A Bad Day for Sorry

Funzi and his wife planned to keep the boy, it could be a stroke of luck. The woman was bound to treat him well, especially if she had started to think of him as her own.

“They—they treatin’ him good?” Chrissy said, echoing her thoughts. Her voice was thin and wavery.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? They plan on raising him—you get it? Like you know, their own son.”

“Ain’t they ever heard of adoption?” Chrissy said.

Patrick’s expression shifted for the first time from straight fear to surprise. “Who’s gonna let them adopt? Don’t you know who Funzi is? They got the whole organized crime unit up in Kansas City trying to crawl up his ass.”

Stella sighed. “So that whole thing’s true? Y’all really are mob?”

Patrick said nothing, and a single tear squeezed out of one eye and bounced down his cheek. Chrissy kicked at his bad leg, not hard this time, and Patrick’s eyelids fluttered like he was going to pass out.

“Come on, boy,” Stella said, not unkindly. “Don’t make this so hard on yourself.”

“Our family’s been connected forever,” Patrick said through clenched teeth. “Beez and Gus, they’re like his nephews or something. They been with Funzi a long time.”

“They’re the guys that nailed me,” Stella said. “Is that it? Everyone who’s down here?’

“Them… and Reggie Rollieri.”

“What’s he do?”

“He covers the casinos for Funzi. And he runs a book down along the shore. He’s only around a couple weeks a month.”

“So Funzi, Reggie, the two goons, and Roy Dean—that’s five, plus Benning is six. And counting you, seven.”

Patrick screwed up his face and drew a breath. “So you gonna kill me now?”

“Me? Nah,” Stella said. “Though Chrissy here might. She’s turning out to be a little itchy on the trigger.”

“They say you kill just about everyone who pisses you off,” Patrick mumbled.

“Who says?”

“Funzi. Benning. All of ’em.”

Interesting. So they’d asked around. Stella couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, it was flattering to know that her reputation as a cold-hearted killer was thriving. It was probably the reason they had junior here down at the gate on guard duty, though they probably didn’t think Stella was a true threat or they wouldn’t have given the job to such a greenhorn.

“Well, I don’t. I haven’t made up my mind on you yet, but you help me out here, maybe we can work it out so you can spend next summer working at Burger King like a regular kid, okay?”

He shook his head. “I’ll be dead in a week after they find out what I told you.”

“Only if they’re still around to come find you. Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said briskly. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. Fast, and you’re not going to leave anything out. Then I’m going to take you to a… friend for safekeeping. Just until we get this mess straightened out. What happens to you, that depends on how you handle yourself now. Hear?”

A single nod.

“Okay, Chrissy. Help me drag him over there.”

Chrissy and Stella hooked his shoulders and dragged. Patrick moaned as they bumped over the ground, but they got him propped up against a tree close to the fence. Stella checked his leg; it could definitely use a cleaning and dressing, but it didn’t look like he was going to bleed out tonight. Satisfied, she sat down cross-legged in front of him and motioned to Chrissy to join her. Sitting side by side, with the flashlight on its head making a circle of light on the ground between them and Patrick, reminded Stella of long-ago Girl Scout camp-fires.

“Where’s Roy Dean?”

Patrick snuck a nervous glance at Chrissy.

“Remember what I said,” Stella reminded him. “The whole truth. And fast. I’m feeling impatient.”

“He’s… uh, dead.”

Chrissy, sitting next to her, didn’t flinch.

Stella nodded. “I’m not all that surprised. Let me guess—he was ripping Funzi off, and Funzi found out.”

“He, um. Yeah.”

“Tell me how.”

Patrick licked his cracked lips. “Funzi had him driving weed up to Kansas City. He’d go pick it up from these Vietnamese guys in Bolivar that Funzi’s got growin’ the shit in their basement.”

“He start skimming, is that it?”

“Yeah… outta the bales, a little here and there, but then he took a whole brick, you know? Hard to miss that. Funzi’s not stupid.”

“What’d he want to do, sell it?”

“I guess. Thing is, he, ah…” Patrick glanced miserably at Chrissy. “I mean, I’m sorry if you didn’t know, Mrs. Shaw, Roy Dean had a girl—”

“That fucktard,” Chrissy spat. “Yeah, I knew.”

“So I guess they were gonna sell it or, I don’t know, he gave it to her or whatever but by the time Funzi had Beez and Gus mess him up, it was gone.”

“So Funzi killed him?”

“Not right then. They gave him a week to come up with a couple thousand bucks.”

Chrissy barked a short laugh.

“That was after they beat him up?” Stella asked.

“Yeah.”

Stella looked to Chrissy. “What do you think? Was Roy Dean looking for money that week?”

“Was he ever not looking for money? Shit, Stella, he’d turn over the couch cushions every time before he went to the bar. But he knew I didn’t have none, so it wasn’t like he’d ask me.”

“Arthur junior didn’t say anything about Roy Dean hitting him up either.”

“Well hell, he was fixing to trade my baby away, I guess he didn’t think he needed it,” Chrissy said. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.”

“That what happened, Patrick?” Stella asked. “Roy Dean come in here with Tucker?”

“Yeah.” If it was possible to look any more uncomfortable than he already was, with a leaking hole in his leg, Patrick did. “He was supposed to have the money Friday night, but he showed up here Saturday with the, uh, with your boy.”

“Oh!” Chrissy said. “That little… I went out to my friend Tiffany’s house Friday night to play cards, and Tucker was with me.”

“He was planning to take Tucker out to Benning’s that night,” Stella guessed.

“No shit! All along he meant to—he had it planned.” Chrissy was trembling from her fury, and Stella put her hand on her back and patted gently. Righteous anger was good, but she had to keep it under control.

“So?” she prompted Patrick.

“So, um, Benning has Roy Dean go wait in the shed and he calls Funzi, and, and Funzi was headed down to the lake house with Gus and Beez and Reggie, so they all turned around and came back up here.”

“How long did it take Funzi and them to get there?”

“Not long, maybe fifteen minutes. Me’n Roy Dean, we were kind of talking some, and the kid was on the floor playin’ with some little stuffed dog—”

“Pup-pup,” Chrissy interjected. “That’s his favorite. Oh, God—”

“Okay,” Stella said, giving Chrissy a one-arm hug, a firm one, to get her to focus. “We got to listen to the rest of this, hon.”

Chrissy gulped and nodded.

Patrick’s breathing had gone short and fast. He looked back and forth between them, his eyes unfocused. “So when Funzi and them came in the kid had shit his pants and Roy Dean couldn’t get him to shut up. Funzi’s all, Where’s the money, you got my money? And then Roy Dean tells Funzi, look here, you can have the kid and that’ll