Rage Factor (3 page)

Parker Dann, bold as a pirate and solid as steel—the man who made Dixie’s toes curl every time he smiled—stood a few feet from the bed, talking to Amy’s husband, Carson Royal. Parker had promised to take the whole family flying next weekend. Amy still had the flutters about going up.

“Isn’t
it safe, Parker?” she insisted.

“Safer than the Parrot Lounge, anyway.” Parker’s dark brows hooded fierce blue eyes as he studied Dixie, thick mustache tracing a narrow smile.

His gaze hadn’t left Dixie’s face since he stormed into the emergency room like a knight on a white charger. A girlish part of her—a part Dixie scarcely knew existed—felt as maidenly as Guinevere. Nevertheless, she’d turned her stoic face on him, declaring she was fine.

“Aunt Dix can still go flying on Sunday, can’t she?” Ryan looked worriedly at the doctor. “And teach our self-defense class?”

The doctor, pushing the cubicle curtain aside to wave in a nurse with a wheelchair, cocked an eyebrow at Ryan.

“Why don’t we wait until after the X rays to talk about what your aunt can do?”

He winked and walked out whistling. Dixie wasn’t sure whether a whistling doctor was a good thing.

A buzz of activity had greeted her when she arrived at the hospital shortly after Coombs. Apparently, Casey James had spread the word that Dixie was responsible for the damage to Coombs’ face. His nose and lip had swelled, turning his handsome features grotesque. Seeing the teeth marks, the doctor had immediately ordered blood tests. Until that moment,
Dixie hadn’t considered the possibility of AIDS. Another dumbass move, biting him.

The nurse positioned the wheelchair close to the bed. “Can you sit up, Ms. Flannigan?”

“Sure.” Dixie’s entire left side objected screamingly, but for Ryan’s sake she bit back the cowardly moan that threatened to spill out.

With the nurse’s help, Dixie eased off the bed and into the wheelchair. A tone chimed outside the cubicle. The nurse frowned toward the sound, glanced back at Dixie, then turned to leave.

“We’re a bit shorthanded,” she explained, “but I’ll send someone to take you upstairs.”

Parker grasped the wheelchair handles. “I’ll take her. Where do we go?”

The nurse paused, as if considering. The chime sounded again.

“Radiology. Second floor. Just follow the signs.” She dashed away.

As Parker wheeled the chair around and aimed it toward the cubicle opening, her brother-in-law stepped forward to hold the curtain.

“This is precisely why I’m saying she ought to think about missing persons,” Carl told Parker, making himself skinny for the wheelchair to pass. “Friend of mine says
everybody’s
looking for somebody these days. Missing mothers, fathers, kids.”

Parker didn’t answer, but in the silence Dixie could sense his agreement. The only time he turned bearish and surly was when Dixie’s job got her into a scrap, which in the past weeks—and she’d barely known Parker three weeks—had happened more frequently than she cared to think about.

“I like Carl’s idea,” Amy said. She’d whipped the blanket off the bed, and now she settled it on Dixie’s lap, tucking it around her legs. “All those missing kids, somebody needs to find them, Dixie, and you’re good at that. She found you quick enough, didn’t she, Parker?”

“Like I had a red beacon blinking on my tail.”

Dixie looked up to find him smiling. He hadn’t thought it humorous at the time, though, her bringing him back from North Dakota after he’d skipped out on his trial. Parker’s case had made Dixie reevaluate her conviction that innocent suspects don’t run.

“Problem is,” her brother-in-law persisted, “police departments don’t have enough manpower to look for missing persons. Opens up a whole new industry—runaways, divorced parents stealing their own kids. What I’m saying, Parker, there’s a need out there that’s not being filled. Your sales ability, Dixie’s street sense, the pair of you could rake in a bundle.”

“Keep talking, Carl,” Parker told him. “Sooner or later some of it’s going to land between her stubborn ears.” He pointed the chair toward an elevator bank and kept moving.

“Guess this was another of your quick, safe, simple jobs,” he muttered to Dixie. “Did you see the size of that bruise on your face?”

“I’ve been needing a new hairstyle anyway.” She drew a strand of her short hair over the bruise, then continued, speaking gingerly around the pain in her jaw. “Maybe I’ll get one that swings over my cheek, all sultry like that actress from the thirties. What was her name?”

Parker jabbed the elevator button. Behind them, Ryan was bumming vending-machine change from his parents. Maybe that meant they wouldn’t all follow her upstairs.

