A Bad Day for Mercy (5 page)

“Well yes, Stella, it’s a damn sight more likely to get you where you’re going. I mean no offense to Chrissy’s vehicle, but if you encounter any trouble—”

“What, like a snowy mountain pass or something? A swamp, maybe a tsunami up there near the Canadian border?”

“Don’t be smart, Stella,” BJ said, frowning, but Stella noticed that he wasn’t mad so much as truly concerned. In his soft brown eyes—like a doe, she thought, noticing how they had little flecks of gold dancing through the middles—there was unmistakable worry. “I was thinking more like a blown tire or if you hit a skid or, or, you know you can’t control them other drivers, what if they’s drinkin’ or typin’ on them damn cell phones—”

“All right,” Stella said impulsively. He was awful hard to resist in this state. She leaned in and planted a chaste peck on his cheek. “I accept. I would love to borrow your truck, Big Johnson.”

His relief was even greater than Stella had expected, if she were to judge from the way he grabbed her and pulled her in for a more substantial lip-lock to seal the deal.

*   *   *

It took her
only a few minutes to throw a couple of changes of clothes and some toiletries into her trusty backpack. The ice cream, forgotten in the midst of the BJ visit, had leaked a little onto the patented Nytaneon fabric, but a quick swipe with a damp cloth took care of that; Stella made a mental note to go on the BlackHawk folks’ Web site and leave an appreciative comment. Apparently most of their customers used the packs for jungle combat and such, given their advertising images, so they might not care much about the easy upkeep, but you never knew.

She wasn’t sure what to expect once she got up to Wisconsin, and she was deliberately not overthinking it. Thing was, this was a whole new kind of trouble, and Stella knew from experience that the best approach was to just go figure out the lay of the land before making any judgments. Still, she was glad she’d taken her equipment out of the Jeep before sending it in for repair. The guns she stored in the steel box bolted to the Jeep’s floor were in an old tackle box that had belonged to her father, and the essentials of her trade were stored in a few large Rubbermaid totes and Tupperware containers. BJ helped her load all of this into the truck’s generous jump seat; he had a custom cover over the truck bed to keep a load safe from the elements, but Stella didn’t fancy the idea of her equipment—particularly the items that were loaded—sliding all over the back of the truck. BJ didn’t comment on the tackle box or the heavy containers, and she gave him credit for that: As her father, Buster Collier, used to say, a smart man lets a lady have her secrets. In his case he was referring to Stella’s mother’s extrafirm-support girdle and her salon touch-ups, but Stella figured the rule extended to a modern lady’s habits as well.

Then it was time to say good-bye.

“You need me to show you how to work the GPS?” BJ asked, fretting like a mother hen as he leaned into the cab to show her all the features and doodads and adjust the seat and steering wheel to her form, which was considerably more petite than his solid six feet some-odd inches.

“No, BJ, I think I can figure that out,” Stella reassured him, enjoying the way he pressed against her, nearly pinning her to the cold hard driver’s side of the truck, a stance that led to all sorts of delicious images. “Noelle’s got one in the Prius and I’ve used it some.”

“You’ll call me, let me know you’re safe?”

“I promise.” Stella gave him her best smile. She was glad she’d added a subtle spritz of White Diamonds under her snug knit top while she was packing. Just because she was likely going to have to drive all night and bust some ass when she got up there didn’t mean she couldn’t smell irresistible while she did it.

BJ evidently agreed, because he leaned in and inhaled a big fraction of the air around them. “Oh, Stella, you do worry me.”

He took one of her hands in his big, meaty one and pressed it to his chest. Stella could feel his heart beating under his waffly cotton shirt. It felt nice.

“Don’t fret,” she said softly. “I got my own special guardian angel lookin’ out for me.”

“She damn well better,” BJ said throatily before he gave Stella a last kiss, one ardent enough to remember.

Chapter Five

For the first hour of the eight-hour trip, once Stella made the pleasant adjustment to the incredibly smooth ride supplied by the OEM suspension lift that had her riding an extra foot or two off the ground, she amused herself by thinking about her guardian angel. Stella had no doubt she possessed one—how else to explain the fact that she was three years into her second career and hadn’t spent so much as a single night in jail? That she usually came out on top from her one-on-one encounters with nothing worse than a rope burn or a pulled muscle or, in one memorable case, a hell of a bruise when the sledgehammer she was using on a man’s pinky finger slipped out of her grip and fell on her instep?

