A Bad Day for Pretty (31 page)

“Come on, Stella,” Wil said confidently. “As soon as we have the confession recorded, ain’t nobody going to care about anything else. And when we’re done, we just leave him here. That’s the beauty of it—I can turn the tape in tomorrow or the next day, maybe mail it, give me and Brandy a little head start getting out of town, not that anyone’s gonna come looking for us once they got the doc for it.”

“I still think—”

“Man, you just have to run the show, don’t you, Stella?” Wil shook his head and gave her a pitying look. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings here, but you ought to take a page out of Brandy’s book, you know what I mean?”

Stella felt her hackles rising. “No, I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”

“Well, you know, being feminine? It’s an art. There’s more to it than just dressing classy and all. You got to let the man drive, see what I’m saying? A man wants to feel like he’s in charge. That’s where your real power is, you women, is if you let the man take the lead. Just a little something to think about, maybe get you a date one of these days.”

Stella fumed silently as they approached the front door. “I’ll think about it,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

“Atta girl,” Wil said.

An interesting thing happened after Wil pressed the buzzer. Stella glanced at him and noticed he was preening, building himself up for the encounter, and it occurred to her that she was witnessing the donning of the charm that Wil must go through for every call on a new customer, for every encounter with a neighbor. Here was the source of his charm. Here was the secret of his eluding the law. He stood a little taller, tugged his collar into place, and flashed his features through a quick calisthenic routine that included a grimace and a grin before it settled into pure, complacent confidence.

Another interesting thing happened when the door opened a fraction of an inch and Dr. Herman peered at them through the opening: a hand holding a gun snaked out and shot Wil Vines right in his handsome kisser.

TWENTY-THREE

Maybe it was age, maybe it was nerves, maybe it was the burden of having already sent one fellow human being to an early death, but Dr. Herman was a terrible shot.

The bullet hit Wil in the cheek and traveled a path that, as far as Stella could tell at first glance, took a chunk out of his ear and possibly chipped his skull and most certainly dented his slick hairdo. He didn’t fall down or anything, though. To Stella’s shocked amusement, he actually said “Ow” and brought up a hand to his face, like he’d been bit by a mosquito, say, or run into a low-hanging branch.

Stella glanced back at the doctor in time to see that he’d opened the door a bit wider and now had the cheap little handgun trained on her. Perhaps it was a more stable stance, or the increased maneuverability he had with the door open, but he seemed more certain of his second shot, the gun pointed in the general direction of Stella’s throat.

The thought that went through her head as she slammed her shoulder into the door with all her weight, as the door caught the doctor’s chest and sent him staggering back into the room, was that she was so fucking
not
about to get herself shot again after the scars from the last round were still shiny and raw and she was painstakingly busting open a vitamin E capsule every damn night like Noelle told her, rubbing that shit on the tender tissue of her stomach and shoulder in hopes of getting the scars to fade enough so she could maybe someday wear a bathing suit again or even a tank top without scaring kids.

She was
not
about to let this old asshole shoot her. The last man who’d tried might have been out of shape, but he was at least roughly her age and had the advantage of years of building up his skills committing all kinds of crimes. The doctor, on the other hand, was a slack-necked white-collar-wearing soft-palmed nancy, and if Stella couldn’t take him, then she didn’t deserve to live.

Only, she didn’t count on Wil.

As she threw herself at Dr. Herman, making a grunting kind of sound deep in her throat, Wil staggered forward and got in her way. He was waving one hand around in the air while with the other he tried to stop the blood pouring out of his face, and into his eyes. He somehow got one foot in front of Stella and the two of them went down together, Stella’s elbow slamming hard against the tile floor of the doctor’s entrance hall as she tried to disentangle from Wil.

The more she scrambled, the more she seemed to end up pinioned. When she finally worked one arm free and pushed herself up to a sitting position, there was the stupid doctor, squatting in front of her and waving his gun back and forth between them.

Wil, lying on his side with a blood-slicked hand on his face, moaned. “How the fuck did you know we were coming?” he demanded.

“Careful preparation,” Dr. Herman said, his voice smug. “Got a call a couple of nights ago from the folks in Fayette, wanting me to send over Neb’s medical records. Now that got me to thinking—what’s my old friend Wil going to do when his hard work gets unearthed, so to speak? I figured you’d probably be a little nervous. Frankly, I thought you would have called me by now.”

“Why, so you could have you a last laugh, you cocksucker?”

“No, I figured you’d want me to bail you out. Or maybe hit me up for more cash, so you could run off to Mexico or wherever low-life scum like you go when the shit hits the fan.”

Wil stopped pushing blood around on his face to blink, slack-jawed, at the doc. Even Stella worked up a little indignation on his behalf.

“Who’s bailing
who
out?” he demanded. “Who covered up your sloppy-assed mistake? Who, I gotta ask you, was blubberin’ like a girl when I got here and you’d done killed your girlfriend?”

“I was not—I was
not
—that was a state of shock, of emotional trauma,” Dr. Herman protested. “Besides, I paid you handsomely.”

