A Bad Day for Pretty

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Well …,” the doctor finally said, drawing out the syllable. “In a high-use phase, which would be characterized by repeated dosage over several days with little if any periods of sobriety in between, it is possible for memory to be impaired, though usually it’s episodic and short term. Which is to say, a person might forget bits and pieces here and there, but retain the general thread of events. Though there is something … what was it…”

  He tapped a finger against his chin thoughtfully, and suddenly looked up at Stella in an aha expression.

  “Kurtzoy syndrome,” he said, “that’s it. I saw a colleague deliver a paper on it a while back.”

  “Kurtzoy?”

  “Yes—this is outside my area of expertise, but in the 1970s, Dr. Kurtzoy did groundbreaking work with, ah, episodic memory loss and opioids. He showed that a patient exposed to high doses over a prolonged period of time could suffer a more profound impairment … in lay terms, he could lose blocks of time as completely as if the memories were wiped clear of his brain, like erasing digital files from a hard drive.”

  Stella’s heart sank. So it was possible that Neb truly was guilty—and didn’t even know it himself.

  She thanked Dr. Herman, receiving a second limp and soggy handshake, and left the office building with a head full of troubled thoughts.

  She almost wished she hadn’t come on this errand. She’d been so certain a quick check would clear up at least one avenue in the case, but instead it had only deepened her nagging worries that she had a guilty client on her hands.

  Stella Stopped by the Wal-Mart on the way home and picked up a collar, leash, giant bag of dog food, and—on a whim—a big soft dog bed with moose and rifles and hounds printed all over it. By the time she got home, it was nearly four o’clock and she was beat.

  Stella felt a little swell of anticipation when she parked the Jeep in her garage. Part of it was dread at discovering what Roxy had managed to destroy in her absence, and part of it felt suspiciously like cheer, looking forward to an affectionate reception, even if it was from a creature whose IQ hovered around twelve on a good day.

  Inside, a quick survey of the kitchen showed no dog, a torn Flaming Hot Cheetos bag, and a generous sprinkling of orange crumbs on the floor.

  “Roxy?” Stella called.

  In answer, there was a familiar thumping sound under the table. Stella knelt down: there was Roxy, lying flat on her side with her tongue lolling, her snout crusted orange. As if in greeting, she sneezed, looked surprised, and sneezed twice more in rapid succession.

  “Oh, you big dummy,” Stella said, extending a hand. Roxy got to her feet and licked Stella’s hand, tail accelerating. “You didn’t try to eat those nasty things, did you?”

  There was one person who really loved the snacks, and Stella was not surprised to see that he’d come and gone, leaving another note as well as the evidence of his pantry-raiding.

  I walked Roxy

  She was hungry so I gave her that fryed chicken you had in the frige

  (DO NOT FORGET TO TAKE THE BONES OUT!!! OR SHE COUD CHOKE ON THEM!!!!!!)

  She did 4 number 1’s and a big number 2

  Stella rolled her eyes, figuring Todd had left Roxy’s deposit for her to clean up—but she was pleased the boy had come by. He was a pain in the ass, but a sweet and generally dependable one.

  As Stella hitched the new collar and leash on her dog for a tour of the backyard, the phone rang. Stella picked it up and let herself out the screen door, Roxy bolting ahead of her in a show of great enthusiasm.

  “Hello?”

  “Stella … this is Brandy. I need you to come over right now. Hurry, all right?”

  “Brandy? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m scared, Stella. I’m out at Goat’s house alone and he’s not going to be home until later and now he’s not even picking up on his cell and—and—”

  “Calm down. What exactly are you scared of?” Stella asked, allowing Roxy to pull her around the perimeter of the yard. When they were nearly at the hedge separating Stella’s lawn from her backyard neighbors, Roxy caught a scent and tugged Stella so hard as she strained on her leash to follow it that they both crashed through the shrubbery, branches scratching at Stella’s legs.

  “I—well—there’s…”

  Stella waited, but Brandy sputtered into silence. “Damn you,” she muttered at Roxy, who dragged her to the base of a big tree and took up baying into the branches. A squirrel, no doubt, who was relishing taunting the big dumb beast.

