A Bad Day for Sorry

detectors were out of batteries—they were always going on about that on the news, how people let their batteries run down and ended up cooked in their beds.

Or what if the fire just took off and sent the whole house up in a ball of flame? Unlikely; they probably coated that Styrofoam stucco with the stuff they made kids’ pajamas out of before the house got a coat of paint.

What if they all came out—Funzi and his wife and Beez. That would be three against two, and then—

Stella forced herself to stop. That kind of thinking wasn’t going to help.

She zipped the backpack shut and slipped it on her shoulders. The pain and fatigue she had been feeling earlier was gone, replaced by a nervous tension that hummed through her whole body.

Chrissy snapped the phone shut and slipped it into her pocket. “Well, what’re ya waiting for?” she demanded.

“Right,” Stella muttered, and flicked her Bic.

She held the flame down to the trim around the window, and there was a sputtering and a strong smell of burning chemicals, but no fire. Stella realized she was holding her breath as her fingertips grew increasingly hot. Right when she thought she was going to have to drop the lighter, a tiny lick of flame went up and over the edge of the painted wooden trim and spread its way down the board. A fraction of an inch at first, and then another one… and then in a whoosh a finger of flame tracked down a rivulet of gasoline that dripped from the stucco and grew into a sizable flame.

“I think we’re in business,” Stella said.

She stepped back and slid the lighter into her pocket. She grabbed Chrissy’s hand and led her away from the growing fire. Chrissy gave her a businesslike nod and sprinted to the back porch, where she took up position on the side of the door, flattened against the house, gun hand bent at the elbow, looking plenty ready to blow the head off anyone who even looked at her sideways.

Stella took the other side of the door, copying Chrissy’s stance, the Ruger drawn and ready. Her fingers felt faintly sweaty on the warm ivory grip, and her heart was keeping up a pretty good pace.

It felt like an hour, but Stella guessed it was another three or four minutes before the flame spread itself out along the trail of gasoline that had dribbled down to the base of the house’s siding, and was burning well in the dried vegetation. The fire leapt along a stretch of wall, growing taller by the second. Flames licked at the bottom of the second-story windows, and the smell of smoke was thick.

Chrissy coughed gently and Stella put her sleeve up to her nose, breathing through the fabric.

Then they heard the bleep of the fire alarm from inside the house.

The thought that came unexpectedly to Stella’s mind was: cooking. That damn alarm that Ollie had installed right in the middle of the kitchen, after Stella tried to convince him to put it in the hall, like it said to do on the box—but you couldn’t tell the man anything.

The thing would go off whenever Stella sauteed or fried or even baked a pizza, and Ollie would come stand in the door, scratching his belly and demanding, “Burning something again?”

Hell, yeah, she was burning something, Stella thought. Almost wished the fucker was there to see it for himself.

Inside, Stella heard someone knocking around upstairs, and imagined Funzi and the other men lurching out of bedrooms, bleary with sleep, looking around and trying to figure out what was on fire.

Probably wondering if it was a false alarm, or if they’d left a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray or a pan of Bagel Bites in the oven.

Above her a window was suddenly yanked open.

“Holy fuck, Marie, there’s a damn fire out back of the house!”

Stella shrank as close to the house as she could manage, praying that whoever was looking out—Funzi, presumably—wouldn’t look down and see her there. There was a growing cloud of thick smoke, swirling blackened bits of charred crap through the air, and she struggled not to cough, the air acrid and poisonous even through the soft fabric of her shirt.

She felt, rather than heard, the reverberations of feet running along the hallway upstairs. A couple of moments later there was a sharp percussive slap on the inside of the door they were guarding, and then the sounds of someone rattling the knob, throwing the bolt.

Stella stared straight into Chrissy’s eyes and was comforted to see that the girl looked just as unafraid and determined as she had a few minutes earlier. She turned back to the door as it sprang open—and nearly fainted from shock.

The man who came bursting out of the house was Roy Dean Shaw.

EIGHT

Roy Dean wore boxer shorts and a muscle T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and while there was little evidence of his having been recently dismembered and burned, he was far from a robust-looking specimen of humanity. His greasy brown hair lay flat on one side of his head and stuck straight out on the other, his pale sloped shoulders were pocked with acne scabs, and his narrow eyes were bloodshot.

“You bastard!” Chrissy yelped. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

“Don’t worry about him, just get on in there,” Stella said, giving the girl a shove, and Chrissy slipped past him into the house.

Roy Dean started to wheel in a circle toward the flames, his feet scrambling on the ground. It was kind of comical, like a cartoon of Wile E. Coyote when he ran off a cliff, legs pinwheeling for a moment in midair before he fell.

Stella took one big step toward him and raised her gun hand, realizing just in time that the trajectory of his out-stretched arm was going to connect about at her wrist, knocking the Ruger out of her grip.

She pivoted forward instead so that Roy Dean connected full on with her, his whole mass slamming into her torso at full speed. The impact knocked her back, and she could feel it in her bones, in her teeth, but it stopped him coming and he tripped and fell forward on top of her, arms flailing.

No gun.

Roy Dean had no gun—that was Stella’s thought as she rolled away from him, tipping a stone planter off its base, the broken shards cutting into her flesh as she scrambled out of the way.

Then she realized that she didn’t have a gun either as she watched the Ruger skitter across the slick patio surface toward the lawn.

For a second her eyes locked on Roy Dean’s homely face above her. There were red lines in his flesh from his pillow, and she could smell his breath and sweat, and then he pushed off her, propelling his body along the ground toward her gun. He managed to grab it and had it up and trained on her in what seemed like half a second.

“Bet you’re wishing you’d been a little nicer to me now, aintcha,” he said, leering.

Stella felt her heart lurch: she’d let Roy Dean take her gun like he was taking a lollipop from a baby. Chrissy had made it inside, but now she was on her own, and after Roy Dean shot Stella he’d go right back inside and alert everyone else.

Chrissy didn’t have a chance.

The thought pissed Stella off mightily. She got to her knees, hair escaping the ponytail holder and falling in her face, obscuring her vision. Her hands scrabbled in the dark behind her, finding the largest piece of the pot, what was left of the bottom, with a thick layer of potting soil matted to it.

“Surprise, surprise, here you are back from the dead,” she said, stalling for time. “So who did you all kill in the shed?”

“Rollieri,” he said. “Who else? Only I didn’t kill him. I ain’t no killer. Funzi done that hisself.”

Stella thought back to what Patrick told them: Reggie’d gone back to the city. Funzi and Roy Dean and Rollieri were alone in the shed while Patrick and Beez waited outside. Funzi must have shot Rollieri instead of Roy Dean. But why?

“What’d he do, anyway?”

Roy Dean snorted. “He was skimming the take on the book. Funzi figured it out a while ago, but he had to