by Unknown
“What? No, I, uh, I ain’t gone anywhere near Chrissy.”
“Can it, lover boy. Make no mistake, if you so much as look at Chrissy crosswise I’ll know before you have time to scratch your balls. And then I’ll, you know, probably come around and shoot ’em off or something.”
Roy Dean’s face darkened like a Fourth of July thunderstorm, and he leaned back against the Formica counter. The boy’s knees were probably feeling a little wobbly, if Stella had to guess. She suppressed a smile.
“I’m through with her,” he snapped. “I tol’ you that.”
“Yeah, you did, but if I recall we were kind of far along the convincing path before you managed to choke that promise out.”
Stella had been surprised that Roy Dean had lasted as long as he had on the day she taught him a lesson. Some guys folded before she even got started—especially the ones who had heard the rumors about Stella being an insane dominatrix. When she started unpacking her bag of toys, some men turned into blubbering masses of terror, ready to talk sense without much exertion on Stella’s part.
Early in her justice-delivering career, the thought of being suspected of favoring kinky sexual practices was intensely embarrassing, especially since the source of the rumors came about for only the most practical reasons. Being five feet six, overweight, and out of shape, Stella had managed to pull a muscle in her lower back the first time she tied up a recalcitrant jerk at gunpoint. She almost shot him by accident as she staggered around, yelping in pain. There was also the fact that the knot-tying skills she learned in Girl Scouts weren’t up to the task: the same guy, as Stella waved the gun around wildly, managed to get his wrists free. It was only slightly reassuring that he immediately fell over as he tried to run away, having forgotten that his ankles were still bound.
Stella realized she had to make some changes. She started a fitness program, but she knew she also needed to find a more reliable way to subdue a man. She had a vague notion of learning some paramilitary restraint techniques that might rely more on finesse than brute force, but Google searches for words like restraint and shackle kept popping up bondage sites.
Stella had never seen anything like the photos featured on those sites. The gear was fascinating, in a creepy kind of way. In the photos, lovely young ladies looked quite pleased to be trussed up like roasts ready to go in the oven. That’s when she had an inspiration: why not try the same thing on her targets and see if it got them under control?
Stella’s first purchase was a spreader bar and a yoke, which worked out better than she could have hoped. The solid metal bar had restraint cuffs at either end; once fastened they kept the legs in a spread-eagle position. Stella didn’t skimp: she went for the most expensive model she could find and made arrangements with the vendor to bulk up the padded cuffs with an extra-sturdy locking mechanism.
The yoke worked in a similar fashion. The bar had padding at the neck and wrist restraints. Stella had to fasten these herself, but generally by the time the object of her attentions had maneuvered himself into the spreader bar, a lot of the fight had gone out of him.
For a while Stella had her eye on a custom-made Saint Andrew’s cross, an arrangement of two-by-sixes that could be bolted onto the wall, with rings for restraining purposes in a variety of positions. It was well made, finished in a choice of mahogany or natural stains, by a very nice man in Ohio, who offered to drive over and install it himself.
At that point, however, Stella figured she was going a little overboard. All she really needed, after all, was to get these guys settled down enough to have a rational discussion.
Sometimes the discussion was a little one-sided. Stella did not care to be yelled at or called names—she’d had enough of that with Ollie—so she bought a selection of gags with balls or bits or rings that fitted into the mouth and kept the wearer nice and silent. Efforts to talk usually just resulted in drooling, so Stella bought a stack of cheap burp cloths at the Babies-R-Us and added them to her kit.
Roy Dean had required the full treatment. He’d shut up briefly when Stella rose up off the floor of the passenger side of his truck in the darkened liquor store parking lot, aimed a gun at his temple, and told him they were going for a drive. Stella kept the gun on him all the way out to an abandoned barn she sometimes used, but Roy Dean kept up a string of ugliness as he drove. He kept hollering right up to the moment when Stella strapped the gag behind his head, and then he glared at her malevolently and fought against the bars and restraints. It took some work with a length of rubber hose and a hammer handle, and a brief poke with the electric shock baton, until she finally judged Roy Dean rehabilitated.