  “What?”

  “No, no, it’s just my dog. What’s got you so spooked, anyway?”

  “There’s—it’s—I think I’m in danger.” Her voice tapered off to a whisper, and Stella jammed the phone against her ear.

  She pulled hard on Roxy’s leash, and only by putting all her weight into it was she able to drag the dog back toward her own yard. She found a thin spot in the hedge and was able to get through without too much more flesh-scraping.

  “What kind of danger?” she asked.

  “Like … maybe … someone trying to hurt me.”

  “You think someone’s in the house, like an intruder? A robber?”

  There was a short pause, and Stella waited while Roxy found two or three patches of lawn that she hadn’t yet urinated on.

  “Could be,” Brandy said in a very small voice.

  Stella sighed. She wouldn’t have figured Goat’s brassy ex for the type, but plenty of people got spooked out in the country at night, and Goat’s place was especially remote, set far back from the main road. There was no road noise once you drove down his long gravel drive. Only the sounds of night in the country: the owls and crickets, the jostling mooing commentary of cattle in close quarters for the night, the din that went up in henhouses and cattle pens and dog runs when the occasional coyote or fox came visiting. But most of all, it was the silence—long uninterrupted stretches of it that could be disconcerting for anyone who’d lived their whole life in town, even a small town.

  “Have you locked all the doors?” she asked, finally getting Roxy’s attention and starting back to the house. “Checked the windows?”

  “Yes … but still, I was thinking, if you aren’t busy … I mean I think Goat has some beer in the fridge, I could make us some grilled cheese sandwiches.…”

  “Brandy,” Stella said, “thanks so much for the invitation, but I don’t know if it’s such a good idea for you and me to get to drinking together every night of the week, you know? And besides, I’m beat. I really am.”

  “But if you—”

  “Look, I’ll be up for another hour. If you want, call me back before you go to bed. Goat’ll probably be back by then anyway. And I’m sure everything’s fine. Prosper’s not exactly a hotbed of criminal activity.”

  “Yeah, ’less you count folks getting murdered,” Brandy muttered, and hung up on her.

  Stella stared at the receiver in her hand, irritated. She didn’t care to be hung up on, especially not by spoiled high-maintenance interlopers from the past who showed up at exactly the wrong time.

  “Pansy-ass,” she murmured softly as she started up the back porch steps.

  Then she stopped.

  Over by the hydrangea bushes, underneath the windows, something caught her eye. In the porch light, she could just make out a trampled section, her coral impatiens crushed to a flattened mess, the storm-soaked earth bearing a pattern of shoe prints.

  She went to check it out, bending down and tracing her finger around the outline of a footprint. It was a deep one, the impression of a lug sole distinct in the soft earth. She straightened and ran her fingers along the window sashing. There—there were loosened flakes of paint, and several gouges in the wood.

  Someone had tried to force the window open.

  They hadn’t tried very hard, and they’d given up when it became clear that they wouldn’t succeed—Stella locked all her windows from inside—but someone had been here with more than a friendly visit on his min
d.

  While Brandy conjured imaginary intruders a few miles away, a real one had visited Stella.

  “Well, fuck,” Stella mused, and let herself into the house, pushing Roxy ahead.

  Suddenly, having a guard dog—even a tail-wagging, trash-digging, worthless specimen such as Roxy—seemed like a good idea. Stella made a circuit of the house, her hand on Roxy’s collar, opening every closet door and looking behind the shower curtain. Roxy didn’t seem to mind, but she didn’t show any signs of excitement, either.

  “If there was a bad guy,” Stella asked when they’d been through the whole house, “you’d tell me, right?”

  Roxy sat down and whapped at the kitchen floor with her tail.

  “I mean, you’d know the difference, wouldn’t you?”

  More spirited whapping. Roxy cocked her head to one side and whined.

  Surely a human being bent on evildoing would give off a different vibe than a regular good citizen. And dogs were supposed to pick up on that, weren’t they?

