Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 01 - Last Call

by Rob Cornell

  I staggered back, somehow keeping my feet. My lips felt hot and wet. When I dabbed them against the back of my hand, I came away with blood.

  “You’re not the tough kid in Hawthorne anymore,” Tom said.

  It was a good line to end on. A movie moment. Now he would turn on his heel and disappear into the shadows. Instead, he charged me and threw three more punches, all quicker than I’d seen in a long time.

  The first one I managed to block only because I saw him coming. I didn’t expect two more to follow so fast. The second punch caught me in the ear, the third in my eye.

  I tried a wild haymaker, but he owned me with all that early damage.

  Pretty soon I huddled against the High Note’s brick façade, elbows tucked in, trying to minimize the effect of his barrage of jabs and uppercuts.

  A brief image of Tom from high school with the crooked glasses and the brittle arms came to mind. That Tom was long gone, and the new Tom wanted to make sure I knew it.

  When I hit the ground, he finally stopped punching. The air felt twice as cold as it should have for a May night. I shivered and waited for a final kick. It wasn’t until I finally looked up that I realized the blow would not come.

  Tom was gone.

  Chapter 10

  It should have taken me an hour and a half to get from the High Note to my parents’ cabin; I got there in forty-five minutes. I even drove the long way to make sure Tom and his bald sidekick hadn’t resumed their surveillance.

  I barged through the door, my face throbbing. I hadn’t bothered checking the damage Tom had dealt except for a quick glance in the rearview mirror, and I could only imagine what I looked like when I charged into the cabin.

  Wearing a towel wrapped around her body as if she had just showered, Autumn sat on a recliner next to a short bookshelf, her hair wet. The book she had pulled from the shelf and started reading popped out of her hands when I entered. The corner of the towel tucked in above one breast slipped free. She hugged the towel against her, gaping at me.

  I slammed the door and leaned back against it. Pain volleyed between my torso and my face as if my body didn’t know where to hurt more.

  Autumn secured her towel and moved toward me. She tried to touch my cheek, but I flinched away.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “You don’t like? It’s the new me.”

  My voice sounded ragged and deep. Autumn cringed as if I’d hit her with the words.

  “It was Tom,” I said.

  She marched into the kitchen and leaned on the counter by the sink, staring into the drain. “Damn him.”

  I stepped to the edge of the kitchen, trying not to notice that only a towel stood between me and Autumn’s bare skin.

  “There’s more to this Dixie thing, isn’t there?”

  “I should put some clothes on.”

  She stomped out of the kitchen, arcing through the front room and into the master bedroom. She shut the door behind her. A minute later, she came out of the bedroom wearing the same clothes she had on when we came to the cabin. We hadn’t had time to pack her anything, and I hadn’t wanted to leave any signs back at the house like missing luggage or toiletries that could tip off Tom. I figured she got the towel from the cabin’s linen closet, but it must not have been much of a shower without soap or shampoo.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been keeping from me.”

  She strode back to the kitchen, sat at the kitchen table.

  “You make it sound like I’m a criminal.”

  I followed her into the kitchen and remained standing, making her look up at me.

  “Are you?”

  “What did Tom say?”

  I didn’t like that, her trying to pump me, find out how much I knew before volunteering anything herself. I crossed my arms. “He chose to speak more with his fists than his mouth.”

  Autumn smirked. “He’s not such a skinny little guy anymore, is he?”

  I loomed over her with my arms crossed and didn’t speak.

  “The least you could do is sit down.”

  I uncrossed my arms and pointed to my face. “Look at me. If it looks half as bad as it feels, I shouldn’t have to tell you what kind of position I’m in for helping you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want sorry, I want answers. What did you do to him?”

  “I didn’t do anything to him. You apparently already know about Dixie.”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded.

  I pulled out a chair and eased into it. A pinch in my side flared, stealing my breath for a second. I felt a clammy sheen on my skin like I had a fever.

  Autumn reached for me, stopped short. “Are you all right?”

  I chewed on the pain until I could swallow it. I prodded a couple tender spots along my jaw. “Do me a favor. There’s some dish rags in the drawer next to the sink. Soak one in cold water for me, then tell me everything about your time with Dixie.”

  She did as I asked and went to put the wet rag to my face. I took it from her and did it myself.

  “Dixie,” I prompted after she sat down again.

  “What do you want to know?”

  The cool rag felt nice against my bruised mug, though I wished I had ice. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “At least ten years ago. Why are we back to Dixie?”

  I dabbed the rag at one eye, then the other. “We never covered her to begin with. You said ‘Bad crowd,’ you never said ‘Dixie.’“

  “I don’t see how it will help.”

  “That’s why I’m the detective, and you’re not.”

  She stood and pulled the rag away from me. “Let me help you with this.” She made hard swipes at my cheek with the rag, sparking new areas of pain.

  I yelped and tried to move away.

  “Quit being such a baby and hold still. You’ve got dried blood all over the place.”

  I grit my teeth and let her clean me up. After a while I didn’t notice the pain anymore. The fingers of her free hand gently maneuvered the direction of my head by pushing on my chin. Her other hand wiped around my nose and mouth with a corner of the rag. She had to stand close to me, while I sat there, my face a handful of inches from her stomach. I could smell her natural scent, any perfumes or fragranced soaps rinsed away from the shower.

