Rage Factor (7 page)

Dixie could tell the prosecutor was serious, and she didn’t want to answer without giving the question some thought. Bouncing the racquetball, she listened to the hollow
thunk, thunk, thunk
echo in the small room.

“You have the guts, Bren,” she said finally. “You have the
stamina. And in defense class I’ve seen you practice hand-to-hand against some tough competition.” She looked Brenda square in the eye. “But could you kill a person, if that was your only reasonable choice?”

“You’ve never killed anyone.”

“Not yet. And I hope I never do. But every day of my life I face the possibility.”

“I could shoot a dirtball like Coombs, easy.”

“Even if you didn’t know whether the dirtball was guilty? Remember, I rarely know as much about a skip as I knew about Coombs.”

“If they skip, chances are they’re guilty.”

“I used to think so.” Until Parker. “A skip tracer brings them back to trial, and lets a jury decide on their guilt or innocence.”

A scowl hardened Brenda’s mouth. “I’m not sure I could do that.”

“Brenda, it’s only in old westerns that bounty hunters get to be judge, jury, and executioner.” Dixie wanted to say more, but all that came to mind were the same lame remarks some of her friends had spouted when she stopped practicing law.

They played two more games, Brenda winning all three. Playing with an injured foot had been dumb, but the vigorous exercise had banished the trapped bees. Dixie felt exhilirated. As they prepared to leave, she limped to the corner and retrieved the black pebble she’d tossed there.

“Wait up,” she said. “I want to share something—guess you could say it’s what keeps me chipping away from the sidelines.”

Brenda eyed her warily, but ambled over to where Dixie knelt on the floor, drawing a big imaginary circle with her finger.

“Throw a rock in a lake,” Dixie said, cradling the pebble in her palm, then tossing it to the center of the circle. “You’ll see ripples. Small, insignificant ripples. Scarcely noticeable.” She drew a second circle, smaller than her hand.
“Toss that same rock in a puddle, and the ripples become great outward waves that turn everything to mud. Like that pebble, one evil man among the righteous is insignificant, a single dark shadow on a sunlit pool.”

“Careful, preacher.” Brenda popped a chunk of nicotine gum in her mouth. “You’re sloshing pond water over your chic new footgear.”

Dixie’s occasional metaphorical lectures, a persuasion technique learned from her Irish adoptive father, were an old joke between them from law school. Tedious or not, Dixie believed some things needed to be said.

“Darkness,” she persisted, “is as much a part of nature’s scheme as you or me, or this rock. It’s not our job to eliminate all the shadows in the world, but to remain part of the light, part of the balance. Without us, the pool shrinks. The light dims. The ripples of darkness spread wider.”

Brenda sighed, long, heavy, and defeated. “I get your belabored point. But I’m not sure our society has enough candlepower these days to brighten a broom closet.”

Dixie scooped up the pebble and balanced it between her thumb and forefinger.

“Benson, you’re one of the brightest spots in the whole system. Next to you, Lawrence Riley Coombs is like a single dust mote in a ray of sunshine.” She flipped the pebble off her thumbnail, caught it in the palm of her hand. “Insignificant.”

The prosecutor frowned at the shiny black rock. After a moment, Dixie closed her fingers over it and shoved it into her pocket.

They spent the next twenty minutes working out with free weights. Brenda seemed hell-bent on pressing as many pounds as the buff young men in the room. Only when she and Dixie were both thoroughly spent did they head for the showers.

Dixie needed to get home. Parker would be pissed if she was late for dinner again, and she had to call Belle Richards for specifics on where to pick up the client’s kid tomorrow morning. But Brenda’s mood worried her.

She fished some coins out of her pocket—a phone call would ease Parker’s mind.

“Looks like the beer’s on me tonight,” she told Brenda. “Might be your last big chance to tie one on at my expense.”

“Think I can’t beat you when your foot’s healed?”

“I think there’s a Mexican beer at the Suds Club with my name on it, and I could use the company for an hour or so.”

Brenda looked at her, not buying it. “I’ve lost cases before, Dixie. I’m not going to do anything crazy tonight.”

Dixie gave her a thin smile. “Crazy is in the eye of the beholder, old friend.”

The ADA stalled a second longer, then shrugged. “I suppose the Suds Club will be bubbling with gossip about my failing record of late. Might as well give them an honest target to aim at.”

