Playing Dead Page 3

  Melva always left a floor lamp lit before shutting the door behind her every weeknight at precisely 5:31 p.m., but tonight, right now, it just lengthened the shadows. The twenty-seven-inch Mac on her desk glowed with a picture of her six-year-old grandson’s Halloween impersonation of Frankenstein, casting an eerie high-tech rainbow on the Charles Russell print hanging behind it.

  I was gathering up the courage to venture back into the dark hall.

  In my mind, not moving an inch from Daddy’s door, I walked the entire route to where I had parked the pickup truck. Down the hall and the staircase, out into the sweltering night, up two more empty blocks until I hit the parking garage. No tequila-soaked tourists in stiff new cowboy hats showed up to keep me company.

  In my head, I rode up the creaky elevator alone to the third floor. I crossed a stretch of concrete and darkness to Daddy’s beater Chevy truck, alone. I fumbled to open the door, panicked by now about getting inside fast enough and punching down the inside locks. No electric locks, no keyless remote for this old girl of a truck.

  Standing there in Melva’s safe world, staring into that dark hallway, I considered turning around and spending the night in Daddy’s indent on the couch, the pistol on the floor right below my head. Instead, I punched a familiar number into my cell, hoping the creak above me wasn’t Jack Smith or Etta Place. Or my dead Daddy, angry that some stranger was trying to lay claim to me.

  CHAPTER 4

  My breath came in short, quick gasps. I could see nothing but blackness and tiny fragments of light, glitter falling in a dark galaxy. My aching arms reached up and my palms pushed against the satin-lined lid of the coffin. I was getting weak. I’d been at this for hours.

  A phone trilled, muffled but close. Someone was out there, six feet of packed dirt and red clay and crawling earthworms above my grave. They could help me. I began to scream so loudly I woke myself up.

  This is how it always ended. The dream haunted me at least a dozen times a year, and the worst part was not knowing which night it would strike, when I’d wake up soaked in sweat, choking on my own spit, gasping for breath. There was only one night—the anniversary, September 3, when I always pulled an all-nighter with the horses, never letting my eyes shut—when I was free of it. On most every other night of the year, I fell asleep to the canned laughter of late-night reruns.

  My dreams, since I was a kid, always had a physical consequence. If I fell off a horse, I’d hit the ground with enough force to wake me up, and my butt would be sore for an hour afterward. Two nights ago, I woke up from a sex dream so close to orgasm that my fingers took me there in seconds. Of course, that could be because my sex life had been a little lacking lately.

  It took a few beats for me to cross over the gray divide from dreamland to the deluxe king room at the Worthington. My body was slick with sweat, my hair damp at the base of my neck. My heart slowed at the sight of a gently starched white top sheet, the carved antique wardrobe, the cherry-red throw still folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

  Victor from El Salvador had been only too happy to drive up to the door of Daddy’s building last night in his Yellow Cab, pop me inside, regale me with tales of his own hopeless love life, then drop me into the waiting arms of a hotel doorman. Victor’s card has been a fixture in every McCloud’s wallet for the last decade, ever since the Christmas Day he slept near a DFW luggage carousel waiting on my long-delayed flight from Cheyenne that didn’t arrive until 3 a.m. He drove the forty-five miles to the ranch as dawn broke and charged only a standard fare. All the McClouds had a stomach virus that year, buckets at every bedside, some pulled from the horse stalls. Still, Daddy crawled out of his sickbed in his pajamas and slippers to hand Victor a crisp $100 bill as a tip.

  My niece, Maddie, is the artist behind the sign pasted on the back of his cab’s passenger seat. “Best Cabbie on Earth!” it shouts, accompanied by a vibrant drawing of a taxi with a friendly brown man waving behind the steering wheel while driving atop a misshapen green and blue planet.

  I hoped that in some small way Maddie’s art negated some of the prejudice that flowed Victor’s way since 9/11. I hated that he felt the need to paste three American flag stickers inside the cab for added passenger reassurance.

