by Unknown
Stella glanced up at the cold steel in Chrissy’s voice.
“I am looking for a little boy,” Chrissy continued. “My son is missing. He is eighteen months old. I want him back. It’s not right, him being away from his mother. Now, do you know anything about him?”
Patrick squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced from the pain.
“You know mothers,” Stella said conversationally. “Chrissy here’s actually a nice lady most of the time. Wouldn’t swat a fly. But get between her and her boy and . . . whoo, I tell ya, I’m not sure I like your odds. I bet your mama’s the same way. I bet if she knew who you were working for, she’d probably hightail it out here and take old Funzi’s head off. Am I right?”
Genuine anguish seeped into the boy’s eyes. “You’re wrong. It’s a family thing. We’re related. Funzi’s her cousin. Look, my dad took off when I was little, okay? I got three little sisters. Funzi’s just helping us out.”
Stella prodded him again, a little harder. The wound, which was down to a trickle of blood, gave up a small gush. “You think your mama would appreciate this kind of help? Huh? Do you?”
Though Patrick’s face had gone chalk white, he kept to his stony silence.
“You’re telling me your mama handed you over to Funzi? Told him, forget finishing high school, forget college, I prefer you take my boy and teach him how to maim and kill, please?”
“I can’t cross him. I don’t care what you say.” The boy’s breath was ragged. “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me slow.”
Man, it was worse than Stella thought. If Funzi’d got the kid running this scared, he must be the genuine, ruthless, bloody-handed mob article. She wasn’t sure how to convince the boy she was every bit as much of a badass threat as Funzi.
Because, in the end, she wasn’t. There was no way she was going to kill this man-child with peach fuzz growing on his upper lip.
As Stella hesitated, Chrissy shouldered her out of the way and leaned in hard on Patrick, her face just inches from his. “I don’t know if your mama’s a nice lady or not. I don’t know her, period. That’s why I can drive over there and start hurting her bad. If I knew her. I might have second thoughts, but I’m not even going to give her time to offer me a glass of tea. First thing I’m going to do is shoot her just like Stella done you, see? Except she don’t have anything useful to tell me, so I don’t know if I’ll really take the time to tie her off so she don’t bleed out. Aw, hell, I know it’ll take a long time to lose enough blood from a hole here—”she jabbed Patrick hard in the skin an inch from the bullet’s entry—“so I might just have to aim a little higher. There’s some artery in the thigh I guess pumps a lot of blood, the, what do you call it—”
“Femoral,” Stella said softly.
“Femoral, yeah,” Chrissy said. Then she drew back slowly, never taking her eyes off the boy’s face.
He gulped. Hard. And Stella knew they had him.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” he wheezed. “You stay the hell away from my mom. Funzi’s got your kid. For his wife.”
There was a moment of shocked silence.
“What are you talking about?” Chrissy demanded.
“Roy Dean gave him to Funzi, okay? He and his wife couldn’t have kids. Been trying forever. Roy Dean said you wouldn’t care.”
Chrissy’s eyes narrowed. “He said what?” she demanded, and Stella grabbed her arm before she could do the boy any more damage.
“He said you never did want that kid in the first place.” The boy squeezed his eyes shut tight, a sheen of perspiration dampening his forehead. “Said he was an accident and all. He like . . . said you wanted to give him up for adoption . . . that he was doing you a favor.”
Stella could feel Chrissy start to shake and clamped her hand down harder. “Easy there, girl,” she murmured. “Easy. Whatever’s happened, it ain’t this boy’s fault.”
Chrissy shone her flashlight directly in Patrick’s eyes, causing him to squeeze them shut. “Where’d Funzi take my Tucker?”
“I don’t know, okay, I don’t know! Probably the lake house, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there.”
“What lake house?”
“They got a place in that new development down by Camden Beach, you know? About thirty-five miles from here.”
“Tucker’s with Funzi’s wife? You’re sure?” Stella asked, thinking fast. If Patrick was telling the truth, and Funzi and his wife planned to keep the boy, it could be a stroke of luck. The woman was bound to treat him well, especially if she had started to think of him as her own.
