A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

and back down with grace. She waited until he slipped into his own front door, using the key he wore on a shoelace around his neck, before she went back inside.
    Just two doors down, but the world was a dangerous place. Anything could happen.
    Good folks had to look out for one another.
     
    One of the biggest rip-offs in the universe had to be when the pleasant buzz you took to bed with you at midnight turned itself into queasy can’t-sleep at 5 A.M . Where the hell did all that lovely sparkle go?
    Stella had drained the Johnnie. She hadn’t really intended to, but some nights were like that. Some nights were for thinkin’ and drinkin’, when it seemed like you couldn’t do one without the other.
    Stella rarely drank in the days before Ollie died. She’d figured that someone in the house ought to stay sober, and Ollie frequently wasn’t up to the job.
    The Johnnie thing—she’d discovered Johnnie Walker Black a few weeks into her new life as a widow and was so grateful for the way it took the edge off that she started spending more and more time with the bottle. There was a stretch there, four or five months, that didn’t bear recalling—even if she could remember anything through the whiskey haze.
    But these days her relationship with Johnnie was more measured. Once Stella took up exercise, jogging around the neighborhood and dragging Ollie’s barely used Bowflex out of storage, she didn’t need the alcohol-induced numbing as much. Just the nightly drink, or occasionally two . . . except for the rare night when two didn’t do the trick. When she needed an extra layer of fuzzy loveliness.
    If only she could skip the early-morning sleeplessness that always followed.
    In those pre-dawn hours Stella sometimes amused herself by imagining how she would do in the joint. It was luck more than anything that had kept the law from investigating her sideline business, but her luck couldn’t hold forever. Eventually, one of her parolees would decide to roll the dice and turn her in. Or the long arm of the law would somehow get wise enough to catch her in the act of rehabilitating a subject. Either way, questions would be asked. Leads would be followed. And when that happened, odds were good that Stella would be headed for jail.
    Stella wasn’t sure she much cared. Life with Ollie had been worse than anything the prison system could dish out. Life without Ollie was better, but it was still lonely. Becoming a stone-cold enforcer had changed her, taking away any desire she’d ever had to play nice just to fit in. She called itlike she saw it now. Cussed when she felt like it. Didn’t back down.
    Jail didn’t scare Stella. With an assault conviction or two, she figured her reputation would precede her. Her nickname would be some variation on Hardesty, probably “Hard-ass.” Of course you didn’t get a handle like that for free; she’d probably have to shank somebody on the first day or something.
    But then there was the matter of all the pairing-off that happened in women’s prison. She’d seen a TV documentary on the subject. Diane Sawyer, Stella’s favorite journalist, spent the night in jail, wearing a prison-issue jumpsuit to interview the inmates. Stella couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact the women were about their sex lives. And how creative, too, making sex toys out of bits of junk stolen here and there.
    Unfortunately, Stella was pretty sure she didn’t have any latent lesbian tendencies, so all that prison action wouldn’t do her much good. It was a shame, too, because the documentary made it clear that even the homelier ladies had opportunities for love.
    Stella was no beauty queen. Despite the hours she spent on the Bowflex, her muscles were still protected by a generous larding of extra pounds. Then there were the gray roots, the facial hair in odd places, the breasts heading to the equator.
    But on TV she’d seen it with her own eyes: gals who didn’t have anything on her—hell, downright old,