Luka was staring at her as though a horn had sprouted in the middle of her forehead. “I thought you were, like, Chip’s grandmother or something.”
“Grandmother? What the hell, I’m fifty years old”—for a few more hours, anyway—“and Chip can’t be more than thirty, so how the fuck would I be his grandmother?”
“Okay, aunt. Whatever.”
Stella took a moment to let her irritation simmer down. She’d expected Luka to be a bit more easily intimidated, but he stared at her with wide and curious brown eyes and no trace of fear. “Look here, do you not understand what I’m telling you? When I say you’re horning in on someone else’s territory, I’m not exactly talking about a vacuum cleaner salesman. These are big-time dealers, gangbangers, who’ve come up from the city looking to expand their reach into these little hick towns. Just because it’s a small town don’t mean they operate any different.”
“I’m not scared,” Luka said. Todd was watching the conversation between them, head bobbing like a fan at a tennis match, not saying a word. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, Mrs. Hardesty, but they’ve already come around and told me to stop, but this is America, yes? They can drive by and kill me in any city, anytime. In America you have to accept violence as part of the society. Like taxes.”
“Is that what they teach you over there? Along with very nice English, I got to give you that, but do you really—wait a minute.” Realization flooded through Stella like an ice-water bath. “When they snatched Todd. That was them, wasn’t it? Your gangbangers?”
“How should I know, I wasn’t there,” Luka said with maddening calm. “I was asleep. Besides, I sleep with a knife.”
He slid a wicked-looking curved-blade hunting knife from a holster hidden under his jeans, his moves so unflinching and steady that any doubts Stella had about his bravery were put to rest. “Let me explain something to you. In Russia, I was selling DVDs since I was nine. We knew this guy, he’d get bootleg copies of new-release American films. The sound was shitty, it was just some guy taking film in a movie theater, you could see people’s heads, but we sold them for two dollars. Alexi, he let us keep seventy-five cents. That’s enough to feed a family over there, and lots of nights it did.”
Despite herself, Stella was fascinated. It took a little work, but eventually she got the rest of the story out of him. After everything went digital, and the market for DVDs dried up, he switched to selling knockoff prescription drugs.
“Wow…” Stella said when he finished.
“Look, don’t think you got a right to judge us. Mom’s not asking for a free ride.”
“And you like Chip?”
“He’s all right.”
Stella figured that was the closest thing to an endorsement she was going to get. “Okay, let’s go. You two are coming with me.”
Stella didn’t expect them to be happy about it, but when Luka stayed where he was, slouching back against the bench with his arms folded across his chest, Todd hesitated, too.
“Oh, hell. Seriously?”
“Stella, he’s fine, don’t make him—”
Stella’s arm shot out nearly as fast as it had the first time, and she grabbed the fine downy hairs at the nape of Todd’s neck, twisted them around her pointer finger, and gave them a good yank. Todd squawked like a stuck pig, and Stella kept up the pressure, dragging him up from the bench.
“Just defy me one more time, I’m asking you, Todd Groffe, because I cannot wait to tell your mom I been covering for your ass all this way up here and through all your shenanigans by mistake, and that you was evading the sheriff so’s you could vandalize your dad’s property in a cold and premeditated fashion. Because Kemper Boys’ Academy? They got a bunk just waiting for you, bucko, and unlike what your pal Luka here’s evidently used to, seventy-five cents won’t buy you a whole lot there except a package of stale Cheez-Its.”
Todd was trying to wrench himself free of Stella’s grip, mewling while tears of pain streamed down his face, but the more he fought her the tighter his hair coiled around her finger.
“As for you,” she told Luka, “I’m sure you’re a nice young man, and you’ve been through a heck of a lot, and I salute your mama for her patience and dedication. Only, you’re not my kid. So I don’t got to try it the hard way first. I can go straight to the tough love without a second thought. Now, I’m taking Todd with me. You’re gonna come home and stay there, and you’re not coming out again until we get a few things worked out.”
