by Unknown
“Oh mercy no, you’re thinking of that other gal out that way. Took up with her aunt’s boyfriend. What was her name, Dora, Doreen, something—”
“It’s a shame Linda’s not here,” Novella said. “Her husband hails from Harrisonville—she’d know. She’s down with her usual unfortunate troubles,” she added in a stage whisper to Stella and Chrissy.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lola said. “You can say hemorrhoid, Novella, it ain’t a bad word.”
“Well,” Novella said primly. “I suppose that’s fine for some.”
“We could call her,” Shirlette said, pulling an iPhone out of her purse and peering at it over her eyeglasses. She tapped at it with her finger a few times and held up a finger.
“She’s not moving too quick today,” she said, “if you know what I mean. Oh, Linda? How are you, dear?”
Shirlette had the volume on the iPhone up high enough that everyone heard Linda’s voice, though Stella couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“Is that right? . . . Oh, I’m sorry. . . . Listen, guess who stopped by? Who? No, Stella Hardesty. And she brought that darling Chrissy Shaw, remember? One of the Lardner girls? . . . That’s right, the pretty one. Anyway, do you know a Darla out Harrisonville way? Young gal, blond . . . Yes, ask him. . . .”
Shirlette drummed her fingers on the table as all six ladies listened to the sounds of conversation on the other end of the connection. “Is that like it sounds? Here, Novella, gimme a pen. . . . Yeah, go ahead, Linda . . . mmm-hmmm . . . okay, I’ll tell her. No, I’ll tell you later. What? . . . Look, Linda, it’s Stella who’s asking, you catch my drift? She don’t have time to be waiting for this information. Yes, I’ll call you back.”
She dabbed at the phone and slipped it back in her purse. “Well,” she said breathlessly, “there is a Darla over in Harrisonville, Darla Merton.”
“That’s right,” Lola said, snapping her fingers. All the ladies leaned in, and Stella found herself following suit. “That’s the one. Kind of a loose one, if I recall.”
“A regular tramp is what Linda said,” Shirlette agreed. “She might as well install a revolving door on her bedroom. She’s out on Dixon Road past the Mobil station. You take a soft right and go over a dip and there’ll be a dirt bike track on the left. She don’t know the house number, but it’s the yellow-brick ranch on the right—it’s a duplex and she’s on the right side.”
“I know where that Mobil is,” Chrissy said, gathering up her purse.
“Please thank Linda when you see her,” Stella said. “I wish we could stay and catch up.”
“But you have important work to do,” Gracie said, winking. “You don’t have to tell us. Well, God bless y’all. And Stella, get to healin’, you hear?”
After quick good-byes, they hurried back to the Jeep, Stella moving as fast as she could.
Chrissy hurtled out of the parking lot. “It’s twelve minutes to noon,” she said. “We got to haul ass!”
It was pretty much a straight shot to Harrisonville down County Road 9, and Stella gripped the dashboard most of the way as Chrissy pushed the little Jeep hard. At the Mobil she barely slowed down, and Stella was surprised the wheels didn’t lift up as Chrissy took the corner. The yellow-brick duplex came up fast on the right, and as she screeched to a stop the dash clock read 12:09.
“Now hold one second,” Stella said, slapping a hand down on Chrissy’s arm to prevent her from bolting out of the car. “You know she’s expecting Roy Dean.”
“I don’t care if she’s expecting Tim McGraw—”
“What I’m sayin’ is, we can make this easier if we start out reasonable, just stay calm and cool and help her see we’re offering a win-win all around here.”
“And then I call the bitch out, if she gives me any shit.”
“Well . . . okay.”
Chrissy wrenched her arm away and got out of the Jeep, and Stella had to hustle to keep up across the burned-out lawn and onto a cracked concrete porch.
Chrissy laid into the door, pounding with a clenched fist. When it suddenly burst open, a large man popped into view and Chrissy went flying inexplicably floor-wards. Only when she was laid out on the carpet with the large man sitting on her chest did Stella see the second man, more of a kid, really, who had taken Chrissy down by throwing himself at her legs and yanking them out from under her.
