Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

Out of Bounds by Terry Barbieri

Texan Terry Barbieri is a five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize for her short fiction. Her stories have appeared in many magazines, both in the United States and abroad. It is rare in the field of crime fiction for a woman author to write from the viewpoint of a male character, as Ms. Barbieri does in almost all of her stories. The following tale belongs to the private-eye genre; it is her third contribution to EQMM.

An assault on my back door lurches me out of a tequila-induced sleep. I pull on yesterday’s jeans, stumble into the kitchen, and peer through the peephole at the rickety stairway leading to the alley below. Marble Melendez, a muscular six-one in his shorts and tank top, stops pounding. “Jason, let me in.”

As I open the door, Marble sweeps past me to the darkened living room and parts the miniblinds. Stepping up beside him, I look out to see two men standing on either side of Marble’s black sedan, like a freeze frame from a KGB film. Only this is El Paso, Texas, perched on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert. I doubt any KGB agent has ever set foot here.

“What’s with the men in black?”

“Security guards. I’ve had two death threats in the last twenty-four hours.”

“What happened to the bald guy?” No matter how often I visit Sidewinder, Marble’s three-hundred-acre ranch, Mr. Potato Head asks to see my ID.

“Gardner? I let him go. He stole some balls I’d signed for local charities. He was auctioning them off on eBay.”

I wonder how much he got. Marble’s name became a household word two years ago, when he led the U.S. National Men’s Team to win its first World Cup. After scoring four goals in the final game, Marble appeared on the Today show, The Tonight Show, and David Letterman and hosted Saturday Night Live. Everyone across America recognized his hazelnut skin and closely cropped curls. He received so many e-mails and letters and phone calls, he had to hire a secretary to answer them. Physics students clocked his balls at seventy-five miles per hour. His aim was legendary.

While Marble and I played on the same team in high school, our home lives couldn’t have been more different. He lived with his Brazilian-born parents and his three brothers and sisters. An only child, I had four stepfathers in fifteen years.

In our junior year, Sports Illustrated named Marble America’s most promising teenage athlete. While he kicked his way into the spotlight, I retreated into the shadows. I dropped out of high school and took a job in construction to escape my most abusive stepfather to date. I spent my nights on eBay, bidding on an increasingly sophisticated array of spy ware, until I was ready to start my own detective agency. Jason Lightfoot, Private Eye.

Half a dozen cars pull up behind the sedan and reporters pour out. One aims a telephoto lens at my window. Marble releases the blinds and the slats snap into place. “They’ve been following me day and night. There are so many of them camped outside my ranch, it’s starting to look like Woodstock.”

I’m not surprised. Two days ago, an eighteen-year-old girl filed a lawsuit claiming Marble had seduced her three years earlier, when she visited his ranch. Last night the comedians who had once hosted Marble on their talk shows opened with monologues about him playing out of bounds, committing fouls with his hands, and scoring illegal goals.

I shove aside the change, keys, cell phone, and Beretta cluttering my dining table, turn on the overhead light, and pour two shots of Cuervo Gold. Taking a seat, Marble draws an eight-by-ten out of an envelope and slides it towards me. I study the photo of him standing behind the dozen foster children he had invited to Sidewinder.

“Which one is she?”

He points to a teenage girl with long blond hair whose pursed lips refuse to smile for the camera. Her eyes burn with the intensity of a child who has seen too much in too few years.

“What happened?”

“I was taking a walk late one night and found her on the path leading to the creek. She was supposed to leave the next morning and she said she couldn’t sleep. She told me Sidewinder was the first place she’d been able to breathe since the state had removed her from her mother and started placing her in foster homes.”

“Sounds like she wanted you to adopt her.”

