Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  Push. Pull.

  I woke to my cell phone vibrating like a giant cockroach on the bedside table.

  It was Lyle, and “unhappy” didn’t begin to describe him. I had broken my promise to call.

  “Hold on,” I whispered, pressing my finger over the tiny speaker, trying not to disturb Hudson, still rolled over, sleeping like a tank. I wrapped the top sheet around me and sat with my knees up in the corner of the room. A real spider made its move down the wall inches from me. At the moment, it seemed less scary than Lyle.

  As soon he stopped berating me, I apologized, rattling on about Hudson’s arrival, the gloomy decorating habits of Jennifer Coogan’s parents, Amanda’s conviction that Jennifer’s boyfriend had been murdered by the same killer, the makeshift memorial site where Jennifer washed ashore, the Hobbit and the Giant as possible suspects, the surreal connection to Jack, his drunk presence at my house. It all seemed ludicrous in the pale light of dawn, now trying to get in through the dirty picture window that looked out on the parking lot.

  “I need to tell you something about Jack Smith,” Lyle said when I finished. “My friend at Texas Monthly’s back. He’d never heard of a Jack Smith, so he checked it out. An IT intern was bribed to set up a voicemail and email for Smith. A kid from Princeton. You think he’d know better.” Princeton. Jack’s supposed alma mater.

  “Tommie, you need to stay away from that guy. Seriously think about taking Sadie and Maddie and going somewhere. The next step needs to involve the police.”

  “I’ll talk to Hudson about it,” I said noncommittally.

  “Good. One more thing. Did you happen to read about Barbara Monroe?”

  It took a sleepy second to jog my memory. Barbara Monroe, previously known as Barbara Thurman, star reporter. It seemed like years since I’d talked to her about Adriana’s kidnapping.

  “Someone broke into her house. The Chicago Tribune ran the story this morning.”

  “What happened?”

  “They are using it as the centerpiece on the Tribune home page. It would have been a Metro brief but a rescue dog bit a chunk out of the intruder and saved the day. Readers love that kind of thing.” This last part came out a little annoyed.

  “Let me call you back, Lyle. No, really, I promise.” I clicked off before he could start up with the yelling again.

  My laptop was still in my backpack. I pulled it out, flipped it open, and sat cross-legged on the bed while the living, breathing lump beside me didn’t budge. The wireless internet connection worked right away, a freak gift courtesy of the Charles Wesley Motor Lodge across the road, which boasted such amenities.

  RESCUE DOG RESCUES RIGHT BACK, the headline read, over a picture of a familiar grinning black dog with a white megaphone cuff around his neck and a new patch taped over one eye. The story, posted two hours and twenty-three minutes ago, had 400,342 hits.

  The Tribune photographer made the heroic effort to take Cricket’s best side, without any scabs showing. The night before last, a man in a navy ski mask entered the Monroe house, apparently expecting it to be empty. But one of Barbara’s daughters was home alone, heard a noise, and wandered out of her bedroom, where she had been studying. The intruder grabbed her and Cricket went wild, banging against his crate door in the kitchen until it fell off the hinges. Cricket bit a chunk out of the guy, which was being tested for DNA.

  I scrolled down more, skimming quickly. One of Cricket’s eyes was damaged. He might lose some sight. The police believed it to be a random break-in.

  The story finished with Cricket’s sad history of disease and abuse at the hands of a previous owner, his rescue by the SPCA, and the numbers and addresses of three of Chicago’s primary animal shelters.

  Good for Cricket. Hundreds of people would scurry to the shelters this weekend to save lives on doggy death row. Unfortunately, a third of them would return the dogs two weeks later after deciding that their cute fuzzy faces weren’t worth all the poop and pee, that actual work was involved to love something that was damaged.

  I punched my cell phone.

  “Lyle?”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “I told you I was calling back.”

  He grunted sarcastically.

  “Do you think I’m the reason Barbara’s house got hit? That they’re looking for something?”

  “Maybe. I went over those Bennett crime scene pictures again. We’ve still been unable to trace the sender. Can you call up the slide show wherever the hell you are?”

