Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

“I am looking for a little boy,” Chrissy continued. “My son is missing. He is eighteen months old. I want him back. It’s not right, him being away from his mother. Now, do you know anything about him?”

Patrick squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced from the pain.

“You know mothers,” Stella said conversationally. “Chrissy here’s actually a nice lady most of the time. Wouldn’t swat a fly. But get between her and her boy and… whoo, I tell ya, I’m not sure I like your odds. I bet your mama’s the same way. I bet if she knew who you were working for, she’d probably hightail it out here and take old Funzi’s head off. Am I right?”

Genuine anguish seeped into the boy’s eyes. “You’re wrong. It’s a family thing. We’re related. Funzi’s her cousin. Look, my dad took off when I was little, okay? I got three little sisters. Funzi’s just helping us out.”

Stella prodded him again, a little harder. The wound, which was down to a trickle of blood, gave up a small gush. “You think your mama would appreciate this kind of help? Huh? Do you?”

Though Patrick’s face had gone chalk white, he kept to his stony silence.

“You’re telling me your mama handed you over to Funzi? Told him, forget finishing high school, forget college, I prefer you take my boy and teach him how to maim and kill, please?”

“I can’t cross him. I don’t care what you say.” The boy’s breath was ragged. “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me slow .”

Man, it was worse than Stella thought. If Funzi’d got the kid running this scared, he must be the genuine, ruthless, bloody-handed mob article. She wasn’t sure how to convince the boy she was every bit as much of a badass threat as Funzi.

Because, in the end, she wasn’t. There was no way she was going to kill this man-child with peach fuzz growing on his upper lip.

As Stella hesitated, Chrissy shouldered her out of the way and leaned in hard on Patrick, her face just inches from his. “I don’t know if your mama’s a nice lady or not. I don’t know her, period. That’s why I can drive over there and start hurting her bad. If I knew her. I might have second thoughts, but I’m not even going to give her time to offer me a glass of tea. First thing I’m going to do is shoot her just like Stella done you, see? Except she don’t have anything useful to tell me, so I don’t know if I’ll really take the time to tie her off so she don’t bleed out. Aw, hell, I know it’ll take a long time to lose enough blood from a hole here—”she jabbed Patrick hard in the skin an inch from the bullet’s entry—“so I might just have to aim a little higher. There’s some artery in the thigh I guess pumps a lot of blood, the, what do you call it—”

“Femoral,” Stella said softly.

“Femoral, yeah,” Chrissy said. Then she drew back slowly, never taking her eyes off the boy’s face.

He gulped. Hard. And Stella knew they had him.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” he wheezed. “You stay the hell away from my mom. Funzi’s got your kid. For his wife.”

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“What are you talking about?” Chrissy demanded.

“Roy Dean gave him to Funzi, okay? He and his wife couldn’t have kids. Been trying forever. Roy Dean said you wouldn’t care.”

Chrissy’s eyes narrowed. “He said what ?” she demanded, and Stella grabbed her arm before she could do the boy any more damage.

“He said you never did want that kid in the first place.” The boy squeezed his eyes shut tight, a sheen of perspiration dampening his forehead. “Said he was an accident and all. He like… said you wanted to give him up for adoption… that he was doing you a favor.”

Stella could feel Chrissy start to shake and clamped her hand down harder. “Easy there, girl,” she murmured. “Easy. Whatever’s happened, it ain’t this boy’s fault.”

Chrissy shone her flashlight directly in Patrick’s eyes, causing him to squeeze them shut. “Where’d Funzi take my Tucker?”

“I don’t know, okay, I don’t know! Probably the lake house, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there.”

“What lake house?”

“They got a place in that new development down by Camden Beach, you know? About thirty-five miles from here.”

“Tucker’s with Funzi’s wife? You’re sure?” Stella asked, thinking fast. If Patrick was telling the truth, and Funzi and his wife planned to keep the boy, it could be a stroke of luck. The woman was bound to treat him well, especially if she had started to think of him as her own.

“They—they treatin’ him good?” Chrissy said, echoing her thoughts. Her voice was thin and wavery.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? They plan on raising him—you get it? Like you know, their own son .”

“Ain’t they ever heard of adoption ?” Chrissy said.

Patrick’s expression shifted for the first time from straight fear to surprise. “Who’s gonna let them adopt? Don’t you know who Funzi is ? They got the whole organized crime unit up in Kansas City trying to crawl up his ass.”

Stella sighed. “So that whole thing’s true? Y’all really are mob?”

Patrick said nothing, and a single tear squeezed out of one eye and bounced down his cheek. Chrissy kicked at his bad leg, not hard this time, and Patrick’s eyelids fluttered like he was going to pass out.

“Come on, boy,” Stella said, not unkindly. “Don’t make this so hard on yourself.”

“Our family’s been connected forever,” Patrick said through clenched teeth. “Beez and Gus, they’re like his nephews or something. They been with Funzi a long time.”

“ They’re the guys that nailed me,” Stella said. “Is that it? Everyone who’s down here?’

“Them… and Reggie Rollieri.”

“What’s he do?”

“He covers the casinos for Funzi. And he runs a book down along the shore. He’s only around a couple weeks a month.”

“So Funzi, Reggie, the two goons, and Roy Dean—that’s five, plus Benning is six. And counting you, seven.”

Patrick screwed up his face and drew a breath. “So you gonna kill me now?”

“Me? Nah,” Stella said. “Though Chrissy here might. She’s turning out to be a little itchy on the trigger.”

“They say you kill just about everyone who pisses you off,” Patrick mumbled.

“Who says?”

“Funzi. Benning. All of ’em.”

Interesting. So they’d asked around. Stella couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, it was flattering to know that her reputation as a cold-hearted killer was thriving. It was probably the reason they had junior here down at the gate on guard duty, though they probably didn’t think Stella was a true threat or they wouldn’t have given the job to such a greenhorn.

“Well, I don’t. I haven’t made up my mind on you yet, but you help me out here, maybe we can work it out so you can spend next summer working at Burger King like a regular kid, okay?”

He shook his head. “I’ll be dead in a week after they find out what I told you.”

“Only if they’re still around to come find you. Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said briskly. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. Fast, and you’re not going to leave anything out. Then I’m going to take you to a… friend for safekeeping. Just until we get this mess straightened out. What happens to you, that depends on how you handle yourself now. Hear?”

A single nod.

“Okay, Chrissy. Help me drag him over there.”

Chrissy and Stella hooked his shoulders and dragged. Patrick moaned as they bumped over the ground, but they got him propped up against a tree close to the fence. Stella checked his leg; it could definitely use a cleaning and dressing, but it didn’t look like he was going to bleed out tonight. Satisfied, she sat down cross-legged in front of him and motioned to Chrissy to join her. Sitting side by side, with the flashlight on its head making a circle of light on the ground between them and Patrick, reminded Stella of long-ago Girl Scout camp-fires.