Playing Dead

CHAPTER 12

It was a quarter after six by the time I finished with Lyle and sneaked my way into a basement room in the downtown courthouse, about a five-block walk from the newspaper.

The room was crowded with the most diverse group of females I’ve ever seen outside of a baseball game. Baseball and fear, the great equalizers. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, senior citizens, teenagers, suburban housewives-all these women had one significant thing in common: They were terrified of something.

Hudson Byrd, the man at the front of the class, a military contractor who witnessed horror shows in Iraq and Afghanistan, who once melted his hard body around mine, was teaching them to respect that feeling.

I spent forty-five minutes in a folding chair in the corner while they took turns imitating Hudson’s simple defense moves on training dummies lined up at the front-slamming the chin with the heel of a palm, jamming the eyes with their thumbs, thrusting a knee to the groin.

Hudson roved around. “Come on, folks, we need a little less Jennifer Aniston and a lot more Angelina Jolie. Make damn sure he can’t continue his gene pool when you’re done with him.”

With every jab and poke and giggle, I had time to doubt the sense of showing up here and getting Hudson involved. I glanced at the door. Maybe he hadn’t spotted me yet. As if he read my mind, he caught my eye and winked. He’d known all along, probably from the second I walked in.

Sadie said he showed up at Daddy’s funeral and sat at the back of the church, that I just didn’t see him. It would be rude to go.

Damn Sadie. Damn her for telling me Hudson was back from the war zone, for finding out that he was teaching this class tonight as a favor for a friend, for writing the time and location on a piece of paper she shoved in my purse, for reminding me without saying a word that I’d never come close to finding any man I loved better.

Eventually, most of the class was exercising serviceable moves. The granny in the back row with a cane and an ass-kicking left leg was the one I’d bet on in a dark alley.

“Knees, eyes, throat, groin,” Hudson said. “Repeat it back.”

“Knees, eyes, throat, groin,” they chirped obediently.

“Those are your target spots. Don’t forget it.”

For the last fifteen minutes of the class, the women sat cross-legged on the carpet and listened to Hudson’s no-holds-barred lecture on weapons laws in Texas and the advantages and disadvantages of carrying guns and pepper spray.

They were rapt because Hudson had that effect on women. Sadie put him in the category of guys you could take home to Mama, but Mama would be shocked if she knew what he’d do to you later that night.

When his mouth was curved up, emphasizing crinkly lines around his eyes and deep dimples, he was irresistible, James Franco and Clint Black rolled into one, a magnet of sexual energy and charm and intellect. When it didn’t, when his mouth formed a tight, inscrutable line, you took a step back.

I stepped back a long time ago and kept on stepping.

“You shoot a gun in self-defense and the bullet hits somebody, that’s just the beginning of your problems,” Hudson was telling the women, holding up his hand amid a spree of protests.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re completely justified. You’ll have to hire a lawyer for the investigation. When you’re cleared, you’ll have to keep him for the civil lawsuit the ‘victim’ will slap you with.” He grinned. “Hey, ladies, that’s life in America, home of the free.”

When he was finished, a teenager, her iPhone on the floor inches from her leg in case of a Facebook emergency, stuck her hand in the air.

“Should I get a gun?”

“No,” Hudson said.

She made a face and glanced down at a flashing text message. “Should I carry pepper spray on my key chain?”

“It depends,” he said. “How pissed off do you get at your boyfriends?”

“My parents are making me take this class.”

“Yes,” he said, pointing to a thin woman with wire-frame glasses who had raised her pencil, briefly halting her compulsion to write down every word he said in a black notebook. She had a bruise around her right eye. “You have a question?”

She cleared her throat. “What specific kind of gun do you recommend that I carry?”

“I don’t recommend that you carry any gun at all,” he said gently, “unless you’ve practiced with it until it is like a glove in your hand. That said, a lot of women like.32 caliber revolvers or 9 mms. Some of them carry.380s. They’re all effective, fairly easy to shoot. With a lot of practice.” He paused. “Never, ever use a gun if you’re afraid of it.”

She wrote this down.

Who would be safer tonight when we drove home, I wondered, her or me?

I wanted to beg her not to return to the man who delivered that punch.

A thirtyish woman, poured like cake batter into a pink tracksuit, waved her diamond rings vigorously.

“OK, what about this situation? A man is coming toward me with a gun and I don’t have one. What should my first move be?” She chopped her hands in the air, karate-style.

