A Bad Day for Sorry

If they weren’t dead yet they would be soon but what good was it going to do with Chrissy dead and Stella shot twice shot twice oh shit how had she been so lucky for so long how had it worked out that a washed-up fucked-over dried-out shell of a disappointed woman had managed to keep it going as long as she had -

- and as her hands found the holes in her flesh, felt her own blood leaking out, heard her own whimpering, Stella knew the answer, knew it as sure as she’d known anything in her entire life:

- she’d had the luck of someone who just didn’t care, who didn’t much give a damn if she lived another day, who didn’t believe life had any more gifts to give her, who believed that death would be every bit as satisfying as rattling around that empty house, as waking up in the early morning hours and feeling loneliness like a huge weight pressing on her chest—

- and then she’d gone and done the one thing that she’d never thought she could do again—she had cared.

And caring was what had got her dead.

Sweet fucking irony. Stella fell down in degrees, feeling her strength ebb out as she grabbed for the bed frame, felt it slip out of her fingers, unable to hold on. She felt woozy, circling clouds of hot red in the outskirts of her vision.

There was no more movement from the men on the floor. With an effort that felt like it took about a year, Stella forced herself away from them, catching sight of Funzi’s staring eyes, no longer mean, just empty.

Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself to her forearms and looked over the bed.

Chrissy lay on her side, turned toward the wall away from Stella. Her cap had come off and her pale, curly hair spilled out prettily. Stella couldn’t see the wound from here. Couldn’t see the blood.

Stella dragged herself the rest of the way up, until she was almost sitting. The crime scene guys were going to have a field day in here—four bodies, all bleeding out. By the time the cops came, no one would be left to tell what happened. And Goat—would they call him? Was he going to have to see her like this, banged up and wearing the blood of too many other people? Was that going to be what he remembered years from now when somebody happened to mention her name in passing?

From somewhere in the vicinity of her heart, Stella thought no.

It was a small notion, but as she sat on Funzi’s floor with a couple of holes in her, it bloomed and grew until the word itself crowded out all her other thoughts and rang in her ears: No. It was too much. It was just too damn much. NO.

She’d been humiliated, beaten, taunted, and now shot, but no one, not even the entire Kansas City mob, was going to leave little Tucker motherless and take away Stella’s chance to get her hands on Sheriff Goat Jones on the same day.

“God… damn…,” she mouthed as she edged her way along the bed, pulling at the frame with her fingers, until the side-table phone was in reach.

It took a couple of tries to get the receiver off the base, and then Stella sank back down on the floor, exhausted from the effort of trying to stay upright. She brought the phone close to her face, and as the numbers swam blurrily, she tried to remember where the hell she’d left her reading glasses this time.

But she could see just well enough to press the buttons. It took a while, and she went slow, because she wasn’t sure she had the energy to do it twice if she messed up, but then she heard Goat’s voice, Goat’s sleepy deep sweet voice saying hello, and Stella closed her eyes and breathed through a smile:

“Come and get me, big boy.”

And then she let the clouds swirl on in.

NINE

When Stella woke up she didn’t open her eyes at first. Didn’t quite feel up to the job, with her head fuzzy as if it had been stuffed with fluffy cotton, and the rest of her body suspended in a kind of swimmy grogginess.

Then the pain made its appearance. What it lacked in immediacy, it made up for with sheer intensity. It felt as though there were a burning ember on the left side of her stomach, and a dull ache that radiated out from her shoulder. Her entire torso felt as if it had been stomped on by someone wearing heavy boots.

It took her only a few seconds to decide she wasn’t dead. Whatever the afterlife held, and Stella didn’t have any special convictions on the subject, she did believe that it probably wouldn’t include all this pain and sweaty nausea. But what really convinced her was the smell: a combination of industrial disinfectant, bleach, burned Salisbury steak, and an undercurrent of floral preservative.

Had to be the hospital again.

Goat must have come and got her. That thought sparkled into her brain like silvery glitter, bringing with it a little hoppity-skip sensation in her gut. She remembered dialing his number, but it had taken a long time.

Thoughts and images flashed by and Stella tried to seize them and make sense of them, but her thought processes seemed a bit compromised. No doubt they had her pumped up full of all kinds of drugs, which were preventing her from using all her powers of logic. But a few things stood out, now that she thought about it, like the fact that she’d been shot. Twice. And hadn’t she left most of her blood on the pale carpeting of Funzi’s lake house?

The scene came back to her in fits and starts until, after a dreamy little while, Stella remembered everything. She moved her fingers, under the hospital blanket, to her stomach, where the second bullet had slammed into her. Wasn’t all that surprised to find a thick layer of bandages. She tapped it experimentally and grimaced from the pain.

Hopefully they’d dug that sucker out. It, and its twin, lodged somewhere around her shoulder, a location that seemed like too much trouble to explore right now. Didn’t they leave the bullets in sometimes? Like if they were too close to an organ or something? Stella did not at all relish the thought of carrying around any souvenirs of the last few days.

Something to ask the doctor about.

Sighing, Stella opened her eyes. The left one seemed more eager than the right, but a little effort unstuck it, and she found herself looking around at a room very similar to the one she’d been in—what was it, two nights ago? It felt like a hundred years had gone by.

This time, Chrissy wouldn’t be arriving to spring her, a thought that made her heart hurt. She’d be all alone in her room in Sawyer County Regional Hospital, a place she’d visited dozens of times over the years. Funny how the humble act of everyday living brought her through the doors of this place from time to time: everything from Noelle’s stitches when she fell off a swing set, to Ollie’s emergency appendectomy, to friends’ and neighbors’ gallbladder surgeries and hysterectomies and cancers and strokes and basic human frailty.

But before this week, the only time she herself had been a patient was when Noelle was born. Almost three decades ago.

Stella remembered that the curtains had been yellow then, thick-woven polyester things, and the floor tiles had flecks of green in them, and the trays they brought the food on were turquoise plastic. She’d stayed three days, dozing and nursing and hobbling to the bathroom, marveling all the while at the tiny little life she’d brought into the world.

It had felt like a solo effort. Lots of men stayed in the waiting room during childbirth back then, but Ollie seemed uncomfortable not only with the baby’s arrival but with everything else about Noelle. He made only one appearance per day, hands in pockets, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably and staring out the window, declining to hold his daughter.

Back then, Stella’s room had a view of the parking lot. Now, her view was of the tops of trees, so she knew she’d scored a room on the other side of the hospital complex, the side that overlooked the little park where patients were taken in their wheelchairs to get some sun.

She was moving up in the world.

An IV cart stood next to the bed, with a line that led under the covers. Stella flexed her fingers—tried to, at any rate, but they were covered with something. She pulled her hands out from under the covers and saw that they