A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (25 page)

Still, if today was her day to go out, so be it. Stella sighed, and added to the note, “If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow afternoon,
find Tucker.
”

She looked down at the note and couldn’t help feeling like she hadn’t quite written everything she wanted to say to the man. But there wasn’t time to worry about that now.

Back outside the car, she noticed that the moon was climbing higher in the sky and plumping itself up into a respectable shiner, lighting up the close-mown lawn and some flower beds Goat had carved out along the edges and filled with petunias and marigolds.

On the porch, Chrissy was fussing with Patrick, wedging a chair cushion behind his head. Stella set the note on the little side table next to the chair and weighed it down with a rock.

“Okay, say good-bye to your boyfriend there,” Stella said. “Time to hit the road.”

Chrissy gave a brief, nervous giggle and waggled her fingers at the unconscious boy, who now looked as though he was taking a noontime siesta, with his hands clasped in front of him and his ankles crossed.

They made the drive to the lake mostly in silence, Chrissy piping up now and then to read from the directions Patrick gave her. The roads were practically empty; they passed only three other cars on the way.

“What’re we gonna do if these directions take us to a Pizza Hut or something?” Chrissy asked as they got close. “Or if the address don’t exist? I mean, we didn’t exactly get any guarantees out of Patrick.”

“That would be a problem,” Stella admitted. “But do you really think he’s feeling the love for those guys right now? If he has half a brain he’s probably hoping we take them all out.”

“That what we’re going to do, Stella?” Chrissy asked, her voice whisper-quiet. “Take ’em all out?”

Stella said nothing for a moment. Then she gave the only answer that she felt she could: “We’ll do exactly what we need to. No more, and no less.”

When Chrissy didn’t say anything more, Stella figured she’d better stop her from getting too far ahead of herself.

“Stop worrying about what you can’t control,” she said. “Trust me, I know. I’ve been there before. What you want to do is stay in the moment, deal with all the shit as it comes down the pike. Then later you can think about how you might have done things different. Over a beer or twelve.”

Chrissy nodded. “Okay. Hey, that’s our turn. Loblolly Pines Road.”

Stella eased past a pair of stone pillars with fancy iron fencing sticking out at angles on either side. There was a brass plate on either column bearing the words
LAKEVIEW MANOR ESTATES
. The road was smooth asphalt, with a median strip planted with young redbud and dogwood trees.

“I’m surprised they don’t have them a little house here with some tight-ass guard ready to blow away any riffraff that comes along.”

Chrissy sniffed. “Riffraff ’s already got in. Funzi’n them ain’t exactly quality folks theirselves.”

Stella laughed softly. “Well said, darlin’. Okay, let’s see what we got.”

She cut the lights and rolled slowly down the road. After a
hundred yards or so, the street curved gently to the left, and there in front of them lay the lake, shimmering in the moonlight.

It was so beautiful it made Stella’s chest tighten up. The little ripples on the water’s surface danced silver and black. The crescent moon was reflected in the water, a flickering slice of pale light. Stars had come out, just a smattering, and they sparkled their way down the horizon until it looked as if they were bits of sugar dusted down from some heavenly shaker.

Reluctantly, she turned away from the water. It wasn’t a night for beauty.

Up ahead she could see the lights of an enormous house, and beyond that another, and another.

“I’d drive on past,” Stella said, “check out the situation, but there’s no telling what Funzi’s got in the way of manpower up at this hour. If he’s got one of his guys outside on some sort of watch—”

She glanced at the dashboard clock. One fifteen. Late enough that presumably everyone but the insomniacs would be asleep for the night. If Funzi had someone posted outside the house, a car driving by at this hour would draw attention, putting them on alert.

“Tucker’s prob’ly been asleep for hours,” Chrissy said. “You know, Stella, don’t laugh, but I got a feeling that he’s right close by.”

Stella didn’t laugh. She eased the car over to the side of the road and let the engine idle, and considered Chrissy carefully. “Yeah, what do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know, I guess it sounds kind of dumb, but I get a sense about things sometimes. I just got this
feeling,
see?”
She held up her hands, turned them over, and looked at her fingers. “Like a little tingly feeling. I can just—oh, Stella, I can just
feel
Tucker, you know, under my fingers, his little cheeks and his hair and his little baby butt when I hold him. I’m tellin’ you, he’s
here
.”

