Bitch Factor

by Chris Rogers

  Dann lowered his eyebrows.

  “You must think I’m a friggin Eskimo. Why would I try to escape in the middle of nowhere before the roads are even clear?”

  “I don’t know what you’ll try, Dann, but why risk it?”

  “So now I’m supposed to make like an invalid while you go up to the main house and chow down, is that it?”

  “We haven’t been asked, yet, but I expect our hosts will arrange a meal of some sort.”

  He was sitting on one of the wooden chairs pulled close to the bed. Now he stood abruptly, knocking the chair to the floor. Snatching his pillow, he plumped it hard against the headboard, but made no move to slide under the covers.

  “Suppose I don’t feel much like an invalid?”

  Dixie leafed through packets of cocoa mix and tea bags that Emma Sparks had left in a straw basket beside the coffeepot If Dann was already getting cabin fever, he was looking at a long, hard time ahead, cooped up in a cell. But telling him so wasn’t likely to calm him down. Finding a packet of instant hot lemonade, she fished it out of the basket.

  “Here’s the ticket. A cup of this and you’ll feel as fine as frog’s hair.”

  “I’m not sick!”

  “You look peaked to me.” She ran fresh water in the coffeemaker.

  Dann glowered at her silently for a long moment. Then he crossed his arms, leaned languidly against the wall, and cocked an insolent eyebrow.

  “On second thought, maybe I’m not feeling so good. Maybe I’m sick enough you should call the sheriff, have him take me to the hospital.” Dann smiled, but there was no humor in the defiance that sparked in his eyes.

  Dixie studied him as water dripped into the glass pot. The possibility of being holed up together for another day and night was likely grating on Dann as much as it was on her. After ten hours of sleep and two hours of gin rummy, she was ready to crawl out of her skin. No reason for him to handle the stress any better.

  “Is that what you want me to do, call the sheriff?”

  “It’d get me off your hands,” he said. “I spend a couple days in a warm bed with three squares, TV, and cute nurses, then the sheriff ships me off to Houston. You still collect your fee, but with only half the work.”

  He had no way of knowing that such a plan wouldn’t fit the arrangement she’d made with Belle Richards.

  “You want to take your chances with the locals?”

  He hesitated, then his lips twisted in a sour smile. “Smalltown cops aren’t too chummy with bounty hunters, are they? Might look the other way while I slip out the hospital door.”

  “And they might not.” But hospitals were notoriously easy to escape from.

  “So what do you think, Flannigan? Do we call a truce until the roads clear? Maybe cut me a little slack while we’re stuck here in this room. Or do I have a convulsion when Sparks knocks on the door, get myself some emergency treatment? My convulsions are Academy Award material—have a brother who suffers grand mal seizures, and I’ve seen all the moves.”

  Dixie didn’t like being backed into corners. If she told him the deal she’d struck with Belle, he might not be so eager to broadcast his whereabouts. On the other hand, it was his own goose he’d be cooking if the sheriff turned out sharper than Dann expected and delivered him straight into the hands of the prosecuting attorney in Houston.

  But it was Dixie’s ten thousand dollars he’d be pissing away.

  “Choose your own poison,” she said at last. “You may be right about small-town cops not liking bounty hunters. I hear they’re not too keen on child killers, either.”

  She poured steaming water over the lemon crystals and watched them burst, filling the cup with a tangy aroma. Dann stood very still, studying her. She could almost see the dilemma behind his blue eyes, and she gave him some space to make his decision. Of course, if he made the wrong decision, there wasn’t a handier tranquilizer in the world than the butt of a.45.

  “All right, I’ll drink the friggin lemonade.” He took the cup and sniffed it. “Don’t suppose you have a shot of brandy to give it some character. My mother’s hot toddies included a healthy measure of spirits.”

  “Which is probably what started you down the road to dipsomania—”

  “I’m not a goddamn alcoholic!”

  “No? Then you must be an ordinary drunk.”

  “Well, yeah…. I mean, sometimes I get drunk, but I don’t have to drink. I can leave the stuff alone if I want to.”

  Dixie had heard that before. She reached into the bathroom for one of the yellow-flowered towels.

