“What the hell are you up to?” Chrissy demanded.
“You’ll see in a minute.” She got two water bottles out of her pack and twisted off the caps. She handed one to Chrissy. “Drink up now because you won’t have another chance.”
After Chrissy obliged, Stella took the bottle back and upended both, pouring the water out on the lawn.
“What’ja do that for?”
“We need the bottles,” Stella said. “Come on.”
In the moonlight she took the stairs, slowly and carefully. To the sides of the steps, long grasses and weeds stirred as they went past, making an otherworldly whispering sound.
At the bottom Stella took a breath and set one foot on the dock, nearly jumping back when the thing swayed under her weight. “Shit,” she said. “If I fall in, pull me out, girl. I can’t swim.”
Chrissy snorted. “Know how my dad taught me to swim?”
Stella made her way gingerly toward the closer of the two Wave Runners, a sharp little craft that looked as if it would seat a couple of bikini-clad nymphets. “No, how?”
“Took me down to the reservoir and threw me in when I was eight years old. I set to dog-paddlin’ for my life. Made it to the side and swore I’d never forgive him, but when I managed to haul myself out he was standin’ there with tears in his eye telling me how proud I’d made him.”
“Wow, sounds like a setup for hundreds of hours of therapy if I ever heard one.”
“Ain’t no Lardner ever had therapy,” Chrissy said, with a note of pride.
Stella figured that was a discussion for another time. She found the gas cap right on top, conveniently located where she didn’t even need to lean far over the open water. She twisted it off and slipped one end of the black plastic tubing inside.
“Let’s hope they left the tank full,” she said. She let the hose loop down so that it touched the deck, then lifted the other end up to her lips and made a face.
“Wow, I’ve sucked all kinds of stuff in my day,” Chrissy said, giving Stella a leering grin, “but I’m glad that’s you about to put that in your mouth and not me.”
“Well, honey, the idea is not to get any in your mouth.”
“How you gonna manage that?”
“It’s a physics thing.” She sucked on the hose until she figured the liquid had traveled as far as the dock, then pulled her lips away and whispered, “Here goes nothing.”
After giving the gas a minute to make its way through the tube to level, she put the open end in one of the water bottles and then held the bottle down along the side of the dock.
Liquid began to fill the bottle.
“Yes!” Stella exclaimed, pleased, a little surprised the technique actually worked.
“Damn,” Chrissy said with admiration. “That’s quite a trick, but it smells nasty.”
“Well, we’re a couple of nasty girls,” Stella said as she filled the second bottle.
When it was full, she coiled up the tubing and dropped it on the deck. She handed a bottle to Chrissy and they started back up the steps.
“So now what, we ask them fellas to drink this shit and hope they pass out?” Chrissy asked when they got back up to the lawn.
“No, darlin’, we’re gonna set this place on fire.” She led the way to the side of the house, running her fingers along the stucco and the trim, trying to judge flammability.
“Stella, I don’t think we better burn the house down,” Chrissy whispered, clearly worried. “I mean, Tucker’s in there. And if, you know, if we get blown away or something, I still want him to get out. Even if it’s with, you know… them.”
Stella turned to Chrissy and saw moonlight creamy on her pale, broad cheeks, eyes miserable with worry. That was a mama for you, putting aside thoughts of her own safety, her own life even, for her baby. It gave Stella an extra little burst of determination. “Ain’t gonna happen,” she promised. “No one’s getting blown away today—at least, none of the good guys. Besides, I’m talking about a little bitty fire, just on the outside of the house. Just enough to set off the alarms and get their attention.”
She settled on a stretch of flower bed that ran along the back of the house. A row of shrubs had been planted out of reach of the sprinkler system and had died and dried up into sticks. Stella slowly poured the gasoline out of the bottles onto the shrubs and the wood trim, and up along the side of the house. She wasn’t sure what stucco was made of these days—probably Styrofoam—and hoped to hell it would burn.
“Okay,” she said. “Moment of truth.”
