A Bad Day for Sorry

wait for Donny Calabasas to give him the go-ahead.”

“Why’d you all lie to Patrick and Beez?”

Roy Dean blinked, his brow furrowing. “How do you know Patrick?”

“We’re old friends. Quilting bees.”

“Fuck you, Stella. Anyway, we didn’t lie, we just couldn’t tell ’em until Funzi sent proof back up to Donny it was done.” Roy Dean giggled, looking like a little boy caught with a cookie. “We sent up Reggie’s hand that had the spider tattoo—that was my idea.”

“Brilliant,” Stella said. “Sure seems like there was a lot of ‘we’ in that story. How come Funzi’s trusting you all of a sudden? The way I heard it, you were skimming off your own deliveries. You were cheating Funzi, too.”

“I wasn’t.” Roy Dean reddened with anger, and the gun wavered in his hands. Stella was tempted to reach out and grab the barrel, take her chances with him getting off a wild shot, but he stood just out of reach. “I paid my debt,” he finally spat. “And that was all mostly just a misunderstanding anyway. What Rollieri did—now that was just wrong. Funzi couldn’t let that go.”

“You didn’t pay anything,” Stella protested, enraged. “You gave away a baby that wasn’t even yours. A baby. How could you do that—even a scum-sucking bottom-dweller like you?”

“Hey, Chrissy ain’t fit to be a mother,” Roy Dean said, his watery eyes narrowing, a vein throbbing on his temple. “She’s no better’n a whore. It’s her as brought this down on herself.”

That was just the reminder Stella needed of Roy Dean’s essential worthlessness. Enraged, she screwed up her face into an expression of exquisite pain—not such a stretch, given the beating her fresh stitches and recent bruises had taken.

“Ohh,” she wailed, reaching a shaking hand down to her legs, which were bent beneath her. “I think you broke my ankle.”

Roy Dean danced from one foot to another. “Shut up, Stella, or I’ll waste you right here.”

But he hesitated—Stella could see him do it. Worthless human being that he was, he’d been right about one thing—he was no killer. He’d fallen for the old lady ruse, and that gave her just the fraction of a second, the opening that she needed. She gave one more weak moan for good measure and stumbled to her feet like she might collapse from the effort.

Roy Dean stutter-stepped out of the way, as though the thought of 180 pounds of AARP-eligible female falling on him was simply too much, and Stella recovered her balance at the last second and pushed off her left foot—pain shooting up into her bad hip—and swung the heavy piece of pot up around and smashed it against his forehead.

Roy Dean went down without even a grunt, collapsing into an awkward pile of splayed limbs, his head bouncing off the slate patio with a thud Stella could feel through her feet.

“Ouch,” she exclaimed. That would have hurt plenty, if Roy Dean wasn’t already out.

Stella took her gun out of his hand, his fingers twitching slightly as she pried them off the grip. She jammed the Ruger back in the holster and dusted off her knees, and then, before she straightened up, she put two fingers to Roy Dean’s neck, finding a fluttery pulse.

“You know what your mistake was,” Stella whispered, backing away. “You hesitated. You thought you had me because you’re young. But badass comes in all ages.”

She spun toward the house, her heart pounding from exertion as well as fear. How long had her encounter with Roy Dean taken? Three minutes? Four? It was miraculous that no one had come out to check on him. Stella opened the door and slipped into the house, flattening herself against the wall to the right of the door and swinging her gun arm to the left and the right, trying to adjust to the dark of the room. The only light came from under the counters in the colossal kitchen that opened up to the left of the family room.

A hall led from the far side of the family room straight through the center of the house, and Stella could see that the front door was open up ahead. Someone—Funzi or his wife or Beez—must have gone to check out front. When they didn’t find anything amiss, they would circle around to the back—and find Roy Dean laid out cold.

Stella darted down the hall toward an ornate staircase on the right, an enormous wood-railed affair that curved upward. She grabbed the rail and hauled herself up the stairs, trying to keep her steps light, but thoughts of Chrissy and Tucker propelled her forward. At the top of the stairs she could see a darkened bathroom with its door ajar, and she dove across the hallway and into the bath, skidding on the polished marble floor, and went into a crouch facing out to the hall.

Cautiously, she peered out: the hall was empty. To the left it opened into a huge loft room dominated by a big sectional sofa, the floor littered with electronics: a PlayStation and Wii controls and a plastic guitar, plus stacks of DVD cases and some crumpled soda cans.

To the right, the hall stretched twenty feet and ended at a set of carved double doors. These were open a fraction of an inch, not wide enough to see anything inside. Along the hall on either side were other doors, all closed, leading to bedrooms, no doubt, and possibly more bathrooms.

Shit. Each of those doors presented a threat. Each one of them could have someone on the other side, poised and ready to shoot. Not to mention whoever was outside, who at any moment would come tearing back up the stairs.

Sweating and hyperventilating, Stella, counted the doors to the right. Five, not including the master.

The wife was probably still in the master bedroom, Stella thought, unless she’d run to the baby when the alarm first went off. Would she do that? Would the last few days with Tucker have been enough to make her start thinking like a mother?

Stella ran that scenario through her mind. If Chrissy had managed to get up here fast enough, if she found the nursery right away, maybe got there at the same moment as Funzi’s wife—Stella had no doubt about who’d prevail in that conflict—or maybe been lucky enough to get in and out before anyone discovered her… was there any chance that Chrissy could have made her way back down the stairs and out the front door with Tucker? Could she be back at the Jeep already, putting it into gear and roaring back out onto the highway?

As Stella considered this hopeful possibility, she heard a sound from one of the doors on the right side of the hallway, a footstep or something heavy being moved. She realized her hopes were wildly unrealistic: Chrissy hadn’t got away. If she had managed to grab Tucker, Funzi and Beez would be in pursuit, the wife hysterical. Instead, they’d shut themselves in the rooms—and they had Chrissy and the baby with them.

Her instincts propelled her, and she burst out of the bathroom and across the hall and into the door, smashing into it with all her force.

It wasn’t locked, and she went flying into the room, knocking into a bed frame, her shins slamming painfully against the brass, her gut jarring against the rail. Staggering back, with nausea rocketing through her, she noticed the other person in the room.

Stella thought for a moment she was staring at a ghost, illuminated by a dainty ceramic lamp on a bedside table. Wearing a nightgown of sheer flower-sprigged cotton, an impossibly thin woman with lifeless blond hair hanging down past her shoulders stood hugging her arms to herself. Her eyes were rimmed red, with huge purple circles underneath. She looked terrified.

But Stella knew better—appearances could be deceiving.

She seized the woman’s arm and twisted it behind her back, doubling her over. She trained her gun on the woman’s head, pressing the barrel to her forehead. The woman made a small mewling sound, like a kicked puppy, but didn’t protest further.

“Where’s the baby?” Stella demanded.

The only sound the woman made was a strangled sob, and Stella yanked harder. She heard something pop in the area of the woman’s shoulder.

The woman screamed.

A thundering sound came from down the hall, and a bulky figure burst into the room, coming to a lurching halt in front of Stella. Funzi. The man who’d watched from the comfort of a park bench while his goons beat the shit out of her. A doughy man in his late forties, he wore striped cotton pajamas, thick black chest hair peeking out of the V neckline. His hair was slicked back on top of his head, in the style of a fifties crooner.

The gun he had trained on her made their entire cache of weapons look like toys from a cereal box. Stella figured it for a streetsweeper, a fully automatic shotgun that could shoot six hundred rounds a minute.

“I’ll shoot her,” she yelled.