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.
At the hospital, while my bloody knee dripped onto a pristine hospital sheet, I punched Jack Smith Texas Monthly into the search function of my phone.
Nada.
All manner of Jack Smiths popped up, dead, alive, and Twittering, but none that appeared to be employed by Texas Monthly.
It took about a half-hour for a resident to cut away the left leg of my jeans at the thigh, cleaning and stitching up the messy gap with the precision of Granny’s old Singer sewing machine. Then, an antibiotics prescription in hand, I tracked down Jack, parked on a stretcher in an emergency room cubicle, tied to a morphine drip. His faded gown bared nicely toned, tan arms with defined biceps, reminding me of a Harvard rower I once knew.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “What do you have to do with me?”
“Blue popsicle,” he said.
“What? Is your mouth dry? Do you want me to tell the nurse?” I tried to casually examine the plastic bag that held his personal items, hanging conveniently on one of the bed’s metal rails, courtesy of an efficient nurse.
“Angel,” he said.
“I’m not your angel.” My surreptitious attempt to dig out his wallet only succeeded in wedging it deeper into the bag. I didn’t see a gun or an ankle holster. Maybe I’d imagined it. More likely, the cops took it. Where were the cops, anyway?
“Chicago,” he mumbled.
I pulled my hand abruptly out of the bag.
“What did you say? Stop punching the morphine button. Jack!”
It was too late. Jack was already drifting off into self-induced slumber.
Chicago.
A word that wouldn’t go away.
CHAPTER 6
I slipped onto the highway about four, curving the wheels in Sadie’s direction, my knee throbbing in annoying rhythm with a persistent headache at the base of my skull. My eyes checked the rearview mirror every few minutes: No one was following me.
My scalp still tingled. In the hospital’s bathroom mirror, I’d discovered a raw pink space on the left side of my head, an injury to my ego that bothered me a lot more than my knee.
A fresh-faced rookie cop, Jeffrey something, was nice enough to retrieve Daddy’s pickup from the garage and drive it to the hospital. He’d brought it to the valet at the front entrance, tucked me inside, asked six times whether I was OK to drive, then handed me his card, doing everything but directly asking for my phone number. Any other day, I’d be interested. I could use a little chivalry in my life.
I usually loved this drive-the desolate Texas plains dotted with baled hay and cattle, the expansive blue sky that made me feel freer than four shots of tequila, the lazy comfort of going home. Today, all of it flew by in a blur of anxiety.
I had to tell Sadie about the letter. Why hadn’t I done that already? My mind raced during the forty minutes of familiar highway to Ponder, the small town that abutted our family’s ranch, finally zeroing in on the one thing that bothered me most: Anthony Marchetti, the butcher who sat in a Fort Worth jail cell. I didn’t believe for a second that Marchetti had anything to do with me but I was beginning to think that somebody or several somebodies mistakenly thought so, and that couldn’t be good for my family, not if that scene in the garage was connected to him.
Maybe Jack Smith was an innocent bystander, just a reporter hanging out by my pickup, and he simply got in the way. Maybe I was their true target. But why? The only weird thing going on in my life was Rosalina’s letter, and she didn’t issue any threats. The note was just a grieving mother’s emotional plea.
No, Jack had to be involved somehow. What reporter wore a backup gun, for God’s sake? A gun in an ankle holster is always a backup to something else strapped higher up. The ankle holster is too damn hard to reach for a primary weapon.
Jack had said “Chicago.”
Rosalina is in Chicago.
Anthony Marchetti wiped an entire family off the earth.
In Chicago.
The whole thing was weird, unbelievable. I turned off I-35, sped by the exit for Dale Earnhardt Way. Minutes later, I entered the Ponder business district, which is, of course, a joke.
My hometown has been living off two things as long as anybody around here can remember: the Ponder Steakhouse and the ghosts of Bonnie and Clyde. The Ponder Steakhouse had served up bull testicles-more politely referred to as calf fries on the appetizer portion of the menu-and very decent steaks since 1948. Bonnie and Clyde actually had the balls to rob the Ponder Bank.
Years later, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway showed up to shoot the movie version, they left it pretty much the same-a dusty spot in the road with twin water towers, three churches, and train tracks right down the middle. I’d like to say the founders named Ponder for its poetic sunsets, highlighted on the city website as some of “the best in the world.” But the town was named way, way back in another century for W. A. Ponder, a big landowner. Land equals power in Texas. I should know. My family owns a lot of it.
I swerved onto the main drag of Bailey Street, and made a quick U-turn into a parking space in the half-full lot of the steakhouse, my stomach growling for the to-go order I’d called in for three chicken fried steak dinners. An early supper for Sadie, Maddie, and me, as promised.
The Ponder Steakhouse could be the only place in the world where you’re required to make a reservation by phone for your baked potato. When you sink your teeth into one, fully loaded, cooked to perfection in a giant oven for two hours at exactly 500 degrees, well, you try to remember to call ahead the day before. Today, I’d have to settle for fries.
The screen door clanged behind me and I could see Betty Lou in the darkened corner taking an order from a couple of old women wearing straw shade hats with jaunty ribbons, in a tiff about the three-dollar charge on the menu for splitting a dinner. Betty Lou was throwing in the senior citizen discount, while righting the tilted frame of a faded autographed picture of Faye Dunaway that hung on the rough-hewn wall.
“Is your top sirloin tender?” one of the women asked Betty Lou primly, pointing to the least expensive cut of meat on the menu.
“No one’s ever said they can’t chew it,” Betty Lou drawled. This was the kind of answer you got from Betty Lou.
“Excuse me for just a moment, ma’am,” she said, waving me over to the register. With a blond dye job from Dot’s Beauty Shop, tomato-red lipstick, and a pair of Wranglers, Betty Lou didn’t look as old as her weathered customers but probably was.
She glanced at me briefly, taking in the tangled hair, the state of my jeans, and the knee decorated with an Ace bandage. None of it fazed her. She’d seen me in much worse condition in the last twenty years, sometimes with a cast from a bull-riding spill, sometimes smelling like something that came out of the rear end of a horse.