“Well, you keep ’em with you. I’ll drive,” Wil said. Stella figured that went without saying when she looked out the kitchen window and saw his white van pulled up close to the garage door. Wil had picked out the signs that read cheery maids—let us clean so you don’t have to! for the occasion. Stella had the fleeting thought that she’d be more than happy to let someone come clean—after all, it looked like she’d be out of the house for a while.
Wil handed the gun over to Brandy as they filed out to the driveway. He directed Stella and Noelle to take the seats in back, a pair of surprisingly comfortable captain’s chairs.
“Buckle up,” he ordered as he rummaged around on the floor between the front seats, coming up with a paper bag from which he pulled out two pairs of plastic restraints. As Brandy settled herself in the front passenger seat and touched up her lipstick in the vanity mirror, Wil knelt on the floor of the van in front of Stella and Noelle and told them to stick out their wrists, but he had a hard time getting the restraints secured in place.
“Guess you’re just a beginner, huh,” Noelle observed as he finally got the tab pulled through the slot. She had calmed down considerably as she got used to the idea of being held captive.
“Why’n’t you watch your smart mouth,” he shot back.
Stella gave her daughter a little head shake, which earned her a roll of the eyes. Same feisty Noelle as always, she didn’t one bit like being told what to do. Stella was pleased that her daughter had some fighting spirit.
“I’m not entirely clear on the picture here,” she said as Wil crawled back to the driver’s seat and Brandy twisted around to wave the gun at them. “Yesterday you were trying to get me to kill this guy. Now you and him seem to have worked out your differences.”
“Power of love, baby,” Wil called out as he got himself settled and buckled in. He got the van started up and backed slowly down the drive onto the street, tapping along on the steering wheel with his thumbs, making pfft-pfft sounds with his teeth against his lips to keep the beat of whatever song was playing in the background of his high.
“I hate to say it, but I had this man all wrong,” Brandy said with a dainty little sigh. At least she had the decency to blush. “After that horrible butch detective got her ass whupped and had to let me loose yesterday, I didn’t know where to go, and I was all desperate and whatnot, and then here’s my cell phone ringin’ and—well, it was Wil.”
She beamed at her lover like a newlywed. Wil gave the steering wheel an extra special series of thumps and gave her a shotgun-style salute, which made her giggle even more. Wil lurched into a sloppy turn and tore down Stella’s street and out onto Hickory doing nearly fifty. With any luck, they’d get pulled over for speeding, except Goat and his deputies had bigger fish to fry at the moment.
“He wasn’t tryin’ to kill me after all,” Brandy continued. “He just didn’t know how else to get that poor woman’s shoes back. And when he realized it was too late to get the evidence off of Goat and all, he was like, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, you know? He told me he wanted me back and then he told me the whole story.”
“’Cause I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill no woman,” Wil crowed, voice going thin and chortling. He was definitely on something, Stella thought, some little chemical enhancement that would render him even more unpredictable and dangerous. Great.
“Did you blow up her car?” Stella demanded.
Wil cast a guilty look at his sweetheart. “Aw, I didn’t mean it to go like that,” he said apologetically. “It’s fuckin’ hard to get that shit right. I didn’t put hardly near as much of the junk in the tank as they said on the Internet. I thought it would, you know, just kind of be like a little bang.”
“You could have killed her!”
“No—no, I made sure she was in the house. I only just wanted to make sure Brandy was taking my, you know, needs seriously. Since we’d been broke up and all. I mean, come on, Stella, I ain’t stupid.”
“Was that you trying to get in the window back of my house, too?”
“Well, yeah. I saw you over at the track talkin’ to the law and them and I didn’t know what-all you were fixin’ to do.”
“So you what, thought you’d break in and look for clues?” Stella leaned heavily on the sarcasm, but the truth was, she was at least a little bit impressed. Wil, hearing on the radio that the twister had taken out the snack shack, had to have hightailed it over to Prosper pretty quick. Idiot or not, managing to sneak all around a town that small without getting noticed was something.
