Hunting Dixie

by James, Harper

  He got his phone out. Found the photos he’d taken.

  ‘A pickup like that, you mean?’

  Her face froze, knuckles white as she tried to remodel the shape of the phone.

  ‘I ran into the guy last night when I went back to the office. Right before those two guys attacked me. I forgot all about it.’

  She passed the phone back.

  ‘Send them to me.’

  Evan pulled a face.

  ‘I don’t know if it’ll help even when they find him. Ryder’s right about crazy.’

  ‘Send them anyway. Unfortunately, he’s still got the fingerprints. He told me to say he’d like a chat with you about that.’

  She smacked her fist into her palm several times. In case Evan was unsure what she meant by chat.

  ‘What about the woman, Rachel?’ he asked, keen to get off the subject.

  ‘Her name’s Rachel Cooper. Used to be . . .’ She clicked her fingers, shook her head. ‘I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. She changed her name, came out here a couple of years ago after a messy divorce. The ex knocked her around. She thought there was a good chance he’d come after her so she changed her name.’

  ‘Looks like she’d have been better off staying with the ex. She should have picked better friends than Carly, too.’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  They both fell silent, the gentle hum of the fridge in the corner the only noise. She stared vacantly at her feet. He reckoned she was seeing a mental picture of Rachel, just like he was.

  At least she wasn’t feeling guilty like him. Because, if he was honest, any sadness he felt for what had happened to Rachel was eclipsed by an overwhelming feeling of relief, by the fact that for him all that really mattered was that she wasn’t Sarah.

  ‘So how’s your day been, dear?’ she said when they’d both had a bellyful of their morbid thoughts.

  He made a strangled sound in the back of his throat.

  ‘I had another conversation with Carly. She totally denies telling anybody about Rachel’s address.’

  ‘What did you expect? A tearful confession?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Hardly. But then I got to thinking about the key Dixie had. How it didn’t fit the lock this morning.’

  ‘So it must fit something else.’

  ‘Like wherever Rachel stashed the money.’

  She stared at him a couple of beats.

  ‘You think Delacroix did that to her?’

  ‘No,’ he said, turning it into a three-syllable word, ‘but—’

  ‘Hang on.’

  She stopped him with a raised hand as she organized her thoughts.

  ‘I thought it was strange when Ryder saw the body. It was as if he’d already seen it. And now he’d found it everything was falling into place.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She shrugged, clasped the back of her head in her hands.

  ‘I don’t think Delacroix killed her. But I think maybe he is—or was—one step ahead of us. I think he was in that kitchen before us. One of the cabinets looked like somebody took a sledgehammer to it. Ryder told me Delacroix’s right hand was busted up. I thought it was from his fight with you. But now I think he saw Rachel, took out his anger on the cabinet. And for some reason he took a photo of her. Then Ryder saw it on his phone.’

  ‘Why would he take a photo?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Forget the photo for now. I think the key fits wherever the cash is. And I think he got it from whoever did that to Rachel. The thing is, it turns out he’s got a brother.’

  ‘Well I know that. Ryder told me. He’s the next of kin. Just got out after a two year stretch inside.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  Her forehead developed a few more creases.

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Did you know we had a beer with him earlier today?’

  She smiled at the memory. It felt like it was a lifetime ago, the silly game pretending to see if she could spot the bracelet in the bar. And look how that turned out.

  ‘That’s the brother, huh? Explains why they had the same tattoo.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s not all, though. I couldn’t understand why Dixie had that code written down. Then it came to me. It wasn’t for him—it was for his brother. He suspected something might happen to him and wanted to make sure his brother got the money if it did.’

  ‘So when he picks up Dixie’s personal effects he finds a key and a coded message left for him.’

  ‘Did Ryder say whether he’d come in to pick up his stuff yet?’

  ‘No, they’re still trying to get in contact with him. Why? You want to go back to the bar to see if he’s still there?’

  ‘No, I’ve got a better idea than that. There’s someone dying to meet you. Get some lipstick on.’