“He’s got a gun?” Hudson asked.

“Yes, a big one.” She couldn’t help herself. She lowered her eyes to his crotch.

“And you don’t?”

“Right. What should my move be?”

Hudson crossed his arms and propped himself against the blackboard that listed two reputable shooting ranges, one that I used to frequent every Sunday night.

“Your move,” he drawled, “should be the same as mine. Haul ass.”

The class erupted in laughter, the teenagers helped up the old ladies, the suburban moms swarmed Hudson for a few extra questions, and I waited in the corner, wondering how to smother the heat coming off my body before he got too close.

Finally, when the last woman scooted out the door and Hudson moved deliberately toward me, all I could think about was how he’d looked on the top of a bull, a moving sculpture of grace and power, fighting for his eight seconds.

His archnemesis was a one-ton creature called Drill, Baby, Drill, a name that had nothing to do with oil and everything to do with West Texas testosterone.

Hudson and I met on the competitive rodeo circuit the year I turned eighteen. Eight months of daredevil riding, passionate arguments, and sex that disturbed the horses. It was the most alive I ever felt. Now he was inches from my face for the first time in six years, and I could barely breathe.

“So Tommie with an ie,” he said, drawing out the words slowly, “what can I do for you?”

For the first time in two weeks, I wished I looked better, as his eyes roamed my face, makeup free, which is the way he always said he liked it.

No prelude, I just spit it out.

“I need one of your cop friends to let me into the downtown jail tomorrow to meet the murderer who might be my real father.”

“Done,” he said. “If you buy me a couple of shots of Dulce Vida.”

An hour later, we sat in a heavily graffitied wooden booth at The Rope bar, breathing the cloud of smoke puffed our way from a guy who looked like Santa Claus with a black leather fetish.

Underneath a studded jacket, Santa wore a T-shirt that read, “You never see a motorcycle parked outside a therapist’s office.” I didn’t take it personally.

The downtown dive catered to cops and Harley riders who shared an unlikely bond after years of drinking beer and twisting on bar stools together. I didn’t want to know what kind of life-and-death issues were decided in this room as the two tribes handed tips back and forth. Regardless, sitting here felt pretty damn safe.

After an intent half-hour of listening to my spew of emotion and wild facts and then reading the letter for himself, Hudson made a few calls. My wish was granted. Tomorrow morning, 6 a.m. Everyone, it seemed, at least those in Hudson’s network, either owed him a favor or wanted Hudson Byrd to owe them one. Now I could be added to the list.

I fiddled with the laminated list of 150 beers from around the world, wondering if the waitress would really bring me a Fredericksburg brew called Not So Dumb Blonde. Today I felt like Pretty Dumb Blonde, and the “pretty” didn’t refer to my looks.

Being this close to Hudson Byrd again, depending on him, was dangerous. He’d almost killed a man because of me. While I lay in a hospital bed with broken bones, he found the rodeo official who had substituted Black Diablo in the lineup at the last minute, a bull unofficially banned on the circuit that year for wicked moves that had nearly killed two other female riders. I was simply unlucky enough to get him in the draw.

Hudson didn’t blame the bull. The bull was a first-class athlete doing his job, almost a thousand pounds of muscle who could leap six feet in the air and spin at a freakish hundred miles an hour.

No, Hudson blamed the human being who put me on that bull. I couldn’t face Hudson after finding out what he did when he found the man at a bar in the Stockyards.

Or so I told myself. The truth was, I couldn’t face my own future. The bull had shattered more than my arm. I was in pieces, devastated, no longer sure what was left of me. We had one more date, an awkward one, and then he stopped calling. Sometimes I think that if one of us had made the slightest move, uttered one more sentence, we might be married and divorced by now, burned out by our passion and tempers.

The relationship was all heat, nothing more, I told Sadie at the time, a lie. We fought too much, the truth. It took six months of healing for me to realize that I loved Hudson, and eight years for us to connect again, unexpectedly, at a New Year’s Eve party in Dallas thrown by an ex-rider we used to hang with. Hudson was flying to Iraq the next day. I gave him a send-off kiss at midnight, which I’d do for any guy going to war, or so I convinced myself.

“How’s the horsey psychology biz?” Hudson asked, tipping his beer, bringing me back to the present. I wanted him to hit the pause button on the charm.

