A Bad Day for Mercy

by Sophie Littlefield

“Great. So let’s get started, okay? Chip, you just jump on in if you got something extra to say. And pour me a cup a that coffee, will ya?”

  Stella took care of the basics first, more from curiosity than any particular bearing on the case. She learned that Doug was twenty-eight, that he’d grown up in Orange County and taken a year off after graduating from UCLA to backpack all over Nepal and Tibet and some other places she’d never even heard of, before entering medical school. He was single, and there were a couple of ladies he saw from time to time.

  “They know about each other?” Stella asked.

  “They—my schedule—I mean, everyone’s just keeping it loose,” Doug stammered. “I’m at the library around the clock anyway.”

  When you aren’t riding that two-thousand-dollar bike around, Stella thought darkly.

  “No time for a job, then.”

  Doug looked wounded. “The study of medicine is my job. Do you have any idea of the hours that we—”

  “So besides your basic med student allowance, you might say money’s tight. Got a steady check coming in from home?”

  Doug reddened. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business. I mean, you come in my house, you pretend you’re here for a good cause…”

  His voice petered out as Stella rooted around in the container and took out a small pair of needle-nose pliers and tested the tips with a flick of a fingernail, holding them up to the light and squinting at them. “Oh, it does pay to buy the very best tools you can afford,” she interrupted. “My dad taught me that.”

  There was a long silence while Stella waited for her performance to sink in. When Doug gulped and went a shade paler, Stella set the pliers on the table.

  “Those are more of what you might call a novelty than anything else. Good for detail work, I guess, but I got a lot more serious equipment out in the truck. So let’s try again. Money from home?”

  “Yes,” Doug said. “Like just about every other intern I know, I get a little bit of help from home.”

  “But I’m guessing it’s not enough to cover your, uh, expenses. Am I right? What’d these renovations set you back, anyway? I mean, I’ve seen bamboo growing along the edge of the creek for free, but I wouldn’t know how to cut it down and install it myself, I reckon that takes a specialist. And all these fancy appliances, and the toys on your back porch—that’s got to add up.”

  Doug frowned, his bottom lip trembling.

  “Look, Doug, pal, I could take all day making you cough up the details, but I’m on a schedule here, so let’s cut to the chase. You’re broke, you’re on the lookout for an opportunity to make some cash. Some of your friends are no doubt selling scrips on the side”—Stella had learned about that gig firsthand when she tangled with a murdering pill-vending crooked doc last fall—“but a nice young man like you, I don’t see you going that route. ’Cause you’re principled. I can see you care deeply about the world, about people, right? So when a fella comes along offering to pay you to do exactly what you’re supposed to be learning anyway, hands you an opportunity to improve your handiwork on a live patient rather than just a head on a tray—why, that had to be an easy jump, right? I mean, who could blame you for taking a short view on the risks and returns. It’s just a few shots here and there. And word of mouth, maybe you were banking on this lady telling her friends and soon you’d have a whole party circuit going like they do in the big city, ladies drinking chardonnay and writing checks while the handsome doctor lines them up for a little light work in the hostess’s kitchen.”

  Doug’s mouth had fallen open, and real fear had replaced his indignant expression.

  “Only … when things go a little sideways, when a patient has an unfortunate reaction, the kind of thing you might have been able to prevent if you’d done everything the way the real doctors do it—when she ends up puffed up like a trout who had a stroke—sorry, Chip—that little sideline gets shut down fast. Am I right?’

  Doug didn’t respond, but Chip’s face darkened with anger and he looked like he was about to jump in with comments and suggestions of his own. Stella rolled right over him—second opinions weren’t helpful in situations like this.

  “And you suck it up and decide you’ll have to go back to the bank of Mom and Dad, like you should’ve in the first place, only unbeknownst to you, the gentleman who retained your services is one very, very unsatisfied customer. Benton Parch, you remember him?”

  “I—I never knew his name,” Doug said. “It was a cash transaction.”

  “Cash—like, he was wanting his cash back, right? How much did you stick him for, anyway?”

