A Bad Day for Pretty (6 page)

Here and there were scattered bits and pieces of the shack’s contents. The popcorn machine, its glass in broken shards, lay upended twenty feet away. Waxed paper soda cups were everywhere, almost like giant confetti playfully sprinkled by the departing storm. The sign, which used to read candy nachos soft drinks ice cream had disappeared except for a jagged section that read simply dy nach, a phrase that struck Stella, in her dazed state, as vaguely Germanic.

Clustered around the foundation were Goat—looking smart in his yellow department-issue windbreaker and pressed khakis, a pair of worn hiking boots his only concession to the conditions—and his deputies, and Neb Donovan.

Neb and Mike Scholl sat on an overturned cabinet that served as a makeshift bench. Their expressions were hangdog, their complexions on the gray side of pale, and their clothes were streaked with dirt. They had the air of a couple of fraternity boys who’d come home from a drunken evening only to find themselves locked out, and woken up hungover after a few hours’ sleep in the bushes.

At least, Stella thought, Neb couldn’t be guilty of anything too egregious, since the members of the Prosper Sheriff’s department were paying him little mind.

Ian had his hands jammed into the pockets of his own windbreaker, which was not an official part of the uniform but rather an ancient-looking gold varsity letter jacket with black sleeves and an embroidered Missouri University Tiger.

Goat was talking into his cell phone and staring into what looked like a sizable hole in the shack’s foundation. Stella was confused by the hole, because even a three-point tornado like the prior afternoon’s wouldn’t be able to dig up solid concrete. As she got closer, however, she realized that the hole was the result of one of the structure’s steel girders being ripped out of the foundation. When the shack blew over, the force of the building being wrenched free had caused the post to come out, cracking and bursting the concrete into which it had been set. Clots of concrete still clung to its base, giving it the look of an upended tree with its roots exposed.

Goat turned toward Stella when she was twenty feet away, and his expression did a funny little presto-change-o. He’d had the focused grimace he tended to get whenever events presented him with a problem he couldn’t immediately fix. It made him look smart. And dedicated. In a hot, don’t-mess-with-me kind of way.

Stella, who had spent the last few years avoiding encounters with Goat in anything that might be considered a professional capacity, had nonetheless been desperate enough to ask for his help several times. There was the time one of her clients went missing, and Stella got the Sheriff’s department to join in the cross-county hunt. Just a few months earlier, she asked for Goat’s help when Tucker was taken. And it was Goat who she called just before she passed out from blood loss when things went seriously south.

Still, it was a delicate thing, bringing in the law when you were working at what technically might be described as cross purposes. Stella preferred to view their efforts as complementary—the yin and yang of holistic justice. But sticklers might have a little trouble with the differences in their methods.

For instance, while Stella and Chrissy had been fighting the ugly underbelly of the mob presence in rural central Missouri, circumstances necessitated a certain amount of unregistered firearms and illegal searching and breaking and entering. Goat and his deputies, on the other hand, focused on the standard aboveboard chores like interviewing persons of interest and canvassing neighborhoods for witnesses and collecting evidence.

It all worked out, in the end. Stella wasn’t great with details. And paperwork? Forget it. So it was all to the good that while she was helping the bad guys reap what they’d sown, there were other folks focused on keeping the evidentiary trail pristine.

When Goat was on the job, the closer he got to the source of the wrongdoing, the more his loose-limbed, easygoing charm got smartened up and turned into a dangerous-edged determination that, no matter how many times Stella tried to deny it, gave her a knockdown thrill. While on the case, Sheriff Goat Jones was a tall-standing, oath-upholding, brook-no-nonsense embodiment of the long arm of Missouri law.

And all wrapped up in those snug-fitting khakis and mirrored sunglasses, to boot.