  “Just look miserable and cover that handcuff when Sparks gets here.” That made twice he’d backed down. Next time wouldn’t be as easy. She wrapped the towel around his throat like a muffler.

  “Hellfire, woman, you’re choking me!” Dann yanked the cloth away from his neck. “Next you’ll be smearing me with Vicks VapoRub.”

  “Too bad we don’t have any. The fumes alone would convince Sparks.” Dixie replaced the towel, leaving it slightly looser.

  Minutes later they heard a shovel scrape the walk outside the door. She finger-combed her hair, smoothed her rumpled clothes, and tried to look domestic. When a loud knock sounded, she opened the door.

  “Morning, Miz Flannigan. Buck Sparks. Hope you folks slept well. Emma sends an invite to come eat breakfast with us up at the house. Plenty of food, plenty of room.”

  “Those ham sandwiches were about the best I’ve ever had.”

  Sparks gave a stiff little nod and puffed on his pipe. “There’s more ham to go with your eggs, and I think Emma’s cooked up some sausage. There’ll be plenty.”

  Dixie opened the door wider so Sparks could see Dann propped up in bed, wool blanket tucked snugly around his makeshift muffler, lemonade steaming in his cup.

  “I’m afraid he’s coming down with something,” Dixie said, adopting Sparks’ speech rhythms. “Been sneezing all night, barking something fierce. Wouldn’t want other folks catching the misery.”

  Parker Dann obliged with a halfhearted cough.

  “Think we oughta fetch the doctor?” Sparks asked.

  “Not yet. But a dose of aspirin and some cough syrup would help, if you think Emma might have some.”

  “Sure she will. You come when you’re ready, get whatever you need.” He started down the walk, the shovel slung across one shoulder.

  Dixie shut the door and picked up Dann’s heavy coat.

  “I’m going to make this as fast as possible,” she told him. “As you reminded me earlier, there’s no point in your trying to get away, since you don’t have a dog sled. So relax and play another hand of solitaire.”

  She removed the magazine from the .45, studied the room, and decided the best place for the gun was on the closet shelf, under the blanket from her cot, far enough away that Dann couldn’t reach it wearing the handcuffs. Shoving the magazine in her jeans pocket, she picked up Dann’s white running shoes, which she’d unpacked for him to wear from the car to the motel room, tied the laces together, and carried them along to hide in a snowdrift. Even if he did manage to free himself, he wouldn’t get far in his stocking feet.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Stupid mistake, Parker figured, tipping his hand like that. Should’ve kept his friggin mouth shut till Sparks knocked on the door. Then go into his act. Writhe around, eyes rolled back, legs jerking, head flopping like a chicken with a wrung neck, making a gurgling, choking noise in his throat. All the time rattling that handcuff Sparks would’ve been suspicious of Flannigan right off. So would the sheriff, keeping a sick man chained up like that.

  Parker flipped up a black nine to play on a red ten.

  The cabin, with its morning muffler of snow, was as quiet as a cell in the dead of night. Parker shuddered. Worst combination he could think of, silence and isolation.

  Funny he hadn’t heard that bathroom faucet dripping before. Must’ve left the cock open a bit. He slid off the bed and stretched around the door facing to the bathroo
m. He’d never seen handcuffs like these, with chain between them. Leg irons, sure, but not cuffs. Must be some kind of special issue. Even with a foot of chain, though, he couldn’t quite reach the friggin faucet.

  Moving the bed might help. It fell shy of the doorway by six or eight inches—could be exactly the inches he needed.

  He eyed the curved iron headboard. His handcuff, attached to the outside, would slide down the curve as far as the mattress, where a horizontal bar stopped it, or up around the curve to the first vertical bar. Dann slid the cuff as far down as it would go, then squatted to lift the bed and scoot it over the wood floor.

  Damn, it was heavy! Heaving and pulling, he finally moved the bed flush with the doorway. When he stood up again, he was breathing hard. Hadn’t realized he was so out of shape.

  He slid the handcuff back up the rail and stretched toward the faucet. Still an inch short.

  Studying the distance, he could see there was no way to get any closer. At least he could close the bathroom door, muffle the drip some.

