“Hah, got it,” he muttered now, clicking the mouse a couple of times and then snapping off the computer. “It’s only a couple miles from here. If we’re lucky, he’ll be home, getting ready for class. Only, if he really took your boy, I’m not sure how you’re gonna get him to answer the door.”
“You forget,” Stella said grimly, taking a deep breath and heaving herself off the stool. “You’re working with a pro now.”
Chapter Ten
As they retraced their steps to the car, Stella noticed a few sleepy-looking folks wandering into the building, suggesting it must be close to class time. These future plastic surgeons sure weren’t what Stella expected. Her experience with practitioners of the discipline was limited to the improbably hot and well-dressed guys on Nip/Tuck, but these students were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, athletic wear and sneakers. Some looked even younger than Noelle and Chrissy; others were a bit longer in the tooth. None of them gave Chip and Stella any notice as they wove their way through the halls.
Stella lowered her voice while she walked. “Look here,” she said carefully. “You know some things about me now that Gracellen don’t even know, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way.”
“You mean like the fact that you carry a gun and all?”
“Well, sure, that, for a start. But there’s a little more to it. I, uh … well, I have a friend in law enforcement. A good friend, really, and he’s let me do the citizen’s police academy kind of on a, what do you call it, like an unofficial basis.”
“What, you mean you do ride-arounds and stuff?”
“Kind of,” Stella hedged, “and, you know, target practice and some, well, martial arts training, self-defense, that kind of thing.”
It was true that she’d taken up studying martial arts, though it didn’t come naturally to her. The whole focus on serenity, the centering and breathing and focusing, wasn’t really in line with the middle-aged irritability she carried around.
Still, she needed to get the point across to Chip that if they happened to stumble into any dangerous situations, she was probably a better bet than he was, and he needed to set aside any notions of gallantry he might be burdened with and get out of her way.
“Well, that’s great, Auntie Stella,” Chip said, distracted, as they reached the truck.
“What I’m trying to say is, seeing as we don’t have a lot of time here and we need to get some information out of this guy as quickly and efficiently as we can, how about if you let me take the lead?”
Chip regarded her doubtfully. “I don’t know, Stella. I mean it’s cool and all that you’re learning new things and staying in shape, but you are, like, Gracellen’s age and, no offense, if things get weird in there, if he doesn’t feel like talking, well, I’m not sure you really want to be in a situation where a big guy—I mean, Stella, he’s six feet easy—if you want to be going up against that.”
Stella took a breath and held it. She got herself underestimated every day, and it never failed to irritate her, but she tried to keep in mind that this was a simple case of Chip not having all the facts.
It would be easier to show him, though, than to try to convince him.
“Tell you what,” she said, “how about I give it a shot when we get there. If it looks like I can’t handle him, why, there you are to back me up. Deal?”
Chip hesitated, but in the end his basic good manners got the best of him. “Deal,” he said, and Stella nodded with satisfaction and blew past the sleepy streets of Smythe for the third time in twelve hours.
* * *
“Let’s go slow here, Chip,” Stella suggested when they got to the wood-sided house, a holdover from the seventies when “Aspen style” meant nailing cedar boards at an angle and wearing boots made out of yak. It and a couple dozen similar houses were tucked into a neighborhood thick with tall evergreens.
She parked behind a slick little black SUV that sat at a rakish angle in the drive leading up to the house. Bumper stickers plastered to the back declared FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FARMED SALMON and EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO US, WE BELONG TO EARTH.
“These med students,” Stella asked, curious. “They get paid while they’re still in the practicing stages?”
Chip shrugged. “I don’t think so. Not much, anyway. Most of ’em live in dumps here and there, share apartments, rent rooms in houses, that sort of thing. I guess Doug is kind of the exception.”
“Why don’t you hang here a minute,” Stella said. “Let me just check out the back.”
“Check out the who?”
“You know, figure out what-all options this guy has for getting away in a hurry, if he has in mind to run out on us.”
“This one of your citizen police academy things?” Chip asked with a roll of his eyes.
Stella gritted her teeth as she jogged around the back. The house had a nice covered cedar patio that overlooked a wooded area, and she had to admit that the architecture, dated though it was, had a ski lodge sort of appeal. A bicycle hung from a complicated hook arrangement bolted to the overhang, and a wheeled device leaned against the wall, about twice as long as a skateboard and a bit wider, tapered at one end. She would have guessed it belonged to a neighborhood kid except that she’d seen enough of these types hanging around the state college at Harrisonville to know better: She’d lay odds that this was the latest thing in transporting oneself around campus, made with only the most sustainable, environment-friendliest, expensive materials and technology available on the market.
Why, the entire place looked like a page from a catalog Noelle got in the mail, where you could pay five times as much for a jacket made out of soda bottles as you could for the same thing at Walmart, except for a little logo on the front so everyone would know you didn’t bust up a nest of endangered ducks or chop down any old-growth forests in the process. There wasn’t a huge earth muffin crowd in Prosper yet, but in addition to the ones in Harrisonville, Stella had noticed a nest of them over in Coffey, and whenever business took Stella up to Independence, it seemed like the ground was thick with ’em.