“A bachelor in his twenties doesn’t adopt a teenage girl. I didn’t know what to say. I took her hand as we skidded down the bank. She was wearing flip-flops, which was stupid; there are snakes and scorpions everywhere out there. We froze as a couple of deer stepped out of the brush. Standing there, watching them drink, Lindsey looked like a little girl. Without thinking, I leaned down and kissed the top of her head. I knew I’d made a mistake when she raised her face towards mine. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to embarrass her. I took a step back and told her, ‘Lindsey, we can’t.’ She wouldn’t speak to me after that. All the way back to the house, she didn’t say a word.

“I need your help, Jason. I’ve been suspended from the team, the National Soccer Hall of Fame has removed my uniform from its exhibit, and three companies have cancelled my endorsements. At the rate I’m going, I’ll have to borrow money to pay my attorney. I need you to investigate who’s behind this, who’s coaching her. She doesn’t have any family.”

According to Marble’s lawyer, Lindsey Stillwell works at a twenty-four-hour diner called the Wagon Wheel. The night after Marble’s visit, I park my van outside a piercing parlor and walk over to the diner. An ageing Asian janitor, seated at the counter, leafs through a leftover newspaper, while a teenage boy and girl share a sundae in a corner booth.

I take a table by the window. A few minutes later, Lindsey approaches. She’s aged since the photo taken at Sidewinder. She’s taller now and her black mascara clashes with her pale complexion, like a pencil sketch in which the artist has inked in only the eyes.

“Know what you want?”

I think of a few things that aren’t on the menu. “Two eggs, over easy, and a coffee.”

When she brings my coffee, I ask if she has a cell phone. “You need to make a call?”

“No, I was expecting one and I’m not sure this thing is working.” I hold up my phone. “I was wondering if you could call my number.”

She shrugs, pulls a phone from her pocket, and keys in my number as I recite it.

Seconds later my phone rings. “Hello.”

“Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thanks.”

Our eyes meet as we hang up.

I’m halfway through my coffee when she returns with my eggs. As soon as I’ve finished eating, I leave her a generous tip and head back to my van. I remove my cell-phone interceptor from the glove compartment, look up Lindsey’s number on my cell-phone log, and key it into the interceptor. It will now pick up any calls Lindsey makes or receives within a ten-mile radius.

On my way home, I cruise past Lindsey’s home address. What I’d assumed was an apartment number turns out to be a room number at the Sandstorm Motel. The parking lot looks like someone has taken a sledgehammer to it. A battered marquee advertises Rooms by the Month. So this is where Lindsey lives, or rather, sleeps. My guess is that life is something she’s still looking forward to.

The next day I set up shop in a parking garage five blocks from the Sandstorm. The protection it offers from the midday sun is worth the four bucks a day, which I’ll charge to Marble anyway. Late in the afternoon, my palm-size interceptor picks up its first call.

I press Record as Lindsey answers. “Hello.”

“How’s the diary coming?” A man. White. Middle-aged.

“I just have a couple of entries to go.”

“I talked to Behind the Scenes. They’ve scheduled your interview for next week, but they want to see the diary first. If Marble touched you outside your shirt, your story’s worth fifty thousand. If he put his hand inside your shirt, it jumps to seventy-five. If he unzipped your jeans...”

“He didn’t.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“The point is, I found you sleeping in Mission Park, surrounded by winos and crack addicts. You looked twenty years older than the girl who visited Sidewinder.”

“So this is about paying you back.”

“It’s about us helping each other. Marble is sure to settle out of court. Do you think he really cared about you or any of those other kids he invited to his ranch? It was all a publicity stunt. And if he’d cared enough to pay his staff a decent wage, I wouldn’t have hocked his damn balls.”

Gardner.

“When do you need the diary?”

“By Sunday. I want to read it before I turn it over to Behind the Scenes.”

I pop open a Coke. So do I.

The following day I stuff my Beretta, my camera, my wallet, and my phone interceptor into my pockets, grab a basket of towels, and drive over to the Laundromat facing the Sandstorm. Breathing in a haze of detergent, I throw my towels into a machine and take a seat by the grimy front window.

