Chill Factor (2 page)

She ripped open the bank notice.

Normally, her checking-account balance bobbed along at five hundred bucks, give or take a few. Overdraft protection enabled the bank to dip into her savings if the checking account dropped too low, which it did on occasion, when Dixie needed travel expenses to chase a skip out of town. Right now she felt certain her checkbook would confirm a reasonably healthy balance. But the bank notice she held in her hand showed a startling overdraft of twenty-six dollars and forty-seven cents. That should
never
happen—unless her three-thousand-dollar savings account had been drained. Where the hell had her money gone?

A light winked out in the front window at 221. A moment later, the television went blank, then a light appeared at the driveway side of the house, near the back.

Dixie aimed the penlight at her watch, checked the time—twenty-three minutes gone—then rolled her shoulders to work out the kinks. Didn’t want her reflexes going sluggish while she waited. Jimmy Voller, a brawny, ill-tempered truck driver, out on bail while awaiting trial for drunk and disorderly conduct, had been known to get mean when cornered.

She considered retrieving the .45 semiautomatic from the locked tool safe in the truck bed. A license to carry and a contract with Voller’s bonding agent gave her the credentials she needed. But Voller’s arrest sheet hadn’t included a weapons charge, and ten years as a State prosecutor had taught Dixie that the best way to get someone hurt was to use more force than necessary. She could handle Voller without the heat.

Ignoring a wimpy little voice that said,
Yeah, but why risk it?
, she wedged the penlight in the crook of her armpit as she skimmed the bank statement. Her check for a pair of new tires had apparently caused the overdraft. But the tires cost less than four hundred dollars. No way that one check could be the problem.

Opening her checkbook, she flipped through the carbonless copies. As usual, she’d neglected to carry the balance forward, but a quick mental tally verified a hundred-dollar balance, even
after
subtracting the amount for the tires, and without touching her savings account.

Had she made any large ATM withdrawals? Not that she recalled. Certainly not enough to deplete her savings account. She hadn’t even gone out of town this month.

The window at the back of 221 went dark.

Dixie dropped the papers, snapped off her penlight, and eased the truck door open. She stepped out, into the still night. Her boots crunched gravel as she crossed the blacktop. She veered to the grass to deaden the sound.

Reaching the back window where the light had blinked off, she silently attached a listening device to the pane. Over the background hum of an air conditioner, she heard a murmur of voices accompanied by an occasional squeak of bedsprings.
Dixie waited until the voices grew quietly urgent and the music of the springs beat a steady rhythm, then she removed the device from the cool glass and walked swiftly, silently, to the tow truck.

Revving the truck’s rumbling engine, she backed into the driveway, behind the girlfriend’s Camaro. Then she grabbed a halogen flashlight from the floorboard, hopped out of the cab, and slammed the door. She stamped down the gritty driveway to the rear of the truck, rattled the tow hooks down on their chains, and attached them to the Camaro’s frame.

The miniblind flew up.

Just as Dixie flashed the spotlight at the glass, a woman peered out, red hair frizzed into a halo.

“Jimmy!” The windowpane muffled the woman’s shriek. “Baby, someone’s stealing my car!”

Dixie flipped a switch to start the hydraulic winch. With a metallic
thunk
, the Camaro’s tail eased off the ground.

“Jimmy!”

The window slid up with a bang.

“What the hell’s going on out there?” A man’s voice, thick and gruff.

“Jimmy, baby, do something! They’re ripping off my new car!”

“Repo,” Dixie called brightly, slapping the Camaro’s fender. She aimed the halogen at the beefy male face now glaring furiously from between gauzy curtains. Then she strode to the truck cab, swung up inside, and dialed the nearest police station.

“Flannigan,” she said softly. “I’ve got Jimmy Voller at 221 Burning Oak Drive. We’ll wait for you.”

By the time the bail jumper yanked his pants on and stormed out the door, a patrol car should’ve been zipping down the street toward the house. Earlier that night, Dixie had alerted the beat cop that she expected to get a bead on Voller. But as he stomped down the front steps, a hairy hulk in the moonlight, the road remained empty.

Dixie pinned him with the halogen spot.

“Hold it right there, mister. This is a righteous repo. You
don’t want any trouble.” Bluffing. The Camaro was paid up, and Dixie didn’t repossess cars, anyway. The tow truck was one of four vehicles she’d acquired cheap from guys like Voller who wouldn’t be driving for a long while.

