Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

“Kinda low, I guess,” Patrick said. “I mean, he’s got just Gus and Beez and Reggie. And me. He reports up to Donny Calabasas, and then after Donny, it’s Justin Frank—he’s got the whole south end of Kansas City.”

“Okay, I get the picture,” Stella said. “He’s a pissant and Gus and Beez and Reggie are little pissants and you’re just a teeny little baby pissant. That about the size of it?”

Patrick barely nodded. His eyelids were slowly sliding down, and Stella was worried he was about to pass out. “Look here, can you tell me how to get to the lake house?”

“Yeah… it’s the biggest-ass house on the north shore. It’s in that new development down past the U-Store-It where Route 4 hits the shore road.”

“On that private drive they put in?”

“Yeah, there’s maybe six, eight houses on a cul-de-sac.”

“And you’re sure that’s where they got the kid?”

Patrick looked uncertain. “Well… probably. I mean, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there, and now she’s got the kid—”

“ My kid,” Chrissy interrupted, and Patrick swallowed.

“Sorry… yeah, I’m like ninety percent sure that’s where they are.”

“All of them? Funzi and Gus and Beez?”

“No, Funzi had Gus run something up to the city, some delivery for Donny Calabasas. So it’s just him and Beez.”

Stella still didn’t like those odds. Ordinarily she wouldn’t move until she was certain. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.

“How long until someone figures out you’re gone?”

Patrick shrugged. “Depends. If Benning and Larissa are partying, sometimes he don’t even come down.”

“But the rest of the time?”

“The rest of the time he’s down here around eleven, eleven thirty. Midnight maybe.”

Stella checked her watch: ten. Shit. “And where’s Funzi and them tonight?”

“At the lake house, I guess. Unless they went into town, to the bars… I don’t know. They don’t check in with me. Benning would know, but—”

“Yeah.”

For a moment Stella considered heading up to the house and scaring the crap out of Benning and his girlfriend, but that was introducing all kinds of opportunities to fuck things up.

If they left now, there was a chance they could get to the lake house and figure out how to get Tucker without Funzi knowing they were coming.

If Funzi had warning, Stella was pretty sure things would end in disaster. She and Chrissy wouldn’t stand a chance against two armed thugs. Plus Funzi’s wife. She wasn’t sure what the body count would be, or who would be left standing, but she wouldn’t put money on any kind of mother-and-child reunion.

“We gotta move,” she said decisively. “Sorry, Patrick, but you’re gonna have to haul your ass down to the road. We’ll help you, but I don’t want to hear any whining. I’ll get the car and then you’re gonna give Chrissy here the best directions you ever gave while I drive you over to my friend’s house, hear? He’ll take good care of you while Chrissy and I go get the job done.”

Patrick nodded miserably. Stella noticed with admiration that he made almost no sound at all as they helped him stagger to his one good leg and gimp his way to the road.

Stella considered having Chrissy keep her gun on Patrick once they got in the car, but since it was going to have to happen eventually anyway, she decided they might as well take care of him now.

She left the car idling while they got Patrick settled into the back seat. Stella helped hoist his bad leg up on the seat, a pile of rags from the trunk spread out underneath to catch the thin stream of blood that ran from the wound.

“Sorry you have to see this,” she told him apologetically, leaning into the car. It was awkward to crawl in, her knees on the floor of the car, but she needed to get close to his face.

“See what?” Patrick asked.

“This.” Stella hit him fast and hard on the chin, the way she’d learned from watching boxing videos on YouTube, channeling Muhammad Ali from when he took Sonny Liston down. She backed her way out of the car and slipped the brass knucks off her hand and returned them to her purse, pleased to see that Patrick was breathing well, his head leaning back against the door.

“At’s a shame,” Chrissy said, shaking her head. “I was star-tin’ to like that one a little bit.”

“Don’t like him too much. He stood by while they killed your husband.”

Chrissy snorted. “Somebody ought to give him a medal for that.”

“Well, but he watched them haul your kid out of there, didn’t he? Would have put a gun on us, too, if we hadn’t got to it first.”

“Wouldn’t a shot us, though.”

“The hell you say.”

“He didn’t have it in him, Stella. Come on, it was obvious.”

“Well, until today I wouldn’t have figured you for cold-blooded shootin’ either, but you sure nailed those two crazy mutts.”

Chrissy didn’t respond. Stella got into the driver’s seat and buckled herself in. Her body ached dully all over, and she figured it was a delayed muscular response to the beating she’d taken the night before. Well, she’d just have to power through the next hour or so and hope she had the juice for another round.

Either way, she’d be in for a long rest after this night was over. She just hoped it wasn’t permanent.

Stella made the U-turn and drove slowly back past Benning’s, glancing over at the trailer. The blue glow from the television was the only light visible inside, though the pole lights still illuminated the grounds. If Benning or his girlfriend looked out the window, Patrick’s post, with its abandoned camp chair and boom box, would be obviously empty. The thought made her want to drive a little faster, but she waited until Benning’s was out of sight in the rearview mirror before putting the pedal down.

The inside of the Jeep was quiet as Stella made the drive back through Prosper and out to Goat’s. She slowed on the final stretch of gravel drive before pulling up in front of the house, a tidy little wood-sided foursquare that had been empty for a few years before Goat moved in.

Stella pulled the Jeep into the yard, cut the headlights and turned off the ignition, and coasted the last twenty yards, praying Goat was a heavy sleeper. Off to the side of the house, his service sedan was pulled up square next to his truck, a battered Toyota. A single light burned somewhere in the house, its soft glow pale gold in the windows. Through the gaps in the sheer curtains Stella could make out the shapes of furniture, the outline of the staircase, a picture hung on the wall.

She felt an odd tug, a longing that she couldn’t at first identify. She wanted to go inside and look around, pick up objects off the tables and hold them in her hands, examine the photographs. She wanted to look in the fridge and the medicine cabinet and the bookshelves. She wanted to know all about the man who’d taken up residence in a protected corner of her mind.

Upstairs, out of sight, Goat was undoubtedly sleeping, dreaming maybe. Stella imagined his bedside table: there would be reading glasses, of course—a person didn’t get to be their age without them—and maybe a glass of water. An alarm clock, though Stella would bet Goat was the kind of man who woke up a minute before it went off. A book—maybe a biography, or a World War II history. The clicker—or maybe not. Maybe he didn’t like a television in the bedroom. They said it distracted—that your sex life suffered from its presence.

That was about enough of that, Stella chided herself. She opened the car door as quietly as she could and got out, Chrissy following suit. Then she opened the passenger door in back and stared down at Patrick.