Playing Dead

CHAPTER 20

I woke up in the back of a car with my head faceup in the lap of Hudson Byrd.

“Get Louie’s cell phone,” I croaked, struggling. “Arrest the last person he called. He’s stalking Maddie at Skatepark.”

One of Hudson’s best qualities was that he didn’t ask a lot of unnecessary questions. He jumped out the door just as Pink Lady slid in the other side, gone so fast I wondered whether I had conjured him up.

“Good, you’re conscious,” she said. I closed my eyes to avoid the psychedelic effect of her pink outfit and my bad decision to sit upright. My head was spinning like a helicopter on its way down.

“The ambulance is almost here.” She patted my shoulder. “Bless your heart. Don’t worry, we got him. He’s in the car behind us, about to take a trip to headquarters.”

“Maddie…” My throat felt like I’d swallowed sand. “My niece. One of his guys is following my niece-”

To her credit, Martha disappeared just as quickly as Hudson, whipping out a walkie-talkie and barking into it as she ran out of my view. Apparently, she wasn’t just a nice mommy with a taste for Russian classics. I could see the shiny Bean in the distance like a huge bubble that had miraculously landed without popping, tourists cluttered around as if this were a perfectly ordinary day.

The seventh-floor Cubs fan popped his head in the window and grinned.

“How ya doin’, kid? Any decent Cubs fan would have stopped to argue that we have no pitching. Agent Waring is going to ask you a few questions if you’re up to it after this nice young lady here checks out your vitals.”

Agent Waring. The FBI.

I nodded, wishing everyone would go away. Find Maddie.

An EMT with a first-aid kit and a blood-pressure cuff appeared. A large black woman with gentle hands. She checked my pupils with a tiny flashlight and asked me a series of questions for a test that I evidently passed. As she worked, the world stopped dancing around. She responded to my half-hysterical request for antibacterial wipes so I could kill any cooties on my hands that had been living down Louie’s pants. Only this and Maddie seemed important.

“Your blood pressure’s not bad, considering,” she informed me. “And your wounds are fairly superficial. The bump is on your cheek, not your forehead. Your eyes look good. I’m thinking you might have passed out from shock.” She pulled out a kit and went to work on my cheek. “As long as you’ve got someone watching you for the next twenty-four hours, I’d just as soon let you go. The Chicago emergency room on a hot summer day-it’s nothin’ you want to experience if you don’t have to.”

She smoothed on a Band-Aid with cool fingers and got out of the car, closing the door and poking her head back in the open window.

“Any dizzy spells or a sharp headache, you come on in. Somebody should check your eyes every now and then for twenty-four hours to make sure they aren’t dilated. Don’t get up. Wait here.”

“Thanks,” I said tonelessly.

I sat perfectly still, imploring God.

Save Maddie, save Maddie, save Maddie.

In ten minutes, God answered. A breathless Martha Waring plopped beside me.

“Your niece is OK. Your friend Hudson knows the owner of the Skatepark where she was hanging out. Buford somebody. Buford found a guy in the parking lot and, frankly, I’m not sure I want to know how things went down from there.”

I closed my eyes and pictured Buford Bell. Balding. A potbelly. A former champion skeet shooter and one-time Olympic alternate who still displayed his dusty trophies in the Skatepark lobby five miles outside of Ponder.

“Buford got the guy to admit he was hired anonymously through Facebook to give a scouting report on your niece over the phone. No plans to kidnap. Buford is holding him for the police, who should be there any second.”

Maddie was safe. Hudson was real.

She stared at me directly. “Did you know your attacker?”

“I never saw him before. He said his name was Louie.”

“That’s right. Louis Cantini. That name doesn’t ring any bells?”

I shook my head.

“I think you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said soothingly, even though we both knew that wasn’t true.

Should I disavow her of that wishful thinking?

“Why were you following me?” I wanted to know.

“I got assigned to tail you after you visited Rosalina Marchetti.” She hesitated, clearly deciding how much else to say. “She’s part of an ongoing investigation.

“When Louie Cantini showed up at the library, I figured, not a coincidence, so I called in some backup. The Cantinis and the Marchettis have an antagonistic history. Plus, Louie is probably lucky if he can read a soup can, much less a book. I apologize for not getting to you sooner. Louie jammed the lock behind him.”

“It’s OK,” I said, trying to process the entry of yet another mob family into my nightmare.

I craned my neck to look out the rear window and was rewarded with a sharp pain.

“Where’s Hudson?” I asked. And how did he get here?

“I told him I’d take care of you for a while. He tagged along to watch them question Louie.”

“He’s not FBI.”

“No, but…” She paused. “He has a lifetime of free passes, apparently. I heard it this way: Several years ago, a local Afghan interpreter opened fire on an army unit. Your friend Hudson and another security contractor ended up saving six soldiers. One of those soldiers happens to be the son of someone very high up in the Bureau.”

Ah, the legend of Hudson Byrd. Nothing could contain it. Not deserts, not oceans, not lonesome prairie.

