Playing Dead

CHAPTER 24

Hudson dropped me off at the Worthington, clearly torn about leaving me. He ordered me to stay put in the room and open the door only for room service.

He’d left a client in the lurch to chase me in Chicago. He didn’t say whom. But when he finished up the job tomorrow afternoon, he would be all mine.

All mine.

While we were flying up in the heavens, a familiar space developed between the two of us that held all the things we wouldn’t say to each other. Like that I couldn’t bear the thought that Hudson had been to war and back, but that he could die, here, because of me.

So that made calling Victor the second I closed the hotel room door a lot easier.

I didn’t want to risk anyone’s life but mine.

I didn’t want to be manipulated anymore.

Not by Hudson, not by Mama, not by madddog12296.

I wanted some clean underwear and my gun.

I wanted to go home.

Victor let me off at our mailbox at the bottom of the road around midnight, the security lights of the house blinking through the branches of the trees.

Not Victor’s preference, but mine. I needed the walk up the road to clear my mind. I wanted to feel open black sky above my head, to see it twinkling like Christmas in summer, to remember when a hot Texas night felt like a security blanket instead of a threat.

About halfway there, I was sweating buckets, wishing I had let Victor drop my suitcase and backpack on the porch like he suggested. I noticed a vehicle half-parked under the branches of a tree near the house. Not Daddy’s pickup, which had been wheezing a little under the hood. I’d parked it in the garage before I left, deciding to take a shuttle to the airport. Could Sadie be back already from Marfa? No lights shone through the windows of the house. Maybe she was in bed. Why the hell didn’t she stay at the hotel like I’d asked?

A few minutes later, I stopped short. Not Sadie’s SUV. A small green Jeep parked recklessly, the front end on the grass. A security light shone directly into the front window, the necklace dangling from the mirror glinting gold.

The Jeep that was parked beside my pickup in a garage a few days ago.

The one stuffed with boxes and papers.

The hoarder.

No effort to hide the Jeep’s presence. And no one inside it.

I dropped my suitcase and backpack onto the grass and crept forward as close to the shadow of the tree line as I could.

Connecticut plates.

I ran the last yards across the open drive, kneeling down on the passenger side, tugging at the door. Locked.

I crouched perfectly still, held my breath, and listened. No sound, except the buzzing of cicadas near the lights as some of them met an early death. I crawled on my hands and knees through the gravel to the driver’s side, acutely aware that I was now an open target to anyone on the porch or in the house.

I lifted the door handle. Bingo.

I opened the door a quarter of the way and hurriedly shut it behind me to cut off the light. Then I threw myself flat over the passenger seat, the stick shift punching me in the gut, and stared at a pile of McDonald’s wrappers on the floor, waiting for a gunshot.

When it didn’t come, I groped for the glove compartment. Nothing much useful. No paperwork like an insurance card or registration that would tell me who owned the Jeep. No weapon. Just a dog-eared Jeep manual. And a mini Maglite. I punched the button. It worked. I raised my head cautiously. Something slithered across my cheek and I screeched.

The damn necklace. Heart thudding, I glanced outside. If anyone heard me, he was biding his time. I pinched the medallion between my fingers and held it under the beam of the flashlight.

St. Michael.

Patron saint of police officers.

Patron saint of fending off evil.

Maybe I should put it on.

I ran the light over the papers piled in the backseat. Some folders were thin, others stuffed. Randomly, I pulled at one folder and the entire pile slid toward me.

Shit. I let it fall, papers slipping loose and skittering onto the floor of the backseat. I grabbed several sheets on the way down and shone the light on them. A document from the Stateville Correctional Center. A handwritten account of a 1983 incident in the shower between Anthony Marchetti and an inmate named George Meadows. Meadows ended up in the infirmary for three weeks with a punctured voice box, but every naked man in the shower that day insisted that he started it, not Marchetti.

I scanned the next sheet. An application from Anthony Marchetti for permission to use the internet in the Stateville prison library once a week. April 8, 2004. Signed and approved. And probably monitored 24/7 by the FBI.

I grabbed at a few more papers. WITSEC documents. Almost every word blacked out. Mama’s? How had all of this wound up at my doorstep?

Swoosh.

I jumped and turned back in time to watch three more stacks topple over, papers sliding out like a waterfall. Their demolition exposed a slick, ultra-thin black laptop computer and an old shoebox on the seat. I dropped the folder and leaned over the back, butt in the air, to reach the shoebox. Not light, not heavy. Facing forward again, I let it sit in my lap, thinking of the wonderful and terrible things it could hold.

The answers to all of my questions.

The souvenirs of a serial killer.

Maybe the rest of Adriana’s fingers.

I ripped off the lid. Old audiotapes. Some with the tape tangled and coming loose. Labeled with people’s names I didn’t recognize. Interviews? The final minutes of dying murder victims?

