Slice of Life Snippet 1
PROLOGUE
“Two ripe and ready redheads. How’d I get so lucky?” Leon Stovall tried to sound hip and experienced, to sound like anything but an overweight, slightly drunk, nineteen-year-old virgin.
He copped a feel under the heavy one’s T-shirt. Sharon, wasn’t that her name?
The slighter one teased his zipper down. “Before you go talking about luck, Leon, let’s see the size of your ante.”
“What, right here?” Leon had stood naked in gym showers often enough to know he wasn’t lacking in size, but he’d never shown it to a girl. He glanced at the glaring light bulb swinging from a grimy electrical cord, then at the cluttered shelves, rusted file cabinets, and dusty racks of wine bottles, some probably older than he was. A storage room. “Don’t you have a bedroom in this spooky old shack? Cold as iced shit up here.”
“Not for long,” Sharon whispered, nipping gently at his neck.
She smelled as sweet as fresh mown grass on a sunny afternoon. They’d entered the storage room by sneaking up a narrow back stairway. After loosening his silver belt buckle,
Sharon had pushed him into a lumpy overstuffed chair, the only soft spot in the cramped room. Dust whooshed up around him.
The other girl knelt beside his thighs. What an arm chair was doing crammed here among the wooden crates, Leon couldn’t grasp. To sit and count the wine bottles? He took a long pull from the Bordeaux they’d opened.
“What’s that song? ‘Ninety-nine bottles of wine on the wall …’” Leon bellowed it in his good voice, six years in the choir, four singing solo, and wished he had as much confidence about women as about singing. “‘Ninety-nine bottles of wine—’”
“Shhhhh!” The skinny one batted his arm. “Quiet! Anyway, that song’s about beer, not wine.”
“‘If one of those—’”
Sharon covered his mouth with her soft lips. The skinny girl’s hand slipped into his khakis. Leon squeezed a sizable mound of firm breast, tasted the wine-sweetened mouth, and let everything between his ears go fuzzy.
What a damn lucky day picking up these two, his first driving trip this far west, stopping in that bar, buying a round with his Pick Three winnings, them cozying up like he’s Daddy Warbucks. Well, hell, let’s have some fun!
A smooth warm hand encircled his Johnson, and a buzz of expectation zinged through his belly. Hunching upward to encourage the stroking hand, he thrust his tongue into Sharon’s moist mouth.
After a moment, she whispered, “We’ll be right back.”
“No, c’mon. I’ve got what we need right here in my back pocket. Never leave home without. Just give me a sec.” He reached for his wallet and the plastic pouch—replaced faithfully every six months—that had etched a circle in the worn leather. They couldn’t leave him all hard and ready and not go through with it, could they? Wasn’t there some unwritten rule?
“Put it on, Leon. We’ll be right back.”
“Oh, hell, Sharon. Don’t go.”
She pressed her velvet lips to his. “Have a little patience. You won’t be sorry.”
They’d vanished behind the wine racks—what was back there, anyway? Leon took another drink before easing Big John out of his pants and into the rubber.
He heard a toilet flush. Wouldn’t mind letting go some of what he’d drunk. But what was that other sound? Someone crying? Big, wailing moans.
“Mama!”
Hells bells. That skinny one had looked awful young, maybe too young, but Sharon sure wasn’t old enough to be her mother.
“Oh, Mama. No!”
The misery in the girl’s shriek cut through him.
Leon zipped his pants over his dwindling erection and pushed himself from the chair, unsettling another cloud of dust. He wasn’t one to go looking for trouble, but he couldn’t ignore those sobs. If they were arguing about having sex with him, well, he could straighten that out. Plenty to go around.
He took another swig and tottered toward the sobs. Saw an open door to a lavatory, toilet, and sink. Beside the door, a wine rack pulled away from the wall, exposing a room
behind it—dark, but … hell, they did have a bedroom up here.
And someone in the bed.
Leon grinned. Playing games?
He glanced at the wine bottle in his hand, nearly empty. Raised it to his lips and poured the mellow liquid into his mouth. He could play games.
With his next step, he saw what all the wailing was about. The wine he’d drunk rose in his gullet like rotted sewage. The bottle slid from his hand.
He stumbled backward through the broken glass. The bloody death in that room had nothing to do with him. Nothing. He should just leave. The house, the town. The state. Keep moving, don’t look back.