I’m running my towels through a third wash cycle when Lindsey, wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts, steps out of the motel. I watch her head down the street, a small leather bag swinging from her shoulder.

As soon as she’s out of sight, I cross the street and enter the Sandstorm. The desk clerk is on the phone, talking ninety miles an hour about her husband who arrived home at two that morning. She ignores me as I cross the lobby, enter the musty hallway, and board the elevator which groans in protest as it carries me to the second floor.

It takes me less than a minute to pick Lindsey’s lock. I take in the neatly made bed, the People magazine, and the pastel bras and panties hanging over the radiator.

In a bureau drawer, beneath a couple of tank tops, I find a clothbound book. Its entries, dated three years ago, describe Lindsey’s stay at Sidewinder. The evenings spent playing video games and eating popcorn and watching DVDs on Marble’s large-screen TV. Marble barbequing burgers. Bats swooping down at dusk to sip water from the pool.

I flip forward to the most recent entry.

Late last night I slipped out the back door and followed a dirt path towards the creek. I’d almost reached the water when I heard someone behind me. It was Marble.

I told him I couldn’t sleep. I told him how, in my foster home, I share a room with three girls, how one of them throws up in our bathroom after every meal, how there are no locks on any of the doors, and how the boys sometimes steal peeks at us when we’re showering. Looking out at the wide, empty desert, I told him, “I’d give anything not to go back there.”

“Maybe we can work something out,” he said.

He took my hand and helped me down the bank. Then he asked, “Have you ever been alone with a boy? I mean, really alone?”

The writing ends here. I use the TV remote control and my phone interceptor to hold open the diary’s facing pages so that I can photograph them.

I’ve shot three pairs of pages when my interceptor picks up a call. I glance out the window to see Lindsey standing in the parking lot, her phone pressed to her ear.

A man answers. “Hello.”

“There’s someone in my room.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside the motel.”

“I’m on South Main. Keep an eye on the entrance; I’ll be right there.”

I shove my camera and interceptor into my pocket, hurry past the elevator to the stairwell, and take the stairs two at a time. The warped door at the bottom won’t budge. I slam my shoulder against it. On the third blow, it bursts open. I race down the hall and duck out the emergency exit, setting off an alarm.

A ten-foot brick wall separates the back of the Sandstorm from the upscale houses behind it. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounds the lumberyard to my left. My only hope is the alley running behind the strip shopping center to my right. I race towards it. As I reach the corner of the motel, I nearly collide with Gardner. He stumbles as I swerve past him, regains his footing, and tackles me from behind. He twists my left arm behind my back as he slams me against the ground. The asphalt burns a skid mark across my cheek.

Gardner pulls my Beretta from my front pocket and presses it to my skull. With my face mashed against the ground, bits of gravel imbedded in it, I don’t see Lindsey, but I hear her running towards us.

Gardner backs off. “Stand up.”

I stumble to my feet and he orders Lindsey to check my pockets. Her slender fingers extract my keys, my wallet, my camera, and my phone interceptor. She hands them to Gardner, who examines the interceptor and presses Play.

“How’s the diary coming?”

“I just have a couple of entries to go.”

He tosses his keys to Lindsey. “Get my car.”

She disappears. Two minutes later she rounds the corner in a white Buick and pulls up beside us.

Gardner opens the trunk. “Get in.”

As I push aside the jumper cables, I consider grabbing the tire iron and taking a swing, but I’m pretty sure Gardner would fire faster than I could bash in his skull. I fold myself into the trunk, which smells of stale marijuana and motor oil. Its worn carpet feels like it’s full of sand fleas.

Gardner slams the trunk, plunging me into darkness. Moments later the Buick backs up, turns, and lurches forward. As we pull out of the parking lot, the trunk heats up faster than an oven set on broil. Sweat trickles into my eyes, soaks through my shirt, my jeans, my underclothes. By the time we’ve put the stop-and-go traffic of the city behind us and hit the open road, the air has grown so thick I can hardly breathe.

