She had a sudden inspiration, no doubt suggested by her subconscious because of the very events that had first brought her to Wisconsin. She’d noticed the sizable diamond studs in his ears, and since he was immobilized, she crouched down and looked closer. The earring had to be a couple of carats. “Is this real?” she asked, flicking it with her fingertip. “Ah, don’t bother answering, I ain’t planning on believing you anyway.” She dug in her pocket for her folding knife and popped it open. “Now there aren’t a lot of nerves in the earlobe, which you prob’ly remember from when you first got your piercing, so just hold still and I’ll see if I can slice this off clean.”
She didn’t really intend to separate the man from his flesh, but she had a steady hand from all her shop-floor practicing with her knife. Stella had discovered she had a particular talent for throwing. On one amusing occasion—amusing in retrospect, that is, not so much at the time—she’d been practicing throwing her Spyderco police knife at a square of orange wool felt that was left over from a Thanksgiving-theme needle-felting class. One of the ladies had left it on the design wall, and Stella had hit the blob of wool dead center six times out of nine and was winding up for her tenth attempt when Francie Cage popped up from under the table, where she’d been hunting for a needle threader she’d dropped. The old lady had been down there so long that Stella had forgotten she was there, seeing as all the other students had gone home and only Francie had stayed behind to finish her cornucopia wall hanging, since she meant to give the homely thing to Pastor Dewey at the Share Our Bounty dinner that evening.
Stella only saw the steely permed top of Francie’s head rising up from under the table after the steel knife had left her hand and gone winging through the air, end over end, toward the wall. There followed the longest slo-mo moment of horror of Stella’s life, as she imagined how Francie, who had designs on Pastor Dewey, only six years her junior and widowed, would look with a rakish black eye patch after her milky blue eye was put out by the flying blade.
In a stroke of great luck, Francie feinted left after spotting a nickel that had rolled under a chair leg, and the knife whizzed past her ear and embedded clean in the center of the wool tuft. Since then Stella had been more cautious, abandoning the showy but rarely useful throwing techniques for good old-fashioned close-in handling. Francie and Pastor Dewey had enjoyed a brief, mad fling before Francie was friended on Facebook by a fellow from her senior class—Prosper High Class of ’56—and her affections made a lurching hairpin turn.
All of Stella’s knife practice made it possible for her to nick only the tiniest notch in her captive’s ear, enough to draw blood and sting a little but nothing that couldn’t be covered up with a nice silver hoop or cuff. A less experienced hand would have risked slicing or stabbing the man when he yelped and jumped, but Stella was able to slip her knife away and deftly twist the diamond stud free while he recovered from his fright.
He held still while she took the other one. She rolled them in her hand for a moment, admiring their fiery brilliance, then popped them in her pocket along with the knife. They weren’t nearly as beautiful as Fred’s sapphire and diamond earrings, but they might be worth something.
After that, the man preceded her meekly inside.
He was silent while Stella got him maneuvered to the kitchen floor and shackled up nicely to the pipe under the sink. Up close, she could see that he was older than she first thought—in his twenties, probably a shotcaller or lieutenant. They usually sent the higher-level guys on missions of intimidation.
Stella removed the rubber gloves and dish detergent and Windex and Brillo pads from the sink and made sure that her captive could rest more or less easily, with his head in the cabinet. He didn’t complain, not even while Stella was getting his leg cuffs on, or when she went through his pockets and took a cheap handgun and a handful of plastic packets off him. This went in a Ziploc bag in her purse, after she made sure to roll his fingers all over them. But he still didn’t have anything to say when she started asking him questions.
“Now I know you’re feeling better, and I didn’t do anything to you’s gonna even hurt tomorrow,” Stella said in exasperation. “I also know you’re disappointed that Luke couldn’t come out and play, and that I took your toys away. But I kind of need to know the scope of what we’re looking at here. I’m not so much worried about
you,
seeing as I have a nice little package in there that I can drop off with the police on my way out of town, but I figure where there’s one of you guys there’s probably more, plus a little line of ants leading back to your anthill down in Madison. Am I right?”