  I clicked on the icon reluctantly. I didn’t really want to ever see these bloody images again.

  “You got it up, Tommie? Are you there?”

  “Yes. To both.”

  “A source of mine faxed the crime scene and coroner reports on all six of the victims. Here’s something surprising: The FBI woman and Fred Bennett weren’t shot. The woman was hit in the head and strangled. The father was beaten with, and I quote, ‘a narrow lead object, probably a pipe.’ ”

  “Why wasn’t this reported?”

  “According to my friend, cause of death was inked out in the reports handed out to the press. He had to really dig for the original reports.”

  “Who is your friend?”

  Lyle acted as if he hadn’t heard me. “This couldn’t have been a one-man job. Really look at the pictures. Fred Bennett didn’t go down easily or quietly. The wife, the kids, would have jumped out a window while that was going down. There were at least two attackers. I think one man took out the FBI agent in the laundry room while she was pulling out a load of clothes. Then he moved on to the father, in the kitchen. The rest of the family was attacked simultaneously at the back of the house by someone else.”

  “The kids and the mother were killed by a Sig semi-automatic.” It was a detail I remembered from one of the Chicago Tribune clips. “It was left at the scene.”

  “As far as I can tell, that’s true,” Lyle said. “But there were three different methods of killing. There’s a psychotic quality to this. Like a Coen Brothers movie. A thrill kill.”

  I wasn’t even really sure why any of this mattered. So what if Anthony Marchetti had an accomplice?

  “This wasn’t Marchetti’s style,” Lyle insisted, determined to make his point. “There’s nothing in his history about killing women and kids. This job was inefficient. Messy. Beneath him.”

  “Damning with faint praise,” I said softly. “But thanks.” I understood now. Lyle believed that Anthony Marchetti was my father. He was trying to make it as OK as it could be.

  After we hung up, I stared at the photograph of the blood-spattered kitchen. Fred Bennett had been preparing a bedtime snack for his kids. An attempt to make their uprooted lives in a safe house feel a little normal? Did he pretend that they were on a big adventure? Or did he tell them the truth?

  Plastic bowls with cartoon figures were lined up on the kitchen counter. Three glasses stood untouched, in a neat row, poured to the brim with juice. The popcorn, though, was everywhere. On the floor, on the counters, some of it dyed red like for a Christmas tree chain. The white cabinets slashed with blood.

  A Jackson Pollock canvas.

  A Coen Brothers movie.

  I said their names softly.

  Alyssa. Robert. Joe.

  My breath grew more shallow, a rope of dread spinning tight around my chest.

  Focus. Don’t give in.

  I drew my knees up, settling my eyes on one of the printed cupcakes running down my pajama legs.

  Pink frosting, lots of sprinkles.

  Imagine something happy.

  The taste of tart strawberry icing, a table piled with presents, a balloon floating away.

  Suffocating to death on this hard, filthy floor.

  All the oxygen in the room was suddenly gone, as if someone had shut off a valve.

  And then, nothing.

  Twenty minutes later, I found myself shivering on the bathroom floor.

  CHAPTER 27

  The next morning, for a crisp hundre
d-dollar bill, Hudson talked the man behind the motel desk at the Charles Wesley Lodge into returning my rental car to a branch in Durant so we could ride home together in his company-owned, late-model black Ford F-350 with a high-end blinking GPS device wired to God knows how many satellites roving above our heads.

  It was custom-built into the dash with an oversized screen and so many buttons and lights that I wondered if it also had the capabilities to shoot lasers and grill a hot dog. The tinted windows, Hudson told me, were bulletproof and the outside was armor-plated. The truck was a loaner, headed for Afghanistan in a month. As soon as we sped by the Idabel city limits sign, I closed my eyes and tucked myself into a corner of the passenger seat with a pillow I’d spied in a plastic bag under the truck bed cover, neatly stacked beside a built-in firearms safe and a first-aid kit.

  But Hudson had other ideas. Like a conversation.

  “You recognized those two men in the photo at the sheriff’s office.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Not exactly. Jack mentioned them. At least I think he did.”

