A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (23 page)

“Well, that’s too bad; basketball’s a shitty sport. Still, you’ll get a chance to keep playing it if you do what I tell you.”

The boy shook his head, determination showing through his pain. “Fuck off.”

Stella raised her eyebrows. “Is that ‘fuck off, I enjoy getting shot and I hope you’ll do it again,’ or ‘fuck off, I’m out of my mind with pain and don’t know what I’m saying?’ ”

The boy just frowned and stared at the ground.

Chrissy kicked him, hard, below the hole in his leg. He made a sound that wasn’t like anything Stella had heard from a human before.

“How do you like that, dirtbag?” Chrissy said, winding up to do it again.

“Hang on there, sweetie,” Stella said, laying a hand on her shoulder. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye.

“Now I understand you got your reasons for not wanting to talk to me,” she told him. “If my boss was some kind of kingpin or what have you, I guess I’d be worried myself. I wouldn’t be in any hurry to spill the beans. In fact, you’re probably sitting there thinking your odds with us are better than with the rest of those clowns. Am I right?”

The boy didn’t say anything, but he gave the muscles around his mouth a workout.

“So that makes it our job to convince you that isn’t the case. You look at me, you probably see a wrinkly middle-aged woman your mom’s age. You think—”

She paused. At the mention of his mom, there had been something—a little blip of emotion that flashed across his eyes. Stella reconsidered her approach.

“Were you one of the ones that nailed me the other night?” Stella kept her voice pleasant as she fixed the knots in place.

When he didn’t answer, she gave Chrissy a tiny nod, and
the girl toed his leg again. Not as hard, but enough to make him grunt with pain. Sweat beads had popped up along his forehead. He worked his lips a bit and then muttered, “No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Patrick.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.” His voice hitched, ending in a bit of a squeak. Hell, bound up like that he looked about as threatening as a teddy bear. “What’d you do to the dogs?”

“Killed ’em,” Chrissy said. “Shot ’em, and it didn’t bother me a bit. I think I might have got me a taste for shooting things.”

Stella glanced up at the cold steel in Chrissy’s voice.

“I am looking for a little boy,” Chrissy continued. “My son is missing. He is eighteen months old. I want him back. It’s not right, him being away from his mother. Now, do you know anything about him?”

Patrick squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced from the pain.

“You know mothers,” Stella said conversationally. “Chrissy here’s actually a nice lady most of the time. Wouldn’t swat a fly. But get between her and her boy and . . . whoo, I tell ya, I’m not sure I like your odds. I bet your mama’s the same way. I bet if she knew who you were working for, she’d probably hightail it out here and take old Funzi’s head off. Am I right?”

Genuine anguish seeped into the boy’s eyes. “You’re wrong. It’s a family thing. We’re related. Funzi’s her cousin. Look, my dad took off when I was little, okay? I got three little sisters. Funzi’s just helping us out.”

Stella prodded him again, a little harder. The wound, which was down to a trickle of blood, gave up a small gush. “You
think your mama would appreciate
this
kind of help? Huh? Do you?”

Though Patrick’s face had gone chalk white, he kept to his stony silence.

“You’re telling me your mama handed you over to Funzi? Told him, forget finishing high school, forget college, I prefer you take my boy and teach him how to maim and kill, please?”

“I can’t cross him. I don’t care what you say.” The boy’s breath was ragged. “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me
slow
.”

Man, it was worse than Stella thought. If Funzi’d got the kid running this scared, he must be the genuine, ruthless, bloody-handed mob article. She wasn’t sure how to convince the boy she was every bit as much of a badass threat as Funzi.

Because, in the end, she wasn’t. There was no way she was going to kill this man-child with peach fuzz growing on his upper lip.

As Stella hesitated, Chrissy shouldered her out of the way and leaned in hard on Patrick, her face just inches from his. “I don’t know if your mama’s a nice lady or not. I don’t know her, period. That’s why I can drive over there and start hurting her bad. If I
knew
her. I might have second thoughts, but I’m not even going to give her time to offer me a glass of tea. First thing I’m going to do is shoot her just like Stella done you, see? Except she don’t have anything useful to tell me, so I don’t know if I’ll really take the time to tie her off so she don’t bleed out. Aw, hell, I know it’ll take a long time to lose enough blood from a hole here—”she jabbed Patrick hard in the skin an inch from the bullet’s entry—“so I might just have to aim a little higher. There’s some artery in the thigh I guess pumps a lot of blood, the, what do you call it—”

“Femoral,” Stella said softly.