  I reigned back the desire to pull up her shirt and press my aching face against her belly. “Why did you start hanging out with her?”

  She wiped a cold line with the rag along the edge of my jaw and stared at me, appraising her work.

  “I went through a… phase. Daddy and I weren’t getting along.”

  That reminded me of my encounter with Lincoln the night before. I decided to keep it to myself.

  “What kind of phase?”

  “Depressed. Self-destructive. Daddy sent me to a psychiatrist who gave me pills I never took.”

  I tried to imagine Autumn needing to take anti-depressants. This sounded nothing like the girl I’d gone with in high school. Autumn must have seen these thoughts in my eyes. She lowered the rag from my face. I caught a glimpse of a red stain on the wet cloth.

  “You’d be surprised by how much I hurt when I found out you were gone.”

  Something quivered inside me.

  “Then why did you let me leave?”

  She sighed, set the rag on the table and brushed both sides of my face with her hands. The one hand that had held the rag felt cooler than the other. Her mouth hung open. I could feel the need to tell me something surging off of her like a steam cloud.

  She closed her mouth, smiled. “I guess I didn’t know what I really wanted until it was gone.”

  Unbidden, a flash came to mind of Doug hanging over the coffee table, that string of spittle dangling from his mouth. A new aching rose from a deeper place than where Tom had bruised me.

  I dropped into detective mode to dull the pain.

  “So you started hanging with Dixie because you were feel
ing self-destructive?”

  Autumn picked up the rag from the table, folded it into a small square on her lap. “More or less. And maybe to piss Daddy off.”

  “I bet that worked pretty well.”

  “He’s very protective,” she said. Before I could comment, she added, “As you already know.”

  “How did it end?”

  She unfolded the rag, folded it into a triangle.

  “I came to my senses.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Dixie wanted me to do something I… it went beyond petty vandalism and smoking weed.”

  She looked up from the rag as if expecting some reaction to her admitted drug use. I met her gaze and said nothing. If she wanted me to judge her based on some pot smoking, she looked to the wrong guy. My first couple years in Los Angeles had been far from drug free.

  Autumn continued, “She wanted to rob a family, charge right into their house with guns while they were home. They had two kids, this family. Dixie said that made it better because the parents would give us whatever we asked to keep their children from getting hurt.”

  She hung her head, staring at the triangle of cloth resting on her thigh. She picked up the rag and held it to her own cheek, gaze still cast down.

  “You couldn’t go through with it?” I asked.

  “And I couldn’t let her either.”

  I waited. I could tell by her absent stare that scenes from her past played across the screen in her mind.

  “I told her I wouldn’t do it. She gave me a hard time. Said I was weak, always had been. I believed her. I believed that because I wouldn’t rob this family I was somehow less of a person. Part of me wanted to do it, just to prove I wasn’t weak.”

  She pulled the rag away from her face and dropped it absently onto the table.

  “I knew she meant to do it whether I helped or not. I kept imagining the family, how the kids would cry, how the mother would beg Dixie not to hurt them. I had to stop her.”

  Her face lost some color. Part of me wanted to let her take a break, but I knew if I didn’t get it now, it would be all the harder for her to talk about it later. I was also starting to see why she’d kept her relationship with Dixie from me to begin with.

  “Tom was just a patrol cop back then. He used to harass Dixie all the time, just waiting to catch her at something. I remember thinking how much he’d changed.”

  She smiled, the shift in expression throwing me. But the smile faded as quickly as it had come.

  “Anyway, I told him what Dixie was planning.”

  “You told Tom? Why him?”

  She shrugged. “I knew him. I knew he had it in for her, and I knew he had it in for me because he’d seen me around with her. I thought this would settle the score or something. Show him I wasn’t as bad as she was. Guess it didn’t work.”

  “What did Tom do?”

  “The police caught her. Tom got his picture in the Hawthorne Daily. I never spoke to either of them again.”

  I played her story through in my mind, seeing Dixie in a new light. I had figured she would only get worse after high school, but the whole home invasion thing sent chills down my spine.

  I mentioned I had two distinct memories of Dixie, the first relating to her violent nature. The second one came from an altogether different place.

  Dixie Jawhar and I had attended the same party once. The details remained fuzzed by a half dozen beers, but somehow I ended up in the backseat of someone’s car with Dixie. Not my car, and I was pretty sure not hers. The petting was more than a little heavy, and I learned despite Dixie’s normal toughness, she could be gentle when it counted—especially with her tongue. I never spoke to her again after that night, not that we had said much to begin with.

  Autumn didn’t know about this encounter, and I didn’t feel the need to share it. But what she told me about Dixie added a whole new context to my memory of her.

  “What happened to Dixie?” I asked.

  Autumn took a deep breath, her focus coming back to the present. “She went to prison. I never looked back.”

  But ten years had passed. Dixie had probably gotten out by now. “Did she know it was you?” I asked. “That turned her in.”

  Autumn looked at her lap again. “Yes.”

  “You sound sure.”