“Ow,” Chrissy said. “Git off me.”
“Shit, Dad, that’s a girl,” the younger man said, scuttling away crab-style before jumping to his feet.
The first attacker had apparently come to pretty much the same conclusion because he lumbered off Chrissy. “Hell,” he said, sounding more annoyed than sorry.
Stella offered Chrissy a hand and hauled her up, the effort ratcheting up the ache through her ribs. “You okay?” she asked.
Chrissy glared at the two men who, now that they were standing sheepishly side by side, could be seen to be clearly related, with the same blockish heads and thin lips and fleshy eyelids. She rubbed at the small of her back and cricked her head one way and then the other. “I’ll live,” she said sourly, before turning on her attackers. “Where’s my baby? Where you got Tucker?”
The men looked at each other.
“Huh?” asked the younger one.
“Look here,” the older one said. “You kind of got in the way of a operation in progress. There’s someone coming along any minute now that needs a major attitude adjustment, so if you don’t mind, we need to get ready for him.”
“I think that’s my ex you’re talkin’ about,” Chrissy said. “Roy Dean. He ain’t comin’.”
“He sent you in his place?” the young one said, clearly agitated at the notion. He looked like a man who had his heart set on delivering a beating.
“No, he did not. He’s done disappeared. Look, all’s I want is my boy, and then I’ll go. Where’s Darla?”
“That ain’t any of your business,” the older one said, stepping forward angrily.
“I think it is.” Stella kept her voice calm, but she drew up to her full height and glared at him. “Are you her father?”
He hesitated only for a second before saying, “Yes I am. Bill Merton.”
He turned to Chrissy and added, “Your ex has been treatin’ my girl pretty poor—he needs his ass kicked.”
Chrissy sighed. “I don’t doubt it, and I don’t much care what you do to him. But way I heard it is he mighta dropped off my little boy here and left him.”
The men glanced at each other, clearly mystified. “I don’t know anything about no baby,” Junior said.
“Call your sister,” the elder Merton demanded.
Junior pulled a phone out of his pocket and dialed.
“I’m going to go look around,” Chrissy muttered, her disappointment clear from the slumping of her shoulders.
Merton started to object.
“Let her go,” Stella snapped. “She won’t hurt nothing.”
As Chrissy made her way down the darkened, cat-smelling hall of the house, Stella listened impatiently to half a phone call for the second time in an hour.
“Darla,” the boy barked into the phone. “Roy Dean leave some kinda baby with you? . . . No, he ain’t been by yet. There’s these two women—I said he ain’t come by, you deaf or something? What’s her name?”
He directed the latter at Stella, jerking a thumb down the hall where Chrissy could be heard opening and closing doors.
“That’s Chrissy Shaw, Roy Dean’s ex,” Stella said.
“Chrissy Shaw, Roy Dean’s ex,” the boy repeated into the phone. “Her little boy’s gone missing, and she thinks Roy Dean had ’im. . . . You’re sure? . . . Hell, I don’t know, I’m just askin’. Well, don’t get mad at me, I didn’t do nothing! . . . Darla . . . Darla, I’m giving Dad the phone.”
He handed the phone to his father. “You talk to her. She’s goin’ all PMS on me.”
“Darla Jane,” Merton said in a voice that didn’t invite argument. “You se
ttle down now, girl. Roy Dean apparently ain’t comin’. . . . No, I don’t believe they found him to tell him the message. Now you come on home, and we’ll figure out what to do. Mmm-hmmm. That’s right . . . love you.”
He handed the phone back to his son as Chrissy came shuffling back into the room looking like she wanted to hit somebody herself. “Tucker ain’t here.”
“Look,” Merton said. “I’m sorry we took you down like that. Just, we were expecting that no-good Roy Dean. He’s been beatin’ up on my daughter. Which I don’t take kindly to.”
“I don’t guess I blame you,” Chrissy said. “Though you could have looked out the front window or something and seen I wasn’t him.”
“We did look,” Junior protested. “We saw your car pull in. But then we had to get in ready position.”
