Early the following afternoon, we flew to Memphis, Luann and I, where I rented a dark blue Mustang. By late afternoon, under a sky full of sunshine, we were following the rambling thing that was U.S. Highway 45 along the Mississippi/Tennessee state line.
It had been my idea to take Luann along, and I’d asked no one’s permission. She appeared to be in my temporary charge, and from what I understood about the job Jack Killian had assigned me, she might serve several useful purposes.
After my meeting with Killian, I’d sat with Luann in the hot tub, enjoying the Jacuzzi spray but having to talk up a little to get over the noise. I was at one end and she was at the other. With her hair damp, she had a baby bird look. A baby bird with nice tits bobbing in the water.
I asked, “You ever work any of the state-line clubs?”
“No.”
“Not stripping or hooking?”
“No. One of my girlfriends did. One of my roommates.”
“What does she say about it?”
“Plenty.”
“Such as?”
“Don’t work there.”
I nodded. Those clear blue eyes were looking at me but with no discernible interest.
I said, “I have to do a job for Mr. Killian tomorrow at the Dixie Club.”
“Oh.” She closed her eyes and her face said the Jacuzzi spray felt good. Then she opened them. “Be careful.”
“Okay. Any particular reason why?”
“There’s a woman that runs it with her husband and she kills people with a hammer.”
This may sound to you like a typically off-the-wall comment coming from a little blonde bimbo, but even if that’s what she was, this specimen was neither flaky nor spacey. And anyway, this gibed with what Killian had told me.
Dixie and Dix Dixon—which was, let’s face it, a lot of dicks—were a couple in their mid-forties who had been running roadhouses since the early ’50s in McNairy County, Tennessee, and Alcorn County, Mississippi, along the state line, an area notorious for that kind of thing.
Currently they were running the Dixie Club, a restaurant with a gambling joint and a shady motel. Their specialty was rolling customers who complained about getting rooked or who flashed a big wad of dough without having the courtesy to lose it all at the Dixie. While locals were on occasion known to get this rough treatment, tourists almost always did, and drunks from anywhere.
“That kind of old-fashioned approach is small-picture thinking,” Killian had said. “Big-picture thinking keeps the customers happy and coming back for more.”
Which they didn’t when they were killed and dumped in a river, swamp or along a highway’s edge.
“Don’t,” Killian said, “let Dixie get behind you. She sometimes works as a bartender, so keep track of her whereabouts. Eyes peeled. She keeps a ball-peen in her apron.”
“What,” I said, “and she just pulls out Maxwell’s silver hammer and bang bangs you in the head? Right in front of God and any other patrons?”
“Yes.”
There was food for thought.
Seemed that Killian had bought out or into almost every roadhouse on the Mississippi/Tennessee state line. The exceptions were the Dixie Club and three more such fleece-and-fuck joints owned by other members of the Dixon clan, who had turned down every offer and overture from the Biloxi boss these past six months. No matter how generous.
Now he needed something done about Dixie and Dix. And if you think he was sending me up there to reason with them, you aren’t paying attention.
Late that same night, after fucking Luann in my bed and tucking her into hers, I had left the Tropical again to cross Highway 90 and walk to a beachfront phone booth. There I got the operator to make a collect call to a long-distance number I knew well.
I said, “I don’t do jobs for just anybody.”
“Job” was the over-the-phone euphemism for that other euphemism, “hit.”
“I know,” the Broker replied in that single-malt whiskey baritone. “You only do jobs for me. But this would seem an extension of that. And it does appear you are being paid. Which is, of course, an above-and-beyond benefit for you.”
I sighed into the receiver. “This sounds dicey as hell, Broker, and it’s well beyond anything you and I discussed. And I have to do the Biloxi job at my first reasonable opportunity, even if I haven’t been paid yet for this side trip.”
“If that proves to be the case,” the Broker said smoothly, “you’ll be taken care of on this end.”
“Try that again, not so ambiguous.”
“I will pay for the state-line trip if necessary.”
“Thanks.”
His sigh was weary but not irritated. “I well understand that you find yourself in a strange environment, undertaking an assignment of some delicacy. That the ground may be continually shifting under your feet. . .”
“There’s sand under my feet, Broker.”
“. . .but this is obviously a vital job not only for my future, but yours. I wish I had more encouraging words for you.”
What was this, Home on the Fucking Range?
“Goodnight, Quarry. Get some rest. It would appear that you’ll need it.”