She dug her lighter out of the bottom of the backpack and then reached for Chrissy’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
Chrissy squeezed back. “What are we going to do when it lights?”
“Well, first of all, try not to set ourselves on fire. Then I guess let’s stay close to the house, maybe around the corner. That way we can see around but we’ll be out of the fire. This ought to smoke up good, so it should set off the alarm and they’ll be able to see it out the windows. You gotta figure they’re gonna come out the back to see what happened.”
“But what if they go out the front?”
“Well… whoever comes out, it’s going to be my job to take them down, so all you need to worry about is getting in. Don’t wait around to see, just go. If no one shows up back here, I guess I’ll go check on the front door. But I got to think they’ll come around to the back once they see nothing’s burning out front, don’t you think?”
“Sounds like a lot of guessin’ and hopin’ to me,” Chrissy said.
“ ’Fraid so. But I’m plum out of alternatives.”
“Okay. So you get the guy outside, I go in and find Tucker—”
“Upstairs, I’m thinking. There’s probably three, four different bedrooms up there. I’ll be right behind you, soon as I can, and I’ll try to cover you. But there’s a chance you’re gonna be on your own until you find him. So you just concentrate on finding him and then you grab him and go. I’m not kidding, Chrissy, you come out of there and you fly. Back to the Jeep, unless you get hurt or something, then I guess you’ll have to get to a neighbor’s house and call the cops.”
Shot, she meant, or stabbed or clubbed or any other manner of violent reckoning—and then it would be a matter of great good luck if Chrissy got out of there at all.
But Chrissy just nodded calmly. “Then what?”
“Throw Tucker in the Jeep and go. Don’t wait on me. Here, you’re going to need these.” She got her car keys and Patrick’s phone out of the backpack and handed them to Chrissy. “Give me a call when you’re safe. I’ll take care of myself until I hear from you, okay?”
Chrissy took the keys and stuck them in her pocket, then flipped open the phone. “Okay. Give me your number.”
As she recited it and Chrissy keyed it into the phone, Stella tried not to think about how flawed the plan was. What if the fire didn’t catch? What if the flames outdoors weren’t enough to set off the alarms? Or if the smoke detectors were out of batteries—they were always going on about that on the news, how people let their batteries run down and ended up cooked in their beds.
Or what if the fire just took off and sent the whole house up in a ball of flame? Unlikely; they probably coated that Styrofoam stucco with the stuff they made kids’ pajamas out of before the house got a coat of paint.
What if they all came out—Funzi and his wife and Beez. That would be three against two, and then—
Stella forced herself to stop. That kind of thinking wasn’t going to help.
She zipped the backpack shut and slipped it on her shoulders. The pain and fatigue she had been feeling earlier was gone, replaced by a nervous tension that hummed through her whole body.
Chrissy snapped the phone shut and slipped it into her pocket. “Well, what’re ya waiting for?” she demanded.
“Right,” Stella muttered, and flicked her Bic.
She held the flame down to the trim around the window, and there was a sputtering and a strong s
mell of burning chemicals, but no fire. Stella realized she was holding her breath as her fingertips grew increasingly hot. Right when she thought she was going to have to drop the lighter, a tiny lick of flame went up and over the edge of the painted wooden trim and spread its way down the board. A fraction of an inch at first, and then another one… and then in a whoosh a finger of flame tracked down a rivulet of gasoline that dripped from the stucco and grew into a sizable flame.
“I think we’re in business,” Stella said.
She stepped back and slid the lighter into her pocket. She grabbed Chrissy’s hand and led her away from the growing fire. Chrissy gave her a businesslike nod and sprinted to the back porch, where she took up position on the side of the door, flattened against the house, gun hand bent at the elbow, looking plenty ready to blow the head off anyone who even looked at her sideways.
Stella took the other side of the door, copying Chrissy’s stance, the Ruger drawn and ready. Her fingers felt faintly sweaty on the warm ivory grip, and her heart was keeping up a pretty good pace.
