“Oh,” Brandy said dubiously. “I guess you could, if you wanted. Except I’m ninety-nine percent sure I’ll be dead here in a bit. No sense holding you up.”
“Where the hell are you, anyway?”
“Well, if I knew that, don’t you think I’d tell you?” Brandy demanded crossly. “Wil got me in the car and put a blindfold on me, then we drove around in circles for like three hours or something. I couldn’t even tell you if it was night or day. I might be in—in Arkansas, for all I know. Then we went on this bumpy road, you know, like in the wilderness or whatever, and after a while—a few miles, I guess—we stopped and Wil made me get out and he wouldn’t take off my blindfold or nothing, so I was just kind of stumbling along. And I could feel weeds and shit on my legs, so I’m thinking it was the middle of nowhere. And then Wil told me to sit my ass down and I did and my legs went in this, like, hole and he gives me a shove and bam I’m falling into this hole he dug, it’s probably twelve, fifteen feet deep—and I think I busted a leg or something falling in here. Then there was all this thumping around, he dragged some kind of boards or something over the top, and then I could hear the dirt start to hit the boards, and that went on like forever until I couldn’t hear nothing. And there’s barely room for me to lay down in here. Plus it’s cold.”
“What—you mean, he buried you alive?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m tryin to tell you. All’s I know is I’m sealed in here and it’s dark as pitch, and it took me forever to get the rope off my wrists and the whole time my phone’s beeping ’cause it’s almost out of power and I knew I only had enough battery left for one call so you better make it good, Stella, ’cause I think I’ve breathed up just about all the air in this here hole and my phone’s about to go and you’re my only hope.” Her voice trailed off in a thin waver and she coughed delicately a few times, and then the phone went dead.
“Holy shit,” Stella exclaimed.
“What the hell was that about?” Goat demanded, his eyes wide and startled.
“It was … uh…” For a moment, Stella thought she ought to just tell him everything. Stella plus Goat plus that detective from Fayette and all her little helpers seemed like a far better bet when it came to tracking down a raging criminal than just plain Stella.
But if what Brandy said was true, and Wil had killed once—and depending on whether Stella could find her dirt grave in time or not, possibly twice—then she made an excellent point: The man needed a bullet in the brain way more than he needed to be a guest of the federal justice system at the taxpayers’ expense, only to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public down the road to get right back into the mayhem business.
Stella wavered, thoughts skittering back and forth across the deep divide between her longing for justice and her nagging worries for her own personal safety—and distracted only a little by Goat’s lips parted expectantly and the look of alarm that had his eyebrows doing that bent-down thing—and then she came down exactly where she knew she would, her mettle having been formed once and for all the day she dropped her husband to the ground with a wrench.
It wouldn’t be such a stretch to suppose that—having discovered how easily a living, breathing, cruel bastard can be turned into a mush-skulled, harmless, dead one—a woman might decide to turn killing into a regular habit. In for a penny, in for a pound, as her mother always said; once you dip a toe in that water, what was going to stop you from jumping on in? Especially when there were so damn many jerks littering the planet, running around hurting and humiliating innocent women with impunity, practically begging to be sent packing to Hell?
There was just one problem: Stella was not a killer.
Yes, she’d taken her husband down, and she’d had to drop a couple of crazed mobsters who had tried to kill her first, but those had all been self-defense. That was different, and no court of law or philosopher or Bible thumper would ever convince her otherwise.
But when those deeds were done, Stella sought out the Big Guy and prayed for His guidance, and when she came to the end of her reflection, she knew in her heart that self-defense was the only excuse for the taking of a life. She knew with divine certainty that unless she was saving herself or her loved ones from imminent peril, justice of the capital punishment variety was off the table. Because that was getting into the Big Guy’s territory. It wasn’t, to be blunt, Stella’s place to decide who should live and who should die. Her job was only to set His more wayward lambs back on the path of righteousness, and if that occasionally took the crack of a whip or delivery of a few thousand volts or the slow and painful removal of a few fingernails, well, she figured the Big Guy would understand.
