Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 01 - Last Call (13 page)

“Looks like.”

Tom sighed and backed off.

I scratched my itchy arm, waiting for Tom to say something else. He didn’t. I assumed he was done and started for my car.

“Ridley?”

I turned.

Tom’s knuckles crashed into my mouth. Before I had a chance to feel any pain, he added two quick jabs to my ribs.

I staggered back, somehow keeping my feet. My lips felt hot and wet. When I dabbed them against the back of my hand, I came away with blood.

“You’re not the tough kid in Hawthorne anymore,” Tom said.

It was a good line to end on. A movie moment. Now he would turn on his heel and disappear into the shadows. Instead, he charged me and threw three more punches, all quicker than I’d seen in a long time.

The first one I managed to block only because I saw him coming. I didn’t expect two more to follow so fast. The second punch caught me in the ear, the third in my eye.

I tried a wild haymaker, but he owned me with all that early damage.

Pretty soon I huddled against the
High Note’s
brick façade, elbows tucked in, trying to minimize the effect of his barrage of jabs and uppercuts.

A brief image of Tom from high school with the crooked glasses and the brittle arms came to mind. That Tom was long gone, and the new Tom wanted to make sure I knew it.

When I hit the ground, he finally stopped punching. The air felt twice as cold as it should have for a May night. I shivered and waited for a final kick. It wasn’t until I finally looked up that I realized the blow would not come.

Tom was gone.

Chapter 10

It should have taken me an hour and a half to get from the
High Note
to my parents’ cabin; I got there in forty-five minutes. I even drove the long way to make sure Tom and his bald sidekick hadn’t resumed their surveillance.

I barged through the door, my face throbbing. I hadn’t bothered checking the damage Tom had dealt except for a quick glance in the rearview mirror, and I could only imagine what I looked like when I charged into the cabin.

Wearing a towel wrapped around her body as if she had just showered, Autumn sat on a recliner next to a short bookshelf, her hair wet. The book she had pulled from the shelf and started reading popped out of her hands when I entered. The corner of the towel tucked in above one breast slipped free. She hugged the towel against her, gaping at me.

I slammed the door and leaned back against it. Pain volleyed between my torso and my face as if my body didn’t know where to hurt more.

Autumn secured her towel and moved toward me. She tried to touch my cheek, but I flinched away.

“Who did that to you?”

“You don’t like? It’s the new me.”

My voice sounded ragged and deep. Autumn cringed as if I’d hit her with the words.

“It was Tom,” I said.

She marched into the kitchen and leaned on the counter by the sink, staring into the drain. “Damn him.”

I stepped to the edge of the kitchen, trying not to notice that only a towel stood between me and Autumn’s bare skin.

“There’s more to this Dixie thing, isn’t there?”

“I should put some clothes on.”

She stomped out of the kitchen, arcing through the front room and into the master bedroom. She shut the door behind her. A minute later, she came out of the bedroom wearing the same clothes she had on when we came to the cabin. We hadn’t had time to pack her anything, and I hadn’t wanted to leave any signs back at the house like missing luggage or toiletries that could tip off Tom. I figured she got the towel from the cabin’s linen closet, but it must not have been much of a shower without soap or shampoo.

“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been keeping from me.”

She strode back to the kitchen, sat at the kitchen table.

“You make it sound like I’m a criminal.”

I followed her into the kitchen and remained standing, making her look up at me.

“Are you?”

“What did Tom say?”

I didn’t like that, her trying to pump me, find out how much I knew before volunteering anything herself. I crossed my arms. “He chose to speak more with his fists than his mouth.”

Autumn smirked. “He’s not such a skinny little guy anymore, is he?”

I loomed over her with my arms crossed and didn’t speak.

“The least you could do is sit down.”

I uncrossed my arms and pointed to my face. “Look at me. If it looks half as bad as it feels, I shouldn’t have to tell you what kind of position I’m in for helping you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want sorry, I want answers. What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t do anything to him. You apparently already know about Dixie.”

“That’s it?”

She nodded.