When she finished up with these guys, she had a little speech she delivered while packing up her supplies. In it, she reminded the man she was about to send back into society that if anything bad were to happen to her, there was an ever-growing army of women who owed her, and who were willing to pursue vengeance on her behalf; women who, like her, had once had very little to lose, and therefore viewed the whole risk-and-return equation somewhat differently than the average person.
Some righteous scary bitches, in other words.
Roy Dean seemed like he got the message, but not even a month later here he was making a new woman cry. Stella was pretty sure it hadn’t gone any further, but she was worried that Roy Dean was the sort of woman-smacker who truly believed down in his bones that it was his God-given right to settle every disagreement with force, that it was a woman’s job to absorb a man’s disappointments and frustrations in the form of taunts and put-downs and thrown punches.
Sadly, this was the type who was most likely to pick up again where he left off with some other poor woman. Which was why Stella was here today. Without proof of the incident at the speedway, she’d limit today’s visit to a warning, but it would be Roy Dean’s last before she dialed up their next encounter to a whole new level.
“You want a beer or not?” he demanded after starting half a dozen protestations and finally giving up.
“I don’t think so. Tell you what, let’s sit down and have this chat so I can get back on my way and you can get back to your knitting, or whatever it was you were doing when I interrupted.”
Roy Dean didn’t look too happy about it, but he lowered himself into one of the dinette chairs, never taking his eyes off Stella. She propped open the trailer’s front door, so as not to miss any small breeze that might happen to wander by. Roy Dean had the blinds down in the trailer, no doubt trying to keep the place cool, but without an air conditioner it was a losing proposition. Stella almost—for a fraction of a second—felt a little bit sorry for him.
The moment passed.
She sat down on the chair across from him and leaned her elbows on the table, resting her gun hand casually on the sticky surface.
“So you got you a new girl,” she said conversationally. “What’s her name?”
“She isn’t—I don’t got—”
“Aw, sugar, don’t try to keep secrets from Auntie Stella,” she said. “You know I’ll find out.”
Roy Dean stared at a nail-bitten thumb. “There ain’t anyone.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said slowly. She let the silence stretch out in front of them, letting him cook in his own juices. Nervous wasn’t a bad way to keep these boys.
“Well, that’s real good,” she finally said, keeping her voice friendly. “I always say, it’s good to let a little time go by after a tough breakup. You know? You’ve got to give your heart a chance to recover. Who needs a rebound relationship, all that drama? Nothing but trouble. Am I right, Roy Dean, or am I right?”
Roy Dean shrugged and mumbled something that might have been assent.
“Hey, Roy Dean,” Stella said, like she’d just thought of something interesting. “I ever tell you about my returning customer special?”
Roy Dean froze for a moment, then slowly shook his head, still not looking at her.
“Well, it works like this. First time around, I look at a guy and I say
to myself, ‘Stella, what are the odds we can make a decent citizen out of this moron who’s been beating up on his woman?’ I look him over good and I try to find it in my heart to give him another chance. I believe in second chances, I really do.”
After staring at his thumb miserably, the temptation evidently became too much for Roy Dean, because he stuck the thing into his mouth and started gnawing at the nail. Stella tried to suppress a wave of nausea at the sight.
“But if that same man—the one I gave a chance to, the one I didn’t nail when I had his dick in a vise—if that man gets a little full of himself and decides to pick up on his old tricks with a new lady . . . well, then I tend to lose all my patience.”
She leaned across the table and waited until Roy Dean flicked an increasingly terrified glance in her direction to continue. “Roy Dean, you know that tire pile out back of Vett’s body shop?”
Roy Dean took his thumb away from his mouth long enough to moisten his lips with his tongue and choke out a “yeah.”
