by Unknown
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.
“You know what your mistake was,” Stella whispered, backing away. “You hesitated. You thought you had me because you’re young. But badass comes in all ages.”
She spun toward the house, her heart pounding from exertion as well as fear. How long had her encounter with Roy Dean taken? Three minutes? Four? It was miraculous that no one had come out to check on him. Stella opened the door and slipped into the house, flattening herself against the wall to the right of the door and swinging her gun arm to the left and the right, trying to adjust to the dark of the room. The only light came from under the counters in the colossal kitchen that opened up to the left of the family room.
A hall led from the far side of the family room straight through the center of the house, and Stella could see that the front door was open up ahead. Someone—Funzi or his wife or Beez—must have gone to check out front. When they didn’t find anything amiss, they would circle around to the back—and find Roy Dean laid out cold.
Stella darted down the hall toward an ornate staircase on the right, an enormous wood-railed affair that curved upward. She grabbed the rail and hauled herself up the stairs, trying to keep her steps light, but thoughts of Chrissy and Tucker propelled her forward. At the top of the stairs she could see a darkened bathroom with its door ajar, and she dove across the hallway and into the bath, skidding on the polished marble floor, and went into a crouch facing out to the hall.
Cautiously, she peered out: the hall was empty. To the left it opened into a huge loft room dominated by a big sectional sofa, the floor littered with electronics: a PlayStation and Wii controls and a plastic guitar, plus stacks of DVD cases and some crumpled soda cans.
To the right, the hall stretched twenty feet and ended at a set of carved double doors. These were open a fraction of an inch, not wide enough to see anything inside. Along the hall on either side were other doors, all closed, leading to bedrooms, no doubt, and possibly more bathrooms.
Shit. Each of those doors presented a threat. Each one of them could have someone on the other side, poised and ready to shoot. Not to mention whoever was outside, who at any moment would come tearing back up the stairs.
Sweating and hyperventilating, Stella, counted the doors to the right. Five, not including the master.
The wife was probably still in the master bedroom, Stella thought, unless she’d run to the baby when the alarm first went off. Would she do that? Would the last few days with Tucker have been enough to make her start thinking like a mother?
Stella ran that scenario through her mind. If Chrissy had managed to get up here fast enough, if she found the nursery right away, maybe got there at the same moment as Funzi’s wife—Stella had no doubt about who’d prevail in that conflict—or maybe been lucky enough to get in and out before anyone discovered her . . . was there any chance that Chrissy could have made her way back down the stairs and out the front door with Tucker? Could she be back at the Jeep already, putting it into gear and roaring back out onto the highway?
As Stella considered this hopeful possibility, she heard a sound from one of the doors on the right side of the hallway, a footstep or something heavy being moved. She realized her hopes were wildly unrealistic: Chrissy hadn’t got away. If she had managed to grab Tucker, Funzi and Beez would be in pursuit, the wife hysterical. Instead, they’d shut themselves in the rooms—and they had Chrissy and the baby with them.
Her instincts propelled her, and she burst out of the bathroom and across the hall and into the door, smashing into it with all her force.
It wasn’t locked, and she went flying into the room, knocking into a bed frame, her shins slamming painfully against the brass, her gut jarring against the rail. Staggering back, with nausea rocketing through her, she noticed the other person in the room.
Stella thought for a moment she was staring at a ghost, illuminated by a dainty ceramic lamp on a bedside table. Wearing a nightgown of sheer flower-sprigged cotton, an impossibly thin woman with lifeless blond hair hanging down past her shoulders stood hugging her arms to herself. Her eyes were rimmed red, with huge purple circles underneath. She looked terrified.
But Stella knew better—appearances could be deceiving.
She seized the woman’s arm and twisted it behind her back, doubling her over. She trained her gun on the woman’s head, pressing the barrel to her forehead. The woman made a small mewling sound, like a kicked puppy, but didn’t protest further.
“Where’s the baby?” Stella demanded.
The only sound the woman made was a strangled sob, and Stella yanked harder. She heard something pop in the area of the woman’s shoulder.
The woman screamed.
A thundering sound came from down the hall, and a bulky figure burst into the room, coming to a lurching halt in front of Stella. Funzi. The man who’d watched from the comfort of a park bench while his goons beat the shit out of her. A doughy man in his late forties, he wore striped cotton pajamas, thick black chest hair peeking out of the V neckline. His hair was slicked back on top of his head, in the style of a fifties crooner.
The gun he had trained on her made their entire cache of weapons look like toys from a cereal box. Stella figured it for a streetsweeper, a fully automatic shotgun that could shoot six hundred rounds a minute.
“I’ll shoot her,” she yelled.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Funzi said, slow and deadly. “That you’d shoot Marie here. The question is, would it be worth it, for a chance to put a bullet in your brain?”
Stella’s finger on the gun twitched involuntarily, and she realized Funzi had just unwittingly saved his wife.
She couldn’t shoot the woman now, knowing that Marie’s own husband was willing to stand there and watch her die. There was the evidence of what mattered to him. There was the balance of power. There was a drama Stella had seen played out a few times too often.