“They—they treatin’ him good?” Chrissy said, echoing her thoughts. Her voice was thin and wavery.
“How the hell am I supposed to know? They plan on raising him—you get it? Like you know, their own son.”
“Ain’t they ever heard of adoption?” Chrissy said.
Patrick’s expression shifted for the first time from straight fear to surprise. “Who’s gonna let them adopt? Don’t you know who Funzi is? They got the whole organized crime unit up in Kansas City trying to crawl up his ass.”
Stella sighed. “So that whole thing’s true? Y’all really are mob?”
Patrick said nothing, and a single tear squeezed out of one eye and bounced down his cheek. Chrissy kicked at his bad leg, not hard this time, and Patrick’s eyelids fluttered like he was going to pass out.
“Come on, boy,” Stella said, not unkindly. “Don’t make this so hard on yourself.”
“Our family’s been connected forever,” Patrick said through clenched teeth. “Beez and Gus, they’re like his nephews or something. They been with Funzi a long time.”
“They’re the guys that nailed me,” Stella said. “Is that it? Everyone who’s down here?’
“Them . . . and Reggie Rollieri.”
“What’s he do?”
“He covers the casinos for Funzi. And he runs a book down along the shore. He’s only around a couple weeks a month.”
“So Funzi, Reggie, the two goons, and Roy Dean—that’s five, plus Benning is six. And counting you, seven.”
Patrick screwed up his face and drew a breath. “So you gonna kill me now?”
“Me? Nah,” Stella said. “Though Chrissy here might. She’s turning out to be a little itchy on the trigger.”
“They say you kill just about everyone who pisses you off,” Patrick mumbled.
“Who says?”
“Funzi. Benning. All of ’em.”
Interesting. So they’d asked around. Stella couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, it was flattering to know that her reputation as a cold-hearted killer was thriving. It was probably the reason they had junior here down at the gate on guard duty, though they probably didn’t think Stella was a true threat or they wouldn’t have given the job to such a greenhorn.
“Well, I don’t. I haven’t made up my mind on you yet, but you help me out here, maybe we can work it out so you can spend next summer working at Burger King like a regular kid, okay?”
He shook his head. “I’ll be dead in a week after they find out what I told you.”
“Only if they’re still around to come find you. Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said briskly. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. Fast, and you’re not going to leave anything out. Then I’m going to take you to a . . . friend for safekeeping. Just until we get this mess straightened out. What happens to you, that depends on how you handle yourself now. Hear?”
A single nod.
“Okay, Chrissy. Help me drag him over there.”
Chrissy and Stella hooked his shoulders and dragged. Patrick moaned as they bumped over the ground, but they got him propped up against a tree close to the fence. Stella checked his leg; it could definitely use a cleaning and dressing, but it didn’t look like he was going to bleed out tonight. Satisfied, she sat down cross-legged in front of him and motioned to Chrissy to join her. Sitting side by side, with the flashlight on its he
ad making a circle of light on the ground between them and Patrick, reminded Stella of long-ago Girl Scout camp-fires.
“Where’s Roy Dean?”
Patrick snuck a nervous glance at Chrissy.
“Remember what I said,” Stella reminded him. “The whole truth. And fast. I’m feeling impatient.”
“He’s . . . uh, dead.”
Chrissy, sitting next to her, didn’t flinch.
Stella nodded. “I’m not all that surprised. Let me guess—he was ripping Funzi off, and Funzi found out.”
“He, um. Yeah.”
“Tell me how.”
Patrick licked his cracked lips. “Funzi had him driving weed up to Kansas City. He’d go pick it up from these Vietnamese guys in Bolivar that Funzi’s got growin’ the shit in their basement.”
“He start skimming, is that it?”
“Yeah . . . outta the bales, a little here and there, but then he took a whole brick, you know? Hard to miss that. Funzi’s not stupid.”
“What’d he want to do, sell it?”
“I guess. Thing is, he, ah . . .” Patrick glanced miserably at Chrissy. “I mean, I’m sorry if you didn’t know, Mrs. Shaw, Roy Dean had a girl—”
“That fucktard,” Chrissy spat. “Yeah, I knew.”