I pulled out a chair and eased into it. A pinch in my side flared, stealing my breath for a second. I felt a clammy sheen on my skin like I had a fever.

Autumn reached for me, stopped short. “Are you all right?”

I chewed on the pain until I could swallow it. I prodded a couple tender spots along my jaw. “Do me a favor. There’s some dish rags in the drawer next to the sink. Soak one in cold water for me, then tell me everything about your time with Dixie.”

She did as I asked and went to put the wet rag to my face. I took it from her and did it myself.

“Dixie,” I prompted after she sat down again.

“What do you want to know?”

The cool rag felt nice against my bruised mug, though I wished I had ice. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“At least ten years ago. Why are we back to Dixie?”

I dabbed the rag at one eye, then the other. “We never covered her to begin with. You said ‘Bad crowd,’ you never said ‘Dixie.’“

“I don’t see how it will help.”

“That’s why I’m the detective, and you’re not.”

She stood and pulled the rag away from me. “Let me help you with this.” She made hard swipes at my cheek with the rag, sparking new areas of pain.

I yelped and tried to move away.

“Quit being such a baby and hold still. You’ve got dried blood all over the place.”

I grit my teeth and let her clean me up. After a while I didn’t notice the pain anymore. The fingers of her free hand gently maneuvered the direction of my head by pushing on my chin. Her other hand wiped around my nose and mouth with a corner of the rag. She had to stand close to me, while I sat there, my face a handful of inches from her stomach. I could smell her natural scent, any perfumes or fragranced soaps rinsed away from the shower.

I reigned back the desire to pull up her shirt and press my aching face against her belly. “Why did you start hanging out with her?”

She wiped a cold line with the rag along the edge of my jaw and stared at me, appraising her work.

“I went through a… phase. Daddy and I weren’t getting along.”

That reminded me of my encounter with Lincoln the night before. I decided to keep it to myself.

“What kind of phase?”

“Depressed. Self-destructive. Daddy sent me to a psychiatrist who gave me pills I never took.”

I tried to imagine Autumn needing to take anti-depressants. This sounded nothing like the girl I’d gone with in high school. Autumn must have seen these thoughts in my eyes. She lowered the rag from my face. I caught a glimpse of a red stain on the wet cloth.

“You’d be surprised by how much I hurt when I found out you were gone.”

Something quivered inside me.

“Then why did you let me leave?”

She sighed, set the rag on the table and brushed both sides of my face with her hands. The one hand that had held the rag felt cooler than the other. Her mouth hung open. I could feel the need to tell me something surging off of her like a steam cloud.

She closed her mouth, smiled. “I guess I didn’t know what I really wanted until it was gone.”

Unbidden, a flash came to mind of Doug hanging over the coffee table, that string of spittle dangling from his mouth. A new aching rose from a deeper place than where Tom had bruised me.

I dropped into detective mode to dull the pain.

“So you started hanging with Dixie because you were feeling self-destructive?”

Autumn picked up the rag from the table, folded it into a small square on her lap. “More or less. And maybe to piss Daddy off.”

“I bet that worked pretty well.”

“He’s very protective,” she said. Before I could comment, she added, “As you already know.”

“How did it end?”

She unfolded the rag, folded it into a triangle.

“I came to my senses.”

“Just like that?”

“Dixie wanted me to do something I… it went beyond petty vandalism and smoking weed.”

She looked up from the rag as if expecting some reaction to her admitted drug use. I met her gaze and said nothing. If she wanted me to judge her based on some pot smoking, she looked to the wrong guy. My first couple years in Los Angeles had been far from drug free.

Autumn continued, “She wanted to rob a family, charge right into their house with guns while they were home. They had two kids, this family. Dixie said that made it better because the parents would give us whatever we asked to keep their children from getting hurt.”

She hung her head, staring at the triangle of cloth resting on her thigh. She picked up the rag and held it to her own cheek, gaze still cast down.

“You couldn’t go through with it?” I asked.

“And I couldn’t let her either.”

