by Unknown
Noelle nodded, and the worried expression relaxed. “Well, maybe when this is all over, I mean, when you get out of here, I can bring you to visit her. Or something.”
“Yeah,” Stella said. “I’d like that.”
There was a silence, but it was a nice one.
“I think I’m supposed to tell the nurse you’re awake,” Noelle said after a while. “And, you know, fetch Sheriff Jones.”
“Speaking of that,” Stella said. “Look, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but I imagine I look pretty terrible, and with you being an expert and all, do you think you could do a little fixing up before he comes in here? I mean, strictly for practical reasons,” she added hastily. “I’m going to come out of this with a lot of explaining to do, and I’ll probably end up in court or jail or something and, you know, seems like I ought to get off on the right foot with Goat . . . uh, with the sheriff .”
“Jail?” Noelle demanded, eyes widening. “Mama, they can’t put you in jail. Those guys were the worst kind of criminal! The sheriff told me—I mean, they’re like the mafia, Mama, up in the city.”
“Sheriff told you that?” Stella asked hopefully.
“Yeah. And what’s with—” Noelle broke off and studied her mother carefully. The scrutiny was uncomfortable; Stella flinched at Noelle’s unwavering examination. Suddenly her daughter raised one eyebrow and cracked a small grin.
“Huh. Well. I got my makeup kit in my purse. Let’s see what we can do.”
He stared.
Stella kept the determined smile fixed on her face, trying to ignore the uncomfortable tugging of her stitches, the warm buttery weight of the concealer and foundation and whatever else Noelle had dabbed on her, and waited for Goat to say something.
But he just kept staring. He’d walked into the room, two, three steps, then sputtered to a halt a good three feet away from the bed. His big hand went to the back of his neck, as though to brace himself, and he grimaced, eyes crinkling up to glinty ice-blue slits.
“Damn it, Goat,” Stella finally said. “Could you say something, please? I just got done taking two bullets. I don’t think I’m up for carrying the conversation, you know?”
Goat snapped to life as though a switch had been turned on. His look of detached horror was replaced by a weak smile. He grabbed the visitor’s chair and spun it around backward, straddling it with his long legs jutting out at angles and his arms draped across the chair back.
“I’m glad you’re not dead.”
Stella gave the smile one last surge and then let it collapse, her facial muscles crying out in protest. “Yeah, me too.”
“You had me worried.”
“Uh.” Stella licked her lips, tasting breath mints and the waxy gloss Noelle had brushed on. “So when I called you from Funzi’s . . .”
“We got it traced to the lake house right away, and Ogden County responded lights and sirens. They made it in less than ten minutes. I was probably fifteen minutes behind—I gotta tell you, I burned rubber.” Goat blinked hard and a pink flush warmed his cheeks. “It was some kind of mess, Stella. When it went out on the scanner, fire service picked it up, and they came on back. I don’t even know how many paramedics there were. And the coroner, and the crime scene techs—I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What about, you know . . . the scene in the bedroom?”
“I couldn’t get anywhere close until the EMTs got you and Chrissy on the bus. They had to move the other bodies to get the stretchers in and get you and Chrissy tubed and loaded up. So by the time the first guys on the scene and the paramedics had been in and out of that room, it wasn’t much of a crime scene anymore, if you know what I mean.”
“Was there any sign of Tucker at all?”
“No, except it looks like they had him sleeping in one of the guest rooms. There was some toys, all new stuff , a few new outfits in a drawer—some even still had the tags on. Did you see him in the house at all?”
Stella gave him an edited version of Marie leaving the house with Tucker in her arms, and passed along the few details she’d overheard: the Escalade, the town house.
“I’ll get the word out,” Goat promised, “but she could be anywhere by now.”
“I know,” Stella said sadly. She was silent for a moment, considering how little there was to go on. “Did they retrieve . . . anything useful?”
Goat wrinkled his forehead. “They took quite a few things out of there. Took ’em forever just to bag and tag it all. They just let me stay as a courtesy, you know, so I couldn’t give you the specifics. Let’s see, there were all the guns. There was a knife . . . and some sort of sewing implement. I know they’re having a devil of a time trying to figure out what went with who.”
Stella swallowed hard and tried to arrange her face in an expression of confusion. “I just wish I could remember what happened. You know? It’s just all so hazy.”
Goat regarded her solemnly for what seemed like hours. Stella was aware of Noelle standing off to the side, looking from one of them to the other like a spectator at a tennis match. The poor girl was no doubt bewildered.
“So . . . ,” Goat finally said. “Why don’t you just tell me about what you do remember. Going back to when they kidnapped you and Chrissy.”
Stella started to correct him, but that’s when she noticed the eyebrows. Goat’s beautiful expressive eyebrows were tilted askew, which along with his faint grin gave him a rakish expression. As she was trying to puzzle out his meaning, he winked at her.
