A Bad Day for Sorry

Silver gave him a sunny smile. “Oh, that’s fine. I’ll go watch the darts for a bit.”

They watched her walk away. Silver had a nice little figure, a narrow waist and ample curves; for a fleeting moment Stella felt wistful remembering the long-ago time when she could still sashay her way to a man’s attention.

“You might think about hanging on to this one,” she said. “Looks nice, talks nice, gainfully employed…”

“Yeah. So listen, I don’t know what my dumb-fuck brother’s gone and done now, hear? I’ve got no part of his dealings. He stopped showing up on Dad’s job about a month ago, won’t answer my calls or nothing. Hell, he hasn’t even been out for Sunday dinner, and Mom’s about to hit the roof. To be honest, Mrs. Hardesty, I ain’t seen him for two, three weeks now.”

Stella evaluated Arthur Junior. She was inclined to believe him. The criminology course said she should look for facial tics, perspiration, and fidgeting—all things that were tough to see in a dark bar.

“Now, Arthur Junior, there’s a chance you could be lying to me, sweetie, and I’d have no way of knowing it. I wonder if I mentioned that the thing Roy Dean took off with is needed in the worst way by a friend of mine. No, now, I’m not saying you know anything about this mess—and I’m not saying you don’t. You may have heard… when it comes to my friends, I take their needs pretty seriously.”

The faint little flicker in Arthur Junior’s eyes clued Stella in: he’d heard. She didn’t know how much he knew, but it looked like it was enough. There were days when it paid to have rumors floating around about how you’d ruined a numbskull’s day with a bit of old-fashioned violent reckoning.

“I hear you, Mrs. Hardesty.” Arthur Junior bit his lip but didn’t take his eyes off her face. “What is it you think Roy Dean took?”

Stella considered her options. She generally had a policy against revealing any of the facts of a case unless absolutely necessary. And given her new information about Pitt Akers, along with Roy Dean’s general lack of affection for Tucker, it almost didn’t seem worth stirring up a fuss over such a long shot. Still, time was critical, and she couldn’t see any reason not to get as many eyes looking out for Tucker as possible.

“A little boy,” she said. “Chrissy’s boy, Tucker.”

Arthur Junior said nothing for a moment. It clearly wasn’t the answer he expected to hear. He frowned, the lines appearing on his forehead making him look a lot like his father.

“Why would he go and do that?”

“I really don’t know. I’m just trying to connect with anyone who was with Tucker right before he disappeared. And your brother was there, at Chrissy’s, picking up some belongings he’d left.”

Arthur Junior took a deep breath and let it out real slow. He stared off at Silver, who was chatting with a couple of local gals over by the dartboard; then turned and looked back down the bar at the assembly of drinkers.

“Look here, maybe we better go somewhere else to talk. Let me just get rid of Silver. If I give her my keys, can you run me home after?”

The evening was shaping up to be full of surprises. “That would be no problem, Arthur Junior,” Stella said.

While he left to make his arrangements, she sucked down the rest of the whiskey and beer. Didn’t make any sense to waste it.

“Anywhere particular you got in mind to go?” Stella asked, once they pulled out of Big Johnson’s parking lot in the Jeep.

“Yeah. Head out Old State Road Nine.”

“You gonna clue me in where we’re headed?”

“In a bit.”

Stella nodded to herself and drove along, well within the speed limit. She was drive-safe, her BAC adequately low due to her sizable frame and the big dinner she’d had and a tolerance maintained with a healthy daily dose of Johnnie Black, but there was still no sense calling attention to herself.

A bright slice of moon lit up the road with a soft glow.

“I’m older than Roy Dean by two years,” Arthur Junior said after a while. “Bigger, too. Taller, at any rate. But do you know, by the time I was ten Roy Dean would sneak up on me and take me down when I wasn’t lookin’.”

Stella nodded. Now the boy had decided to talk, it was best to let him unroll his story at his own pace.

“Now that’s the kind of thing you just hate when you’re a kid. Specially if your friends know about it, getting your ass kicked by your kid brother. So I made it a project to beat the crap out of him. And you know what? I never did. See here?”

Stella glanced over; Arthur Junior had pushed up his short sleeve to reveal his shoulder, but Stella couldn’t make much out in the dim light in the Jeep. “Hmm,” she said anyway.

“Fucking bite marks. I got him down, got his arm pulled behind him one day, had half a mind to break it I was so mad, and he bit me. Mom wanted to take me to the hospital, but Dad said I was just going to have to learn to fight back. Now that was plenty humiliating, let me tell you. And Roy Dean just standing there grinning at me the whole time.”

“Your folks didn’t punish him?”

“Well, sure they did, but the thing was, wasn’t much you could do to Roy Dean that would make any kind of difference. I think they took him off TV for a month, but he didn’t care—he just invented new kinds of trouble to stir up. When he got bored, Roy Dean used to sit out back on this split-rail fence Dad built behind the vegetable garden, and when a rabbit or something would come by he’d shoot it with his slingshot. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he just kep’ at it and kep’ at it, and now and then he’d get lucky and hit one. Thing’d drag itself off and Roy Dean would follow, and if he caught up, he’d stomp the thing dead with his boots. I’ll say one thing for my brother—he ain’t got a lot of quit in him.”

Stella thought of little Tucker and got a very bad feeling in her gut. On the off chance that Roy Dean had taken him, she prayed he was keeping his temper under control.

“Arthur Junior, I gotta tell you, you’re not painting a very pretty picture of your brother. But what would he want with a little boy that isn’t even his?”

“I have no idea,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”

“You could have told me that back at BJ’s,” Stella pointed out. “Not to sound ungrateful, but if you don’t know where Roy Dean is, there’s other holes I could be digging in. Why exactly did you want to go for this here drive?”

“Because I believe I know where Roy Dean has been spending his time lately, and it ain’t no kindygarden, see what I’m sayin’? It’s bad news, serious bad news—no place to be haulin’ kids into. If Chrissy’s kid is with Roy Dean, then somebody needs to do something.”

“Jeez, just what is this place anyway? Some kind of strip joint?”

“I believe I’ll just show you. Turn off on Methaney there.”

Stella glanced at Arthur Junior; his arms were folded across his chest and he had an angry set to his jaw. She did as she was told.

She hadn’t driven Methaney in years. A couple of decades ago, someone still farmed soybeans out here, but the soil didn’t give up much, and the fields lay mostly unworked and fallow, sowthistle and carpetweed taking over.

“Drive slow,” Arthur Junior said, his voice a near whisper, “and don’t stop.”

After a half mile or so, they drove by a hand-painted wood sign that hung by chains from a couple of posts driven into the ground next to a gravel turnoff. In big block letters, it read BENNING SALVAGE. Five yards into the turnoff, a tall set of steel gates was locked tight with a heavy padlock.

“Oh,” Stella said. “The junkyard. That’s what you wanted to show me?”

“Ain’t just a junkyard,” Arthur Junior said, his voice low. “Drive on by, and when you get down to the T down there, turn around and come back. But don’t stop, hear? Don’t be lingerin’.”

The boy was spooked, that was for sure. Wasn’t any way anyone could hear them out here, but Stella didn’t bother to point that out. Driving past the property, she spotted lights on in a little prefab house up on a berm shaded by a couple of twisty scrub oaks. A few pickups and sedans were parked out front. Further back on the property, sodium vapor lights on blocky steel poles illuminated other buildings and sheds. And beyond that, cars—