A Bad Day for Pretty (9 page)

She gently sudsed up the dog’s snout, then washed the grime off her paws and legs and a few spots here and there where bits of pasta sauce were stuck to her fur. She rinsed the washcloth and carefully dabbed the soap away from the dog’s soft coat, finishing up with a fluffing from a fresh dishcloth. She surveyed her handiwork, Roxy regarding her solemnly in return.

Then Roxy picked up her paw, deliberately, almost delicately, and laid it on Stella’s forearm—and Stella knew she was done for.

“Shit,” she said. “I don’t need a dog. I don’t
want
a dog. You got owners already, don’t you? Some nice family somewhere?”

There was a noise behind her, the door from the garage opening, and a gentle cough. Roxy tensed up and started making a low rumble in her throat, and the fur stood up along her back. Stella whirled around, and found herself staring at the woman who’d interrupted her evening with Goat Jones.

“Brandy,” she said. “Did you miss out on the knocking lessons when you were a kid?”

“Oh, excuse me,” the woman said. This evening she was wearing a shimmering red pantsuit, a whole lot of ruching in the jacket making it fit as close as if she’d wrapped herself up in red florist foil. “I saw the lights on, and the door to the garage was open—”

“That’s because I was taking out the trash,” Stella said, emphasizing that last word.

Trash
. It was on the tip of her tongue to describe the teased-and-sprayed high-heel-teetering woman in front of her, but Stella was uncomfortably aware that she was in range of breaking one of her own rules, and that was a place where she’d sworn off loitering.

There were plenty of men in the world who were ready to call decent women terrible things: whores, sluts, skanks. Why was it that the insult that came first to some men’s mind when describing a woman had to do with their willingness to give up exactly what these same men spent most of their waking hours trying to get their nasty hands on?

Stella recalled something a client had once said, once she’d shed herself of a boyfriend whose jealousy took the form of choking her half to death when she put on a short skirt and high heels to go dancing: some men get agitated by women who look like they can make their own fun. And now Stella was dangerously close to being guilty of the same thing.

If she was really honest with herself, if she looked past the eye shadow with glints of glitter, and the out-to-there stick-on lashes, and the ankle bracelet with the giant Diamonique sparkler, what she was looking at was no more or less than another woman with a claim on the man she wanted.

And she was jealous.

Fuck. Sometimes when she had these mental dialogues with herself, Stella hated being right.

“You got a little … somethin’ … um…” Brandy reached out a sharp pokey fingernail and dabbed at Stella’s cheek. Roxy stood up, head lowered, her throaty growl escalating into a lip-curling snarl. Stella laid a hand on the dog’s back and shushed her; to her amazement, Roxy settled down.

“Sit,” Stella said experimentally.

Roxy sat. She didn’t look happy—she looked like she wanted to take a bite out of Brandy’s plump calf—but she sat.

“My dog doesn’t like it when folks get in my personal space,” Stella said coolly.

Brandy shrugged. “Well, I’m not fond of dogs myself, so I imagine we’ll just both stay out of each other’s way.” She held her finger up, and they both examined it: a bit of dried parsley, perhaps. Or worse, considering the muck Stella’d been cleaning up.

Stella stared down at herself: sweatpants grubby at the knees from scrubbing the floor, smudges on the pink T-shirt she’d borrowed from Chrissy. And the smell coming off her wasn’t the freshest, either; she’d never managed a shower, given that she’d gone from Chrissy’s to the track to working around the shop to Roxy’s squalor.

“It’s been a long day,” she said. “Look, I need a drink. I can drink alone, or I can pour us both one and we can sit down and get to know each other properly.”

Brandy hesitated for a moment, then set her purse—a boxy red patent job this time—down on the kitchen table. “I suppose I might have just a bit of something.”

Stella pointed to the corner of the kitchen. “Git on over there,” she told Roxy.

Nothing happened; Roxy glanced at Stella, then went back to snarling at their guest.

“She ain’t trained,” Brandy observed.

“Yes, she is. She’s just—very protective. Excuse me a moment.”

Stella got a couple of old towels out of the linen closet and made a nest in the corner of the kitchen. Roxy stayed where she was, sitting and glaring at Brandy the whole time.

