A Bad Day for Pretty (10 page)

“You saying you aren’t?”

The two women glared at each other, until finally Brandy blinked first.
Damn right
, Stella couldn’t help thinking,
he’s
keeping your high-maintenance ass on ice
. She felt a little of the tension in her chest dissipate.

“The situation at Goat’s is fluid,” Brandy snipped, slurring her words.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” Stella asked, thinking:
lightweight
.

“Why? Are you inviting me to spend the night here? Like a sleepover, just us girls?”

“On second thought,” Stella snapped, “I’m sure you’re fine.” She picked up Brandy’s keys from where she’d tossed them. The keychain was attached to a little plastic rectangle that read if you’re rich, i’m single.

Brandy scraped her chair back and stood up unsteadily. “Well, if I get in a wreck or something, I guess they’ll know who to blame,” she sighed.

“Who, me?” Stella demanded. “Or Johnnie Walker here? I don’t think so, honey. ’Cause let me tell you, when you go around pointing fingers of blame for messin’ up your life, nine times out of ten you’ll find you’re pointing right back at your own bad self.”

SEVEN

Stella was out of the house the next morning by nine. It had taken a little extra time to get ready, because she was in the unaccustomed position of planning to use her feminine wiles to get some information.

And the information-giving-up target of her plan was Goat, which added a layer of ambivalence to the proceedings. She’d promised Brandy she’d stick to business with the man—but there didn’t seem to be any reason not to try to tilt the encounter in her favor. She hadn’t promised not to look and smell irresistible while they were doing said business.

After trying on four outfits, Stella finally settled on a skirt that had last fit when the elder Bush was still in office and which, if she stared at her backside in the mirror at precisely the right angle, gave her ass kind of a sassy Tina Turner shape—more generous, certainly, but still curvy and high.

Makeup had been another minefield; with her head full of Noelle’s counsel from her last visit—“Matte’s so last season, Mom”—she gouged a fresh track in an old bronze eye shadow and dusted up her lids, adding a bit of Avon Glimmerstick eyeliner in Majestic Plum. It was quite a challenge: she had to wear her reading glasses to see well enough to work, but then it became doubly difficult to get the makeup brush where it was going. It was like trying to sew on a button through a layer of Jell-O.

Perfume, at least, was easy. She gave herself a generous spritzing of White Diamonds, which always made her feel flat-out sex-goddess hot.

On her way to the shop—a quick stop to make sure Chrissy was set for the day—Stella carefully ate her way around the edges of two Pop-Tarts, avoiding the jammy middles where all the calories were clustered, and taking dainty bites so as not to mar her lipstick. Beauty was a hell of a taskmaster.

The shop was empty, except for Tucker, who was seated cross-legged on a big floor cloth stenciled with railroads, a much-chewed Thomas the Tank Engine in his drooly fist.

“Sow!” he exclaimed, waving the toy train in the air.

“Hi, punkin,” Stella said, bending down for a knee-creaking embrace. “Where’s your mama?”

“Down here,” came Chrissy’s muffled voice from beneath the computer desk Stella had set up adjacent to the counter where the cash register sat. “Stella, you ever hear of a damn fire code? You got about fifty cords all pluggin’ into each other and no surge protector—why, I’m surprised that storm didn’t blow this place outta the ground.”

“I’ve been meaning—”

“You’ve been meaning to do a lot a things, but none of ’em’s done theirself, I notice. So I’m taking care of this for you.”

She backed out from under the desk, trailing a power cord so fresh and new, it still kinked where it had been folded. It was connected to a little black blinking plastic box.

“What’s that—a bomb? You fixing to blow up the place and start over?”

Chrissy sighed with a full measure of drama. “This here’s a wireless router, Stella,” she said. “The Comcast fella dropped it off for me this mornin’ ’long with a couple a surge protectors so you don’t go blowing us up to kingdom come. I had him charge your Visa.”

