Chill Factor by Chris Rogers Read Free Book Online Page A

sort it out? You didn’t really tell Marty that, did you?” Amy’s constant big-sister complaint since Dixie left the DA’s staff was the danger of working as a bounty hunter. She claimed it would someday get Dixie killed. Now Amy
wanted
her sister meddling in a robbery-shooting investigation?
    “Marty’s like family, Dixie. He was on his way to the airport, and he’s coming straight over here for a late lunch, as soon as the cops stop rubber-hosing him.”
    “Amy, get a grip.” Gently, Dixie took the egg her sister was about to break into a bowl and set it back in the carton. “It was Edna’s car, Edna’s mole scar. It was Edna.”
With two bullet holes in her chest and a piece of her cheek missing.
    Dixie swallowed back a sudden surge of bile as she envisioned Aunt Edna lying in a pool of blood beside her Subaru.
Wasn’t there
anything
you could’ve done, Ms. Butt-kicking Instructor?
    Dixie blinked away the image. Though thinner and younger-looking than she’d been a year ago at Bill Pine’s funeral, the dead woman had definitely been Edna Pine. Grasping Amy’s arm, Dixie guided her toward the den.
    But Amy jerked away and lifted the receiver on the kitchen phone. “Edna is no bank robber. I’ve left messages for her to call us as soon as she gets home. She’s probably at a movie—you remember how much Edna likes movies.”
    With the phone to her ear, Amy tucked Dixie’s unkempthair back, plucked lint off her shirt, smoothed her collar. Fussy, even for Amy. Dixie found herself praying that Edna would miraculously pick up the phone.
    “Hello! Aunt Edna, this is Amy Royal. You won’t believe the awful thing that’s happened here—”
    For one dizzying instant Dixie thought Amy was right: The whole episode
had
been a weird mistake. Then she realized Amy was talking to Edna’s answering machine.
    When her sister banged the phone down in frustration, Dixie wrapped an arm around Amy’s waist and once again tugged her toward the den—less forcefully this time. Amy’s warm, cushiony body smelled of vanilla. Her blond hair, cut neckline-short for the rapidly approaching summer, already showed sun-bleached streaks from working in the yard. Fiddling with a silver pendant, she relaxed into Dixie’s embrace as they walked.
    “Remember the weekend Aunt Edna took us all to Astroworld?” Amy asked. “You, me … Marty. She wouldn’t get on the roller coaster, but Marty teased her until she agreed to try it, trembling like a wet Chihuahua—”
    “Then we couldn’t get her off the thing. I believe she had more fun than we did.”
    “
You
didn’t have much fun. The rides made you sick.”
    “Edna gave a lot of her time to us kids,” Dixie recalled.
    “She’s been lonely since Bill died. Edna needs people around. Shame on us for not going to see her more often. Carl!” Her husband’s balding head barely showed above his leather recliner. “We’re going out to visit Edna tonight, as soon as she calls back.”
    “Amy—” Dixie wished her sister would stop speaking about the woman in the present tense. Amy’s ability to dismiss anything she didn’t want to believe could be mind-boggling at times.
    “Keep it down back there,” Carl groused, turning up the TV volume. “I want to hear the news.”
    “
In a police shoot-out today a second Granny Bandit…”
    Amy tried to pull away and head back to her kitchen.
    “No, sit!” Dixie tugged her onto the sofa. Brutal truth might be the best medicine.
    On the screen, patrol cars clustered around Edna’s Subaru. Reporters, uniformed officers, and plainclothes investigators obscured the camera’s view of the body on the asphalt as paramedics wheeled a gurney to a waiting ambulance.
The wounded officer
, Dixie figured. They’d whisked him away just as she arrived on the scene.
    But police were either keeping the details of the robbery under wraps or were as dumbfounded as the media claimed.
    “A suspect in the Texas Citizens Bank robbery that