Stella figured her guardian angel probably looked a little like her. For that matter, Stella wouldn’t be surprised if the gal’s angelic personal history shared a few parallels as well. She probably got lost in the back of the angel crowd, being shorter, dumpier, and older than the ones you always saw depicted on Christmas cards and First Communion knickknacks, the blond, blue-eyed willowy variety who somehow managed to keep their robes and wings pristine despite the strenuous demands of angelhood. Plus they probably all had lovely names like Grace and Chastity and Faith, while Stella’s was probably saddled with a name like … Bertha. Bert for short. Yeah, her name was Bert, she was soundly middle-aged, she’d arrived at the pearly gates dressed in the stretched-out sweats she saved for gardening, her upper arms jiggled, and she couldn’t see her toes past her tummy. She’d been afraid to speak up in Angel Orientation, so she probably got the shoddiest quarters, the ones by the air-conditioning unit and closest to the Dumpsters, and none of the hot man angels ever asked her to dance at the mixers.

Then … this thought arrived as Stella passed through the twinkling lights of Jefferson City, giving the stately capitol building a jaunty two-finger wave … then one day Bert got pissed. Maybe it was discovering that they ran out of ambrosia just as she got to the front of the line. Maybe it was because the holy calisthenics instructor had designed all the exercises for angels with long slender limbs and flexible spines and bottomless stamina. Maybe it was getting her wingtips stuck in the doors of the chapel once too often, making all the other angels cluck judgmentally at how long it was taking her to get the hang of folding them prettily on her back.

Whatever it was, on that day, Stella had no doubt that Bert snapped. “Listen up, y’all!” she imagined her girl shouting, gnawed-nail fists on her hips. “I am sick and tired of being treated like a second-class citizen of Heaven just because I can’t fly straight or do laps around the cloud bank or recite all of Psalm 119. I’ll tell you what, I have something that the rest of you girls are only just getting started on. I’ve got experience, I’ve got some hard miles, and most of all, I’ve got balls.”

That word, “balls,” would have echoed shockingly through the celestial chamber while, all around her, flaxen-haired beauties fainted and pressed their hands to their hearts. Then Bert would have announced herself done with training and taken herself straight to the Job Board and picked off the most challenging case she could find.

Stella.

Stella laughed out loud, imagining that day. It was probably the same day that Ollie found himself laid out like a sheared sheep on the kitchen floor, a nice big dent in his woman-beating skull. She hoped she’d kept Bert busy and entertained. She
knew
Bert had made the Big Guy proud.

Stella prayed to the Big Guy every day, far more often than all those years when she’d shown up faithfully every week in church. She had never said it to another living soul, but she was pretty sure that the Big Guy walked beside her everywhere she went. Sure, there were a hell of a lot of people in the world who’d object to the particulars of her one-woman religious philosophy, but Stella figured that since she didn’t go around telling Baptists and Presbyterians and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Buddhists and Muslims what to believe, they ought to just learn to keep their opinions to themselves as well.

By the time Stella stopped at the turnoff for Hannibal for a pee break, the novelty of the trip had worn off and the drive had grown monotonous. Night had fallen, a star-studded sliver-mooned warm sort of a late-May night, and Stella got herself a big Diet Coke and a full tank of gas, suffering heart palpitations when she discovered what kind of cash it took to fill up BJ’s tank. Before starting the engine she transferred one of the guns from the tackle box to her purse, just in case, and helped herself to the CD holder she found stowed neatly in the glove box.

She discovered that she and BJ shared a few favorite crooners, and settled on Shane Yellowbird. When the first track came up “Pickup Truck,” she figured it was a sign, blew a kiss to Bert, and settled in for a cruise and a listen:

Somewhere around the bend

I know we’ll have better luck in my pickup truck

Yeah, somewhere around the bend, indeed.

*   *   *

A little before two
in the morning Stella came up on Rockford, Illinois, and figured she ought to get out for another pee break and a swift jog around the parking lot of an all-night QuikGo to keep her awake for the final stretch. She had no intention of going to the warehouse, or whatever it was, where she was expected to leave all the cash that she didn’t have, and that evidently her sister’s husband’s family had let slip through their fingers like so much of that colored sand you could stuff into bottles at the carnival. Snagging Chip unawares wasn’t much of a plan, especially if he didn’t care to accompany her to Missouri, but Stella was pretty sure she could talk him into it. It might have put Gracie’s mind at ease to know about Stella’s considerable resources, since for all her sister knew, the only weapons in Stella’s arsenal were a sassy mouth and a hefty store of maternal concern.