Stella noted the way Goat held the phone to his ear: his muscular arm, bent at the elbow, positively strained against the sleeve, which had evidently not been tailored for a man who enjoyed kayaking around the Ozarks every chance he got, building up big rock-hard biceps. And those trousers—ordered extra-long, no doubt, for Goat’s lanky build—she appreciated the sharp knife-edge crease and the smart, tailored cuffs, but what she really dug was the excellent view of his nice, tight rear whenever he turned away from her. There was every reason to believe that his butt—legs, too—were every bit as well-maintained as those arms.

The only problem was—as she’d discovered last night—the goods on display weren’t actually available. No, they were pre-owned; and if Brandy wasn’t spinning tall tales, still off the table by reason of a previous legally binding situation.

Stella’s cheeks flamed at the thought. She felt betrayed. Or, at the very least, bamboozled and underinformed. She didn’t care to be taken advantage of on a good day, but when she’d squeezed her midsection into an uncomfortable girdle—more specifically, a Spanx Hide & Sleek Hi-Rise Panty with Thong Back—when she’d endured her daughter’s sinus-searing, scalp-burning, double-process hair color—when she’d popped open a brand-new tube of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara in Blackest Black—well, on such a day she found it particularly galling.

While Stella covered the last of the distance to the little group gathered around the wreckage of the snack shack, her emotions running their complicated gauntlet, Goat flipped his phone shut and slipped it back into the holster on his broad, shiny black belt. Neb looked up at Stella, but barely seemed to register her presence—if he recognized her at all, it wasn’t clear from his unfocused gaze. Mike gave her a weak little wave.

Only Ian managed much of a greeting. “Mornin’, Miz Hardesty,” he said, touching the brim of his black-and-yellow Sawyer County Sheriff’s Department baseball cap, which Stella happened to know was not a bona fide part of the uniform, but a freebie the department had made up several years back when Sheriff Burt Knoll was still alive. Sheriff Knoll had gone in for swag in a big way, especially at Christmastime, when the town’s most upstanding citizens, as well as a few of his favorite reformed criminals, received an ashtray or a pen or some other useful item with the department logo embroidered, emblazoned, or otherwise affixed to it.

“Good morning, Ian. Mike. Neb.” She nodded to each man in turn. Then she turned and faced Goat, forcing her gaze up as far as his chin. “Goat.”

“What are you doing here, Stella?” he demanded.

Well, so much for worrying about letting the man down easy. There was about as much warmth in Goat’s voice as in a freezer-burned Eggo waffle. Still, it was Stella’s job—since she was present on behalf of Neb—to play it cool.

“Well, I heard on the radio that the shack blew over, yesterday when I was—”
On my way to your place
, Stella had been about to say. “—when I was out,” she amended. “Didn’t have much going on this morning so I thought I’d come and see if I could lend a hand.”

“Is that right. What were you thinking to do, stitch it back together with your sewing machine? Maybe donate a big hank of yarn to tie the bleachers up with?”

Stella blinked. If there had been any doubt as to his mood, the way his brows knit together as he fixed her with an extra-searing stare, sparks practically flying from those ice-blue eyes, even paler than usual under the bright September sky, laid it to rest.

The man was not one bit happy with her.

Well, what the fuck? Hadn’t
he
been the one to unleash an unreported spouse right in the middle of what had the potential to be a pretty damn romantic dinner? Hadn’t he been the one to have married a brassy-haired, big-titted, vavoom-hipped, gap-toothed man-stealing kind of woman in the first place?

That thought ratcheted through Stella’s brain so quickly and unexpectedly that she found her bottom lip was hanging open without a single thought to justify putting into words. She hadn’t realized how much Brandy’s big entrance last night had upset her until just this moment, when the woman’s parting grin intruded on her vision like a big stop sign while the clouds gathered on Goat’s sharp-planed features. He made mad look good, she had to admit; there was something about that generous mouth set in a firm line above that equally firm jaw that gave her an extra shiver even as she felt her back go up defensively.

