Bitch Factor

by Chris Rogers

  Right or wrong, Dixie believed the three kids and their gang of castaway teens caused fewer problems with these Robin Hood heists than if they turned to less discriminating crime. Maybe they were even doing a little good, so she’d left them alone—but included them in her information network.

  From the beginning, she’d hit it off with Brew and Hooch, but Ski was a different story. Something dark in Ski’s early years had skewed her thinking. With a vengeance bordering on psychotic, the young woman despised all authority figures, and even though Dixie was no longer with the DA, Ski maintained Dixie would turn them in as soon as she no longer needed their services.

  Dixie watched her now, knowing that without the Flannigans’ rescue she herself might have turned out as bitter.

  “Dixie!” Brew hung up the phone, wheeled his chair around the desk, and pulled her close in a powerful bear hug. His legs had been crushed in a playground accident before he was school age. To compensate, he spent hours each day developing upper-body strength. “Been too long, Dix. Hope you got our invitation.”

  Ski plucked her throwing knife from the wall and drifted into the dark recesses of the warehouse.

  “Invitation?” Dixie had picked up the mail when she arrived home, but hadn’t sorted it.

  “Our New Year’s Eve bash. You have to come. It’ll be a gas. Hey!” He spun the wheelchair around the desk. “I’m glad you’re here. You can preview my new magic show for the daycare tours. Watch this.” Reaching over the desk, he pulled a huge storybook onto his lap and opened it.

  “Once upon a time…” he read with grave emphasis, “there were lee pittle thrigs.” Three fat rubber pigs popped up to peek over the top of the book. “The first pittle thrig built a haw strouse.” Brew snapped his fingers and a handful of straw appeared.

  “The second pittle thrig built a hig twouse.” A bundle of twigs popped out of his shirt pocket, into the air, and rained all around him. “But the third pittle thrig worked lard and hong, building a brouse out of hicks.”

  As Brew turned a page in the storybook, a brick appeared in his other hand.

  “How’d you do that?” Dixie said.

  “Great, huh? How about the spoonerisms? Think the kids will understand?”

  “With the visual aids, sure they will.” And if the kids didn’t understand, they’d love the show anyway. When Brew turned on his showmanship, he was a regular Pied Piper. Kids followed him everywhere. “But, Brew, I need—”

  “Wait till you see the wig wad bolf, all clangs and faws—”

  A furry puppet popped over Brew’s shoulder, baring its fangs and claws. Dixie laughed. But after seventeen hours on the road, she was tired and needed some answers. “Brew—”

  “I know. You didn’t come downtown for kid stuff.” Grinning, he laid the storybook down. The fat little pigs disappeared inside it. “What’s happening?”

  He scooped two sodas from a foam cooler beside the desk and tossed one to Dixie.

  “Last May,” she said, popping the aluminum pull tab, “there was a hit-and-run killing in Spring Branch, a girl on her way to school.”

  Brew nodded. “The dude that did it is on trial right now.”

  “If he did it. Something doesn’t feel right about the case. I’m wondering if anyone was working the area that night. Maybe picked up the car, hit the girl by accident, then returned the car to throw the investigating officers off track.”

  Brew shrugged. “Eight months is like forever. Who remembers what went down eight months ago?”

  “People who keep good records. People with long memories who hear stories from other people who can’t keep their mouths shut.”

  He shrugged. “Won’t hurt to ask.”

  Picking up the phone, he pecked out a number. When it answered, he turned away from Dixie to speak privately. Taking her cue, she strolled across the room to a pile of toys and rooted around until she found a rubber ball. Bounced it a few times on the concrete floor. Pop. Pop.

  She heard the elevator hum. The doors opened and Hooch stepped out. It took him all of five seconds to spot her.

  “Say, I knew there be a dang good reason to stop here, my main squeeze paying a visit.”

  He wrapped his enormous arms around Dixie, lifting her off the floor to plant a substantial kiss on her cheek.