  “Jack.”

  “Yes, Jack. Before he passed out on my kitchen floor, he mumbled something about a hobbit and a giant. And Anthony Marchetti being a liar. The men in that picture fit the bill.”

  “I can’t believe you went back to the house.”

  I ignored his anger. “The Jeep was parked out front. Packed with documents. Lots about Marchetti. I found a picture of me in one of the folders from when I was still competing. Jack was too drunk to explain. You’re swerving.”

  “You went in alone.”

  “I think you’re missing the point.”

  “According to you, I usually do.”

  He stuck the cord of an iPod into an auxiliary plug, adjusted earbuds, and turned his attention to the road. It struck me that we were not a very good team. I wadded myself back into the corner and shut my eyes again.

  Almost immediately, my cell phone sang out from the depths of my backpack. I pulled it out on the fourth ring. Private caller.

  “Hello?” I asked hopefully. I’d left the phone on because I didn’t want to miss a call from Sadie. Hudson had wanted me to shut it off, worried that it could be tracked.

  “I thought you were strung up somewhere! Like, dead.” I held the phone tightly against my ear so Hudson couldn’t listen in on Charla’s wailing. I shouldn’t have worried; his iPod was turned up so loud that I could hear Johnny Cash walking the line.

  “No,” I told Charla. “Not strung up.” Not yet.

  “It’s an emergency. An emergency. Your dad wants you to come to see him tomorrow during visiting hours. My lawyer called to say an anonymous donor is going to put ten thousand in my defense fund if I cooperate. If you don’t come, it will be big trouble for me.”

  When did I become responsible for the fate of this squeaky death row inmate who had me on speed-dial?

  I tried to speak calmly. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “What? The trouble? I’m damn sure it is if you don’t show up.”

  “I’m not coming.” My tone was not to be reckoned with. I didn’t care what Anthony Marchetti had to say, I would never believe a word of it. I glanced at Hudson. His head was bopping, eyes on the road.

  “I’m supposed to tell you that you were lucky in Chicago,” Charla whined. “That you won’t be so lucky again.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No. Supposably, it’s a fact.” The word supposably always set my teeth on edge. It was a Texas colloquialism used by a quarter of the state. It’s probably in the dictionary now a few skips ahead of Sarah Palin’s refudiate.

  “Are you listening to me? He says to tell you they’re following you all the time, even if you can’t see them. He says to trust no one.”

  “I got that loud and clear the last time you called.”

  I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder at the rear window. Summer wheat grass rippled on either side of a retreating ribbon of black highway, empty except for a rusted green pickup on the verge of passing us. I really ought to be driving. That pickup should not be taking us down.

  I returned to Charla. “Are they threatening you?”

  “Are you not hearing me? Lordy. Although the guard who’s my contact is not bad. He drops good stuff on me. Like a box of Whitman’s Samplers and that Dove lotion that turns you tan real gradual so nobody knows it’s fake. People just say you look healthy.”

  Exasperated, I tried to get her back on point. “You know that if you take money, you are theirs forever. Did you ever wonder why Marchetti chose you? Because the guards think you are susceptible. I am probably not the last assignment they have in mind for you.”

  “Mmmmhhmmmm,” Charla said, noncommittally. “I don’t know what septi-whatever means. Here comes my keeper. I don’t want to scare you or nothing. At this point, you’re like my dear third cousin and I’m thinking you’d be a good character witness for me at my appeal. But I’m supposed to tell you one last thing.” I heard the muffled sound of voices before she came back on the line.

  “You’re currently ten or so miles outside of Melissa, Texas. Going about fifty-five. Why so slow?” Then, wistfully, “I wonder who Melissa was. I bet she was pretty. A natural blonde. She was probably so beautiful that her Daddy named a town after her. I wished my Daddy had named a town after me. Instead, he was just a shitty, lying drunk.”

  A slight commotion, and then a click.

  “Who was that?” Hudson asked, a full ten minutes after I hung up.

  I debated where to start. Maybe with the truth.

  “Charla Polaski.”

  Hudson turned his head sharply.

