cheerfully, sliding it under Stella’s nose, “and… Grand Slam.”
Arthur Junior stared at his plate with little interest.
“Anything else I can do for you right now?” the waitress asked.
“No, sweetie, but thanks—I think we’re set.” Stella smiled despite herself. There was nothing in the world better than eggs cooked in pools of butter, bacon finished off in the deep fryer, and pancakes swimming in puddles of syrup. Even late at night—especially late at night—breakfast was Stella’s absolute favorite meal.
“If I ever end up on death row, this is what I’m ordering for my last meal,” she said, and dug in energetically.
Arthur Junior stared at her with a look bordering on horror.
“What?” Stella mumbled around a mouthful of eggs.
“Nothing. It’s just—I mean—what I hear and all, I can’t believe you can talk that way. If they can ever pin half the stuff on you that people say you done…”
Stella swallowed and set down her fork. This was a bit delicate. She knew what people said—that there were bodies buried all over the state, men who’d met their bloody end at Stella’s hands. The truth was that despite beating, interrogating, threatening, and torturing her parolees; despite leaving them with scars, broken bones, burns, post-traumatic stress disorder, even the occasional missing limb—despite all of this, she hadn’t killed a single parolee, no matter how blackhearted and irredeemable he was. Other than Ollie, but she figured she’d earned that one.
But there was no percentage in quelling the rumors. They were, after all, largely responsible for her effectiveness: a man who believed her next visit would bring a bullet to the forehead was far more likely to behave.
“You shouldn’t go listening to everything you hear,” she said carefully. “I really lead a pretty laid-back life. You know, what with the shop, and—and my garden and all.”
“Well, if you’re going to tangle with Benning and them, I hope at least some of it’s true.”
Stella nodded. “All right. Let’s just say that maybe some of the ass-kicking part’s true.”
“And look, if you do talk to them, you can’t—I mean you
“Okay. Noted. So we got you and Roy Dean making a little extra cash at the chop shops. How often were you doing this?”
“I only went a couple times, back in March, and then I told Roy Dean I was done. I’m getting my certification. I don’t want to mess that up. He got all pissed off and then he tells me we don’t have to take the whole car anymore, that Benning’s given him a list of what he wants, shit like GPSs and DVD players, speakers, xenon headlights. Says we can do two or three or more at a time, but we might have to go up to Kansas City. Man, I didn’t like that. I hate the fucking city. But Roy Dean kept on me until he talked me into going around and meeting Benning. Told me if I didn’t like it once we talked to him, I could leave off and he’d quit too, even told me he’d go back to helping Dad out. Like he’s any help to Dad. Anyway, like some kind of dumbass, I went.”
Stella wrote a few notes with one hand and forked up hash browns with the other. “Okay, so you went with Roy Dean out to the salvage yard? When was that?”
“I don’t know, maybe end of March, start of April, somewhere in there. So he wants to go over there late at night, and I ask Roy Dean why we can’t go during the day and he’s like, no, we got to go when Benning’s associates are there. How do you like that, ‘associates,’ my brother the damn fancy talker. Should’ve told me something. So anyway we get there and honest to fuckin’ God they got this guy down at the gate waitin’ for us. Comes out with a flashlight and shines it in our faces and talks to Roy Dean before he’ll open the gate, and he calls someone on his cell phone and tells us to go park up by the shed and I’m like, what shed, and Roy Dean tells me to shut up and so that’s when I realize he’s been here before, because he drives up past the main area back to this prefab storage building, but I’m telling you, it ain’t really any kind of shed. I mean you could park a couple of tractor-trailer trucks in there, but it’s pretty much empty except this one area they got done up kind of like a living room—they got a carpet scrap on the floor, some recliners and whatnot, a table… and some computer stuff. Couple of PCs and printers and faxes and all that. Mini fridge… anyway, I don’t know what to think of this whole thing, but Roy Dean walks right up to Earl Benning and high-fives him and already I’m getting scared, ’cause the other guys sitting around there, man, it’s like
“What do you mean? These guys… they were Italian? They were armed? They were wearing tuxedos?” Stella was fascinated, despite herself.
