Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

He didn’t make for a very threatening captive, unconscious in the back seat, his lips parted and his long lashes casting moon shadows on his smooth cheeks. He looked about twelve years old, in fact.

“Well, let’s get it done,” Stella said, grabbing one of his feet and indicating that Chrissy should take the other. They pulled him out, Stella grabbing his head and barely preventing it from glancing off the door well and banging into the ground. “This fellow’s too damn big. I’m getting tired of hauling him around.”

“We can just drag him, I guess,” Chrissy said. “You clipped him pretty good. I don’t think he’s gonna wake up anytime soon.”

“Yeah. Too bad we couldn’t just put a timer on him. A pop-up timer like you stick in a turkey. I don’t want Goat finding him too soon. We need to get in there, you know—”

“Without the law,” Chrissy finished her sentence for her. “Well, we could hit him again, I guess.”

They staggered across the lawn, up the steps, and then lurched onto the porch and dropped Patrick into one of the Adirondack chairs—nice ones, looked like Goat had made them himself—on the porch. They stretched Patrick out as comfortably as they could. Stella went back to the car for the rope and tied Patrick’s ankles together. She checked the wound, which had nearly stopped bleeding and was drying to a crust around the edges.

The ankle of the shot leg was looking pretty pale, and it felt cold to the touch. The skin had a little too much give, like chicken skin on a butcher fryer. Stella wondered if she ought to loosen the rope she’d tied above the knee.

Then she remembered Patrick—sweet baby face and all—stalking toward them with that gun slung across his body, hand caressing the trigger. And left the rope right where it was.

Chrissy stepped back and examined their handiwork. “He looks kinda funny,” she said.

“I guess maybe we ought to leave some sort of note,” Stella said. “Hang on.”

She went to the car, got her case notebook, and tore out a sheet. With the car’s dome light for illumination, she wrote a quick note:

Goat, don’t untie this boy until you got some other way to keep him down. It’s one of Alphonse Angelini’s boys—he tried to shoot us. Tell you all about it later.

She looked at what she’d written, chewed on the pen.

There was a chance that things were going to go spectacularly wrong. She and Chrissy were about to go looking for a pair of coldhearted gangsters who had a whole lot of firepower between them. Neither of whom, presumably, were chubby or beat up or schooled only in shooting squirrels—and now, of course, dogs. As far as weapons went, Stella didn’t even want to think how outgunned they were.

Still, if today was her day to go out, so be it. Stella sighed, and added to the note, “If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow afternoon, find Tucker. ”

She looked down at the note and couldn’t help feeling like she hadn’t quite written everything she wanted to say to the man. But there wasn’t time to worry about that now.

Back outside the car, she noticed that the moon was climbing higher in the sky and plumping itself up into a respectable shiner, lighting up the close-mown lawn and some flower beds Goat had carved out along the edges and filled with petunias and marigolds.

On the porch, Chrissy was fussing with Patrick, wedging a chair cushion behind his head. Stella set the note on the little side table next to the chair and weighed it down with a rock.

“Okay, say good-bye to your boyfriend there,” Stella said. “Time to hit the road.”

Chrissy gave a brief, nervous giggle and waggled her fingers at the unconscious boy, who now looked as though he was taking a noontime siesta, with his hands clasped in front of him and his ankles crossed.

They made the drive to the lake mostly in silence, Chrissy piping up now and then to read from the directions Patrick gave her. The roads were practically empty; they passed only three other cars on the way.

“What’re we gonna do if these directions take us to a Pizza Hut or something?” Chrissy asked as they got close. “Or if the address don’t exist? I mean, we didn’t exactly get any guarantees out of Patrick.”

“That would be a problem,” Stella admitted. “But do you really think he’s feeling the love for those guys right now? If he has half a brain he’s probably hoping we take them all out.”

“That what we’re going to do, Stella?” Chrissy asked, her voice whisper-quiet. “Take ’em all out?”

Stella said nothing for a moment. Then she gave the only answer that she felt she could: “We’ll do exactly what we need to. No more, and no less.”

When Chrissy didn’t say anything more, Stella figured she’d better stop her from getting too far ahead of herself.

“Stop worrying about what you can’t control,” she said. “Trust me, I know. I’ve been there before. What you want to do is stay in the moment, deal with all the shit as it comes down the pike. Then later you can think about how you might have done things different. Over a beer or twelve.”

Chrissy nodded. “Okay. Hey, that’s our turn. Loblolly Pines Road.”

Stella eased past a pair of stone pillars with fancy iron fencing sticking out at angles on either side. There was a brass plate on either column bearing the words LAKEVIEW MANOR ESTATES. The road was smooth asphalt, with a median strip planted with young redbud and dogwood trees.

“I’m surprised they don’t have them a little house here with some tight-ass guard ready to blow away any riffraff that comes along.”

Chrissy sniffed. “Riffraff ’s already got in. Funzi’n them ain’t exactly quality folks theirselves.”

Stella laughed softly. “Well said, darlin’. Okay, let’s see what we got.”

She cut the lights and rolled slowly down the road. After a hundred yards or so, the street curved gently to the left, and there in front of them lay the lake, shimmering in the moonlight.

It was so beautiful it made Stella’s chest tighten up. The little ripples on the water’s surface danced silver and black. The crescent moon was reflected in the water, a flickering slice of pale light. Stars had come out, just a smattering, and they sparkled their way down the horizon until it looked as if they were bits of sugar dusted down from some heavenly shaker.

Reluctantly, she turned away from the water. It wasn’t a night for beauty.

Up ahead she could see the lights of an enormous house, and beyond that another, and another.

“I’d drive on past,” Stella said, “check out the situation, but there’s no telling what Funzi’s got in the way of manpower up at this hour. If he’s got one of his guys outside on some sort of watch—”

She glanced at the dashboard clock. One fifteen. Late enough that presumably everyone but the insomniacs would be asleep for the night. If Funzi had someone posted outside the house, a car driving by at this hour would draw attention, putting them on alert.

“Tucker’s prob’ly been asleep for hours,” Chrissy said. “You know, Stella, don’t laugh, but I got a feeling that he’s right close by.”

Stella didn’t laugh. She eased the car over to the side of the road and let the engine idle, and considered Chrissy carefully. “Yeah, what do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know, I guess it sounds kind of dumb, but I get a sense about things sometimes. I just got this feeling, see?” She held up her hands, turned them over, and looked at her fingers. “Like a little tingly feeling. I can just—oh, Stella, I can just feel Tucker, you know, under my fingers, his little cheeks and his hair and his little baby butt when I hold him. I’m tellin’ you, he’s here .”