I run my hand along the side of the trunk until I find the wires leading to the brake lights. Making a fist, I punch them out. Air and light stream in.

Through my peephole, I watch the asphalt unwind behind us. Eventually we turn onto a steep dirt road. Or maybe it’s a driveway. Rocks and ruts scramble my insides as we bounce over them.

When the ground finally levels out, we stop. I glimpse Gardner’s legs as he approaches the trunk and tells Lindsey, “I’m heading back to town for some Xanax and this guy’s vehicle. We’ve got to make it look like an accident.”

I think about the local canyons. Is he planning to drug me, strap me into my own driver’s seat, and send me flying? I tell myself it will take him all day to match my key to my van. Then I remember my proof of insurance, folded inside my wallet. If Gardner sees that, he’ll know the make and model and will be back in no time.

The trunk pops open. The sunlight is so bright it bleaches the color out of the sky.

“Get out.”

Stiff as a prizefighter who’s gone one round too many, I straighten my arms and legs and climb out of the trunk. The sweat around my mouth instantly evaporates, leaving behind a thin crust of salt.

I look around but have no idea where we are. A ranch house overlooks the driveway. Three horses, in the pasture to our right, crowd beneath the shade of a single cottonwood tree. The desert stretches for miles in all directions.

“Let’s go.” Gardner waves my gun towards a wooden shed, unlocks it, and escorts Lindsey and me inside. Clay pots, a wheelbarrow, and collapsed lawn chairs crowd the windowless interior. Gardner hands Lindsey my gun, takes an extension cord from the wall, and binds my wrists so tightly behind my back, I fear my shoulders will pop out of their sockets. Then he turns over a bucket, orders me to sit down, and ties my ankles together with twine.

He takes the gun from Lindsey. “I’ll be back.”

She waits until his car has pulled out of the driveway before she tries the door. It’s locked.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“A ranch Gardner takes care of. The owners live in Dallas.”

“If you untie me, I can get us out of here. You don’t think I’m the only one who’s going to suffer an accident.”

She stares at me, her eyes two smoldering coals unearthed from the ashes of an abandoned fire. “Gardner wouldn’t kill me. He needs me.”

“All he needs is your story. Think about it. He’ll plant your diary in my apartment and tear out the blank pages to make it look like someone else got to it first. He’ll tell the tabloids that you and I were lovers, that I talked you into suing Marble, and that we offered him a cut if he testified that he saw Marble touching you. The story will be worth more with you dead than alive, especially if he hints that Marble was behind our accident.”

Lindsey frowns, looks around, then unties my wrists. The blood stings as it rushes back into my hands. As I rub my wrists, she kneels down in front of me and struggles with the knot that binds my ankles.

“There’s a pair of pruning sheers on that wall.”

She retrieves them and cuts through the twine.

“Where are we?” I ask again. “What road?”

“We took 54 out of El Paso, then we turned onto a side road.”

“Marble lives off 54. How far are we from Sidewinder?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been there since I was a kid.” She makes it sound like it was ten years ago instead of three.

“Do you have your cell phone?”

She pulls it from her pocket and hands it to me. I dial Marble’s number, get his voice mail, and leave a message. Then I remove an axe from the wall. “Stand back.”

I swing at the wall and the wood splinters as the head of the axe imbeds itself in one board. I yank it out and swing again. The board cracks in half.

Three minutes later, I’ve created a gap large enough for us to slip through sideways. We climb out, scan the horizon, and hike downhill.

The afternoon sun casts a watery mirage on the asphalt. We keep our distance from the road. If Gardner returns, the occasional cactus won’t provide us with much cover.

We’ve walked a couple of miles before we spy a marker: Route 117. As we pass a fenced goat pasture, Lindsey’s phone rings.

I recognize the number. “Marble, it’s Jason. Are you home?”

“What’s wrong?”