She relaxed her grip on Marie Angelini’s arm, and the woman fell to the floor, whimpering with pain and clutching her arm. Stella pointed the Ruger at Funzi.
“You’ll take me out with that thing,” she said, voice hard, “but can you be sure I won’t get off a shot, too? I’m not a bad shot, and right now I’m sighting right up your hairy nostrils.”
Funzi laughed, a horrible sound laced with what sounded like genuine mirth. “Yeah, you might. And if you do, know what’ll happen next?”
Stella said nothing, dread growing in her gut; From down the hall she heard a huffing cry: Tucker.
“Beez, come on down here,” Funzi called. “Bring our guest.”
Funzi stepped lightly aside, never taking the gun off Stella, and a second later Chrissy’s battered face appeared in the doorway. She was being shoved along by a compact, muscular dark-haired man in his twenties who was wearing a T-shirt smudged with blood and a pair of cotton lounge p
ants with beer cans screen-printed on them.
Chrissy’s hands were bound behind her, and she’d taken a couple of good slugs to the face. One eye was rapidly swelling shut, and as she opened her mouth to speak, Stella could see that a couple of her front teeth had been broken off.
“You look about like I feel right now,” Stella said, trying to keep her voice from wavering, but the situation was impossible now. They were doomed.
Chrissy gave her a small nod, but her eyes glinted with fury. Down, Stella thought, but not out. There was still some fight left in the girl.
“Did you nail Roy Dean?” Chrissy asked, her voice thick and slurred through the busted teeth.
“Yeah, I did,” Stella said. Though a fat lot of good it was going to do. “I knocked him out. Now I’m gonna take down this jerk.”
“You shoot me, Beez here will put a bullet in your girl’s brain and then, depending how pissed off he is, he just might go put one in the kid, too.”
Chrissy went rigid at his words, her eyes wide, her muscles straining as she worked against her restraints. Her lips moved and she spat at Funzi; the bloody glob landed on his cheek. Marie whimpered from the floor.
Gus yanked upward on Chrissy’s restraints, making her gasp with pain, but she didn’t cry out. Funzi picked up a little decorative pillow from a chintz armchair and wiped Chrissy’s saliva slowly and deliberately from his face. Then he tossed the pillow to the floor.
“I think you’ll be sorry you did that,” he said. He turned to Stella. “Okay, you ugly sack of flesh, how ’bout you give me that gun and come along like a good little girl.”
Reluctantly, Stella lowered her gun and handed it to Funzi, who stuck it in a pocket of his lounge pants. He came forward and yanked her shirt up, revealing the empty holster below. He took it off her with a vicious yank and threw the thing in the corner of the room.
“What you got here?” he demanded, reaching down to her ankle holster. He pulled out the scissors and laughed, then tossed them in the corner, too. “What were you going to do, snip me to death?”
Stella focused her attention on Chrissy, never taking her eyes off the girl’s face. “How’s Tucker?” she asked quietly.
Chrissy nodded once, firmly. Good: so the boy was all right. For now.
She had to believe Funzi had been bluffing about shooting the kid, but it was too risky to try anything now. Especially given the odds: two large, armed, and muscular men against the two of them, unarmed and beat to shit.
“Get up, Marie,” Funzi growled to the woman on the floor. Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet.
Stella heard something. A faint sound, a wail that gradually got louder. A siren.
Someone had called the fire department. Or—was it possible?—maybe the next-door neighbors had been looking out their window and seen her struggle in the back of the house with Roy Dean. Maybe the cops were on their way. Suddenly, the idea of being arrested sounded pretty damn appealing, since it would mean Chrissy and Tucker’s safety.
Down the hall Tucker’s hiccuping whine escalated to a wailing cry. Chrissy bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut for a second.
“Beez,” Funzi barked. “Go see what happened to Roy Dean. I’ll deal with these two.”
Beez bolted from the room and down the stairs. Stella hoped Roy Dean had bled rivers from the gash on his forehead, a blood pool so big and wide the cops or fire rescue couldn’t miss it.
“In the room,” Funzi said to Chrissy, getting behind her and giving her a shove. The girl stumbled forward and sat down hard on the bed.
“You,” Funzi said to Stella. “Next to her.”
Stella sat down on the bed, close to Chrissy, and put her arm around the girl. “It’s okay,” she whispered fiercely.
Whether it was or not might be up in the air, but Chrissy leaned into the hug. “I know,” she whispered back. It clearly hurt to talk, given the hit she’d taken to the mouth.
“Marie, get your ass in gear and get the rope,” Funzi ordered his wife. “And the tape. Move!”
Holding her arm painfully to her side, Marie slipped past him without a word. The blood had drained from her face, leaving her skin white and lifeless, and Stella figured the shoulder was dislocated and hurting like a bitch.
Too damn bad.
Marie was back in moments with a coil of orange plastic rope looped over her good arm. She also held a roll of duct tape. Outside, the sirens had grown in volume until they were practically earsplitting; then, abruptly, they stopped. Stella heard men’s voices and the clop of heavy boots on the drive, a pounding on the front door—Beez must have shut the door when he went down to deal with Roy Dean.
