Playing Dead (34 page)

“I don’t know these men,” I said firmly, now that I could catch my breath. That was true. “Who are they?”

“Strangers in town who got caught on a video exiting a local bar two nights before Jennifer’s body was found. Their looks made folks remember them. The bar owner had just put in a newfangled camera outside his dump to keep the drug pushers away. He watched every frame for the first month until he got bored of it. He brought this in right away.”

“Did the FBI know about these two? I didn’t read anything about these guys as suspects.”

“Nope. Don’t think so. Like I said, they treated us like a bunch of local yokels with our heads up our asses. So the sheriff kept a few clues to hisself.”

Great
, I thought.
Prove the FBI right by hiding information that could lead to solving Jennifer’s murder
. It occurred to me that Sheriff Joe Bob knew this meager case file surprisingly well.

“How old were you when this happened?” I asked.

“Sixteen goin’ on thirty. Scared the pee out of all of us. Shut down our Saturday night make-out and beer parties for a month or so.” For a second, I felt the panic of trying to get the beer and cigarette smell out of Sadie’s favorite jeans before Granny got hold of them for Monday’s wash. I was familiar with the thrill of illicit parties that spilled into hay fields from the backs of pickup trucks, the cheap beer, the amateur groping.

“Her younger sister was a wild thing when she was growing up.” The sheriff paused. “Not pretty like Jenny, but she put out. I hear she’s finally settling down. Some psychologist fellow in Broken Bow.” My hope for Amanda took a hit. “Y’all want to see where they pulled Jennifer out of the water?”

Now he sounded like a forty-year-old going on sixteen.

There seemed to be no reason, other than morbid fascination, to say yes. Hudson gave a mute nod. His face was unreadable.

Minutes later, the three of us sat in intimate discomfort bumping along in the front cab of the sheriff’s fully loaded shiny black Eddie Bauer Ford truck, the portable flashing red cherry on the roof giving us the eighty-mile-an-hour right-of-way down the highway. I was squashed in the middle and none of us smelled very good.

The speedometer tipped up toward ninety.

“All the sudden, I’m guessin’ you’re not a reporter,” the sheriff said.

“No.” The right tires caught the rough, unpaved berm and he swung the wheel back, but his focus stayed on me, the speedometer holding steady. “But I do have a legitimate reason for being here.”

“That’s what they all say. You leaving town soon?”

“Yes. Soon. Very, very soon.”

“Then I reckon I don’t need to know about your legitimate reasons.” He gunned the motor.

This seemed to be the general approach to law enforcement in Idabel. Machismo and benign neglect.

Minutes later, the sheriff brought the pickup to a halt on the side of the road right before an old bridge that hovered over a slow-drifting, rusty river. We sidestepped broken beer bottles as we worked our way down a marshy path of trampled grass toward the water. I remembered that two boys out fishing had discovered Jennifer’s corpse.

“Can’t keep the kids out, unless I physically post somebody here. Her ghost brings ’em. Freshman football initiations, séances, first-time lovers, double-dares—you name it.”

Surely
, I thought, swatting at mosquitoes,
anyone idiotic enough to lose their virginity at a murder site must wind up with some pretty big hang-ups
.

It took about five minutes to walk the path, five minutes for my anxiety to start thrumming again. My white T-shirt, soaked with sweat, clung to my breasts. The mud-caked leopard-print cork wedge sandals on my feet appeared to be yet another piece of my new Nordstrom wardrobe headed for a hotel trashcan. Thorns found their way up the hem of my jeans and bit my ankles.

I stepped into the clearing with a sense of dread and involuntarily grabbed Hudson’s hand. To my surprise, he didn’t pull away.

Someone had stuck a small white cross in the ground near the water’s edge. A used, cream-colored candle lay toppled on its side, wet with river muck and dripping with hard tears of wax. Candy wrappers, diet drink cans, and a couple of broken tequila bottles littered the area. I saw three used condoms and a pair of muddy purple thong panties.

Almost as soon as we got there, I asked to leave.

Hudson and I silently shared wrinkled hot dogs and soggy crinkle fries in a green plastic booth at Burger Barn, a small converted dry-cleaner shop smack in the middle of the Idabel loop. We probably should have been dissuaded by the fact that the word “Burger” on the sign had been changed to “Booger” by some spray-paint-happy teenagers. At least we were smart enough to pass on the special of the day, jalapeño tater tots.

I did venture a hesitant question.

“Did you … see Jack?”

“The Jeep was gone by the time my friend got there.” He said it curtly.

That’s all he was giving me. He knew a lot more, I was sure. He was Hudson, the legend.

In as few words as possible, we determined that the most sensible thing was to spend the night at my motel before heading home. We stopped at Walmart on the way back so I could buy a pair of pajamas. The choices in my size were covered with ducks, cupcakes, or Britney Spears’s face. I picked cupcakes.

When we stepped through our motel room doorway, I announced I was taking a shower. Anything to avoid him.

Every molecule in the room was charged with the potent combination of anger, cheap pine-scented air freshener, and sexual tension. Hudson ignored me. He flipped on the TV, trying to find something other than gray fuzz. While I dug through my backpack for clean underwear, he adjusted the aluminum foil on the rabbit ears for a recognizable image of Diane Sawyer. Or maybe it was Brian Williams.

