A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (2 page)

For kicks, Stella gave the Jeep a little extra gas and held on tight, flying over the hillocks and shallows of the road until she landed on the patch of cleared earth. She hit the brakes and spun in the dirt as she pulled up in front of the trailer and turned off the ignition.

It was worse than she’d expected. The trailer seemed to be leaning on its foundations. The wood lattice that someone had nailed around the bottom had come loose, and pieces of it lay in the weeds. The siding had once been white, but that was a distant memory; rusty streaks leaked down from all the seams. One of the windows had been boarded with a sheet of plywood, but that too had separated from its moorings and hung by a single nail.

Parked next to the trailer was a truck Stella recognized, having recently followed Roy Dean so they could have their first conversation. Last time she saw the truck, it had been parked in front of a liquor store at eleven thirty on a Monday night. Like Roy Dean, the truck was hard on the eyes and didn’t look very reliable, with its dented tailgate and rust spots and low-hanging tailpipe.

Stella didn’t plan on needing it, but she got a gun out of the locked steel box bolted to the floor of the Jeep, just in case. There were currently two weapons in the box: her dad’s old Ruger .357 flat-top, and a cheap little Raven .25 semi-auto that she’d picked up on a trip to Kansas City six months back, when she’d tracked down a missing high school principal. The asshole had cleaned out his bank accounts and left his wife to face
eviction while he moved into his waitress girlfriend’s apartment in Blue Hills. The gun was a little bonus that Stella had taken off the guy, along with a tall stack of cash he’d kept in the kitchen cabinets, and his wife’s good jewelry. Stella felt sorry enough for the girlfriend to give her back some of the cash before breaking a couple of the man’s fingers and working out a payment plan. The ex-principal, now a Best Buy salesman, sent his ex a tidy little sum every month.

Stella made sure.

For today’s visit with Roy Dean, she chose the Raven. She checked the magazine and chambered an extra round, then slid back the safety. The gun was a little short on firepower—it wouldn’t drop someone the size of Jelloman, for instance, barring one hell of a lucky shot—but Stella liked it for little jobs where the power of suggestion was her main weapon.

As she stepped out of the Jeep’s lovely air conditioning, heat and humidity hit her like a warm wet washcloth full of buckshot. Stella took a minute to stretch and peeled her shorts away from her thighs before crossing the dirt yard. She rapped her knuckles on the door and waited. There was something about the front doors on trailers; they never seemed to fit snug in their frames, so you always got a rattle when you knocked. That alone would keep Stella from ever living in one. That and the old twister problem—one tornado out for a joyride and you were history.

Stella heard movement inside the trailer. Banging around and cursing, mostly. After a few minutes of that, the door popped open an inch; a bloodshot eye peered out and then the door promptly slammed shut again.

Stella sighed and put her weight on the hip that didn’t cause
her trouble, and settled in for a wait. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to roust someone from a trailer, and there wasn’t a whole lot to it, once you took a moment to assess the particulars of the situation. She’d already seen that the rear of the trailer backed up against a brambly thicket of bush honeysuckle, so if Roy Dean hauled his skinny ass out of a window or door on the back side, he’d have to make his way along the side of the trailer, battling the shrubs the whole way, and come out one side or the other. If he picked a window on the front side, he’d be stuck wrassling his way out for a few moments. Either way, shooting into the dirt at his feet ought to do the trick.

Minutes ticked by, and still Roy Dean didn’t appear. Stella heard the sound of heavy objects being pushed around. Incredulous, she demanded, “Roy Dean, you aren’t trying to barricade yourself
in
there, are you?”

There was a pause, a few moments of silence. Stella could almost picture Roy Dean knitting those scraggly eyebrows together, pursing his lips and thinking hard—as hard as he could, at any rate.

“Well . . . what if I
am
?” he finally said, his voice muffled and echoey inside the trailer. “What are
you
gonna do about it?”

