “I’m locked and loaded. Show me something I can shoot the shit out of.”
SIX
Stella was relieved to discover that not only did Chrissy know how to handle the Makarov, she wasn’t a bad shot. They drove out to the back side of an old peach orchard, the trees so ancient and gnarled they didn’t give up much fruit anymore, and set up a row of Fresca cans on a folding table she brough
t from home. Then they started shooting. When Chrissy missed, it wasn’t by much.
The Ruger felt good in Stella’s hand. It had been her father’s personal firearm, and aside from target shooting, it had spent most of its days locked in Buster Collier’s gun cabinet along with his hunting rifles. Stella had always thought it was pretty, with its ivory grip. On the rare occasions that her father let her hold it, he’d cupped her hand in his bigger, stronger ones and made sure her fingers didn’t go anywhere near the trigger, even with the cylinder empty and the safety on.
Buster had died of a heart attack when he was still in his forties. He’d walked her down the aisle, but he hadn’t lived to see what a monster Ollie turned out to be. Maybe it was better that way. Buster might have killed Ollie himself, and Stella doubted whether the law would have been as lenient with him as it had been with her.
Picking off Fresca cans with her father’s gun, Stella wondered what he would have thought of the career she’d stumbled into. She was certain both her parents would have understood about Ollie. And they’d always preached a duty to lend a hand to those in need. Surely no one was more in need than Stella’s clients, the ones society couldn’t—or wouldn’t—protect, the ones who resorted to begging and promising and praying as their only weapons against the horror in their own homes.
When Stella started helping these women, she remembered how her father dressed so carefully each morning, putting on the Missouri Highway Patrol uniform shirts her mother pressed and starched, the heavy belt that contained the radio and the summons book, and finally, the gun. Buster had only drawn it twice in the line of duty, and he hadn’t fired either time. But it was a powerful symbol of order for Stella.
That gun went back to the Highway Patrol. But the Ruger was hers now. The ivory was slick-cool in her hand. She kept her arm firm against the recoil, sighted carefully, and fired over and over. The smell of the guns firing was acrid on the air, burning her nostrils, but she breathed it in hungrily anyway. Target practice had a calming effect on her, and she did it regularly, even if she’d never fired a gun into a man’s flesh and hoped she’d never have to.
She and Chrissy settled into a rhythm, without speaking, taking turns sighting down the cans and blowing them off the table, stopping to reload now and then or to stack the cans back on the table.
When the cans were nothing but shredded scraps of metal, Stella and Chrissy gathered them up in a plastic trash bag Stella had brought from home.
“Guess you’ll do,” she told Chrissy, grinning.
“You ain’t too bad either.”
For an instant they just looked at each other. Stella was praying they wouldn’t have to shoot, when it came down to it. She figured Chrissy was doing the same.
At home Stella defrosted a couple of rib eyes and microwaved some potatoes. They ate on TV trays out on the back porch, saying little as evening settled down and the sky turned pink and red.
“You probably shot people before,” Chrissy said as they dug into bowls of rainbow sherbet with Cool Whip and Nilla wafers crumbled on top.
Stella was silent for a while before answering. “Honey, I haven’t.”
“Oh.” Chrissy licked Cool Whip off her spoon, a bit of the white stuff perched on her upper lip. “ ’Cause, what they say and all, I just thought . . . and I wouldn’t think no less of you, either.”
“Well, thank you. That means a lot to me. But . . . killing a man. I mean, it changes you.” She paused—that was the first time she’d actually admitted to anyone what she’d done to Ollie. For a second she wished she could take the words back, but it seemed important for Chrissy to know. “It’s a one-way street. You come out harder. And maybe stronger. But I hate to think what would happen to a person if they made it a regular habit. I sure don’t want to find out. Especially when—so far, anyway—it seems like there’s other ways to handle men that need . . . handled.”
Chrissy nodded. “I imagine I understand. I mean, if we ever do find Roy Dean, I don’t need him dead, just—just really far away from me, and maybe hurtin’ a little bit, too. Or a lot, even.”
That wasn’t a bad summary of what Stella promised to deliver when she took on a new client. She was relieved that the girl got it; she didn’t need a loose cannon for a partner.
She examined Chrissy carefully. She had pulled her hair back with a pair of orange plastic barrettes that featured butterflies with sparkly wings. Her eyelids were dusted with gold eye shadow. She was wearing a scoop neck top that showed a bit of her creamy, youthful cleavage—and the edge of a fading ghost of a bruise.
Chrissy’s eyes didn’t look vulnerable, but they didn’t look bloodthirsty either. They looked alert and hard and determined.
