Playing Dead (5 page)

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.

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 these 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!”

“What the hell?” The biggest guy swung my way.

I slipped behind a red mini-van, readjusting my aim over the hood to point at the guy’s left shirt pocket.

“Bubba, I think we have a little girl with a gun.”

Bubba? The last time I heard that name I was sixteen, and dating one. Now Bubba walked toward me, unmoved and unarmed, into a slash of light. Brute nose. Evil grin. A black beaver-felt Stetson that cost about five hundred bucks new. Ostrich boots.

Not a pretender. A professional redneck.

“This ain’t just any little girl, Rusty,” Bubba said, seemingly unconcerned that I might blast out his heart. “I think this is
our
girl.” He punched at the screen of his iPhone. “Lookie here, cutie,
I’ve got your picture. I’m not going to hurt you.” He strode forward, holding out the phone.

“I
will
shoot you,” I yelled. “Stop right there!”

He grinned and kept on coming. Thirty feet away. Twenty.

Grip, stance, sight. White noise roared in my head.

“I’ve already called the police. And you don’t think I can shoot?” I took aim at a Jack in the Box ball grinning from the antenna of a white Volvo station wagon to the right of his head, and it exploded satisfactorily into a puff of plastic. The human Jack had managed to drag himself into a seated position, but his arm hung at a sickening angle. Jack Smith wasn’t going to be any help. I guessed at least three broken ribs.

I didn’t really believe I would shoot this guy, and by the look in his eye, he knew it. He would be on top of me in seconds. Grandaddy’s combat training raced through my brain while he advanced again, still smiling.

When he was a yardstick length in front of me, I burst from beside the van and thrust an impressive high kick in the direction of his crotch. The ballet classes I still attended every Wednesday night paid off.

“You little bitch!” he screeched. He grabbed his crotch with one hand and my hair with the other as I ran past. Yanking me violently to the ground, he pinned me beneath the weight of his boot. I saw long blond wisps in his fist.

I don’t like to admit it, but I have a thing for my hair. As he leered above me, holding material from my scalp, I forgot to be scared.

With both hands, I twisted the boot as hard as I could into the most unnatural and painful position possible. The steel toe made a ninety-degree turn, knocking him off balance. His phone clattered to the ground. He let out another howl. I flipped away from him as 250 pounds of hard fat and muscle hit the floor.

My left cheek was now smack against the cold concrete, inches from the pointy toes of his boots and from his phone. The screen glowed with a picture of me from the staff bio section of the Halo Ranch website. There was no time to think about this. I scrambled up and ran toward Jack and his other attacker, fueled by frustration and anger and hellbent momentum, without a single thought of a plan.

What was happening to me? I didn’t want to mess with these redneck freaks. I didn’t want the pink letter in my purse. I didn’t want my Daddy to be waiting for a headstone covered with a mound of fresh earth and a blanket of a hundred long-stem roses fried brown by the August heat.

“GET ON YOUR KNEES,” I screamed at the other goon.

I hadn’t even heard them coming, not until the two police cars screeched short behind me, and four uniformed officers, a bona fide battalion for a Sunday morning in Fort Worth, exited with guns raised. I braced, my own gun pointed at the head of bad guy No. 2.

I was only inches from Jack, who peered up at me with a goofy expression.

“Your hair. It’s so pretty,” he said dreamily. “Like an angel.”

A cop gently pried the .45 from my hand.

“Is this registered?” he asked me.

I nodded, mute.

“I’ll take your word for it. Let’s put it back where you got it.” Texas cops could be nice that way. His mouth was still moving, telling me how I should look into pepper spray or a more appropriately sized weapon. Texas cops could be sexist like that, too. Grandaddy’s advice was to never argue with them. Eighty percent of Texas law enforcement, he claimed, was the same kind of man, the kind on a lifetime power trip.

The other cops were busy cuffing the two thugs, who turned
as docile as little sheep and no longer had a word to say. The guy in the black hat winked broadly in my direction, though. He held up a few strands of my hair and tucked them in his shirt pocket like a souvenir, before a cop pushed his head down and shoved him into the backseat of a patrol car.

Smiling at me through the window, he mouthed:
You’re welcome, Tommie
.

The cops insisted I take a short ride to the hospital with them so I could get “checked,” although I’m sure they were thinking there is not a pill for a 107-pound woman who tries to take down a 250-pound man with a ballet move.

They reminded me about Texas’s concealed weapons law when they glimpsed the handle of Daddy’s pistol in my purse, and then proceeded with a barrage of questions about the events of the last twenty minutes. I told them the truth: that Jack Smith had showed up in Daddy’s office last night but that before that, I’d never seen him. I knew nothing about him except that he clearly irritated other people besides me.

I had no idea why Jack and I ended up in the garage at the same time. It sounded unlikely even to my ears but the McCloud name gave me some clout (“You mean, of
the
McClouds?” one cop asked). I left out the part about my picture on Bubba’s cell phone. That was too complicated to process.