  Chapter 44

  ‘KATE. HOW LOVELY TO meet you at last,’ Elwood Crow said, his wrinkly old face looking even more like a prune as he beamed at them standing on his doorstep. He extended his arm to take her hand in his, elbowed Evan out of the way at the same time.

  She smiled back, nervously watching her damaged hand disappear into something the size of a catcher’s mitt.

  ‘Come in, come in. The boy’s told me all about you.’

  He led her inside, down the hallway.

  ‘Don’t just stand there letting in all the cold air, Evan. Make yourself useful. You know where the coffee is. The good stuff, mind.’

  Crow was an ageing, semi-retired investigator who’d played a pivotal role on one of Evan’s previous cases. Since then Evan had consulted with him a number of times. Particularly when things got cerebral. Earlier Evan had called him and given him the details of what Guillory had found in Dixie’s possessions.

  Crow led her into the back room, the room he shared with his pet bird, an American crow called Plenty that was allowed to fly free. He leveled his finger at the bird, gave it a stern look. The bird looked down at its feet. Shifted along on its perch as if it had been caught pecking an important visitor’s ear.

  ‘He’s got a foul beak,’ Crow explained.

  While Evan made the coffee, Crow kept Guillory entertained. Asked whether she’d noticed an improvement in Evan’s abilities since he’d taken him under his wing.

  ‘No pun intended,’ he said.

  She had to admit there was nothing she’d noticed.

  ‘What’s that?’ Evan said, carrying in the coffee.

  ‘We’re talking about you, not to you,’ Crow said, then proceeded to explain his thinking about the coded message.

  ‘It’s a vigenère cipher. A polyalphabetic substitution code—’

  ‘Whoa.’

  Guillory held her hand up, nodded towards Evan.

  ‘You’re right,’ Crow said.

  They shared a smile. Evan let them have their little joke.

  ‘All you need to know is it’s a vigenère cipher. It works with a keyword. If you pick a long keyword it’s almost unbreakable. If you’ve got the keyword, there are websites where you simply plug it in and it spits the answer out.

  ‘I tried all the obvious things—Dixie and Delacroix and Joseph. None of them worked but I didn’t expect them to. Evan told me he had a copy of the Serenity Prayer on him so I tried all the important words from that. Serenity and courage and wisdom. I tried complete lines, parts of lines. You name it, I tried it.’

  He opened his hands, shrugged. No dice.

  ‘What’s the brother’s name?’ Evan said to Guillory.

  ‘Jackson.’

  Crow went over to his laptop and tried it. First name only, then full name, with and without the space.

  ‘Nope.’

  Evan decided to say something stupid to Guillory.

  ‘Maybe you copied it down wrong.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll stick—’

  ‘Now, now, children,’ Crow said. ‘No bickering.’

  Evan barely heard Crow. Guillory’s sharp tone of voice had kicked loose a memor
y. A pointed comment directed at him as they discussed the prayer.

  It’s not only alcoholics who need to pay attention to the words.

  But it was what she’d said immediately before that.

  ‘You said there was something written on the back of the prayer. What was it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It was just a single word.’

  He let out a short chop of a laugh.

  ‘What? Like a keyword you mean?’

  Her face hardened at the sharpness of his tone.

  ‘I didn’t think it was important so I didn’t bother making a note of it.’

  The edge to her voice suggested if he wanted to question her judgement with the benefit of hindsight she was in exactly the right mood to argue the point. Injured hand or not.

  Crow started to say something before it got out of control. At the same moment the pet bird picked up on the tension in the air and cawed loudly.

  ‘Fear!’ Guillory blurted out. ‘The word was fear.’

  Crow was still at the laptop.

  Everybody in the room held their breath as he typed, waited for him to speak.

  ‘Sorry.’

  In their disappointment Evan and Guillory hardly noticed that Crow was still typing. They sure as hell noticed—and jumped—when he slammed both fists into the table like an impatient diner demanding his dinner, a triumphant yes! on his dry lips.