“You paid me chickenshit!” Wil started to scramble to his feet, waving his hand around, still trying to get the blood wiped off his face, as Dr. Herman jerked the gun back and forth between him and Stella. “Twelve thousand bucks? It weren’t worth it for the trouble. That ain’t even enough to buy a ugly-ass used truck. That’s not but a couple good weekends in Vegas. You busted up my
relationship
, you fucker—”

Stella sighed, a huge, impatient, world-weary sigh, the sigh of a kindergarden teacher breaking up yet another scuffle in the sandbox. Goddamn Y chromosome. Here they were at what any sane human being might consider an impasse, a time to quit shootin’ and threatenin’ and blamin’ and start working toward a creative solution—and these two still couldn’t stop slinging the shit.

“Just
shut
the fuck
uuuuup
!” she screamed, putting her fingers to her ears and lurching to her feet. She braced for the shot, but when it didn’t come in the first seconds, she swung her bad leg back and then brought it forward with every last bit of momentum she could muster in a roundhouse kick to Dr. Herman’s unprotected groin.

The twin sounds that filled the moment that followed—the second crack of the gun and Dr. Herman’s high-pitched scream—echoed around in Stella’s head as she got the hell out of the way, reckoning that if the two damn fools were bent on killing each other, she might as well let them do it without her.

TWENTY-FOUR

Stella couldn’t quite decide if she was disappointed that Dr. Herman’s second shot lodged itself in the fleshy part of Wil’s arm. The man was certainly carrying on like a stuck pig, but she could tell that not only would he live to tell the tale but that he’d also get out with nothing more than a few dollars’ worth of gauze and bandages. Although if Dr. Herman’s brethren had their say, it would probably cost a few thousand bucks, but that was the health care system for you.

Dr. Herman, on the other hand, might have inspired a little more sympathy if she wasn’t just so disgusted with him. The shrill cry he let loose when her foot connected had diminished to a series of keening sobs, but he didn’t even seem to notice when Stella carefully plucked his gun from his twitching hand.

Stella leaned back against a sofa and stared at the two of them for a minute, shaking her head and sighing. Worthless. God help a world that handed over the keys to every important organization—the United Nations, NASA, professional sports—and in effect said, “Here, boys, go on ahead and drive.” When would women wake up and start running things?

“So, Doc,” she said conversationally. “You ever think about the fact if you’d just kept your dick in your pants, none a this would have happened? Huh?”

The doc huffed a few shallow breaths before he rolled his head to the side and glared at her. “Fu … fu … fuck you.”

Stella shook her head. Typical. A man can’t come up with an answer to a perfectly legitimate question, he goes right on the attack. “And selling drugs out of your office, I mean, isn’t there some kind of provision in that Hippocratic oath about that? And how much money could you have
made
, anyway? Was it really worth it?”

If it was possible for Dr. Herman’s expression to turn any more bitter, that last comment did the trick. “Everyone screws over doctors,” he panted. “Malpractice and the damn insurance companies—”

“And all those ex-wives, oh, yeah, blah blah blah,” Stella cut in. “My heart bleeds for you, buddy, it really does. I just got to ask you, though. That shit you told me in your office, that Kurtzoy syndrome—none of that was true, was it.”

Dr. Herman managed to lift his head up off the floor an inch or two so he could look at her. She was astonished to see his face twist itself up into that self-important sneer he’d had when he was sitting behind his big desk with all those diplomas up on the wall behind his head.

“There
is
a Kurtzoy syndrome,” he said, his voice assured and arrogant as hell. “It has to do with spinal stenosis complicated by tortuosity of the nerve roots. I’m afraid it’s probably a little too complicated to explain to a lay person like yourself.”

Un-fucking-believable. There he was, a murderer, lying on the floor, felled by his own stupidity as much as by her determination, and he still felt like he could talk down to her just because he had a title in front of his name.

Stella gave the doctor one final disgusted kick in the testicles, just enough to keep him occupied for a few more minutes, and grabbed a tissue from a box before picking up his phone. Ignoring the renewed whimpering from the floor, she dialed her own cell phone number.

After a few rings, it was picked up.

“Wil—that you?”

“No, Brandy,” Stella sighed. “It’s not your lame-ass idiot boyfriend. Seriously, woman, you wake up to Wil every day and really think he’s a better deal than you had with Goat?”

There was a long silence—so long, Stella began to wonder if Brandy had hung up on her.

Then Brandy hiccupped delicately in her ear. “Wil ain’t a bad man,” she whispered.

If Stella had a dollar for every time some confused female laid that line on her, she figured she could have already retired. Usually, when a woman resorted to that line, it was code for “this man of mine is so bad and such a disappointment and so far from what I dreamed of when I was a little girl that I’ve created an alternate reality in which my mind can relax and hallucinate while the rest of my self is being beat to hell.”

But in some weird, confused way that Stella had never even imagined before meeting this woman, she kind of got it.

Wil wasn’t a good man. He wasn’t even a mediocre man. But he also wasn’t exactly evil.

So his idea of a good time involved relieving folks of household goods they’d just as soon hang on to—was that any worse than some of these guys running for office who were selling off influence to the highest bidder and throwing their constituents under the bus every time the political winds changed directions?

Was he worse than men of the cloth carrying on in the pulpit on Sunday and getting their rocks off on Monday with some poor gal who had to put out to buy baby food?

Was he worse, come to think of it, than family physicians dealing drugs out of their offices just to make a few extra bucks?