“You know what I don’t get about guys like you,” she continued, “you could be doing just as well for yourself just going to work and punching the clock like a regular joe. I mean, come on, does the small-time crook thing really pay all that good? This ain’t exactly a Maserati you’re driving.”
“Don’t you talk that way,” Brandy snapped as Stella gestured around the worn surfaces of the van. “Wil’s doing very well for himself.”
“Brandy,” Stella said, exasperated, “even if he didn’t kill Laura Cassel, which you only have his word on, you’ve gotta know about all that robbing he’s been doing. He goes around measuring people’s closets, or pretending to, most likely, checking out their silver and their jewelry and shit while he’s there, and then he drives this here funmobile on over when they’re out at work and helps himself.”
“And then they get their insurance, Stella,” Brandy shot back, “which they probably overexaggerated in the first place and they probably claim stuff while they’re at it that weren’t even missing. Everybody does it, you ask me, you’re a damn fool if you don’t—”
“Oh, so folks who do things by the rules are stupid?” Noelle broke in. “That’s just about the biggest pile of crap I ever heard.”
“They’re goddamn victimless crimes!” Wil hollered, and swung his head around to give Stella a slightly unbalanced leer. “Takin’ shit from rich folks, distributing a few recreational substances here and there—”
“So you’re into drugs, too?” Stella wasn’t surprised. She’d seen guys like this before, the ones who were motivated by the thrill of the underworld, for whom a dishonest buck would always spend way sweeter than an honest one.
“The point, Stella, is he ain’t a murderer,” Brandy said. “He didn’t do it. He’s innocent. And now we got everything worked out between us, we just want to clear his good name so’s we can move on. And that’s where you come in, to help us with the violence part, seein’ as we’re just not violent people.”
“Just what are you saying, ‘the violence part,’” Stella said. “What have you got in mind for me to do, anyway?”
“You’re going to take care of a little job for us. Just like you do all the time, so don’t go acting like it’s any kind of hardship or nothing,” Brandy said. “And Noelle’s here for a little extra guarantee that you’re going to do what you’re told. We’ll let her go as soon as we know you done the job.”
Stella’s heart sank. They were going to force her to kill someone—and the reason they were so sure of themselves was that they thought she killed folks all the time. It was safe to say that no amount of protesting would change their minds.
Still, she had to try. “You can’t think this plan makes sense,” she said to Brandy.
“Oh, but it does,” Brandy interrupted. “Wil’s thought it all through.”
“You’re willing to hang your future on—”
Stella gestured at the driver’s seat, trying to communicate with the gesture loser, idiot, smack-head, but Brandy was staring at the man with adoration.
She finally tore her gaze away and fixed Stella with a peaceful smile. “I blame myself, really. I should have been there for Wil from the start. If I’d of only been a better communicator—if we’d just talked, you know, the way they do on Dr. Phil, why—”
“I can’t stand Dr. Phil,” Noelle cut in. “He’s mean. Especially to women, like if they’re a little heavy or something? I mean, say what
you will about Oprah, she knows what it’s like to be female, she understands women.”
“I don’t know,” Brandy said doubtfully. “Thing about women is, they’ll turn on you. You can’t trust another woman like you can trust a man, ’cause a man don’t want to compete with you, you know? Women are always competing with each other.”
“You think Oprah’s competing with other women?” Noelle demanded hotly. “So when she gets them little gals that got a couple of legs blown off in the service, or them women that quit being prostitutes so’s they can start families and run companies, you figure Oprah’s competing with them?”
“Noelle, sugar, let’s save this conversation for later,” Stella said gently. No sense getting Brandy any more riled than she already was.
“But, Mama, I don’t even think Dr. Phil is a real doctor.”
“Well, he’s like a psychology doctor, a—”
“I mean he’s always talking about this and that syndrome, shit that don’t make no sense, and half the time I think he just goes and makes it up.”
Something clicked in Stella’s brain.