The mixture of odors at the Suds Club was like no other bar in town. The small brewery and pub sat alongside a laundromat, taking advantage of a captive clientele waiting for their clothes to dry. Like other lawyers, Dixie had started hanging out there not because she liked doing laundry but because the owner was a friend, another former prosecutor whose golden dreams of making a difference had tarnished. He and four other attorneys—who happened to also be musicians—had formed a band, calling themselves “The Convictions,” that played the club on weekends. Damned good vintage rock and roll. Tonight, a neon Wurlitzer provided music at a volume allowing easy conversation.

But Brenda wasn’t doing much talking. They’d taken their usual booth in the smoking section. Although Brenda was trying to shuck the habit, and Dixie’s one childhood attempt had made her sick enough to swear off for life, their corner niche was tradition.

Simulated padded leather walls and plush wine-red carpet muffled the hum of a hundred conversations. Neon beer signs provided the dim lighting. Brenda stared at a Corona bottle on the bar in front of her, alternately drinking from it, sucking on a lime wedge balanced on its rim, and scraping at the bottle’s label.

Dixie’s efforts to lift the prosecutor’s spirits had struck out. Time for some ass-kicking.

“How many open cases are stacked on your desk right now?” she asked.

“Fifteen. Maybe twenty.”

“How many more assault charges you figure were filed today?”

“What’s this, Monday? Forty or so, mostly family violence. It’ll be over a hundred before midnight.” Brenda’s fingernail scraped a long tear through the Corona label.

“And how many of those will land on your desk?”

“What’s your point, Dixie? We both know there’s no shortage of work to be done.”

“Precisely. Yet here you sit moaning in your Corona after losing a single case.”

Lifting her chin, Brenda swept a somber gaze around the crowded room. Dixie recognized many of the men and women from courtrooms and plea-bargaining tables.

The prosecutor’s gaze rested for a beat on a lone man at the bar, fortyish, attractive, and nearly bald. When he raised his glass, Brenda nodded curtly, an odd wistfulness softening her coarse features. An instant later the effect was gone, and Brenda’s gaze hurried past.

“Look at them.” she said. “How many men do you think will go home later and beat up their wives? Or discipline their children? Or pick up a prostitute and knock her around awhile before kicking her out of the car? Or stop at the liquor store going home, decide hell, why not have some fun with the owner’s granddaughter—”

“If you’re talking about the Ramirez case—”

“The two SOBs who raped that child are going to walk.”

“Maybe not. Mr. Ramirez gave a good description before he died.”

“Not good enough. And the girl’s too terrified to ID them. The dickhead cop who was first at the scene made sure of it.”

Dixie sighed. “Is that the game we’re playing now? Male bashing?”

“You think I’m wrong?”

“I think your viewpoint is skewed. As my sainted adoptive mother would say, ‘Even men and barbed wire have their good points.’”

Brenda grimaced and took another swallow of her beer.

“There
are
plenty of good men in the world,” Dixie persisted. “Only, you won’t find them in the case folders stacked on your desk—”

“Hell, Dixie, it’s not just men. I had a woman in my office last week left her month-old baby in a shopping mall storage room while she went to work. Said she didn’t have money for a sitter. Two months ago we found a seven-year-old girl chained in a bathroom. Dirty, starved, scared. Sores all over. Never been to school a day—could barely talk. Three other kids in the family, all going to school, playing with friends. Father and mother both had good jobs. A normal American household. Except nobody in the neighborhood,
nobody
, knew about that fourth kid, chained in a bathroom, fed table scraps, treated worse than you’d treat a dog. An entire
family
, Dixie, in collusion against one poor child.” Brenda pushed her beer aside. “How does such a thing happen?”

Dixie had seen worse during her ten years as a prosecutor, before she quit trying to understand.

“You need some balance to your perspective,” she replied. “Get away for a few weeks. Spend a month in the sunshine. Find a brown-skinned island gigolo and get gloriously laid.”

“Ha!” Brenda’s sudden smile flickered to the balding man at the bar. Her spontaneous hoot turned to a chuckle, then to roaring laughter.

Dixie couldn’t help grinning. Brenda had an infectious laugh, deep-throated and tobacco gruff.