  Now it was really too friggin quiet. A radio would help. Understandable, a small-town motel not having television. Crap on TV wasn’t worth watching anyway, but a radio, what could that cost? Ten, fifteen bucks?

  He sat down on the bed. At least he could see out the window from this new position, see where Sparks had cleared a path around the side of the motel office. Probably where Flannigan had gone for breakfast.

  Somehow, he had to get her to unbend a little, let down her guard. She wasn’t the easy touch he’d expected. Those brown, velvety eyes looked soft and inviting, but the woman was hard as bedrock. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Shakespeare might’ve written more plays about women if he’d met the likes of Flannigan.

  Parker turned up the ace of spades and played it beside the other two.

  As good a salesman as he was, there had to be a way to convince Flannigan to cut him some slack. He’d sold everything from doorknobs to dump trucks, hair products to helicopters. Amount of money he’d made ought to be a sin. He was a charming, reasonable, agreeable fellow, wasn’t he? Nonthreatening. Friendly. Likable.

  Lovable, even? Maybe he should romance her a little.

  She was a good-looking woman. Dressed like a man, but that didn’t necessarily mean…

  Hellfire, the way her jeans fit, the way she filled out a sweatshirt, could make a man crazy if he hadn’t more important things to worry about—like staying out of prison. Maybe women had taken a bottom rung on his priority list, but Parker still knew the right moves. And Flannigan might not be the easy touch he’d first guessed, but she was still a woman.

  Parker’s neighbor said he reminded her of Clark Gable—sometimes she said Burt Reynolds, her memory wasn’t the greatest—Gable, Reynolds, Tom Selleck. Couldn’t make his big voice go squeaky like Selleck’s, but he could wiggle his eyebrows. Wasn’t a woman alive could resist his boyish humor for long. He’d charm the pants off her, like Magnum, P.I.

  Kind of funny, actually. Flannigan was the PI, so to speak, Parker was the bad guy. Never thought of himself as a bad guy. He was the “… man more sinned against than sinning.” At least that’s what he’d hoped the jury would believe.

  Wouldn’t let them lock him up again. Those few days in jail had convinced him. But staying out of jail meant getting Flannigan to loosen up, drop her guard.

  Information, that’s what he needed. Where were her soft spots? What made her happy? What excited her?

  Learn what got a person excited and you could sell them anything. Problem was, Flannigan didn’t talk much.

  Two things, then. Step one, find her talk button. Everybody had a button—he’d learned that as a rookie salesman—a passion that opened them up like turning on a faucet. Once folks opened up, they just naturally felt friendlier.

  Parker played a red deuce on a black trey, and realized he was out of cards. Game over.

  Out on the highway again, he could use what he learned about Flannigan for step two: romance her. Maybe he’d talk her into letting him sit up front. She’d already let him drive, hadn’t she? Eleven hundred miles—should be plenty of time to prove what a reasonable, charming, nonthreatening sort of guy he could be.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Emma Sparks’ kitchen smelled of baked apples and cinnamon, awakening a pang of nostalgia in Dixie. Cheeks rosy from the heat and wisps of white hair springing around her head, Emma was rubbing peanut oil on a plump turkey in a blue granite roaster. She looked as happy in her kitchen as Kathleen had always been in her own.

  “Can’t recall the last time we had guests for breakfast. God sure does work in mysterious ways. Sends a blizzard to make us take time with each other.”

  Dixie lifted a warming lid. “Smells great.”

  “Honey, there’s not much trick to whipping up a batch of eggs and sausage. Now you grab a plate from the cabinet and fill it from those pans. There’s hot coffee and buttermilk biscuits on the sideboard. Remember, I don’t want a mess of leftovers to deal with.”

  The early sunlight streaming through yellow-flowered curtains gave the kitchen a homey glow. In the adjoining dining room, dishes clinked around a table. Conversations hummed. Dixie saw her henna-haired neighbor and a young man wearning a Ski Canada sweatshirt. She was tempted to sit down with them.

  But the antsy part of her mind was back in the room with Dann. Handcuffed to the bed, he couldn’t raise much havoc. Yet why risk leaving him alone to try something stupid?

