the seat, a pile of rags from the trunk spread out underneath to catch the thin stream of blood that ran from the wound.
“Sorry you have to see this,” she told him apologetically, leaning into the car. It was awkward to crawl in, her knees on the floor of the car, but she needed to get close to his face.
“See what?” Patrick asked.
“This.” Stella hit him fast and hard on the chin, the way she’d learned from watching boxing videos on YouTube, channeling Muhammad Ali from when he took Sonny Liston down. She backed her way out of the car and slipped the brass knucks off her hand and returned them to her purse, pleased to see that Patrick was breathing well, his head leaning back against the door.
“At’s a shame,” Chrissy said, shaking her head. “I was star-tin’ to like that one a little bit.”
“Don’t like him too much. He stood by while they killed your husband.”
Chrissy snorted. “Somebody ought to give him a medal for that.”
“Well, but he watched them haul your kid out of there, didn’t he? Would have put a gun on us, too, if we hadn’t got to it first.”
“Wouldn’t a shot us, though.”
“The hell you say.”
“He didn’t have it in him, Stella. Come on, it was obvious.”
“Well, until today I wouldn’t have figured you for cold-blooded shootin’ either, but you sure nailed those two crazy mutts.”
Chrissy didn’t respond. Stella got into the driver’s seat and buckled herself in. Her body ached dully all over, and she figured it was a delayed muscular response to the beating she’d taken the night before. Well, she’d just have to power through the next hour or so and hope she had the juice for another round.
Either way, she’d be in for a long rest after this night was over. She just hoped it wasn’t permanent.
Stella made the U-turn and drove slowly back past Benning’s, glancing over at the trailer. The blue glow from the television was the only light visible inside, though the pole lights still illuminated the grounds. If Benning or his girlfriend looked out the window, Patrick’s post, with its abandoned camp chair and boom box, would be obviously empty. The thought made her want to drive a little faster, but she waited until Benning’s was out of sight in the rearview mirror before putting the pedal down.
The inside of the Jeep was quiet as Stella made the drive back through Prosper and out to Goat’s. She slowed on the final stretch of gravel drive before pulling up in front of the house, a tidy little wood-sided foursquare that had been empty for a few years before Goat moved in.
Stella pulled the Jeep into the yard, cut the headlights and turned off the ignition, and coasted the last twenty yards, praying Goat was a heavy sleeper. Off to the side of the house, his service sedan was pulled up square next to his truck, a battered Toyota. A single light burned somewhere in the house, its soft glow pale gold in the windows. Through the gaps in the sheer curtains Stella could make out the shapes of furniture, the outline of the staircase, a picture hung on the wall.
She felt an odd tug, a longing that she couldn’t at first identify. She wanted to go inside and look around, pick up objects off the tables and hold them in her hands, examine the photographs. She wanted to look in the fridge and the medicine cabinet and the bookshelves. She wanted to know all about the man who’d taken up residence in a protected corner of her mind.
Upstairs, out of sight, Goat was undoubtedly sleeping, dreaming maybe. Stella imagined his bedside table: there would be reading glasses, of course—a person didn’t get to be their age without them—and maybe a glass of water. An alarm clock, though Stella would bet Goat was the kind of man who woke up a minute before it went off. A book—maybe a biography, or a World War II history. The clicker—or maybe not. Maybe he didn’t like a television in the bedroom. They said it distracted—that your sex life suffered from its presence.
That was about enough of
He didn’t make for a very threatening captive, unconscious in the back seat, his lips parted and his long lashes casting moon shadows on his smooth cheeks. He looked about twelve years old, in fact.
“Well, let’s get it done,” Stella said, grabbing one of his feet and indicating that Chrissy should take the other. They pulled him out, Stella grabbing his head and barely preventing it from glancing off the door well and banging into the ground. “This fellow’s too damn big. I’m getting tired of hauling him around.”
“We can just drag him, I guess,” Chrissy said. “You clipped him pretty good. I don’t think he’s gonna wake up anytime soon.”
“Yeah. Too bad we couldn’t just put a timer on him. A pop-up timer like you stick in a turkey. I don’t want Goat finding him too soon. We need to get in there, you know—”
“Without the law,” Chrissy finished her sentence for her. “Well, we could hit him again, I guess.”
They staggered across the lawn, up the steps, and then lurched onto the porch and dropped Patrick into one of the Adirondack chairs—nice ones, looked like Goat had made them himself—on the porch. They stretched Patrick out as comfortably as they could. Stella went back to the car for the rope and tied Patrick’s ankles together. She checked the wound, which had nearly stopped bleeding and was drying to a crust around the edges.
The ankle of the shot leg was looking pretty pale, and it felt cold to the touch. The skin had a little too much give, like chicken skin on a butcher fryer. Stella wondered if she ought to loosen the rope she’d tied above the knee.
Then she remembered Patrick—sweet baby face and all—stalking toward them with that gun slung across his body, hand caressing the trigger. And left the rope right where it was.
Chrissy stepped back and examined their handiwork. “He looks kinda funny,” she said.
“I guess maybe we ought to leave some sort of note,” Stella said. “Hang on.”
She went to the car, got her case notebook, and tore out a sheet. With the car’s dome light for illumination, she wrote a quick note:
She looked at what she’d written, chewed on the pen.
There was a chance that things were going to go spectacularly wrong. She and Chrissy were about to go looking for a pair of coldhearted gangsters who had a whole lot of firepower between them. Neither of whom, presumably, were chubby or beat up or schooled only in shooting squirrels—and now, of course, dogs. As far as weapons went, Stella didn’t even want to think how outgunned they were.
Still, if today was her day to go out, so be it. Stella sighed, and added to the note, “If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow afternoon,
She looked down at the note and couldn’t help feeling like she hadn’t quite written everything she wanted to say to the man. But there wasn’t time to worry about that now.
Back outside the car, she noticed that the moon was climbing higher in the sky and plumping itself up into a respectable shiner, lighting up the close-mown lawn and some flower beds Goat had carved out along the edges and filled with petunias and marigolds.
On the porch, Chrissy was fussing with Patrick, wedging a chair cushion behind his head. Stella set the note on the little side table next to the chair and weighed it down with a rock.
“Okay, say good-bye to your boyfriend there,” Stella said. “Time to hit the road.”
Chrissy gave a brief, nervous giggle and waggled her fingers at the unconscious boy, who now looked as though he was taking a noontime siesta, with his hands clasped in front of him and his ankles crossed.
They made the drive to the lake mostly in silence, Chrissy piping up now and then to read from the directions Patrick gave her. The roads were practically empty; they passed only three other cars on the way.
“What’re we gonna do if these directions take us to a Pizza Hut or something?” Chrissy asked as they got close. “Or if the address don’t exist? I mean, we didn’t exactly get any guarantees out of Patrick.”
“That would be a problem,” Stella admitted. “But do you really think he’s feeling the love for those guys right now? If he has half a brain he’s probably hoping we take them all out.”
“That what we’re going to do, Stella?” Chrissy asked, her voice whisper-quiet. “Take ’em all out?”
Stella said nothing for a moment. Then she gave the only answer that she felt she could: “We’ll do exactly what we need to. No more, and no less.”
