Playing Dead (31 page)

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?