And he hung up.
This morning I had taken Luann to the Edgewater Mall, where there was a lot of construction. A famous adjacent hotel was getting torn down, and Sears and some other new stores were coming in. At a department store called Gayfers, I bought the girl some non-hookerish things in the teen department and picked up some collegiate things for myself.
At the same mall, we stopped at Godchaux’s, which made Gayfers look like a Salvation Army shop. Three black suits and half a dozen silk ties were waiting, courtesy of Mr. Killian. I tried on the suits, which got marked up for alterations, and would be delivered to the Tropical tomorrow. That was fine, because I wouldn’t need them where we were going today.
While Luann’s participation was my idea, Killian had suggested I take the plane to Memphis, rather than make the nearly six-hour drive from Biloxi to the state-line strip. The girl’s airfare came out of my pocket, but I figured the Broker would reimburse.
We were barely out of the rental car lot when Luann found a rock station. She liked it loud, but not blaring—she probably got enough of that on stage at Mr. Woody’s—and I had a feeling she cranked it just to where conversation would be difficult. Conversation seemed to be something in life that she just put up with. Like fucking the occasional fat guy.
The idea was that she’d look like a nice girl, a coed or a newlywed, and the clothes I’d put her in did the trick: a red cotton short-sleeve top with a U-neck, a wide red belt with a big gold-and-red buckle, and striped jeans of red, white and pale blue. Her feet were in leather open-toed sandals with cork bottoms, or they were when she didn’t have them off to paint her toenails red as we drove.
I had on dark brown jeans and a rust-color short-sleeved turtleneck, untucked, just a little big for me, enough to conceal the Browning nine millimeter stuck in my waistband. Since it got cool here at night, I’d have a brown windbreaker on, too, which would also help hide the weapon. I was wearing tan sneakers, anticipating I might need to move quickly.
Highway 45 alternated through tall piney woods and fertile farm country. Often roadsides were choked with thickets overtaken by kudzu, making odd shapes, like a topiary garden of extinct beasts. The land we were winding through had some roll to it, but was mostly flat, interrupted by the occasional small house and/or big barn. Country churches (where anti-state-line sermons surely flourished) sent their steeples skyward to greet the Lord and flee the overgrowth.
When the state-line strip kicked in, it wasn’t a Vegas or even Biloxi kind of thing. The roadhouses—with names like the Shamrock, the Plantation, the Nitefall—popped up only now and then, like clusters of mushrooms, the kind you shouldn’t swallow. Now and then one would be across the road from another. But mostly each joint ruled its own little roost.
The Dixie Club was no exception. The parking lot was big and gravel, the building itself a long, one-story white frame building with a green pitched roof, green-and-white striped awnings, and a central neon saying
DIXIE CLUB
in red with smaller neons along the right roof saying
DINE DANCE DRINK
while a metal Coca-Cola sign ran horizontally along the left roof adding
STEAK CHICKEN BURGERS HOME-COOKING
although I doubted whoever was cooking actually lived there. The motel was a separate building off to the right, sitting at a forty-five degree angle with a red neon sign that said
DIXIE
COURT
TV AIR-CONDITIONING POOL
but the pool must have been in back.
Some roadhouses we passed had small fleets of campers where the hookers took their johns, the girls escorting their clients across parking lots while other fallen flowers leaned in camper doorways, in skimpy tops and hot pants or minis, casually displaying their wares. But the Dixie was much classier than that—the motel apparently served as its brothel.
The parking lot at 7:30 on a weeknight was maybe a third full, the motel’s parking spaces about the same. I wondered if you could actually check in there, or was it strictly for working girls, and maybe cheaters paying by the hour.
But I gave it a try at a registration desk overseen by a hard-looking but not unattractive brunette in her late thirties who had apparently moved into management. She wore a sleeveless dress, white with cherries all over it; maybe that was irony. On the counter were dust-covered leaflets about the sites and attractions in the area and a tumbler of an amber liquid that was probably bourbon.
She frowned at me in confusion. “All night?”
“Yeah.” I smiled over at Luann, who was staring blankly at nothing. Then I smiled back at the brunette in the cherry-strewn dress. “We’re on our honeymoon. Kind of collecting out-of-the-way motels.”
Her pretty face had more wrinkles than a slept-in suit.
“You kids have fun,” she said. “That’ll be thirty-five. No credit cards.”