Amateurs, Stella thought. She’d lain in wait dozens of times, in alleys, behind bushes, in cars, outside office buildings—even in a men’s room once or twice—and never had she taken down the wrong guy.
But that’s what made her the professional that she was. Fastidious planning, careful preparation, flawless execution—when you made a career out of delivering justice, there was no room for error.
She knew there were lots of folks who’d figure that, working outside the law, Stella might have flexible standards. And it was true, in some ways—but not when it came to getting the job done. She didn’t tolerate near misses or botched reconnaissance or loose ends. It made the job harder—a lot harder—but no one ever changed the world by taking the easy way out.
“So this thing that Roy Dean was supposed to have left here,” she said. “Was that all just a trick?”
The elder Merton snorted. “There’s a box of his clothes and shit out in the garage, but I expect what he’s missing most is them illegal drugs he left in my daughter’s home.”
He dragged out the syllables in “ill-legal” to show his distaste, even as his son rolled his eyes heavenward in a grand show of impatience. “Ain’t but a couple a nasty smoked-down blunts, Dad.”
“And that mess of para-pher-nalia,” Merton huffed, glaring at his son and Chrissy in turn, as though he suspected them of being in cahoots. “Them papers and clippers and I’m sure I don’t know what all else. My daughter ain’t got no use for that sort of thing.”
“Don’t look at me. I don’t want none of it,” Chrissy said. “Listen up, sugar,” Stella said. “Tucker isn’t here. These men don’t know where he is, and it sounds like Darla doesn’t know either. I’m afraid this might just be a dead end.”
Chrissy nodded, frowning.
“All right,” she said, never taking her eyes off the Merton men. “We’re going to leave now. But if you find out anything—and I do mean anything—about my little boy, you call me right away. ’Cause if you don’t, I will find out and I will hunt you down. Now get me something to write on.”
As Chrissy wrote their cell phone numbers on the back of a takeout menu, underlining the digits three times and circling them, Stella noted that any traces of the earlier Chrissy—the one who battled her fears with nothing stronger than Oreo cookies—were long gone.
With two avenues left to explore—Pitt and the hornet’s nest of corruption brewing in the northeast end of town—Stella made an executive decision as they got back in the Jeep and Chrissy pulled away from the curb at what was, for her, a sedate pace.
“Sweet pea, I think it might be time to let the law do its thing,” she said. “If Pitt’s got Tucker, the longer we wait, the further he could be taking him.”
“You’re saying Pitt wants to keep Tucker for himself, like that?”
“Well . . . I’m just saying, we got to consider all the scenarios here. That’s one of them.”
Chrissy frowned doubtfully. “I seen them tapes. What was that, England or something? Where they got that little girl in the grocery store and snipped off all her hair in the bathroom and put her in boy clothes. But Stella, that’s over there. Pitt wouldn’t ever do like that.”
“How can you be sure, Chrissy?”
“Well, I know him, is all. He’s tryin’ to court me to death.”
Stella tried to figure out a polite way to ask how sneaking over for noontime quickies counted as courting, or if there were some other romantic behaviors she wasn’t aware of. “But let’s say . . . I mean, here’s Pitt, wanting you to, ah, to date him again. And on the other hand, there’s a baby he thinks is his, and we know how that can get a man’s spurs up, right? So if you had to guess, sugar, and meaning no disrespect, which would you say is front and center in Pitt’s mind? You or Tucker?”
Chrissy slowed to a few miles an hour to avoid a yellow dog lying in the street, snoozing in the afternoon sun. “He wants the whole package, Stella. Me ’n Tucker and the white picket fence shit. I’d’ve been tempted too ’cause I am fond of that man, but I just know myself a little too well, you see what I mean?”
“Uh, not exactly . . .”
“Well, just that you know how some men scratch your itch a little but they still leave you feeling restless. And then there’s the ones that do it for you and then some, you know? Like a little bit a what they got goes a long way, they just kind of shiver you all over. Inside, outside, and twice on Sundays . . . see? Pitt’s the first kind of man, and that’s how I ended up steppin’ out on him when we was married, and I just know I’d do it again.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s the gift of being in your late twenties, is you get mature. You know yourself.”
