Slice of Life Snippet 2
Imagining her sister’s plump, cheerful face twisted with alarm, Dixie felt a twinge of culpability.
“His mom saw the car at four-twenty,” Ryan added. “I was afraid you wouldn’t get home in time to go after it.”
“Ryan, thousands of cars travel that highway. Thousands. We need to call the Highway Patrol.”
“Would we still get the reward?”
“Possibly.” If the mail carrier had indeed spotted the right car, if the Highway Patrol apprehended Thompson before she went to ground, and if they acknowledged that Ryan’s tip led directly to her capture. “But don’t get too excited about collecting. Like I said from the start, it’s a long shot.”
“Wouldn’t be a long shot if you brought her in.”
“First, we’d have to find her. Houston’s a big city.”
“You’d go to the places she’d go. That’s how you said you catch bail jumpers.”
True. People could change locations, jobs, cars, even their appearance, but habits drew them to familiar territory like wild game to a watering hole. Find out two things: who they know, where they go out of habit, and eventually—by burning up phone lines, tire tread and boot leather—you find the skip.
“But all we know about Thompson is that she usually works sales jobs in small towns. Makes me doubt she’d actually come to Houston.” Most recently, the clever twenty-year-old thief had managed a computer store in Tulip, Arkansas—a burg.
“We have small towns. Humble. Seabrook. You live in a small town.”
Richmond, Texas, population thirty-eight thousand, was indeed located on Highway 59, currently Thompson’s route from Nacogdoches. The highway continued south straight through Houston and all the way to the Mexico border, and felony theft, even with no violence attached, would put Thompson on every Texas law officer’s punch list—unless the mail carrier really was the only person who’d spotted the Escort after it left Arkansas.
According to Ryan’s email source in Tulip, the girl had worked there three months, nearly doubling the computer store’s sales. But when the owner strolled through the warehouse, showing inventory to a potential buyer, a casual hand against a row of pricey software and peripherals had sent boxes tumbling like a house of cards.
Empty boxes. Out front, customers stood waiting to pay at an equally empty, and unattended, cash register. Marla Jennae Thompson had fled. Enraged at being ripped off, the owner posted an unusually generous reward for the girl’s capture.
“We could drive to the small towns between Richmond and Nacogdoches,” Ryan coaxed.
The thought of driving anywhere at the moment made Dixie’s butt ache. Her gaze shifted to the calendar. MONDAY: COURT APPEARANCE. Immediately following the weekend she was due to testify against a skip who’d backed into Dixie’s .45 when he tried to hold up a coffee shop for traveling money. But the subject of her immediate interest was penciled on today’s date: DINNER, CHATEAU La FITTE, 8:30. Eighty miles south, but with a promise of sun, fun and sex.
She rubbed a kink in her aching neck. She needed this weekend, dammit.
“Okay, kid. Tomorrow I’ll check small-town stores along the highway for any new hires. Burn up the phone lines instead of tire tread and boot leather.”
“Tomorrow?! Aunt Dix—”
“Traveling up and down the highway is not an option, Ryan.” Her voice sounded harsher than she intended. Usually, she’d move mountains to live up to Ryan’s unshakable faith in her super powers. Thirty-nine and childless, she valued their relationship, had fallen under the twerp’s spell the instant she first held him, scarcely out of his mother’s womb. Her gaze fell on a framed aphorism rendered in needlepoint by her adoptive mother: Years Wrinkle the Skin; Loss Of Enthusiasm Wrinkles the Soul. Dixie shaved the barb from her voice as she added, “Anyway, I’ll be in Galveston tonight.” And all weekend, if she could swing it.
“With Parker?” Ryan’s buffered image on the monitor gave a jerky thumbs-up.
“Of course, with Parker.”
“If you picked me up, we could all drive—”
“Not an option.” Dixie snapped off the monitor, tossed an Astros cap over the tiny camera and began peeling out of her sweaty camp shirt. But she couldn’t keep her gaze from wandering over the WANTED poster again.
