Chill Factor (5 page)

“Why you didn’t kick the effin’ gun out of the mofo’s hand?” This from Lureen, class smartass, cleaning up her language just enough to comply with center rules.

But her question was legitimate. Dixie taught them to defend against knives and guns.

Bettye, the librarian, had joined the class after stumbling upon a pair of students engaged in a gun sale one evening. Her sudden appearance sent the seller scurrying away, but the buyer had whirled in rage and struck Bettye repeatedly, breaking her collarbone. In the weeks it took the bone to heal, the
librarian lost forty-two pounds, applied for a concealed-weapon permit, and signed up for defense lessons.

Lureen, mother of two fatherless kids about the same age as the one who’d attacked Bettye, ran a convenience store on the graveyard shift. Barely five feet tall but strong and savvy, Lureen had joined the class at the store owner’s insistence.

“Maybe Jackie Chan, with a twenty-million-dollar movie budget,” Dixie told her students, “would try to kick through a glass wall. But that’s not the real world. Besides, what’s the first thing we learned?”

“Ain’t no effin’ fool come at us with a gun or a knife who
deserves
to live.”

“Well, yes, that’s one thing, Lureen, but not the first thing.”

Silence, as the five women sitting on blue mats stole glances at one another, searching for the right response.

“C’mon, guys,” Dixie prodded. “Defending yourself starts with head muscle.”

Joan, the battered wife of a prominent Houston physician, spoke up. “Knowing
when
to act is every bit as important as knowing what to do.”

Joan had learned that lesson the hard way, refusing to leave her husband until one of his drunken assaults cost her an eye.

“
When
to act,” Dixie said, “is usually instantly. The faster the better. But not always. And when the choice is between losing money or losing a life—there’s no choice. No amount of money or property is worth getting killed.”
Especially when it’s bank money. Insured money.
In the end, though, someone
had
gotten killed: Aunt Edna.

“Ain’t no granny bandit robbin’ my effin’ store.” Lureen jumped to her feet and shadow-boxed the mirror.

“Why would she do it?” Bettye asked. “A woman of her class? Her age?”

“Her
class?”
Lureen threw a shadow punch at Bettye. “What
class
you think be robbin’ banks?”

“There were
two
women robbers,” Joan interjected. “And
three
robberies. Do you think the two women worked together?”

“Course they workin’ together. Effin’ Dumb and Dumber.”

“No, Lucy Ames taught school before she worked at that bank,” Bettye pointed out. “I’m sure she wasn’t dumb.”

“Oh? How the fuck she goan spend that money—sorry—how she goan spend her effin’ money dead?”

“Maybe it was some kind of suicide pact,” Joan said quietly.

The statement stunned everyone silent. The theory made a strange kind of sense, Dixie admitted. Edna may not’ve been a schoolteacher, like Lucy Ames, the robber gunned down the previous day, but she was smart enough to know that aiming a weapon at a police officer amounted to suicide. Had Edna been so lonely after Bill’s death that she no longer wanted to live? Barney Flannigan had mourned his dead wife for only eighteen months before passing away, dying of what Dixie still believed was loneliness.

“Enough chatter, ladies. Twenty-seven minutes and only your jaw muscles are moving.” Dixie strapped on a padded helmet. “What’s your best weapon?”

“Our minds,” Bettye mumbled.

“And your best advantage as a woman?”

“Surprise. No effin’ bastard expects a pussy to stomp his ass.”

Dixie couldn’t have put it better. Less crudely, maybe. “Where do you aim?”

“His nuts,” Joan said, with more anger than usual. “Smash his coconuts, he won’t be thinking about sex.”

“Coconuts?” Lureen hooted. “Filberts is more like it. Show me a man wit’ coconuts, maybe I don’t fight too effin’ hard.”

“The crotch is okay, if you have a clear target,” Dixie told them. “But a man instinctively protects his manhood. Joints are better targets. Knee, elbow, wrist. Joints are fragile. Sweep a knee and he’s down.”

Lureen feigned a kick at Joan’s knee, barely missing. Joan came back with a side kick to Lureen’s hip, connecting.

“Hey! Easy there,” Dixie told them. “Screw around and somebody will get hurt. Take that energy out on the bag. We’ll pair up later.”

But Dixie was glad to see Joan getting some spunk. For the next ten minutes, she watched them all take a turn kicking and punching the heavy bag.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking only men can be dangerous,” she reminded them.
Hadn’t Edna proved as much that
morning?
“Or that every man is out to hurt you. Being prepared means not having to run scared.”