It wasn’t that Stella had anything against the eco-happy crowd. Hell, she dutifully sorted her recycling and bought the organic stuff if it was on sale and used eggshells and Ivory dish soap to keep the pests under control instead of the poison in the cans. She hoped as much as anyone to leave a tidy, healthy planet for any grandchildren she might one day have. Only, the way she saw it there were a number of holes in the logic spouted by some among the earth-saving crew. For instance, she thought as she peered in the back window of the house into the kitchen and noticed an expensive-looking canvas jacket slung over a chair and a couple of pairs of shoes—the kind made out of colorful woven straps and cork and who knows what else and cost more than an entire closet full of Naturalizer sandals—if they slowed down on the purchasing of rafts of hippie fashions and accessories and instead wore the perfectly good clothes they bought a few years ago, that would be a whole lot of manufacturing power that could be saved. Even when you made shirts out of hemp or alfalfa or old tires or whatever, you had to figure there was a factory somewhere using up energy and belching out manufacturing by-products, and according to Stella’s math that was still a check in the negative column even if every person who drew their paycheck at the factory planted a tree on their way home and composted their nail clippings and ate raw wheat berries for lunch.
And big toy skateboards for grown-ups? Stella shook her head with disgust.
Back in front of the house, Chip was drumming his fingers impatiently on the little hybrid SUV’s hood. Stella tutted under her breath. Noelle had recently bought a hybrid, but only because she’d driven her prior car into the ground. Yuppie folks who protested rain-forest butchering and white flour but drove a brand-new car every few years—Stella wouldn’t mind giving them a piece of her mind either.
“You know, Chip, down in Cuba they’re still driving cars made before you were born.”
Chip blinked, confused. “Uh…”
>
“Yeah, no one’s bought a new car there in like forty years. They make parts out of melted beer cans and old radio components and stuff and they keep that fleet running—I saw a show about it on TV. You ever think about how much shit we could keep out of the landfills if we just fixed it now and then and kept on using it?”
“How does…”
“Like for instance, the stove in my house used to be my mom’s. It was built in 1959 and it works fine, but you go on over to the Home Depot and they got them four-thousand-dollar ranges all lined up and none of ’em with more than a year or two warranty. Then when they break they tell you it’s gonna be cheaper to get a new one than fix the one you have. That make sense to you?”
“But what…”
“Never mind. Just thinking out loud. Hang on, give me a sec here.”
Stella reached into the backseat and grabbed a couple of her smaller Tupperware containers, the contents clanking around inside. She tucked them into a mesh bag she’d lifted from the Green Foods up in Independence for that purpose—yet another brilliant idea from the eco-nuts, manufacture bags to haul groceries around in as though every household in America didn’t already have half a dozen gym bags and sewing totes and advertising freebies lying around. Then she and Chip tromped up to the door, not bothering with stealth.
Within moments of her knocking, the door opened and a bleary-eyed, shaggy-haired, handsome young man stood blinking in the sun, pulling a T-shirt over his bare chest. He was wearing what appeared to be ladies’ drawstring pants in a shade somewhere between taupe and brown. Around his wrist he wore what looked like a friendship bracelet made by a Girl Scout who’d run out of ribbon and used her dad’s boot laces and dental floss instead.
“Hey,” he said, covering up a yawn. “Good morning. What can I do for you?”
“I was just wondering if we could have a few minutes of your time,” Stella said. “I’m Dora Whitney and this is my associate, Caleb Gomez. We’re speaking with people who have supported sustainability initiatives in the past, about a new threat to the fragile ecosystem of, uh, midsouthern Wisconsin.”
“Um, sure…” Doug said, rooting around in the sagging pocket of his lady-pants and digging out an iPhone. He thumbed it and squinted at the display. “Yeah, I got a few minutes before I need to get motivated. Come on in, I just put on some coffee. It’s Nicaraguan fair trade.”
Stella winked at Chip, who looked like he was about to object, and followed Doug into the house, through a nicely furnished living room into the kitchen. The coffee smelled wonderful, so it was a great disappointment to see that there was very little of it, slowly dripping through what looked like a science lab experiment beaker.
“It’s French press,” Doug said, getting three dainty cups down from a cabinet. Stella noted to herself that all her favorite men—her dad when he was alive, Goat, BJ, Jelloman—drank coffee out of big mugs and didn’t stint. Man mugs, you might say.
“Nice dishwasher,” she said.
“Oh yeah, it’s a Miele. Crazy good, the lowest water usage you can get. So anyway, what have you guys got?”
“It’s the green-bellied saw beetle,” Stella said. “Practically extinct in this county. Let me just…”
She opened her Tupperware and removed a couple of items. “I can do a simple re-creation for you of the, um, effects on the, er, strata of sustainability. It’s the best way to show it. I mean, so dramatic. Say that your floor—what is this, anyway?” she asked, noting the unusual grain of the polished floor.
“Oh, that’s bamboo! Totally sustainable. I had the tile ripped out, it was like this seventies gold color? Really wrong, man.”
“Uh-huh. Well, anyway, say that the floor is, you know, the planetary mantle.”
