Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

I finally left the whoosh of traffic and drove under a blessed quiet canopy of green oak branches to my apartment. When I rounded the last curve, I saw Paco in front of the carport. Still in disguise, he was holding a man to the ground with one hand while he held a phone to his ear with the other.

I pulled into the carport and got out.

Paco snapped his phone closed and flashed a white grin up at me. “Got a friend of yours here, Dixie.”

The man was face down with his hands cuffed behind him. His head was smooth and shiny as a dolphin’s, and his piggy black eyes were spitting venom.

I said, “He’s been following me. He chased me at the Crab House the other night and he was at the beach this morning.”

Paco took one of the man’s ears and twisted it. “How come you’re following the lady, pendejo?”

“Fuck you, asshole!”

“Don’t you wish.”

Paco got to his feet and put one foot on the man’s butt to hold him down. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, amigo. The lady used to be a deputy, and she’s still got a lot of friends in the department, and they’re gonna be real mad when they find out you’ve been stalking her. They may decide to dump you in the surf and let the sand crabs crawl in your eyes.”

Any other time, I would have enjoyed listening to Paco pretend to be a zonked-out bum who had no connection to law enforcement, but I hadn’t had a shower all day and I knew company was coming.

I said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

I ran upstairs and took a two-minute shower. Just as I was pulling on underpants, I heard tires crunching the shelled driveway. I shimmied into a short skirt and T, stepped into sandals, ran lipstick over my mouth, and sprinted for the French doors.

Downstairs, Paco stood on one side of the downed man, and Lieutenant Guidry stood on the other. Guidry said, “Dixie, I’d like you to meet Bull Banks, a freelance thug who’ll do anything for a buck. He was recently released from one of our penal hotels for beating up an elderly couple.”

Paco said, “I was just asking him nicely to tell us who hired him to attack the kid.”

Bull said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What kid?”

Guidry said, “Bull, it’s not like it was when you started your career. Now we’ve got all kinds of technologies. When we get DNA results from what we found on Phillip Winnick, I think we’ll find that you’re our man.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You gotta have hair or something for a DNA test.”

“Oh, we can use lots of things. Little skin cells from your fists maybe.”

“Fists! Ha, that’s a good one.”

“Oh yeah, we got good skin cells from your knuckles, Bull. Little knuckle cells were all over the kid’s face.”

“Didn’t use my fists!”

Guidry and Paco exchanged looks and grinned. Just at the instant I realized they knew each other, Bull Banks realized he’d just made a tactical error.

“You can’t prove a fucking thing! Anyway, the kid’s a goddamn queer!”

My head exploded, and the next thing I knew, I was on top of Bull Banks like a rodeo cowgirl, using his ears to slam his face in the sand and yelling words at him that would have made my grandmother ground me for a year. I didn’t know how long I’d been on him, but Bull was howling and sputtering and choking from all the sand in his mouth and nose and eyes. From the looks of his face, I’d been at him long enough to cause him some serious discomfort.

Paco pried my hands off Bull’s ears, and Guidry hooked an arm under my waist and lifted me up. Guidry was grinning, and when they stood me on my feet, he kept one arm around me to keep me from falling on Bull again. I kicked Bull in the ribs and yelled, “Who paid you to beat him up? You tell me who, or so help me God, I’ll kick your teeth down your throat!”

It felt so good to kick him that I kept doing it.

Bull yelled, “Stop it, bitch!”

Guidry said, “Now Bull, that’s not a nice way to talk to a lady, especially when she’s going to press charges against you for stalking her. When they add that to attacking the Winnick kid, you’ll get the ‘three times and you’re out’ life sentence. If you’re nice to Ms. Hemingway, she might be persuaded to forget about the fact you’ve been stalking her.”

Paco said, “The way you’re protecting him, you must be a good friend of whoever hired you.”

I turned at the sound of a marked squad car scrunching over the shell toward us. A uniformed deputy got out and took in the scene. When I turned my head back, Paco had disappeared.

Guidry spoke to the deputy. “This is Mr. Bull Banks. He needs to be Mirandized and taken in for the assault of Phillip Winnick.”

The deputy nodded and hauled Bull to his feet. Guidry touched the small of my back with his fingertips and said, “Let’s go upstairs and talk.”

Feeling more surreal by the moment, I climbed the stairs ahead of Guidry. At the porch, he turned the umbrella in the table so it shaded us from the midday sun. “Sit down, and I’ll get us something to drink.”