It felt like an hour, but Stella guessed it was another three or four minutes before the flame spread itself out along the trail of gasoline that had dribbled down to the base of the house’s siding, and was burning well in the dried vegetation. The fire leapt along a stretch of wall, growing taller by the second. Flames licked at the bottom of the second-story windows, and the smell of smoke was thick.
Chrissy coughed gently and Stella put her sleeve up to her nose, breathing through the fabric.
Then they heard the bleep of the fire alarm from inside the house.
The thought that came unexpectedly to Stella’s mind was: cooking. That damn alarm that Ollie had installed right in the middle of the kitchen, after Stella tried to convince him to put it in the hall, like it said to do on the box—but you couldn’t tell the man anything.
The thing would go off whenever Stella sautéed or fried or even baked a pizza, and Ollie would come stand in the door, scratching his belly and demanding, “Burning something again?”
Hell, yeah, she was burning something, Stella thought. Almost wished the fucker was there to see it for himself.
Inside, Stella heard someone knocking around upstairs, and imagined Funzi and the other men lurching out of bedrooms, bleary with sleep, looking around and trying to figure out what was on fire.
Probably wondering if it was a false alarm, or if they’d left a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray or a pan of Bagel Bites in the oven.
Above her a window was suddenly yanked open.
“Holy fuck, Marie, there’s a damn fire out back of the house!”
Stella shrank as close to the house as she could manage, praying that whoever was looking out—Funzi, presumably—wouldn’t look down and see her there. There was a growing cloud of thick smoke, swirling blackened bits of charred crap through the air, and she struggled not to cough, the air acrid and poisonous even through the soft fabric of her shirt.
She felt, rather than heard, the reverberations of feet running along the hallway upstairs. A couple of moments later there was a sharp percussive slap on the inside of the door they were guarding, and then the sounds of someone rattling the knob, throwing the bolt.
Stella stared straight into Chrissy’s eyes and was comforted to see that the girl looked just as unafraid and determined as she had a few minutes earlier. She turned back to the door as it sprang open—and nearly fainted from shock.
The man who came bursting out of the house was Roy Dean Shaw.
EIGHT
Roy Dean wore boxer shorts and a muscle T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and while there was little evidence of his having been recently dismembered and burned, he was far from a robust-looking specimen of humanity. His greasy brown hair lay flat on one side of his head and stuck straight out on the other, his pale sloped shoulders were pocked with acne scabs, and his narrow eyes were bloodshot.
“You bastard!” Chrissy yelped. “You’re supposed to be dead!”
“Don’t worry about him, just get on in there,” Stella said, giving the girl a shove, and Chrissy slipped past him into the house.
Roy Dean started to wheel in a circle toward the flames, his feet scrambling on the ground. It was kind of comical, like a cartoon of Wile E. Coyote when he ran off a cliff, legs pinwheeling for a moment in midair before he fell.
Stella took one big step toward him and raised her gun hand, realizing just in time that the trajectory of his out-stretched arm was going to connect about at her wrist, knocking the Ruger out of her grip.
She pivoted forward instead so that Roy Dean connected full on with her, his whole mass slamming into her torso at full speed. The impact knocked her back, and she could feel it in her bones, in her teeth, but it stopped him coming and he tripped and fell forward on top of her, arms flailing.
No gun.
Roy Dean had no gun—that was Stella’s thought as she rolled away from him, tipping a stone planter off its base, the broken shards cutting into her flesh as she scrambled out of the way.
Then she realized that she didn’t have a gun either as she watched the Ruger skitter across the slick patio surface toward the lawn.
For a second her eyes locked on Roy Dean’s homely face above her. There were red lines in his flesh from his pillow, and she could smell his breath and sweat, and then he pushed off her, propelling his body along the ground toward her gun. He managed to grab it and had it up and trained on her in what seemed like half a second.
“Bet you’re wishing you’d been a little nicer to me now, aintcha,” he said, leering.