Stella put out a hand to help Chrissy up, noting that the girl was getting a little more limber every day, hardly hesitating at all anymore when she bent at the waist. “What’d that cost me? And how’d you get him here when all kinds of folks were probably lined up for service, I wonder?”

“The receipt’s in the drawer,” Chrissy said, straightening her clothes and dusting off her knees. “And he was tryin’ to git in my pants, I reckon.”

“No shit? Well, see if he’ll give you free lessons, then.”

Chrissy fixed her with a disdainful glare. “I don’t need no lessons. I read that manual, come with it. Done set it up myself. Now we’ll just power back up and see—”

She toed the power strip’s switch and stepped back, hands on hips. Together, they watched the Mac—only a year old, a splurge after Stella received a handsome bonus from a client whose husband had been siphoning money into a variety of secret investments that came to light following a hunting accident that left him with a bullet in his butt—whirr to life, the router signaling furiously.

Suddenly a full-screen image of a hard-muscled, deep-tanned, dew-dotted male torso, the nether regions tucked into a rather tiny thong that was by no means adequate for the job, flashed onto the Mac.

“Oh, dear,” Chrissy said. “That darn Brody Jenner. Stella, you would not b’lieve what-all you can find on that TMZ website. It’s positively distracting.”

“Hmm,” Stella murmured.

A sprinkling of icons blipped into place, and Chrissy clicked on one that looked like a button inscribed with a gold
W
.

“Check
this
, ” she said proudly. The
World of Warcraft
portal popped up on-screen, an impressive stone arch guarded by cloaked red-eyed giants. In short order, there were a variety of trolls and thugs whacking each other with broadaxes and clubs.

“Neat-o,” Stella said. “Look, you want to really make yourself useful around here, why don’t you see if you can hack into the Show Me Five Paydown and transfer some of the cash from those state lottery crooks over into my account.”

Her finances, she suspected, were a little dire, since she hadn’t brought in any extra sideline money in recent months, and Hardesty Sewing Machine Shop & Repair had been closed while she and Chrissy recuperated. Stella was paying the most urgent bills as they came in, but she’d been afraid to check the balances in her accounts.

She owned a book by Suze Orman. That was a start, anyway. In the one chapter Stella’d read, Suze had made the point that it was kind of dumb for women to bury their heads in the sand and let money issues get the upper hand. Well, that Suze was a smart one, all right, and just as soon as Stella got an evening free … or hell froze over … she intended to see what else the woman had to say.

“You sayin’ the lottery folks is crooks?” Chrissy demanded, so incredulous she let a hairy dude with hooves and horns club her character into a bloody pulp.

“Well, if you believe that taking money from poor folks and handing it over to bloated government agencies makes a person a crook, then, yeah, I guess I do,” Stella said.

“Stella Hardesty,” Chrissy breathed, her voice nearly quaking with conviction. “It is the God-given right of every citizen of our nation to gamble. You take away a person’s gambling rights—why, it’s gonna be our right to bear arms comin’ close behind.”

“Chrissy—,” Stella started. Political discussions with the girl, she’d learned, were the sort of activity that required an erasure of all the basic tenets she’d long assumed right-thinking people shared. Growing up in a family of six children on hardscrabble acreage without enough resources to support all those folks comfortably—Chrissy’s early training focused on a special family blend of ingenuity and bootstrap opportunism that reflected nearly unplumbable depths of skepticism and idealism. She wasn’t dumb—far from it—and she wasn’t always wrong, either, but adjusting to Chrissy’s world in preparation for a serious discussion required a nearly Zen-like realignment of her preconceptions that Stella simply did not, at the moment, have time for.

“Honey. Let’s table this particular discussion, okay? I just wanted to see if you were all set for the day before I headed out.”

“Well, all right.” Chrissy turned her attention back to the screen. Her character, a horned, tusked creature in a leather bikini, picked up a spiked throwing disk and let it fly. “Nailed you, you speckle-assed little yammer.”

“I hope the customers don’t cut in on your playtime too much.”