“Well, a couple years ago, a man—a preacher, if you can believe it—came back for my returning customer special. He was smart enough not to bother his ex-wife, she and I made sure of that. But get this, he wasn’t smart enough to stay away from the lady who played the organ at the noon service. Moved her right in with him and everything. Now I’m not saying she was any kind of smart to hook up with him, but still, stupid ain’t a crime. Oh, I’m sorry, here I am babbling on, taking up all your valuable time. . . . What I mean to tell you is . . .”
She leaned even farther across the table, keeping her finger nice and easy on the trigger, though she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be needing it today, and whispered, “That preacher’s in about six pieces buried under that tire pile.”
She lowered herself slowly back onto the chair, gauging the effect her news had on Roy Dean. There was a fair amount of truth to the story—all of it, in fact, right up to the tire pile.
Stella didn’t kill the man, though. She had only one death on her hands, and she meant to keep it that way. Killing Ollie had been a case of special circumstances—she was pretty sure that when Judgment Day arrived and she was called for her audience with the Big Guy, He would understand.
Still, there were other ways to skin even the most stubborn tomcat. When the preacher took up his old ways on a new lady, Stella merely switched tactics.
Whenever a garden-variety restraint-and-reckoning first visit didn’t do the trick, Stella got creative. In this case, the preacher’s hypocrisy reminded her of a story she’d read in her English class at Prosper High School, and she slowly and carefully burned a scarlet A on the preacher’s chest with her electric prod.
If she remembered her lessons properly, poor Hester Prynne lettered in Adultery. The preacher, Stella figured, earned his for Assholism. But at least now he was a retired Asshole. Taking his shirt off was probably all a lady needed to see before she took off running.
Roy Dean left off his thumb mid-gnaw. The color drained from his face, and he blinked rapidly a few times.
“No’m,” he said, pure sincerity. “I’m off women, and if I ever take them up again, you can bet you won’t have no trouble from me.”
“She won’t have no trouble from you,” Stella clarified. “That’s what you meant, right?”
Roy Dean nodded and gulped air.
“Okay, good. Well, now, I’m glad we got that out of the way, but since I’m here I thought I’d ask about something a friend of mine saw down at the speedway.”
Stella watched carefully, especially Roy Dean’s eyes, tracking to see which way his glance darted, but he didn’t look up. “Well, I been there. Same’s about a million other folks. But I ain’t taken no woman there.”
Stella leaned back in the dinette chair, disappointed. The online criminology course she was taking from a college based in Idaho had offered up a bunch of theories about how to tell when somebody was lying. Apparently, liars looked down and to the left when they spoke. They also tended to touch their faces and turned their bodies away and showed emotions only in their mouth, not their eyes.
What a bunch of crap.
“Dang, Roy Dean,” Stella said. “I wish I could believe you. But I don’t, I just don’t. I mean, you’re all twitchy like—”
“You got a damn gun pointed at me!”
“Yes, I guess that’s right. Thing is, if I put it away in the truck, and come back in here all nice and friendly, it’s not going to be much of an incentive for you to say any different, is it?”
Roy Dean started to say something, then apparently realized the futility of the argument and just shrugged.
“Well, how about this,” Stella said, pushing back her chair and standing, giving her bum hip a shake. “You know I’m a friendly kind of person, right, Roy Dean? I got a lot of friends, all over the place. And not just in Prosper, either. They’re all over Missouri, and I got a few in Kansas and Arkansas. . . . I even got one gal all the way over in Ohio. And these nice friends of mine, if I ask them to keep a special watch out for you, maybe let me know how you’re doing, since I can’t really spend all my time babysitting—well, I’m sure they’ll be glad to keep me posted.”
Roy Dean’s chin hung lower, his lower lip jutting out.
You can run, Stella telegraphed with her expression, but you can’t hide. She stood and pushed her chair back in under the beat-up old table. “Roy Dean, you ever figure on getting a real job? You know, one with a paycheck? Benefits?”