The fellow looked like he might actually be considering answering her. He opened his eyes wide and worked his mouth, though nothing came out, and then he kicked out with his feet and made a gasping sort of sound of surprise.
“Hey, there, easy, we don’t want to go ripping the pipes out. Chip’s got enough on his hands to—hey!”
The young man had made the very ill-advised decision to try to lunge toward her but, given his restraints and awkward wedged-in stance, succeeded only in cracking his forehead hard against the front of the cabinet, and Stella had bent down to try to push him back where he couldn’t hurt himself when there was a loud cracking sound.
The idiot had managed to dislodge something, a pipe joint or disposal unit perhaps. The sound of it breaking was magnified so loud it echoed in her ears. Even worse, he’d hit himself so hard that—shit, was that—Stella reached out and touched the man’s forehead, where a neat little hole was blooming with blood.
That was no—
It was—
Stella hit the floor and rolled just as the second gunshot was fired. She didn’t see where it went because she was frantically trying to propel herself out of the kitchen, but a tangle of dinette chair legs made it difficult. She’d been shot at often enough for her instincts to be sharply honed—basically the idea was to get yourself where the bullets weren’t, which in this case meant out in the hall.
“Goddamn it, hold still,” a voice hollered over the sound of more shots—Topher, to her surprise, who, thankfully, had remarkably poor aim. She dove for the hall and made it around the corner before she remembered that her own gun was in the purse she’d left on the kitchen counter. She pushed herself to her feet and careened off the walls. Down the hall were the bedrooms, two of them, and the bathroom. The windows were a possibility, but even as oafish a shooter as Topher was proving to be would probably be able to get a clear shot in before she managed to pry a window open and jump through it.
Which left the living room—racing across it, specifically, to the front door, then out into the indifferent streets of the worst neighborhood in Smythe.
Except that the string of cursing issuing from the other room was not being punctuated by any additional gunshots—it sounded, in fact, like the fury of a smited and quashed man, one whose best efforts were going awry. Stella, who knew a thousand times better, could not resist sneaking a peek into the kitchen before she escaped into the night.
“Damn it, damn it,
damn
it!” Topher was hopping around in a most unusual way, trying to kick the ammo clip that he had dropped on the floor, and succeeding only in sliding it along the slick vinyl flooring and lodging it beneath a cabinet. As Stella watched, fascinated, Topher tried to bend down and get it, but his man-girdle was hampering his attempts most cruelly. After his attempts to reach under the cabinet while on his knees failed, he gave up entirely and lay down on his stomach and inched toward the cabinet like a worm.
Stella knew she ought to run, ought to let the authorities handle it, ought to leave Smythe’s finest to untangle the mess on the kitchen, which now included a pool of blood seeping out of the sink cabinet. The dead drug dealer would give them a lot to work with, but then again Natalya and Chip—even with the alibi the restaurant was sure to supply—might have more difficulty than they needed in explaining what he was doing there.
Most of all, she just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to let a dumb-ass do what dumb-asses do best, which was to dig themselves deeper. She took her time walking back through the kitchen, pausing to fetch her own gun from her purse, then crouching down next to where he was lying on his stomach gasping for air.
“I got a few years on you, and yet look what I can do,” Stella said cheerfully and did a graceful dip and lunge and plucked the clip from under the cabinet, just beyond the reach of Topher’s grasping fingers. “Trouble with these crappy little Rugers, you only get six shots out of a magazine. Now I suppose you’ve noticed that the tables have turned, so to speak, and you ain’t got any call to try anything tricky, or I’ll shoot your hand off. I realize you have a, uh, limited range of motion in that getup, so I’m gonna let you make your own way into this chair, if you can.”
It took a while, but eventually Topher grunted and panted his way into the chair. The bottom of his ManTee had somehow rolled up, revealing a pale band of puffy muffin-y middle that oozed out between his trousers and the shirt.
That just made Stella cluck sadly. “What on earth were you thinking, anyway? I mean, you’re not a bad-looking man. You’re some ladies’ kinda handsome, I’d be willing to bet, but I’ll tell you one thing—don’t anyone want to see the marks I bet that thing leaves on you once you take it off. And who do you think you’re fooling, really? That there’s like a—like a
comb-over.