Stella was relieved when both boys shuffled after her when she started walking away. She wasn’t sure about Luka, who was as cynical as any grown man she’d ever met—but then again he was still a kid in many ways, with the faint speckling of acne along his hairline, the wad of gum in his cheek, the baggy jeans that hung low on his narrow ass. He stayed close as he shuffled along behind Todd, and Stella felt herself soften a little.
“I realize you’re some sort of teenage thug where you’re from,” Stella said. “Maybe you are that tough, I don’t know. But here’s what I do know. Your mom is important to someone who is important to me. And he has asked me to help. And I’m going to do so, whether you like it or not, and whether you like my ways or not. I’m not really DEA—”
“Well, no shit, Stella, I think he knows that,” Todd interrupted.
“—but I am a little more capable of defending myself and the people I care about than the average middle-aged lady. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Luka regarded her skeptically. “I guess, but I think you’re overreacting here. It’s just a—”
Stella felt her reserves of patience quickly emptying. “What it is is, it’s not your place to judge. You are still a minor. In this country, that means that grown-up people are still in charge of you. Specifically your mom. Do you have any idea—I mean, you of all people should understand the sacrifices she’s gone through for you. To make a better life for you. Do you realize, if you play your cards right”—and if Benton’s dead body went undiscovered, and Chip and Natalya remained unaccused of murder, and the INS viewed any future applications for permanent residency favorably, and Natalya obtained a divorce from a man who the rest of the world considered merely disappeared, not dead—all significant challenges, Stella had to admit—“then you have a chance at growing up in this country, going to college here, getting a job in a field of your choosing that is not against the law. I mean … Luka, you got a shot at the American dream here.”
Stella was getting herself so worked up that beads of perspiration popped out along her forehead. She was as patriotic as the next person, but the idea of kids forced to sell drugs on the cold and forbidding streets of an indifferent and hostile nation was enough to make her practically tearful. “Don’t you see,” she finished hoarsely, “if you don’t fuck things up, you could be somebody.”
BJ was still standing where Stella had parked him, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands in the pockets of his slacks, looking somewhere halfway between bored and confused and concerned.
“Hey, Mr. Brodersen,” Todd mumbled, giving him a halfhearted handshake.
Luka did a little better, standing up straight and using a firm grip. “Hi. I’m Luke.”
“These fellas have managed to get themselves into a whole lot of needless trouble,” Stella said.
“Well, that’s what guys do at their age,” BJ said, grinning. “I could tell you stories, put the fear in my poor mom eight ways to Sunday. Came out of it all a lot wiser, though, I’ll tell you that much.”
“BJ,” Stella admonished, “this ain’t on the scale of lifting a can a Skoal from the filling station or shootin’ at mailboxes. This is the kind of serious that could land ’em in jail or beat to shit. I know neither one of ’em has a lick of sense, and I almost wish there was some way we could knock ’em out and keep ’em on ice until their powers of reasoning were a little more finely developed but, well, you men don’t seem to pick up much common sense until well into middle age so I guess that�
�s out.”
“We can just go back to Luke’s and hang out,” Todd suggested hopefully.
“Ha!”
“Or we could go to a movie or something—”
“No chance. I’ve got—appointments, and Mr. Papadakis and Mrs. Markovic don’t need to be babysitters.” More to the point, Stella figured she couldn’t trust Chip and Natalya to keep them in one place.
It was a real problem. It would be easy to whisk Todd away and decide that Luka-Luke was Natalya’s problem, and leave it at that. Except that Natalya’s problems were Chip’s problems, and according to the way Stella had chosen to view her family obligations, that made them hers as well.
So the gangly, handsome-in-a-scruffy-and-vacant-eyed-way, hoodlum boy in front of her was her problem as well.
Stella’d been circling the problem in her mind, but from the start she knew deep down how it was all going to go down. She just hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself yet. Now it looked like she was out of options.
“Come on,” she told the little group. “I’m going to buy us a pizza and we’re all going to have a talk.”