“Tucker don’t have nobody else,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I’d tried a little harder to find out who his daddy was. You know? I mean, back then I thought I could do everything myself, and mostly I have, but right now it sure would be nice if there was some man out there who loved Tucker as much as I do. Who was willing to do anything for him.”
“I know, darlin’.” Stella did, too. She remembered sitting in church years ago, watching other men with little ones on their laps or a hand on their son’s shoulder, and cursing herself for not picking out a better father for Noelle. “But there’s nothing a man can do here in this situation that you can’t do. You and me.”
Stella prayed that was true.
Thought of Goat, of his broad shoulders and strong arms and determined jaw and—she couldn’t help it—of that heavy belt with his service revolver and cuffs, and was sorely tempted to call him. But Goat couldn’t go in the way they needed to, which was to say, sneaky and immediate.
“Honey,” Stella said. “We’re going to use whatever tricks we need to until we find Tucker. Even, you know, unlawful-type tricks.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I just didn’t want you to think that I was worried about getting caught or something. I don’t mind that. I mean, I’d mind, I guess, going to jail and all that, but Tucker comes first.”
That made Chrissy smile. “Yeah, right. You’d probably love getting arrested. ’Cause then Sheriff Jones would have to frisk you and all. Prob’ly strip-search you.”
“Chrissy!” Stella exclaimed, shocked.
“Well, come on, you’re all googly when he’s around. It’s, like, obvious.”
“I am no such thing!” Stella could feel the blush creeping up her face.
“Oh, please, Stella, when he’s around your voice goes up and you twist your hair and all that. You might as well hang a sign around your neck says ‘do me now.’ Hey, it ain’t a bad thing, is it? I mean, you got to signal to the man you’re interested somehow, don’t you? I guess you could come right out and ask him out, but you probably want him to ask you first or something like that, right?”
“I can’t—I wouldn’t—Chrissy, he’s a law man, for crying out loud. I’m . . . not.”
“My ma’s a Baptist and my dad won’t go in a church,” Chrissy said. “She likes spicy food and he don’t. She’s itching to go on one of those RV trips and he wants to go to Branson. But they get on good. Conflict’s like the center of every good relationship, you know?”
“I’m not talking about conflict here, I’m—listen, can we drop this subject? We got to get ready, don’t we?”
Chrissy shrugged and gathered up the plates and glasses, but she had a smirky little expression that didn’t fade even as they worked side by side in the kitchen cleaning up.
Stella retired to her room to prepare for the rest of the evening. The stitches in her face itched fiercely, and any lingering effects of the pain medication had long since dissipated. She dabbed around the edges with the Betadine swabs they gave her at the hospital, and smoothed on a little antibiotic ointment. At first she tried to apply it just to the worst spots, but eventually she gave up, squeezed out a glob and rubbed it all over her face, then frowned at the result: now she was puffy, bruised, scabbed, and cursed with excess shine. S
he considered dabbing on a little concealer and then realized how ridiculous the idea was: pretty didn’t really play into her agenda.
Which led her to go over the plan. Essentially, there wasn’t one, other than to get close enough to Benning and Funzi and the others to find out what they were up to. Yeah. Maybe they’d be sitting in a kiddie pool unarmed, drinking root beer and talking about where they’d stashed Tucker and the best way for someone to sneak up and take him back.
Stella snorted with disgust as she pulled her hair back and secured it in a short ponytail with an elastic. It was far more likely that she and Chrissy were going to have to beat the information out of one of them. With any luck they’d be able to separate one of the losers from the rest, and somehow make him tell them everything, all without causing the others to wonder where their friend had got off to.
And that’s if Funzi and his associates were even at Benning’s. Maybe it was bowling night, or maybe they’d got tired of the local color and gone back up to Kansas City. They could try to get something out of Benning and his skinny-ass girlfriend, if that was the case, but if Roy Dean had somehow ended up bringing Tucker into the mess, and now the goons were gone, Tucker was probably gone with them. Stella didn’t like thinking about that one bit.
No, it would be better if it was another boys’ night at the play house.
She pulled on the pair of loose camo pants and black T-shirt they’d bought at the Wal-Mart, and laced up her hiking boots. She surveyed herself in the mirror: with her hair up and her mangled face, she looked like a kid who couldn’t decide what to be for Halloween, Rambo or Frankenstein.
Disgusted, she went to the garage and loaded up her backpack with supplies. In addition to a pair of powerful LED flashlights she packed a coil of nylon rope, a utility knife, a compact set of bolt cutters, pliers, her cell phone, and bottled water.
Chrissy was in the kitchen with the box she’d brought from home, strapping a shoulder holster over her own black T-shirt. It crossed in the back and bisected her generous bosom in the front. She picked up the Makarov, gave it a fond little dusting with her fingertips, and slipped it in the leather holder.