“No problem,” I said, still smiling, but hoped not overdoing it. I handed over the cash, signed us in as Bob and Holly Johnson, and asked, “Is the food good over next door?”
“It’s all one business,” the brunette said, “so of course I’ll say yes. Can’t go wrong with the chicken. Meat’s iffy by midweek.”
“Thanks.”
Our room was dingy but not dismal, with pea-soup color walls, a yellow nubby spread on the double bed (which for a quarter vibrated), and chairs covered in orange fake leather (not that any real leather came in orange). A darker green semi-sheer curtain covered a window onto the parking lot. A little hallway went past the john to a door to the pool area. The pool, which nobody was using, was small but serviceable, surrounded by sad-looking deck chairs, the kind that drifted up on a beach after a shipwreck.
Swimming was my chief mode of exercise, relaxation and reflection, but I didn’t figure I’d be partaking of this particular perk of the Dixie Court.
Luann, not surprisingly, was trying out the TV, a futuristic mid-’60s portable on a stand.
“Shit reception,” she said, sitting on the foot of the bed. She looked cute and young in the red top and the striped jeans.
I sat next to her. “Most people don’t check in here to watch the tube.”
She turned her eyes toward me. Such a light blue. Such a lack of interest. “If you want sex, I’m okay with it.”
How could a man resist that kind of passion?
“No, Luann, we’re not here for that, either.”
I hadn’t filled her in much, because my plan was still sketchy in my mind. Back at the Tropical, I did tell her that things might get dangerous and she could stay home if she wanted. She’d just shrugged and said that she knew any trip to the state-line strip could be hairy.
“We’ll go over to the Dixie Club,” I said, holding onto her right hand like she was a child I was reassuring, “and get something to eat. Your name is Holly and I’m Bob.”
“Got it.”
“I’m going over there to kind of. . .get the lay of the place.”
“You said you didn’t want sex.”
“I mean just kind of. . .what would they say on Hawaii Five-O? Case the joint. Take a look at everything and everybody. That woman with the hammer is probably going to be there, and I want to get a handle on her.”
“You better, because she’s already got a handle. On her hammer.”
This girl was not stupid. She just had lived in a kind of bubble. Of course, that bubble had been sleazy skin palaces like Mr. Woody’s, so she should be able to take care of herself in a rough situation.
“After a while,” I said, “I’ll walk you back here. And I’ll go back by myself.”
“To do a job for Mr. Killian.”
“That’s right.”
“Rob the place? I saw you put that gun in your suitcase.”
“No. Something else. Something you don’t need to think about. Don’t need to know.”
The downside of Luann’s presence was that I was potentially bringing along a witness, and the last thing I wanted to do was have to snuff the little twat. But the upside was considerable. With her next to me, the whores at the Dixie wouldn’t swarm me. With her, I was a credible clean-cut young tourist just begging to be taken.
Whereas a guy alone could get rolled and killed.
And killing two young tourists, say a nice honeymooning couple, could get some real out-of-state interest stirred up in the side businesses at the Dixie Club.
So bringing Luann along seemed worth the risk.
Right now she was almost smiling at me. “Really, if you want to fuck before we go over there, it’s no problem.”
I had zero intention of fucking her or anybody else in this room. This was the kind of bed where you could catch twelve kinds of V.D. just jerking off.
“No, honey, this is business,” I said.
She smirked as if to say, And what I said wasn’t business?
Soon the clean-cut couple was walking across the gravel lot, where pick-up trucks mingled with sports cars and various stops between. We entered through red double doors into a big dining room with a high open-beam ceiling adding to a barn feel. Four waitresses in red-and-white checked uniforms with lacy aprons were taking orders and picking them up at a window. Nothing about the place, with its red-plastic tablecloths, folksy wooden chairs, and cement floor, conveyed anything fancy, much less sinister. What looked to be local couples aged twenties through fifties seemed comfortable dining here—not a lot of them tonight, half a dozen maybe.
A pleasant middle-aged waitress took our orders—two fried chicken baskets and Cokes—and, when I asked, said I was welcome to have a look around. But the dance hall (down to the right) was only open weekends. When our drinks came, Luann stayed behind as I did some reconnoitering.