What He probably would not be very pleased about was Stella taking on the Wil-hunt without every resource available, not when one of His children—even if she was an annoying, overblown, man-stealing, hussy type of child—was in jeopardy.
She allowed herself one short sigh. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, and then she told Goat all about the call, even as his face went from alarmed to chalk white to a ruddy shade of pissed-off red. He was practically out of the booth before she was finished, pulling his phone out of his pocket and throwing some bills on the table.
“Guess we got to go find Brandy now, huh,” Stella said, scrambling to follow.
“There ain’t no ‘we’ about it, Stella.” Goat stopped in his tracks and laid one large and heavy hand on her shoulder. “You hear? Go on home and mind your own business. This don’t have anything to do with you.”
He was out the door before she could come up with any kind of response, leaving her in the middle of the shabby bar with a few curious patrons giving her the once-over.
Stella picked up her purse and made her way slowly back down the street toward the municipal center, which was lit up bright in the autumn evening, energy conservation be damned. Ahead she could make out Goat sprinting across the parking lot, yanking open the door to his cruiser. A moment later, he peeled out onto the street, his flasher strobing blue light into the darkness.
As Stella trudged back to her Jeep, she reflected that Goat was moving awfully fast for a man who wasn’t still stuck on the stupid woman who’d managed to unhinge Stella’s life in the process of fucking up her own.
SIXTEEN
When she pulled onto her darkened street half an hour later, dispirited and tired from the drive back from Fayette, Stella was so relieved to see Jelloman’s restored El Camino in her driveway that little prickly tears formed in her eyes.
She blinked them away fast as she went into the house and found Jelloman taking loaves of fresh-baked bread out of the oven. One look at the man—not even a fraction of his bulk covered by her favorite red apron, flour dusting his cheeks, a wide and welcoming smile on his face—caused Stella to burst into delayed-reaction tears and tell him, if not the whole story, at least the part about hankering for a man who was still hung up on his ex. The whole saving-her-from-death angle seemed, at that point, superfluous.
Jelloman gave Stella the extra-long version of his trademark bear hug and then between the two of them, they polished off nearly an entire loaf of seeded challah with a generous melty layer of butter. Then Stella allowed him to shoo her off to bed while he went about the business of cleaning up the kitchen, whistling and whipping a dish towel around the kitchen’s surfaces like an oversized, bearded Betty Crocker.
Before going to sleep, though, Stella made one more call. Even though she was certain she wouldn’t have any more luck trying to find Brandy’s burial site than a whole county’s worth of trained professionals, it didn’t feel right to her not to try. She was more than a little skeptical about Brandy’s claim that she was running out of air already, in a hole of the size she described, so to reassure herself, she’d called Chrissy and had her get Larry on the line for a three-way chat.
If she’d had any doubts about Larry’s geekiness before the call, they were put to rest when the boy didn’t bother to ask her why she needed to know how long th
e air in a hole ten to fifteen feet tall and five feet around could sustain a person. He immediately started mumbling numbers and equations to himself and then wandered away from the phone, though they could occasionally hear him talking to himself as he typed furiously, the clack of the keyboard as loud as if he were typing with hammers.
“He’s got a lot a finger strength,” Chrissy explained while they waited, “and whaddaya call it, manual dexterity.”
Stella took advantage of the lull to fill her partner in on everything that had happened since the morning. Chrissy felt like they ought to set out right that minute to add their womanpower to the search efforts—“Just ’cause she’s got her hooks in your man don’t make her less deservin’ to live,” she pointed out—but when Larry came back on the line and told them that in a hole that size, Brandy probably had at least a couple days’ worth of air, Stella convinced Chrissy that they’d be a lot more helpful with a good night’s sleep behind them.
