Chill Factor (3 page)

Fifteen-year-old Amy, Dixie’s adoptive sister, had bought her a sundae just last week. Dixie hadn’t thought about where the money came from. Should she pay Amy back?

Money … her own money … money of her very own.
Dixie’s
teenage head suddenly ached. She opened the pink purse and shoved the bills into Barney’s broad hands.

“
Please.
You take care of it for me.”

Despite Barney’s patient counseling, she’d avoided dealing with money ever since. And the bank officer who’d opened that first “principal” savings account had been a much younger, much thinner Len Bacon.

“Here it is,” Len said now. “Here’s the problem. A two-thousand-dollar check you deposited, Dixie, was returned from the payee’s bank, marked insufficient. My dear, when you made the deposit, you apparently withdrew a thousand dollars of the money in cash.” His voice dropped into the sympathetic zone. “When the check was returned to us unpaid, we had to debit your account for the cash you received.”

A handful of unopened mail lay in a basket in Dixie’s kitchen, where she’d tossed it before her thirty-six-hour skip-chasing flurry.

“That’s
one
thousand. What about the other two?”

He scrolled through the numbers and hit a couple of keys.

“More of the same … yes, more of the same. You deposited four more checks … hmmm, that’s interesting, at four different branches in one day … each time withdrawing part of the funds in cash. All five deposited checks were returned insufficient.”

Five deposits? Hell, she hadn’t received that many checks last month. And she never used another branch, except for ATM withdrawals.

“Who are the checks from?”

“Hmmmm, let’s see … here it is—Cook. All five checks—for different amounts—were written on the personal account of a Mr. James Cook.”

“Never heard of him.”

Len swiveled to face Dixie. “You’re saying you didn’t make those deposits?”

“No, I—”

The office door popped open, and Dana stuck her head in.

“Mr. Bacon! This … this lady says you’re to come out here immediately!”

Through the glass wall separating Len’s office from the
lobby, Dixie could see people lying prone on the floor. At the teller’s window, a smiling, middle-aged woman pointed a revolver at a teller’s head.
A holdup?

Watching Len scurry to comply, Dixie mentally ticked off a half-dozen stupid tactics that might stop the robbery and would likely get someone shot. Her gaze took in the video camera near the lobby ceiling, the frightened teller, the woman with the gun.

She looked familiar …

Then Dixie’s gaze locked on the desk phone, inches from her hand. Her fingers flexed toward it—

No … wait for the right moment.

Through the glass partition, she studied the bank robber. Five-three, late fifties, blond-gray hair stylishly combed. Pleasant, round face. Blue silk dress, matching shoes, gold earrings. Impeccably groomed. Hell, she was the TV version of every kid’s Aunt Bea.

Aunt Bea wouldn’t actually pull the trigger and blow a teller’s head off.

But then, neither would she rob a bank.

Two other Texas Citizens branches had been robbed recently, Dixie recalled—one just yesterday. In both cases, the thief was a woman over fifty—but that woman was
killed
after the second robbery. The police shoot-out had been all over the evening news. One middle-aged female bank robber seemed impossible, but two?

As Len hustled behind the tellers’ counter to the vault, the robber shifted slightly to watch him. Dixie waited a beat, then reached across the desk, eased the receiver up to open the line, and tapped 9—1—

Something crashed through the glass,
zing
ed past Dixie, and slammed into Len’s leather chair.
A bullet!
She dropped the phone.

Her heart thumped hard enough to break a rib.

The bank robber, smiling her sweet Aunt Bea smile, shook her head at Dixie and motioned her down to the floor. As Dixie knelt, glimpsing the woman’s face from a new angle, she recognized her: not Aunt Bea but Aunt Edna, her own neighbor!

Memories flashed through Dixie’s mind: She’d gone to
school with Edna Pine’s son, Marty. Dated him in high school. Every summer, Edna and her husband Bill had taken the three teenagers—Marty, Dixie, and Amy—camping at Brazos Bend State Park, bowling at Richmond Lanes. The last time Dixie’d seen Edna—a year ago, at Bill’s funeral—she’d hugged the widow as she sobbed into a handkerchief.

But even at Bill’s funeral Edna hadn’t been gussied up as she was now—looking not a day over fifty-five when she must be a decade older. No wonder Dixie hadn’t recognized the woman.

