A Bad Day for Pretty (22 page)

And then her stupid cell phone rang, the annoying trilling flutey tones instantly evaporating the thin layer of bad girl that Stella had worked so hard to conjure.

“’Scuse me,” she muttered, and got the cursed thing out of her purse, flipping it open without bothering to check the ID screen. “Yeah, what.”

“Stella, don’t you hang up!” It was Brandy’s unmistakably breathy voice. “You’re the only one can help now. I’ve been kidnapped and left to die.”

FIFTEEN

What the—?” Stella started, and was instantly interrupted.

“Now, listen good, Stella,” Brandy said. Her voice had a strangled, terrified quality to it that went a long way to convincing Stella to do as she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell y’all sooner, but I know who killed that gal in the track.”

“You
what
?”

“I said, I know who did it. The whole reason I came to Prosper was for protection. I thought I’d be safe with Goat, only now he’s gone and kidnapped me ’cause I know too much. I can
identify
him. Which is what I’m about to do, but you got to promise me you’ll take care of this yourself.”

“
Me
? What—?”

“And
not
Goat. Hear? He’s a good man, and now I think about it, I guess you can have him, seein’ as I’m probably gonna be dead here in a bit, but he can’t do what needs done to this guy. Only you can do it.”

“For criminy’s sakes, who the—?”

“It’s Wil Vines. My old boyfriend. That’s who killed her. And blew up my car. It was like a warning or whatever, but now he thinks I was fixin’ to tell Goat, which is why he’s going to kill me, only I didn’t tell Goat, I only—”

“Your
boyfriend
killed the woman at the track?” Stella’s mind practically ran over itself trying to absorb the new information.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you—”

“But why don’t you want Goat to know? He’s—”

“Is he there?” Despite her predicament, Brandy managed to get a fair amount of outrage and suspicion into her voice. “’Cause he
can not
know about this.”

“But he’s the—”

“
Promise
me,” Brandy hissed with such force that Stella drew back from the phone a little.

Stella had no idea what was going on, and she had half a mind to suspect that Brandy was up to another of her tricks, except what if she was telling the truth and—

As if reading her mind, Brandy yelped, “My battery is about to
die
, Stella. Now, do you want to hear the rest or
not
?”

“All right … Noelle,” Stella said haltingly. She glanced at Goat to see if he bought the ruse; he picked up his beer and drained a good stretch of it. There was enough noise in the bar that she figured he couldn’t hear Brandy, screeching or not.

“Now, listen good. Wil, he’s up to all kinds of shit. That’s why I finally left him, he’s never let go a chance to make a dirty buck. Drugs, stealing, all kinds of—”

“But why’d he … you know, what did he have to do with that gal?”

“Well, that I don’t quite have a handle on. But I know he did it. He come home that night, the night they laid in that foundation, all covered with concrete dust and tells me this story how it was
guns
he buried in there. All this song and dance about how he was just holding ’em for a guy but they were hot and he didn’t want ’em traced back to him, he just tossed ’em into the foundation and wouldn’t you know I fell for that like I fell for every other line of bullshit he ever fed me.
Men
.” She spat the last of her impassioned speech, and Stella figured they had that little bit in common, anyway; both of them let down by poor representatives of the other gender.

But she wasn’t sure that was enough to convince her to go after a killer without the backup of the law, even if it did mean clearing Neb. After all, Wil sounded like a worse brand of trouble than she had him figured for.

But it was a heck of a lot of coincidence to swallow for the two cases to be connected. What were the odds of Goat’s saucy ex appearing at the very same time that
her
ex’s murder victim got unearthed?

“Why don’t you just tell … our friend?” she demanded. “Let him deal with it?”

“Stella, don’t forget that I
know
what you do,” Brandy said, her voice dropping conspiratorially. “To men. The ones as have it coming, anyway. So you can quit pretending. Now, look, you got to
kill
Wil. If Goat gets him, there’s gonna be all kinds of red tape and he’ll probably end up getting off on some dumb-ass technicality and then he would have killed me for nothing. You got to find him first and, and, you know, drop him like a rabid dog.”

Stella didn’t bother to point out that Brandy was operating on bad information—that she wasn’t available to hire for murder, even for a good cause. “You ain’t, uh, gone yet,” she said instead. Trying to speak in euphemisms to keep Goat in the dark was difficult. “Don’t you want me to find him and get him to tell me the, ah, location, and come get you?”

“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.