Stella felt her heart lurch: she’d let Roy Dean take her gun like he was taking a lollipop from a baby. Chrissy had made it inside, but now she was on her own, and after Roy Dean shot Stella he’d go right back inside and alert everyone else.
Chrissy didn’t have a chance.
The thought pissed Stella off mightily. She got to her knees, hair escaping the ponytail holder and falling in her face, obscuring her vision. Her hands scrabbled in the dark behind her, finding the largest piece of the pot, what was left of the bottom, with a thick layer of potting soil matted to it.
“Surprise, surprise, here you are back from the dead,” she said, stalling for time. “So who did you all kill in the shed?”
“Rollieri,” he said. “Who else? Only I didn’t kill him. I ain’t no killer. Funzi done that hisself.”
Stella thought back to what Patrick told them: Reggie’d gone back to the city. Funzi and Roy Dean and Rollieri were alone in the shed while Patrick and Beez waited outside. Funzi must have shot Rollieri instead of Roy Dean. But why?
“What’d he do, anyway?”
Roy Dean snorted. “He was skimming the take on the book. Funzi figured it out a while ago, but he had to wait for Donny Calabasas to give him the go-ahead.”
“Why’d you all lie to Patrick and Beez?”
Roy Dean blinked, his brow furrowing. “How do you know Patrick?”
“We’re old friends. Quilting bees.”
“Fuck you, Stella. Anyway, we didn’t lie, we just couldn’t tell ’em until Funzi sent proof back up to Donny it was done.” Roy Dean giggled, looking like a little boy caught with a cookie. “We sent up Reggie’s hand that had the spider tattoo—that was my idea.”
“Brilliant,” Stella said. “Sure seems like there was a lot of ‘we’ in that story. How come Funzi’s trusting you all of a sudden? The way I heard it, you were skimming off your own deliveries. You were cheating Funzi, too.”
“I wasn’t.” Roy Dean reddened with anger, and the gun wavered in his hands. Stella was tempted to reach out and grab the barrel, take her chances with him getting off a wild shot, but he stood just out of reach. “I paid my debt,” he finally spat. “And that was all mostly just a misunderstanding anyway. What Rollieri did—now that was just wrong. Funzi couldn’t let that go.”
“You didn’t pay anything,” Stella protested, enraged. “You gave away a baby that wasn’t even your
s. A baby. How could you do that—even a scum-sucking bottom-dweller like you?”
“Hey, Chrissy ain’t fit to be a mother,” Roy Dean said, his watery eyes narrowing, a vein throbbing on his temple. “She’s no better’n a whore. It’s her as brought this down on herself.”
That was just the reminder Stella needed of Roy Dean’s essential worthlessness. Enraged, she screwed up her face into an expression of exquisite pain—not such a stretch, given the beating her fresh stitches and recent bruises had taken.
“Ohh,” she wailed, reaching a shaking hand down to her legs, which were bent beneath her. “I think you broke my ankle.”
Roy Dean danced from one foot to another. “Shut up, Stella, or I’ll waste you right here.”
But he hesitated—Stella could see him do it. Worthless human being that he was, he’d been right about one thing—he was no killer. He’d fallen for the old lady ruse, and that gave her just the fraction of a second, the opening that she needed. She gave one more weak moan for good measure and stumbled to her feet like she might collapse from the effort.
Roy Dean stutter-stepped out of the way, as though the thought of 180 pounds of AARP-eligible female falling on him was simply too much, and Stella recovered her balance at the last second and pushed off her left foot—pain shooting up into her bad hip—and swung the heavy piece of pot up around and smashed it against his forehead.
Roy Dean went down without even a grunt, collapsing into an awkward pile of splayed limbs, his head bouncing off the slate patio with a thud Stella could feel through her feet.
“Ouch,” she exclaimed. That would have hurt plenty, if Roy Dean wasn’t already out.
Stella took her gun out of his hand, his fingers twitching slightly as she pried them off the grip. She jammed the Ruger back in the holster and dusted off her knees, and then, before she straightened up, she put two fingers to Roy Dean’s neck, finding a fluttery pulse.
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