I tell him how Gardner caught me spying on Lindsey, how he forced me into his trunk, how he locked Lindsey and me in the shed, and how we escaped.

“Where are you now?”

“Route 117, off 54. We’re outside a small ranch. There’s a beige trailer set back from the road and a goat pasture with a lean-to in the middle.”

“Stay there. I’ll come get you.”

I hand the phone to Lindsey. “He’s coming.”

I notice that her cheeks have turned a painful shade of pink. “Let’s get out of the sun.”

We walk towards the pasture, lie flat on our stomachs, and drag ourselves beneath the barbed-wire fence. The goats scatter as we scramble to our feet and approach their water trough. I turn on the faucet and pass one finger through a stream of scalding water. I give it a minute, then test it again. “Go ahead.”

Lindsey bends down, twists her head, and drinks, oblivious to the water streaming sideways off her face. When she’s done, I take a drink myself. Then we duck inside the lean-to. Lindsey leans her head against one post and closes her eyes.

Fifteen minutes later, we hear a car approaching. Lindsey’s eyes snap open. “Marble?”

I peer out and spy my own van cresting the hill. “Gardner.”

We press ourselves against the back of the lean-to. Instead of passing us, the van stops. How could Gardner possibly know we’re there? Then I remember that he took my interceptor, still programmed with Lindsey’s number. He must have picked up Marble’s call.

I yank Lindsey’s hand. “Let’s go.”

The driver’s door slams as we run towards the back of the pasture. This time we drag ourselves too quickly beneath the fence. Lindsey cries out as a barb draws a bloody line along the back of her left calf. The fence tears my shirt, punctures my right shoulder.

Lindsey’s leg leaves a thin trail of blood as we free ourselves and race towards the trailer. Gardner has already circled the pasture. Sunlight reflects off my gun, clutched in his right hand.

We keep running as he fires the first shot. An explosion of dirt marks the bullet’s landing. The next shot strikes even closer.

“I can’t,” Lindsey pants. She stops, raises her hands, and turns to face Gardner.

Blood runs from her wound. I can’t leave her. I raise my hands and turn around too.

As Gardner takes a step towards us, Marble’s Jaguar convertible appears at the top of the hill.

“Distract him,” I whisper.

Lindsey leans her weight on her good leg. “I’m hurt.”

Gardner squints. “What the hell are you doing?”

“He had a knife hidden in his boot. He worked his way loose. He forced me to go with him.”

Gardner doesn’t look convinced.

Marble’s car purrs to a stop.

“Listen,” I step forward, hands still in the air. “Let me join your side. I can tell the lawyers about the times I’ve seen Marble with his hands up girls’ shirts. How he invites foster kids to his ranch and pretends to love them the way their parents never did. Just give me a small cut.”

As I speak, Marble climbs out of the car, a soccer ball in one hand, and approaches Gardner from behind. He drop-kicks the ball. With a loud thump, it strikes the back of Gardner’s head. He sways forward and drops my Beretta as he crumples to the ground.

I grab my gun, then step back as Marble turns Gardner over. He’s out cold, but he’s breathing.

Marble calls 911. As soon as he’s done, he turns to Lindsey. “Are you okay?”

She nods.

“We’ve got to do something about that leg.” He helps her to his car, opens his trunk, and pulls out a white towel and a shin pad. He folds the towel, places it over her cut, then puts the shin pad on backwards to hold it in place. I feel a twinge of envy as Lindsey climbs into the front seat and Marble slides in beside her.

Ten minutes later the police arrive, followed by an ambulance. The medics offer Lindsey a ride to the hospital, but Marble tells them he’ll take her. After taking our statements, the cops tell me, “We’ll have to impound your van. It’s evidence.”

What can I do? I climb into the back of the Jaguar. Lindsey’s hair whips at my face as Marble drives us into town.

Marble and I sit beside Lindsey in the emergency room while she fills out a stack of forms. After she’s turned them in, Marble asks her, “Why did you spread all those lies about me?”