But Dixie’s comment hadn’t been funny enough to elicit the convulsive gales that followed. Brenda pounded the table, tears streaming down her cheeks. People turned to stare, sparking more laughter. Hysterical laughter. Brenda’s hair pulled out of its braid. Her skin flushed. With the Beach Boys singing “I Get Around” on the Wurlitzer, Dixie glared at the gawkers until they turned hastily back to their drinks.

Finally, Brenda mopped her face with a wad of napkins, and her laughter subsided.

“Maybe you’re right,” she gasped. “Maybe the world is sane and it’s only my viewpoint that’s skewed.”

“That’s not exactly what I said,” Dixie argued.

Brenda popped the lime wedge into her mouth and sucked, then took a long pull on the Corona. Finally, she seemed composed.

“Cases pile up faster than we can clear them,” she grumbled. “No matter how many hours I grind away, the stack never gets smaller. The world isn’t going to change. As you say, I may as well put blinders on and save my own sanity.”

A waitress plucked their empty beer bottles off the table. Brenda twirled her finger to signal another round. Glancing at her watch, Dixie was about to protest when a voice carried from across the room.

“There she is! I knew that was her laugh.” Clarissa Thomas, the pale, determined witness from the Coombs trial, started weaving her way through the crowd, accompanied by Regan Salles and Julie Colby, the witness coordinator who’d comforted Regan in the courtroom.

“A hairdresser, a DA liaison, and a socialite housewife,” Dixie mused. “What’s that old saying? ‘Adversity breeds strange bedfellows’?”

Brenda peered at Dixie curiously. “I don’t find it so surprising they’d strike up a friendship. When men are the enemy, women have to stick together.”

“A man is the enemy,” Dixie amended. “Lawrence Coombs
is only one man.” She refused to lump all the males in the world into one big bad villain, and she had no desire to get into a pity party with these women over the verdict. Besides, it was time to call Belle Richards about the bodyguard job. Parker would be grumpy, hearing she was working again, but a deal was a deal. She’d lost the bet, including the coveted vacation at Belle’s Caribbean condo, which after the past weeks didn’t sound half as inviting as it usually did. She needed the job just to be busy at something useful.

“Same time next Monday?” she asked Brenda, dropping bills on the table for the beer tab. “I reserved a court.”

Brenda’s amber eyes showed a trace of sparkle. “By then, I’ll be over my anger, knee-deep in another case, your foot will be stronger, and you’ll beat my socks off.”

“Yep. That’s what I’m counting on. I can carry my weight in class this week, too.” She and Brenda taught a self-defense class together, women on Saturdays, Ryan’s private school on Thursdays. In the past month, Dixie’s foot fracture had kept her from participating.

As she stood to leave, the three women approached. Something in their attitude made Dixie linger. She was sure they hadn’t been in the bar when she and Brenda entered.

“You said we’d put him away,” Clarissa challenged.

She and Regan were both drinking wine, Julie a draft beer.

“In prison for a very long time.” Regan’s voice carried a hint of panic. “A very long time, you said. But he walked right out of that court, free to come after us—”

“Just as you told us the restraining order would keep him in line while he was out on bail,” Clarissa spat. “It didn’t!”

“Sit down,” Dixie said firmly, offering her own chair and pulling up another one for Regan. They didn’t appear drunk, merely angry.

Clarissa glared at her, but sat. Regan plopped down beside her. Looking uncomfortable, Julie set her beer mug on the table, tapped a thin cigarette from a package of ultralight Capri, and took a seat slightly behind the pair. Apparently,
the task of calming the two witnesses after the jury’s verdict had not gone well.

“My husband practically lost his job,” Clarissa said, “coming home all hours to check on me. Worried out of his mind. He
begged
me to go to my mother’s in Boston—”

“Not a bad idea,” Brenda told her, maintaining the calm but forceful voice Dixie’d heard her use with distraught victims in the courtroom. “Maybe you
should
go away for a while. Regan, maybe you should, too.”

Regan blanched. “You really think—you think Lawrence will come after us?”

“Frankly, I think he’ll be … looking for fresh game,” Brenda hedged. “But I can have patrol cars watching him—”

“That’s what you said before!” Clarissa snapped.

And before, when Coombs was charged with a crime, HPD had cause to watch him, Dixie added mentally. He was a free man now.

Clarissa slapped her glass down on the table, spilling a few drops.