“Technically, I’m a licensed equine therapist,” I answered. “It’s going fine.” I shook my head. “Actually, I love it. Horses are amazing teachers. There’s no bullshit with them. No human emotion to get in the way. The horses don’t feel sorry for kids, don’t care about their baggage. Treat the horse with respect and control or he won’t cooperate. But, of course, you know this.”

He grinned. “I was trained by a stallion named Wicked when I was six. Some would say he could have done a better job.”

The waitress, walking past, slid a cardboard container of fried jalapeños stuffed with cream cheese onto the table, her fingers brushing Hudson’s on purpose as she picked up an empty glass. It ticked me off, a ridiculous, involuntary response.

“I’m running a program with juvenile delinquents, mostly boys who’ve shown aggressive behavior,” I said, trying to keep the conversation neutral. “They train our wild mustangs. It is a beautiful thing to watch. One rebellious spirit against another.” I bit into a pepper, catching the cheese dripping down my chin. “But what about you? How’s Afghanistan?”

“A disaster in every way,” he replied grimly.

His lips curved into a slow smile. “You’ve still got the softest, sexiest drawl on the planet. You used to drive all those rodeo boys crazy. They said you had the guts of a tiger and the face of an angel.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. He was piling it on and the liquor was doing its job. I felt like I was rafting on a warm river.

“What, you don’t think cowboys can be poetic?” He leaned in, tucking a stray piece of hair behind my ear. Stop it, I pleaded silently. “You were hard to resist then and near impossible to resist now.”

I could feel the blood surging in my face, a tingling where his finger had grazed my cheek. It had just been two of the worst days of my life. I wasn’t ready for a full-on advance from Hudson, especially if it didn’t mean anything to him.

“Are you scared?” he asked gently, his voice low.

“Of you? Or Anthony Marchetti? The answer is yes on both counts.”

“You don’t have to meet with Marchetti. There are other ways.”

“I need to do this,” I insisted stiffly. “I appreciate your help. I’ll owe you a favor.”

“That might be one more reason this is a bad idea.” His finger trickled over the back of my hand. “I usually collect.” He leaned back. “You understand you only have ten minutes? Outside the bars of his cage? With Rafael standing right beside you? You understand that now I know about this, I’m in all the way. I will be a wart on your very nice ass. You accept these conditions?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “I do.”

“I’m committed to a job out of town for a few days. So don’t do anything stupid until I get back. Just the Meet and Greet.”

I heard him, but my mind was on something else.

“Are you going back?” I pulled it out of the air, but he knew that I was talking about the desert, where I’d been afraid he’d vanish into the sand.

“No,” he said. “Never.”

The next morning, in the pre-dawn, air-conditioned cool of my bedroom, I pulled on old Wranglers, my hair still wet from the shower. I refused to dress up for my meeting with Anthony Marchetti. I stared at my extra-pale complexion in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, sorry that I’d let Hudson talk me into joining him for a couple of shots of tequila.

Then I bent over the toilet and threw up.

Last night, I’d done a little drunk Googling, unearthing a portrait of Anthony Marchetti worthy of a bad Hollywood script.

I found it on a website run by Horace Finkel, a native Chicagoan and twenty-four-hour plumber, who declared himself the “leading historical blogger of Chicago’s top ten crime lords.”

Marchetti’s primary racket before the slaughter of the Bennett family was flooding Chicago’s South Side with heroin. The blog casually linked him to ten gangland slayings and thirteen individual hits in the seventies, but nothing the cops (or Horace) could prove.

Horace painted Anthony Marchetti as a romantic figure known for striding down Rush Street in a black designer trench coat with a red scarf whipped around his neck and a seven-foot bodyguard at his side. Marchetti considered the red scarf to be a lucky charm because he was wearing it during a failed assassination attempt. Later he used a symbolic red scarf to strangle people who betrayed him.

It really didn’t matter if any of it was true. What mattered was that Anthony Marchetti was a man about whom it could be true.

I cleaned my face with a cold washcloth and scrubbed my teeth for five minutes to wash the taste of bile out of my mouth. I brushed mascara around green, slightly bloodshot eyes, applied a little base to smooth out the sunburn. It didn’t help.