Well, hell. Goat Jones might be hot, but Stella Hardesty didn’t put up with unprovoked meanness from anyone. Never again would she volunteer for the receiving end of a man’s bad mood. Not even Viggo Mortensen could treat her like this—on a morning when not only had she done nothing wrong, but also hadn’t managed a single cup of coffee—and get away with it.

“I’m sure I could come up with something,” she said, meeting Goat’s scowl dead-on with her own, “I’m finding I can do just about anything on my own as good as it can be done by committee. Especially these days, when you never know what-all you’re gonna get when you go bringing in outside help.”

Goat opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again. Noises behind Stella let her know why—she turned and saw that the crime scene unit had arrived. There were two men and a woman, the men dressed in navy long-sleeved shirts that would soon be much too hot as the sun rose in the sky. The woman strode quickly in the lead and the men struggled to keep up, dragging their gear in wheeled duffles. One of the men had a serious-looking camera slung around his neck. The overall effect was of badly dressed tourists who’d accidentally become separated from their tour group and were racing to make it back to the harbor before the cruise ship departed without them.

“Sheriff,” the woman said, nodding at the group. “Good to see you again. So where’s this mummy you all turned up?”

FIVE

Stella blinked in the bright sun of the storm-scoured morning and gave the woman from the crime scene unit her full attention. A little taller than Stella’s five feet six inches, the gal was as thin and leathery as a strip of beef jerky, and dressed in an overlarge wrinkled pale pink canvas blazer that looked like it used to be white until it had a laundry accident. She looked like she’d busted plenty of balls in her day, and Stella figured they ought to get along fine, except the woman was staring at her like the remains of a bug squashed on her shoe. Stella squinted at the laminated ID on a chain around her neck, and made out the Detective insignia. detective simmons.

“Mummy?” Stella asked politely.

“Who’s she?” Simmons replied, poking out her chin in Stella’s direction.

Goat squared his shoulders and, ignoring the question, stepped forward and offered his hand. Simmons met him head-on with a strong grip of her own. “Daphne,” he said. “It’s been too long.” Then he shook with the other two men, murmuring a polite greeting.

Stella figured he was hesitating his way out of having to introduce her, so she stepped right in behind him and did her own shaking and helloing. “I’m Stella Hardesty,” she said, “very dear friend of Neb here.”

Simmons’s handshake was unenthusiastic, and Stella quickly passed to the two men, leaning in to read the lettering on their gold name tag pins. “Officer Hewson,” she said. “Officer Long.”

“It’s just Harvey and Chuck, ma’am,” the shorter one said.

“Well, and you can call me Stella,” she said smoothly, stepping between the techs and their boss. A quick glance at Neb revealed that he hadn’t shifted from his spot, and he wasn’t looking any less likely to hurl. If anything, he looked even more uneasy. She gave him a quick glare, a get-your-shit-together kind of look, but if he got her meaning, he didn’t show it.

“It’s just terrible, all this devastation and destruction,” she continued, wondering if she could distract them long enough to pluck Neb out of his makeshift seat and get him home. As curious as she was to see what the mummy was all about, Stella’s first duty was to remove Neb from this atmosphere of unbridled suspicion. The equation that was forming in her mind was not to her liking. Presence of sheriff plus visiting crime-scene-solvers plus some sort of mummified body plus pale and quaking civilian on overturned cabinet did not, in her professional experience, bode well for the civilian.

Besides, whenever Stella was faced with a new and unknown enforcer of the law, caution was her byword. Especially when one of her clients was involved; then she became as protective as a feral cat when a chicken hawk gets between her and her kittens. And while Neb wasn’t a typical client, she’d grown fond of the man, and she wasn’t about to let anyone ride roughshod over him.

“It sure is good of you all to come all the way down to Prosper, but didn’t you all have any twisters of your own?” she said, taking two little steps to the right in order to block Simmons’s view of Neb. At the same time, she craned her neck toward the fissure that snaked through the concrete foundation. It widened to a debris-littered hole where the girder had ripped clear of its mooring.