At the far left I went through a push door into the bar, which was like entering into a different world. Country western from a jukebox, barely audible out in the dining room, blasted in here—Charley Pride singing “Kiss an Angel Good Morning.” Charley was the only black person in here. The patrons appeared to be locals ranging from retail workers to lawyers to farmers to loggers to college kids. Beer neons glowed behind a long, well-stocked teakwood bar with ten stools and two bartenders, one of them female. The tables were rough varnished wood and so were the booths.
Here the hookers were hard at work, segregated from the respectable folk partaking of the dining room’s countrified fare. This was a world of single men (well, men who’d come alone anyway) and decent-looking hookers no older than early thirties in bare-midriff blouses and minis or hot pants, doing the time-honored B-girl routine of getting watered-down drinks bought for them, with that motel next door just waiting to take it to the next rung of paradise.
On the far side of the room was a double-size doorway with a red drape hung from a curtain rod. Nobody stopped me when I pushed through into a casino that made Mr. Woody’s look like Caesar’s Palace. The walls were covered in cheap rec-room paneling, the floor cement again. More lighted beer signs rode the walls, many plastic, a few neon.
A roulette wheel, a craps table and two blackjack tables were well-attended by a mix of men similar to the bar’s, which it was slightly bigger than. One side had four sectioned-off areas for poker, two tables in play. A couple of bouncers in black t-shirts and black slacks were walking the room—they looked like country boys, thick-armed, thick-thighed, and thick-browed, ex-farmhands who got fired for diddling the livestock.
Again, the hookers were working the room, bringing luck (of a sort) to various men, some of whom spurned them but many did not. The odd thing was the variant nature of the men—a frat boy in colored t-shirt and bellbottoms rated the same kind of twenty-something babe as the country-club type with a white vinyl belt in his plaid pants. A few waitresses in black hot pants and white halter tops were threading through, handing out complimentary drinks. When a hand landed on a shapely waitress behind, it just got lifted gently off, like a piece of lint.
I was heading through the bar to rejoin Luann when I heard somebody call to me. The voice was female, mid-range and as smoky as the room itself.
“Hey, honeymooner! Bring your cute buns over here.”
The female behind the bar was in her mid-forties with a red beehive that had been in style when she dropped out of high school. Her features were formerly attractive, meaning booze and hard living had exploded them into caricature, with heavy make-up adding further cartoon touches—painted-on thick black eyebrows, big green bloodshot orbs under green eye shadow, pug nose with too-large nostrils, thin-lipped wide mouth with yellow teeth and vertical smoker’s wrinkles.
She wore a waitress’s uniform, black, cut low enough to expose as much of a shelf of bosom as possible without entering aureole territory. She also had on a white apron.
Her name tag said DIXIE.
I went over to her, leaning in between vacant bar stools. Down two from us, at the end of the counter, a deathly pale dark-haired sunken-cheeked guy—who had been handsome once in the way Dixie had been pretty once—was reading the sports section of a newspaper, smoking a cigarette, with a can of Miller’s and a glass ashtray in front of him. This was Dixie’s better half—Randolph “Dix” Dixon. Killian showed me pictures.
She said, “Fanny Rae snitched on you.”
“She did?” Who the hell was Fanny Rae?
Reading my mind, she answered, “Your waitress, you silly goofus! She says you and the pretty little lady in there are on your honeymoon.”
“Yeah, we are.” I jerked a thumb in the general direction of the Dixie Court. “This’ll make our seventh motel in as many nights.”
Dixie chortled and all of that red hair moved as one, like Mickey Mouse’s head at Disneyland. “Lucky seven!”
“Lucky seven,” I said, grinning back at her.
She leaned in and rested her boobs on the bar. She smelled like face powder and too much perfume. Probably not cheap perfume, but too much. “Listen, handsome, I got a soft spot for kids just starting out. Can I buy you two a drink?”
“Sure. Just a Shirley Temple for Holly. She doesn’t imbibe.”
“Well, ain’t that cute. How about you, good-lookin’? Do you ‘imbibe’?”
“I wouldn’t say no to a beer. Anything you have on tap is fine.”
“We got Bud and Coors.”
“Coors.”
“You sure, kid? Drinkin’ Coors is like makin’ love in a boat, you know.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah—it’s fuckin’ close to water!”
I laughed, like I hadn’t heard that a decade ago, and then pretended to read the name tag just under the exposed flesh of one vast breast. “ ‘Dixie’. . .are you the Dixie?”
“One and only. That’s the hubby—Dix. Dix! Meet the honeymoon kid here.. . .What’s your name, good-lookin’?”