“Aw, hush, Stella, I just got this set up for Todd.”

The boy biked over to the shop a few days a week, when he couldn’t find anything better to do; Stella figured that playing on a computer in her shop probably beat smoking weed with the deadbeats down behind the Arco while he waited for his mom to come home from work.

Recently, though—as Todd approached his fourteenth birthday—she suspected the boy had another reason to be visiting the shop: a bit of a crush on Chrissy.

“Now, you watch his tender little heart,” she warned. “Won’t do to go breakin’ it before he’s even had a chance to kiss a girl.”

“Oh, now,” Chrissy said. “Boys used to fall in love with me all the time, and it ain’t never killed any of ’em.”

Stella resisted pointing out that one, at least—her ex, Roy Dean—lay dead in the town cemetery. After all, it wasn’t really accurate to say that a broken heart had led to the man’s death sentence at the hands of the Mafia.

“Anything you want me to look up for you while you’re gone?” Chrissy continued, shutting down the game.

“Thought you weren’t interested in my side business,” Stella retorted. “You know, you wanted to keep your knickers pristine and all.”

“Yeah? Well, not to complain or anything, but I’ve just about sucked all the joy outta stocking thread as I think I possibly can. I need a challenge.”

“A challenge,” Stella repeated. “Okay.”

She took a pen and a note from the cube on the counter—it read she who dies with the most fabric wins—and scribbled out a note:

Cory Layfield
Background
Priors—associations, juvenile records, ???

“Here,” she said, handing it over. “See if you can, I don’t know, Google all this or whatever. I got a recent address and I imagine I’ll just work from there unless you come up with something better.”

“Boy howdy,” Chrissy said, taking the note and slipping it under the keyboard. “That ain’t much of a challenge.”

“Well, don’t get too excited, you’re not going to find anything but junk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, it’s just that if you want to get anything besides a zillion pointless hits, you have to know what you’re doing.”

Too late Stella realized her error: Without meaning to, she’d implied that Chrissy did not, in fact, know what she was doing; and if there was one thing she’d learned in their young partnership, it was that Chrissy Shaw had had about as much being dismissed, marginalized, ignored, put down and left for stupid as she was planning to take. Stella began edging away from the counter, toward the door, taking her purse with her—a quick retreat was always the best option when Chrissy was provoked.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Fuck that!” Chrissy exclaimed, her cornflower-blue eyes snapping, her generous gloss-sticky lips thinning to a hard line. “I
know
what I’m doing, all right. I’m workin’ for shit wages for a woman with no more education than
I
got. And if any provin’ needs done, I reckon you’ll be eatin’ those words for dinner, so I wouldn’t go around callin’ me no kinda—”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Stella called hurriedly as she backed out the door. As she practically ran for the Jeep, she remembered a truth she’d picked up in recent years, something she really ought to have put on a sign and hung up out front:

The less a woman has to lose, the quicker you better get out of her way.

Stella Knocked
sharply on Goat’s office door for the second time. His office had a very large window—on account of the sheriff’s offices being housed in what was once a Hardee’s restaurant, with the kitchen now converted to records storage and a supply closet and a conference room, and the staff offices carved from what used to be the dining room.

A spanking-new Hardee’s had been built out State Road Nine in the mid-’90s, where traffic from the interstate was more likely to find it, but Stella had eaten in the old one often enough in her younger days that she still got a flashback every time she opened the double glass doors from the parking lot, one of the building’s features that had gone unmodified. She could almost smell the char on the charbroiled burgers.

The big windows had been covered with mini-blinds in a pinkish shade of mauve to match the industrial carpeting and wallpaper from the remodel, but Stella had learned that crouching down at the right angle from a vantage point in the shrubbery gave a person a pretty clear view of the goings-on inside, so she knew that Goat was at his desk. Besides, Irene Dorsey, the departmental receptionist and records officer, stage-whispered,
“He’s hiding,”
with a theatrical nod in the direction of the sheriff’s office.