  “I am.”

  An armed home invasion could easily lead to someone getting shot. Maybe shot in the back if the victim tried to run to another room. Autumn followed my train of thought.

  “I don’t think it was her,” she said.

  “Why not? She wants revenge, she tracks you down—”

  “But why would she shoot Doug and not me?”

  “You weren’t home.”

  “If she went through the trouble of finding me, wouldn’t she wait to make sure I was there?”

  The soothing effects of the cool rag began to fade, and pain seeped back into my jaw, my cut lip, my nose, around my eyes—hell, just about everywhere on my face.

  “Why are you sticking up for her?”

  Autumn put a hand to her forehead and rubbed. “I’m not. It just sounds farfetched to me.

  “If not Dixie, than who?”

  She dropped her hand and gave me a hard stare. “How about the woman in those pictures you took?”

  “Possible. But we don’t even know who she is, let alone how to find her. We should go with what we have. The Dixie angle makes sense.”

  “Fine.”

  I tried to stand, and a shock of pain crackled through my ribcage. I had sat for too long, giving the pain a chance to settle in.

  Autumn stood and came to my side.

  “Let me help you.”

  “I’m all right.”

  She ignored my protest and gripped my arm to give me support.

  I shuffled into the guest bedroom like an old man. But as I lay in bed knowing Autumn lay in the next room, my mind raced with the thoughts of a teenage boy. My body responded in kind, despite the pain, and I thought I’d never get to sleep. My exhaustion won in the end.

  An hour later I snapped awake, heart pounding. I thought a nightmare had jolted me from sleep until I sensed, somewhere in the dark room, another presence with me.

  Chapter 11

  I lay in the double bed, the sheets I’d retrieved from the closet smelling musty. My body tensed when I heard the floorboards creak, and a new dose of pain scoured me from the inside out.

  I widened my eyes, trying to will them to adjust to the darkness. I thought I saw a shape standing over me. I made a fist under the covers.

  “Relax,” Autumn said, and stroked my face.

  I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I was holding, let the fist melt. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a private eye like that. Haven’t you read Robert Parker?”

  Autumn climbed into the bed next to me. She didn’t speak, only traced her fingers across my cheek. Her light touch soothed my aching face better than the wet rag had. Her skin felt cool. After a moment, the tension seeped from my muscles, easing more of the pain.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, voice lilted with sleep.

  She answered by brushing my lips with her fingertips.

  “You thought my bed would be more comfortable?”

  My eyes finally adjusted to the small amount of moonlight coming through the window above the bed. I saw Autumn smile.

  “Are you going to speak to me?” I asked.

  Her fingers lingered at my chin, then skated down my neck, over my Adam’s apple to my chest. She pressed her palm flat over my heart.

  “You shouldn’t be in here.” Though hadn’t I imagined this scenario the night she came to the High Note? Wasn’t this what I wanted?

  Autumn sagged down onto the bed, her one arm tucked under her head. She wore only a t-shirt, which had slipped up over her hips, exposing her body from the waist down. Shadows kept me from seeing whether or not she wore panties. I almost reached to find out.

  We lay still for a moment, staring at each other.<
br />
  “I could feel you in the next room.” She closed her eyes. “I’m a horrible person.”

  “You’re confused,” I said, my throat hitching.

  “I feel like I’m in a vacuum. It still hasn’t really hit me that he’s gone. I mean, I saw him …”

  She rolled on her back. Her chest rose as she inhaled deeply. The shadows pulled away, revealing the lacy pattern of her panties.

  “I saw him dead.”

  I found one of her hands with one of mine and squeezed. I shouldn’t have touched her at all with her in my bed practically naked. But I couldn’t ignore her either.

  “You are sort of in a vacuum. I put you there. When things get straightened out and you return home, reality is going to hit.”

  “Reality,” she said and sighed.

  “Anything that happens here can only complicate that reality.” The words sounded right and responsible. I should have felt proud for saying the right thing. Instead, I regretted it and hoped she would argue with me.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  She turned back on her side to face me. “But there’s still something between us. It never went away.”

  “Yes.”

  “There was never any closure.”

  “No.”

  She touched my face again, drawing a line with her finger tips along the edge of my jaw. “It wasn’t fair.”

  I closed my eyes. Why fight? She clearly wanted it. Even if she only wanted to use me to numb her pain, I could handle it. Wouldn’t I be using her, too?

  I took her hand and put it to my lips, kissed her palm.

  The shuddering breath Autumn released sounded like music. I wanted to hear her breathe like that again, and know that I had caused it.

  I sucked on her fingertips, then drew her hand down to my chest, down over my abs, ignoring the pain of my bruises, eating the pain, even liking it. By the time Autumn’s hand slipped under the waistband of my boxers, I was ready for her. Her grip sent waves of sensation through me strong enough to shake my body.

  Autumn groaned, sliding up against me, and I pulled her harder to me and kissed her, tasting the inside of her mouth, tasting what I had been missing for so damn long. This was how it was supposed to be. This worked. Her body seemed to fit like a joint against mine, as if she were carved to the perfect shape. There was no way Doug could have ever felt this way about her. She was mine.