  “Look, I told him I’d get it for him, if he’d just be reasonable, but he didn’t want to wait, and he wanted me to pay extra. Like, way extra. Called it punitive damages. I mean, nobody’s sorrier than me about what happened to, to the lady, but it might—I mean, it probably, in a few months that swelling’s going to take care of itself and that texture’s going to improve and I don’t see where, I mean where am I going to get my hands on fifteen thousand dollars?”

  “Where, indeed,” Stella said drily, letting her gaze travel from the expensive appliances to the man’s shoes, which she would bet cost more than all of hers put together.

  “I know, right?”

  “So he starts talking about going to the authorities. About exposing you. And then what’s going to happen—you’ll be tossed out of the program in a heartbeat, I imagine. Far as I know, doctors aren’t supposed to start getting crooked until they’ve been in the business for a while.”

  Doug shook his head. “He never said—he only wanted his money. I said I’d try to get it, I am getting it, it’s just … it’s taking longer than I thought. I have to, uh, my dad, he’s gonna come around, I just have to explain it in a way he can understand.”

  “Your dad won’t give you the money, is that it?” Stella demanded. “He’s tired of buying skateboards and gourmet coffee for his grown son, figures it’s time you learn a lesson?”

  “Look, if this, this guy Parch sent you, you tell him I’m good for it. End of the week, I know I can have the money wired by then. Or look, I can send along collateral. I got stuff—my watch, that’s worth almost what I owe him. Hell, I’ll give you the keys to my car.”

  “Nice try,” Stella said. “You’re a first-rate actor, Doug. Maybe you should consider that line of work, in fact, seein’ as you’re kind of a butterfingers in the operating room. Only you and I both know that Benton isn’t waiting around to get his money back anymore. You took care of that, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Doug wailed.

  “Luckily, I know just how to make sure,” Stella said softly. “Chip, honey, I need you to go wait in the truck.”

  Chip needed a little convincing before he agreed to leave them alone, but once he did, it didn’t take too long for Stella to get what she needed out of the young man on the floor. A few rounds with a basic C-clamp and a little horsehair crop led her to believe that he really hadn’t done anything to Benton, who he truly did intend to reimburse.

  Stella had become a sort of truth machine, more reliable than any lie detector or serum that she was aware of, and she’d refined her art to the point that she was a master of the light touch. She did only what was needed and no more, so that when she was finished with Doug he was a blubbering, babbling, pants-wetting shadow of his former self, but his injuries were nothing that a couple of days on the couch with a gallon of ice cream wouldn’t fix.

  Not only had he not taken Todd, however, he had never been to Chip’s house, didn’t even know where it was.

  “I’m sorry this was a dead end,” Stella said tightly, as she snipped his restraints and packed up her supplies. “Sorrier than you know. Now, you remember what I told you? Tell me all four things.”

  “I’ll never discuss what happened here with anyone as long as I live,” Doug snuffled, rubbing his wrists and wiping his nose on the shoulder of his T-shirt.

  “
That’s good,” Stella said. “What else?”

  “No more practicing on people until I have my degree.”

  “And?”

  “If I come upon any information about Benton Parch or Todd Groffe, even if it seems unimportant to me, I will call you immediately and I won’t discuss it with anyone else.”

  “Excellent! One more, Junior, and we can call it a day.”

  Doug hesitated, staring at the table and hanging his head.

  “Come on, Doug,” Stella cajoled gently, snapping the tops on her Tupperware and slipping her gun in her purse. “What’s the last thing?”

  “I’m gonna give away these pants and buy a pair of Dockers,” he said miserably.

  Chapter Eleven

  Stella was backing out of the driveway when her phone rang. She stopped halfway into the street and got her phone out and squinted at the tiny numerals.

  “It’s a 715 area code,” she muttered. “Who the hell is that?”

  “Lemme see,” Chip said, taking the phone from her. “Smythe is 715, but … nope, I don’t recognize the number.”

