by Unknown
If they left now, there was a chance they could get to the lake house and figure out how to get Tucker without Funzi knowing they were coming.
If Funzi had warning, Stella was pretty sure things would end in disaster. She and Chrissy wouldn’t stand a chance against two armed thugs. Plus Funzi’s wife. She wasn’t sure what the body count would be, or who would be left standing, but she wouldn’t put money on any kind of mother-and-child reunion.
“We gotta move,” she said decisively. “Sorry, Patrick, but you’re gonna have to haul your ass down to the road. We’ll help you, but I don’t want to hear any whining. I’ll get the car and then you’re gonna give Chrissy here the best directions you ever gave while I drive you over to my friend’s house, hear? He’ll take good care of you while Chrissy and I go get the job done.”
Patrick nodded miserably. Stella noticed with admiration that he made almost no sound at all as they helped him stagger to his one good leg and gimp his way to the road.
SEVEN
Stella considered having Chrissy keep her gun on Patrick once they got in the car, but since it was going to have to happen eventually anyway, she decided they might as well take care of him now.
She left the car idling while they got Patrick settled into the back seat. Stella helped hoist his bad leg up on the seat, a pile of rags from the trunk spread out underneath to catch the thin stream of blood that ran from the wound.
“Sorry you have to see this,” she told him apologetically, leaning into the car. It was awkward to crawl in, her knees on the floor of the car, but she needed to get close to his face.
“See what?” Patrick asked.
“This.” Stella hit him fast and hard on the chin, the way she’d learned from watching boxing videos on YouTube, channeling Muhammad Ali from when he took Sonny Liston down. She backed her way out of the car and slipped the brass knucks off her hand and returned them to her purse, pleased to see that Patrick was breathing well, his head leaning back against the door.
“At’s a shame,” Chrissy said, shaking her head. “I was star-tin’ to like that one a little bit.”
“Don’t like him too much. He stood by while they killed your husband.”
Chrissy snorted. “Somebody ought to give him a medal for that.”
“Well, but he watched them haul your kid out of there, didn’t he? Would have put a gun on us, too, if we hadn’t got to it first.”
“Wouldn’t a shot us, though.”
“The hell you say.”
“He didn’t have it in him, Stella. Come on, it was obvious.”
“Well, until today I wouldn’t have figured you for cold-blooded shootin’ either, but you sure nailed those two crazy mutts.”
Chrissy didn’t respond. Stella got into the driver’s seat and buckled herself in. Her body ached dully all over, and she figured it was a delayed muscular response to the beating she’d taken the night before. Well, she’d just have to power through the next hour or so and hope she had the juice for another round.
Either way, she’d be in for a long rest after this night was over. She just hoped it wasn’t permanent.
Stella made the U-turn and drove slowly back past Benning’s, glancing over at the trailer. The blue glow from the television was the only light visible inside, though the pole lights still illuminated the grounds. If Benning or his girlfriend looked out the window, Patrick’s post, with its abandoned camp chair and boom box, would be obviously empty. The thought made her want to drive a little faster, but she waited until Benning’s was out of sight in the rearview mirror before putting the pedal down.
The inside of the Jeep was quiet as Stella made the drive back through Prosper and out to Goat’s. She slowed on the final stretch of gravel drive before pulling up in front of the house, a tidy little wood-sided foursquare that had been empty for a few years before Goat moved in.
Stella pulled the Jeep into the yard, cut the headlights and turned off the ignition, and coasted the last twenty yards, praying Goat was a heavy sleeper. Off to the side of the house, his service sedan was pulled up square next to his truck, a battered Toyota. A single light burned somewhere in the house, its soft glow pale gold in the windows. Through the gaps in the sheer curtains Stella could make out the shapes of furniture, the outline of the staircase, a picture hung on the wall.
She felt an odd tug, a longing that she couldn’t at first identify. She wanted to go inside and look around, pick up objects off the tables and hold them in her hands, examine the photographs. She wanted to look in the fridge and the medicine cabinet and the bookshelves. She wanted to know all about the man who’d taken up residence in a protected corner of her mind.