Gussied up or not, the Edna Dixie knew was a loving mother, a gentle soul. Kind. Thoughtful. A good neighbor.
No way was Aunt Edna a gun-wielding bank robber.

Yet, pressed to the floor, Dixie watched through the glass partition as her neighbor of nearly twenty-eight years carried away three canvas bags bulging with stolen money.

Humming “The Merry Widow,” fingers marking perfect waltz time on the steering wheel, the Shepherd of The Light watched for Edna’s blue Subaru to exit the bank parking lot. Balanced on his knee was a small, gold-edged notebook where he’d recorded the subject’s progress. The careful jottings included phrases he knew would brighten the widow’s smile or cause her pain, key words that, used in the right order, would entice her into a lion’s cage should he choose to suggest it.

He’d tuned Edna like an exquisite piano. In precisely ninety-two seconds she’d sail past him, eagerly delivering the bank’s money.

The only hitch had come when the Shepherd arrived to find a Houston Lighting & Power crew working on a transformer near the drop point.
Subject will realize she must drop the bag outside the workers’ line of vision
, he penned, in his precise style.
The minimal script change will not cause her any confusion.

But as he capped his pen, the Shepherd’s pulse quickened. No subject was entirely predictable. Yet, he felt certain his merry widow could easily handle such an insignificant correction in the script, and each test she passed reinforced his belief in the power of positive—or negative—persuasion.

Outside his car window, a brown spider dropped a thread
from the splayed fingers of a mimosa leaf and hung suspended, swinging gently in the morning breeze. The Shepherd watched, fascinated, as the slender, jointed legs worked at casting a second thread.

Sometimes the Shepherd liked to imagine himself a mighty arachnid, commander of a giant web spanning the underbelly of the country’s control centers, touching the most powerful offices, the most influential homes. Thrum any strand and the entire web vibrated.

He’d learned about vibrations on an October afternoon when he was nine years old. School let out early. Whooping with glee and bounding with energy, he rode his bike the long way home, knowing his mother wouldn’t arrive from her Bible study group until later. She’d promised to decide today whether he’d get the new racing bike in Johnson’s shop window.

But passing the Cactus Bar, he noticed something that caused him to brake hard and pull over into the shadows, the gossamer fabric of an idea materializing in his brain.

During one of his parents’ arguments, loud enough to hear throughout the house, his father had promised to stop gambling. Yet, here he came now, out of the Cactus Bar & Truck Stop. And the scowl dragging the corners of his mouth southward suggested his pockets had been plucked clean.

A moment later one of his father’s gambling buddies exited, shoving a wad of bills deep in his pocket. A woman clung to the man’s arm like a sand burr to socks. Both laughed, heading toward a row of cabins. His father tossed a hard look after the pair, then staggered to his Plymouth sedan.

The bike seemed to move on its own. Rolling right up to the car, its front wheel bumped his father’s leg.

“What the hell?” His father’s billfold fell to the dirt.

“Sorry, Dad.” But as he picked up the empty leather wallet, he resisted a smile, recalling his mother’s words during the noisy argument …
If I hear you’re gambling again, I’m calling a lawyer and filing for divorce.
“What’s wrong with a friendly poker game,” his father had whined.
Friendly? Your friends lining their pockets with
my
money? I won’t have it.

Dusting off the billfold, he asked, “Did Mom talk to you about the blue racer?”

“The blue what?” His father’s words sounded mushy and smelled of the Scotch whiskey he liked to drink. “You mean that bicycle you’ve been on about?”

“In Johnson’s Sport Shop. She’ll buy it if you say to.” He let his gaze drift toward the bar, where two more of his father’s gambling pals had stepped out the door.

“You’ve got a bicycle. Perfectly good one.” But his father darted an anxious glance at the two men, another at the couple, still laughing as they entered a cabin, then back at his son. “That racer, boy, that’s a lot of money,” he added, as if the cost hadn’t already been discussed at length.

“Yes, sir. My birthday’s only a month—”

“Your mother worries you’re not mature enough to take care of a bicycle that expensive. Not a toy, it’s a responsibility.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you know about …
responsibility?”
His father spit the word at him, harsh and biting.

“Keep my room picked up. Get good grades.” Ever since the blue racer appeared in the shop window, he’d been cleaning his room and doing his homework without being nagged. “Take out the trash.” He’d only missed one night this week.