He shaded his eyes against the glare, hesitating. Then he charged toward the truck, shoulder muscles bunching as he knotted his fists.

Watching him storm at her like a raging javelina, Dixie mentally flashed on the .45 in the tool safe—too far to reach. Anyway, Voller wasn’t armed. She could handle him. She could.

Snapping open the glove box, she kept one eye on the skip as she grabbed a pair of handcuffs.

“Jimmy!” the girlfriend screeched from the front door. “Baby, don’t let them take my car!”

Through the open truck window, Dixie kept the spotlight shining in Voller’s eyes. He blinked but charged onward, fists swinging like sledgehammers.

Leaving the window down, Dixie locked the door. She slid backward on the truck seat, snapping the handcuff open.

The thermos fell over. Iced tea soaked her crotch.
Shit!
And still no sign of that patrol car.

Voller seized the door handle. Dixie lunged forward, reached through the open window, and clamped the cuff around his wrist.

“What the fuck!!!?” He jerked his arm back as if stung.

But Dixie yanked the handcuff tight and snapped the other end to the steering wheel.

“Forget your court date, Jimmy? The judge suggested someone should drop by, see you don’t forget again.”

“Goddammit to hell! This ain’t no repo!”

His menacing free hand shot toward her. She ducked out of reach. He kicked the truck door but, barefooted, didn’t quite dent it. He howled.

“Jimmy, baby? What’s happening out there?” The girlfriend, in a T-shirt and panties, minced across the yard swinging a butcher knife.

Oh, great.
“Back inside, lady! Jimmy Baby’s going to jail.”
Dixie cranked up the window until it trapped Voller’s shackled arm. His curses grew more colorful.

For a butt-numbing hour, with Voller snorting like an enraged bull and his girlfriend alternately cursing Dixie and pleading tearfully for her to let him go, they waited. Dixie’s cell-phone inquiry brought the curt assurance that a patrol car would be dispatched as soon as possible. Finally, a blue-and-white whipped into the driveway.

“Sorry,” the officer muttered. “Bunch of 911s came in. Your call shuffled to the bottom.”

Six minutes later, with Voller on his way to jail and the Camaro back on the ground where it belonged, Dixie pointed her tow truck down the twenty-mile stretch of highway toward home. Recalling the look on Voller’s face when he realized he’d been duped, she couldn’t help grinning. Skip tracing did have its moments of satisfaction.

More moments, perhaps, than her decade on the DA’s staff. The realization always saddened her. She’d entered the study of law with an expectation of making a difference. Although law certainly was fallible and susceptible to human error, Dixie’d been callow enough to expect truth and justice would prevail.

Truth, she soon discovered, was a pale ghost roaming lost in the courthouse halls. While Dixie sparred with legal swashbucklers over petty technicalities, confirmed criminals swaggered through revolving jailhouse doors. When she could no longer stomach the futile fencing, Dixie’d tucked her sword and shingle into a briefcase and drifted.

Now, three years later, she still drifted, winning minor skirmishes like the one tonight. Her efforts didn’t count for much, but at least she could look her five-foot-four-inch self in the mirror and see truth standing behind her.

Truth and the occasional bail bondsman with a fat check.

Dixie clicked on the dome light and snatched up the bank statement from the passenger seat. Holding it so she could watch the deserted road and still scan the page, she tried to recall some withdrawal that would explain the overdraft. Obviously, she’d used the ATM on the fly, without jotting the amount in her checkbook, and the bank had neglected to
apply her overdraft protection. Banks
did
occasionally make mistakes.

The only other explanation she liked even less: Someone had snatched more than three thousand dollars from her account. Shot one hell of a big hole in the fee she’d earned that night.

8:55
A.M
.

Historic Richmond awakened like a lazy cat as Dixie stopped her Mustang in front of Texas Citizens Bank. Once a fort, when Stephen F. Austin’s vanguard of colonists landed at a bend in the Brazos River, the small town now melded into the fringe of Houston’s southwest suburbs, where increasingly more urbanites sought greener, safer, quieter lifestyles.