Something that had been struggling to make it to the surface for days.
“Noelle …,” she said slowly, “what did you just say?”
Noelle looked at her like she was crazy, and slowly and carefully repeated herself. “I think Dr. Phil makes shit up, Mama.”
Like … what was it Dr. Herman had said in the office?
Some kind of medical syndrome. Groundbreaking research … memory loss … like erasing digital files from a hard drive.
That sure went against everything else Stella had heard about OxyContin. In her experience, it left folks crashed out and jittery, but they generally knew exactly where they’d been and what they’d done. What if Dr. Herman had made it all up?
Neb had said he’d bought his junk from “someone who’d surprise you,” a respected member of the medical community. And naturally, when Stella found out Laura Cassel had been a drug rep, she’d tied the two together. But if he’d been getting his Oxy straight from the doctor …
And the doctor and Laura would have known each other. Picot was less than ten miles from Fairfax, where the hospital was—it had to be in her territory, so she’d have called on the medical offices there.
Maybe Laura had figured out the doctor was dealing. Threatened him with exposure.
Would that be enough to make him kill her?
Stella smacked her linked hands against her knees, cutting into the flesh of her wrists with the restraints.
“It’s Dr. Herman!” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out before. And the drugs, right. What did you do, get ’em from the doc and sell ’em to Neb?”
“I’d shut my mouth, I was you,” Wil sputtered, turning to glare at Stella and then jerking the wheel after he drifted across the center line. “Ain’t any reason for you to do all that figuring. You’ll get your orders when it’s time, and not a minute sooner.”
Stella could so easily grab the gun if she could only use her hands. Hell, if she could get her seat belt unbuckled, she could probably push herself out of her seat and throw herself at Brandy, and the dumb bunny would no doubt drop the gun, she was so busy drooling over her crook boyfriend, but then Wil would probably wreck the car and she didn’t feel like becoming part of a dumb-ass pileup.
Instead, she sat silently and fumed, thinking through her theory. If the doctor wanted to make some cash on the side, he’d do better with a partner—someone who moved in the low-life circles where customers were likely to be found. Using a middleman, the doc was less likely to draw attention to himself—he’d keep his hands more or less clean.
“Well, now, here we are,” Wil said as they tore through the outskirts of Fairax and into a tired subdivision on the near end of town. He pulled into the tidy driveway of a rather ordinary white colonial. Black shutters shed splinters of paint on either side of square windows set in aluminum siding, but the house was in fairly good repair. The lawn was cut to a ruthless couple of inches of turf, but otherwise the landscaping was fairly indifferent, a couple of shrubs hacked into spheres.
A bachelor’s lawn. Stella’s trained eye picked out a few other clues: the flyers jammed into the door handle, the empty ornamental urns.
“There’s no Mrs. Doctor Herman, I take it.”
“You think you’re so smart, with this whole guessin’ game,” Wil said, cutting the ignition. “Okay. Fine, Miss Smarty Pants. Yes, it’s Dr. Herman. And yes, his wife left him awhile back. Ding-ding-ding. Happy? Satisfied?”
“I still don’t get why he killed Laura,” Stella said.
“Well, not every love is like ours,” Brandy said sorrowfully. “Ain’t every couple can support each other through all the ups and the downs.”
“Wait—you’re saying Laura was his girlfriend?” Stella demanded. She remembered what Goat said, that her parents thought she might be seeing an old boyfriend, someone she was embarrassed about. But if she was seeing a married man, she would have had a good reason to be evasive.
“Yeah, Sherlock. And he didn’t mean to kill her, either—that was an accident.” Now that the cat was out of the bag, Wil was warming to the subject. “She showed up at his place one morning all bent out of shape ’cause she’d got a gander at his numbers and put two and two together and figured out he was moving stock out the side. She got self-righteous on him—she said she was going to report him, how he was going to lose his license. I mean, that’s not the kind of thing you spring on a guy before his coffee, you know?”