“Tallulah Bankhead. And stop changing the subject. Carl has a point this time. If this missing persons investigator needs a partner—”

“I don’t need a partner to find lost kids or lost parents.”

The elevator doors opened. Parker pushed the chair into the empty car and punched a button for the second floor. Dixie could feel his frustration pulsing behind her as he stood waiting for the doors to close. When the car began to move, he leaned over, captured her hands for a gentle squeeze, and kissed the top of her head. Then he held
on, as if drawing her energy inside him. His breath escaped into her hair. The warm scent of him enveloped her.

“Dixie, do what you have to do. But don’t expect me not to worry about you.”

She turned her face up to meet his lips. Instantly, all the pain and frustration of the past few hours began to dissipate, like ashes on a lake. Much too soon, the elevator bumped to a halt and the doors slid open. A white-coated technician stood in the hall.

“Ms. Desiree Flannigan?”

“Its
Dixie
Flannigan.” Her blood mother, an incurable romantic, had christened her Desiree Alexandra, which Dixie promptly shed at the age of twelve, except on legal papers.

“The doctor wants pictures of your foot. My, that
is
swollen, isn’t it?”

Twenty minutes later, after being x-rayed, turned, x-rayed some more—feeling a whole lot like a piece of microwaved beef—Dixie eased into the wheelchair again, and Parker maneuvered her back down to the ER. Ryan bounded up beside her.

“Is it broken?”

“Don’t know yet.” Dixie hooked an arm around his scrawny neck and pulled him down to eye level. “What’s with all the enthusiasm? Are you trying to get a school paper out of this?”

He grinned sheepishly, wriggling in her grasp as they continued down the corridor. Her escapades had gained Ryan at least one A in creativity and a lot of attention from his classmates. She planted a loud kiss on his cheek, then whispered in his ear, “You can
claim
it’s broken, if you want.”

She dropped several more wet kisses on him while he squirmed, finally freeing himself.

“That reporter lady said the man you beat up is in jail.” He scrubbed a hand over his damp cheek.

“Let’s hope he stays there.”

“What’d he do?”

They’d reached the treatment cubicle, where Carl and Amy loitered outside the curtain, along with a new visitor, Brenda Benson, prosecutor on the Coombs case.

Small but sturdy, Brenda was striking without being pretty, with amber eyes, a strong jaw, and magnificent yellow-gold hair that made you think of sunny beaches, even on the stormiest winter day. In grade school, Dixie recalled, her hair had invoked taunts—“Hey, Straw Head,” “Hey, Mellow Yellow,” or even “Hey, Pee Brain.” But the jibes bounced off Brenda like water off a hot griddle, and now, at nearly forty, her yellow hair looked as lustrous as ever, despite the unforgiving hospital lights.

As Parker coasted the wheelchair to a stop, Brenda raked back a long strand that had escaped its clip. Dixie wondered if her friend had torn herself away from a prosecutor’s crushing workload just to check on a sprained foot. Probably. Compassionate, aggressively single, stubborn as a dripping faucet, Brenda had once snipped off her own beautiful locks to support a classmate who was humiliated for having a case of head lice. Afterward, without the golden mane waving above her coarse features, Brenda was frequently mistaken for a boy. Any other girl would’ve been insulted. Brenda had seen both humor and opportunity in the situation, encouraging the misconception anytime being a boy offered advantage.

Tonight her amber eyes shone with the same intensity as when she and Dixie, as ten-year-olds, had shared their darkest secrets. She wore a smart camel suit, somewhat wilted, simple alligator pumps, and an expression of intense worry.

To ease her friend’s concern, Dixie flashed a grin.

“Hey, Mellow Yellow. Next time a worm wriggles off your line, I want a bigger net to catch him with.”

Brenda’s weary smile barely lifted the corners of her thin lips.

“From what I hear, you gaffed the sonofa—” She cut her eyes toward Ryan, and the smile brightened a watt or
two. “To answer your question,” she told Ryan, “Lawrence Coombs committed as many rotten, dirty deeds as any videogame monster. Your aunt zapped the sucker, thus doing the women of Houston a supreme justice.”

“Really?” Ryan beamed at Dixie.

“Glad I could help.” She managed another grin, ignoring the ache in her jaw.

Amy plucked at Ryan’s shirt, straightening the collar. Then taking a firm hold on the boy’s shoulder, and another on Carl’s arm, she shot a meaningful glance at Parker.

“Come on, fellows. Let’s give these two lawyers a chance to talk in peace.” She herded the three males down the hall toward the vending machines.