  Or maybe that was just vampires and robots and that sort of thing, like in the Terminator movies, when the dog went berserk whenever Arnold showed up.

  “Look here,” Stella said, getting a cereal bowl out of the cupboard and pouring some kibble from the bag she’d bought. “No more people food for you. But tell you what, you turn out to be a good watchdog, maybe I’ll get you some of those Snausages they got over at Wal-Mart. You’d like those, wouldn’t you?”

  Roxy didn’t answer—she stuck her snout right into the bowl and set to work—but the phone rang again. Stella jumped. Nothing like an unseen hostile presence to get the blood moving.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Stella, I need you to come over here and babysit. Immediately would be preferable.”

  “Chrissy, you better not be calling to tell me you got the heebie-jeebies,” Stella said. “I’ve had about enough of that for tonight.”

  “The what? No, I’m—hang on a minute.” There was a sound of shuffling and a door shutting and then Chrissy’s voice came back on, slightly muffled. “I’m fixing to get me some tonight, is what’s going on, so I need you to watch Tucker for me.”

  “You what? Girl, you ought to have thought of this a while ago. I love Tucker like my own and I’m happy to sit him anytime with just a little notice, but I can’t go clearing off my schedule just because you get it in your head to go out and wet your whistle.” Stella was crabby enough without having to muster up much in the way of encouragement for her partner’s plan. “I’m too tired.”

  “Stella,” Chrissy hissed. “I ain’t doing this for me. I mean, not entirely, anyway. It’s Larry Klipsinger who I’m seducing here.”

  “Larry who?”

  “Aw, come on, Stella. He was in my high school class, star of the Mathlete team? Remember? Smartest kid to ever graduate Prosper? He had a free ride to MIT, but he stayed here to help his folks with the farm.”

  Stella had a vague memory of a newspaper article, a photo of a tall, skinny kid holding a plaque, shaking hands with abunch of guys in suits over in Jefferson City. “He couldn’t have been all that smart if he gave up a chance to go to MIT.”

  “Bite your tongue, Stella. He’s plenty smart. All that higher learnin’s not for everyone. Larry likes it here. And listen, he’s already showed me how to hack into the DMV. I got Cory Layfield’s license plate number. He drives a 2002 Ford Expedition. White.”

  Stella whistled. “No shit. Well, I stand corrected. Maybe you got yourself a hot one.”

  “Yeah. I guess so. But look, I had to show him my tits to get that far. I figure, if we want to get into the evidence files and what-all, I’m going to have to take him around the bases.”

  “Chrissy,” Stella exclaimed, alarmed, “you can’t go bartering sex for favors, honey. We don’t run that kind of operation.”

  There was a short pause in which Stella could fairly well sense her partner rolling her eyes.

  “It ain’t like that,” Chrissy whispered fiercely. “I was gonna go for it anyway. He’s gone and filled out nice, you oughtta see him. Got him a little stubble makes him look like Keith Urban.”

  “Well, you didn’t know that when you asked him over,” Stella protested. She was delighted with the girl’s ingenuity, but theirs was a pro-woman business, and trading sexual favors seemed somehow slightly antithetical to the whole corporate philosophy. “What did you tell him, anyway?”

  “Just we had a new computer at the shop and would he mind taking a look. He works part-time at the library doing their computers, and it’s not like I’m the first person around here asked him for help. I was just gonna try to sweet-talk him into a lesson, is all.”

  “And he agreed to come over? Just like that?”

  “Stella,” Chrissy scolded. “I was smokin’ hot in high school. I b’lieve Larry would of cut off a arm just to slow dance with me back then.”

  “Well. Excuse me.”

  “Looka here,” Chrissy said. “You think we can quit flapping jaws now and get this show on the road? He’s upgrading the OS right now, but I think I got him all primed up and interested, and that’s the kind of thing that don’t keep.”

  Stella watched as Roxy inhaled the last of her dinner then belched contentedly. “I was gonna get to bed early,” she sighed.

  “Ain’t no one stoppin’ you. Fix Tucker some fish sticks and applesauce, and then you can both crash. I imagine we’ll be pretty busy here at the shop for a good long while.”