  Hooch looked like something out of a horror movie. He stood six-four and weighed 240 without an ounce of fat. His face had never been handsome, but before it was nearly sliced in half by an ax blade, it might have been bearable. The jagged scar crossed the inside corner of his right eye, the bridge of his nose, and the left side of his mouth, where the ax had split his jaw, displacing some teeth and severing nerves and muscles necessary for smiling. Now Hooch only smiled on one side; the other remained frozen in a toothy sneer. Most who saw him preferred he didn’t smile at all.

  “If Lissie hears that ‘main squeeze’ bullshit, you’ll be needing a patch for the other eye.”

  His grotesque grin spread across half his face.

  “Lissie got selective hearing. She don’t hear nothing she know I don’t want her to hear.”

  “Hooch, you might convince somebody else you’re a mean mother, but I know you too well.”

  He chuckled. “Danged if you don’t. Say, girlfriend, you see the stuff for the Casa?” He waved an arm toward the wall of diapers and toys.

  “The hospice for kids with—?”

  “Yeah! We took over a whole truckload of toys and clothes. Diapers, too. Save these for later, you know, so they wouldn’t be overstocked—”

  “Or get suspicious about where they came from.” The Casa took care of children under six who were HIV positive. The Gypsy Filchers had a special soft spot for kids. Many of the team’s “charities” were homes for abused or sick children, but Hooch didn’t like to think about what happened to HIV kids when they disappeared. The only time Dixie had ever seen him violent was when a boy he’d grown attached to was returned to his abusive parents. Brew, Ski, and Hooch—they would never say whether the names parodied the old cop show team, Starsky and Hutch, or were further bastardizations of slang terms for beer and whiskey, brewsky and hooch—had slipped into the house after everyone was asleep, captured the abusive couple in their bed, and threatened to carve them into dog food if any member of the team ever saw so much as a bruise on the boy again. It seemed to work for a while. Then the child was admitted to the emergency room with multiple fractures. That same night, the couple disappeared, leaving their home and car behind. Dixie never knew whether they disappeared on their own or with a strong suggestion from a big, scary black guy. “Ill bet the president of Kimberly-Clark would be proud to learn their missing truckload of Huggies is so hugely appreciated,” she told Hooch. “I hope you sent a thank-you note.”

  “Don’t we always?”

  Dixie felt someone slip up catlike beside her.

  “Hooch,” Ski said, “you make that pickup?”

  “Like clockwork. Being unloaded as we speak.”

  “Good. I need the truck for a delivery.”

  “The truck be all yours, Ski. Need any help?”

  She seemed to think about that for a moment, eyeing Dixie all the while. Although the trio acted like brothers and sister, Hooch was the only one Dixie had ever seen with a date, and Ski was fiercely possessive of both men.

  “Yeah, I do need your help,” she said.

  “Then let’s be doing it.” He ruffled Dixie’s hair as he turned to go. “You, girlfriend. Don’t be so scarce.”

  “Good to see you, too, guy.” Dixie looked back at Brew, who was still on the phone. He waved her over.

  “—forget it,” he said into the phone. “We’re even now. Thanks for the help.” He wheeled around to face her and tapped a pencil on the desktop.

  “I’m not sure this is what you want to hear,” he said. “Nobody was working that part of Spring Branch the night the girl was hit. Nobody professional, that is. We can’t rule out amateurs or someone passing through town.”r />
  “If it was somebody passing through town, we’re sunk.”

  “Yeah, well an amateur would either freak out and skip town with the car or dump it far from the accident. He wouldn’t calmly drive back and park it where he stole it, then trip away into the moonlight.”

  “That’s how I see it, too.”

  “Does your man have enemies?”

  “I don’t think he stays in one place long enough to make anybody hate him. No family in town, no close friends.” But Dixie knew that a person could make enemies without being aware.

  Before leaving, she promised to attend the New Year’s Eve party and forked over fifty dollars to send some teens to a big-screen pay-per-view bowl game. Yawning, she looked at her watch. As a skip tracer, she attracted strange friends who kept strange hours.