Chapter Fifteen
Once they were settled in at Smythe’s one and only sit-down pizza joint, a large combo on order for the boys and a small one for her and BJ, Stella excused herself to make a couple of calls.
One, in particular, she was dreading … but in a heart-flutter weak-kneed sort of way, because it was straight to the personal cell number of the cornerstone of the Prosper, Missouri, law enforcement team.
“Sheriff Jones speaking.”
“Hi, Goat, it’s Stella.”
“Stella! I was just gonna call you, matter of fact.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, Irene told me your birthday’s tomorrow.”
Stella grinned to herself. So her little scheme had worked. She had a complicated give-and-take relationship with Irene Dorsey, the sheriff’s departmental assistant, that recently had stretched to accommodate a college-age nephew of Irene’s who Stella was keeping tabs on. He was a reasonably good boy, but Stella occasionally paid a visit to remind him of his priorities and suggest modifications to his work habits, using only the mildest of her persuasive techniques. In return for helping to ensure that the first of Irene’s relatives ever to go to college actually finished, Irene was on the hook for a variety of little favors here and there.
Like dropping hints about upcoming birthdays, for instance.
“Oh, that, I’d practically forgotten,” Stella lied.
“I was thinking, I know you’re probably already busy, but I’d love to take you out to dinner to celebrate, I mean if not tomorrow, then soon. Maybe drive over to Casey, try that new steakhouse they got.”
Stella raised her eyebrows. She knew exactly the place Goat was talking about, because she’d recently overheard a few ladies down at the post office sharing the opinion that charging more than forty dollars for a piece of meat was a crime, even if that meat had grown up in a field of daisies taking butter baths and wearing wreaths of clover around its horns.
The restaurant was bound to be fancy-schmancy, an opportunity to wear her silky mauve boatneck blouse, over the neckline of which her black lace bra could be counted on to occasionally peek in a coquettish fashion. Maybe get Noelle to do her nails in OPI Shangri-la-la Lilac and wear heels that would bring her lips a few inches closer to Goat’s in case there was any lingering to be done in restaurant doors or such.
“I’d love to,” she said, “only it’s going to have to wait a few days, if that’s all right.”
“That’s fine, I can move things around—you name the night, I’m yours.”
His words gave Stella a delicious little thrill as she imagined all the ways that Goat might, indeed, be hers—and then she forced herself to put the possibility out of her mind for now, until she got more immediate matters settled.
“I was actually calling because I have … well, sort of a professional favor to ask.”
There was a pause, long enough presumably for both of them to remember just how successful such favors had been in the past, which was to say not very much at all, when you took into account the degree of violent tendencies and gray-area delving and line crossing that had gone on. Goat had saved Stella’s ass once or twice, and she’d extended the unofficial reach of the law on a number of occasions with her off-the-record contributions, but none of these were the sort of thing one could talk about in public and, in fact, none of them were especially pleasant memories for Stella. Nor, apparently, for Goat.
“Is that right.” His tone was perceptibly chillier.
“Yes. Remember my sister, Gracellen?”
“I seem to remember you mentioning a sister … yes.”
“And how she’s got a stepson, Chip, who’s taken up residence in the middle of Wisconsin?”
“Now, that I don’t recall.”
“Huh. I guess I must not have mentioned him. Nice young man, hardworking … anyway, his girlfriend’s son, he’s seventeen, well, he got himself into a bit of a scrap up here with the local, uh, well, I guess you’d call them a bad element. Mighta been some drugs involved, bad judgment, that sort of thing.”
“Mmmm.” Goat’s tone was guarded, noncommittal, and Stella steeled herself to put on the hard sell in the push.
“So I was just wondering if you might be willing to, you know, reach out a little on the boy’s behalf, make sure he doesn’t get swallowed up in something over his head his first time out of the gate.”
“What are we talking about here, Stella, you want me to talk to him, give him some direction? Or what, has he already been picked up, you want me to put a good word in for him with the sheriff up there?”
“Uh. Well. Those are great ideas, but see—I’m kind of up here with him.”