Stella took a slow, easy U-turn in the broad street, still well back from the first house, and drove slowly back to the gated entrance at the turnoff. Back on the main road, she drove a few moments until she found what she was looking for, a turn-in for farm vehicles, with a padlocked gate over a cattle guard. She parked off the road and cut the engine, then turned on the map light and looked at her partner.

“Well, honey girl, what’s this sixth sense of yours tell you about what we’re about to do?”

Chrissy put her fingers lightly to her face, tapping on her chin, and closed her eyes. She focused hard for a minute, her eyebrows knit in concentration, and then her eyes popped open.

“Oh!”

“What?”

“I don’t know—I had this, like, swirly feeling and then kind of a like a mini fireworks in my head.”

“Is that good?”

“I—I’m not sure. Yes. Wait. Yes, it’s good, I’m getting a good feeling, but there’s all this trouble first—that’s what I’m sensing.”

“Well, that sounds about right.”

Stella reached in the back seat for her backpack. She took out the flashlights again and handed one to Chrissy.

“You better reload,” she said. She dug in the backpack for
the Makarov’s spare magazine. Stella slid the other one out expertly and replaced it, sending the slide home with a satisfying snap.

“This old piece turned out okay, I guess,” Chrissy said, tucking it back in the holster. “Thanks to Uncle Fred. So what’s the plan?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have much of one. Kind of goes like this: sneak in, don’t get caught, and get Tucker. Then we can get the hell out of here and call the sheriff.”

Chrissy put her hand on the door latch and nodded as if Stella had given her a detailed strategy. “Okay.”

She got out of the Jeep and Stella followed suit, slipping the backpack onto her sore shoulders. They kept off the street a few yards. On the lake side, there were clumps of cattails and the occasional stand of willows, which made for good cover, so Stella felt confident they wouldn’t be spotted even by someone on the street.

As they passed the first two houses, a motion light went on. She grabbed Chrissy’s arm and scrambled out of the illuminated arc, close to the bank that sloped down to the water.

They stood motionless for a few moments, waiting for a reaction from inside the house. Stella could feel Chrissy’s pulse, rapid and strong, through her sleeve. Her own heart was pounding just as fast. After a few minutes they ventured ahead, staying close to the bank of the lake. At the edge of Funzi’s lawn, they paused.

Ahead loomed the enormous house, three stories of pale stucco topped with a tile roof like it was in the middle of the damn Mediterranean. There were arched windows all along the back of the house, and sets of French doors, and little
balconies sticking out from the upstairs rooms, like some kind of
Romeo and Juliet
stage set. Stella was a little surprised to see that some of the windows were open; she expected them to have the air-conditioning blasting on a night as hot as this.

Stella glanced at Chrissy and saw that she had drawn the Makarov and held it ready, her hands steady.

“Thinking about dogs?” she whispered.

“Hell, yes.”

“Maybe the Angelinis aren’t pet people.”

In answer Chrissy only snorted.

“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Stella said. “The place has got to be alarmed every which way, right? We try to break in, even through a screen, they’ll be on us before we have time to turn around. Plus they’ll have the advantage of knowing exactly where we are.”

“Yeah . . . so?”

“What we need is, we need one of
them
to come
out
. Then I figure it’s a fair fight.”

Chrissy scratched her chin with her free hand and gave Stella a quizzical look. “Well, how are you gonna manage that? Ring the doorbell? Pretend you brung ’em a pizza?”

Searching for ideas, Stella looked carefully from the vine-covered trellis that ran from the front overhang along the side of the house, around to the back where a wooden pergola had been built over a huge tiled patio. Extending out from the patio, a stone path bisected the backyard, continuing to a set of steps that led down to the water, where a number of boats were docked.

She briefly considered climbing up the trellis to the second
floor, where she figured the master bedroom faced out over the water. It would be possible to get from the trellis to the balcony, and it looked like the French doors were open, so she could slip into the room, possibly surprising Funzi and his wife in their sleep, getting a gun on them before they had time to react.