Kidnapped . . . by Funzi.
“In my own car,” she said, and then elaborated, making it up as she went. “Um, from my house. Chrissy took me back to the house after she sprung me from the hospital, and, you know, we just rested the rest of the day. We were getting ready to watch a little TV and I guess I, uh, left the back door open and suddenly there they were. I mean, Chrissy and I didn’t stand a chance.”
“That,” Goat said carefully, “must have been terrifying.”
“You’re telling me. Why, there was nothing to do but go along with them, not make a fuss, them being armed and all.”
“I mean, the weapons they found at the scene . . . knives and handguns and pistols and I don’t know what-all,” Goat said. “It was just a real wide range of firepower, you know?”
Stella shrugged. “I guess maybe Funzi was a, what do you call it, gun fancier?”
Goat snorted. Okay, that might have been pushing it a little.
“If mine and Chrissy’s prints were to show up on any of those . . . ,” she said carefully.
“Yeah, now, that was a concern of mine, frankly,” Goat said. “But I figure, you all obviously gave them quite a battle, grabbing at everything in sight, who knows what you would have touched? Besides, there was a hell of a lot of matter on everything. It’s not clear whether the evidence is going to give up much in the way of prints.”
Stella swallowed. She remembered trying to hang on to the handle of the rotary cutter with her hands slick with blood. Remembered looking up into the snub barrel of Funzi’s handgun.
“Now the scene in the back yard, that’s sure got everyone scratching their heads.”
“Oh?” Stella said. “Um, what did they find—what happened in the back yard?”
“Well, it’s a puzzler. There was a struggle back there, that’s for sure. Lots of blood trace, though somebody hosed it down. See, there was a fire earlier in the evening, like I mentioned, with the fire department called out and all, just a little structure fire on the back side. It got put out pretty quick. Duty boys barely logged it. But get this, we found Roy Dean Shaw shot dead and stuffed in a landscape box.”
“No kidding,” Stella said faintly. “How on earth, I wonder?”
“I mean, he must have done something to piss off Funzi,” Goat said. “But we just can’t figure what it was. You know? I mean, maybe it was some sort of double-dealing—we got some leads that he was doing work for that outfit. Oh, by the way, there’s a team out at Benning’
s now, digging up pieces of a body. Must be somebody else that ticked him off. There’s a thousand things, when you get down to it, that can get you in bad with the boss, you know?”
“I—I just wish I could remember,” Stella said. “I mean, if I could remember what happened after they took us to that house—”
“Yeah, that would sure clear up some things,” Goat said. “But if it ain’t happenin’, it ain’t happenin’. The brain is a mysterious thing.”
“Yeah,” Stella agreed. “Very mysterious.”
“And you know, that wasn’t the only strange thing about today,” Goat said. “I found something real interesting sitting on my doorstep when I went home to take a shower awhile ago.”
Shit! Stella had forgotten all about Patrick. The kid had been laid out on the chaise since the middle of last night. He would have woken up at some point with a hell of a headache, wondering where he was and how he got there.
“Was he—was it—”
“I think somebody left it there by accident,” he continued, ignoring her. “Clearly this thing didn’t belong there. And it was in kinda bad shape. I fixed it up as good as I could, put a fresh shine on it, and took it back to its rightful owner.”
He put extra emphasis on the last words, fixing her with an intent stare.
And then he winked.
And the corner of his mouth twitched.
And under all the layers of gauze and bandages and tape and antiseptic gel, Stella felt a little stirring. A little warmth. A little reminder that there was at least one darn good reason to hurry up and get better.
“And did she . . . the rightful owner”—Patrick’s mother, it had to be. “Was the owner happy to have this thing back?”
“Yup. I think it’s safe to say she’s gonna take real, real good care of it. Not let it out of her sight, you know?”
Stella tried to absorb what Goat was telling her. He’d been hinting pretty broadly that he was ignoring and willfully misinterpreting the evidence laid out at the Funzi place. That was bad enough. But freeing Patrick had to add up to evidence tampering. Or worse, if he’d told the boy to keep his mouth shut—that might be considered a threat.
Goat was riding straight into a storm without an umbrella.
And he was doing it for her. Her gut flip-flopped over again.
“That trick with the rotary cutter—that was really something,” Goat continued.
“Oh. Uh, now that you mention it, seems like I might have had that on me.”
“Took us a little while to figure out. You know, it has that retractable blade and all. Plus, it was pink. We had to call a gal from Jo-Ann Fabrics up in Fayette to explain that one.”
They stared at each other and then Goat gave a little chuckle. Nothing more than relief, it sounded like, but it was contagious, and Stella couldn’t help joining in, though she had to be careful because of the pain in her stomach.