The crease between his father’s eyes sharpened like a hatchet mark. “Your mother has a great deal on her mind these days, church studies, the new housekeeper. I don’t like worrying her about … things.”

“No, sir.” Some of his parents’ noisiest arguments concerned the amount of time his mother spent at church. “But the racer—” He stopped suggestively.

“There’s no need to trouble your mother about my stopping off here. For one
drink”

“No, sir.”

“Boy your age, old enough to understand
responsibility
, doesn’t worry his mother. You won’t be bothering her about … anything?”

“No, sir.”

They stared at each other in the afternoon heat. Sweat beads hung from the bristly hairs above his father’s ears; his eyes, small and green and hard, did not blink. Finally, his father looked away.

“Guess I can put a bug in your mother’s ear about that bicycle, tell her you’re grown-up enough. I’ll talk to her tonight.”

“Great! Thanks, Dad!”

Later that week, as he zipped along on the gleaming blue racer, the situation between his mother and father and the gambling popped repeatedly into his mind. He suspected his mother would’ve reached a different decision about the new bike if not for his father’s encouragement … if not for that chance ride past the Cactus Bar & Truck Stop. He filed away the experience to examine again from time to time. To squeeze every bit of learning out of it.
Thrum.

A week later, at lunch, he sat beside Penny Hatcher, the most awkward, smelliest girl in his fourth-grade class. No prize himself—short, skinny, with big ears, freckles so dark and numerous he looked diseased—he knew well how it felt to be snubbed. When Laura Shane, the class beauty, strolled by their table and “accidentally” tipped over Penny’s milk, ruining her sandwich, he offered Penny half his lunch.

At first, she was dubious. No one
ever
treated Penny kindly, probably not even at home. When she realized he wasn’t going to snatch the sandwich back at the last moment or tease her in some other monstrous way, she turned to him with the most astonishing look.

“Grateful” was how he eventually tagged it, as his father had been grateful that his mother never found out about the continued gambling. But at that moment he only knew, instinctively, that Penny Hatcher would do practically anything he asked because he’d shown her that small courtesy.
Ask her for something
, the voice nagged, the voice he’d come to think of as his racer voice.
Ask her now.

But he couldn’t think of anything.

“I’m failing arithmetic,” he’d stammered, finally. “And you’re the best in class. I wish I was as smart as you.”

“Really?” Penny blushed. “I’d be glad to help you.”

Thrum.

Over the months ahead, he thought of Penny as a banjo that needed only a talented hand at the strings. He learned exactly what to say and do to intensify that look in her pale eyes.

“Is that a new dress? The color looks great on you.”

Penny started washing more often after that and doing something different with her hair.

“I like it curly,” he told her. “You could be in the movies.”

She laughed, but walked prouder and spoke up more often in class.

“Your oral report,” he promised, “will be the best of anyone’s. Read it to me again for practice.”

By the end of the school year, Penny had earned respect from the teacher as well as her classmates. She’d never win any beauty contests, but she no longer sat alone at lunch. And the look in her eyes when she gazed at him bordered on worship.

In return, he rarely asked anything of Penny. A week before summer break, he decided it was time.

“Did you see that catcher’s mitt at Johnson’s Sport Shop? I can’t believe Mom won’t buy it for me. I need that mitt for try-outs next week.”

Of course, Mom
would
buy it—he knew by now that all it’d take was casually mentioning the Cactus Bar & Truck Stop when Dad was in the room—but he wanted to test Penny’s gratitude. Three days later, she gave him the catcher’s mitt wrapped in a brown gift box. He never asked how she got it.

Over the following summer, he thought a lot about that experiment with Penny, never doubting that his friendship and coaching had elevated her from class embarrassment to class monitor. If he could do that with Penny, why not with someone more … promising?
Thrum.

During the next four years, he singled out seven classmates for special attention. The girls were by far more compliant than the boys, but he sensed the key lay not so much in gender as in some other quality he hadn’t quite identified, at least not consciously. Operating mostly by instinct, he created a network of devoted disciples, learned to play each one like an instrument, discovering when to strum a chord and when to thump it. By the end of grade school, his network had helped him acquire answers to a number of math tests and kept him supplied with the latest sports equipment.