A Bad Day for Sorry

FIVE

Stella could open only one eye. She could see enough to know she was in a hospital room, but the details were flickery and vague. It was her right eye that still seemed to be working, and for a moment she thought that was a good thing, her being right-handed and all. Then she realized that made no sense at all.

Her next thought was that she must have had a stroke that not only left half of her body incapacitated but also played havoc with her reasoning. Great, she thought, not just the lurching and the drooling, but embarrassing conversational gaffes, too?

And then it occurred to her that such a state wasn’t all that different from lots of the customers down at BJ’s as the evening wore on, and she felt a little more cheerful, despite a splitting pain that seemed to bisect her head as though someone had stuck a shiv in one ear and shoved until they saw the point coming out the other.

Might have to blow Big Johnson, she thought, just to celebrate if and when she got back on her feet again—and to cement her new status as a regular in his joint, since she probably wouldn’t be fit to drink anywhere else.

“That so.”

The sound of Goat’s voice—deep, rumbly, and close—gave Stella a shock that started in the gut and blasted out, causing her arms and legs to spasm and her reluctant left eye to gap open just a little. So, she could see out of both her eyes. And what she was looking at was Goat Jones’s broad, tanned face leaning in and staring at her with what appeared to be equal parts concern and amusement.

She could smell him, too, his woodsy scent that had notes of laundry softener and coffee and a faint hint of man, just sheer sweaty testosterone-y man. That final bit gave her a different sort of tremor that let her know that another quadrant of her anatomy had also pulled through.

“Goat,” she said, licking her lips, which felt sticky and crusty. It occurred to her that it was unlikely that anyone had bothered to brush her teeth, and Goat was leaning close enough she was going to have trouble talking to him and sparing him the effects of her breath at the same time. “You got any gum?”

He stared at her hard, then split into a grin. “Gum? You get the shit kicked outta you, get left to marinate in the golf pond, dragged out by a couple of stoned teenagers, and all you can think to ask for is gum?”

Ah… that. Goat’s words filled in the details on the sketchy framework of last night’s history. She’d remembered getting into a jam… oh, yeah, and there was the thing with her gun, too—and then—

The entire sequence came back to her, right up to landing that sweet kick to the asshole’s gonads. Bet he was a little worse for wear today. Probably lying on a couch with a bag of frozen peas duct-taped in his skivvies.

That made her feel a little better.

“What’s so funny, Dusty? You still thinking about goin’ down on Big Johnson?”

Stella felt her one good eye go wide. Shit. She’d said it out loud. “I didn’t say that,” she protested. “What are you talking about?”

“Yup, just a minute ago you were coming out of la la land. All these drugs they got in you for the stitchin’ up and what-not must be wearing off. And you were saying—”

“I said I got to show Big Johnson,” Stella said, feeling her face grow hot. She could also feel little itchy pinpricks of sensation, and she put her fingertips to her cheek. Felt stitches. Well, damn. Traced them from close to the bridge of her nose down to the back of her jaw on the left. And there was some sort of bandage-and-tape thing going on up on top of her skull, too. She continued her exploration and found a little nest of stitches buried in a shaved patch on the other side of her head, the skin there raised up in a sizable goose egg.

“Yeah? What-all you plan to show him?”

“Obviously not my beauty pageant sash,” Stella said, sighing. “How bad off am I?”

Goat looked at her with one corner of his mouth quirked down and the other up; like his eyebrows, his mouth appeared to have a mind of its own when it came to expressing mixed feelings.

“Well…,” he said slowly. “Considering they hit you hard enough to put you out for a few hours, I guess I’ve seen plenty worse. I mean, not on a girl… I mean, a woman… or anything… not that you look any worse than a guy who’s had the crap kicked out of him—”

“Jesus, Goat, shut the fuck up and get me a mirror.”

Goat folded his arms across his chest and stared at her with a squinty expression. “You sure that’s a good idea? You know, you’re just damn lucky you’re not in worse shape. Dr. Guevera says you’re in a lot better health than she expected. Heart like a teenager.”

Great. Better than expected… it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for her appearance. It was nice to be judged healthy, but Stella already knew she was in basically superb shape—her job required it. Under her curves were muscles she never knew existed until a few years ago. There was a reason she spent an hour every day on the stupid Bowflex and ran her ass off a few times a week. “Really? What kind of health did she expect me to be in?”

“Oh, come on, Dusty, don’t get all prickly. I’m sure she just meant—well hell, you know, we’re not spring chickens here, me and you. Be happy, you’re on top of the curve. Besides, you look fine to me. You always do.” He looked away, reddening. “How about we talk about what you were doing down at the golf course, instead? And who your little playmates were, that decided to show you such a nice time.”

Stella rolled her eyes, which turned out to be a bad decision, since it made the ache in her head turn into more of a symphony of pain. “How should I know who they were?” she demanded. “It’s not like they wrote their names in my yearbook before they took off.”

“Well, let’s back up a little then. What did you do after we talked yesterday? What kind of rocks have you been turning over, looking for beetles?”

Stella was sorely tempted to tell Goat everything that had happened: breaking into Pitt Akers’s apartment, with all that extra cat food. The trip to see Benning, his threats, spotting the shed at the back of the lot, the evidence of his living-it-up lifestyle. The call from Darla and Stella’s suspicion that Tucker might be marking time in nothing worse than a pissed-off girlfriend’s house—in which case she’d stirred up the mob pot for nothing and bought herself a mess of trouble in the bargain.

There was something about having the tar beat out of you that made a big strong man with a badge and a gun seem strangely comforting.

But the risks were too great. So far she’d seen no trace of Tucker at all, and she had to get more leverage before she could take a chance on pushing Benning any harder.

Not to mention the stakes being raised by his thugs. It had to be the guys Arthur Junior had seen in the shed that day. Stella wished she’d gotten a look at them, but the only one she’d have a chance of even recognizing again was the man on the bench. Stella would lay odds that was Funzi himself, since he seemed to be older than the other two, and a little thicker, and probably didn’t move quite as fast. Plus, he looked pretty comfortable directing the action while sitting on his ass.

If Stella told Goat everything now, he would have to act. But now that she knew how far Funzi and company were prepared to go, she was more frightened than ever of what they might do with Tucker, if for some reason the boy had ended up in their clutches. If they got wind of an AMBER Alert or a cross-county search or something, Stella didn’t doubt they would make the boy disappear forever.

She glanced at the clock on the wall and was reassured to see that it was only a little after nine o’clock. There was still time to keep her date with Darla—Roy Dean’s date, actually—if she could just find out who and where Darla was. Tucker had to be there. He had to.

“Well, let’s see,” Stella said. She’d play along now, then try to get rid of Goat so she could figure out her next move. “Chrissy and I had lunch over at Roseann’s, and then we minded the shop and sewed all afternoon. We’re making a quilt for little Tucker.”

“That so? You conveniently left out the part where you went to the beauty parlor first.”

“Where I did what?”

“Went to the beauty parlor. For a facial and a full-leg wax. Your social secretary told me.”

“My what? You mean Chrissy? When did you—”

“Hell, Stella, when you didn’t come home by midnight that gal went through your address book and called me