The damn necklace. Heart thudding, I glanced outside. If anyone heard me, he was biding his time. I pinched the medallion between my fingers and held it under the beam of the flashlight.
St. Michael.
Patron saint of police officers.
Patron saint of fending off evil.
Maybe I should put it on.
I ran the light over the papers piled in the backseat. Some folders were thin, others stuffed. Randomly, I pulled at one folder and the entire pile slid toward me.
Shit. I let it fall, papers slipping loose and skittering onto the floor of the backseat. I grabbed several sheets on the way down and shone the light on them. A document from the Stateville Correctional Center. A handwritten account of a 1983 incident in the shower between Anthony Marchetti and an inmate named George Meadows. Meadows ended up in the infirmary for three weeks with a punctured voice box, but every naked man in the shower that day insisted that he started it, not Marchetti.
I scanned the next sheet. An application from Anthony Marchetti for permission to use the internet in the Stateville prison library once a week. April 8, 2004. Signed and approved. And probably monitored 24/7 by the FBI.
I grabbed at a few more papers. WITSEC documents. Almost every word blacked out. Mama’s? How had all of this wound up at my doorstep?
Swoosh.
I jumped and turned back in time to watch three more stacks topple over, papers sliding out like a waterfall. Their demolition exposed a slick, ultra-thin black laptop computer and an old shoebox on the seat. I dropped the folder and leaned over the back, butt in the air, to reach the shoebox. Not light, not heavy. Facing forward again, I let it sit in my lap, thinking of the wonderful and terrible things it could hold.
The answers to all of my questions.
The souvenirs of a serial killer.
Maybe the rest of Adriana’s fingers.
I ripped off the lid. Old audiotapes. Some with the tape tangled and coming loose. Labeled with people’s names I didn’t recognize. Interviews? The final minutes of dying murder victims?
I tossed the box down by the hamburger wrappers, panic snuffing out the air in the Jeep. I rolled down a window and sucked in a deep breath of hot, humid air.
I stared at the front door.
Was it pure crazy to venture into the house alone?
Distractedly, I opened the folder I’d dropped onto the seat beside me. On top, a bad photo, snapped from a distance, blurred by motion and age.
Something about it felt voyeuristic.
Maybe because I recognized the girl.
It was me, at sixteen, on the back of a bull.
He was sitting in Daddy’s chair with a huge grin on his face, like nothing could be more normal. Jack.
There was a little pop of electricity when I saw him there, a thousand questions like lightning strikes.
He was not a reporter chasing a random story.
The Jeep was his.
Everything was shifting.
It took half a second for me to realize that Jack was sloppy drunk. The sprawl of his body, the eight crumpled beer cans on the floor. Cheetos crumbs littered an orange trail down the front of his sweaty white Tommy Hilfiger shirt.
“Long time, no see,” he slurred, although it sounded more like, “Lun ti, no seep.” He let out a long, textured burp.
“Comm eeer,” he coaxed, reaching out his arms.
Not what I expected. Not at all what I expected.
“I’ll be right back,” I said politely, as if, yes, indeed, finding him in Daddy’s chair in the dead of night was perfectly OK.
It took less than a minute for me to grab my.45 out of the safe in Daddy’s office, check the chamber, and fast-walk it back to the living room, tripping over three more empties and fossilized evidence of pepperoni pizza.
Jack hadn’t moved an inch.
“Whatcha got that for?” His eyes jittered over the.45. He seemed genuinely confused.
“Is that your Jeep? Are you alone?”
“Oh, my Jeep! Didn’t want to pay another week on rental.”
“Are you alone?” I repeated.
“Jus’ you and me, baby.” His right hand moved like a snake along the seat cushion.
“Uh-uh. Get up. Keep your hands in front of you.” I pointed my gun at the center of his chest.
He pushed himself to his feet, grinning. “Whatever you say, Miss Tommie.”
“Jesus, Jack.” I waved the.45 in the general area of his crotch, averting my eyes.
“Oops.” He laughed sloppily, zipping up, nearly toppling over. “Don’t think my aim was so good in the pisser.”
“Move,” I said impatiently, gesturing with my gun toward the kitchen.
When we reached the kitchen table, I shoved him into a chair.
Now I had a dilemma. Too drunk and he wouldn’t stay focused. Too sober and I wasn’t sure. So far, no aggressive behavior. But with a drunk, that could change in a beat.
“Put your hands flat on the table and keep them there,” I said. “You move, and I will blow your head apart like that Jack in the Box antenna ball.”
With one hand on the gun and one eye on Jack, I opened the pantry door and pulled out a monster-sized Costco can of Maxwell House. The expiration date was two years ago. Mama had written it on the lid with black marker. So she wouldn’t forget. I ripped off a paper towel for a filter and, without measuring, dumped a liberal amount from the can into the coffeemaker, the blacker the better.
While it brewed, Jack’s head drooped on the table. He started to snore.
I filled his mug to the top with sludgy liquid and slammed it down in front of him.
Jack’s head popped up. His eyes were glassy.
“Drink,” I said, my voice friendly. “Tell me, what are all those papers in the back of your Jeep?”
“Stuff.” He obediently tipped the mug up, making a face and doing a spit-take across the table.
“This is yucky.”
I tried not to let the frustration enter my voice.
This was like interviewing an unhappy Maddie.
“You mean stuff related to Anthony Marchetti?”
“Useless,” he slurred. “All that work. Every damn thing you ever wanted to know ’bout that son bitch except why he’s a big fat liar. I know. I was there. I saw.” He stood, wobbled, raised his fist, and then thumped the kitchen table so hard I thought it might crack the ancient wood.
He missed the chair entirely when he decided to sit back down, falling flat on his butt onto the tiles and popping the last button on his fly. Calvin Klein boxer briefs. No surprise. Like every good drunk, he apparently didn’t feel any pain.
I knelt beside him cautiously.
“Jack. Look at me. Focus. What do you know? What did you see?”
“A Hobbit man. Mean. A giant. Big heart.”
Jack drew wildly concentric circles in the air with his finger.
“Like that.”
Then he crumpled, and laid his cheek flat on a cold tile, the one with the little bluebird etched on it that I’d found as a prize at the bottom of a dusty box in Tijuana. Mama had let me pick a spot for it when she had workers redo the floor with old Saltillo tile from Mexico. Sadie had pressed her orange dragonfly into the corner under the window so it could feel the sun.
“Pillow,” he ordered. “Nice down here.”
I pulled the necklace, the one I’d unhooked from the Jeep’s rearview mirror, from my pocket. I used the chain to tickle his cheek.
“Who are you, Jack Smith?”
His eyes flickered open. “Mommy’s. Thank you.” He grabbed the necklace with one hand and curled it up in his fist. Then Jack lived up to every other encounter I’d ever had with him. He passed out.
I rolled him over and pulled a wallet out of his back pocket, the one I tried to dig from a plastic bag hanging on a hospital gurney what seemed like years ago. Preppy, of course. A Tommy Hilfiger flag in the corner. Where was his phone?
The wallet held a liquor store receipt dated yesterday, $162 in cash, and six credit cards in the name of Jack R. Smith. Nothing else. His other back pocket held the keys to the Jeep.