  ‘I knew there must be a reason why fear was written on the back of the prayer. Why it wasn’t on the paper with the code. It meant there was a connection between the prayer and the word fear. The prayer is important to alcoholics so I did a search on fear and alcoholics anonymous . . .’

  Evan knew Crow well enough to not waste his breath trying to hurry him. Guillory didn’t. She was on her feet now.

  ‘And?’

  Crow looked up at her, enjoying his moment of glory—unaware of how close he was to a smack on the back of his wrinkly head.

  ‘Fear can mean one of two things. Are you a half-full or a half-empty type of person?’

  Her face compacted in confusion for a second before she realized what he was talking about. She shrugged.

  ‘Half-full, I suppose.’

  Crow began to type.

  ‘Okay, Miss Positive. As far as you’re concerned, FEAR stands for Face Everything And Recover.’

  He finished typing. Everyone in the room knew the result before he hit return.

  ‘Sorry, no cigar.’

  He started to type again.

  ‘However, there’s a more negative version of what FEAR stands for . . .’

  Evan was on his feet now. They both stood over Crow. Watching his bony fingers as he typed. Unable to breathe.

  Fuck Everything And Run crawled across the screen, character by character.

  ‘Ha! I prefer that anyway,’ Guillory cried. ‘Sums up how I feel at the moment.’

  ‘Ready?’

  Crow’s finger hovered over the return key. Guillory beat Evan to it, slammed it down like she wanted to break the keyboard.

  Everyone stared at the screen. It got very quiet in the room. Then suddenly it got very noisy all at once.

  ***

  ELWOOD CROW WIPED THE lipstick off his cheek as he watched them walk down the path. There was more of a spring in their step as they left, the address of the storage facility and the unit number safely in Guillory’s notebook. They made a nice couple. Evan had looked like he was going to carry her off on his shoulders.

  In a way it made him sorry he’d agreed to help Evan in his search for Sarah, acting as an intermediary between Evan and Jack Adamson—the man who claimed to have information relating to Sarah’s disappearance. Information he would only give in return for Evan helping to keep him out of jail.

  Damn.

  He’d gotten so carried away, so caught up in their infectious enthusiasm when he’d cracked the code, and then they’d rushed off so quickly, he’d forgotten to tell Evan.

  Adamson had called again.

  He was running out of patience waiting for Evan. So he’d given Crow another name to pass along. A gesture of goodwill he called it. Proof that there was substance to his story.

  He started down the path after them. But they were in the car already, too engrossed to see him waving. Besides, he wasn’t sure how much Evan had told Kate about his search for Sarah. He wouldn’t want to put his foot in it.

  It could wait until next time.

  But that wasn’t all that was worrying him. After Adamson had called a second time, he’d gone back to check on his original story again. When he’d first looked into it for Evan he’d found a news report on the internet that backed up Adamson’s story to a certain extent—allowing for what Adamson was deliberately holding back.

  It concerned a man found dead at the side of the road and evidence of an unknown woman having been there with him. Adamson was insinuating that the woman was Sarah and that he could tell Evan what the hell she was doing there. And what happened to her afterwards.

  Being something of a dinosaur, Crow had printed out the page so that he had a hard copy. He reckoned the planet could afford one more sheet of paper. And if it couldn’t, what did he care, he’d be going the way of the dinosaurs soon enough anyway.

  Being a careful dinosaur, he’d also bookmarked the page for future reference.

  So there was no problem with the facts—sketchy as they were—being lost. What concerned him, what caused a little worm of disquiet to turn over in his gut, a feeling he hadn’t felt for twenty years or more, was when he clicked on the bookmark, the page was gone.

  And being a paranoid, careful dinosaur, he reckoned somebody was covering their tracks.