Roy Dean’s spiky eyebrows rose up in surprise. “I done that, already, Stella. That’s what got me in this whole mess with you in the first place.”
“Really?” Stella paused at the door of the trailer, interested. “How’d you figure?”
“Well, when I was on at the Home Depot, I got this promotion, see? Thirty-five cents an hour, and Chrissy thinks suddenly we’re all moneybags, took herself over to Fashion Gal and bought her that leather jacket.”
“And this is a problem . . . how?” In truth, Stella figured she knew where this was headed, and felt her fingers tighten on the frame of the screen door.
“I tol’ her we couldn’t afford that! Bitch wouldn’t listen, started in on me about a few times I went out after work, while she just keeps spending my money, one fucking thing after the next—”
The Raven, as Stella raised it up and pointed at him, got his attention. Stella could feel just a faint tremor along her arm, down to her trigger finger. It would be a real shame to shoot Roy Dean by accident. And that’s what it would be, if she was provoked like that. An accident. But bad things happened every day.
“You listen to me real clear,” she hissed. “I know about that jacket. That’s the one Chrissy had on when she came to me the first time, ’cept she couldn’t get the sleeve over her sling. Roy Dean, you know what irony is?”
Roy Dean, eyes fixed on the gun, shook his head and swallowed hard.
“Well, it’s when the outcome of events isn’t what you’d guess from what all leads up to it. Like Chrissy, see, she told me she had been saving for that jacket since last fall. She said on double coupon day she’d take whatever she’d saved and put it in a jar, and finally she had enough to buy the jacket. Only the same day she buys it, she gets her arm broke and she can’t even wear it proper. See? Irony.”
Roy Dean fixed his gaze on the floor and refused to look at her. “Or another example might be us talking here,” Stella continued. “Getting everything all worked out, me spending my valuable time shaping you into a productive member of society and all, and then you say one stupid little thing and I have to shoot you dead. That would be ironic.”
She slowly lowered her gun arm, gave Roy Dean a final glare, and left.
She was still shaking a little as she bounced along the rutted track, pushing the Jeep harder than it cared to go, taking the turns fast enough that the wheels threatened to lift up off the road.
That jacket. That damn jacket. She’d listened to Chrissy’s tearful story with sympathet
ic fury, but only later did Stella figure out that it reminded her of something that had happened a week before she finally took care of Ollie once and for all.
It was an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon three years ago. She’d come home from the grocery with a bunch of daffodils. Jonquils, her mother had called them. Pat Collier used to grow them in every bare spot in her yard: under trees, along the fence, between rocks. Her mother was never happier than when the flower bulbs pushed their shoots up through the last of the snow, when the tight-rolled buds flung themselves open on a sunny early-spring day.
They had fresh-cut bunches for two bucks sitting in buckets of water outside the FreshWay, and Stella brought one home, thinking of her mother the entire time. Pat had been gone two years by then—pancreatic cancer, mercifully quick. As Stella was reaching up to the top shelf for her mother’s old white scallop-edged pitcher, Ollie came stomping into the kitchen, scratching his wide ass. He took one look at her flowers lying there on the counter and demanded, “Where the hell do you get off spending my money on shit like this?”
She’d started to tell him it was only two lousy dollars, started to say she’d been thinking about her mother that day, missing her, but before she could get any of those thoughts out, he’d taken a whack at her that sent her toppling off the step stool and left the pitcher lying in a dozen pieces on the floor.
By the time she got back to the highway, Stella had herself almost under control. She slowed as she approached the cluster of gas stations and fast-food joints before the entrance ramp, and after a split second’s consideration, eased into the drive-through lane of the Wendy’s. Not on her diet, but she hadn’t missed a workout for weeks, so that had to be a few thousand calories she’d worked off.
As the line of cars made its slow trek around the parking lot, Stella got her gun locked back up in the box. By the time she got up to the order screen, her fury had simmered back down to its usual bubbling simmer.
“Number three,” she said. “And a chocolate Frosty. Better make it a large.”