Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

“Where’s Roy Dean?”

Patrick snuck a nervous glance at Chrissy.

“Remember what I said,” Stella reminded him. “The whole truth. And fast. I’m feeling impatient.”

“He’s… uh, dead.”

Chrissy, sitting next to her, didn’t flinch.

Stella nodded. “I’m not all that surprised. Let me guess—he was ripping Funzi off, and Funzi found out.”

“He, um. Yeah.”

“Tell me how.”

Patrick licked his cracked lips. “Funzi had him driving weed up to Kansas City. He’d go pick it up from these Vietnamese guys in Bolivar that Funzi’s got growin’ the shit in their basement.”

“He start skimming, is that it?”

“Yeah… outta the bales, a little here and there, but then he took a whole brick, you know? Hard to miss that. Funzi’s not stupid.”

“What’d he want to do, sell it?”

“I guess. Thing is, he, ah…” Patrick glanced miserably at Chrissy. “I mean, I’m sorry if you didn’t know, Mrs. Shaw, Roy Dean had a girl—”

“That fucktard,” Chrissy spat. “Yeah, I knew.”

“So I guess they were gonna sell it or, I don’t know, he gave it to her or whatever but by the time Funzi had Beez and Gus mess him up, it was gone.”

“So Funzi killed him?”

“Not right then. They gave him a week to come up with a couple thousand bucks.”

Chrissy barked a short laugh.

“That was after they beat him up?” Stella asked.

“Yeah.”

Stella looked to Chrissy. “What do you think? Was Roy Dean looking for money that week?”

“Was he ever not looking for money? Shit, Stella, he’d turn over the couch cushions every time before he went to the bar. But he knew I didn’t have none, so it wasn’t like he’d ask me.”

“Arthur junior didn’t say anything about Roy Dean hitting him up either.”

“Well hell, he was fixing to trade my baby away, I guess he didn’t think he needed it,” Chrissy said. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.”

“That what happened, Patrick?” Stella asked. “Roy Dean come in here with Tucker?”

“Yeah.” If it was possible to look any more uncomfortable than he already was, with a leaking hole in his leg, Patrick did. “He was supposed to have the money Friday night, but he showed up here Saturday with the, uh, with your boy.”

“Oh!” Chrissy said. “That little… I went out to my friend Tiffany’s house Friday night to play cards, and Tucker was with me.”

“He was planning to take Tucker out to Benning’s that night,” Stella guessed.

“No shit! All along he meant to—he had it planned .” Chrissy was trembling from her fury, and Stella put her hand on her back and patted gently. Righteous anger was good, but she had to keep it under control.

“So?” she prompted Patrick.

“So, um, Benning has Roy Dean go wait in the shed and he calls Funzi, and, and Funzi was headed down to the lake house with Gus and Beez and Reggie, so they all turned around and came back up here.”

“How long did it take Funzi and them to get there?”

“Not long, maybe fifteen minutes. Me’n Roy Dean, we were kind of talking some, and the kid was on the floor playin’ with some little stuffed dog—”

“Pup-pup,” Chrissy interjected. “That’s his favorite. Oh, God—”

“Okay,” Stella said, giving Chrissy a one-arm hug, a firm one, to get her to focus. “We got to listen to the rest of this, hon.”

Chrissy gulped and nodded.

Patrick’s breathing had gone short and fast. He looked back and forth between them, his eyes unfocused. “So when Funzi and them came in the kid had shit his pants and Roy Dean couldn’t get him to shut up. Funzi’s all, Where’s the money, you got my money? And then Roy Dean tells Funzi, look here, you can have the kid and that’ll settle us up, and Funzi looks at him like he’s out of his mind and then he goes nuts. Tells Roy Dean, Is he fucking crazy?… And then he smacks him around a little, keeps asking where the fuck his money is, and then all of a sudden he just stops. He, uh, tells Gus to take the kid and drive him down to the lake house, you know, where his wife is. And Roy Dean’s looking all happy because, like, he figures Funzi went for it and all, but the second Gus walks out the door with the kid Funzi tells me and Beez, go outside and guard the place and don’t go nowhere until he comes and gets us. So we go out, and it wasn’t more than a minute or two after they locked the doors again, we heard a shot. And I knew Funzi shot Roy Dean.”

Patrick swallowed hard. Stella had a pretty good idea it was the first time Patrick had heard something like that, despite all his swagger.

“Okay,” she said gently. “He killed Roy Dean. Maybe he figured he couldn’t keep him around, knowing where the kid was. What happened to the body?”

“Well, shit, we were like—I mean, Funzi tells me, go get some plastic and a chain saw from Benning, and I, and I, I did that, and Beez stayed and guarded the shed, and when I got back I knocked on the door and gave the stuff to Funzi and then a minute later we heard them fire it up.”

“Funzi and Rollieri…”

“Yeah.”

“Holy mother,” Stella said. “A chain saw, didn’t that make a hell of a mess?”

“Yeah,” Patrick said, his voice a hoarse whisper. Stella noticed a smell coming off him, acrid fear mixed with blood and body odor. “Funzi, uh, didn’t make us help with the, uh, sawing. He told us to stay outside and, you know, we did. But later, when we were cleaning up… Jesus.”

“So you and Beez helped take care of the body when it was done?”

“No. Funzi gave me the chain saw and said, clean it off, and I wiped it down and all that, and Beez went and helped Benning close up and Funzi said, wait for him in the house so we… we, um, did.”

“How long did that take?”

“I don’t know… maybe like… half an hour? More maybe, we were, uh, sitting around at the house, and, and finally Funzi called on the cell. He said for me and Beez to come back up to the shed and, like, the pieces of, of Roy Dean were wrapped in plastic and Funzi told us to carry it all out to the burn barrel. Reggie had headed back to the city, so it was just me and Beez done it.”

Stella grimaced, thinking of the grisly task. Chrissy looked a little green herself. “Where’s the burn barrel?”

“Out behind the shed on the back side,” Patrick said, lifting a limp arm to point back across the property.

“Then what did you do?”

“We, uh, laid in some newspaper and shit to get it started and then we put the, uh, you know, Roy Dean in there. Plastic and all, Funzi wanted it all burned. Poured on the kerosene but we waited until dark to light it up.”

“Did it catch right off?”

“Yeah, but it took all night to burn down. The smell… it nearly killed us. In the morning, there was, there was a few pieces of bone or something with the plastic burned onto it. Gus was back by then, and Funzi made us dig, like, five or six holes and put the shit in.”

“Was it all destroyed? Other than the bone pieces?”

“There was some little bits of cloth around the barrel that must’ve come out of the flames or something. And what didn’t burn… I think there were teeth, like that.” Patrick stared miserably at the ground.

“Could you find those holes again?”

“Yeah. Since I had to do most of the digging. Funzi had me put the dirt back and drive the front loader over the top when I was done.”

“Okay.” Stella sat back on her haunches for a minute, thinking over the story. She glanced at Chrissy, whose anger seemed to have dissipated some, though she kept the gun loosely trained on Patrick. “Patrick, where exactly is Funzi on the old mob totem pole?”