“Now, lie down,” Stella said firmly. Roxy sighed, then trotted over to the towels, made a few pawing circles, and collapsed in a heap, batting her tail a few times in appreciation. Stella got a couple of tumblers from the shelf, and her bottle of Johnnie.

“Ice?” she asked after pouring her own straight.

“Yes, please.”

Stella fetched a few cubes from the freezer without comment, though she didn’t think much of anyone who needed to tinker with a good honest belt. She poured a slug over the ice and handed it over.

Brandy looked at it dubiously. “When I said ‘just a bit,’ I was being, you know, polite.”

Stella raised an eyebrow and set the glass back on the counter, then poured slowly until Brandy said, “That’ll do it, I guess.”

The tumbler was nearly full.

They sat at the table, Stella sinking into her chair with a sigh, the day’s tension seeping out of her muscles, her feet grateful not to be bearing her weight after hours of trudging and cleaning up debris and hauling trash. At the end of the day, especially one like today, she felt the ghost of her bullet wounds, a slight throbbing in her gut where one bullet had nicked her spleen, and an ache in her shoulder where the other had passed clean through. But worse was the fatigue, a weariness that emanated from her feet up through her legs and clear out to the end of her fingers. She planned to overcome it—Stella Hardesty
would
come back 100 percent, and that was a fucking promise, if only to herself—but she wasn’t quite there yet.

She took a sip and let the whiskey burn its familiar soothing path down her throat.

Brandy tossed back a healthy gulp of her own and regarded Stella through narrowed eyelids. “So, Stella,” she said, licking her plump, shiny red lips. “Let’s talk about my husband.”

Stella blinked. “Ex, is what I believe you mean to say. Least that’s the story he’s been telling around town ever since he got here.”

Brandy smiled, a not-particularly-nice smile that didn’t do much to warm up her icy green eyes. “Oh, now,” she said. “You know how men are. Sometimes they need a little time to cool off. After, you know, a misunderstanding.”

“Three
years
? Must have been a hell of a misunderstanding. What happened, one of you in the habit of speaking in tongues or something?”

“I prefer not to discuss the specifics of our relationship,” Brandy said delicately. She took another healthy gulp; the level in her glass was getting low. Stella automatically reached for the Johnnie. She’d been to Costco, and there were a couple more fresh soldiers up in the pantry, so there was little chance of running out—and her mama had raised her to be gracious to even the most unwelcome guest.

“Seems to me that it was news to Goat that y’all still had one,” she said, topping off Brandy’s drink. “Relationship, that is.”

“Hmmph,” Brandy said, making the syllable sound both patronizing and mirthful
. Oh, silly you
. “What we had—
have
—is special. It can stand tests that might kill other folks’ marriages.”

“Oh?” Stella didn’t bother to mask her skepticism; she’d seen her share of dead marriages herself—and helped kill a few more.

“Goat has to go out and
prove
himself, now and again,” Brandy explained. “He’s a warrior. That’s why he’s drawn to keepin’ the peace and bustin’ heads and all that. I read a book about it, how men have to be in touch with their inner vanquisher. The masculine side needs to conquer. But when he comes home, what he needs is a soft place to land … a
femi
nine
side. His other half.”

She pointed to herself as illustration; her feminine side, apparently, was located somewhere in the vicinity of her silicone-assisted breasts, which today had been molded into a pair of conical-shaped cups, à la Madonna in the ’80s. Not a bad look, Stella had to admit, grudgingly.

“Seems to me he’s done okay with just his male half, here, for a while. Any particular reason you’ve picked now to go worrying about him?”

Brandy blinked and for just a moment something flashed across her eyes—something dark and out of place on her gaudy, confident features. “It’s time to mend fences,” she muttered. “My horoscope said so.”

“Yeah? Which one would that be?
Cosmo, Woman’s World
?
Star
? ’Cause I got to tell you, sometimes I get an inconsistent read from them. You know? Like one of them tells you a windfall’s coming your way and the other one says it’s time to pinch your pennies. … I mean, seems like it could make a person kind of schizophrenic, counting on them for direction.”

