A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (3 page)

The moment passed.

She sat down on the chair across from him and leaned her elbows on the table, resting her gun hand casually on the sticky surface.

“So you got you a new girl,” she said conversationally. “What’s her name?”

“She isn’t—I don’t got—”

“Aw, sugar, don’t try to keep secrets from Auntie Stella,” she said. “You know I’ll find out.”

Roy Dean stared at a nail-bitten thumb. “There
ain’t
anyone.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said slowly. She let the silence stretch out in front of them, letting him cook in his own juices. Nervous wasn’t a bad way to keep these boys.

“Well, that’s real good,” she finally said, keeping her voice friendly. “I always say, it’s good to let a little time go by after a tough breakup. You know? You’ve got to give your heart a chance to recover. Who needs a rebound relationship, all that drama? Nothing but trouble. Am I right, Roy Dean, or am I right?”

Roy Dean shrugged and mumbled something that might have been assent.

“Hey, Roy Dean,” Stella said, like she’d just thought of something interesting. “I ever tell you about my returning customer special?”

Roy Dean froze for a moment, then slowly shook his head, still not looking at her.

“Well, it works like this. First time around, I look at a guy and I say to myself, ‘Stella, what are the odds we can make a decent citizen out of this moron who’s been beating up on his woman?’ I look him over good and I try to find it in my heart to give him another chance. I believe in second chances, I really do.”

After staring at his thumb miserably, the temptation evidently became too much for Roy Dean, because he stuck the thing into his mouth and started gnawing at the nail. Stella tried to suppress a wave of nausea at the sight.

“But if that same man—the one I gave a chance to, the one I didn’t nail when I had his dick in a vise—if that man gets a little full of himself and decides to pick up on his old tricks with a new lady . . . well, then I tend to lose all my patience.”

She leaned across the table and waited until Roy Dean flicked an increasingly terrified glance in her direction to continue. “Roy Dean, you know that tire pile out back of Vett’s body shop?”

Roy Dean took his thumb away from his mouth long enough to moisten his lips with his tongue and choke out a “yeah.”

“Well, a couple years ago, a man—a preacher, if you can believe it—came back for my returning customer special. He was smart enough not to bother his ex-wife, she and I made sure of that. But get this, he wasn’t smart enough to stay away from the lady who played the organ at the noon service. Moved her right in with him and everything. Now I’m not saying she was any kind of smart to hook up with him, but still, stupid ain’t a crime. Oh, I’m sorry, here I am babbling on, taking up all your valuable time. . . . What I mean to tell you is . . .”

She leaned even farther across the table, keeping her finger nice and easy on the trigger, though she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be needing it today, and whispered, “That preacher’s in about six pieces buried under that tire pile.”

She lowered herself slowly back onto the chair, gauging the effect her news had on Roy Dean. There was a fair amount of truth to the story—all of it, in fact, right up to the tire pile.

Stella didn’t kill the man, though. She had only one death on her hands, and she meant to keep it that way. Killing Ollie had been a case of special circumstances—she was pretty sure
that when Judgment Day arrived and she was called for her audience with the Big Guy, He would understand.

Still, there were other ways to skin even the most stubborn tomcat. When the preacher took up his old ways on a new lady, Stella merely switched tactics.

Whenever a garden-variety restraint-and-reckoning first visit didn’t do the trick, Stella got creative. In this case, the preacher’s hypocrisy reminded her of a story she’d read in her English class at Prosper High School, and she slowly and carefully burned a scarlet A on the preacher’s chest with her electric prod.

If she remembered her lessons properly, poor Hester Prynne lettered in Adultery. The preacher, Stella figured, earned his for Assholism. But at least now he was a retired Asshole. Taking his shirt off was probably all a lady needed to see before she took off running.

Roy Dean left off his thumb mid-gnaw. The color drained from his face, and he blinked rapidly a few times.

“No’m,” he said, pure sincerity. “I’m off women, and if I ever take them up again, you can bet you won’t have no trouble from me.”

“
She
won’t have no trouble from you,” Stella clarified. “That’s what you meant, right?”

Roy Dean nodded and gulped air.

“Okay, good. Well, now, I’m glad we got that out of the way, but since I’m here I thought I’d ask about something a friend of mine saw down at the speedway.”