“Fuck, girl,
you
were scared.” Lureen feigned a jab at Dixie and grinned. “Whyn’t you kick Granny in the knee?”

Dixie let a weary sigh escape, then grasped Lureen’s arm and whipped her around into a choke hold. Slipping a revolver from her pocket, she pressed it to the woman’s temple.

“One flinch of my trigger finger and brains splatter the wall. What do you do?”

Lureen tensed to break the hold, but Dixie kept her in check. “Huh-uh, not you. Them.” She faced the other four women. “How do you save your friend?” she demanded.

Joan shifted her weight, telegraphing the coming kick. Dixie pulled the trigger.

Snap!
The mirrored room amplified the tiny sound of the gun’s hammer harmlessly striking the disabled firing pin. Instantly, all five women sobered.

Dixie released Lureen and reviewed the value of knowing not only what to do but when
not
to do it. She glanced up to find Mike Tesche and two of his students watching from the doorway. Mike taught yoga, meditation, and a lot of touchy-feely crap—useful as hell in a civilized society, but on mean streets none of it kept a woman from getting killed.

Wearing his usual navy-and-white baseball cap to control a mop of unruly curls, blue tweed blazer over a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, jeans, bulky white gym shoes, he grinned at her, teacher to teacher. Then he rolled his eyes comically at her dramatic demonstration. Dixie couldn’t help grinning back.

Mike dressed like a kid who’d never quite left college, although Dixie felt sure he was close to her own age. She appreciated his friendly good humor, providing the first cheerful moment she’d had all morning.

But his students’ frowns suggested that Dixie’s teaching method might, with improvement, measure up to barbaric.

Minutes later, as Dixie ambled toward the showers, Mike fell in step alongside. He’d changed into his workout clothes.

“You were tense in there. Come join us and chill awhile.”

“Thanks.” Dixie could hear the mellow strains of Mozart—or was it Bach?—seeping from Mike’s meditation-and-exercise
room. She felt tempted. But her pager had recorded seven calls during class, five from the house of Amy and Carl Royal. Her family had probably seen the news. “Another time, maybe. Right now I need to check in with my sister.”

He grinned, a lighthearted, boyish flash of perfect white teeth in his not-so-perfect face. Mike wasn’t at all handsome, but he had a sincere smile and remarkable green eyes that sparkled with merriment while at the same time radiating intelligence and understanding.

“If Sis is half as intense as you are, Dixie Flannigan, I wouldn’t keep her waiting. Did you receive our invitation?”

Dixie paused, then recalled the card from The Winning Stretch lying with the other mail on her kitchen table. The overdraft notice had eclipsed Mike’s invitation.

“I got it,” she told him. “Some kind of health … thing … going on this weekend?”

He chuckled. “Sundown Ceremony. You
will
come, won’t you?”

If the invitation had been for lunch or a beer or a racquet-ball game or practically anything one-on-one, Dixie might’ve taken him up on it. For the past three months, the important man in her life had spent more time at his beach house communing with seagulls than he’d spent with her. Dixie liked Mike, what little she knew of him, and this wasn’t the first time he’d invited her to one of his weekend gatherings.

“Mike, today is not good for making decisions.” Continuing toward the showers, she told him briefly about the robbery and shooting.

He touched her arm. “Your neighbor, Dixie, you said her name was Edna Pine. Blond hair? Sixtyish?”

“You knew her?”

He nodded thoughtfully, and rotated a ring on his right ring finger. A single garnet surrounded by diamonds, the design looked custom-crafted and exquisitely masculine. Dixie liked it.

“Edna was a student for a while. A good student.”

Dixie’s surprise lasted only long enough for her to remember that Mike instructed classes at most of the health club chains in the city, and Edna hadn’t lost all that weight sitting on her duff.

“When did you last see her?”

He pursed his lips in a soft whistle, deepening the cleft in his chin. “A month ago? Seems about right, but I’d have to check my records.”

Questions tumbled into Dixie’s mind.
Did Edna seem despondent? Was she friendly with any of her classmates? Did she ever mention knocking off the local bank?

“Mike,” a girlish voice called down the hallway. A trim woman with shining blond hair stood outside his training room. “I’ve finished the warm-up exercises. Ready to take over?”

He hesitated, turning back to Dixie. The blonde stood her ground, watching.