  The phone shrilled two more times before I made a supreme effort to try to find it, lost somewhere in the puffy clouds of the comforter.

  “Where the hell are you?” Sadie demanded as I pressed it to my ear.

  “What time is it?” I asked groggily.

  “It’s eleven a.m. You’re not at the ranch. I’m standing on the porch, so don’t lie about it. You told me you were spending the night here.” Her tone, accusing, was justified.

  “Oh, Sadie, I’m sorry! I was at the office late …” I wondered whether to tell her first about Wade or the obnoxious reporter or the woman claiming I was not Sadie’s biological sister.

  I chose none of the above.

  “I decided to pull a Daddy and take a room at the Worthington. I thought I’d be up at seven and home before you got there.” Sadie and my niece, Maddie, lived two miles from the ranch in a doublewide trailer they dubbed the Can of Dreams. It overlooked a sweet spot of the property that Sadie hadn’t committed to building on yet.

  “Uh-huh, right. Like you were going to pull yourself off of a million-count feather pillow-top mattress at the crack of dawn. Very optimistic. Well, at least you finally got some sleep.”

  She changed the subject abruptly.

  “Tommie, yesterday afternoon after you left, Mama had a little spell.”

  I sat up, fully awake now, taking in the three tiny empty bottles of vodka on the dresser and the fact that I was completely naked except for a pair of purple striped bikini underwear.

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you while you were trying to get a handle on Daddy’s stuff because, Lord, we really need to do that. By the time I got there, she was calm. She said she just had another headache and asked why everybody was all bothered. Meanwhile, an orderly was picking up the lunch dishes she’d tossed across the room. She got a little V for that.”

  V is for Valium. At some point, I think every single word in the English language will be abbreviated or eliminated if it cannot conform to one to four letters. Sadie, an iPhone addict, is on board with this; me, not so much. A hundred years from now, I believe linguists will study our language and write (brief) papers on how inefficient we were with our brains. Why use a complicated word when a shorter one will do? Why store fifteen words in your head that mean essentially the same thing? The poetry, the nuance, the rhythm will no longer matter.

  “Did she recognize you?” I asked my sister.

  “No. Well, yes, eventually. After we got to Irene’s.” She paused. “We took a little field trip.”

  I slid back down in the bed. No wonder Sadie was so eager to forgive me.

  “And what did Irene have to say?”

  “I can hear your tone, Tommie.”

  There are words for people like my sister. Kook was harsh. I preferred free spirit. Sadie is both my polar opposite and my favorite person on earth.

  There are words in my head for Irene not nearly as kind.

  “She laid her out on her table. She thinks Mama stores too much energy in her head and that’s causing some of her headaches and memory problems.” Sadie took a breath. “I swear, Tommie, I think I saw something rise out of her like a fog. Mama kind of shuddered. And then we had a nice lunch at Catfish King. You know how she loves Catfish King. She called me Sadie Louisa. She hasn’t called me that in ages.”

  I stopped myself from saying that Sadie should be thanking a piece of fried fish for triggering Mama’s memory instead of a lapsed-Catholic/psychic/yoga instructor with an occasional marijuana habit.

  Two years ago, doctors diagnosed our mother with early dementia. Eleven months ago, Daddy gave in and moved her to a nursing facility that specialized in Alzheimer’s and its many unnamed cousins.

  No c
ure, just drugs that could help but often didn’t. All of us took it hard, but Sadie still passionately sought the supernatural miracle that would bring Mama back to us.

  “That’s great,” I said carefully.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Good job.” I wasn’t lying. It probably did Mama a world of good to get out of that place for a while. And who was I, the runaway, to criticize how Sadie took care of Mama when I was usually hundreds of miles north?

  We hung up, agreeing that I’d be at the ranch by mid-afternoon, with CFS in hand as a peace offering. That would be text-speak for Chicken Fried Steak.

  I spent twenty glorious minutes with my back to the shower’s luxury hot water massager, the equivalent of a generous man giving me a back rub without expecting anything in return.