Stella watched carefully, especially Roy Dean’s eyes, tracking to see which way his glance darted, but he didn’t look up. “Well, I been there. Same’s about a million other folks. But I ain’t taken no
woman
there.”

Stella leaned back in the dinette chair, disappointed. The online criminology course she was taking from a college based in Idaho had offered up a bunch of theories about how to tell when somebody was lying. Apparently, liars looked down and to the left when they spoke. They also tended to touch their faces and turned their bodies away and showed emotions only in their mouth, not their eyes.

What a bunch of crap.

“Dang, Roy Dean,” Stella said. “I wish I could believe you. But I don’t, I just don’t. I mean, you’re all twitchy like—”

“You got a damn gun pointed at me!”

“Yes, I guess that’s right. Thing is, if I put it away in the truck, and come back in here all nice and friendly, it’s not going to be much of an incentive for you to say any different, is it?”

Roy Dean started to say something, then apparently realized the futility of the argument and just shrugged.

“Well, how about this,” Stella said, pushing back her chair and standing, giving her bum hip a shake. “You know I’m a friendly kind of person, right, Roy Dean? I got a lot of friends, all over the place. And not just in Prosper, either. They’re all over Missouri, and I got a few in Kansas and Arkansas. . . . I even got one gal all the way over in Ohio. And these nice friends of mine, if I ask them to keep a special watch out for you, maybe let me know how you’re doing, since I can’t really spend
all
my time babysitting—well, I’m sure they’ll be glad to keep me posted.”

Roy Dean’s chin hung lower, his lower lip jutting out.

You can run, Stella telegraphed with her expression, but you can’t hide. She stood and pushed her chair back in under
the beat-up old table. “Roy Dean, you ever figure on getting a real job? You know, one with a paycheck? Benefits?”

Roy Dean’s spiky eyebrows rose up in surprise. “I done that, already, Stella. That’s what got me in this whole mess with you in the first place.”

“Really?” Stella paused at the door of the trailer, interested. “How’d you figure?”

“Well, when I was on at the Home Depot, I got this promotion, see? Thirty-five cents an hour, and Chrissy thinks suddenly we’re all moneybags, took herself over to Fashion Gal and bought her that leather jacket.”

“And this is a problem . . . how?” In truth, Stella figured she knew where this was headed, and felt her fingers tighten on the frame of the screen door.

“I tol’ her we couldn’t afford that! Bitch wouldn’t listen, started in on me about a few times I went out after work, while she just keeps spending my money, one fucking thing after the next—”

The Raven, as Stella raised it up and pointed at him, got his attention. Stella could feel just a faint tremor along her arm, down to her trigger finger. It would be a real shame to shoot Roy Dean by accident. And that’s what it would be, if she was provoked like that. An accident. But bad things happened every day.

“You listen to me real clear,” she hissed. “I know about that jacket. That’s the one Chrissy had on when she came to me the first time, ’cept she couldn’t get the sleeve over her sling. Roy Dean, you know what irony is?”

Roy Dean, eyes fixed on the gun, shook his head and swallowed hard.

“Well, it’s when the outcome of events isn’t what you’d guess from what all leads up to it. Like Chrissy, see, she told me she had been saving for that jacket since last fall. She said on double coupon day she’d take whatever she’d saved and put it in a jar, and finally she had enough to buy the jacket. Only the same day she buys it, she gets her arm broke and she can’t even wear it proper. See? Irony.”

Roy Dean fixed his gaze on the floor and refused to look at her. “Or another example might be us talking here,” Stella continued. “Getting everything all worked out, me spending my valuable time shaping you into a productive member of society and all, and then you say one stupid little thing and I have to shoot you dead. That would be ironic.”

She slowly lowered her gun arm, gave Roy Dean a final glare, and left.

She was still shaking a little as she bounced along the rutted track, pushing the Jeep harder than it cared to go, taking the turns fast enough that the wheels threatened to lift up off the road.

That jacket. That damn jacket. She’d listened to Chrissy’s tearful story with sympathetic fury, but only later did Stella figure out that it reminded her of something that had happened a week before she finally took care of Ollie once and for all.