“No, just—well, I’m pretty sure they all had guns. Some in plain sight and I figure some hid. Roy Dean ’n me, all we got’s my .22 in the rack in the truck, and we didn’t bring it. This guy standing with his hand on the table, I figure him for in charge, and sure enough, later I find out it’s Funzi, even though none of ’em ever talked direct to me or Roy Dean.”
“How long were you there?”
“Not long. I was trying to signal Roy Dean, you know, like let’s get outta here, but he’s acting like some kind of hotshot, won’t even look at me. So Benning’s all, you’ve done some good work for us, and Roy Dean’s just pleased as shit to hear it. Like he’s a fuckin’ big dog, you know? And he starts saying that’s nothing, he and me can do double, triple that kind of turnaround, and I’m starting to sweat but I don’t want to say anything because, like, you argue with these guys you end up regretting it, right?”
“Yeah. Swimming with the fishes in the East River,” Stella said. She was dubious.
“Huh? Whatever. Roy Dean says he feels like he’s ready for more responsibility, and isn’t there some sort of work for us? Says he’s willing to relocate. I mean, beat that! So then I’m like, come on, Roy Dean, we need to get going and Benning’s like, you got some sort of curfew? And Roy Dean laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard, but when we’re back out in the car, out through the gates with that guard guy locking the whole thing up behind us, he nearly rips me a new one. Tells me I just blew our chance to get somewhere in the organization, and I tell him he’s full of shit and to make a long story short he dumped me out a mile from home and I had to walk and that’s the second-to-last time I seen him since.”
“So you told him you didn’t want anything to do with his… activities.”
“Yeah. I mean, I got this ITT course and once I get my certificate I’ll be making good money anyway, and I don’t have to go to the city or break any laws to do it.”
“Straight and narrow,” Stella agreed, spreading jelly on her toast, which had gone cold. “Not the worst idea in the world, when you get down to it. So what do you think, Roy Dean went back with these Mafia goons or whatever they are and got busy doing their errand-boy work? Or what?”
Arthur Junior shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I was freaked out enough I asked around. You know, a couple guys I know that are into… some shit. And Benning’s name came up a few times. Guess he’s got his fingers in drugs, least that’s the rumor, except it’s hard to know because he’s the—what do you call it?—the middleman. He isn’t selling at the street level or anything.”
“What kind of stuff?” Stella asked, her apprehension growing. “Pot? Prescription?”
“Mostly pot,” Arthur Junior said. “I guess there’s a bunch of Vietnamese down south Ozarks as are growing it indoors. Them Vietnamese know the hydroponics and all that shit. But far as I can tell it’s not getting resold around here. Somehow it goes up through Benning and disappears, up to the city or who knows where. I mean, if Funzi and them really are mob, it could be Saint Louis or Chicago or who the hell knows—they’re all connected.”
“Hmm,” Stella said. As little as she knew about organized crime, she had trouble believing that Arthur Junior knew much more. But the thought that the mob could have its tentacles here in rural Missouri—it was a possibility she’d never considered. “What else?”
“Well… I don’t know about this one, but this guy I know works on one of the riverboats. He says they’re running a skim operation on a lot of the mom-and-pop slots. You know, you got your low-end casino hotels, like that? Not a lot of oversight. Supposedly these guys, not Benning but some of Funzi’s guys, they come around and take a regular payout, and I guess that goes up through the organization, too.”
“So you’re telling me that Benning’s place is, what, like some kind of mob playhouse?”
Arthur Junior frowned. He’d barely touched his food. The eggs were congealing, and the bacon grease had solidified. “Mrs. Hardesty, all due respect, I think you’re not taking this serious enough. I think Benning’s place is kind of like the conduit for all their local operations. You know, out all over the county—maybe up along the river, where the gambling is—through Funzi, up to Kansas City and then who knows.”
Stella thought that through.
