Bitch Factor – Chapter 8
Thursday, December 24, Interstate 29
The Mustang’s tire felt solid enough on the snow covered gravel stretching back to the highway, but the icy blacktop was less forgiving. When Dixie stepped on the gas, the big engine surged and the car’s rear end fishtailed all over the road, swerving inches from an oncoming pickup truck.
She fought for control, panic snapping at her. Suddenly the tires grabbed the pavement and the car settled into the lane, steady and straight.
Dixie filled her lungs, waited a beat, then let the air seep out between her teeth, countering the surge of adrenaline that tensed her muscles.
“ Let me guess,” Dann said. “ Got your driver’s license by mail order.” It happened so fast, everything fine one minute, out of control the next. Usually, she was a good driver, facing tricky situations with a cool head, but she was tired, wired, and sleepy – the worst driving conditions she could imagine. Loosening her grasp on the steering wheel, she flexed her fingers, mentally counting to ten.
Losing control was a special fear of hers, a deep-rooted fear. As a youngster, she’d play football with the tough kids on the block, but roller skating left her hugging the rail. Where was the logic?
Just now, though, she’d done all right. Both truck and Mustang sped unmarred toward their destinations. By midnight or bust, she’d make Omaha, even without chains or snow tires.
Easing up on the gas, she relaxed into a comfortable cruising speed a hair over forty-five. Driving would be a damn sight easier if she could give her eyes a rest from the blinding whiteness. Squinting made her head ache, yet her sunglasses were too dark. Their comforting shade would coddle her right to sleep.
A silent barrage of snowflakes flying straight at the windshield was sleep-inducing enough, every bit as mesmerizing as the glistening ribbons snaking along the highway in front of her. Dixie cast her gaze into the distance and tapped her foot to an imaginary rock band, refusing to be lulled.
“No ketchup for these fries,” Dann groused.
“Look in the other bag.”
Dixie heard a rustle of paper followed by the crinkle of plastic packets. She’d tossed everything to the back except the thermos of coffee.
“Damn good burgers. Do you want one?”
“Later maybe. Not now.”
Her stomach felt as empty as a winter ball park, but tanking up on food would only encourage sleep. With the lane stripes buried under the snow, she had to keep sharp to stay on the road. Luckily, the highway was straight and flat.
“Saw you thump your bumper back there at the cafe. Nasty fall. Surprised you didn’t break something.”
Dixie ignored him. Conversing with skips made as much sense as laundering bullshit. Skips bitched about how the cops handled their investigation, bitched about their own attorneys, and bitched about the system in general. They could spin heartrending stories asserting their innocence, but anyone guppy enough to listen would be broadsided later by the truth.
If she made a list of people to scrape off the face of the earth, drunk drivers would crowd right up near the top. Dumb, self centered and lethal. She could understand anyone getting snockered – hell, she’d been snockered a few times herself, had even curled up in the backseat to sleep it off. But a drunk behind the steering wheel turned a car into a weapon. Parker Dann might as well have held a gun to Betsy Keyes’ head and pulled the trigger.
“Probably stepped on a patch of black ice back there,” Dann mumbled around his hamburger.
Sure was a talkative bastard.
A shock of wind slapped the car, sending it scudding across the road. Startled, Dixie clenched the wheel and took her foot off the gas until the car righted itself. It had swerved only a few inches into the other lane, but the incident left her shaken. Crosswinds could be devastating. She had battled them on the Texas flatlands, usually during spring or fall, not dead of winter; never on icy pavement. She slowed to forty.
“Black ice,” Dann was saying, “dangerous stuff. Slick as oiled glass…”
At forty miles an hour, Dixie calculated, we’ll make Watertown in three hours, Sioux Falls in five.
“… builds up in thin sheets. So clear you see the pavement through it and don’t know you’re on ice until it’s spinning you nine ways to Sunday.”
The entire sky now roiled with clouds, forward horizon as murky as the one behind. Folks at the diner hadn’t been joking when they called it a devil storm. Dixie nudged her speed back up to forty-five. She wanted to be clear of this mess before dark.
The buzz-saw sound of Dann’s snoring drifted from the backseat. Much better than listening to his prattle. The next twenty hours would be nerve-racking enough without his voice to grind on her. A dismal damn way to spend Christmas Eve.