Despite growth pains, the town’s heritage landmarks remained intact. Morton Street, where Dixie now parked, had floated rescue boats during the Great Flood of 1899. A clerk at the county courthouse six blocks away had issued a marriage license to Barney and Kathleen Flannigan, Dixie’s adoptive parents; at that same site, a doctor had registered their deaths. And five minutes down the farm-to-market road lay the family home and pecan orchard Dixie’d inherited from them.

This morning she’d cut the trip to
three
minutes. Her overdraft problem loomed like a toothy monster.

She loathed handling money and only sporadically balanced her checkbook. To counter her shortcomings, she used direct-draft banking, carbonless-copy checks, a single credit card, a CPA—inconveniently out of town this week—and a financial planner to handle her investments. She’d rather wrestle the meanest water moccasin on a Texas bayou than haggle
over the money missing from her account, but she wanted the problem gone before her self-defense class later that morning.

Ignoring the blinds still drawn shut across the bank’s expansive sweep of glass, she stepped from the Mustang and tugged on the door. Locked.

Brown eyes, road-mapped from too little sleep, glared back at her from the sun-silvered glass. Her hair looked as spiky as a clump of swamp weeds in a drought—she’d been too impatient to use the hair dryer—and her hastily laundered jeans and shirt felt damp. Not one of her best grooming days.

As soon as the lock clicked open, she pushed through the door, bank notice gripped in one determined fist—

Three thousand dollars!

—zipped past the startled young woman behind the new-accounts desk—

Gone!
How in Hades had a bank with thirty-odd years’ experience lost track of her hard-earned money?

—stalked past the teller windows, past the loan desks, past the branch manager’s latest painted and coiffed secretary.

“Ms. Flannigan, good morn—wait!” The secretary popped up from behind her desk. “You can’t go in there.”

Facing Dixie’s glare, she backed off.

Len Bacon, a phone at one ear, leaned back in his executive swivel chair, desk as clean as a new notepad. When he saw Dixie, his hound-dog jowls worked his mouth into a smile.

“A customer just came in,” Len said into the phone. “Let me call you back.” Rising, he glanced behind Dixie to the secretary following at her heels.

“Sorry, Mr. Bacon. I couldn’t stop—”

“It’s fine, Dana, fine. I’ll handle it.”

The secretary backed out, closing the door.

Still smiling, Len offered a handshake.

Dixie slapped the bank notice into his palm.

“Three thousand dollars disappeared out of my account.”

“Dixie, Dixie, Dixie.” The jowls shook amiably as Len wagged his unperturbed head. He patted the air toward a chair, which Dixie ignored. “If there’s a discrepancy, I’m sure it’s merely a computer error. Computers are wonderful at
unexplained mischief.” When she continued to glare, he added, “Sit down, sit down. Let’s take a look at your file.”

Grudgingly, she sank onto a tweed guest chair. Len settled his portly rump onto his leather executive model. The chair
whooshed
in protest.

Turning to the computer on his credenza, he tapped a few keys. Over his shoulder, Dixie watched bright green numbers scroll on a gray screen and recalled the day she’d started banking here—the day after her thirteenth birthday. Barney had brought her in with twenty-seven dollars gift money stuffed in a pink vinyl purse.

“You’ll never beg a loan, lass,” Barney told her, “if you remember the rule o’ thirds. One third o’ every dollar goes into a principal account. You daren’t touch it, even when wind howls through your roof and you’ve only one cold potato to ill your belly. You don’t touch it.”

Before being adopted at twelve, Dixie’d known a day or two when she wouldn’t have turned up her nose at a cold potato.

“The second third you tuck into a wishes-and-treasures account, mounting it up for a special treat, a vision that makes your innards quiver when you think about it.”

As she wrestled with dividing twenty-seven dollars by three, Dixie’s wayward thoughts drifted toward a pair of white boots she’d seen in a magazine—

“And the final third you spend on daily necessities.”

“Like what?” Dixie blurted. Carla Jean, her birth mother, had considered hair ribbons and nail polish necessities, though Dixie’s underpants might pinch and only a layer of cardboard kept dirt from creeping through the soles of her shoes. At the Flannigans’, food, clothes, books, and anything else Dixie needed were hers for the asking. Not that she’d think of asking for something as frivolous as white boots.

“What are necessities, lass? Well, whatever you think they are. Birthday card for a friend? Strawberry sundae with Amy after the movies?”