“Femoral, yeah,” Chrissy said. Then she drew back slowly, never taking her eyes off the boy’s face.

He gulped. Hard. And Stella knew they had him.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” he wheezed. “You stay the hell away from my mom. Funzi’s got your kid. For his wife.”

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“What are you talking about?” Chrissy demanded.

“Roy Dean gave him to Funzi, okay? He and his wife couldn’t have kids. Been trying forever. Roy Dean said you wouldn’t care.”

Chrissy’s eyes narrowed. “He said
what
?” she demanded, and Stella grabbed her arm before she could do the boy any more damage.

“He said you never did want that kid in the first place.” The boy squeezed his eyes shut tight, a sheen of perspiration dampening his forehead. “Said he was an accident and all. He like . . . said you wanted to give him up for adoption . . . that he was doing you a favor.”

Stella could feel Chrissy start to shake and clamped her hand down harder. “Easy there, girl,” she murmured. “Easy. Whatever’s happened, it ain’t this boy’s fault.”

Chrissy shone her flashlight directly in Patrick’s eyes, causing him to squeeze them shut. “Where’d Funzi take my Tucker?”

“I don’t know, okay, I don’t know! Probably the lake house, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there.”

“What lake house?”

“They got a place in that new development down by Camden Beach, you know? About thirty-five miles from here.”

“Tucker’s with Funzi’s wife? You’re sure?” Stella asked,
thinking fast. If Patrick was telling the truth, and Funzi and his wife planned to keep the boy, it could be a stroke of luck. The woman was bound to treat him well, especially if she had started to think of him as her own.

“They—they treatin’ him good?” Chrissy said, echoing her thoughts. Her voice was thin and wavery.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? They plan on raising him—you get it? Like you know, their
own son
.”

“Ain’t they ever heard of
adoption
?” Chrissy said.

Patrick’s expression shifted for the first time from straight fear to surprise. “Who’s gonna let
them
adopt? Don’t you know who Funzi
is
? They got the whole organized crime unit up in Kansas City trying to crawl up his ass.”

Stella sighed. “So that whole thing’s true? Y’all really are mob?”

Patrick said nothing, and a single tear squeezed out of one eye and bounced down his cheek. Chrissy kicked at his bad leg, not hard this time, and Patrick’s eyelids fluttered like he was going to pass out.

“Come on, boy,” Stella said, not unkindly. “Don’t make this so hard on yourself.”

“Our family’s been connected forever,” Patrick said through clenched teeth. “Beez and Gus, they’re like his nephews or something. They been with Funzi a long time.”

“
They’re
the guys that nailed me,” Stella said. “Is that it? Everyone who’s down here?’

“Them . . . and Reggie Rollieri.”

“What’s he do?”

“He covers the casinos for Funzi. And he runs a book down along the shore. He’s only around a couple weeks a month.”

“So Funzi, Reggie, the two goons, and Roy Dean—that’s five, plus Benning is six. And counting you, seven.”

Patrick screwed up his face and drew a breath. “So you gonna kill me now?”

“Me? Nah,” Stella said. “Though Chrissy here might. She’s turning out to be a little itchy on the trigger.”

“They say you kill just about everyone who pisses you off,” Patrick mumbled.

“Who says?”

“Funzi. Benning. All of ’em.”

Interesting. So they’d asked around. Stella couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, it was flattering to know that her reputation as a cold-hearted killer was thriving. It was probably the reason they had junior here down at the gate on guard duty, though they probably didn’t think Stella was a true threat or they wouldn’t have given the job to such a greenhorn.

“Well, I don’t. I haven’t made up my mind on you yet, but you help me out here, maybe we can work it out so you can spend next summer working at Burger King like a regular kid, okay?”

He shook his head. “I’ll be dead in a week after they find out what I told you.”

“Only if they’re still around to come find you. Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said briskly. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. Fast, and you’re not going to leave anything out. Then I’m going to take you to a . . . friend for safekeeping. Just until we get this mess straightened out. What happens to you, that depends on how you handle yourself now. Hear?”

A single nod.

“Okay, Chrissy. Help me drag him over there.”

Chrissy and Stella hooked his shoulders and dragged. Patrick moaned as they bumped over the ground, but they got him propped up against a tree close to the fence. Stella checked his leg; it could definitely use a cleaning and dressing, but it didn’t look like he was going to bleed out tonight. Satisfied, she sat down cross-legged in front of him and motioned to Chrissy to join her. Sitting side by side, with the flashlight on its head making a circle of light on the ground between them and Patrick, reminded Stella of long-ago Girl Scout camp-fires.