Upstairs, out of sight, Goat was undoubtedly sleeping, dreaming maybe. Stella imagined his bedside table: there would be reading glasses, of course—a person didn’t get to be their age without them—and maybe a glass of water. An alarm clock, though Stella would bet Goat was the kind of man who woke up a minute before it went off. A book—maybe a biography, or a World War II history. The clicker—or maybe not. Maybe he didn’t like a television in the bedroom. They said it distracted—that your sex life suffered from its presence.
That was about enough of that, Stella chided herself. She opened the car door as quietly as she could and got out, Chrissy following suit. Then she opened the passenger door in back and stared down at Patrick.
He didn’t make for a very threatening captive, unconscious in the back seat, his lips parted and his long lashes casting moon shadows on his smooth cheeks. He looked about twelve years old, in fact.
“Well, let’s get it done,” Stella said, grabbing one of his feet and indicating that Chrissy should take the other. They pulled him out, Stella grabbing his head and barely preventing it from glancing off the door well and banging into the ground. “This fellow’s too damn big. I’m getting tired of hauling him around.”
“We can just drag him, I guess,” Chrissy said. “You clipped him pretty good. I don’t think he’s gonna wake up anytime soon.”
“Yeah. Too bad we couldn’t just put a timer on him. A pop-up timer like you stick in a turkey. I don’t want Goat finding him too soon. We need to get in there, you know—”
“Without the law,” Chrissy finished her sentence for her. “Well, we could hit him again, I guess.”
They staggered across the lawn, up the steps, and then lurched onto the porch and dropped Patrick into one of the Adirondack chairs—nice ones, looked like Goat had made them himself—on the porch. They stretched Patrick out as comfortably as they could. Stella went back to the car for the rope and tied Patrick’s ankles together. She checked the wound, which had nearly stopped bleeding and was drying to a crust around the edges.
The ankle of the shot leg was looking pretty pale, and it felt cold to the touch. The skin had a little too much give, like chicken skin on a butcher fryer. Stella wondered if she ought to loosen the rope she’d tied above the knee.
Then she remembered Patrick—sweet baby face and all—stalking toward them with that gun slung across his body, hand caressing the trigger. And left the rope right where it was.
Chrissy stepped back and examined their handiwork. “He looks kinda funny,” she said.
“I guess maybe we ought to leave some sort of note,” Stella said. “Hang on.”
She went to the car, got her case notebook, and tore out a sheet. With the car’s dome light for illumination, she wrote a quick note:
Goat, don’t untie this boy until you got some other way to keep him down. It’s one of Alphonse Angelini’s boys—he tried to shoot us. Tell you all about it later.
She looked at what she’d written, chewed on the pen.
There was a chance that things were going to go spectacularly wrong. She and Chrissy were about to go looking for a pair of coldhearted gangsters who had a whole lot of firepower between them. Neither of whom, presumably, were chubby or beat up or schooled only in shooting squirrels—and now, of course, dogs. As far as weapons went, Stella
didn’t even want to think how outgunned they were.
Still, if today was her day to go out, so be it. Stella sighed, and added to the note, “If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow afternoon, find Tucker.”
She looked down at the note and couldn’t help feeling like she hadn’t quite written everything she wanted to say to the man. But there wasn’t time to worry about that now.
Back outside the car, she noticed that the moon was climbing higher in the sky and plumping itself up into a respectable shiner, lighting up the close-mown lawn and some flower beds Goat had carved out along the edges and filled with petunias and marigolds.
On the porch, Chrissy was fussing with Patrick, wedging a chair cushion behind his head. Stella set the note on the little side table next to the chair and weighed it down with a rock.
“Okay, say good-bye to your boyfriend there,” Stella said. “Time to hit the road.”
Chrissy gave a brief, nervous giggle and waggled her fingers at the unconscious boy, who now looked as though he was taking a noontime siesta, with his hands clasped in front of him and his ankles crossed.
