Pixie Meeks always walked around town like she knew which way the wind was blowing. She had a snub noise and a lot of freckles as well as a pair of very long, very tan legs, usually encased in a loose pair of plaid trousers.
That’s not to say she was manly. Not at all. A lot of the women in Dana Point had weather beaten faces and long messy hair bleached by the sun, but Pixie’s hair was always neat and trim and her complexion was perfect.
Pixie was about 21 when I first met her, buying some rope at the tackle shop on Violet Lantern Street. Pixie had a boat called Thunder Bug out at the yacht harbor that she spent a lot of time on. Well, a lot of people in Dana Point have boats. But Pixie was serious about hers. Other girls her age liked to decorate the prow of their boyfriend’s boats by draping themselves across the bow, a martini in one hand, and nothing in the other. Not Pixie. She thought of boats as an art form, rather than just a piece of wood upon which she could stretch out her body and wave at people. And she thought of sailing as a vocation. You could often see Pixie hard at work on her craft, out at the far end of the harbor. That’s why it didn’t take long for people to notice when she went missing.
Any other girl in her set you wouldn’t think twice about a sudden disappearance. They’d be gone a few months – a little under 9, to be exact – and then return like nothing happened. The less said the better. But Pixie was not that kind of a girl.
It was her father who approached me about finding her first. He’s a former commando, who, it’s rumored, once slit the throats of seven Nazis in a PT boat, but he sits on the bench these days, and does a damn good job there. “I hear you do missing persons,” he said, having found me one afternoon in my office on the Coast Highway.
“You heard right,” I said. My feet were on my desk and I was sipping a highball as is usually the case at 3 pm, but I was just affecting my indifference. Bernard Meeks wasn’t a man who’d come to me lightly, being a judge, and anyway, I was already a little concerned.
Meeks told me that Pixie had been gone for over a week. Hadn’t left a note or a clue – just went out to Thunder Bug one morning like usual and never came back. No one had seen anyone going into the harbor, either by boat or by car, on the last evening she was known to be there.
Pixie had a little two-seater that she used to get around town. It was parked in front of her slip, just where she’d left it. I sniffed around the yacht harbor for a few days and came up with nothing – except a faint intimation that something was very wrong.
I figured there were only two other options: Pixie’d been kidnapped, or she’d planned her own getaway. Both seemed unlikely. Still – someone or something must have spirited her away.
The Meeks family kept me on a retainer for a few months, and throughout that time I kept an eye on Thunder Bug. Pixie loved that boat like a pet or a brother – so I kept my eye on those two things as well. Pixie had a dog called Midge and a brother called Chips, and about a month after her disappearance, Chips appeared on Thunder Bug, with Midge in tow. He said he was getting it ready for sale: he’d found a buyer in Mexico who was willing to take it sight unseen.
“I guess you’ve given up on your sister then,” I said. Chip wouldn’t look me in the eye.
Luckily, boat’s bills of sales are easy to track. It took me three days to find Thunder Bug in an Ensenada harbor, with Midge and Pixie on the deck. Pixie just shrugged when I asked her why she’d done a flit, and the dog wasn’t talking either. She told me to get lost, but I’m not that easily gotten rid of. That night I confronted her in the local cantina, a few margaritas short of silent.
I asked her how she got out of the harbor without a vehicle and no one seeing her and she told me she’d swum: Pixie was the junior champion at freestyle at Dana Point High School, so it was easy enough for her to make her way at midnight round the Monarch Beach, where Chip was waiting for her in his truck.
Pixie begged me not to tell her parents where she was for a while, and I agreed. Judge Meeks is notorious for his probity and his decisions don’t sit well with a large portion of the criminal community here. He’s also an ex-Commando, and not a man I’d want to confront in the middle of the night. It seemed likely to me that whatever had happened to Pixie involved him in some way that she wasn’t willing to make public, and in my opinion, we need to keep him on the bench. Sure enough, when the authorities finally decided to dredge the harbor – after Pixie had been declared missing for several months – they brought up a body alright. After so many weeks in the water, it was hard to tell what had happened to it, but it probably wasn’t pretty.
I still don’t know whose it is or why Pixie’s parents weren’t in on her shenanigans but I have my suspicions. Anyway, a few weeks after the body was buried, Pixie came on home.
Like it. A touch of Don Winslow.