“Bob.”
Dix managed a smile that was like a wrinkle in a hound dog’s neck. He gave me a lazy glance from dark rheumy wide-set eyes, then stuck out a clammy hand that I shook, and he returned to his paper.
“You go in,” Dixie said warmly, “and enjoy your dinner. That’s the best chicken in either McNairy or Alcorn Counties. Shoo! I’ll bring them drinks in myself.”
I thanked her and returned to the table, wondering if Dixie’s kindness was Act One of a melodrama that was destined to end with a good-lookin’ honeymoon kid getting looted and beat to shit in the parking lot.
Back in the dining room, the chicken arrived about the same time Dixie did with the Shirley Temple and the pilsner of Coors. She was all smiles and shook Luann’s hand, saying, “You done right good, honey. Your man’s got some nice buns on him!”
Luann whipped up a smile that seemed to satisfy Dixie, who took her leave. In her business, Luann often had to whip up such smiles.
She was looking past me as Dixie hauled herself, big boobs and all, back into the bar. “Did you see that lump?” she asked.
“You mean in her throat, when she talked about us being honeymooners?”
“No. In her apron.” ’
“Yeah. Must be a tumor.”
“What?”
“A tumor shaped remarkably like a ball-peen hammer.”
The chicken was good enough that I understood how respectable people from nearby little towns might drive out here for it, even with prostitution and gambling running wide-open next door. Luann liked the well-battered stuff, too. She seemed at her happiest eating something that wasn’t salad or some guy’s johnson.
Using both hands to hold up a chicken breast, Luann said, “Don’t let her fool you.”
“She doesn’t.”
“She isn’t nice.”
I gestured with a chicken leg. “Well, she might be nice about some things, and not nice about others. People aren’t just one thing, you know.”
“They are mostly one thing.”
“You mean nice or not nice.”
She nodded and her tiny teeth tore off a bite of breast.
I ordered Luann a dish of ice cream with chocolate sauce and left her at the table again, so I could go back in the bar and thank Dixie for her generosity.
When I got there, she was dealing with an aggrieved customer. He was a small bald man about thirty-five in a brown off-the-rack suit and he was crying.
“My wife will kill me,” he said. “My boss will fire me.”
“You’re a growed man, sir,” Dixie said coldly. “You shouldn’t ought to gamble more than you can afford.”
He lowered his voice, and I had to edge up just a little closer to hear. “There’s something you need to know. If I tell you, will you help me? I think it will help you.”
Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t. “Tell me and we’ll see.”
He swallowed. Pointing toward the red curtain onto the gambling hall, he said, “That man with the mustache and the glasses who deals poker for you? He’s cheating both of us! I lost five hundred dollars to him. All my traveling money.”
“Damn shame. I can stake you a twenty if that will help.”
“I’m only halfway through my route! I sell watches. Good ones. Hundred up. My sample case is in my trunk.” A thought jumped into his mind and his eyes. “I could give you a really fine watch, if you help me out!”
“That’s right generous.”
He was keeping his voice low. “I don’t want to embarrass you. I know you and your husband run this place.”
“We do,” she said.
Dix, reading the funnies now, was glancing the salesman’s way. He had the expression of somebody tasting an oyster for the first time.
Very quietly, the little guy said, “That mustached dealer of yours is cheating. Dealing off the bottom. I thought I saw him do it more than once. Then I saw him for sure. That’s how I lost the big hand, and it’s not right. He must be cheating you, too.”
Her hand dropped to her apron’s pouch, fingers slipping in there.
Maxwell’s silver hammer?
But instead she brought out a fat wad of cash. She peeled off twenties to the tune of what must have been five hundred and said, “We’ll just take care of this, sir. Thank you for callin’ it to our ’tention, in such a gentlemanly fashion.”
She handed him the cash.
He wasn’t crying now. He was beaming. “Thank you! Oh, Dixie. . .may I call you Dixie?”
“Please do. And what’s your name, hon?”
“Harold. Harold Reed.”
“Mr. Reed, Harold,” she said with a wide yellow smile, extending a hand and her big bosom over the bar, “don’t you be a stranger now. Never let it be said the Dixie Club can’t take a little ’structive criticism.”
Grinning, Harold Reed was counting his money as he went out the bar exit.
I said, “That’s damn decent of you, Dixie.”
She looked distracted. “Uh, yeah. Price of doin’ business.”