My collection of injuries began to sing in chorus. My spine ached like I’d fallen off a wild bull; my concrete-grazed cheek and knees stung like the burn of multiple angry hornets; my throat felt like a night spent screaming at a TV in a sports bar. Nothing I hadn’t experienced before.

I would live.

More important, Maddie would live. I would make sure of it.

When Agent Waring dropped me off in front of the hotel with two of the Chicago Bureau’s “best” rookie agents to guard my hotel room door for the night, I had to ask.

“Is genealogy actually a hobby?”

“When you have five hours,” she said, “I’ll tell you how I have about three-fourths of an ounce of Tom Cruise’s blood running in my veins.” She grinned. “Enough to brag about at parties but not enough to drop Jesus for Scientology.”

She tossed off a two-fingered salute. “I’ll be in touch.”

As nice as she had been, I knew what that meant.

Pink Lady didn’t think I was her problem anymore.

My temporary guard detail consisted of two nervous-looking guys in their early twenties assigned to stand outside my room. I knew that nervous and young wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It meant they’d stay alert, worried about not screwing up, and I guessed they wouldn’t mind checking my eyes for dilation every now and then.

I slipped the keycard in the door, promised the boys hamburgers from room service in an hour or so, and stepped inside.

How could I ever think this room felt cold?

The lamp’s blue light stood like a welcome home beacon. Tiny chocolate truffles rested on top of the oversized down pillows, perfect fluffs of cotton candy that I couldn’t wait to mess up with my aching head. The pale gray comforter-what a soothing color!-was turned down with a military precision that my own bed could only fantasize about.

I walked only a few feet inside before dropping my bag and stripping every disgusting bit of clothing off my body, things that he had touched. I even wanted to burn the lacy black underwear that I’d paid fifteen bucks for at Nordstrom. I can’t say that Hudson’s ripped chest hadn’t crossed my mind when I’d swiped my MasterCard in the lingerie department.

Where the hell was he anyway?

Instead of lighting a match to my underwear, I limped into the bathroom, knelt by the marble bathtub, and twisted the faucets all the way until the sound of the blasting water drowned out my sobs. I wrapped myself in a fetal position on the cold black tile floor, naked, head down, tears running down my legs, until I got it out of my system. By then, the tub was filled to drowning level, not that I planned to. I tipped in a generous amount of bubble bath, turned the spa jets to “gentle,” and dipped a toe in. Perfect. Then I hustled out butt-naked to the mini-bar, retrieving a supremely overpriced bottle of screwtop Chardonnay to celebrate the fact that I wasn’t being tortured or raped tonight.

If anybody ever asked me, the psychologist, what to do in a meltdown when therapy wasn’t available, I’d tell them that I considered hot water to be the emotional equivalent and a lot cheaper.

I slid under, closed my eyes, and counted to sixty, a habit since Sadie and I competed for best underwater time one summer at the lake. Then I barely exposed my face, my ears still filling up with water, and let the minutes tick by with excruciating slowness. I’d always done some of my most rational thinking in the bathtub.

I sunk a little deeper in the water. Every cell in my body fought the idea that Anthony Marchetti was my biological father.

There could not be a human being more different from the salt-of-the earth rancher who raised me. No matter what facts were placed in front of me, I still could not believe that Daddy would lie to me, especially a whopper like this one. He got on to Sadie and me for the smallest infractions of the truth. “White lies are lies just the same,” he’d say, even though most Texans found white lies pretty damn useful.

The tub had already cooled off. I used my big toe to turn on the hot water faucet. Mama used to say I liked to poach myself. Satisfied with the temperature, I closed my eyes again and returned to a half-formed plan that I’d thought up at the library. It had nothing to do with today’s research or my family heritage. It involved a trip to Oklahoma to investigate a murder. More than anything else, those newspaper articles in Mama’s box pulled at me like a magnet. They meant something. They dated back to the days when Mama was meticulous, when she made sense.

Two rough hands grabbed under my arms, yanking me out of my reverie and into the cold air. In that fraction of a second before my eyes flew open, I knew that Louie was back to finish the job.

“What are you doing?” Hudson’s angry voice destroyed every bit of effort I’d made to decompress. He picked up the bottle of half-drunk Chardonnay and dumped it into the tub. The other hand gripped my elbow a little too tightly.

“I’m trying to relax after a bad day,” I said with controlled fury, moving my hands fast to cover my breasts. But Hudson seemed not so much turned on as fascinated by the artwork of bruises that covered my body.

“Ouch,” he said, wincing, loosening his grip.

“The boys outside are getting hungry. I called your name at the bathroom door five times and you didn’t answer. I got worried.”

I knotted a towel around me and changed the subject, struggling to regain some dignity. “How did you get here?”

“The usual way,” he drawled, “in one of those big things that fly.”

“Why are you here?”

“I made a promise to you over tequila. I always keep promises when tequila’s involved.”

He saw the anger in my face and held up his hand. “I talked to Sadie. She told me what you were up to. She already had the impression I was protecting you. How did that happen, I wonder?”