I pushed away a brief recollection of Hudson and me tightly wrapped, dancing slow on the boot-scuffed floor to bad Santa’s off-key karaoke rendition of Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places.” We’d left the bar around eleven-thirty and, when I refused to follow him to the Dallas hotel where he was holed up, Hudson ordered a large cup of thick black coffee to go and walked me back to Daddy’s pickup parked in an open city lot near the courthouse. He watched me drink half of it before letting me drive off. No kiss. A good thing, I told myself.

My hair was already beginning to dry and I combed it and left it straight. I kicked aside last night’s clothes, tossed carelessly on the creaky wood floor, and made my way to the five-foot-tall dresser in the bedroom. The two top drawers had always been Sadie’s, the other three mine.

I opened the bottom one and moved aside a disintegrating homecoming mum, a crown with three rhinestones missing, and a half-full box of tampons. The cigar box hid out in the corner, under a pile of fading horse show ribbons, where I put it a week ago after finding it in a drawer in Daddy’s office. I lifted the lid, overwhelmed by the smell of tobacco and the ache of loss. I raked through the mementoes-cuff links, a few old photographs, a faded red handkerchief, a watch, Daddy’s silver U.S. Marshal badge.

My fingers rubbed over the words stamped underneath an eagle’s wings. “Justice. Integrity. Service.”

Sadie and I were too young to remember his career as a federal marshal. I always had the feeling it was a career path chosen for him by our grandfather.

Either way, Daddy never talked about those years. He didn’t talk much, period, about anything personal. As long as we could remember, he was the caricature of a Texas rancher. He hung his cowboy hat on the same hook in the kitchen every day as soon as he walked in the door.

He was sexist in the way that men of his generation could be. He didn’t touch dishes or fold clothes. He expected his dinner on the table at five sharp and all of us kids to be there, seated. We could get grounded for not making our beds with hospital corners. If he and Mama had a disagreement, we knew she’d always defer.

But he was always there. When Mama disappeared into her room or into her head, he remained present. A rock. If he favored one of us, it was me, not Sadie. We hunted, fished, rode-all with a comfortable silence I’d never achieved with anyone else. I dropped the badge back in the box and dug until I found the old snapshot I’d been looking for.

A little girl with long, messy blond hair sat on a Palomino horse grinning at the tall man in a cowboy hat holding the reins. He grinned back, his tanned face prematurely lined from years in the Texas sun. It had been a good day, but I couldn’t remember why. Daddy apparently thought so, too, or I wouldn’t be tucked in this box.

Why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t yours?

I slipped the picture into my back pocket for luck or comfort. Or maybe a little of both.

My phone beeped on the bedside table. An early-morning email from Lyle, with an attachment. Maybe he was able to clean up the image already.

Subject line: Sit down first.

I didn’t sit down or read the text of the email.

Instead, I clicked the attachment. Then I stood frozen as the screen filled with a tiny, lifeless form in Sesame Street pajamas, crumpled in a pool of blood.

I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up again.

Hudson’s friend Rafael escorted me by my elbow through a seemingly endless gray corridor, my sock feet padding on the waxed linoleum. I’d been asked to remove my shoes and all my jewelry by the stocky female guard who’d frisked me, like a gentle massage. I almost wanted to tip her.

I couldn’t even remember the details of my half-hour drive over from the ranch. The beginnings of a hangover headache, the nasty kind that lies on one side of my temple, pounded out the thump of my heartbeat. My stomach still rolled around like a choppy lake, in no condition to be up and about.

Still, I kept moving.

Move or Maddie could die like that little girl.

“Hudson told you the drill, right?” Rafael slid his passkey through the slot of a heavy gate lined with black steel bars. “Stand two feet back from the cell at all times. You have ten minutes. Maybe less. We’ll see how he does. He’s been a good boy. Nice and quiet. We don’t want you to mess that up.”

Five identical cells lined either side of this block, usually used as a holding facility for prisoners destined for more dangerous quarters in the unforgiving state of Texas, where we boast the all-time record for legally killing people. The cells measured about the size of my walk-in pantry. A shiny stainless-steel toilet and a narrow built-in cot with a one-inch mattress took up most of the space, leaving no room for a morning session of yoga.

Every cell I passed was empty, a set of stiff, bleached sheets folded neatly on each cot for its next guest. It was colorless, freezing, claustrophobic.

I shivered. Even in the brief time I’d been there, I wanted to let out a scream. This was my idea of hell.