  “Who’d be calling me from around here … tell you what, go ahead and answer for me, tell ’em I’m not here,” Stella said. It was probably connected with the fake break-in, someone from the police department following up on the report, and Stella was feeling worn out from the interrogation and exhausted from a lack of sleep and dispirited enough about the state of affairs that she didn’t feel up for a lot more creative lying at the moment.

  “Hello?”

  Stella could hear a voice, loud and unhappy from the sound of it, but couldn’t make out any words. “Yeah, who? Oh? Oh!” Chip held the phone away from his ear in a state of great excitement. “It’s Todd, Stella, it’s your boy Todd!”

  Stella screeched the truck to a halt, the sensitive brakes locking and throwing her and Chip against their shoulder restraints, and snatched the phone.

  “Todd? Todd, is that you?” Her heart felt like it was going to clang out of her chest, and she gripped the steering wheel so hard that pains shot up into her wrist. Please please please please please Big Guy, Stella prayed, the prayer of someone who’d trade in every good moment she ever had for things to turn out right this one time.

  “Stella, you got any idea how long I been hikin’ and it turns out they sent me in the wrong direction?” Todd, to Stella’s astonished relief, sounded irritable and frustrated but not the least bit maltreated or abused.

  “Where are you?” she demanded shrilly.

  Todd’s voice took on a muffled tone as he spoke to someone away from the phone. “Where’d you say I am again exactly?”

  “Is that them? Is that the people that took you? Put them on!” Stella yelled. “Todd! Todd! Listen to me, put them on!”

  A car passing in the other direction tapped the horn and gave Stella a what-the-fuck sort of gesture. She was vaguely aware of the fact that the truck was taking up more than one lane of traffic, and at an improper angle to boot.

  “Ma’am?” a polite, female, soft-spoken voice said.

  “What have you done to the boy?” Stella bellowed, almost launching herself out of the seat with anxiety.

  There was a pause, in which Stella could hear Todd grumbling in the background, and then the voice said, in somewhat aggrieved tones, “Ma’am, I just found your boy in my garage about fifteen minutes ago, getting himself a root beer from the refrigerator. Wess, that’s my husband, he had the garage door up because he’s got the lawn mower out. I was fixing to drive into town and, why, there he was, your young man.”

  “Wait,” Stella said. The tension had taken up residence in her forehead, splitting pains of postadrenaline agony spiking down behind her eyeballs. Todd, it seemed, was safe, so there was nowhere for all that pent-up terror on his behalf to go. “Todd’s fine, you’re telling me he’s not hurt, he’s alone, there’s no, like, other people, other kidnappers, with him?”

  “Why no, ma’am, he didn’t mention any kidnappers. He just said he got dropped off and he’s been walking. Apparently he took a wrong turn because we’re about eleven miles out of Smythe down Chokeberry Road.”

  Stella let a moment pass as she felt the blood rush to her face. “I, uh, am very, very sorry about the way I spoke a moment ago. It is not my habit—you see, I was just so very worried—look, can I come and get him?”

  “Certainly,” the lady said, with no hesitation at all, leading Stella to imagine that she might be eager to be shut of her newfound acquaintance.

  * * *

  Emily Allgaier was a proper lady, however, endowed with enough old-fashioned courtesy that she couldn’t bring herself to let Todd go without offering everyone a glass of tea and a slice of blueberry buckle.

  “That was delicious, Mrs. Allgaier,” Todd called as he leaned out of the window of the truck, waving good-bye. “Thank you!”

  “Nice manners,” Stella said dryly, adding her own little wave and then accelerating to a good clip. Grateful as she was to the silver-haired Good Samaritan for delivering Todd back to her, the whole episode had left a hollow taste in her mouth, the result of terror and self-recrimination and an uncomfortably close brush with all the ways the situation could have gone terribly wrong. Todd was tired and cranky and dusty but otherwise unharmed, and while he swore he’d walked twenty miles since his captors released him on an unpopulated stretch of farm road earlier in the morning, Stella figured it was more like five. “Now you tell me everything.”