In the not-very-clean bathroom of the QuikGo, Stella dabbed at her face with a wet paper towel, trying to wake up. She peeped in the cloudy mirror and immediately regretted it; the purple circles under her eyes were decorated with the mascara that had gotten dislodged in those final moments of mashing with BJ, and she’d left all her lipstick on the rim of the Diet Coke tumbler. Oh well, she wasn’t headed for a beauty contest.

She picked out a roll of SweeTarts—“tart” sounded like it might enhance alertness—and got in line behind the QuikGo’s only other middle-of-the-night customer, a skinny youth who, from behind, bore a passing resemblance to Todd, with his too-long hair and shorts three sizes too large for his skinny hips. Even the T-shirt was remarkably similar—

“No, sir,” the boy mumbled, pushing a stack of loose change across the counter and stifling a yawn as the clerk put a pair of impossibly tall cans of some sort of sports drink into a paper sack. “One’s for my Gram. She’s old and all but she likes ’em and the caffeine keeps her going.”

That voice—Stella would know it anywhere. She’d first heard it when its owner was a towheaded six-year-old who was pedaling his bike as fast as he could after the neighbor’s cat. She’d heard that voice snuffle and sob when its owner’s daddy left for the last time. In recent years she’d heard it changing, cracking and wobbling as it started to turn into a man’s voice—though it was going to be a while before that happened, and that was if its owner survived the whuppin’ that was about to be unleashed on his skinny ass.

“I’ll take that,” she snapped, reaching out a hand and snatching the paper sack, grabbing one bony shoulder and giving it a spin. “Todd Groffe, as I live and breathe, what the hell are you doing here?”

The clerk, a fortyish fellow with a Penske cap pulled low and an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth, gave Stella a squint-eyed once-over. “You’re his
granny
?” he demanded, letting go of the sack and scooping change into the drawer. “Time’s been kind to you, I’d say.”

Stella couldn’t help taking a moment to process the compliment. One never knew where one was going to find them, just like Popeye’s restaurants when you were on a trip; you had to get your biscuits—or sweet words, as the case may be—whenever they came along. “He ain’t mine, but I suppose I’ll take him off your hands,” she said sweetly, adding a little toss of her hair.

Still, a fellow who worked the late shift eight hours away from Prosper wasn’t exactly a promising candidate for a dating relationship, so Stella gave him a regretful smile and dragged Todd toward the door.

“Now I’m gonna ask you a question,” she hissed into his ear as he squawked in protest, oversized sneakers dragging along the floor. “I imagine you already know what it is. And I’ma tell you right now I ain’t interested in anything you got to say but the truth and quick, too.”

“It wasn’t like I done it on purpose,” Todd said crossly.

“Done
what
?”

“Fell asleep in there.”

Todd pointed across the parking lot at BJ’s truck. Stella saw that the tailgate had been left down, the black fiberglass cover still in place.

“You been in the back of BJ’s truck this whole time?”

“Well yeah, Stella, I cain’t even get my permit for another four months—”

“I wasn’t suggesting you’d be
driving
up here—”

“Well, hell, Stella, look around, you see any other way I’d end up here? What state are we even in, anyway? We going to Florida?”

Stella’s eyes widened with disbelief. “You came along because you figured I was headed for
Florida
? Now why in … never mind. You just stand there lookin’ like you fell off the turnip truck while I call your mom.”

Night had rolled in humid and warm, and Stella enjoyed a faint little stirring of the night breezes that carried with them the fresh scent of the row of spruces that bordered the QuikGo. Somewhere in a field beyond, a dog’s bark was answered by a whistle. She pulled the phone out and speed-dialed Todd’s mother, the long-suffering Sherilee Groffe, wishing she didn’t have to wake the poor woman up in the middle of the night. Since Sherilee did the job of several people every day of the year—she was mother and father and breadwinner and dispenser of both justice and kisses, with no time for herself except the hours when her head hit the pillow—it didn’t seem fair to add to her burden.