“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Funzi said, slow and deadly. “That you’d shoot Marie here. The question is, would it be worth it, for a chance to put a bullet in your brain?”
Stella’s finger on the gun twitched involuntarily, and she realized Funzi had just unwittingly saved his wife.
She couldn’t shoot the woman now, knowing that Marie’s own husband was willing to stand there and watch her die. There was the evidence of what mattered to him. There was the balance of power. There was a drama Stella had seen played out a few times too often.
She relaxed her grip on Marie Angelini’s arm, and the woman fell to the floor, whimpering with pain and clutching her arm. Stella pointed the Ruger at Funzi.
“You’ll take me out with that thing,” she said, voice hard, “but can you be sure I won’t get off a shot, too? I’m not a bad shot, and right now I’m sighting right up your hairy nostrils.”
Funzi laughed, a horrible sound laced with what sounded like genuine mirth. “Yeah, you might. And if you do, know what’ll happen next?”
Stella said nothing, dread growing in her gut; From down the hall she heard a huffing cry: Tucker.
“Beez, come on down here,” Funzi called. “Bring our guest.”
Funzi stepped lightly aside, never taking the gun off Stella, and a second later Chrissy’s battered face appeared in the doorway. She was being shoved along by a compact, muscular dark-haired man in his twenties who was wearing a T-shirt smudged with blood and a pair of cotton lounge pants with beer cans screen-printed on them.
Chrissy’s hands were bound behind her, and she’d taken a couple of good slugs to the face. One eye was rapidly swelling shut, and as she opened her mouth to speak, Stella could see that a couple of her front teeth had been broken off.
“You look about like I feel right now,” Stella said, trying to keep her voice from wavering, but the situation was impossible now. They were doomed.
Chrissy gave her a small nod, but her eyes glinted with fury. Down, Stella thought, but not out. There was still some fight left in the girl.
“Did you nail Roy Dean?” Chrissy asked, her voice thick and slurred through the busted teeth.
“Yeah, I did,” Stella said. Though a fat lot of good it was going to do. “I knocked him out. Now I’m gonna take down this jerk.”
“You shoot me, Beez here will put a bullet in your girl’s brain and then, depending how pissed off he is, he just might go put one in the kid, too.”
Chrissy went rigid at his words, her eyes wide, her muscles straining as she worked against her restraints. Her lips moved and she spat at Funzi; the bloody glob landed on his cheek. Marie whimpered from the floor.
Gus yanked upward on Chrissy’s restraints, making her gasp with pain, but she didn’t cry out. Funzi picked up a little decorative pillow from a chintz armchair and wiped Chrissy’s saliva slowly and deliberately from his face. Then he tossed the pillow to the floor.
“I think you’ll be sorry you did that,” he said. He turned to Stella. “Okay, you ugly sack of flesh, how ’bout you give me that gun and come along like a good little girl.”
Reluctantly, Stella lowered her gun and handed it to Funzi, who stuck it in a pocket of his lounge pants. He came forward and yanked her shirt up, revealing the empty holster below. He took it off her with a vicious yank and threw the thing in the corner of the room.
“What you got here?” he demanded, reaching down to her ankle holster. He pulled out the scissors and laughed, then tossed them in the corner, too. “What were you going to do, snip me to death?”
Stella focused her attention on Chrissy, never taking her eyes off the girl’s face. “How’s Tucker?” she asked quietly.
Chrissy nodded once, firmly. Good: so the boy was all right. For now.
She had to believe Funzi had been bluffing about shooting the kid, but it was too risky to try anything now. Especially given the odds: two large, armed, and muscular men against the two of them, unarmed and beat to shit.
“Get up, Marie,” Funzi growled to the woman on the floor. Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet.
Stella heard something. A faint sound, a wail that gradually got louder. A siren.
Someone had called the fire department. Or—was it possible?—maybe the next-door neighbors had been looking out their window and seen her struggle in the back of the house with Roy Dean. Maybe the cops were on their way. Suddenly, the idea of being arrested sounded pretty damn appealing, since it would mean Chrissy and Tucker’s safety.
Down the hall Tucker’s hiccuping whine escalated to a wailing cry. Chrissy bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut for a second.
“Beez,” Funzi barked. “Go see what happened to Roy Dean. I’ll deal with these two.”
Beez bolted from the room and down the stairs. Stella hoped Roy Dean had bled rivers from the gash on his forehead, a blood pool so big and wide the cops or fire rescue couldn’t miss it.
“In the room,” Funzi said to Chrissy, getting behind her and giving her a shove. The girl stumbled forward and sat down hard on the bed.
“You,” Funzi said to Stella. “Next to her.”
Stella sat down on the bed, close to Chrissy, and put her arm around the girl. “It’s okay,” she whispered fiercely.
Whether it was or not might be up in the air, but Chrissy leaned into the hug. “I know,” she whispered back. It clearly hurt to talk, given the hit she’d taken to the mouth.
“Marie, get your ass in gear and get the rope,” Funzi ordered his wife. “And the tape. Move!”
Holding her arm painfully to her side, Marie slipped past him without a word. The blood had drained from her face, leaving her skin white and lifeless, and Stella figured the shoulder was dislocated and hurting like a bitch.
Too damn bad.
Marie was back in moments with a coil of orange plastic rope looped over her good arm. She also held a roll of duct tape. Outside, the sirens had grown in volume until they were practically earsplitting; then, abruptly, they stopped. Stella heard men’s voices and the clop of heavy boots on the drive, a pounding on the front door—Beez must have shut the door when he went down to deal with Roy Dean.
Funzi took the rope from his wife and, with surprising speed, tied Stella’s hands behind her and then looped the rope through Chrissy’s arms and secured the ends of the rope to the bed frame.
“Marie, get that kid and shut him up for Christ’s sake,” Funzi said.
Marie backed out of the room, but at the doorway she hesitated.
“He has a name,” she said, her voice quiet but with a faint echo of something at the heart of it.
“Yeah. Alphonse junior. Now move your ass.”
“No,” Marie corrected him. “It’s
Stella felt Chrissy tense next to her, but before she could say anything, Funzi grabbed the roll of duct tape and tore off a huge strip. He slapped it across her mouth, winding the ends around her head a couple of times. Stella had to work hard to keep the panic from making her hyperventilate, and she breathed hard through her nose as Funzi repeated the process on Chrissy.
The pounding downstairs grew louder, and Stella willed the firefighters to break the door down, to come in primed for action—but instead she heard Beez’s voice, slightly winded, speaking calmly.
“Hey, guys. Thanks for coming out.”
“Sir, we have a report of a fire at this address.”
“Yeah. Yeah, damndest thing. I think I just got it put out. I’ve had the hose on it out back.”
Funzi stepped away from the bed and gave his handiwork a once-over. Stella glared at him as hard as she could. Funzi wiped his hands on his pants and straightened the collar of his polo shirt and shot her a thumbs-up before he disappeared around the corner.
Tucker’s cries had diminished to a cranky whimper, with a rhythmic pattern to it, and Stella figured Marie had picked him up and was bouncing him quiet, much as she’d done for Noelle all those years ago.
Of course, she’d never done it with a dislocated shoulder. Grudgingly, she raised her opinion of Marie a few notches.
“Gentlemen,” Funzi’s voice boomed heartily from downstairs. “So glad you all came out. Me’n my buddy here
