Before The Killing Starts (Dixie Killer Blues Book 1) (2 page)

Chapter 3

It's just a question of
finding the right button and pushing it. Evan's button wasn't hard to find—it
was practically sticking out of the top of his head, and Ellie hadn't so much
pushed it as hit it with a sledgehammer.

That's what he felt had
happened anyway. If Babe Ruth had come charging into the bar, swinging his bat
wildly and caught him round the head with it, he would have been hard pressed
to tell the difference between that and how he felt now. His hands began to
sweat and the back of his neck went cold.

He'd come in for a quick
after-work beer just like any other day and now this. He wasn't sure he'd heard
her correctly. He was vaguely aware that she was still talking—he could see her
mouth moving, going ten to the dozen like all women's do, the vocal cords
twanging away tirelessly, but he couldn't hear anything apart from a roaring
silence, his blood a steady pounding of fists against his ears. He thought his
own mouth was probably hanging open, catching flies.

His head started to
clear. It felt as if it had expanded and snapped back into place like a rubber
band. He could hear Patsy Cline singing
I've Loved & Lost Again
in
the background, which was some sick coincidence if you asked him. The song
ought to be banned. Ellie was saying something to him. 

'Evan! Have you heard a
word I'm saying?' She took hold of his arm and shook him.

'I'm not sure I heard
you right,' he said. It came out more like a croak than his voice, hollow
behind the blood in his ears.

'I said I can't
guarantee anything, but I think I can help.'

He grabbed hold of her
arm more roughly than he meant to and squeezed. 'Where is she?' Five years'
worth of pain and hurt crammed into three little words.

She slapped at his hand.
'You're hurting me.'

He let go and slumped
down into his seat. 'Sorry.'

'You have to help me
first,' she said.

It took a moment for her
words to sink in. He stared at her open-mouthed. Did she think this was some
kind of game and he'd pulled the short straw? But there was obviously something
in the way he was looking at her that made her realize she'd strayed into
territory where anything could happen. Her face softened and she put a
conciliatory hand on his arm. Her voice took on a calm, measured tone, as if he
was a patient waking from a coma and she had to give him some important, but
bad, news:
Sorry, we had to amputate your legs; deal with it.

'If I tell you what I
know now, you'll be out that door'—she nodded her head towards the door which
had just opened behind them—'faster than a scalded cat.'

Evan nodded several
times, his breath exiting through his nostrils. He had to admit—to himself at
least—that she was right about that.

'Also,' she said
squeezing his arm in a patronizing way so that he knew something nasty was on
its way, '. . . and there isn't any nice way to put this, but you've been waiting
five years already. Another day or two won't make any difference.'

He felt as if he'd been
slapped.

Had she really just
said that? You've been waiting five years already.

'I need help right now.
If you don't help me, I probably won't be around in five days' time, forget
about five years.'

He didn't believe a word
of it—she was being melodramatic. But he was back where he seemed to spend most
of his life—between a rock and a hard place. He was going to have to do what
she wanted if she was going to help him. Unless he took her outside and beat
the crap—and the information—out of her. That idea was currently a
very
close second. It wouldn't take a lot to move it to the head of the line. He
stared at his reflection in the mirror, his eyes never blinking, and almost
prayed for her to give him an excuse to erupt.

'Evan?'

He rubbed his eyes with
the heels of his hands, his jaw moving tightly, as another hateful hypothesis
intruded into his mind; did she really know something or was she just pulling
his chain, pushing the right button to make him help her? There was only one
way to find out and he hated himself for being so easy to manipulate. He threw
his hands up in the air, unable to put his frustration into words.

'So, what's this guy's
name?' he said eventually, sucking air up from the floor.

He saw a flash of
triumph in her eyes.

'Dixie.'

He pulled a face.
'That's it?'

'No, his full name's
Richard LaBarre, but everybody calls him Dixie.'

'Why? Is he from down
South?'

She shrugged. 'I don't
know—it doesn't matter anyway. I know he spends a lot of time in a bar called
Kelly's Tavern. That'd be a good place to start looking for him.'

Evan knew the place; it
was probably the roughest dive in the whole city.
No danger, my ass
.

'What do you want me to
say to him if I find him?'

'Just ask him to call
me.' She handed him a piece of paper with her number scribbled on it.