I tossed the box down by the hamburger wrappers, panic snuffing out the air in the Jeep. I rolled down a window and sucked in a deep breath of hot, humid air.

I stared at the front door.

Was it pure crazy to venture into the house alone?

Distractedly, I opened the folder I’d dropped onto the seat beside me. On top, a bad photo, snapped from a distance, blurred by motion and age.

Something about it felt voyeuristic.

Maybe because I recognized the girl.

It was me, at sixteen, on the back of a bull.

He was sitting in Daddy’s chair with a huge grin on his face, like nothing could be more normal. Jack.

There was a little pop of electricity when I saw him there, a thousand questions like lightning strikes.

He was not a reporter chasing a random story.

The Jeep was his.

Everything was shifting.

It took half a second for me to realize that Jack was sloppy drunk. The sprawl of his body, the eight crumpled beer cans on the floor. Cheetos crumbs littered an orange trail down the front of his sweaty white Tommy Hilfiger shirt.

“Long time, no see,” he slurred, although it sounded more like, “Lun ti, no seep.” He let out a long, textured burp.

“Comm eeer,” he coaxed, reaching out his arms.

Not what I expected. Not at all what I expected.

“I’ll be right back,” I said politely, as if, yes, indeed, finding him in Daddy’s chair in the dead of night was perfectly OK.

It took less than a minute for me to grab my.45 out of the safe in Daddy’s office, check the chamber, and fast-walk it back to the living room, tripping over three more empties and fossilized evidence of pepperoni pizza.

Jack hadn’t moved an inch.

“Whatcha got that for?” His eyes jittered over the.45. He seemed genuinely confused.

“Is that your Jeep? Are you alone?”

“Oh, my Jeep! Didn’t want to pay another week on rental.”

“Are you alone?” I repeated.

“Jus’ you and me, baby.” His right hand moved like a snake along the seat cushion.

“Uh-uh. Get up. Keep your hands in front of you.” I pointed my gun at the center of his chest.

He pushed himself to his feet, grinning. “Whatever you say, Miss Tommie.”

“Jesus, Jack.” I waved the.45 in the general area of his crotch, averting my eyes.

“Oops.” He laughed sloppily, zipping up, nearly toppling over. “Don’t think my aim was so good in the pisser.”

“Move,” I said impatiently, gesturing with my gun toward the kitchen.

When we reached the kitchen table, I shoved him into a chair.

Now I had a dilemma. Too drunk and he wouldn’t stay focused. Too sober and I wasn’t sure. So far, no aggressive behavior. But with a drunk, that could change in a beat.

“Put your hands flat on the table and keep them there,” I said. “You move, and I will blow your head apart like that Jack in the Box antenna ball.”

With one hand on the gun and one eye on Jack, I opened the pantry door and pulled out a monster-sized Costco can of Maxwell House. The expiration date was two years ago. Mama had written it on the lid with black marker. So she wouldn’t forget. I ripped off a paper towel for a filter and, without measuring, dumped a liberal amount from the can into the coffeemaker, the blacker the better.

While it brewed, Jack’s head drooped on the table. He started to snore.

I filled his mug to the top with sludgy liquid and slammed it down in front of him.

Jack’s head popped up. His eyes were glassy.

“Drink,” I said, my voice friendly. “Tell me, what are all those papers in the back of your Jeep?”

“Stuff.” He obediently tipped the mug up, making a face and doing a spit-take across the table.

“This is yucky.”

I tried not to let the frustration enter my voice.

This was like interviewing an unhappy Maddie.

“You mean stuff related to Anthony Marchetti?”

“Useless,” he slurred. “All that work. Every damn thing you ever wanted to know ’bout that son bitch except why he’s a big fat liar. I know. I was there. I saw.” He stood, wobbled, raised his fist, and then thumped the kitchen table so hard I thought it might crack the ancient wood.

He missed the chair entirely when he decided to sit back down, falling flat on his butt onto the tiles and popping the last button on his fly. Calvin Klein boxer briefs. No surprise. Like every good drunk, he apparently didn’t feel any pain.

I knelt beside him cautiously.

“Jack. Look at me. Focus. What do you know? What did you see?”

“A Hobbit man. Mean. A giant. Big heart.”

Jack drew wildly concentric circles in the air with his finger.

“Like that.”

Then he crumpled, and laid his cheek flat on a cold tile, the one with the little bluebird etched on it that I’d found as a prize at the bottom of a dusty box in Tijuana. Mama had let me pick a spot for it when she had workers redo the floor with old Saltillo tile from Mexico. Sadie had pressed her orange dragonfly into the corner under the window so it could feel the sun.

“Pillow,” he ordered. “Nice down here.”

I pulled the necklace, the one I’d unhooked from the Jeep’s rearview mirror, from my pocket. I used the chain to tickle his cheek.

