Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

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.

“Well, that’s too bad; basketball’s a shitty sport. Still, you’ll get a chance to keep playing it if you do what I tell you.”

The boy shook his head, determination showing through his pain. “Fuck off.”

Stella raised her eyebrows. “Is that ‘fuck off, I enjoy getting shot and I hope you’ll do it again,’ or ‘fuck off, I’m out of my mind with pain and don’t know what I’m saying?’ ”

The boy just frowned and stared at the ground.

Chrissy kicked him, hard, below the hole in his leg. He made a sound that wasn’t like anything Stella had heard from a human before.

“How do you like that, dirtbag?” Chrissy said, winding up to do it again.

“Hang on there, sweetie,” Stella said, laying a hand on her shoulder. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye.

“Now I understand you got your reasons for not wanting to talk to me,” she told him. “If my boss was some kind of kingpin or what have you, I guess I’d be worried myself. I wouldn’t be in any hurry to spill the beans. In fact, you’re probably sitting there thinking your odds with us are better than with the rest of those clowns. Am I right?”

The boy didn’t say anything, but he gave the muscles around his mouth a workout.

“So that makes it our job to convince you that isn’t the case. You look at me, you probably see a wrinkly middle-aged woman your mom’s age. You think—”

She paused. At the mention of his mom, there had been something—a little blip of emotion that flashed across his eyes. Stella reconsidered her approach.

“Were you one of the ones that nailed me the other night?” Stella kept her voice pleasant as she fixed the knots in place.

When he didn’t answer, she gave Chrissy a tiny nod, and the girl toed his leg again. Not as hard, but enough to make him grunt with pain. Sweat beads had popped up along his forehead. He worked his lips a bit and then muttered, “No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Patrick.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.” His voice hitched, ending in a bit of a squeak. Hell, bound up like that he looked about as threatening as a teddy bear. “What’d you do to the dogs?”

“Killed ’em,” Chrissy said. “Shot ’em, and it didn’t bother me a bit. I think I might have got me a taste for shooting things.”

Stella glanced up at the cold steel in Chrissy’s voice.