'Nothing else? What if
he asks why?' His voice had taken on a long-suffering tone. He wondered if this
is what his life would feel like after a few more years if Sarah ever did come
home. A life of summary orders handed down to him without explanation or the
possibility of non-compliance:
do this; don't do that; do this chore now;
what the hell are you doing that for?
until he wished that she'd never come
back. If only he knew, because if that's what life was going to turn into, he'd
be out the door right now and Ellie could shove her problems up her (shapely)
ass.

'I might be prepared to
do everything you ask without a word of explanation,' he said, 'but not
everybody's so amenable. Some people want a reason before they hop to it.'

'He won't,' she said,
ignoring the jibe, the smug confidence in her voice irritating the hell out of
him.

Everything she said made
him realize there was a lot more going on that she wasn't telling him (all the
important bits) and here he was about to walk into it all blindfolded. If it
wasn't for the carrot she was dangling . . . Christ, how many more times did he
have to think it before he got up and walked out and hoped next time she left
it ten years before she came looking. In fact, make that twenty.

Talk about a prisoner
of hope.

'Have you got a picture
of him?'

She fished in her bag
and pulled out half a photograph. It had started out as a photograph of two
people but one of them had been cut out. It looked as if it had been taken
somewhere hot and sunny and he could see a woman's arm but that was all. He
wondered if Ellie was the other person and she didn't want him—or anyone else—to
know it.

'Was that you who's been
cut out?' he asked.

'No.'

'Really?' He leaned away
from her and studied her for a moment. 'Because that'—he pointed very carefully
at the dimples of cellulite pocking the white flesh under the woman's arm in
the photo—'looks like your arm.' He chewed on the inside of his mouth to keep a
grin from breaking out.

Her self-satisfied smile
evaporated and was replaced with a look like she’d sat on a hot coal. She shot
him a look of such hatred and contempt, it gave him goosebumps. At least she
had the presence of mind not to glance down at her arm.

He gave a small
it
was worth a try
shrug and topped it off with a smug smile. He felt much
better. 'Do you know who it is?'

'No.' She shook her
head. Not no,
sorry
, just no.

He smiled again as if to
say he'd have been surprised and disappointed by any other answer. He'd find
out who it was if he needed to, but the cellulite would never go away.
Ha,
ha, ha.

'There's no risk of me
drowning in a sea of facts then.'

She climbed off her
stool and picked her bag up off the bar, ready to go. That suited Evan just
fine; he hadn't been about to offer her another drink anyway. He gave her his
number and she punched it into her phone as if he'd given her the number for
dial-a-cockroach
.
He watched her in the mirror behind the bar as she walked back towards the
door. He was pretty sure she stole a quick look at her arms in the mirror as
she went. A number of the other guys were watching her too, all sitting in a
line at the bar like grinning idiots. One of them picked up his beer bottle and
blew a hollow toot with it. You couldn't blame them—she was good to look at
after all, in a selfish, manipulative bitch sort of way.

He ordered another beer
and sat staring into the distance, wondering how likely it was that a person,
even one as narcissistic as Ellie, would wait five years before telling her
best friend's husband what she knew about her disappearance. Unless the best
friend had asked her not to, of course . . .

Chapter 4

Dixie
didn't say anything. He just sat
quietly and waited for Chico to finish. The way things were looking, he should
probably have brought a pillow.

Chico
was an evil son of a bitch,
although you couldn't really blame him for turning out that way. He'd been
unlucky enough to be born in 1951 which meant that he was seventeen years old
in 1968. That was the year the movie
Once Upon a Time in the West
was
released and the patrón of the local Hacienda—José Salgado—went to see it in Mexico City. It would have been much better for the young Chico and his family if the
patrón had visited when
Planet of the Apes
or
Bullitt
was
showing, but that's the way it goes sometimes.
Shit happens
, as they
say.

The patrón was an
impressionable man despite his standing and he came away from the movie with
his head full of ideas. Unpleasant ideas, as if there weren't enough of those
in there in the first place. Chico's father wasn't to know any of that, of
course, when he stole a pig that year.

So it was that when the
patrón and his men turned up at the shack where Chico lived with his family and
took Chico—the eldest son—and his father out into the desert, the patrón had
something very specific in mind. Under the branches of a Desert Ironwood tree, Chico's hands were bound behind his back and his father stood on his shoulders, also bound,
with a noose around his neck, the rope looped over one of the branches.