There ain’t anything in the world wrong with a bald man”—and she should know, given the fact that Goat Jones didn’t have a single hair decorating his head—“but trying to cover it up with whatever you got left, well, that’s just wrong.”
Topher hadn’t looked all that excited about the fact that he hadn’t managed to kill her, but now he looked positively incensed. “That’s nothing like—”
Stella, despite emerging unscathed from this latest threat to her life, was not about to have Topher hollering at her. She simply wasn’t in the mood. “So what brought you here tonight, anyway? How’d you figure out I was onto you?” She hadn’t really reached that conclusion on her own—the fact that he was trying to kill her was pretty convincing proof.
Topher looked disgusted, his scowl deepening the lines around his eyes. “I actually thought you were
interested
in me,” he sputtered. “I looked you up. Only guess what, there isn’t any state intellectual property department. And the only hits on any Stella Hardesty in Wisconsin are for a woman up in Muskego who’s running for city controller—and she’s a
blonde
.”
“I’ve been a blonde,” Stella shrugged.
“Yeah, well, it was pretty clear you were lying to me, so I figured out that Chip and Natalya had hired a private investigator. I bet that isn’t even your real name, is it?”
“Damn, you’re good. What were you gonna do, make them admit they were onto you?”
“Whatever I had to do,” Topher said darkly.
“Huh.” Stella didn’t care for his attitude, a point she made with a gentle tap of the SIG’s barrel against his temple. “So let me guess, you invited Benton over to your place. Pretended you wanted to kiss and make up—”
“I told him I wanted to show him a new design. I had to practically beg him to come, it’s like he didn’t even care anymore, even after he realized Natalya was never coming back.”
“So he came over and … how’d you get him in that T-shirt, anyway?”
“I asked him if I could take a picture. For the Web site.”
“But—I thought you sold the patent.”
“I sold
one
patent. For
one
product. Trust me, I’ve got thousands of ideas. The shirt I showed him was the one I had on the other day. It’s meant for the gym.”
“Huh. So he puts it on…” Stella thought of Benton changing clothes in Topher’s apartment and remembered something. “In that room you just happened to have tricked out with down pillows, a down comforter. What did you do, lock him in?”
Now Topher smiled, cruelly. “From the outside. I just changed the lock, took me ten minutes. I could hear him knocking around in there forever. Got so bad, I went out for a latte—I didn’t want to listen to it.”
“That’s—wow. And then how’d you get him into your car?”
“Hey, I work
out,
” Topher said, looking wounded. “I just waited until midnight and drove my car around, and it wasn’t too hard to get him in there. Dropped him off at the house and then waited until I was pretty sure janitor boy would be home from work, and then I called the cops.”
“That was
you
who called?”
“Yeah.” Topher frowned. “Should have known it would get fucked up. Man, I just can
not
catch a break.”
“What I don’t get is what turned you into an indiscriminate killer in the first place. I mean, Benton was your friend. You worked together for
years
. From what I hear you two would go out on Friday night and then get up on Saturday morning and go Rollerblading. Heck, it sounds to me like you were closer than most married folks. So what happened?”
“It wasn’t
just
about the money,” Topher said. “Even though that was bad enough. Selling the patent was stupid. The real money’s in licensing. If Benton would’ve held out like I told him to, LockeCorp would be sending us a check every time one of those shirts rolled out of the factory, and it would have added up to a hell of a lot more than a few thousand bucks.”
“So you two disagreed about how to proceed? And since his name was on the patent, you couldn’t stop him from selling?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve got a lot more planned than ManTees. Shaper tees have flooded the market, anyway; every major manufacturer’s bringing them out. But I have other ideas men are going to love. The hidden-panel shirt, with customizable pectoral enhancement—no one’s doing that yet. And the panel undershort I’m working on now, I’ve got a patent pending on a sling I designed for the front so it compresses the waist area without diminishing a man’s other attributes at all. That’s revolutionary, that’s going to take the industry by storm—”