They made the drive to the lake mostly in silence, Chrissy piping up now and then to read from the directions Patrick gave her. The roads were practically empty; they passed only three other cars on the way.
“What’re we gonna do if these directions take us to a Pizza Hut or something?” Chrissy asked as they got close. “Or if the address don’t exist? I mean, we didn’t exactly get any guarantees out of Patrick.”
“That would be a problem,” Stella admitted. “But do you really think he’s feeling the love for those guys right now? If he has half a brain he’s probably hoping we take them all out.”
“That what we’re going to do, Stella?” Chrissy asked, her voice whisper-quiet. “Take ’em all out?”
Stella said nothing for a moment. Then she gave the only answer that she felt she could: “We’ll do exactly what we need to. No more, and no less.”
When Chrissy didn’t say anything more, Stella figured she’d better stop her from getting too far ahead of herself.
“Stop worrying about what you can’t control,” she said. “Trust me, I know. I’ve been there before. What you want to do is stay in the moment, deal with all the shit as it comes down the pike. Then later you can think about how you might have done things different. Over a beer or twelve.”
Chrissy nodded. “Okay. Hey, that’s our turn. Loblolly Pines Road.”
Stella eased past a pair of stone pillars with fancy iron fencing sticking out at angles on either side. There was a brass plate on either column bearing the words LAKEVIEW MANOR ESTATES. The road was smooth asphalt, with a median strip planted with young redbud and dogwood trees.
“I’m surprised they don’t have them a little house here with some tight-ass guard ready to blow away any riffraff that comes along.”
Chrissy sniffed. “Riffraff ’s already got in. Funzi’n them ain’t exactly quality folks theirselves.”
Stella laughed softly. “Well said, darlin’. Okay, let’s see what we got.”
She cut the lights and rolled slowly down the road. After a hundred yards or so, the street curved gently to the left, and there in front of them lay the lake, shimmering in the moonlight.
It was so beautiful it made Stella’s chest tighten up. The little ripples on the water’s surface danced silver and black. The crescent moon was reflected in the water, a flickering slice of pale light. Stars had come out, just a smattering, and they sparkled their way down the horizon until it looked as if they were bits of sugar dusted down from some heavenly shaker.
Reluctantly, she turned away from the water. It wasn’t a night for beauty.
Up ahead she could see the lights of an enormous house, and beyond that another, and another.
“I’d drive on past,” Stella said, “check out the situation, but there’s no telling what Funzi’s got in the way of manpower up at this hour. If he’s got one of his guys outside on some sort of watch—”
She glanced at the dashboard clock. One fifteen. Late enough that presumably everyone but the insomniacs would be asleep for the night. If Funzi had someone posted outside the house, a car driving by at this hour would draw attention, putting them on alert.
“Tucker’s prob’ly been asleep for hours,” Chrissy said. “You know, Stella, don’t laugh, but I got a feeling that he’s right close by.”
Stella didn’t laugh. She eased the car over to the side of the road and let the engine idle, and considered Chrissy carefully. “Yeah, what do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t know, I guess it sounds kind of dumb, but I get a sense about things sometimes. I just got this feeling, see?” She held up her hands, turned them over, and looked at her fingers. “Like a little tingly feeling. I can just—oh, Stella, I can just feel Tucker, you know, under my fingers, his little cheeks and his hair and his little baby butt when I hold him. I’m tellin’ you, he’s here.”
Stella took a slow, easy U-turn in the broad street, still well back from the first house, and drove slowly back to the gated entrance at the turnoff. Back on the main road, she drove a few moments until she found what she was looking for, a turn-in for farm vehicles, with a padlocked gate over a cattle guard. She parked off the road and cut the engine, then turned on the map light and looked at her partner.
“Well, honey girl, what’s this sixth sense of yours tell you about what we’re about to do?”