Brandy giggled as though he’d told a hilarious joke.
“So he just killed her?”
“No, he tried to talk her out of it, like for an hour or two, but she kept digging in her heels and wouldn’t see no reason. Way he told me, he was just trying to keep her from leaving, he had a hold of her arm or something and she was trying to, I don’t know, wiggle out or whatever and she slipped. Hit her head, something like that.”
“Uh-huh.” Now this was an area where Stella would wager she did have more experience than Wil—the sort of “accidents” that happen when a man and a woman have a domestic disagreement. “And let me guess … after she had this little accident, Dr. Herman panicked and called you, his one and only shady underworld friend?”
Wil’s scowl deepened. “I’m a problem -solver, Stella, that’s why he called me.”
Dang if there wasn’t a note of pride in the man’s voice. Yeah, Stella thought with disgust, being summoned to dispose of the body had been, for all Wil’s whining and complaining, a high point, a big day in his criminal career.
Another difference between them, then. When Stella’s work met with success, what she felt was relief. Relief that another woman would be able to sleep easily that night, without fear of waking to the sound of curses and the impact of fists.
But she was never proud of hurting people, not even the wretched, hateful targets of her brand of justice. She was proud of turning her life around, certainly. Proud of running the sewing shop without Ollie, proud of picking up the pieces of their domestic life and making it run smoothly, paying the bills and figuring the taxes and negotiating with vendors.
She was definitely proud of the body she’d toned, of the hard muscle beneath her soft curves.
And she was proud of a few of the innovations she’d come up with. The bondage gear, for instance, that kept her targets incapacitated while Stella adjusted their attitudes. The gags that kept them quiet while she explained the new rules. The follow-up regimen that ensured none of them escaped her watchful eye afterwards.
But in the moment where she saw the defiance go out of a man’s eyes, when he finally stopped cursing and started to look afraid, when she convinced herself he would never again be a threat to a woman—was it pride she felt?
No.
And seeing pride in Wil’s eyes made her more than a little queasy.
“So why the track?” she demanded. It was the one piece of the puzzle s
he hadn’t figured out yet.
“Oho,” Wil chuckled. “That was pure dumb luck. I told the doc to go on back and finish up his rounds or whatever. Don’t draw attention to himself, that’s what I said. So who’s his first appointment? Neb Donovan! In there to get a fifteen-thousand-mile checkup on that bum disk of his. Anyhow they’re talking, and Neb’s carrying on about this and that, how he’s got to get a little help getting that foundation poured. How it’s yea big and yea wide, so many cubic feet, and so on, and then the doc realizes how this might be the perfect opportunity.”
“To pin a murder on an innocent man.”
“Yeah, that’s right. He got Neb to sign a blank piece of paper—hell, Neb was so messed up in those days, hitting the Oxy around the clock, he never knew what he was signing. Then, after Neb left, the doc made out like it was a note from him so he could stick it on the body. He was thinking ahead, I’ll give him that.”
“So then what, the doctor finishes up his office hours, and the two of you all wait until dark and dragged that poor girl on out to the track in the middle of the night?”
Wil frowned. “The doc wasn’t about to do that. Kinda pissed me off. He was all, That’s why I’m paying you, you figure it out. Bastard. So I had to get her in the ground myself.”
“What did he pay you, anyway?” Stella turned to Brandy. “And you’re okay with this, Brandy? This man of yours putting someone’s daughter in the ground for money?”
“It wasn’t like he wanted to,” Brandy retorted hotly. “He had to. The doctor said he’d turn Wil in if he didn’t help. Believe me, that doctor’s no good. I mean, he planted evidence on that poor girl to make it look like Wil done killed her.”
“The shoes.”
“The patent leather shoes,” Brandy breathed, “that show every mark.”
“So you want me to think the doctor went out and got shoes special and put ’em on the body just so—”
“No, I never said that. Only, when they took that body out to Wil’s trunk, the doctor made Wil get the feet. Tell her, Wil.”
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