“So I guess they were gonna sell it or, I don’t know, he gave it to her or whatever but by the time Funzi had Beez and Gus mess him up, it was gone.”
“So Funzi killed him?”
“Not right then. They gave him a week to come up with a couple thousand bucks.”
Chrissy barked a short laugh.
“That was after they beat him up?” Stella asked.
“Yeah.”
Stella looked to Chrissy. “What do you think? Was Roy Dean looking for money that week?”
“Was he ever not looking for money? Shit, Stella, he’d turn over the couch cushions every time before he went to the bar. But he knew I didn’t have none, so it wasn’t like he’d ask me.”
“Arthur junior didn’t say anything about Roy Dean hitting him up either.”
“Well hell, he was fixing to trade my baby away, I guess he didn’t think he needed it,” Chrissy said. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.”
“That what happened, Patrick?” Stella asked. “Roy Dean come in here with Tucker?”
“Yeah.” If it was possible to look any more uncomfortable than he already was, with a leaking hole in his leg, Patrick did. “He was supposed to have the money Friday night, but he showed up here Saturday with the, uh, with your boy.”
“Oh!” Chrissy said. “That little . . . I went out to my friend Tiffany’s house Friday night to play cards, and Tucker was with me.”
“He was planning to take Tucker out to Benning’s that night,” Stella guessed.
“No shit! All along he meant to—he had it planned.” Chrissy was trembling from her fury, and Stella put her hand on her back and patted gently. Righteous anger was good, but she had to keep it under control.
“So?” she prompted Patrick.
“So, um, Benning has Roy Dean go wait in the shed and he calls Funzi, and, and Funzi was headed down to the lake house with Gus and Beez and Reggie, so they all turned around and came back up here.”
“How long did it take Funzi and them to get there?”
“Not long, maybe fifteen minutes. Me’n Roy Dean, we were kind of talking some, and the kid was on the floor playin’ with some little stuffed dog—”
“Pup-pup,” Chrissy interjected. “That’s his favorite. Oh, God—”
“Okay,” Stella said, giving Chrissy a one-arm hug, a firm one, to get her to focus. “We got to listen to the rest of this, hon.”
Chrissy gulped and nodded.
Patrick’s breathing had gone short and fast. He looked back and forth between them, his eyes unfocused. “So when Funzi and them came in the kid had shit his pants and Roy Dean couldn’t get him to shut up. Funzi’s all, Where’s the money, you got my money? And then Roy Dean tells Funzi, look here, you can have the kid and that’ll settle us up, and Funzi looks at him like he’s out of his mind and then he goes nuts. Tells Roy Dean, Is he fucking crazy? . . . And then he smacks him around a little, keeps asking where the fuck his money is, and then all of a sudden he just stops. He, uh, tells Gus to take the kid and drive him down to the lake house, you know, where his wife is. And Roy Dean’s looking all happy because, like, he figures Funzi went for it and all, but the second Gus walks out the door with the kid Funzi tells me and Beez, go outside and guard the place and don’t go nowhere until he comes and gets us. So we go out, and it wasn’t more than a minute or two after they locked the doors again, we heard a shot. And I knew Funzi shot Roy Dean.”
Patrick swallowed hard. Stella had a pretty good idea it was the first time Patrick had heard something like that, despite all his swagger.
“Okay,” she said gently. “He killed Roy Dean. Maybe he figured he couldn’t keep him around, knowing where the kid was. What happened to the body?”
“Well, shit, we were like—I mean, Funzi tells me, go get some plastic and a chain saw from Benning, and I, and I, I did that, and Beez stayed and guarded the shed, and when I got back I knocked on the door and gave the stuff to Funzi and then a minute later we heard them fire it up.”
“Funzi and Rollieri . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Holy mother,” Stella said. “A chain saw, didn’t that make a hell of a mess?”
“Yeah,” Patrick said, his voice a hoarse whisper. Stella noticed a smell coming off him, acrid fear mixed with blood and body odor. “Funzi, uh, didn’t make us help with the, uh, sawing. He told us to stay outside and, you know, we did. But later, when we were cleaning up . . . Jesus.”
