Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

“Um… I mean, she’s alive but they—but—Mama, I’m so sorry, they don’t know if she’s going to make it. She barely had a pulse when they got there, and the bullet went through her lung and there was some problems with her heart and they got her on all these machines.”

Slowly Stella relaxed her grip on Noelle’s arm. She nodded once. All right. Chrissy had made it this far. Good girl, she thought fiercely. There probably wasn’t a betting pool in the hospital, but if there were, Stella would put all her chips on Chrissy.

“She’s a good kid,” she said. “I think you’ll like her.”

For a moment Noelle’s expression wavered, her smile slipping, her eyes going a little opaque, and Stella realized something surprising: Noelle was jealous. Just a tiny bit, maybe she wasn’t even aware of it, but it was there nonetheless.

“I know you’ll like her,” Stella said quickly. “She’s not smart like a whip, the way you are, and she’s still got some growing up to do, but I think she’s got potential.”

Noelle nodded, and the worried expression relaxed. “Well, maybe when this is all over, I mean, when you get out of here, I can bring you to visit her. Or something.”

“Yeah,” Stella said. “I’d like that.”

There was a silence, but it was a nice one.

“I think I’m supposed to tell the nurse you’re awake,” Noelle said after a while. “And, you know, fetch Sheriff Jones.”

“Speaking of that,” Stella said. “Look, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but I imagine I look pretty terrible, and with you being an expert and all, do you think you could do a little fixing up before he comes in here? I mean, strictly for practical reasons,” she added hastily. “I’m going to come out of this with a lot of explaining to do, and I’ll probably end up in court or jail or something and, you know, seems like I ought to get off on the right foot with Goat… uh, with the sheriff .”

“Jail?” Noelle demanded, eyes widening. “Mama, they can’t put you in jail. Those guys were the worst kind of criminal! The sheriff told me—I mean, they’re like the mafia, Mama, up in the city.”

“Sheriff told you that?” Stella asked hopefully.

“Yeah. And what’s with—” Noelle broke off and studied her mother carefully. The scrutiny was uncomfortable; Stella flinched at Noelle’s unwavering examination. Suddenly her daughter raised one eyebrow and cracked a small grin.

“Huh. Well. I got my makeup kit in my purse. Let’s see what we can do.”

He stared.

Stella kept the determined smile fixed on her face, trying to ignore the uncomfortable tugging of her stitches, the warm buttery weight of the concealer and foundation and whatever else Noelle had dabbed on her, and waited for Goat to say something.

But he just kept staring. He’d walked into the room, two, three steps, then sputtered to a halt a good three feet away from the bed. His big hand went to the back of his neck, as though to brace himself, and he grimaced, eyes crinkling up to glinty ice-blue slits.

“Damn it, Goat,” Stella finally said. “Could you say something, please? I just got done taking two bullets. I don’t think I’m up for carrying the conversation, you know?”

Goat snapped to life as though a switch had been turned on. His look of detached horror was replaced by a weak smile. He grabbed the visitor’s chair and spun it around backward, straddling it with his long legs jutting out at angles and his arms draped across the chair back.

“I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Stella gave the smile one last surge and then let it collapse, her facial muscles crying out in protest. “Yeah, me too.”

“You had me worried.”

“Uh.” Stella licked her lips, tasting breath mints and the waxy gloss Noelle had brushed on. “So when I called you from Funzi’s…”

“We got it traced to the lake house right away, and Ogden County responded lights and sirens. They made it in less than ten minutes. I was probably fifteen minutes behind—I gotta tell you, I burned rubber.” Goat blinked hard and a pink flush warmed his cheeks. “It was some kind of mess, Stella. When it went out on the scanner, fire service picked it up, and they came on back. I don’t even know how many paramedics there were. And the coroner, and the crime scene techs—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What about, you know… the scene in the bedroom?”

“I couldn’t get anywhere close until the EMTs got you and Chrissy on the bus. They had to move the other bodies to get the stretchers in and get you and Chrissy tubed and loaded up. So by the time the first guys on the scene and the paramedics had been in and out of that room, it wasn’t much of a crime scene anymore, if you know what I mean.”

“Was there any sign of Tucker at all?”

“No, except it looks like they had him sleeping in one of the guest rooms. There was some toys, all new stuff , a few new outfits in a drawer—some even still had the tags on. Did you see him in the house at all?”

Stella gave him an edited version of Marie leaving the house with Tucker in her arms, and passed along the few details she’d overheard: the Escalade, the town house.

“I’ll get the word out,” Goat promised, “but she could be anywhere by now.”

“I know,” Stella said sadly. She was silent for a moment, considering how little there was to go on. “Did they retrieve… anything useful?”

Goat wrinkled his forehead. “They took quite a few things out of there. Took ’em forever just to bag and tag it all. They just let me stay as a courtesy, you know, so I couldn’t give you the specifics. Let’s see, there were all the guns. There was a knife… and some sort of sewing implement. I know they’re having a devil of a time trying to figure out what went with who.”

Stella swallowed hard and tried to arrange her face in an expression of confusion. “I just wish I could remember what happened. You know? It’s just all so hazy.”

Goat regarded her solemnly for what seemed like hours. Stella was aware of Noelle standing off to the side, looking from one of them to the other like a spectator at a tennis match. The poor girl was no doubt bewildered.

“So…,” Goat finally said. “Why don’t you just tell me about what you do remember. Going back to when they kidnapped you and Chrissy.”

Stella started to correct him, but that’s when she noticed the eyebrows. Goat’s beautiful expressive eyebrows were tilted askew, which along with his faint grin gave him a rakish expression. As she was trying to puzzle out his meaning, he winked at her.

Kidnapped … by Funzi.

“In my own car,” she said, and then elaborated, making it up as she went. “Um, from my house. Chrissy took me back to the house after she sprung me from the hospital, and, you know, we just rested the rest of the day. We were getting ready to watch a little TV and I guess I, uh, left the back door open and suddenly there they were. I mean, Chrissy and I didn’t stand a chance.”

“That,” Goat said carefully, “must have been terrifying.”

“You’re telling me. Why, there was nothing to do but go along with them, not make a fuss, them being armed and all.”

“I mean, the weapons they found at the scene… knives and handguns and pistols and I don’t know what-all,” Goat said. “It was just a real wide range of firepower, you know?”

Stella shrugged. “I guess maybe Funzi was a, what do you call it, gun fancier?”

Goat snorted. Okay, that might have been pushing it a little.

“If mine and Chrissy’s prints were to show up on any of those…,” she said carefully.

“Yeah, now, that was a concern of mine, frankly,” Goat said. “But I figure, you all obviously gave them quite a battle, grabbing at everything in sight, who knows what you would have touched? Besides, there was a hell of a lot of matter on everything. It’s not clear whether the evidence is going to give up much in the way of prints.”