  While I toweled off, my brain, still relentlessly processing, conjured up another picture. Mama pulling weeds in the garden, singing to herself, a mournful, bluesy song at odds with a bright day, knee deep in cilantro and lemon mint, the most cheerful of herbs. Still, it was a beautiful sound. Haunting. I was about thirteen, several yards away, cutting lilac for the sachets Granny liked in her underwear drawer.

  When I asked, Mama told me the song was an Ethel Waters classic from the twenties. She said her mother used to sing it to her when she was a little girl. She seldom mentioned her mother, so those few words, that tiny glimpse, were a rare gift.

  An odd lullaby, I thought. More of a lament.

  Ain’t these tears in these eyes tellin’ you.

  Right after Mama was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I became obsessed with listening to every version of “Am I Blue” in digital existence. Ella Fitzgerald, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson. At the time I just thought I was missing the Mama who used to know the words, hoping to trap her inside a little machine and plug her voice back into my head.

  Now I wondered if my subconscious had been bubbling up, telling me that even at thirteen, I already knew something was not quite right. That the song was a clue.

  A finger of dread found its way under the thick cotton of the complimentary hotel robe. I shivered. I stared in the mirror and told myself to buck up, raking my fingers through wet, stringy hair that reached halfway down my back.

  I’d never believed in layers or bangs or Chi irons. I washed my hair. I combed my hair. I let the air dry it.

  I’d only seriously chopped it off once, three years ago, donating it to a little girl named Darcy. In her case, A was for alopecia. She’d arrived at the ranch with a bad synthetic wig and the kind of emotional scars that only other little twelve-year-old boys and girls can scratch out on your heart. Darcy loved the horses first and my hair second. When she left, a hairdresser in town cut off fifteen inches. I put it in a plastic bag as a goodbye present, which sounds creepy but wasn’t in the least.

  Myra, a good friend and the psychologist who ran the therapy side of the ranch, pulled me in afterward.

  “That wasn’t exactly protocol,” she said.

  “Do you think it was the wrong thing to do?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not Darcy I’m worried about, Tommie. Or any of the other kids. You have the highest degree of success of anybody here. I give you the most messed-up kids for a reason. The person I’m worried about is you. You get in too deep. I’m afraid the next body part you chop off will make you bleed.”

  I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking metaphorically or not.

  “I don’t know any other way,” I protested. “And I always let them go.”

  “Maybe you watch them walk away, Tommie. But you never let these kids go.”

  I scooped my jeans up off the floor by the bed where I’d dropped them last night, smelled under the arms of the peach-colored Lucky Brand T-shirt I’d borrowed from Sadie because the clean clothes in my suitcase had run out, found my bra and one boot under the bed and another near the door.

  I tugged it all on and checked my purse for the pistol.

  A weapon didn’t seem like overkill even in the light of day. Then I called down and asked for a cab to take me back to Daddy’s pickup in the Stockyards. Victor, I knew, had a lunch date with a single mom he’d met online.

  CHAPTER 5

  I decided to take the stairs because all the magazines say you should.

  Those same magazines also advise you never to walk into a parking garage alone, even in the daytime.

  Later, when I thought about what happened, I wondered if it was sweat or intuition that sent a prickly feeling down my neck when I placed my foot on the first step. I’m not one of those women who walk with their keys poking between their fingers, ready to combat a would-be rapist, but I’m more wary than average and my paranoia had hit Level Orange about eighteen hours ago.

  My father descended from a long line of federal marshals, soldiers, and Wild West lawmen, one said to have put a bullet into Clyde Barrow. My late grandfather—federal marshal, combat veteran of two wars, and one-time sheriff of Wise County—religiously trained Sadie and me in target shooting and hand-to-hand combat on Sunday afternoons when Granny took her nap. The combat part mostly involved lots of giggling and kicking the straw out of a homemade dummy’s private parts while we knocked it around the trampoline. The goal was to empower us and it worked. Boys’ private parts never scared us much.

  Halfway up the second stairwell of the parking garage, I heard noises above me. A symphony of muttering voices, percussive thwunks, and intermittent groaning. Someone was getting beat up.