“So you and Beez helped take care of the body when it was done?”
“No. Funzi gave me the chain saw and said, clean it off, and I wiped it down and all that, and Beez went and helped Benning close up and Funzi said, wait for him in the house so we . . . we, um, did.”
“How long did that take?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe like . . . half an hour? More maybe, we were, uh, sitting around at the house, and, and finally Funzi called on the cell. He said for me and Beez to come back up to the shed and, like, the pieces of, of Roy Dean were wrapped in plastic and Funzi told us to carry it all out to the burn barrel. Reggie had headed back to the city, so it was just me and Beez done it.”
Stella grimaced, thinking of the grisly task. Chrissy looked a little green herself. “Where’s the burn barrel?”
“Out behind the shed on the back side,” Patrick said, lifting a limp arm to point back across the property.
“Then what did you do?”
“We, uh, laid in some newspaper and shit to get it started and then we put the, uh, you know, Roy Dean in there. Plastic and all, Funzi wanted it all burned. Poured on the kerosene but we waited until dark to light it up.”
“Did it catch right off?”
“Yeah, but it took all night to burn down. The smell . . . it nearly killed us. In the morning, there was, there was a few pieces of bone or something with the plastic burned onto it. Gus was back by then, and Funzi made us dig, like, five or six holes and put the shit in.”
“Was it all destroyed? Other than the bone pieces?”
“There was some little bits of cloth around the barrel that must’ve come out of the flames or something. And what didn’t burn . . . I think there were teeth, like that.” Patrick stared miserably at the ground.
“Could you find those holes again?”
“Yeah. Since I had to do most of the digging. Funzi had me put the dirt back and drive the front loader over the top when I was done.”
“Okay.” Stella sat back on her haunches for a minute, thinking over the story. She glanced at Chrissy, whose anger seemed to have dissipated some, though she kept the gun loosely trained on Patrick. “Patrick, where exactly is Funzi on the old mob totem pole?”
“Kinda low, I guess,” Patrick sa
id. “I mean, he’s got just Gus and Beez and Reggie. And me. He reports up to Donny Calabasas, and then after Donny, it’s Justin Frank—he’s got the whole south end of Kansas City.”
“Okay, I get the picture,” Stella said. “He’s a pissant and Gus and Beez and Reggie are little pissants and you’re just a teeny little baby pissant. That about the size of it?”
Patrick barely nodded. His eyelids were slowly sliding down, and Stella was worried he was about to pass out. “Look here, can you tell me how to get to the lake house?”
“Yeah . . . it’s the biggest-ass house on the north shore. It’s in that new development down past the U-Store-It where Route 4 hits the shore road.”
“On that private drive they put in?”
“Yeah, there’s maybe six, eight houses on a cul-de-sac.”
“And you’re sure that’s where they got the kid?”
Patrick looked uncertain. “Well . . . probably. I mean, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there, and now she’s got the kid—”
“My kid,” Chrissy interrupted, and Patrick swallowed.
“Sorry . . . yeah, I’m like ninety percent sure that’s where they are.”
“All of them? Funzi and Gus and Beez?”
“No, Funzi had Gus run something up to the city, some delivery for Donny Calabasas. So it’s just him and Beez.”
Stella still didn’t like those odds. Ordinarily she wouldn’t move until she was certain. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.
“How long until someone figures out you’re gone?”
Patrick shrugged. “Depends. If Benning and Larissa are partying, sometimes he don’t even come down.”
“But the rest of the time?”
“The rest of the time he’s down here around eleven, eleven thirty. Midnight maybe.”
Stella checked her watch: ten. Shit. “And where’s Funzi and them tonight?”
“At the lake house, I guess. Unless they went into town, to the bars . . . I don’t know. They don’t check in with me. Benning would know, but—”
“Yeah.”
For a moment Stella considered heading up to the house and scaring the crap out of Benning and his girlfriend, but that was introducing all kinds of opportunities to fuck things up.