Chrissy put her fingers lightly to her face, tapping on her chin, and closed her eyes. She focused hard for a minute, her eyebrows knit in concentration, and then her eyes popped open.
“Oh!”
“What?”
“I don’t know—I had this, like, swirly feeling and then kind of a like a mini fireworks in my head.”
“Is that good?”
“I—I’m not sure. Yes. Wait. Yes, it’s good, I’m getting a good feeling, but there’s all this trouble first—that’s what I’m sensing.”
“Well, that sounds about right.”
Stella reached in the back seat for her backpack. She took out the flashlights again and handed one to Chrissy.
“You better reload,” she said. She dug in the backpack for the Makarov’s spare magazine. Stella slid the other one out expertly and replaced it, sending the slide home with a satisfying snap.
“This old piece turned out okay, I guess,” Chrissy said, tucking it back in the holster. “Thanks to Uncle Fred. So what’s the plan?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have much of one. Kind of goes like this: sneak in, don’t get caught, and get Tucker. Then we can get the hell out of here and call the sheriff.”
Chrissy put her hand on the door latch and nodded as if Stella had given her a detailed strategy. “Okay.”
She got out of the Jeep and Stella followed suit, slipping the backpack onto her sore shoulders. They kept off the street a few yards. On the lake side, there were clumps of cattails and the occasional stand of willows, which made for good cover, so Stella felt confident they wouldn’t be spotted even by someone on the street.
As they passed the first two houses, a motion light went on. She grabbed Chrissy’s arm and scrambled out of the illuminated arc, close to the bank that sloped down to the water.
They stood motionless for a few moments, waiting for a reaction from inside the house. Stella could feel Chrissy’s pulse, rapid and strong, through her sleeve. Her own heart was pounding just as fast. After a few minutes they ventured ahead, staying close to the bank of the lake. At the edge of Funzi’s lawn, they paused.
Ahead loomed the enormous house, three stories of pale stucco topped with a tile roof like it was in the middle of the damn Mediterranean. There were arched windows all along the back of the house, and sets of French doors, and little balconies sticking out from the upstairs rooms, like some kind of Romeo and Juliet stage set. Stella was a little surprised to see that some of the windows were open; she expected them to have the air-conditioning blasting on a
night as hot as this.
Stella glanced at Chrissy and saw that she had drawn the Makarov and held it ready, her hands steady.
“Thinking about dogs?” she whispered.
“Hell, yes.”
“Maybe the Angelinis aren’t pet people.”
In answer Chrissy only snorted.
“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Stella said. “The place has got to be alarmed every which way, right? We try to break in, even through a screen, they’ll be on us before we have time to turn around. Plus they’ll have the advantage of knowing exactly where we are.”
“Yeah . . . so?”
“What we need is, we need one of them to come out. Then I figure it’s a fair fight.”
Chrissy scratched her chin with her free hand and gave Stella a quizzical look. “Well, how are you gonna manage that? Ring the doorbell? Pretend you brung ’em a pizza?”
Searching for ideas, Stella looked carefully from the vine-covered trellis that ran from the front overhang along the side of the house, around to the back where a wooden pergola had been built over a huge tiled patio. Extending out from the patio, a stone path bisected the backyard, continuing to a set of steps that led down to the water, where a number of boats were docked.
She briefly considered climbing up the trellis to the second floor, where she figured the master bedroom faced out over the water. It would be possible to get from the trellis to the balcony, and it looked like the French doors were open, so she could slip into the room, possibly surprising Funzi and his wife in their sleep, getting a gun on them before they had time to react.
It would be possible . . . if she were Tarzan. She doubted the trellis would hold her weight, and even if it did, climbing the wooden structure was a little different from the climbing wall she occasionally worked out on at the gym.
She studied the pergola. It had no hand-or footholds, and the vine on it was still young, its strands thin and weak. No help there.
So she wasn’t going to be able to get in. There had to be a way to get someone to come out. Some way to cause a distraction in the backyard so that someone investigating would leave the door open behind him, letting one of them get inside.