Funzi took the rope from his wife and, with surprising speed, tied Stella’s hands behind her and then looped the rope through Chrissy’s arms and secured the ends of the rope to the bed frame.
“Marie, get that kid and shut him up for Christ’s sake,” Funzi said.
Marie backed out of the room, but at the doorway she hesitated.
“He has a name,” she said, her voice quiet but with a faint echo of something at the heart of it.
“Yeah. Alphonse junior. Now move your ass.”
“No,” Marie corrected him. “It’s Tucker.” And she was gone.
Stella felt Chrissy tense next to her, but before she could say anything, Funzi grabbed the roll of duct tape and tore off a huge strip. He slapped it across her mouth, winding the ends around her head a couple of times. Stella had to work hard to keep the panic from making her hyperventilate, and she breathed hard through her nose as Funzi repeated the process on Chrissy.
The pounding downstairs grew louder, and Stella willed the firefighters to break the door down, to come in primed for action—but instead she heard Beez’s voice, slightly winded, speaking calmly.
“Hey, guys. Thanks for coming out.”
“Sir, we have a report of a fire at this address.”
“Yeah. Yeah, damndest thing. I think I just got it put out. I’ve had the hose on it out back.”
Funzi stepped away from the bed and gave his handiwork a once-over. Stella glared at him as hard as she could. Funzi wiped his hands on his pants and straightened the collar of his polo shirt and shot her a thumbs-up before he disappeared around the corner.
Tucker’s cries had diminished to a cranky whimper, with a rhythmic pattern to it, and Stella figured Marie had picked him up and was bouncing him quiet, much as she’d done for Noelle all those years ago.
Of course, she’d never done it with a dislocated shoulder. Grudgingly, she raised her opinion of Marie a few notches.
“Gentlemen,” Funzi’s voice boomed heartily from downstairs. “So glad you all came out. Me’n my buddy here can’t figure out what happened out back. Why don’t you all come on this way. . . .”
She could hear their voices at the back of the house but couldn’t make out the words. She strained her wrists against the rope, but flexing her muscles just made it bind more tightly against her skin, cutting in painfully. She wondered if she and Chrissy could maneuver themselves so their hands touched, whether one of them might be able to free the other’s wrists. But there was no way to make the suggestion, not with their mouths taped shut.
Stella fought against the panic in her chest. Was there any way to get to the scissors? She could see them across the room, where Funzi had thrown them against the wall, but they were four feet past the end of the bed, too far away to do any good.
That’s when she remembered the rotary cutter. Rocking her hips, she worked her loose camo pants around, twisting them against the shiny bedspread, until she could touch the top of the pocket with her fingertips. She tried to communicate to Chrissy with her eyes, to let her know what she was trying to do, and though the girl looked confused, she leaned as close as she could to give Stella as much slack in the rope as possible.
She strained against the rope and managed to touch the top of the rotary cutter’s handle, but it was smooth curved plastic, and she couldn’t ge
t a grip on it. She bent backward, forcing her shoulders back and straining her fingers as far as she could, until they slid down the handle far enough to get a grip. Stella grasped the cutter and worked it out of her pocket.
Comprehension dawned in Chrissy’s eyes, and she nodded sharply and looked down at her bound hands. Stella followed the path of her gaze and saw that she was opening and closing her fist, and realized what the girl was trying to communicate: she had more freedom of movement in her hands than Stella did. She wanted Stella to give her the cutter.
Stella didn’t hesitate. She managed to turn the tool in her hands, and pointed it toward Chrissy. She felt the girl take it from her and then she heard a beautiful sound: the snick of the safety being released.
She looked at Chrissy and for a moment their eyes held and she tried to communicate everything she was feeling: encouragement, resilience, and sheer ass-kicking vengeance. Chrissy blinked twice and then she leaned back and Stella felt the pressure of the blade against her restraints.
The blade was wicked sharp, and it spun free, making it hard to control. It was meant to be held firmly against a flat cutting surface. Used against an uneven surface like the knots, it could easily slip off, slicing into the vulnerable flesh of Stella’s hands or wrist.
She held as still as she could, but even so, twice she felt the blade slip and sink into her skin. She tried not to react, knowing that Chrissy needed all her focus for the task, but she felt blood dripping down her hands and pooling in her curled fingers. She’d cut herself with the rotary cutter before, and it was like a cut with a straight razor—so clean and so fast that you didn’t feel the pain at first.
The voices in the back yard faded and then came back louder as the men returned to the house. Stella could hear them in the downstairs hall, laughing now, all worries about the fire put to rest, and her heart sank. So Beez had managed to obliterate all her hard work with Roy Dean—the unconscious body, the puddle of blood. Well, it wouldn’t have been hard, with a few minutes’ blasting with the hose.
She felt one of the strands of rope strain against the blade, and suddenly it snapped free, the frayed end hitting her fingers. Stella made a sound in her throat, of surprise and gratitude. Chrissy murmured in response, and Stella could feel her tugging at the loosened rope.