  Emma clucked sympathetically about Dann’s “cold.”

  “You just pile both these plates high, and I’ll wrap them up good for you to carry back.”

  As Dixie scooped spoonfuls from each dish, she watched the redhead chat gaily with everyone at the table. Somehow, the woman had tamed her mass of tangles into a curly mane that bounced like copper pennies around her shoulders, and judging by the freckles sprinkled delicately across her nose, the copper hadn’t come from a bottle as Dixie first suspected. The woman’s skin had a translucent quality, like fine porcelain. She’d artfully tinted her eyelids lavender, which made her green eyes bright and vivid. A peachy blush colored her cheekbones. Not young—probably Amy’s age—but youthful and vibrant, she was the sort of woman who totally baffled Dixie.

  Why did anyone spend that much time on looking good? For that matter, how did they know where to start? Somewhere there was a secret women’s club that passed these little tricks around. Dixie’d never been invited. Oh, sure, she’d played with makeup. Amy had insisted. “You only need a touch, Dixie, with your strong bones and naturally rich coloring, but you do need a touch.” And she’d had her “colors done” by a professional—also at Amy’s insistence. Dixie knew she wasn’t homely; she cleaned up pretty damn good at times. But there was something missing, a distinctly feminine quality this redhead possessed.

  Amy had it, too, although the hard edge of her glamour had softened as she matured. Carla Jean had it in spades. Dixie’s mother was female extraordinaire, not a masculine bone in her perfumed, powdered, ruffle-clad body, and not a practical thought in her head. Carla Jean always presented herself as a princess, a tawdry princess perhaps, too often used and discarded, but always a princess. Maybe Dixie, in her fear of becoming like her mother, had bent too far the other way.

  Scooping butter pats onto the plates, Dixie caught a glimpse of herself in a narrow beveled mirror above the buffet. She hoped she didn’t smell as scruffy as she looked. Forty-eight hours without a bath or change of clothes was probably pushing bad grooming to its limit. She turned away from the troublesome reflection—out of sight, out of mind—and was glad, after all, that she hadn’t sat down to eat with these people. One thing she didn’t have to worry about with Parker Dann was her appearance.

  Buck held the door as she started back to the cabin between shoulder-high mounds of shoveled snow, the aroma of baked apples still strong in her nostrils. Now that the wind had died down, she hardly felt the cold. The sun had popped out strong and brig
ht in a sky as blue as Texas blue-bonnets. A brush-stroke of creamy clouds mirrored the snowscape.

  She wished Ryan were here. He’d want to jump right in the middle of those tall drifts. Make snowballs. Build a space-age snowman. Hell, Dixie herself felt an urge to jump in the middle of a drift. God sends a blizzard to make us take time with each other, Emma had said. Those few minutes with the Sparkses had dredged up a slew of concerns. When Dixie didn’t show up for Christmas dinner tonight, Amy would be worried and upset. Ryan would be disappointed, opening his Cessna and having no batteries to fly it. And shucks! Dixie would miss meeting Old Delbert Snelling!

  She grinned. Things could be worse. She could be shacked up with an ugly, foul-tempered, illiterate jerk. At least Dann was reasonably good company. Maybe she should loosen his rein some. Even in the harshest of prisons, criminals celebrated Christmas; and as Dann had pointed out, there was no way anybody could leave until the snowplows came roaring through.

  With that settled, Dixie felt better about herself. Even a badass bitch should take Christmas off. After breakfast, maybe she’d telephone Amy.

  “South Dakota?” Her sister’s mellow voice had picked up a worried barb. “Dixie, whatever possessed you to drive to South Dakota during a blizzard?”

  “The blizzard happened after I drove up here. And the weather is beautiful again. I’m only waiting for a highway crew to clear the roads, then I’ll start home.”

  “On Christmas Day? You think people are going to run those snowshovel things instead of being home with their families?”

  “Lots of people have to work on Christmas.” Including me. But Dixie didn’t want to remind Amy of the reason for her unplanned trip, because then she’d have to admit she was sharing a motel room with a prisoner. Amy would have nightmares.

  “I hope you realize how upset Ryan’s going to be. I swear, Dix—”