Before The Killing Starts (Dixie Killer Blues Book 1) Read online

  '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 awa
y 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.'

  Chapter 5

&n
bsp; The talk of kid brothers and kicking them into shape brought back some memories that Dixie didn't want to think about right now. About the day his own kid brother killed himself. But he couldn't blame Chico, he wasn't to know about that. He'd been working ridiculous hours—nothing new there—and hadn't been back to his apartment for a couple of days, just grabbing a few hours sleep wherever and whenever he could. And when he'd finally got back home there were two messages waiting for him on the answering machine.

  Hey, it's Remy. I need to talk to you. Want to get some breakfast this morning?

  And then, the voice a little more strained:

  Me again. I guess you're really busy. How about a beer later? Call me.

  But Dixie never got to make the call, because by then he already knew his brother was dead. If only he'd called him on his cell? Why call the house for Christ's sake?

  All Remy had wanted was a quiet drink with his brother; maybe ask his advice on something that was bothering him, who knows, but his brother was busy—nothing new there. What are you gonna do? You can't find anybody to talk to about your problems, you might as well make them go away for a while—so he'd had a drink with Charlie instead, because Charlie was always there for you.

  The medical examiner said there was no evidence of long-term abuse—it was just one of those things. Apparently you didn't need a history to choke to death on your own vomit. Like that made it easier to accept.

  He still saw Remy from time to time. He'd be sitting up at the bar and see a movement out of the corner of his eye. He'd turn to look and there would be Remy turning away, disappearing into the crowd. The first times it happened he'd jump up and chase after him, but he'd be gone, of course. He'd push his way through a crowd of people and then stand there in the middle of the floor, head frantically turning, everybody staring at him, their faces softening as he changed from a rude drunk into an object of pity.