I waited. I could tell by her absent stare that scenes from her past played across the screen in her mind.

“I told her I wouldn’t do it. She gave me a hard time. Said I was weak, always had been. I believed her. I believed that because I wouldn’t rob this family I was somehow less of a person. Part of me wanted to do it, just to prove I wasn’t weak.”

She pulled the rag away from her face and dropped it absently onto the table.

“I knew she meant to do it whether I helped or not. I kept imagining the family, how the kids would cry, how the mother would beg Dixie not to hurt them. I had to stop her.”

Her face lost some color. Part of me wanted to let her take a break, but I knew if I didn’t get it now, it would be all the harder for her to talk about it later. I was also starting to see why she’d kept her relationship with Dixie from me to begin with.

“Tom was just a patrol cop back then. He used to harass Dixie all the time, just waiting to catch her at something. I remember thinking how much he’d changed.”

She smiled, the shift in expression throwing me. But the smile faded as quickly as it had come.

“Anyway, I told him what Dixie was planning.”

“You told Tom? Why him?”

She shrugged. “I knew him. I knew he had it in for her, and I knew he had it in for me because he’d seen me around with her. I thought this would settle the score or something. Show him I wasn’t as bad as she was. Guess it didn’t work.”

“What did Tom do?”

“The police caught her. Tom got his picture in the Hawthorne Daily. I never spoke to either of them again.”

I played her story through in my mind, seeing Dixie in a new light. I had figured she would only get worse after high school, but the whole home invasion thing sent chills down my spine.

I mentioned I had two distinct memories of Dixie, the first relating to her violent nature. The second one came from an altogether different place.

Dixie Jawhar and I had attended the same party once. The details remained fuzzed by a half dozen beers, but somehow I ended up in the backseat of someone’s car with Dixie. Not my car, and I was pretty sure not hers. The petting was more than a little heavy, and I learned despite Dixie’s normal toughness, she could be gentle when it counted—especially with her tongue. I never spoke to her again after that night, not that we had said much to begin with.

Autumn didn’t know about this encounter, and I didn’t feel the need to share it. But what she told me about Dixie added a whole new context to my memory of her.

“What happened to Dixie?” I asked.

Autumn took a deep breath, her focus coming back to the present. “She went to prison. I never looked back.”

But ten years had passed. Dixie had probably gotten out by now. “Did she know it was you?” I asked. “That turned her in.”

Autumn looked at her lap again. “Yes.”

“You sound sure.”

“I am.”

An armed home invasion could easily lead to someone getting shot. Maybe shot in the back if the victim tried to run to another room. Autumn followed my train of thought.

“I don’t think it was her,” she said.

“Why not? She wants revenge, she tracks you down—”

“But why would she shoot Doug and not me?”

“You weren’t home.”

“If she went through the trouble of finding me, wouldn’t she wait to make sure I was there?”

The soothing effects of the cool rag began to fade, and pain seeped back into my jaw, my cut lip, my nose, around my eyes—hell, just about everywhere on my face.

“Why are you sticking up for her?”

Autumn put a hand to her forehead and rubbed. “I’m not. It just sounds farfetched to me.

“If not Dixie, than who?”

She dropped her hand and gave me a hard stare. “How about the woman in those pictures you took?”

“Possible. But we don’t even know who she is, let alone how to find her. We should go with what we have. The Dixie angle makes sense.”

“Fine.”

I tried to stand, and a shock of pain crackled through my ribcage. I had sat for too long, giving the pain a chance to settle in.

Autumn stood and came to my side.

“Let me help you.”

“I’m all right.”

She ignored my protest and gripped my arm to give me support.

I shuffled into the guest bedroom like an old man. But as I lay in bed knowing Autumn lay in the next room, my mind raced with the thoughts of a teenage boy. My body responded in kind, despite the pain, and I thought I’d never get to sleep. My exhaustion won in the end.

An hour later I snapped awake, heart pounding. I thought a nightmare had jolted me from sleep until I sensed, somewhere in the dark room, another presence with me.

Chapter 11