  “Awww… the shop? You all aren’t gonna do it on the counter, now, are you?” Stella had a sudden vision of the pair of them toppling the cash register on the floor in the heat of the moment.

  Chrissy giggled. “I ain’t promising anything like that, but we’ll be sanitary. I’ll put down some fusible web or something first.”

  “Ah—why’d you have to—that’s just disgusting,” Stella said.

  “I was just messin’ with you, we’ll probably go back to his place. Besides, it ain’t disgusting. It’s just natural, and you’re just jealous. Now git on over here ’fore Larry goes and fries all his circuits, waitin’ on me.”

  Chrissy hung up in a fit of more giggling.

  Geek humor, Stella thought darkly as she rounded up her purse and keys. An hour later, she was rinsing out a very messy bib in the little sink in Chrissy’s microscopic kitchen, trying not to think about what was going on in the darkened shop across the parking lot. Tucker was fast asleep, curled up sweetly with his bottom in the air in the crib that shared the bedroom with Chrissy’s twin bed and an old dresser.

  Larry had been everything Chrissy promised and then some; it was hard to see a whole lot of computer geek left in the hard-muscled, tanned, compact young man who was somehow managing to type and mouse while staring at Chrissy’s ample, softly rounded behind with his lips parted in anticipation while she got Tucker’s diaper bag and toys ready for Stella.

  Stella had been curious to see what the amorous pair had discovered in all their online sleuthing, but between her fatigue and Tucker’s hungry whining, she figured she might as well leave them to their varied pursuits. She’d crash in Chrissy’s bed, and the gal could explain it all in the morning.

  She got the latest J. D. Robb paperback out of her purse—she couldn’t wait to see what that badass lieutenant Eve Dallas was up to now—and poured a tumbler of purple grape juice, ready to settle in for a few minutes of reading before she nodded off, when her phone rang.

  “Damn you!” she exclaimed, pulling the thing out of her purse. She hadn’t gotten this many calls on a single day in ages.

  Goat’s number showed on the caller ID.

  “Brandy—”

  “It’ ain’t her, it’s me,” a deep and desperate-sounding male voice cut in. “Get over here, Stella. It’s an emergency.”

  Unbelievable. By the end of the night, everyone Stella knew was going to have called with some made-up emergency that demanded her immediate attention. “Is it her imaginary burglar?” she de
manded. “’Cause I’m not going anywh—”

  “I’m telling you, Dusty, for the love of everything you hold dear, if you don’t get here now, I’m liable to kill this woman with my bare hands.”

  “What’s she done now?” Stella couldn’t quite keep a smug note out of her voice. It should have been obvious that Brandy was going to prove her own undoing, with her fragile little poor-me helpless act.

  “Oh, not much,” Goat grumbled, “unless you count hitting me on the head, knocking me out, and stealing my pants.”

  NINE

  I didn’t say I was knocked out for very long, ” Goat protested when Stella arrived half an hour later with Tucker in tow.

  “Yeah? Well, what about your pants?” Stella nodded at the faded old cargo pants that were slung nicely around Goat’s athletic hips, held up by a burnished brown belt with a silver buckle. Nothing, that she could tell, was amiss there.

  “She didn’t get them all the way off, but she would have, if she hadn’t been too drunk to deal with the buckle. You don’t know how she gets when she’s drinking.”

  Stella was not happy. She’d gotten Tucker out of the crib, bundled him into the car seat, listened to him wail all the way over to Goat’s, only to fall asleep just as she arrived, and now he was twenty-eight pounds of back-breaking weight slumped against her chest.

  Not to mention the fact that she’d flossed and brushed and swigged a bolt of Scope and redone her eye makeup. None of that was Goat’s fault, of course, but it still made her irate that she’d gone to the trouble, only to arrive and find out that Goat was suffering only a knot on the side of his bald head, and he’d locked Brandy in the guest room.

  “I thought for sure she’d pass out by now,” he added conversationally. “She drank every one of my beers and made a dent in some schnapps that probably goes back a decade.”