Then she’d gone to bed and slept like a rock, and if she’d dreamed, the dreams were forgotten by morning.
Stella woke to the smell of bacon and coffee and the feel of warm breath on her face. She slowly opened one eye and then the other and found herself staring into Roxy’s freckled snout, and she wondered for a moment if she was imagining the delicious smells, until she remembered that Jelloman had taken over her kitchen.
Stella lingered under the covers for a while, penned in by fifty pounds of affectionate dog, trying to convince herself she should be happier. If Brandy was right about Wil, Neb should be in the clear. There was the little matter of the evidence to consider, but whatever they had on him ought to seem a lot less significant when viewed in the light of them having produced an entirely separate killer and kidnapper.
And since Brandy had a couple of days’ worth of air left, surely they’d find Wil and get the information out of him in time to find and free her. That is, if Brandy didn’t claw her way out first—those long scarlet fake nails, combined with her relentless need for attention, ought to make easy work of all that digging.
Which was all good … real good. Crime solved, bad guy put away, Neb out of jail, Brandy rescued, the town recovered from the spate of twisters, and Stella free to get back to her regular life.
As Stella pushed hard against Roxy’s plump and spotted rib cage, and Roxy rolled onto her back and waved her paws in the air, letting her tongue loll out, Stella tried hard not to admit to herself that getting back to her life was a lot less appealing without the prospect of Goat being in it.
But if there was one thing harder to compete with than a sexpot ex-wife, it was a sexpot ex-wife who’d just been rescued from the jaws of death. If the man of your dreams was the valiant, come-to-the-rescue variety, that is, and Goat fit the bill to a T.
Stella wasn’t a victim. Not anymore, anyway, and never again, if she could help it. She was a badass in her own right, which meant she wasn’t exactly catnip for would-be heroes.
“Move it, you worthless beast,” Stella muttered, and gave Roxy an extra-hard shove that rolled her right out of the bed and onto the floor, where she stood wagging her tail and grinning a big doggy grin. Stella sat up and scratched her mutt behind the ears for a while. At least one creature on the planet seemed pleased to have her around.
Make that two. After Stella took a quick shower and picked out a pair of stretchy pants and a loose top suited for a day of victim-hunting, Jelloman squeezed her in a hug, sat her down at the kitchen table, and slid a big plate of challah French toast and bacon in front of her. She nibbled at it and endured Jelloman’s admonishments to slow down and appreciate life and not be in such a fuckin’ hurry all the damn time.
He fussed like a mother hen until she made it through nearly a whole slice of French toast and most of her bacon, and then he handed her a steaming cup of coffee in a travel mug and demanded one last hug before he let her out of the house.
Stella told Jelloman that she was headed over to do inventory at the shop, which was closed, seeing as it was Sunday. She saw no need to worry him with the petty little details of buried rivals and riled murderers on the loose. But as she got in the Jeep and headed over to pick up Chrissy, her glum mood threatened to evaporate the little bit of enthusiasm she’d managed to stir up for the job that needed doing.
When the man of your dreams was a justice-hungry knight in khaki polyester armor, there just wasn’t any way to compete with a woman whose ass needed saving—especially if that ass was sporting skimpy thong underwear.
Tucker Came to the door and mashed his face against the screen, yelling “Sow, Sow!” Stella let herself in and found Chrissy sitting at the kitchen table, looking extremely smug.
“What’re you so dang cheerful about?” Stella demanded.
Chrissy fluffed her tumble of damp blond curls and sent them springing around her pale china-smooth cheeks.
“’Cause I’m a genius, is why,” she said. “Listen up, once you hear what I figured out, you can go home and change outta them nasty-lookin’ rags and into something decent, ’cause we ain’t gonna have to go hunting today after all. Not in any dirty old holes, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Stella reached down for Tucker, but he darted away and ran through the apartment, hollering unintelligibly. In seconds he was back, carrying a glittery platform sandal with pink and yellow fake gems all along the straps.