“It benefits breast cancer research,” she finally said. “We carry a whole line of pink accessories down at the shop.”
“I’ll make a note,” Goat said. “Maybe I ought to come check it out. You know, the whole . . . sewing thing.”
“Goat Jones,” Stella said coquettishly, batting her eyelids as well as she could, given the fact that they were swollen nearly shut and gluey with Noelle’s eye shadow and mascara. “Are you one of these pathetic men who can’t sew on a button to save his life?”
As she watched, Goat’s broad, handsome face slowly reddened, starting at his cheeks and spreading out to his ears and up to his lovely smooth scalp. He opened his mouth to say something and closed it again.
Then he shrugged. “Guilty.”
“Well, about time we take care of that, don’t you think?”
“You off erin’ me sewing lessons, Stella Hardesty?”
Stella smiled for real this time, searing pain in her lips be damned.
“I might be,” she said. “What have you got to trade?”
Goat grinned back. “I don’t know, Stella,” he said, his voice low and rough, just the way she liked it. “I have half a mind to paddle you out to this little spot I know.”
TEN
Stella was trying to nap the next morning, breathing the cloying scent of flowers and wishing evil on the nurses, who’d come in every few hours during the night to poke and prod her. With any luck she’d be out of here in another couple of days, but she planned to return, fortified with snacks and celebrity magazines, to set up camp in Chrissy’s room.
Apparently Chrissy had woken up for a few minutes early in the morning. Stella was torn between dismay at not having been there and enormous relief when the shift nurse described how Chrissy looked around the room and asked where she was.
The doctor said it would probably go like that for a while, little lucid periods and lots of sleep, while Chrissy’s body made up its mind to start rebuilding the destruction the bullet had wreaked on her innards.
Stella let her eyes flutter slowly open and noticed that there were even more flowers than when last she drifted off. Lots of her well-wishers had remained anonymous: Stella figured her past clients had heard about her troubles.
But the biggest arrangement was from Goat. It was a funny-looking thing, giant pink and green caladium leaves with white roses, delphinium, and Shasta daisies. “All my favorites,” he’d confided, embarrassed, when he stopped last night as he was heading home for the day. “I had ’em make it up special.”
Then they’d stared at each other for a while, not saying much, while Noelle watched from her chair, a knowing little smile on her face.
Noelle had finally gone home this morning after spending the night on a cot. She said she’d be back after a shower—with doughnuts.
Stella pressed the button to lift the back of the bed, slowly gliding to a more upright position. Her stomach, if possible, hurt worse today, but the shoulder throbbed a little bit less and her face was more itchy than anything. Noelle had removed the makeup carefully, dabbing with swabs and cotton squares, and then spent forever massaging cream in between the stitches. Stella hoped she wasn’t having some sort of allergic reaction; there’d be hell to pay with her doctor, who’d practically blown a gasket when she saw the makeup.
Stella was reaching for the clicker, figuring she’d see what the fuss over The View was about these days, when Noelle walked in the door.
Carrying a baby.
Stella’s mind did a loop-de-loop and then she recognized the familiar shock of white-blond fluffy hair and said, “Is that who I think it is?”
Noelle turned the little guy around in her arms. He was rubbing at sleepy eyes with a fist, yawning, showing a pair of tiny white teeth.
“Mama, a lady came by the house this morning and dropped this little fella off. She said I should bring him to you.”
“Holy shit.” Stella breathed, her heart leaping.
“Mama! Not in front of a child,” Noelle scolded, covering one of Tucker’s perfect little shell ears with her hand.
While they made their way down the hall, Stella going as fast as she could while limping and dragging her IV drip, Noelle said the lady looked as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in a year but was dressed nice and driving a new Escalade, and that she said Stella would know what to do.
“Where was she going?” Stella asked.
“I didn’t ask her,” Noelle said, exasperated. “I was still trying to figure out what to do with this guy, you know?”
Stella shut her mouth, but not before noticing that Noelle seemed to be finding her way around a baby without too much trouble.
Maybe she’d make Stella a grandma someday. The notion wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
Stella pushed open the door to Chrissy’s room, and Tucker took one look at the sleeping woman and made a sound that was half burp and half exclamation and then he leaned out of Noelle’s arms like he wanted to fly through the air to his mother.
Noelle sat gingerly on the bed just as Chrissy’s eyes fluttered open and then she saw he
r baby and cracked a smile that couldn’t have been lovelier if she’d been the Mona Lisa herself.
Stella, watching from the foot of the bed, holding her gown shut with one hand and the IV pole with the other, beaten and bruised and smelling of a couple hard days, got a little sniffly and figured she’d never seen anything prettier.
Good job, she congratulated herself.
There was nothing quite as satisfying as honest hard work.