“Um.”

“Yeah… um.” Hudson sat on the edge of the tub, feeling right at home while I stood clutching a towel around my naked body.

I stalked around him to the hotel robe hanging on the door. “I can’t reach Maddie or Sadie. They aren’t answering their cell phones. I tried calling from the car.”

“No worries. They’re on their way to your cousin’s house in Marfa for a little safekeeping. It’s a long drive. Sadie said she’d call you tomorrow.”

Would Marfa be far enough?

“By the way,” Hudson said. “Louie refused to talk until his lawyer gets back in town tomorrow. His father and Anthony Marchetti were big-time rivals in the drug trade in the seventies. Maybe still are. The FBI was a little tight with me on details.”

I reached for the robe and he turned his head. Nice, I thought grudgingly.

“Louie threatened me.” My voice trembled a little. “He hinted that this has everything to do with the murders that Marchetti went to prison for… OK, I’m decent.”

“You were always way more than decent.”

I was suddenly too exhausted to carry on the banter, and he sensed my mood, following me silently into the bedroom, where my clothes were still strewn across the floor, not saying a word as I picked them up and stuffed them in the trashcan under the desk.

“How did you know to find me at the Bean?” I demanded.

“The bellman who directed you to a coffee shop this morning saw you Googling the library on your phone.”

Spies, spies, everywhere.

“From there,” he said, “I just followed the action.”

Was he really this good at his job? Or was he one more person lying to me?

An hour and two beers later, I almost didn’t care. I was dressed in a deliberately unsexy pair of cotton granny pajamas littered with tiny flowers, my hair dangling down my back like a wet rope. Hudson had rescheduled the flight I missed this afternoon for tomorrow night and booked himself in the seat next to me. He didn’t think I should fly until we were pretty sure a blood clot wasn’t forming in my head.

Now he lay beside me, propped up on the bed with the best view of the TV. No touching, I’d told him, before we settled in to watch the last half of the Cubs game.

Things were fine, until Hudson broke my rule in the bottom of the seventh. He turned on his side and ran his finger alongside a bruise.

“Tommie, I think you should disappear for a while until I figure this out. If I know the FBI, and I do, they aren’t going to share much. I’ve got a place in Cabo. Take Sadie and Maddie. You could be a thousand miles out of danger and on your way to a nice tan by tomorrow night.”

“I burn,” I said, unable to focus much on anything but his finger traveling up and down my arm like the tip of a hot poker. It reminded me of something else.

“Hudson, there’s a dead girl’s finger in my purse.” My laugh sounded slightly hysterical.

“What?” Hudson raised up, his foot knocking over the half-finished beer on the side table behind him. He hadn’t asked me a thing about my meeting with Rosalina Marchetti, whether I was or wasn’t her daughter.

“Yesterday, at Rosalina’s house. She said she’s not my mother. But she gave me her daughter’s finger. The kidnappers sent it to her in the mail thirty-one years ago. She wants me to find her. She’s convinced Marchetti knows where she is. That she might be alive. She says my mother and I… owe it to her.” I realized I was babbling. “I haven’t worked up… the nerve… to open the box.”

“Jesus,” Hudson said, resigned. “This is a very complicated soap opera you are living. You couldn’t have picked a more effective mood killer. Go get the finger. Otherwise, I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

I retrieved the box, wondering why I hadn’t chucked it and its contents into the Chicago River.

“Go ahead,” he urged, “open it.”

I snapped up the lid and pushed down the urge to throw up.

The finger, the size of a doll’s, rested on black velvet.

It was dusty gray, wrapped carefully in Saran Wrap like a tiny leftover.

I cleared my throat. “I’m going to get it tested for DNA. I have a friend from college who works in a medical lab. I have multiple DNA projects in mind for him. Including my own.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“No,” I said.

I snapped the box shut.

I was about to say more, to tell him that Rosalina claimed I was the child of a liaison between Anthony Marchetti and my mother. But Hudson pulled off his sweats, revealing pale blue boxers against beautiful desert-browned skin and the most amazing calves I’ve ever seen outside of a professional baseball catcher. He yanked off his T-shirt. Everything was as I remembered, only better. Perhaps I hadn’t completely killed the mood, after all.

“The Cubs are up by six,” he said, sliding over to the other bed and popping the mint in his mouth before punching his pillow into a hard, tidy square. I watched those legs disappear under the sheets, thinking about being entwined between them, desperately wanting to taste that mint by putting my mouth on his.

“You need to work on your bedtime stories,” he said, turning over to face the wall. “Sleep tight.”

In two minutes, he was snoring, leaving me to stare at the ceiling and think.

I knew Hudson too well. Maybe the finger was a surprise, but he knew more than he was saying about Rosalina and Anthony Marchetti. Or he would have asked more questions.

Oh, the irony. In less than forty-eight hours, I was breaking a promise to myself, about to close my eyes and leave myself vulnerable to another man of unnerving contradictions.