Stella couldn’t believe it—the little asswipe was
still
mouthing off to her. After all the effort she’d put in. After laying it all out for him—with extra care, given his evident slow-wittedness—and explaining both what he’d done to get her attention and what the consequences would be of any further mischief. It was bad enough that she’d got the call about him yesterday—one of her sources said she had spotted a fella that looked an awful lot like Roy Dean at the concession stand of
the Latham County Speedway, pulling on the long blond ponytail of his companion hard enough that she was crying and trying to get away, while he just laughed—but to give Stella lip? When she’d driven all this way? On her
day off?

Stella sighed again and leveled the little Raven about two feet to the right of where she figured Roy Dean to be. She thought about the calendar sitting on her kitchen counter, with its pastel flower borders and its encouraging sayings, and she realized that she was no longer a member of its target audience.

“Fuck serenity,” she said, and shot the trailer.

She wasn’t sure whether the bullet would make it through—no telling what-all they used to line the walls of these things—but judging by Roy Dean’s startled yelp and the string of cursing that ensued, the shot had apparently made an impression.

“I’m shooting out the windows next,” she called, just to speed things along.

Sounds of the heavy objects being pushed out of the way were followed by the door being flung open and there stood Roy Dean in all his glory, sweating and panting hard, grimy boxer shorts hanging off his bony hips, a filthy white tank top leaving most of his pale chest exposed.

“Shit, Miz Hardesty, cut it out. Okay? Look, I’m invitin’ you into my home, you don’t need to go shootin’ no more.”

Stella lowered her gun hand to her side and let the Raven hang there casually. She could go from full dangle to aimed and ready to shoot in about a tenth of a second. That was a trick she’d worked on most of last winter when business was slow at the shop—sitting on her stool behind the cash register and
practicing her draw, tucking the gun into the drawer when the bell at the door signaled a customer’s arrival.

She’d also taught herself to spin the thing on her finger just like Gary Cooper in
High Noon,
but that trick was strictly for her own enjoyment. She didn’t mind having a little flair, but she wasn’t an idiot: guns, after all, were serious business.

“You got any coffee on?” she asked as she shouldered her way past Roy Dean. Inside it didn’t smell any too fresh, and the dining table and chairs were all bunched together to the side. Presumably they had been part of the barricade that Roy Dean had been erecting to keep her out.

Roy Dean snorted, but as he circled the tiny kitchen he kept to the edges, his eye on her gun hand. Good. She liked them scared.

“It’s almost one,” he said. “Who the hell drinks coffee in the afternoon?”

“Me, as a matter of fact. But I guess I’d settle for a Coke.”

“All’s I got is beer. Coors or Coors Light.”

“Coors
Light,
huh? You wouldn’t be entertaining any
ladies,
now, would you, Roy Dean?”

“What? No, I, uh, I ain’t gone anywhere near Chrissy.”

“Can it, lover boy. Make no mistake, if you so much as look at Chrissy crosswise I’ll know before you have time to scratch your balls. And then I’ll, you know, probably come around and shoot ’em off or something.”

Roy Dean’s face darkened like a Fourth of July thunderstorm, and he leaned back against the Formica counter. The boy’s knees were probably feeling a little wobbly, if Stella had to guess. She suppressed a smile.

“I’m through with her,” he snapped. “I
tol’
you that.”

“Yeah, you did, but if I recall we were kind of far along the convincing path before you managed to choke that promise out.”

Stella had been surprised that Roy Dean had lasted as long as he had on the day she taught him a lesson. Some guys folded before she even got started—especially the ones who had heard the rumors about Stella being an insane dominatrix. When she started unpacking her bag of toys, some men turned into blubbering masses of terror, ready to talk sense without much exertion on Stella’s part.

Early in her justice-delivering career, the thought of being suspected of favoring kinky sexual practices was intensely embarrassing, especially since the source of the rumors came about for only the most practical reasons. Being five feet six, overweight, and out of shape, Stella had managed to pull a muscle in her lower back the first time she tied up a recalcitrant jerk at gunpoint. She almost shot him by accident as she staggered around, yelping in pain. There was also the fact that the knot-tying skills she learned in Girl Scouts weren’t up to the task: the same guy, as Stella waved the gun around wildly, managed to get his wrists free. It was only slightly reassuring that he immediately fell over as he tried to run away, having forgotten that his ankles were still bound.