If Chico had been born
in, say 1959, he would only have been nine years old in 1968. Unless he'd been
an unusually big and strong boy for his age—which would have been unlikely
given that he spent his whole life hungry—he wouldn't have been suitable for
the role that the patrón had in mind for him. At age seventeen he was just
perfect (although the patrón ended up being very disappointed nonetheless).

Dixie had heard the
story many times but he could never remember whether the young Chico had cussed the patrón or whether the patrón simply saw himself as an innovative sort
of man, but, whichever it was, he added an extra touch. A certain
je ne sais
quoi
. Before standing Chico's father on his shoulders, they tarred his
feet. Then they broke a couple of beer bottles into small pieces—the men had
been enjoying some cold beers while they had their sport—and pushed the pieces
into the tar. It made Dixie shudder to think about it. Who knows whether it was
the pain of the glass shredding his shoulders or his legs giving way, but he
didn't suppose Chico could have taken it for long. Twenty seconds? Thirty, at
most.

Dixie seemed to remember
that the patrón had gone for lunch—he'd never bothered asking how Chico was supposed to know that detail; people always got irritated if you questioned
their stories too closely—his men staying behind and severely beating Chico. When they'd finished, they'd gone on their way, leaving him to die in the desert.
Somehow he'd managed to drag himself to the nearest road where he'd been found
by a pack of roving Jesuits. Unable to get any sense out of him, they'd taken
him with them back to the seminary where they put him to work to earn his keep.

Chico
had stayed with them for three
years, the last two as a noviate, hoping to find the elusive state of grace in
the ranks of God's Soldiers. But the state of grace did just that—eluded him—perhaps
because there was a part of him that nobody could reach and nothing could rid
his mind of thoughts of revenge. So, after two years he left the seminary,
roman collar tucked away in his bag.

It took him six months
to get close enough to the patrón. The patrón was a careful man with a lot of
enemies and it would have taken a lot longer except for the fact that nobody
suspects a man wearing a roman collar in a Catholic country like Mexico. A bit like a man with a clipboard; he can't possibly be up to any mischief. Chico caught up with him in a hotel in Mexico City and, after putting the fear of God into
his whore, set about the process that left the patrón in need of the last
rites.

Chico
had studied diligently in the
seminary and although he wouldn't have said he went hunting for the means of
his revenge in the scriptures, he knew it when he saw it. So it was that the
patrón went to meet his maker in the manner of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle
and Chico liked to say that at least his chosen method had better provenance
than a spaghetti western starring Charles Bronson and Peter Fonda, however good
a movie it might have been. He also said he wore his dog collar the whole time.

Dixie
believed most of the story, subject
to a certain amount of artistic license (such as the patrón's lunch appointment
and maybe the dog collar) but there were other aspects that he wasn't so sure
about. Foremost amongst these was Chico's claim that he'd kept a large piece of
the patrón's skin and found a man in the city who had made it into a wallet for
him. Ignoring any questions about the suitability—mainly the durability—of
human skin for an item that is going to go in and out of your pocket all day
long, Dixie doubted this was true. Not only that, but Chico was always careful
to ensure that nobody ever got too close a look at it.

Dixie was pulled from
his reverie by the realization that Chico had stopped pacing up and down, his
ranting and raving finally running out of steam. He looked at the trim,
sixty-something man opposite him, his hair still without a hint of gray, and
smiled.

'You shouldn't get so
uptight, Chico. You'll give yourself a heart attack,' he said, settling back in
his chair and crossing one leg over the other.

'Three million dollars
go missing and he tells me not to get so uptight.' Chico shook his head in
amazement. He took a sip from the glass of Tequila in his hand. Dixie had a glass of coke in front of him. With ice and a slice of lemon, as if that made
it any more palatable. The last bartender who'd asked, with a mocking smile on
his lips, what color bendy straw he wanted with it had got a sharp poke in the
eye with a cocktail umbrella.

'Easy for you to say,' Chico continued. 'I knew I should never have sent the stupid bitch with them.'

'You don't know it's her
fault.'

Chico
wasn't listening to him. 'This is
what I get for giving a woman a man's job. For all I know she left it sitting
in the car while she went to fix her makeup in the bathroom.' He looked down at
the floor and Dixie was sure he was about to spit. 'I should have sent you.'

Dixie
shrugged. Chico walked over to the
window and looked out, resting a hand on Dixie's shoulder as he passed.

'Tell me again what
happened,' Dixie said.

Chico
took a deep breath and let it out
slowly. 'I sent the three of them. That retard Ricardo'—Dixie just about
managed to stop himself from laughing out loud—'with that bitch and one of the
other guys, Domingo.'