It would be possible . . . if she were Tarzan. She doubted the trellis would hold her weight, and even if it did, climbing the wooden structure was a little different from the climbing wall she occasionally worked out on at the gym.

She studied the pergola. It had no hand-or footholds, and the vine on it was still young, its strands thin and weak. No help there.

So she wasn’t going to be able to get in. There had to be a way to get someone to come out. Some way to cause a distraction in the backyard so that someone investigating would leave the door open behind him, letting one of them get inside.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Down on the docks, see?”

Chrissy looked where Stella was pointing. “Yeah, they got a speedboat. Couple a those Wave Runner things. What do you want to do, hop on one and drive it up on the lawn?”

“No, not exactly . . . do you know where they put the gas in on one of those things?

“I guess. I been Wave-Running with my cousin Kip, and we pulled up along the pumps at the marina to get gas. There’s a gas cap up there near the front, just like on a car.”

“Huh. Okay, I think I have an idea.”

“A good idea?”

“Not really, kind of a piss-poor one, but we don’t have a lot of options.”

Or a lot of time, either. Stella considered checking her
watch and decided she was nervous enough already. She got the bolt cutters out of the backpack and knelt at the edge of the flower bed, rummaging through the impatiens with her hands until she found what she wanted. She gave the irrigation system’s drip line a yank and came up with a loop of black tubing, then pulled carefully and followed where it snaked along the edge of the bed, back along the fence, and toward the host pipe. She snipped off a six-foot section and wrapped it around her palm.

“What the hell are you up to?” Chrissy demanded.

“You’ll see in a minute.” She got two water bottles out of her pack and twisted off the caps. She handed one to Chrissy. “Drink up now because you won’t have another chance.”

After Chrissy obliged, Stella took the bottle back and upended both, pouring the water out on the lawn.

“What’ja do that for?”

“We need the bottles,” Stella said. “Come on.”

In the moonlight she took the stairs, slowly and carefully. To the sides of the steps, long grasses and weeds stirred as they went past, making an otherworldly whispering sound.

At the bottom Stella took a breath and set one foot on the dock, nearly jumping back when the thing swayed under her weight. “Shit,” she said. “If I fall in, pull me out, girl. I can’t swim.”

Chrissy snorted. “Know how my dad taught me to swim?”

Stella made her way gingerly toward the closer of the two Wave Runners, a sharp little craft that looked as if it would seat a couple of bikini-clad nymphets. “No, how?”

“Took me down to the reservoir and threw me in when I was eight years old. I set to dog-paddlin’ for my life. Made it
to the side and swore I’d never forgive him, but when I managed to haul myself out he was standin’ there with tears in his eye telling me how proud I’d made him.”

“Wow, sounds like a setup for hundreds of hours of therapy if I ever heard one.”

“Ain’t no Lardner ever had therapy,” Chrissy said, with a note of pride.

Stella figured that was a discussion for another time. She found the gas cap right on top, conveniently located where she didn’t even need to lean far over the open water. She twisted it off and slipped one end of the black plastic tubing inside.

“Let’s hope they left the tank full,” she said. She let the hose loop down so that it touched the deck, then lifted the other end up to her lips and made a face.

“Wow, I’ve sucked all kinds of stuff in my day,” Chrissy said, giving Stella a leering grin, “but I’m glad that’s you about to put that in your mouth and not me.”

“Well, honey, the idea is not to get any in your mouth.”

“How you gonna manage that?”

“It’s a physics thing.” She sucked on the hose until she figured the liquid had traveled as far as the dock, then pulled her lips away and whispered, “Here goes nothing.”

After giving the gas a minute to make its way through the tube to level, she put the open end in one of the water bottles and then held the bottle down along the side of the dock.

Liquid began to fill the bottle.

“Yes!” Stella exclaimed, pleased, a little surprised the technique actually worked.

“Damn,” Chrissy said with admiration. “That’s quite a trick, but it smells nasty.”

“Well, we’re a couple of nasty girls,” Stella said as she filled the second bottle.