“Hell, if you’ve managed that already, you must be some kind of genius,” Stella exclaimed. “It took me until I was almost fifty.”
“Well . . . you’re smart in other ways,” Chrissy said kindly, driving lazily across the center line as she turned to give Stella a reassuring pat on the knee. Chrissy, who’d barely let the needle drop below eighty on the way over, was negotiating the streets of Harrisonville like a blind old lady.
“But how do you explain him leaving town then?”
“What you said—he could be visiting someone or catching a show in Branson or something. Course, that was back when you were still shuttin’ me out of this here investigation, so I don’t guess you even believed them poor excuses when you said ’em.”
Ouch. The girl had a point, and Stella swallowed hard, guilt weighing heavy on her. “There still might be a logical reason . . .”
“Tell you what, let’s just save that for now. What I’m worried about is, you said if the law gets on this and word gets back to them Kansas City gangsters and Roy Dean is involved with all that, then it could be even more dangerous for Tucker if he’s with Roy Dean.”
“Well . . .” There was an uncomfortable amount of truth in what Chrissy said. Stella still couldn’t piece together a logical reason why Roy Dean would have taken Tucker, but if he’d done something stupid and pissed off the mafia, it wouldn’t matter if he’d taken the Hope Diamond or a can of pork and beans into their midst: either way, he wasn’t likely to come out again. And if that was the case, their only hope of getting the boy was to somehow get inside their inner circle and take him back themselves. “I guess . . . if you’re sure about this . . . me and you are going to have to go turn over some rocks.”
“What sort of rocks?”
“Ugly, nasty ones. The rocks rolling around at Benning’s. Only look here, Chrissy. I think there’s every chance in the world I’ve poked a mad dog in the eye that don’t have anything to do with Tucker. I mean, even if Roy Dean took him through there on his way out of town, there’s no reason those men would want anything to do with a little boy.”
“Yeah . . . I guess. But I know Roy Dean. He wouldn’t be able to stay away from a bunch of losers like that. Prob’ly made him feel all important. Mr. Big Man.”
Without warning, she hit the gas, and they screeched forward down the couple of blocks leading back to the state road. A man working the front of his lawn with an edger jumped out of the way just in time as she barreled past him.
“Where are we go
ing, exactly?” Stella asked as Chrissy turned the wrong way down 9.
“Just a quick stop at Wal-Mart. We’re gonna need some supplies if we’re going to bust into that place.”
“But—but Wal-Mart’s the other way.”
“Not that Wal-Mart. We’re going to the other one, over in Casey.”
Stella’s head throbbed, and she gently massaged her temples, avoiding the bruised and stitched areas of her face as well as she could.
“I almost hate to ask, but what are we shopping for exactly?”
Chrissy glanced over at Stella, an all-business expression on her face. “Clothes for sneaking around in. I figure we got to get back over to Benning’s tonight, after dark, and look around. Best we wear black so we don’t stand out. Or camo, maybe. They make practically everything in camo these days, you know.”
“Oh.” Stella had to hand it to Chrissy for jumping right in to the details, which were still fuzzy in Stella’s own mind. Of course, Chrissy had the advantage of not having a concussion. “So . . . we’ll head out there tonight.”
“Yeah, well, we need to go when they’re closed, right? I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be happy to see you again, ’specially since it’s probably them as beat you up. You think we ought to get some of those night vision glasses?”
“I don’t know. . . . I think they’re pretty expensive.”
; “Yeah. Thanks to our stupid government,” Chrissy said, disgusted. “They pay six hundred dollars for a toilet seat, they probably want, like, a thousand bucks for those glasses.”
Stella was lost. “How does the government figure into what Wal-Mart charges?”
“Oh come on, Stella, don’t be naïve. The government doesn’t want us to defend ourselves. Or bear arms or anything like that. They put a special tax on things that it’s our constitutional right to buy, and then the money goes straight into their pockets. Or they use it for all those programs where they spy on what’s in your trash and read your mail. It’s true—I saw a special on it.”
“Uh, yeah.” Stella decided not to argue; she was still a little light-headed. “That’s too bad. I do have a good flashlight, though.”