Stella realized she had to make some changes. She started a fitness program, but she knew she also needed to find a more reliable way to subdue a man. She had a vague notion of learning some paramilitary restraint techniques that might rely more on finesse than brute force, but Google searches for words like
restraint
and
shackle
kept popping up bondage sites.

Stella had never seen anything like the photos featured on
those sites. The gear was fascinating, in a creepy kind of way. In the photos, lovely young ladies looked quite pleased to be trussed up like roasts ready to go in the oven. That’s when she had an inspiration: why not try the same thing on her targets and see if it got them under control?

Stella’s first purchase was a spreader bar and a yoke, which worked out better than she could have hoped. The solid metal bar had restraint cuffs at either end; once fastened they kept the legs in a spread-eagle position. Stella didn’t skimp: she went for the most expensive model she could find and made arrangements with the vendor to bulk up the padded cuffs with an extra-sturdy locking mechanism.

The yoke worked in a similar fashion. The bar had padding at the neck and wrist restraints. Stella had to fasten these herself, but generally by the time the object of her attentions had maneuvered himself into the spreader bar, a lot of the fight had gone out of him.

For a while Stella had her eye on a custom-made Saint Andrew’s cross, an arrangement of two-by-sixes that could be bolted onto the wall, with rings for restraining purposes in a variety of positions. It was well made, finished in a choice of mahogany or natural stains, by a very nice man in Ohio, who offered to drive over and install it himself.

At that point, however, Stella figured she was going a little overboard. All she really needed, after all, was to get these guys settled down enough to have a rational discussion.

Sometimes the discussion was a little one-sided. Stella did not care to be yelled at or called names—she’d had enough of that with Ollie—so she bought a selection of gags with balls or bits or rings that fitted into the mouth and kept the wearer
nice and silent. Efforts to talk usually just resulted in drooling, so Stella bought a stack of cheap burp cloths at the Babies-R-Us and added them to her kit.

Roy Dean had required the full treatment. He’d shut up briefly when Stella rose up off the floor of the passenger side of his truck in the darkened liquor store parking lot, aimed a gun at his temple, and told him they were going for a drive. Stella kept the gun on him all the way out to an abandoned barn she sometimes used, but Roy Dean kept up a string of ugliness as he drove. He kept hollering right up to the moment when Stella strapped the gag behind his head, and then he glared at her malevolently and fought against the bars and restraints. It took some work with a length of rubber hose and a hammer handle, and a brief poke with the electric shock baton, until she finally judged Roy Dean rehabilitated.

When she finished up with these guys, she had a little speech she delivered while packing up her supplies. In it, she reminded the man she was about to send back into society that if anything bad were to happen to her, there was an ever-growing army of women who owed her, and who were willing to pursue vengeance on her behalf; women who, like her, had once had very little to lose, and therefore viewed the whole risk-and-return equation somewhat differently than the average person.

Some righteous scary bitches, in other words.

Roy Dean seemed like he got the message, but not even a month later here he was making a new woman cry. Stella was pretty sure it hadn’t gone any further, but she was worried that Roy Dean was the sort of woman-smacker who truly believed down in his bones that it was his God-given right to settle
every disagreement with force, that it was a woman’s job to absorb a man’s disappointments and frustrations in the form of taunts and put-downs and thrown punches.

Sadly, this was the type who was most likely to pick up again where he left off with some other poor woman. Which was why Stella was here today. Without proof of the incident at the speedway, she’d limit today’s visit to a warning, but it would be Roy Dean’s last before she dialed up their next encounter to a whole new level.

“You want a beer or not?” he demanded after starting half a dozen protestations and finally giving up.

“I don’t think so. Tell you what, let’s sit down and have this chat so I can get back on my way and you can get back to your knitting, or whatever it was you were doing when I interrupted.”

Roy Dean didn’t look too happy about it, but he lowered himself into one of the dinette chairs, never taking his eyes off Stella. She propped open the trailer’s front door, so as not to miss any small breeze that might happen to wander by. Roy Dean had the blinds down in the trailer, no doubt trying to keep the place cool, but without an air conditioner it was a losing proposition. Stella almost—for a fraction of a second—felt a little bit sorry for him.