We stopped abruptly in front of the last cell on the left. Anthony Marchetti was already front and center, gripping the bars with clean, well-manicured hands, the faint sound of classical music, something familiar, drifting from the headphones on the empty cot.

I couldn’t place it.

“Hello, Tommie,” he said softly.

His icy blue eyes sent over a shot of electricity that I thought existed only in the pages of pulpy fiction. It shocked me, this demand for immediate intimacy, the sensation of falling down a dark, infinite space. I had the bizarre thought that I was the one trapped, not him.

He did not look like an old man beaten down by life in prison. The faded newspaper picture had not done him justice. He’d grown more distinguished with age, his black hair threaded with gray, his lean, muscular six-foot frame a testament to prison workout facilities.

I knew from my research that he was remarkably well-educated for a drug lord, with a master’s from Northwestern’s prestigious Kellogg School of Management. Strap him into an Armani suit and he could slip easily into place as a corporate predator. But right now, I felt like his prey.

“They told me you were coming. Are you afraid of me?” he asked, with a slight Italian inflection. I tried to switch my expression from one of panic, but the muscles in my face did not cooperate.

I wondered for a second if he could see into me, if he knew that less than an hour ago, I’d gagged over the picture of a child he murdered.

Lyle’s email said it hadn’t been hard for his “technician” to sharpen the picture, just a little tweaking with Photoshop. The “technician” had also traced where the sender had downloaded the photo, a circuslike site that promised true crime scene pictures for a monthly rate of $19.99.

Alyssa Bennett, the little girl now stored on my phone, had 527,453 hits. She was the daughter of FBI agent Fred Bennett, whose entire family was slaughtered more than thirty years ago.

Madddog12296 was going to be trickier to trace, Lyle wrote. No luck on that yet.

Lyle never sugarcoated a thing, Daddy said. On balance, I liked that, but not so much right now, because I couldn’t get that girl out of my head while Marchetti leaned casually against the bars, arms crossed.

Rafael, standing at my side, shifted uncomfortably. “Ask your questions,” he urged me.

The speech I’d practiced obsessively broke into fragments. “I want to know whether… you know my mother,” I began nervously, and started to pick at the dry skin around my thumb, a habit since childhood whenever I worked myself into a jam. I could tell Marchetti noticed, intent on making me as uncomfortable as possible.

“I have not had much opportunity to meet women in the last thirty years.” He gestured at the tiny cell.

“Your wife… Rosalina Marchetti says I’m her daughter,” I blurted out. “She wrote to me.” I reached in my pocket for her letter, the single thing the guard allowed me to carry through.

I held it out, now folded small and tight like a paper football. A symbol of my desire to bend and crease myself into something as tiny as possible.

“I need your help,” I told Marchetti. “I have to know if this is true.”

As I spoke these words out loud, it struck me how odd it was that I stood there pleading with a murderer, a stranger. He looked at me with something like pity, if that’s possible from a man who reputedly thought up a torture technique that involved water and electricity generated from his custom-made silver Porsche.

He glanced at Rafael, ignoring the piece of paper in my outstretched hand.

“Why did you let her in here? She’s a crazy girl, eh? As for Rosalina, she’s a liar. And a whore.”

He smiled tightly. “I’m done here.” And then, nodding at me: “Be careful.”

A threat? Or a warning? I couldn’t tell.

He moved away from the bars and fell back on the cot, turning up the volume loud enough for me to hear the strains of a sonata. He flicked his hand toward me like I was a bug in his face. Dismissed. I wondered how many lives besides Alyssa’s he had ended as casually.

“I’m sorry,” Rafael said, genuinely feeling bad for me, drawing me away.

The music hummed.

I could place it now.

Marchetti was listening to the third movement of Sonata in C Major, K. 309, which Mozart improvised in a performance more than two hundred years ago.

I knew this arcane detail because Mama played it on Sunday nights before Sadie and I went to bed.

Anthony Marchetti was toying with me, pulling me along his dark highway.

Sending a message.

We had reached the exit door at the end of the row, Rafael already sliding his keycard, when Marchetti’s voice traveled down the cellblock.

“Tommie.”

So commanding that I stopped and turned back.

“No time left.” Rafael’s hand was on my shoulder.

All I could see of Anthony Marchetti were his fingers wrapped around the bars of the cage.

But in the stillness of the empty concrete chamber, I could hear.

“Tell your mother hello,” he said softly.