Before he could turn away, Leon felt a slice of cold steel at his throat. He choked, gasped, clawed at the pain. He kicked out convulsively. Then he slid to a concrete floor made slippery with his own blood.
*
Run, her brain screamed. Run!
But her knees wanted to fold, her body longed to slump around her leaden feet, curl up and wait to die.
Eyes darting, taking in all the blood, the bodies, her brain shrieked again—and this time she found her voice. “Run!”
A hand clamped over her wrist, bloody and slick.
She yelped, twisted free, and ran … ran … ran …
CHAPTER 1
Friday afternoon
From El Paso, Texas, to Houston is nearly the same distance as driving across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, and Virginia—but West Texas is a damn sight bleaker and dustier. After retrieving a smelly, Bible-quoting bail jumper, Dixie Flannigan pushed the Mustang to triple digits and covered the seven-hundred-odd miles in just under nine hours. Near San Antonio her air conditioner wheezed its final puff of cool air, setting the prisoner to grumbling and allowing the August heat to sap Dixie’s last ounce of give-a-damn.
Sweaty, cranky, but with the accused felon finally handed over to Houston police, she drove the twenty-seven miles home. Under the blessed shade of pecan trees, she shouldered her ready bag through the kitchen door, hell-bent on improving her mood before a dinner date later that night.
Despite feeling like something you’d scrape off your shoe, Dixie couldn’t help smiling. Looking forward to this dinner date had kept her going those last few hours on the road. She kicked the door shut behind her. Skin-prickling shower followed by an icy mug of Shiner Bock …
“Welcome,” her computer greeted saucily. “Check your mailbox.”
“Greetings to you, too,” she groused.
How her teenage nephew had managed to rig the door lock to trigger her on-line message service—with auxiliary speakers in every room—Dixie couldn’t fathom. The imp had also set up video-conferencing.
“Aunt Dix! We got another hit on that Arkansas license plate!”
Dixie kicked off her dusty boots, grabbed a cold beer from the fridge and carried it into the office.
“Hey, kid.” The sight of Ryan’s goofy grin on her computer monitor mellowed her out faster than a six-pack of Shiner. “What’s cooking?”
“A mail carrier in Nacogdoches spotted Thompson’s Ford Escort headed south on Highway Fifty-Nine. She’s gotta be coming here.”
Not a bad bet. Dixie lifted a sheet of pale yellow paper from her printer—she’d forgotten to remove the letterhead stock again. Above the photo of a young woman’s grimly attractive face appeared a single word: WANTED. A paragraph below gave the particulars.
Usually, Dixie focused her bounty hunting skills on rounding up suspects who’d skipped while awaiting trial. But early that morning Ryan had discovered the thirty-thousand-dollar reward for Marla Jennae Thompson posted on the Internet, sparking a dialogue about the suspect’s possible whereabouts as Dixie drove across Texas. His unflagging enthusiasm for pursuing the reward was typical of a thirteen-year-old’s ability to resist reason.
“Ryan, every cop and bounty hunter in East Texas will be watching that highway, with more manpower than—”
“That’s the cool part. Nobody knows but us—and my email bud in Nacogdoches.”
Sure, kid. She sighed sympathetically at the tiny camera her nephew had stationed atop her vintage PC.
“Such a tasty morsel of information will spread faster than hot cane syrup on a short stack.” Dixie gazed out the window, glad to be home, even for a few hours. She peeled off her socks and toed a button on her CD player to start the mellow
riffs of a jazz sax. Then she looked back at her nephew, all cheekbones and scrawny neck in his sudden growth of puberty. “Where did your friend hear it?”
“His mom is the mail carrier who spotted the Escort.”
“Why didn’t she notify the local police?”
“She hates cops. His dad is a cop.”
“But she told her son, who put it on the Internet? Don’t you think cops have access?”
“We’re talking private email, not a post. He’s in with us.”
Dixie’s ears did a double-take. “What do you mean ‘in with us’?”
“A bird dog—like you told me about. When we claim the reward, he and his mom get a split.”
Dixie’s network of bird dogs—law officers and other individuals she counted on to relay information—stretched across most of the fifty states and into Mexico and Canada. Ryan’s online chat groups appeared to be equally handy. But what would the kids’ mothers think about their teenagers tracking a felony suspect, even over the relative safety of the Internet?