“Go ahead,” Dixie told him. “I need to talk to my sister before she starts phoning the hospitals. Can we chat later?”

“Anytime.” He touched her arm again, lightly. “And, Dixie, you’ve a friend here if you need one.”

“Thanks,” she called as he jogged back down the hall.

Nice man, Dixie thought.
Damn
nice body.

“Why didn’t you kick butt and take the gun away?” This time the question came in the adolescent bullfrog voice of Dixie’s twelve-year-old nephew, Ryan.

“Never got close enough.” Over the previous semester Dixie’d trained Ryan and his schoolmates in a gentler version of the same Israeli defense techniques she taught to women. The private school her nephew attended remained blessedly free of violence, but Dixie believed children should learn to take care of themselves as early as possible. “Guess I needed you there, kid, to snap-kick that glass wall out of my way.”

“Yuh!” He jumped from his chair and shadow-kicked his bedroom wall, then popped a series of jabs at a Grim Reaper poster. “Hee-yuh!”

Dixie looped an arm around his neck to wrestle a cheek smooch, which was getting harder now that the imp had learned evasive moves. And jeez—he’d grown since Christmas! Why hadn’t she noticed? She succeeded in planting a nice wet one on his temple.

“Aunt Dix!” He eeled out of her grasp and plopped onto his chair.

As she knuckled his head, Dixie caught a glimpse of her name on his computer monitor.

My Aunt Dixie made those bank robbers eat their shorts.

“Ryan, only
one
bank robber—a woman, and—”

“You saved the manager and all those people from getting killed!”

“Hey, guy, I know you want me to be the hero in this story, but that’s not quite the way it went down.” After the bullet smashed through Len’s office wall, Dixie’d stayed on the floor. Later, as she left the shooting scene after identifying Edna’s body, a news photographer had captured her face on video, and her family had indeed seen the TV coverage. Three of the seven pager messages during defense class had come from Ryan, two more from his mother. Returning the calls, Dixie’d calmed Amy with a few reassuring words, but Ryan refused to be satisfied with less than a play-by-play account—and now Dixie knew why: He’d bragged to his E-mail buddies that he had “inside” dope. Ryan’s enthusiasm for his aunt’s escapades never flagged.

“One bank robber,” she reaffirmed now. “And no heroics. If I did anything smart, Ryan, it was staying still, allowing the woman to take the money and go, so that no one in the bank got hurt.”

“Was she like Juliette Lewis in
Natural Born Killers
, all crazy and mean and waving her gun around?”

Crazy and mean?

“No, Edna was …”
An off-key voice leading goofy camp songs when their two families drove to Brazos Bend. A sturdy arm stirring a pot of stew over the open fire or knocking spiders off the tent. A nervous thumb whisking dirt from Dixie’s cheek after a bad fall.
“Edna Pine was someone your mother and I knew growing up, Ryan.” Someone Dixie had loved like an aunt. “Someone who must’ve taken a very wrong turn … or had a very good reason for what she did this morning.”

Her nephew’s face screwed up in concentration. He craved juicy details to convey to his friends.

“The robber was coolheaded and determined,” Dixie admitted. “And a pretty good marksman.” That bullet had missed by a hair. Was the miss intentional?

Ryan’s fingers danced over the keyboard. When Dixie saw him type “cold-blooded killer” in his E-mail message, she thumped the back of his head and left the room.

In the kitchen she found her sister sliding chocolate-chip cookies from a baking sheet to a platter. Amy baked only when she was upset, then she turned out enough goodies to give the neighborhood a sugar high for weeks. Through the oven window Dixie saw a sheet cake rising. A pecan pie cooled on the counter. And the three-course lunch Dixie’d been promised looked ready to eat. A busy morning in the Royal kitchen.

“It
wasn’t
Aunt Edna,” Amy declared, offering Dixie a warm cookie. “You were mistaken. We all have twins, don’t we? Didn’t I see that on A&E? Look-alikes. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, all those Elvises? Why not an Edna Pine look-alike? I called Marty in Dallas and told him not to worry, it was
not
his mother, no matter what the police say. This is all a terrible mistake. You’ll sort it out, Dixie, and he’ll see.”

“I’ll sort it out? You didn’t really tell Marty that, did you?” Amy’s constant big-sister complaint since Dixie left the DA’s staff was the danger of working as a bounty hunter. She claimed it would someday get Dixie killed. Now Amy
wanted
her sister meddling in a robbery-shooting investigation?