“Soo!” he yelled, and held it up to Stella.
“That’s right, it’s a shoe, ” she said. “Very good.”
Tucker, barely able to contain his excitement, jumped up and down a few times and pointed at her shoes. Today Stella had on her yellow rubber clogs. She had four or five pairs in a variety of colors; they were comfy, could be hosed off if her work took her into unsavory or dirty conditions, and on most surfaces they were silent, which made them good for sneaking up on people.
Tucker loved Stella’s colorful clogs. She kept meaning to get him a pair of his own, except she was pretty sure he didn’t exactly want to wear them. No, he liked putting his little action figures and cars in them, and putting them on his bears, and most of all, he loved running around the house carrying them and using them as bumpers when he smashed into things.
“I got a couple of things I think you’ll be interested in,” Chrissy said. “You know that whole story Brandy told you? About the hole and all?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, you remember that movie Jennifer Garner and Matthew McConaughey done a couple years back, where Jennifer’s a model with three months to live and Matthew plays her boyfriend and then she gets kidnapped—it was what’s-his-name played the bad guy, the one who used to be hot like a hundred years ago and now he looks—Alec Baldwin, that’s it—well, anyway, turns out she’s just one in a whole mess of girls? Like, there’s a serial killer?”
“I must’ve missed that one.” In truth, Stella made it a policy to avoid movies that featured violence, since she figured she got enough of that at work. Which certainly cut down on the pop culture offerings she could stand to watch, but she was too busy to see very many anyway.
“Well, when we were talking yesterday, it hit me that there was something awful familiar about that whole cockamamie story Brandy was feedin’ you. In the movie, Alec Baldwin hits Jennifer over the head in a bar parking lot and then he takes her out into the woods up in Montana, and he’s got a whole bunch of big old holes dug out there. I guess there ain’t very many folks living up in that entire state, so you can do shit like that and no one pays any mind.”
“That so. Huh.”
“Well, least in the movie that’s how it was. So anyway, he puts her in the hole and then he drags a piece a wood over the top and—is this startin’ to sound just a little familiar, Stella?”
“Either you’re sayin’ Brandy’s been picked off by a serial killer who’s been poking holes all over Sawyer County, or—”
“Or Brandy made the whole thing up and she couldn’t be bothered to come up with an original plot, even.
” Chrissy seemed more outraged at the lack of originality than by the lie itself. “Only I can’t figure why she’d go and kidnap herself.”
Stella snorted. “Well, girl, I gotta hand it to you. I think you might be on to something. The whole thing sounded pretty stupid to me when she was telling me about it—like Wil would let her keep her cell phone, I mean, come on—and it would just happen to have enough juice for the one call. Course, she’s got more tits than brains, I guess.”
“Hey—watch it,” Chrissy snapped. “Just ’cause someone’s got a nice set—”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry. You know, you gals that got the looks and the brains just make it tough for the rest of us. Have a little sympathy.”
“Oh, now,” Chrissy said, mollified. “You got your own look. We just got to dress it up a bit.”
Stella chose to ignore the comment, but Tucker was getting more and more agitated as he tried to pry the yellow clogs off her feet.
“Soo! Soo! ”
“Oh, all right, you can borrow them,” Stella said, slipping off the clogs. Tucker immediately bundled them up in his arms and ran off, hollering “Da-doo!”
“Was that—?”
“Yup, ‘thank you,’” Chrissy said, beaming. “His first sentence!”
“Oh, my,” Stella said, and she took a break for a few minutes to chase the little towheaded toddler around long enough to tackle him and blow a congratulatory raspberry on his plump tummy.
“The reason she did it,” she said when she caught her breath, “is this way she thinks I’ll go after Wil and kill him. If she just told Goat, she was afraid they wouldn’t be able to make any charges stick and Wil’d just go after her again, and maybe shut her up for real.”
A Bad Day for Pretty Page 17