  Arriving home at three A.M., she found a single light burning in the kitchen and a note propped against a plate of brownies on the table:

  Your cupboard’s bare. I found four eggs, shortening, some flour and sugar in the canisters & a partial can of cocoa, hard as brick until I beat hell out of it with a tenderizing mallet. I threw out the fuzzy green stuff in the fridge. God knows what it was before it started growing hair. 2 of the eggs I scrambled and ate. I used the other 2 in the brownies. Eat these, they taste fine. You owe me breakfast.

  —Dann

  Dixie studied the brownies, lifted one from the pile, and took a hesitant bite. It was good. In fact, it was excellent. Her can’t-fail box type invariably came out tasting like cardboard.

  She eased open the guest-room door to find Dann snoring and Mud curled up on the floor beside the bed. The dog raised his ugly head, yawning.

  “Good boy,” Dixie whispered. Mud lowered his chin across freshly manicured paws and winked out. The vet would no doubt send a whopping bill for the extra days of kennel service.

  Dixie considered what to do about breakfast. Taking Dann to the local cafe and supermarket in Richmond should be safe enough with Mud along. If Dann liked to play chef, she’d buy whatever he needed. Home-cooked meals had been damn scarce since Kathleen died.

  Cooking meals might also keep Dann too busy to cook up trouble. She could count on Mud to take Dann’s leg off if he tried to leave the yard, but a desperate criminal with too much idle time might eventually outwit even the World’s Best Watchdog.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Sunday morning came and went in a blur. After pounding the pillow until well past ten, Dixie took Dann to breakfast and then to the grocery. They bought a carload of food, things like ginger root, which she couldn’t imagine eating, and parsley, which she thought was used only as plate clutter.

  By afternoon, the smells from the kitchen convinced her Dann knew what he was doing—pasta with shrimp, coffee made from freshly ground beans, and homemade pecan pie. He’d found her pecan stash in the pantry, the fifty-pound bag she saved out of each year’s crop, and had spent the morning shelling pecans while she slept. She didn’t have the heart to tell him about the automatic sheller in the barn.

  “So,” he said over coffee. “We get started first thing tomorrow?”

  He had shaved, and she was still getting used to his new face. He looked younger, friendlier, less sinister.

  Mud lay with his muzzle on Dixie’s foot, faking sleep. She could feel his gentle pulse thrumming up her leg. Comforting.

  Dann sat across from her in the breakfast nook, a diner-style booth Barney had built after Dixie and Amy went off to college.

  “Forget that ‘we,’” Dixie told him. Legally, she was treading a fine and hazardous line between illegal restraint and harboring a criminal, proving she could get in plenty of trouble without Dann’s help. “Your part is to stay put and fix whatever’s broken.”

  He rose abruptly and carried their coffee cups to the counter, his face turned determinedly away from her.

  “Show me something that’s broke. I’ll fix it,” he said curtly. He took a long time refilling their cups. Then his broad shoulders relaxed, and he turned, set the cups on the table, and settled back into the booth. “Meanwhile, I cook and keep the place picked up, right? So you can concentrate on finding evidence to clear me. That’s our deal.” His voice had lost its edge. He gazed at her with wide-eyed innocence.

  The high-backed benches were padded in imitation leather, cadet blue, exactly the color of Dann’s eyes. She hadn’t realized until now that his eyes were the same shade of blue as Barney’s.

  True blue. The color of loyalty, royalty, and robin’s eggs.

  Trustworthy blue.

  Barney had been trustworthy, but Dann was still a suspect in at least one killing. Dixie couldn’t afford to forget that. She looked at his mustache instead of his eyes. Definitely the mustache of a scoundrel.

  “There’s no guarantee I’ll find anything,” she said. “Or if I do, that it will help your case.”

  “Can’t blame me for hoping, can you?” He wiggled his eyebrows.

  Dixie hated that. When he wiggled his eyebrows, she couldn’t help grinning.

  “Hope is okay. But writing down everything you can remember about that night would be even better.”

  He groaned. “We’ve already been over it—”

  “And the tenth time around you remembered something important.”

  “The salesman with the butterfly? Think he might be important?”

  “You never said he was a salesman.”