  “The woman on death row who shot off her husband’s genitals in a middle-school shower?” Was everyone in my life a virtual Wikipedia of crime information?

  “The one and only. Currently in the same prison as Anthony Marchetti. She’s been turned into a messenger. Calling me. I figure Marchetti is bribing the guards to make it happen.” I hesitated. “There’s a tracer on this car or those guys behind us aren’t on our side because she just told me our exact location.”

  “Or they tracked us by the signal in your damn phone, which you left on even though I asked you nicely not to.”

  “Well, there’s that possibility, too.”

  “How many times has she called?”

  “Three in the last seven days if you don’t count the ten times I didn’t answer.” I was making this sound perfectly logical, the sudden liaison of a Texas murderess and a Chicago mobster legend with me, the magnet in the middle. “Charla says Marchetti wants me to come see him tomorrow during visiting hours.”

  I stole a look at Hudson’s face. Redder. About five or so on the volcano scale.

  “I’ll go,” he said stiffly. “You won’t.”

  “I think she needs protection.” I didn’t mention that he’d announced last night that he was done with me. “Maybe to be moved to another facility. Also—”

  “I can’t even express how angry I am with you.”

  “She told me to trust no one.”

  “Hell, you didn’t need her to tell you that. You’ve been operating that way for years.”

  “Hudson …”

  “Just shut up and turn off that phone,” he said, his eyes on our tail in the rear-view mirror. “I need to think.”

  When I was small, I pictured God sticking His finger down through the clouds into the dust of the earth and drawing all the roads in lines and loops, circles and zigzags, so that we could go wherever we wanted but always end up back in the same place.

  I never expected Tuck to die violently on one of those roads while I slept on my favorite pony sheets. Tuck left and I never got to say goodbye and the little girl in me won’t forgive God for not bringing him home.

  I never knew Roxy Martin in life, but it was her car wreck on a moonless Wyoming night twenty-two years after Tuck’s death that gave birth to the panic attacks buried inside me.

  I was only a hu
ndred yards away shortly after Roxy’s spirit abandoned her body in the ravine. I felt a connection, as if she’d swept by and tried to help me catch my breath before she flew off for good. Sometimes I imagine she still visits me, her ghost as gauzy as the dress she died in. Tuck visits, too, but his energy is dense and thick, like the air before a thunderstorm.

  For a week after Roxy’s death, I became her primary voyeur. I walked in a dream through my job at Halo Ranch and devoured every newspaper article about the investigation into the crash, every word of her obituary. She was the best setter on her high school volleyball team, a part-time worker at Burger King, her single mother’s best friend. Ordinary and not, like most of us.

  I attended her funeral even though she was a complete stranger, even though the thought of a funeral overwhelms me with dread, like when the bar clamps down before the roller coaster takes off.

  I knew, of course, that Roxy broke something loose in me, that my brief obsession with her was rooted in pent-up grief for my brother, who died the same way, a teenager on a night of celebration.

  My larger fixation with death is more complicated. The therapist in my head says it is because I was left alone with Tuck’s closed casket when I was six and looked inside.

  I don’t know why I am thinking about this now, in the middle of Texas nowhere, whizzing by fields fried gold by the heat, as Hudson gives me the silent treatment.

  Granny would call it a premonition.

  I had my finger poised to power off my phone when it began to vibrate.

  Private caller. Please, not Charla.

  One press of a button, and my world hurtled out of control again.

  Sadie’s voice. Two words, the last ones I expected.

  “Mama’s dead.”

  The next twenty-four hours were a blur of tears, anger, denial, and the tedious business of death.

  I learned that Hudson was, in fact, extremely good at speeding. It turns out that his team in Afghanistan drove a “controlled” hundred miles an hour everywhere they went to avoid getting ambushed. With warning lights flashing and the speedometer pushing ninety, he scooted every vehicle to the side of the road like an obedient row of ants. He stopped only when we reached the hospital, where Sadie and I sat numbly in the office of a suited nerd who’d been through this routine way too many times to still successfully fake sympathy. I almost appreciated that.