At home, she could be finishing her Christmas shopping, buying batteries for Ryan’s new remote-control model airplane. Recalling her nephews beaming face the day they’d come upon the Cessna in the hobby store, Dixie smiled.
“If I had this, Aunt Dix, we could go flying together!”
One day, while exploring the attic, he’d seen Dixie’s identical model, a gift from Barney her first Christmas after the adoption. With visions of dueling Cessnas, and showing off her model-flying skills, Dixie had waited until Ryan’s interest was captured by a rack of CD’s, then skulked back over to have the Cessna wrapped and shipped to Amy’s. What were kids for, after all, if not a chance to relive the best moments of our lives?
Dixie glanced at the sun visor, where she had clipped the Christmas snapshot of the Keyes girls. Dixie had been just a year older than Betsy the day her blood mother, Carla Jean, dropped her on the doorstep of Founders Home and disappeared – the best thing that could have happened. Within a month, Barney and Kathleen rescued Dixie, and a few months later, their lawyer tracked down Carla Jean to sign the adoption papers. Withdrawn at first, Dixie had soon warmed to the love that permeated her new home. Amy was fifteen, and the two girls became inseparable.
Dixie’s gaze flicked once more to the big grins in the Keyes snapshot. Living with the Flannigans had erased the horrors of her first twelve years. But Betsy’s young life had been snuffed before it had a chance.
According to the dash clock, Dixie’d been driving half an hour, but had traveled barely twenty miles. Maybe Omaha-by-midnight was a trifle ambitious.
A crust of ice covered the windshield outside the fan-shaped area scraped clear by the wipers. That same icy crust would be building up on the pavement. Her arms ached from fighting the crosswind. Her eyes felt grainy and raw from the tiresome whiteness.
She closed them briefly for relief….
Damn she needed sleep!
Jabbing the radio’s ON button, she set the scanner to search for a local station. It swept the band, found nothing but static. Dixie turned up the volume, rotated the dial, and picked up a few words. They faded. Her next sweep got only dead air.
Turning it off, she listened instead to the hum of the heater fan…
the scrape, scrape, scrape of the wipers…
A grunt from the backseat signaled her prisoner’s awakening. Snow fell so furiously now that Dixie could scarcely see past the hood. The Mustang’s speed had dropped to thirty, and they’d traveled fewer than fifty miles since leaving the diner.
“Look at those taillights,” Dann said suddenly. “See them up ahead there?”
Dixie could barely make out the twin red specks. Where had they come from?
“That’s a truck. A big one. Lights are too high off the ground for anything else. Probably turned in from one of the state roads.”
You mean there’s another fool on this highway? Dixie had begun to think the world ended at the Grandin Diner.
“If you catch those taillights,” Dann said, “we can travel in the truck’s wake…”
Like riding behind the windshield wipers.
“…plow right behind him all the way to Watertown. Yep, catch those taillights, we might make it.”
The distance between the Mustang and those red lights were tantamount to leaping the Grand Canyon. The truck driver must have been going fifty, at least. Dixie nudged the Mustang to forty and instantly felt the tires lose their traction, the same way she’d lost her footing on the icy sidewalk. The brutal crosswind threatened to blow them into Iowa.
Yet those tail lights were the only sign of life Dixie had seen in nearly and hour. Tightening her grip on the steering wheel, she pushed her speed past forty, past forty-five.
She’d driven through stretches of Texas as desolate as this, miles of highway without passing a car, no sign of a town, nothing to break the monotony but fence posts, road signs, and from time to time, a cow lumbering along the road. Here, even the fence posts were buried.
A bleak white emptiness stretched all around, the delineation between highway and prairie no longer discernible. Dixie felt like an ant skating on whipped cream. Only her intuition and the occasional reflector kept the Mustang from running off the road.
A flash of movement streaked across the highway.
Dixie stomped the brake –
The steering wheel whipped through her hands.
The car spun out of control – whirling in sickening gut wrenching circles – skidded sideways, tires skimming the ice like new skates, gliding, sailing, sliding – and whammed bumper deep into a snowbank.
“Dammit to hell, woman. You sure know how to make a bad day worse.”
Join me right here next week for the next Bitch Factor chapter… because you’ll want to read what happens next.
Meanwhile, check out Slice of Life, another Dixie Flannigan book. You can watch the cool Slice of Life video trailer below…
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