“You’re in Wisconsin? But Irene said she saw Camellia Edwards jogging around Nickel Pond last Saturday and she said you two were training this week.”
“Oh, that was the plan. But then I got a call from Gracellen, and…” Stella coughed delicately, hoping Goat might be satisfied with only a vague suggestion of the business that had taken her north, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to unveil any hints of the true reason for her trip.
“You went up to deal with a mess he made?” Now there was true alarm in Goat’s voice. “You ain’t, uh, been trying to convince anyone of anything up there, have you, Stella?”
Stella figured that the word “convince” was the sheriff’s euphemism for all the brands of trouble that he would never actually utter aloud, which he was dimly aware of Stella’s participation in, and which he probably had been working very hard to put out of his mind and which might even now be wearing down his determination to spend a romantic evening with her. Nevertheless, she pressed ahead.
“No, I just came up here to check on him. See, the thing is, what I think Luke needs most is a change of scenery, a chance to get away from this bad element.” At least for a day or two until Stella could figure out the rest of the family’s troubles.
“Wait, wait, wait, Stella, if you think you’re gonna drag that boy back here and let him loose on the streets of Prosper and turn him into my problem—”
“That’s not exactly what I was hoping for,” Stella said carefully, trying to sound as reasonable and sweet as possible. “I actually need to finish up, ah, a little thing I got up here, and what I was hoping was that I could send him to you in the care of a—a friend who’s with me, and then you could just watch him until I get home. You know, put him to work in the office, have him wash the cars or something—you could maybe even put him in the Dumpster overnight. Kind of a ‘scared straight’ scenario.”
Stella instinctively pulled the phone a few inches away from her ear just before Goat’s outraged bellow.
“Are you out of your mind? I am not going to use the county facilities to store some kid who’s worn out his welcome in his own hometown. It’s, it’s fraud for one thing and wrongful imprisonment and probably a half
a dozen other kinds of illegal.”
“No problem, no problem,” Stella said hastily. She didn’t really think that Goat would agree to house Luke in Prosper’s single temporary holding cell, which had been built on the site of the old Dumpster enclosure behind the Hardee’s restaurant that had been turned into the Prosper Municipal Annex a number of years ago. However, she had learned that sometimes it paid to ask for more than you planned on settling for and bargaining your way down. “I totally understand. But I forgot to mention this boy is a skilled laborer. He learned, uh, all kinds of trades in his native country, and I’m thinking you could take him out to your place with you in the evenings, you know, after you get him to clear the parking lot or whatever down at your office. And maybe he could bunk with you, and you could tell him all about, you know, the American system of justice and how you got interested in a law career and what all. Be a chance to make a difference for, uh, the next generation.”
Stella realized that she had, without even realized it, crossed her fingers for luck and squeezed so hard she was about to break a bone. She exhaled slowly, trying to calm herself and waiting for what was sure to be an explosive response.
Goat surprised her, though. Very quietly, after a moment passed, he spoke again. “Stella Hardesty, from the moment I met you, I have known there was something special about you. I thought maybe the jumpy feeling I get when I’m around you was related to some sort of, I don’t know, attraction or something between us, but now I’m suspecting it’s just a reaction to the fact that you have got the biggest set of solid-steel balls on the planet.”
Before Stella could entirely process his comment, and before she could even remember to move the phone away from her ears, he hollered, “No one else in this entire county would have the nerve to offer out my own home as some sorta, I don’t know, halfway house for hoodlums imported from a whole other state, a state which, I shouldn’t ought to have to tell you, has got itself a way more generous social services budget than Missouri, which is probably equipped to handle him through its own legal and social channels, but oh, no, that ain’t good enough for you, Stella, cause you ain’t ever satisfied to let the law do what the law’s supposed to do, you got to jump on in there and stomp all over it and make a mockery of the system and do everything your own way and plus turn a man’s well-deserved quiet evening into a carnival roadshow. Plus I ain’t even been to the grocery.”
A Bad Day for Mercy Page 14