Brandy frowned. She considered Stella for a moment, and then she picked up her glass and nearly drained it again. When she set it down, her expression had settled into equal parts crafty and curious.

“Okay, sister,” she said. “Let’s cut to the chase. I don’t know what you think you have going on with Goat, but I can give you one real good reason to back off.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Does the name Loriann Portera ring a bell?”

Loriann had been a client a little over a year ago. She’d hired Stella to convince her husband that it would be easier to move out of the state—after deeding her the house—than to keep getting drunk every Friday and Saturday night and taking all his disappointments out on her.

“Loriann and I got to be friendly last year at the gym,” Brandy continued. “She told me all about how
convincing
you could be. And I’m glad you were able to help her, I really am, only some folks might not approve of your methods. ’Specially law enforcement folks. You see what I’m sayin’?”

“No one’s going to believe a crazy story like that,” Stella said quickly, but inside she felt a little blip of panic. She had always known this day would come, when someone would find out what she did, someone who wouldn’t honor the delicate web of secrecy that allowed her to keep helping people.

“Oh, I think they might,” Brandy said calmly. “I asked around. Seems like Loriann ain’t the only gal you been working with. All’s it would take is for someone to open up an investigation, start handing out subpoenas and lie detector tests and all that kind of business. I mean, it could get real complicated, real quick. I’d just hate for that to happen, especially ’cause—and Stella, you got to understand I’m on your side here. I totally get that there’s women need to go your route to get justice. And I want you to be able to keep takin’ care of ’em. Only, you got to see
I
have a need here, too.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” Stella demanded.

“What I need is for you to stay the hell away from my man.”

Stella regarded Brandy through narrowed eyes and tried to judge exactly how serious the woman was. Something still was not sitting right with her. She could certainly sympathize with Brandy’s desire to get her hands on her own ex—what red-blooded woman could resist a man like Goat?—but there was something the gal wasn’t telling her. And if Brandy was going to come at the discussion in a shifty-type way, Stella figured she was allowed a little truth-skirting, too.

“Okay,” she said, crossing her fingers under the table. “Fine. What exactly are your terms?”

“Here’s how it’s gonna be,” Brandy said. “You walk away from whatever you got—or
imagine
you got—going with my husband. You need to consider him off-limits. He ain’t yours to date. Or, or
flirt
with even. Or whatever else kind of ideas you got.”

“Well, I can’t hardly avoid talking to him,” Stella hedged. “It’s a small town and all, plus we got us a friendly relationship.”

“Just how friendly are we talking? You slept with him?”

“Not yet.”

“Kissed him?”

Stella felt a flush creeping from her chest, up her neck, into her cheeks. “None of your damn business,” she said.

“You said—”

“Okay. Fine. No. I mean yes. Once.” Which was almost true: she hadn’t ever kissed Goat, but at one point when she was slipping into a narcotic haze the day after the surgery that removed the bullet from her gut, she felt his lips brush her forehead before he left her hospital room.

“Huh. I’ll take that as a no.”

“You can take that as a—”

“Calm down, Stella, you don’t need to be like that. We’re working together here, right?”

Yeah … though Stella also wanted to get laid again before she was dead. And doable single men in her age bracket weren’t exactly thick on the ground. And as much as she’d been ready to scratch Goat off her to-do list the night before, having Brandy calling the shots irked her.

“Whatever,” she sighed. “Look, I can’t promise I won’t talk to Goat. But I promise I’ll keep our conversation all business. And you keep your damn mouth shut about
my
business.”

“Fine.”

“Why do you care all of a sudden, anyway?” Stella asked, genuinely curious. “Seems like if you wanted your man back, letting him off the leash for three years is a funny way to show it.”

Brandy took a healthy swig of her drink, shuddering slightly as it went down. “I got out of a long-term relationship not too long ago,” she said. “It didn’t end real good. It unfortunately reminded me how rare a good man is. You know?”

Stella knew, though she didn’t care to commiserate on the subject. “Look, this has been a real fun visit and all, but I’m done in.”

“Yeah, you look it.”

Stella fumed. “So what I’m sayin’ is, you may want to just collect your things and head on back to Goat’s guest room.”

“What makes you think I’m staying in the
guest
room?”