“Who are you, Jack Smith?”

His eyes flickered open. “Mommy’s. Thank you.” He grabbed the necklace with one hand and curled it up in his fist. Then Jack lived up to every other encounter I’d ever had with him. He passed out.

I rolled him over and pulled a wallet out of his back pocket, the one I tried to dig from a plastic bag hanging on a hospital gurney what seemed like years ago. Preppy, of course. A Tommy Hilfiger flag in the corner. Where was his phone?

The wallet held a liquor store receipt dated yesterday, $162 in cash, and six credit cards in the name of Jack R. Smith. Nothing else. His other back pocket held the keys to the Jeep.

No driver’s license or ID of any kind.

No explanation.

Nothing, nothing, nothing made any sense.

Jack Smith was a goddamn drunken mess, passed out on my kitchen floor. Before that, he’d been babbling like he stepped out of a J.R.R. Tolkien novel.

I sat in Daddy’s chair in the living room with my gun in my lap and punched in my cell phone’s voicemail password. Nine unplayed messages since I stepped on the plane in Chicago. I hurried through them-four from Charla from prison that were all versions of “Shit, she’s not there,” two from Lyle that asked me to call as soon as possible, one from my boss at Halo Ranch, one from Wade asking where the hell Sadie and I had lit off to. Desperately punching away, I finally found what I wanted.

Hearing Sadie’s voice was like drinking in air after a punk kid held your head under water.

“Hey, Tommie. This is awful, isn’t it? I’m on my way back from Marfa now. I left Maddie with Nanette. I had to get her out of there. Hudson has promised me one of his war buddies as a companion for the next few days. Anyway, my first stop will be the hospital. Love you. See you soon.”

I stared at my hands, willing them to stop shaking. I took in the mess Jack had made: newspaper scattered all over the floor, crumbs smeared into the Oriental rug, a slice of half-eaten pizza under the sofa, what appeared to be a little throw-up on the arm of the chair. Jack was like the potbellied pig that my East Texas cousin let roam her house. My hand followed a hard lump near my butt and found a cold steel handle.

Jack’s gun was wedged between the cushion and the frame. Had he been reaching for it before I made him stand up?

I emptied the chamber, stuck the bullets in my pocket, and placed it on the mantel. Fully wired, I glanced at my watch. Ten till one.

Jack said the answer wasn’t in his Jeep. I tended to believe him. The thought of hauling those files in here and pawing through them was overwhelming. It could take days, and I’d still be nowhere.

I walked back into the kitchen and nudged Jack with the toe of my boot. Still out.

I pulled up the leg of his jeans and carefully removed his backup weapon, emptied the chamber, and stuck it in the refrigerator.

The door to the laundry room was shut.

I never left it shut.

I kicked it open and crouched down. Nothing sprang out. Jack didn’t budge.

Gun drawn, I flipped the switch in the laundry room.

Nobody.

I breathed.

I was facing the map tacked to the wall and the jagged black route I’d drawn across it.

Two of the newspaper articles began to nag at me: the one about a city councilman’s race in Norman, Oklahoma, and, of course, the tragic story of Jennifer Coogan’s murder in Idabel. They were the only two clippings from the same state and were No. 1 and No. 2 on the map going chronologically by date.

The thought slammed into me like things often do when you’ve thought too hard about them, as if it had always been there, just waiting for a lull.

The University of Oklahoma was in Norman. Jennifer Coogan was a student at the University of Oklahoma, waitressing for the summer back home in Idabel. That had to mean something, didn’t it? Was the crooked line the path of a serial killer? Why, why, why would my mother know anything about that? And how could it have anything to do with Anthony Marchetti? Or Rosalina? Or the man snoring on my kitchen floor? Or me?

I headed to the computer. Obsessively, I raked through the archives of newspapers located in the cities on my map. I searched the FBI official missing persons list, along with a number of other sites. No murders, and no girls went missing in the month before or after the dates on the clips. The city councilman in Norman was squeaky clean and long retired. His name popped up as an elder at the First Presbyterian Church.

The time on the computer screen read 3:08 a.m.

I got up and kicked Jack again, noticing for the first time that he no longer had a sling. Was that a fakeout, too?

“Ow,” he grumbled, turning over, never opening his eyes.

Back in the laundry room, I flipped off the computer and leaned in to lift the blind on the window, staring into the inkiness of the backyard. Empty, open space.

Jack R. Smith appeared to be on an obsessive quest. Like me.

I didn’t think he was my primary enemy, but how many times did the plucky heroine get that part wrong?

A half an hour later, I was creeping down the hill, Daddy’s hunting backpack slung over my shoulder, stuffed with my laptop, two pairs of my new lace underwear, a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, the Beretta, and a toothbrush.