  “I didn’t?” Dann frowned, thinking about it. “He asked questions about selling, but like he didn’t have much experience. Said he was working on a big deal.”

  “You said the Hornet was full of computer techies that night. Was he one of them?”

  “No, he was talking land… or development… or something. Is that where you went last night, to talk to Augie?”

  “Your friend wasn’t working last night.”

  “Where the hell was he? Augie always works on Saturday. Big tip night.”

  “Sick with the flu, according to his replacement.”

  “That’d be the day man. Luke. So that’s all? You were gone half the night—”

  Dixie slammed her cup down. “Cripple that horse, Dann, and walk it by me real slow.”

  “What?”

  “You’re here because I have a soft spot for justice. And because I think maybe justice is being thwarted in your case. It’s my call. This is my house. I’m not in the habit of reporting my every move.”

  For an instant his blue eyes flashed anger, then he blinked it away and looked embarrassed. “Sorry. Your personal life is none of my business.”

  Personal? He thought she was out with a lover? She felt a flush of color rise in her own cheeks. This situation was getting damned complicated.

  Mud had jumped to attention and stood watching them beside the table. Dixie patted the dog’s side to reassure him.

  “Okay, here’s what I found out. There were no local car theft rings working Spring Branch the night before the accident—which doesn’t rule out a solo—”

  “Someone just picking up wheels? That’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Possible,” Dixie said, not believing it.

  “Gets in a hurry. Tears around a corner and boom! Hits the kid. Then he’s scared. Maybe drives around, realizing how much trouble he’s in. Sneaks back. No cops yet, so he parks the car in my driveway and beats it on foot.”

  “Possible.”

  Dann studied her Face, and she could see some of the hope go out of him.

  “We have other angles to work,” she said. “We have the guy with the butterfly tattoo, and we have all those techies to check out.”

  The blue eyes brightened a bit. “We do, don’t we?”

  Yeah. And only six days to find a lead that Belle Richards hadn’t found in seven months.

  After dinner, Dixie marshaled her resolve for a duty she could no longer put off. Christmas gift in hand and embittered feelings firmly set aside, she visited her mother. The Flannigans had always encouraged Dixie to forgive a
nd forget.

  Your mum’s no saint, child, Kathleen had told her. She’s your blood mother, all the same, and you’ll do right by her. We can’t let wrong beget wrong, can we? Remember the good times. Remember she had a hard life. Kathleen had combed Dixie’s hair with her strong fingers. To whelp a child sweet as you, a mother can’t be too bad, now, can she?

  The first few years after her adoption, Dixie had lost track of Carla Jean completely. Then the year she graduated high school, a card came, “To my darling daughter on Graduation Day,” postmarked Dallas. After that, Dixie received a postcard once a year, usually from somewhere in Texas, but once as far away as Phoenix. The cards stopped abruptly about the time Dixie joined the DA’s staff.

  The next communication was from a hospital. Carla Jean had been found wandering along Interstate 10, bruised, bleeding, and confused. She’d been riding with a friend, she told the paramedics who picked her up. The friend was angry, and Carla Jean told him to stop the car and let her out. He opened the door and shoved her; her head hit the pavement. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, she’d slipped into a coma. She never told anyone who the “friend” was. On an ID card in her mother’s handbag, Dixie was named as next of kin. Two weeks later, Carla Jean awoke from the coma remembering nothing about the accident and only bits and pieces of the past. Her motor skills were drastically impaired, but after a while she recovered enough to manage a walker. The doctors were encouraged. Then little by little, she lost all the ground she’d gained, along with her speech.

  Now she lay in an oversize baby bed with chrome rails to keep her from falling out. The nurse had dressed her in a pink gown and brushed her thinning hair, gathering it back with a pearl-encrusted comb.

  Carla Jean’s green eyes sparkled as they had when she was young, but there was no depth to them. The doctors said she wasn’t blind or deaf, but she no longer responded to people in the room. She could eat when someone fed her, soft foods, which required no chewing. She could hold her hand up if someone raised it, and she wouldn’t know to put it down again until someone lowered it.