  Chapter 45

  JACKSON CHECKED HIS WATCH. Dixie was late. He’d already downed several beers with a chaser or two. The liquor sledding through his blood made him pleasantly mellow. The music was good, the place heaving on a Friday night. A friendly crowd, everybody happily stepping on toes, spilling drinks on each other. Best of all, plenty to look at. Short skirts and high heels. Too much cheap makeup and firm young flesh on display wherever he looked.

  He pulled out his phone. Dialed Dixie’s number. It went straight to voicemail. Again. He needed to go to the men’s room. He got halfway out of his seat. Then froze. He lowered himself gently back down again like a man with hemorrhoids. Tried to absorb himself into the back of the seat.

  Carly had just walked in with a friend. He hunched over, watched them from under his eyebrows as they took a couple of seats at the bar.

  He couldn’t afford to sit and wait.

  Dixie might walk in any second. He wasn’t sure which way he wanted this to play out. Dixie said he wanted to find her, get the money back. But after his tête-à-tête with Miguel he had his own reasons for talking to her—talking being a broad, generic term for the exchange he had in mind.

  He slid out of the booth. Went to wait in the car Chico had loaned him. He’d planned to leave it overnight if he drank too much—which he already had—but things don’t always go the way you plan. Seeing her had taken the shine off his mellow mood pretty fast. And after his two-year stint inside he didn’t have too much respect for the law anyway. He moved the car so he had a good view of the door and of the entrance to the parking lot. He tried Dixie’s number again. It was still going to voicemail. It wasn’t a problem. He’d intercept him when he drove in.

  He reclined the seat a notch to get more comfortable, turned on the radio and settled back to wait.

  ***

  HIS BACK WAS STIFF. He was bored. Dixie still hadn’t shown up, still wasn’t answering his phone. On the radio Lucinda Williams was telling somebody to go on back to Greenville when the bar door opened and they finally came out. Hallelujah. Carly put her friend in a taxi, then walked to a car parked underneath the trees in the far corner of the lot.

  Bad place to park, Carly.

  He started his engine. Let her get in her car. Then stomped his foot to the floor. Swung t
he wheel hard right. The car shot across the lot. Plowed straight into her front fender. Metal buckled and glass shattered, the impact wedging her car up against the curb and trees behind her.

  He leapt out, vaulted over her fender. Pulled her door open before her head had bounced back off the headrest. She tried to scream as he dragged her out of her car. Nothing came out. He hustled her towards his passenger door, her feet stumbling under her. She finally realized what was happening. Started to struggle in earnest. Panic gave her strength. She surprised him with a good punch on the nose. The shock made him lose his grip as his eyes watered up. It didn’t do her any good. He shoved her hard, knocking her against the car. Then he stepped back a half pace, gave her an almighty slap, felt her teeth changing places under his palm.

  She yelped loudly. Slid slowly down the side of the car. He caught her under the armpit before her ass hit the ground. Manhandled her into the passenger seat. Clipped her seatbelt in.

  ‘You move and you’ll get a lot worse than that.’

  He pointed his finger at the middle of her face. Her glazed eyes stared at the finger. Nothing was going on behind them. He slammed the door shut, raced around to the driver’s side. She was still dazed, shaking her head slowly, as he stuck it in reverse and put his foot down, taking half her bumper with him. By the time they hit the street she was staring at him open-mouthed.

  ‘Jackson?’

  ‘You don’t look very pleased to see me.’

  ‘Oh really. I wonder why that is?’ She touched her cheek. Winced. ‘Maybe it was the way you introduced yourself, you bastard. What do you want?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with what happened.’

  That sounded to him a lot like a guilty conscience.

  ‘That’s not the way I heard it.’

  ‘I don’t care what you’ve heard. Stop and let me out.’ She fumbled with the seatbelt. Her fingers were shaking too much.

  He knocked her hand away with a lazy swipe.

  ‘You touch that one more time and you’ll get another slap. A proper one, this time. No half measures for a lady. Besides, we’re doing forty-five. It’s not the movies, you know. You can’t roll out the door and pick yourself up and walk away.’