“I need a rental car,” I told Victor when he cheerfully pulled up in his taxi to our rusty mailbox on the main road ten minutes later. “Find me one at this hour and you’ll get my undying gratitude and a hundred-dollar tip.”

“Where the hell are you?”

The fury in Lyle’s voice through my cell phone was the jolt I needed to stay awake. I was driving through a rare Starbucks-free zone, my eyes drooping dangerously with jet lag and the monotony of navigating country roads for two and a half hours with very little sleep.

“I’m in Melissa. No, wait, that was a while ago. I’m just outside of Paris. Oui, oui.” I offered up a weak laugh.

“What the hell are you doing up near the Oklahoma border?”

You couldn’t throw Lyle, not even for a second. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had every city and town on the U.S. map memorized, along with their latitude and longitude.

Paris, Texas, was a fly speck on the map, a place to grow up and leave. Its importance in the universe shot up mildly when the enterprising Boiler Makers Local #902 constructed a sixty-five-foot Eiffel Tower replica in the center of town. As I whizzed past, I noticed the addition of a large red cowboy hat perched jauntily on top of it.

“I’m going to Idabel,” I said in a small voice. “Alone.”

The deep silence that followed hurt my ears more than the yelling.

“Lyle? Say something. This is my life, you know. I’m going to lose my mind if this goes on much longer.”

He made his usual grunting sound. Good, bad, or indifferent, I couldn’t tell, but I was pretty sure he was tussling with himself. He let his reporters do stupid, dangerous things all the time in pursuit of truth and you rarely found their skeletons hanging from trees.

He finally spoke. “You’re talking to Jennifer Coogan’s parents?”

“I spoke with them a little while ago. They’re expecting me. So is the sheriff. He’s pulling the file. Very cooperative.” I hesitated. “I told them I was a journalist.”

“That’s just dandy,” he shot back sarcastically. “I expect a call as soon as it’s over. In fact, I want a call every twenty-four hours, just to know you’re all right. I’m extremely pissed off that you are doing this on your own.”

“Sorry,” I said meekly.

After we hung up, my guilt got the better of me. I dialed Hudson, knowing he wouldn’t answer because he let everything go to voicemail when he was on a job. I told him that Jack was laid out drunk on my floor with a Jeep full of documents parked out front. I said I was taking a little trip, but not to worry, that I would see him soon. It was like dropping a little bomb into his cell phone. I was glad I wouldn’t be there when it went off.

Two hours and a Big Gulp Dr Pepper later, I pulled up to a renovated green storage unit with a flashing red “vacancy” sign. A white banner stretching across the low-slung building advertised itself as the “Sunset Motel, Idabel’s Bargain Bed, Under New Management.”

The Sunset Motel sat across the street from the Charles Wesley Motor Lodge, a palace in comparison, but the Lodge was booked solid with a bunch of Eagle Scouts. Only in Oklahoma would a religious icon get his own motor lodge. Wesley wrote six thousand hymns, including Granny’s favorite, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” which she belted out a cappella.

The bare-bones, photo-free website said the Sunset Motel had plenty of its rooms available-I could now see why-and a customer review raved about “good heat, AC, and hot water” although, unfortunately, “there isn’t a good place to pull your boat and four-wheelers up to your door.”

The strip of rooms faced the main road with barely enough concrete parking in front to keep the end of the cars out of traffic. No office in sight.

As I crammed my car sideways into the lot, searching for a sign of life, I decided it was probably as good a place as any to hide from the mob. Bullets wouldn’t fly through steel, for one thing. I’d kept one eye on the rearview mirror all the way here, looking for more Louies. I was sure there were more ants in the pile he crawled out of.

I honked twice, and after a few minutes, a scraggly man in a white T-shirt and jeans came out of one of the units. He stuck his head in the car window, providing a suffocating whiff of bad breath and body odor.

“Sixty dollars a night, cash,” he said. I opened my purse and handed over $120. From his happy expression, this didn’t happen very often.

“Two nights,” I said. “I have a reserva-”

“Don’t need to know who you are.” He thrust a metal key at me through the window. It dangled off a crudely whittled pine bear, a homey touch, maybe what he did in his spare time.

“Key says thirty-two,” he said, “but you’re in number five. No service after eight.”

Uh-huh.

I watched him walk back to his unit, which probably served as both office and home, before making a tight U-turn into space No. 5.

I opened the door to a room more pleasant than its manager-a wood-paneled space right out of the 1960s, including a red phone with an old-fashioned round dial. I liked the clicking noise when I stuck my finger in a hole and gave it a whirl. I thought briefly about calling Hudson again. The room smelled musty but not too bad. And it was deliciously cool.

The king-sized bed sank easily from the weight of a thousand bodies before me and boasted a scratchy polyester bedspread with a pinecone motif, a few mysterious stains, and pillows that were hard as rocks. I fell asleep instantly.