“I just wanted to thank you for the free drinks for my wife and me.”
She realized who I was suddenly (or anyway, thought she did). “Well, it’s my favorite honeymooner. You bet—my pleasure. You all come back.”
“Oh we will.”
I went quickly into the restaurant where Luann had just finished her ice cream. Without sitting, I took a look at the bill, which was under ten bucks, and left fifteen. Took my bride by the hand and went out.
They were fast. Dixie and her husband were already in motion, trailing the bouncer who was dragging the salesman from the parking lot to between the main building and the motel. A big air conditioner was making a lot of noise nearby.
I told Luann: “Get our bag out of the room and put it in the car. Here are the keys.”
I handed them to her.
She nodded.
“You get in the car and wait for me. Keep your head down.”
She nodded, and scurried off.
The slice of moon was painting the overgrown area behind the buildings a deceptively peaceful ivory. Forming a semicircle, they were in the ankle-high grass, but a thicket of weeds and kudzu and God knew what else was waiting like an all too penetrable wall just a few yards away.
So pale he almost glowed, Dix was smoking, grinning, his mustache riding his sneer like a surfboard does a wave. He had a gun in one hand, a snubby .38. He stood near Dixie, who faced the bouncer and his prisoner. The captor had a roundish head, a stupid face, long brown stringy hair with sideburns, and was beefy verging on fat. His chin sat on another one and his little eyes peeked out from piggy pouches. For a big guy, he didn’t look like much trouble to me.
But he was plenty of trouble for the salesman, whose arms he held pinned back. . .
. . .if not as much trouble as the big-boobed beehive redhead in the black waitress uniform and the white apron, which was already splashed with blood.
The three places where she had hit him in his bald skull with the hammer were easily visible, ribbons of red trailing from each. The little guy was woozy from pain but the mercy of unconsciousness hadn’t come his way yet.
Chicken wasn’t the only thing that got well-battered at the Dixie Club.
She snarled, “What do you think, Dix? Has our guest learned his lesson? Or does he go for a swim in the swamp?”
Dix had a laugh that was mostly cigarette cough, a harsh, terrible disruption in a night where insects and birds sang. “Put him out of his fuckin’ misery. That sample case may not be no small change, ya know.”
The little salesman said, “You can have the watches! Take them! Let me go!”
She raised the hammer and I said, “That’s enough.”
I stepped into view with the nine millimeter raised their way. No silencer, but that chugging air conditioner should do the trick.
Dix’s gun was at his side, as limp as that jaw of his, which had just trapdoored open. The bosomy broad whirled toward me and blood flew off the hammer’s head like scarlet spittle. Her lip was peeled back and her teeth looked feral and her big green bloodshot eyes looked fucking nuts.
“You!” she said.
“Drop the hammer,” I said.
“Fuck you!”
I shot her husband.
She dropped the hammer.
And the bouncer dropped the little guy, and took off running, toward that wall of bushes. The nine millimeter slug entered his head in back and a clumpy stream of things that had been inside it projectile-vomited out his forehead.
Dix was slumped in the grass, awkwardly on his side, an uncomfortable position had he been alive; he was staring at us with a ragged hole just above one expressionless eye. Several yards away, the bouncer lay face down, dead as the Confederacy. Dixie just stood there with clawed hands trembling at her side, staring at me with hot hatred that might have got to me if I didn’t have the gun.
The salesman was on his knees in the grass. He looked up at me, wondering if he had just been saved or was in the middle of something very bad about to get him killed.
“Have you ever seen me before?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Could you recognize me again?”
“No!”
“Good. Why don’t you take your five hundred dollars and go? Go. Don’t look back.”
“Thank you,” he said, getting up unsteadily. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.. . .”
And he scrambled to his feet and careened off toward the parking lot. It’s hard getting your footing after somebody has hit you in the head with a hammer three times.
Dixie was wasting no time mourning her husband. All her energy was focused on hating me. Her hands were fists now.
“Killian sent you,” she said.
“Well, it wasn’t Kilroy.”
A car engine started. Wheels spat gravel. The little salesman was on his way somewhere else.
Without taking my eyes off her, I picked up the hammer.
That gave her a start. She may not have known the term, but she was clearly thinking poetic justice might be about to come her way.
“What are you going to do?” she spat. But there was fear in her bloodshot eyes. “Kill me with it?”
“What am I, a psychopath?”
And shot her in the head.