Brenda’s amber gaze followed them out of earshot, then swung back to Dixie.

“For months I’ve been trying to get enough evidence to convict Coombs. He’s injured other women before Regan Salles, but they’re all too scared to sign a complaint.”

“Can’t say I blame them.” Dixie recalled Coombs’ heightened pleasure as he watched each vicious blow register on her face.

“With both you and Regan testifying, I think I can get a conviction.”

“You
think?
Surely his failure to appear at trial will sour his case.” Testifying in court was Dixie’s least favorite part of skip tracing.

Brenda’s mouth twisted bitterly. “It seems Coombs left an emergency message for his attorney early this morning, claiming he had to see his mother at a nursing home in Galveston. Marianne Coombs is a stroke patient, and Coombs
did
show up there, but so far no one’s saying what the emergency was. His attorney didn’t receive the message until after court convened.” She peeled the wrapper from a chunk of nicotine gum, popped the gum into her mouth, then rolled the wrapper into a tight ball. “Considering Coombs’ fine family history in political circles, the judge will jump hoops to be lenient.”

“Visits his sick mother in the morning, then trolls the Parrot Lounge that night?” Dixie shook her head at the double standard. “Don’t worry so much, Brenda. You’re good. You’ll nail him.”

“With your help, I’ll have a better chance.”

Dixie sighed. She and Brenda shared a lot of history. At twelve, when Dixie moved away with adoptive parents, the girls remained pen pals. Years later, they reunited at law school, only to drift apart again after graduation, losing track completely until the day four years ago when Brenda applied for a job as Assistant DA. And once again, Dixie had moved on. After ten years of frustration with Texas’ swinging-door justice, and reaping a bumper crop of stomach ulcers to show for it, Dixie had drifted into the fringes of the judicial system—bounty hunter, bodyguard, occasionally a finder of lost persons. Have Mustang, will travel. Ulcer-free and pig-simple.

But Brenda worked harder than anyone in the department, making a personal commitment to every assault case against women or children that crossed her desk. Now, in the familiar lines of her face and the exhausted slope of her shoulders, Dixie could see the ravages of too much work and worry.

But she still didn’t relish taking the witness stand.

“A bounty hunter who gets popped a few times by a skip won’t gain many points with a jury,” she grumbled.

“The officer said Coombs jumped you. Tried to rape you. You have a bruised jaw, Dixie, and a broken ankle—”

“Sprained.” Dixie shifted in the wheelchair to relieve a twinge in her battered ribs. “Listen, Bren, what I’d like most is to never set eyes on Lawrence Coombs again. But if you need me, I’ll be there. You know that.” What else could she say?

Abruptly, the ADA bent awkwardly over Dixie’s chair to throw both arms around her. Shalimar—a scent Brenda had always loved and wore too heavily—took Dixie’s breath away.

“I knew I could count on you. But I needed to hear you
say it.” Brenda’s voice broke. She cleared her throat and straightened self-consciously, releasing Dixie’s shoulders. Then she grabbed her friend’s hand and held on. “This case—” She swallowed. “We
can’t lose
this one.”

Her hand felt cold in Dixie’s.

“After you
win
it, Bren, take a vacation. A
long
vacation. You deserve a break from all the misery you take on.” An orderly appeared with Dixie’s X rays. Hearing the Happy Whistler, she looked around to see the doctor headed their way, as well. She turned back to Brenda. “Try the West Indies. I hear St. Martin is virtually crime free.”

Brenda nodded and released her hand. “I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, I hope you don’t expect that sprained foot to get you out of racquetball next week.”

“Not sprained,” the doctor said cheerfully, snapping Dixie’s X rays onto a light box. “Fractured. Looks like your nephew gets to sign a cast after all.”

Two hours and twenty miles later, Dixie struggled with a temporary splint as she attempted to climb out of Parker’s Cadillac—her own Mustang still parked in the hotel garage. “The cast will come later,” the doctor had told her. “After the swelling subsides.”

She’d barely pushed open the car door when Mean Ugly Dog, her half Doberman, nosed under her arm. Mud usually waited in the kitchen, all grins and wags when she opened the door. He must have sensed something wrong tonight. Sometimes the ugly mutt astonished her with his perceptiveness.

He sniffed out the bulky foreign substance on her left foot, a high thin whine drifting softly on his breath. Then, planting two heavy front paws on her lap, he gave her face a thorough tongue bath—Mud’s version of reassurance.