“You made me believe that you cared about me, then you abandoned me. That night you took my hand was the first time I’d let anyone touch me in years, since my stepfather...” She looks down at the scuffed linoleum. “He’s the reason they placed me in foster homes. I begged my mother to leave him, but she wouldn’t.”

I recall the times I asked my mother to leave the stepfathers who abused me. In the end, I was the one who had to go.

Lindsey looks at Marble. “Do you know what it’s like to live with people who don’t care about you? People the state pays to house you? Before I visited Sidewinder, I could stand my life. I didn’t know any better. But afterwards the foster world was like this huge weight holding me down. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Some mornings I couldn’t get out of bed at all. I wrote to you every day for three months. I stole stamps from my foster mother’s purse so I could mail them, but you never wrote back.”

“I’m sorry.”

“After I finished high school, I had nowhere to go. Gardner found me living in Mission Park. He got me a room and helped me find a job. When he suggested the lawsuit, I felt like I owed him and I figured you had so much money, you’d settle out of court and never miss it.”

Marble looks at her. “Do you have any idea how much damage you’ve caused? My team’s suspended me, my endorsements have been cancelled, and my own sister won’t let me take my niece to the zoo.”

A woman opens the door at the back of the waiting room. “Lindsey Stillwell.”

Lindsey rises and limps towards her. Marble and I stay behind.

Marble and I are drinking Balkan beer in his vaulted living room when his picture appears on the ten o’clock news. Marble turns up the volume. In a strange twist of events today, Marble Melendez’s ex-security guard, Phillip Gardner, allegedly abducted Lindsey Stillwell and her companion Jason Lightfoot.

I choke on my beer. “Companion?”

The two of them escaped and Stillwell was treated for minor injuries at St. Luke’s Hospital. Stillwell recently filed a lawsuit against Melendez claiming that he had seduced her when she visited his ranch three years ago, at age fifteen. This afternoon Stillwell reported that she is withdrawing that suit.

Lindsey, standing outside St. Luke’s, answers a reporter’s questions. “The lawsuit was Gardner’s idea. He twisted my memories of a gentle, caring man into something ugly. After Jason talked me out of filing the lawsuit, Gardner went crazy.”

I put down my beer. “I need something stronger.”

Marble pours me a double shot of mescal.

I spend the next two nights at Sidewinder. On the third day, the police release my van. When I pull up in front of my apartment, I wonder whether there’s been a murder. Reporters, photographers, and cameramen mob the sidewalk. The moment I climb out, they surround me.

“How long have you and Lindsey Stillwell been lovers?”

“Is it true that you and Marble played on the same team in high school?”

“Did Marble ask you to date Lindsey so you could talk her out of the lawsuit?”

Before I can speak, Marble’s sedan skids to a stop in the middle of the street. He opens the rear door. “Jason!”

I shove my way through the reporters and climb into the back. “What the hell is going on?”

“Lindsey was on Good Morning America. She’s sold the movie rights to her story for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Her story?”

“Growing up in foster care, her life on the streets, how you two met, the kidnapping.” He pauses, then asks, “Did you sleep with her?”

“No.”

I imagine what it would have been like if I had. As we reach Highway 54 and put El Paso behind us, I think out loud. “I guess she got what she wanted in the end, a nice fat check and lots of attention to make up for being ignored as a child. I just wish she wouldn’t share all that attention with me.”

Marble leans back in his seat. “Welcome to the club.”

“What club?”

“The club where delicate young women prey on strong, virile men.”

“And truth is auctioned off to the highest bidder?”

“Some days I think the world is turning into one big reality show.” He leans forward and tells the driver to floor it.

I glance over my shoulder at the van that’s tailing us. A man hangs out the window and aims his camera at the back of our sedan as we pick up speed and zoom off into the desert.

Copyright ©2006 by Terry Barbieri