Apparently, police had identified two similar crimes in Texas and Georgia; no fingerprint ID yet, but probably the same young woman with different hair color and an alias. Her recent employer, who posted the reward, knew her as Jennae Thompson. Customers liked her, but no one admitted knowing her well. Two footnotes on the reward sheet described her as handy with disguises and an addicted gambler.
Not a lot to go on.
Twenty refreshing minutes later, damp from a shower and wrapped in a terry cloth robe, Dixie snapped the monitor back on. Instead of Ryan’s goofy grin, she saw a full-color photo of Marla Jennae Thompson.
“She’s a hottie,” Ryan commented.
He’d only recently brought girls into their conversations. Dixie wanted to be cool about it, but couldn’t he stay a kid a while longer? She uncovered the camera.
“Jennae Thompson is twenty years old and a three-time felon,” Dixie said pointedly. “Who will very probably waste her best years sitting in a nasty little room with bars.”
The photo slid away, replaced by Ryan’s jerky image, turned solemn. Until now, his computer chase of the accused felon had been about as real as his favorite online game. His next words sounded darkly thoughtful.
“What if she’s innocent?”
“That’s why we have lawyers, judges, and due process.”
“It’s not like she killed someone.”
“Theft is a crime, Ryan. She’ll be arrested—”
“What if she had a really good reason? Would she get off?”
“A good reason to steal?” Dixie studied the girl’s face on the yellow printout. In ten years as a state prosecutor, Dixie’d seen younger criminals, and they never failed to sadden her. She saw in Thompson’s eyes something unexpected, something vulnerable and desperate. Before being adopted at twelve, Dixie’d known plenty of desperate moments that might easily have sent her down a dead-end road if not for the Flannigans’ intervention. Jennae Thompson had progressed from purse snatching at eighteen—arrest but no conviction in her home state of Georgia—to fraud and grand theft. Unless someone intervened now, the girl was destined to do hard time.
“Maybe she stole stuff so her family could eat,” Ryan suggested.
“Right. Food stamps are too embarrassing, so she robs her employer.”
“He was insured.”
“You mean it’s okay if the insurance company gets ripped off?” Dixie sighed. “The line between right and wrong shouldn’t be so hazy, kid. I’m with you on that part. But once we turn Thompson in, her fate is out of our hands.” Earlier in the year, Ryan had landed in some Internet trouble and lost computer privileges. Dixie’d been the badass aunt who ratted him out to his parents. Ryan hadn’t spoken to her for weeks, and still didn’t believe what he’d done was such a big deal. Maybe it wasn’t. But Dixie’d put away too many offenders who might’ve been saved if someone had ladled good sense into their stubborn brains before they hardened to concrete.
“If we don’t find her and claim the reward, someone else will,” Ryan said, in a voice that lacked conviction.
“Or maybe she’ll zip across the border and vanish. A single white female can find all sorts of trouble in Mexico. She could land in a jail far more sordid than the Harris County lockup.”
“Should we keep looking then?”
“You started this, Ryan. What do you think?” He needed to discover which side of that hazy line he intended to toe. Regardless, Dixie was keeping that dinner date tonight.
“If we catch her, she’ll go back to Arkansas?” Ryan asked.
“Eventually, perhaps, but she’ll be arrested here in Texas, where she’s wanted for an earlier felony.”
“What if she makes it all the way to Mexico? Would you still go after her?”
Three-hundred-thirty-one-point-six miles, providing Jennae Thompson stayed on Highway 59 all the way to the border crossing at Laredo. Five hard hours, even with the Mustang tapping ninety. Then there’d be the trip back, Dixie’s butt numb as a rock, furious prisoner yammering through the steel mesh separating the front and back seats. Smarter to turn her in to the Texas Highway Patrol and let them deal with the transport. In any case, if she wanted to travel with air conditioning, Dixie would have to forgo the Mustang’s speed and take one of the other three vehicles she’d bought cheap from skips with no current need for wheels.