She ignored Chip, who was looking at her as though she were deranged, and knelt down on the floor.
“Here, come on down with me.”
Doug obliged, evidently without a second thought. Hard to fault the boy for his enthusiasm or good nature.
“Now right here in the middle of the table leg, say that’s the loam. That’s where the green-eyed beetle nests, and—”
“Bellied,” Doug said. “Didn’t you say, green-bellied beetle?”
Stella blinked. “Yes. Yes! The thing is, that whole damn beetle is green. Everything, from the little feelers to the wings to the tail, all green. Part of our research is into its, uh, pigmentation. But anyway, so here it is nesting in its loam…” She waved her hands at chest level and then wrapped them around the brace attaching the leg to the tabletop. “And then the beetle rises up on the cottonwood shrub, to a branch. Here, put your hands on the branch there…”
To her amusement, Doug didn’t hesitate but wrapped his hands—nice ones, strong and long-fingered and sprouting a bit of nice dark hair at the knuckles, which went a long way toward countering the emasculating effects of his unfortunate pants—around the brace.
“Yeah, like that. And then comes the threat, the thing we are here to talk to you about today, the completely terrible…”
While she rambled, she opened the zip cuffs and then slipped them quickly onto Doug’s wrists, looping them through the triangular space made by the brace. In a matter of seconds he was shackled to the table.
“There,” Stella said cheerfully. “Now excuse me, if you don’t mind—when I stand up these here knees of mine are liable to make a variety of unwholesome sounds, but that’s just middle age for you. Which I guess you know all about, being a man of medicine and all.”
She stood in stages, crackling and popping. A series of squats that she had added into her cardio regimen had given her some temporary soreness while her muscles registered their surprise and irritation over the novel moves.
“I don’t get it, man,” Doug said, as Stella sat down in the chair and snapped the top back on her Tupperware. In the other box she had a small handheld battery-powered prod and a nice set of Crown chisels, but she was hoping that she wouldn’t need them today. Instead, she reached in the purse for her SIG and laid it on the table. No need to go waving it around just yet—she was guessing that just the suggestion of violence would be enough to put this tree hugger into a state of cooperation.
To her mild disappointment, he merely regarded her with wounded surprise.
“Aw, man, you’re here to rob me? Not cool. Not cool at all.”
“No, Doug, we’re not here to rob you,” Stella said. “You ain’t really got anything I need. I mean, I’m sure you get a ton of use out of that six-burner stove of yours, cooking up your barley and dandelion greens and all, but I don’t really have room for it. Plus I already got a friend with a skateboard, which I imagine he’d lend me anytime I want.”
“You don’t even recognize me, do you?” Chip asked, with an aggrieved note in his voice. “I’m the dude that takes care of the labs. I’ve seen you like, half a dozen times.”
Stella turned to Chip impatiently. “You might want to stop there,” she said. “Usually in these circumstances we try to limit what-all we tell the person we’ve just tied up about ourselves.”
“And you,” Chip said severely. “I think you’ve been holding out on me, Aunt Stella. I don’t believe most ladies your age tote handcuffs around with them in the car. Does Gracellen know about this?”
Stella paused and fixed Chip with a baleful glare. “Let’s get one thing straight here right now, Chip. Your stepmom sent me up here to help you, and that’s what I aim to do. But I’m not about to have an ex-con gambler who I’ve known since you had braces and that unfortunate mullet passing judgment on me. Yes, there are … things … that I do that my sister knows nothing about, and if you want my help—and lemme tell you, from what I seen here the answer to that is a pretty clear ‘yes ma’am’ ’cause it don’t appear you and Natalya got the juice to do much of anything ’cept fuck things up more than they already were—so anyway, if you want my help, you keep your opinions to yourself and you keep everything you see—every word I say, every move I make—in the vau
lt. As in, secrets that die with you.”
She had been getting more and more worked up while delivering this impassioned speech. Her face was warm, and little dots of sweat had popped out along her forehead. Heck, it was more effort to get Chip up to speed than it had been to subdue the eco-cowboy cowering on the floor.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do now,” Stella said to Doug, after taking a calming breath or two. “Chip and I are going to ask you some questions. You answer straight the first time, it stops there. You give me any shit, or give me cause to think you’re lyin’, I’m gonna make you regret it. And let me add just one more thing. You look at me, you see a nice middle-aged lady with a few pounds to lose, right?”
Doug gave her a goggle-eyed stare that took in her elastic-waist yoga pants, her comfy sandals with the gel soles, and her easy-care faux-wrap top with the decorative stitching around the neckline. He took a closer look at her face, which Stella knew was not at its finest, since she hadn’t managed anything more than a quick splash with cold water in Chip and Natalya’s bathroom, and a swipe of lip gloss.
He grunted in affirmation.
“Well, that’s what I am, I guess—but there’s a little more to me than that. I’ve got like a graduate degree in hurtin’ people. I know all about pain and how to lay it on folks who deserve it, and I know how to do it so’s it don’t leave any evidence.”
Doug’s eyes widened with doubt, but he stayed scared looking.
A Bad Day for Mercy Page 9