  She’d gotten only a few details out of him, after the initial crushing hug in Mrs. Allgaier’s living room, when Stella had surprised herself by tearing up a little. Since she didn’t think it was wise to disabuse Mrs. Allgaier of her misbegotten notion that this was nothing more than a case of a family getting its wires crossed, dramatically so perhaps, she’d gone along with the idea that she was merely collecting the boy from a sleepover that had ended in confusion.

  “How about you thank me first?” Todd demanded, leaning across Chip, who was sandwiched between them in the front bench seat.

  “Thank you for what?” Stella was trying to keep a lid on her temper, but she was a little short on patience now that she knew Todd was all right.

  “For not letting that lady in on the fact of what you’re up to, you’n Chip and all.”

  “And what exactly would that be?”

  “Well, taking out Chip’s bookie, of course, like you told me about at the Arco.”

  “You told him what?” Chip demanded. “Stella, I showed you my key chain, I’m six months clean!”

  “Well yes, but I didn’t know that yet,” Stella said. “And Todd, I never said anything about killing anyone—”

  “Killing, or beating the shit out of him, I guess that’s up to you to figure out, whatever works,” Todd said placidly. “Only I don’t guess people like Mrs. Allgaier would really see it that way, even if they knew that he kidnapped me first. I mean, it’s not like they treated me terrible or whatever, so you don’t got to kill ’em on my account.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” Stella insisted, figuring the boy’s misinformation regarding the nature of the mission could be dealt with after she had the facts.

  “Well, you probably know just about as much as I do. I was just sleeping in the truck, I didn’t even know we’d stopped anywhere, and all of a sudden there’s this big crash and I wasn’t even all the way awake and someone picks me up and they’re pushing me into a car.”

  “Oh, Todd. Oh, good Lord in heaven,” Stella said, her pulse going haywire just imagining the scenario, even though the boy was safe back in the truck with her now. It made her trembly through and through to consider what might have happened, the terrible things that occur when innocent children are taken, and so she didn’t; she pushed those thoughts back into the box marked TOO AWFUL in her mind, and resisted an urge to stop the truck just so she could hug him again.

  “And first thing I thought was, this was probably one a them things you got mixed up in like what hap
pened to Tucker.”

  “That ain’t—” She wanted to say that would never happen, she would never allow it; but the memories of feeling helpless as they frantically searched for Chrissy’s son were all too fresh. Besides, she knew she couldn’t promise safety to anyone on God’s green earth—all she could promise was to keep doing her damnedest. “I’m gonna do my utmost best to make sure nothing like that happens again,” she promised, in a wobbly voice.

  “Well, thing is, I know I fucked up with hiding in the back of the truck and all. But still, I was mad, you know? So I’m all kicking and yelling, even though they got some sort of hood thing on me before I could see who they were and I kept getting the fabric in my mouth. I think there must’ve was two of ’em because they got me in their car pretty easy, in the backseat, and then they stuck me with a needle and knocked me out.”

  As scrawny as Todd was, Stella figured it wouldn’t take but one large and reasonably muscular bad guy to pick the boy right up and stuff him anywhere he felt like, but on the other hand the boy was tough and scrappy as they came, even if he barely crossed the hundred-pound notch on the scale.

  “You felt the needle?”

  “Yeah…” Todd rubbed his upper arm, then pushed up his T-shirt sleeve. There was no mark on his skin that Stella could see. “I mean it wasn’t super big or anything, more like a little pinch? Anyway, after that I woke up lying under this big old tree. And it was weird ’cause it felt like I’d been napping maybe five minutes? Except when they got me it was dark and when I woke up it wasn’t. I think I was layin’ right on a chigger nest ’cause I got them little buggers down … you know.”

  By way of illustration Todd scratched vigorously around his privates, while yawning hugely. Stella felt enormously relieved that there appeared to be no lasting psychic damage, no post-traumatic stress from the encounter. Todd’s greatest discomfort seemed to be the little red mites—and Stella knew how they loved to go straight for the nethers.

  “Don’t be scratchin’ like that in public,” she said automatically. “So you couldn’t say who it was got you? Man or woman, tall or short, nothing like that?”