  Should I go up? Down? Was I the hero type? My heart began a slightly faster pound, like I was five minutes into a treadmill workout with the incline rising.

  Was my imagination working overtime? Yes. It was probably a couple of construction workers. Or tourists. What kind of bad guys struck on Sunday morning in the middle of a tourist haven famous for expensive western wear, saddle bar stools, and the Cattlemen’s restaurant where J. R. Ewing ate his big rare steaks?

  Sweat dripped little raindrop streams down my chest, my neck, my back.

  Do not, do not, do not, DO NOT have a panic attack.

  I whispered this to myself like a mantra, as if it would actually help, while I slipped off my boots and padded cautiously up the stairs, dodging broken glass from Coors Light bottles. The stairwell door was propped open on the third-floor landing, making me an instant target, so I dropped to all fours, jamming my left knee into a jagged two-inch shard of glass. I pulled it out without thinking, wincing, feeling blood dampen my favorite jeans.

  Tourists.

  I was wet with perspiration. I guessed that it was about 110 degrees in the unventilated stairwell. The concrete barriers blocked most of the brutal sun, letting in only slivers of light. It took a second for my eyes to adjust. Daddy’s pickup was twenty feet from me, right where I’d parked it yesterday.

  Ten other cars were parked on this level, leaving plenty of scary open spaces.

  This was important to note because the action was taking place in the far corner of the garage, about seven car lengths away. Three guys. Two standing up, faces shielded by large cowboy hats. And one on the ground, flopped over like a cotton dummy, on the wrong end of the punching. So far, they hadn’t looked my way.

  I blinked twice, not really believing what I was seeing.

  Today’s polo was the color of the Caribbean.

  What the hell was Jack Smith doing near my pickup truck? Staking me out? A self-centered reaction on my part, since he was the unfortunate man on the ground. I stepped back into the stairwell, ran partway up the next flight, and dialed 911.

  “Help,” I whispered. “Guy getting beat up. Third floor. Stockyards Station garage.”

  “Ma’am, did you say someone is getting beat up?” I could hear the click of her computer keys.

  I hung up.

  The logical thing would be to retreat down the stairs and outside into the sunshine. I wanted more than anything to leave Jack Smith to his own problems, especially because I half wondered if thes
e two thugs were doing me a favor. But the thump of a hard boot hitting soft flesh reminded me of an old man in Ponder who used to kick his dog in public.

  One of the men continued to go at Jack; the other leaned against a car, arms crossed. Jack’s groans had stopped, his body’s reaction reflexive now instead of defensive. Not good.

  I grabbed my keys out of my purse, sucked in a breath, and, crouching, made an awkward, limping run for the passenger side of the pickup. I knelt down on the concrete to fit the key in the lock. I might as well have jabbed a pocketknife into my bleeding knee. It took every ounce of willpower not to cry out.

  I pulled open the door and gingerly stretched myself flat over the ripped Naugahyde bench seat. My hand groped for the gun tucked underneath the seat. I slid backward out of the pickup, peered around the bumper, and took aim.

  Daddy’s pistol in my purse wasn’t loaded.

  But the .45 under the driver’s seat of the pickup was. Unlike Daddy’s pistol, it felt as natural in my grip as a hairbrush or a tennis racket. My grandfather gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday after Mama had retired for the night. Lots happened while the women in our family slept.

  It was a big gun for a girl, my grandfather warned me, with a hell of a kickback if you didn’t know what you were doing.

  “But,” he added, “you’re going to know what you’re doing. It needs to be second nature or you have no business carrying.”

  Grip, stance, sight.

  Practice, practice, practice.

  It was a year before Grandaddy decided I had passed his training class and gave me permission to take the gun out on my own.

  The two men seemed to be arguing over whether to dump Jack into the back of a black Escalade.

  “OK!” I yelled, like an idiot, running straight at them with the outstretched .45. I imagined several generations of dead, experienced law-enforcing McClouds flinching from their bird’s-eye view in heaven. “Put your hands in the air!”