“Where’s Roy Dean?”

Patrick snuck a nervous glance at Chrissy.

“Remember what I said,” Stella reminded him. “The whole truth. And fast. I’m feeling impatient.”

“He’s . . . uh, dead.”

Chrissy, sitting next to her, didn’t flinch.

Stella nodded. “I’m not all that surprised. Let me guess—he was ripping Funzi off, and Funzi found out.”

“He, um. Yeah.”

“Tell me how.”

Patrick licked his cracked lips. “Funzi had him driving weed up to Kansas City. He’d go pick it up from these Vietnamese guys in Bolivar that Funzi’s got growin’ the shit in their basement.”

“He start skimming, is that it?”

“Yeah . . . outta the bales, a little here and there, but then he took a whole brick, you know? Hard to miss that. Funzi’s not stupid.”

“What’d he want to do, sell it?”

“I guess. Thing is, he, ah . . .” Patrick glanced miserably at Chrissy. “I mean, I’m sorry if you didn’t know, Mrs. Shaw, Roy Dean had a girl—”

“That fucktard,” Chrissy spat. “Yeah, I knew.”

“So I guess they were gonna sell it or, I don’t know, he gave it to her or whatever but by the time Funzi had Beez and Gus mess him up, it was gone.”

“So Funzi killed him?”

“Not right then. They gave him a week to come up with a couple thousand bucks.”

Chrissy barked a short laugh.

“That was after they beat him up?” Stella asked.

“Yeah.”

Stella looked to Chrissy. “What do you think? Was Roy Dean looking for money that week?”

“Was he ever
not
looking for money? Shit, Stella, he’d turn over the couch cushions every time before he went to the bar. But he knew I didn’t have none, so it wasn’t like he’d ask me.”

“Arthur junior didn’t say anything about Roy Dean hitting him up either.”

“Well hell, he was fixing to trade my baby away, I guess he didn’t think he needed it,” Chrissy said. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.”

“That what happened, Patrick?” Stella asked. “Roy Dean come in here with Tucker?”

“Yeah.” If it was possible to look any more uncomfortable than he already was, with a leaking hole in his leg, Patrick did. “He was supposed to have the money Friday night, but he showed up here Saturday with the, uh, with your boy.”

“Oh!” Chrissy said. “That little . . . I went out to my friend Tiffany’s house Friday night to play cards, and Tucker was with me.”

“He was planning to take Tucker out to Benning’s that night,” Stella guessed.

“No shit! All along he meant to—he had it
planned
.” Chrissy was trembling from her fury, and Stella put her hand on her back and patted gently. Righteous anger was good, but she had to keep it under control.

“So?” she prompted Patrick.

“So, um, Benning has Roy Dean go wait in the shed and he calls Funzi, and, and Funzi was headed down to the lake house with Gus and Beez and Reggie, so they all turned around and came back up here.”

“How long did it take Funzi and them to get there?”

“Not long, maybe fifteen minutes. Me’n Roy Dean, we were kind of talking some, and the kid was on the floor playin’ with some little stuffed dog—”

“Pup-pup,” Chrissy interjected. “That’s his favorite. Oh, God—”

“Okay,” Stella said, giving Chrissy a one-arm hug, a firm one, to get her to focus. “We got to listen to the rest of this, hon.”

Chrissy gulped and nodded.

Patrick’s breathing had gone short and fast. He looked back and forth between them, his eyes unfocused. “So when Funzi and them came in the kid had shit his pants and Roy Dean couldn’t get him to shut up. Funzi’s all, Where’s the money, you got my money? And then Roy Dean tells Funzi, look here, you can have the kid and that’ll settle us up, and Funzi
looks at him like he’s out of his mind and then he goes nuts. Tells Roy Dean, Is he fucking crazy? . . . And then he smacks him around a little, keeps asking where the fuck his money is, and then all of a sudden he just stops. He, uh, tells Gus to take the kid and drive him down to the lake house, you know, where his wife is. And Roy Dean’s looking all happy because, like, he figures Funzi went for it and all, but the second Gus walks out the door with the kid Funzi tells me and Beez, go outside and guard the place and don’t go nowhere until he comes and gets us. So we go out, and it wasn’t more than a minute or two after they locked the doors again, we heard a shot. And I knew Funzi shot Roy Dean.”