Ricardo was Chico's son. Dixie picked up his drink and took a sip to hide his face. Luckily Chico was still looking out the window and couldn't see the smile on his lips.

'That should have been
enough.'

Chico
gave an irritated head shake. 'Tell
me about. On the way back they had to stop for gas. Ricardo went to the
bathroom. Probably to play with his pecker or comb his hair, who knows? Every
time I look at that boy I know God holds a grudge against me, you know that?
Anyway, Domingo's filling up; the bitch stays in the car. When Ricardo gets
back from the bathroom Domingo's taking an unauthorized nap and bleeding all
over the place on the ground and the car and the girl are gone.'

'And the money,' Dixie
said helpfully, as if Chico needed reminding.

'And the money,' Chico said with some feeling to the window.

'So, either the girl got
out of the car and snuck up on the guy while he was filling up—'

'Or somebody else snuck
up on him and brained him with a baseball bat.'

'And you think it must
have been her.'

Chico
turned to look at Dixie and shook
his head vehemently. 'I didn't say that. But whatever happened,
she
drove off with the money and we haven't seen her since.'

Dixie
rubbed his jaw with his palm, the
sound of bristles against rough flesh loud in his ear.

'If it was somebody
else, they must have known about the deal.'

Chico
let out a short bark of a laugh and
turned away from the window. 'No shit? Either that or it was a damn good guess.
A random mugger's three million dollar lucky break. Somehow I don't think so.'

'Who else knew about
it?'

'Alvarez and his guys of
course.'

'What? You think they
did the deal, lots of big smiles and back slaps all round, then followed them
and stole the money back again.'

Chico
waved that away. 'Who knows?
Somebody's got it.'

'Anyone else?'

Chico
gave him a pained look.

'If I knew all the
answers, I'd have the money back by now,' he said in the quiet, measured voice
of a disappointed parent.

'I suppose so.'

'I need you to find out
what happened,' Chico said.

'I thought you already
sent a couple of men.'

'Men!' Chico snorted.
'You see any men around here; you point them out to me. I might as well have
sent my mother-in-law. They caught up with her but she got away from them.'

'You still don't know
it's anything to do with her,' Dixie said again.

'So where is she? Why
did she run?' Chico said crossing his arms and sticking his thumbs in his
armpits.

'You have . . . a
reputation. I'd probably run.'

Chico
crossed the room and sat on the
corner of his desk and smiled for the first time that morning. He shook his
head. 'Not you.
Cojones
the size of a bull.'

Dixie
smiled at the compliment.

'She's probably scared.
Even if she hasn't got the money herself, she's the one who lost it. Maybe she
hasn't heard about
Chico
's legendary leniency
. Just because you
wear a dog collar doesn't mean you forgive people.'

Chico
actually laughed out loud at that. Dixie started laughing too.

'Why can't you teach
Ricardo to be more like you?' Chico said, the laughter fading, a rueful smile
taking its place. 'Kick him into shape like he's your kid brother.'

Dixie
studied his shoes for a moment;
they could do with a shine and he rubbed the toe of the left one against his
right calf. It didn't make a lot of difference so he didn't bother doing the
other one. He really didn't want to get into all this now. Sure, he'd like to
kick Ricardo, but not
into
shape. He knew Chico and his son had their
problems. Ricardo's resentment of his own relationship with Chico was one of
them; the only one as far as Ricardo was concerned. For Chico it was more to do
with the fact that his son was an idiot. He got his brains from his mother,
according to Chico.

Dixie
stretched his arms above his head,
then laced his fingers behind his head. 'What do you want me to do?' he said,
getting the conversation back on track.

'Go and talk to Alvarez
first. See what he has to say. Then find her. One of them's got it.'

'Or somebody else
altogether.'

'Or somebody else altogether,'
Chico agreed without much conviction.

Dixie
nodded. 'At least you're prepared
to consider other possibilities. That's a move in the right direction.'

Chico
considered him carefully, his eyes
clear and cold. Dixie shifted in his chair. Sometimes he saw his grave in those
eyes, heard the shovels in the dirt.

'I don't know why you're
so keen to put the blame on somebody else—you're not sticking it to her, are
you?'

Dixie forced a laugh so
that Chico understood what a ridiculous notion that was and shook his head,
although he didn't exactly straight out deny it.

'Leave it with me. I'll
make a start tomorrow.'