A Bad Day for Sorry

When Chrissy didn’t say anything more, Stella figured she’d better stop her from getting too far ahead of herself.

“Stop worrying about what you can’t control,” she said. “Trust me, I know. I’ve been there before. What you want to do is stay in the moment, deal with all the shit as it comes down the pike. Then later you can think about how you might have done things different. Over a beer or twelve.”

Chrissy nodded. “Okay. Hey, that’s our turn. Loblolly Pines Road.”

Stella eased past a pair of stone pillars with fancy iron fencing sticking out at angles on either side. There was a brass plate on either column bearing the words LAKEVIEW MANOR ESTATES. The road was smooth asphalt, with a median strip planted with young redbud and dogwood trees.

“I’m surprised they don’t have them a little house here with some tight-ass guard ready to blow away any riffraff that comes along.”

Chrissy sniffed. “Riffraff ’s already got in. Funzi’n them ain’t exactly quality folks theirselves.”

Stella laughed softly. “Well said, darlin’. Okay, let’s see what we got.”

She cut the lights and rolled slowly down the road. After a hundred yards or so, the street curved gently to the left, and there in front of them lay the lake, shimmering in the moonlight.

It was so beautiful it made Stella’s chest tighten up. The little ripples on the water’s surface danced silver and black. The crescent moon was reflected in the water, a flickering slice of pale light. Stars had come out, just a smattering, and they sparkled their way down the horizon until it looked as if they were bits of sugar dusted down from some heavenly shaker.

Reluctantly, she turned away from the water. It wasn’t a night for beauty.

Up ahead she could see the lights of an enormous house, and beyond that another, and another.

“I’d drive on past,” Stella said, “check out the situation, but there’s no telling what Funzi’s got in the way of manpower up at this hour. If he’s got one of his guys outside on some sort of watch—”

She glanced at the dashboard clock. One fifteen. Late enough that presumably everyone but the insomniacs would be asleep for the night. If Funzi had someone posted outside the house, a car driving by at this hour would draw attention, putting them on alert.

“Tucker’s prob’ly been asleep for hours,” Chrissy said. “You know, Stella, don’t laugh, but I got a feeling that he’s right close by.”

Stella didn’t laugh. She eased the car over to the side of the road and let the engine idle, and considered Chrissy carefully. “Yeah, what do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know, I guess it sounds kind of dumb, but I get a sense about things sometimes. I just got this feeling, see?” She held up her hands, turned them over, and looked at her fingers. “Like a little tingly feeling. I can just—oh, Stella, I can just feel Tucker, you know, under my fingers, his little cheeks and his hair and his little baby butt when I hold him. I’m tellin’ you, he’s here.”

Stella took a slow, easy U-turn in the broad street, still well back from the first house, and drove slowly back to the gated entrance at the turnoff. Back on the main road, she drove a few moments until she found what she was looking for, a turn-in for farm vehicles, with a padlocked gate over a cattle guard. She parked off the road and cut the engine, then turned on the map light and looked at her partner.

“Well, honey girl, what’s this sixth sense of yours tell you about what we’re about to do?”

Chrissy put her fingers lightly to her face, tapping on her chin, and closed her eyes. She focused hard for a minute, her eyebrows knit in concentration, and then her eyes popped open.

“Oh!”

“What?”

“I don’t know—I had this, like, swirly feeling and then kind of a like a mini fireworks in my head.”

“Is that good?”

“I—I’m not sure. Yes. Wait. Yes, it’s good, I’m getting a good feeling, but there’s all this trouble first—that’s what I’m sensing.”

“Well, that sounds about right.”

Stella reached in the back seat for her backpack. She took out the flashlights again and handed one to Chrissy.

“You better reload,” she said. She dug in the backpack for the Makarov’s spare magazine. Stella slid the other one out expertly and replaced it, sending the slide home with a satisfying snap.

“This old piece turned out okay, I guess,” Chrissy said, tucking it back in the holster. “Thanks to Uncle Fred. So what’s the plan?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have much of one. Kind of goes like this: sneak in, don’t get caught, and get Tucker. Then we can get the hell out of here and call the sheriff.”

Chrissy put her hand on the door latch and nodded as if Stella had given her a detailed strategy. “Okay.”

She got out of the Jeep and Stella followed suit, slipping the backpack onto her sore shoulders. They kept off the street a few yards. On the lake side, there were clumps of cattails and the occasional stand of willows, which made for good cover, so Stella felt confident they wouldn’t be spotted even by someone on the street.

As they passed the first two houses, a motion light went on. She grabbed Chrissy’s arm and scrambled out of the illuminated arc, close to the bank that sloped down to the water.

They stood motionless for a few moments, waiting for a reaction from inside the house. Stella could feel Chrissy’s pulse, rapid and strong, through her sleeve. Her own heart was pounding just as fast. After a few minutes they ventured ahead, staying close to the bank of the lake. At the edge of Funzi’s lawn, they paused.

Ahead loomed the enormous house, three stories of pale stucco topped with a tile roof like it was in the middle of the damn Mediterranean. There were arched windows all along the back of the house, and sets of French doors, and little balconies sticking out from the upstairs rooms, like some kind of Romeo and Juliet stage set. Stella was a little surprised to see that some of the windows were open; she expected them to have the air-conditioning blasting on a night as hot as this.

Stella glanced at Chrissy and saw that she had drawn the Makarov and held it ready, her hands steady.

“Thinking about dogs?” she whispered.

“Hell, yes.”

“Maybe the Angelinis aren’t pet people.”

In answer Chrissy only snorted.

“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Stella said. “The place has got to be alarmed every which way, right? We try to break in, even through a screen, they’ll be on us before we have time to turn around. Plus they’ll have the advantage of knowing exactly where we are.”

“Yeah… so?”

“What we need is, we need one of them to come out. Then I figure it’s a fair fight.”

Chrissy scratched her chin with her free hand and gave Stella a quizzical look. “Well, how are you gonna manage that? Ring the doorbell? Pretend you brung ’em a pizza?”

Searching for ideas, Stella looked carefully from the vine-covered trellis that ran from the front overhang along the side of the house, around to the back where a wooden pergola had been built over a huge tiled patio. Extending out from the patio, a stone path bisected the backyard, continuing to a set of steps that led down to the water, where a number of boats were docked.

She briefly considered climbing up the trellis to the second floor, where she figured the master bedroom faced out over the water. It would be possible to get from the trellis to the balcony, and it looked like the French doors were open, so she could slip into the room, possibly surprising Funzi and his wife in their sleep, getting a gun on them before they had time to react.

It would be possible… if she were Tarzan. She doubted the trellis would hold her weight, and even if it did, climbing the wooden structure was a little different from the climbing wall she occasionally worked out on at the gym.

She studied the pergola. It had no hand-or footholds, and the vine on it was still young, its strands thin and weak. No help there.

So she wasn’t going to be able to get in. There had to be a way to get someone to come out. Some way to cause a distraction in the backyard so that someone investigating would leave the door open behind him, letting one