It was an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon three years ago. She’d come home from the grocery with a bunch of daffodils. Jonquils, her mother had called them. Pat Collier used to grow them in every bare spot in her yard: under trees, along the fence, between rocks. Her mother was never happier than when the
flower bulbs pushed their shoots up through the last of the snow, when the tight-rolled buds flung themselves open on a sunny early-spring day.

They had fresh-cut bunches for two bucks sitting in buckets of water outside the FreshWay, and Stella brought one home, thinking of her mother the entire time. Pat had been gone two years by then—pancreatic cancer, mercifully quick. As Stella was reaching up to the top shelf for her mother’s old white scallop-edged pitcher, Ollie came stomping into the kitchen, scratching his wide ass. He took one look at her flowers lying there on the counter and demanded, “Where the hell do you get off spending my money on shit like this?”

She’d started to tell him it was only two lousy dollars, started to say she’d been thinking about her mother that day, missing her, but before she could get any of those thoughts out, he’d taken a whack at her that sent her toppling off the step stool and left the pitcher lying in a dozen pieces on the floor.

By the time she got back to the highway, Stella had herself almost under control. She slowed as she approached the cluster of gas stations and fast-food joints before the entrance ramp, and after a split second’s consideration, eased into the drive-through lane of the Wendy’s. Not on her diet, but she hadn’t missed a workout for weeks, so that had to be a few thousand calories she’d worked off.

As the line of cars made its slow trek around the parking lot, Stella got her gun locked back up in the box. By the time she got up to the order screen, her fury had simmered back down to its usual bubbling simmer.

“Number three,” she said. “And a chocolate Frosty. Better make it a large.”

Stella visited the
bottle of Johnnie Walker Black before her date, just to make sure there was enough left for a powerful belt before bed. She unscrewed the top and inhaled—held it—then replaced the cap with a mild sense of regret. She was running low—and that was an errand she couldn’t put off. Johnnie was a staple item in Stella’s pantry.

But she never drank before her standing Sunday night date with Todd Groffe. It would be bad form, since he couldn’t join her, being thirteen and all.

Todd let himself in the front door without knocking at a little after seven. “Damn them damn girls,” he said by way of greeting.

“What’d they do this time?” Stella asked, getting a couple of cans of Red Bull out of the fridge and tearing open a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

“Got in my dresser and got my damn boxers and they’re wearin’ ’em around the house over their clothes and shit. And Mom thinks it’s cute so she won’t make them take ’em off. She’s all like taking their pictures and stuff.”

Todd’s twin sisters were six. Stella, like everyone else in the world besides Todd, thought they were adorable. Todd’s father wasn’t in the picture anymore, and his mother, Sherilee, worked long hours during the week and brought work home on the weekend. They lived in a little house a few doors down from Stella, and Sherilee had a hard time with the upkeep on the place, not to mention paying the mortgage.

But on Saturdays Sherilee got the girls a sitter and took Todd out on the town. Stella admired her for that. Sherilee took her son to Burger King, to action movies, to play paintball. They went to Wal-Mart and played laser tag and mini golf.

Sunday night it was the girls’ turn, and Todd came over to Stella’s. They shared a secret passion: they were both
America’s Next Top Model
junkies. Stella TiVoed the show, and she and Todd ate junk food and critiqued the outfits and the judging and tried to figure out who was really nice and who was just pretending to get along with the other girls. Meanwhile, Sherilee took the girls to Disney movies and Pizza Hut and Fantastic Sams and Sears.

Tonight, though, Stella had a hard time concentrating on Tyra and her crew as they shuttled the models through a photo shoot in what looked like a muddy jungle. Her thoughts kept going back to Roy Dean and his insolent, stupid expression as he denied that he was seeing a new girl.

She had a bad feeling about this one. He might turn out to be one of the ones who required creative thinking, a step up to an intensified program of discouragement.

Stella didn’t relish this aspect of the job—the turning of the screw, the dialing up of the pressure, the creation of new varieties and levels of pain. She understood that there were people in the world—plenty of them—who got their kicks from hurting others, who experienced a rush of pleasure to see other human beings contorted in agony. Heck, if she were to advertise for an assistant—someone to wield the whip or rubber hose or cattle prod or pliers or lit cigarette so she could keep her hands clean—she’d probably have applicants lined up out the door.