The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright

Author:Snowden Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

16

Southways Alliances

Honey?” Dixon yelled over his shoulder as he stood in the open doorway to his apartment. “Lock the liquor cabinet!”

On Dixon’s front steps, Clem crossed her arms and tapped one foot against the pavement, a pantomime of annoyance. She almost sprained her eyes from rolling them so hard. “I just about sprained my eyes,” she said to Dixon, “from rolling them so goddamn hard.”

“I guess I can let you in,” her partner said. “But you promise to behave?”

Dixon’s invitations to have dinner with him and his wife were as common as Clem’s refusal of them. Tonight was an exception. He had coerced her into accepting the invitation by promising new information on the Hubbard case, despite, as Clem had claimed earlier in the day, that being “your job—for now, at least.”

The smell of pot roast greeted Clem as Dixon led her into the living room. A cassette player spilled slide guitar across arts-and-crafts furniture. Atop built-in shelves, relegated to the back corners, sat framed photographs from what Clem liked to think of as her partner’s Springsteenian glory days: Dixon puffing his chest at prom, Dixon throwing for a touchdown, Dixon at a graduation podium, midspeech, mortarboard on his head.

“Drink?” Dixon said, giving it, Clem noted, more period than question mark.

“Yes, thanks.”

Two and a half sips later, Dixon’s wife, Heather, walked in from the kitchen, a towel draped over her shoulder, longneck hooked between her index and middle fingers. “Oh God, yes,” she said before taking Clem’s glass of whiskey, downing what remained, and handing it back to her. Their subsequent hug reminded Clem how hard it always was to turn down any chance to hang out with this tiny, blond, psychotic bundle of egoless id.

“Thank you, Heather. I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to finish that.”

“I am owed. The late nights you get to spend with the ol’ ball and chain? I am owed.”

Heather, Clem knew, had put up all those photographs of Dixon’s glory days. Heather, Clem knew, was ridiculously, cartoonishly in love with her husband, whom she had first started dating at the peak of those glory days. It would’ve been enough to make Clem sick, if only it weren’t so frigging adorable.

“Garçon, fetch us another round of ’freshment,” Heather said. She shoved her empty beer bottle toward her husband and led Clem into the kitchen, where they gathered plates, silverware, and pots to set the table. Boy was insulting enough in English, Clem paused to think, but deliciously more so in French. She had to hand it to Heather Hicks.

“It beats Denny’s Build-a-Breakfast, you have to admit,” Dixon said as he placed drinks in front of his wife and partner, each of whom had already sat down.

“I’d rather it were a Dixon’s Rebuild-a-Carburetor.” Heather, while scooping butter beans onto her plate, made a face at Clem. “I’ve been trying to get Spark Plug here to fix my truck for three months. Three. Months.”

“It’s not the carburetor. Squirrels chewed up the fuel line. I’ve told you.

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