I yanked out a T-shirt. That’s when my gun hit the floor.

But he didn’t seem perturbed at all. He picked it up off the floor and handed it back to me, butt first.

“I used to love watching you shoot Miller Lite cans off the fence at twenty-five yards,” he said.

“Thirty-five yards,” I corrected. “And I can do it on a horse at full trot.”

“I don’t think I can do this again, Tommie.” His voice was tired, not angry. He sat on the edge of the bed, eyes wet. “I thought we could make it work this time, but I was wrong. As soon as we get back, I’m assigning a friend of mine to see you through this. He owes me a favor. And he’s almost as good as I am.”

I stood there, stunned, feeling an awful weight in my stomach, not at all sure I believed him.

“What do you mean, ‘again’? I asked. “You said you couldn’t do this
again
.”

“This push-pull thing. I think I’ve made my intentions pretty damn clear all along but you still go your own way at the end of the day. This time, you might get yourself killed. Go on, take your shower.” He lay back, faceup on the bedspread, eyes closed.

“I want to know why
you
think we broke up.”

He opened his eyes and regarded me thoughtfully. “Partly because you were too young. Partly because I’m an ass. But mostly because I was never going to live up to your Daddy.”

I looked around for something to throw at him but the choices were limited. The pillows weren’t hard enough and the bedside lamps were screwed to the tables. I stalked off and slammed the bathroom door.

I waited to cry until I stripped and leaned into the tepid stream of water, so Hudson couldn’t hear. I didn’t indulge myself for long.

The shower was the size of a coffin standing on end. It took all my concentration to wash myself while dodging alien life-forms that grew in black patches on the walls. The mildewed shower curtain brushed up against my skin like a dog’s cold wet nose. With evil timing, the shower spurted boiling hot water down my
spine, followed shortly by an icy blast. I let out a tiny shriek. At least it sounded tiny to me.

Not three seconds later, a shadowy figure hovered outside the curtain. I screamed.

The bathroom erupted in a stream of angry words. Hudson, busting in on me again. Thankfully, the scummy plastic shower curtain obscured his view. Until he slung it open.

I scrambled to cover myself with the Sunset’s rag of a washcloth and pointed wordlessly to the showerhead. He couldn’t help himself. He laughed, a sound I loved.

He whipped the curtain back across and I heard him mutter either, “Oklahoma’s version of
Psycho
,” or “Omigod, she’s a psycho,” before making his exit. I figured on the latter.

The shower had settled on a temperature right below freezing, and I reached for a towel. The air-conditioning draft from the gap left by the open door woke up every goose bump on my body. I shivered into the pajamas and then took a good half-hour to blow out my hair into the long, soft mane that Hudson used to bury his face in.

Push. Pull.

I stared at my face in the milky mirror. A small, good nose, defined cheekbones, pearl-white poreless skin that needed the regular attention of a self-tanner, green eyes, arched eyebrows. And fear. I saw fear.

By the time I exited the bathroom, it was after nine. All the lights were out, except for a small lamp shedding a half-moon glow on my side of the bed. I say
my
side because Hudson’s long lean form took over the other side. No chivalrous pallet on the floor for him, I guess. He lay under the tiny pinecone forest, his back to me speaking volumes.

The door chain was in place and a brittle-looking unfinished pine chair, the only one in the room, was jammed under the
doorknob. The setup didn’t give me confidence that it would hold a determined person from getting in, but maybe just long enough for us to draw or hit the floor. I slipped the gun out of my backpack and placed it as quietly as possible near the lamp, although I imagined the evil outside transforming into wisps of smoke and snaking under the crack of the door. In that scenario, a bullet would not help.

I glanced at Hudson’s still form on the bed. I knew he was awake, the jerk. I slipped in beside him, a foot of sexual tension between us. I turned over and faced the wall, making out the face of a monster in the knotty pine. Maybe he
was
asleep. Oh, God, was that a brown recluse crawling on the back of my neck? I thought I’d seen a carcass in the bathroom. I slapped at it, the worst thing to do with a legendary poisonous spider that eats a hole in your skin.

“Hmm, I guess that’s not one of your top ten erogenous zones,” Hudson said. “I was misinformed in eighth grade by my sister’s
Cosmo
.” His finger continued to trail up my neck, disturbing every nerve ending in my body.

“Turn around,” he urged, pulling me over. “Let’s not go to sleep angry.”

The window air conditioner was rattling like a truck. My body, still cool, melted against his warm one. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and my hands moved on his back, feeling the hard curve of muscle. I couldn’t tell what, if anything, he was wearing below the waist.

This simple hug in Idabel’s Bargain Bed with scratchy 100-thread-count sheets was the safest place I’d been in days. Maybe years.

When he finally bent to kiss me, I lost track of everything. It was like falling into an endless stream. We came up for air and he tipped my chin and planted a light kiss on my forehead.

“Good night,” he said gently, and turned over, his back now a wall, leaving me wide awake, body pulsing, thinking I was screwing this up again.

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.