“I can’t believe you went back to the house.”
I ignored his anger. “The Jeep was parked out front. Packed with documents. Lots about Marchetti. I found a picture of me in one of the folders from when I was still competing. Jack was too drunk to explain. You’re swerving.”
“You went in alone.”
“I think you’re missing the point.”
“According to you, I usually do.”
He stuck the cord of an iPod into an auxiliary plug, adjusted earbuds, and turned his attention to the road. It struck me that we were not a very good team. I wadded myself back into the corner and shut my eyes again.
Almost immediately, my cell phone sang out from the depths of my backpack. I pulled it out on the fourth ring. Private caller.
“Hello?” I asked hopefully. I’d left the phone on because I didn’t want to miss a call from Sadie. Hudson had wanted me to shut it off, worried that it could be tracked.
“I thought you were strung up somewhere! Like, dead.” I held the phone tightly against my ear so Hudson couldn’t listen in on Charla’s wailing. I shouldn’t have worried; his iPod was turned up so loud that I could hear Johnny Cash walking the line.
“No,” I told Charla. “Not strung up.” Not yet.
“It’s an emergency. An emergency. Your dad wants you to come to see him tomorrow during visiting hours. My lawyer called to say an anonymous donor is going to put ten thousand in my defense fund if I cooperate. If you don’t come, it will be big trouble for me.”
When did I become responsible for the fate of this squeaky death row inmate who had me on speed-dial?
I tried to speak calmly. “That’s not going to happen.”
“What? The trouble? I’m damn sure it is if you don’t show up.”
“I’m not coming.” My tone was not to be reckoned with. I didn’t care what Anthony Marchetti had to say, I would never believe a word of it. I glanced at Hudson. His head was bopping, eyes on the road.
“I’m supposed to tell you that you were lucky in Chicago,” Charla whined. “That you won’t be so lucky again.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No. Supposably, it’s a fact.” The word supposably always set my teeth on edge. It was a Texas colloquialism used by a quarter of the state. It’s probably in the dictionary now a few skips ahead of Sarah Palin’s refudiate.
“Are you listening to me? He says to tell you they’re following you all the time, even if you can’t see them. He says to trust no one.”
“I got that loud and clear the last time you called.”
I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder at the rear window. Summer wheat grass rippled on either side of a retreating ribbon of black highway, empty except for a rusted green pickup on the verge of passing us. I really ought to be driving. That pickup should not be taking us down.
I returned to Charla. “Are they threatening you?”
“Are you not hearing me? Lordy. Although the guard who’s my contact is not bad. He drops good stuff on me. Like a box of Whitman’s Samplers and that Dove lotion that turns you tan real gradual so nobody knows it’s fake. People just say you look healthy.”
Exasperated, I tried to get her back on point. “You know that if you take money, you are theirs forever. Did you ever wonder why Marchetti chose you? Because the guards think you are susceptible. I am probably not the last assignment they have in mind for you.”
“Mmmmhhmmmm,” Charla said, noncommittally. “I don’t know what septi-whatever means. Here comes my keeper. I don’t want to scare you or nothing. At this point, you’re like my dear third cousin and I’m thinking you’d be a good character witness for me at my appeal. But I’m supposed to tell you one last thing.” I heard the muffled sound of voices before she came back on the line.
“You’re currently ten or so miles outside of Melissa, Texas. Going about fifty-five. Why so slow?” Then, wistfully, “I wonder who Melissa was. I bet she was pretty. A natural blonde. She was probably so beautiful that her Daddy named a town after her. I wished my Daddy had named a town after me. Instead, he was just a shitty, lying drunk.”
A slight commotion, and then a click.
“Who was that?” Hudson asked, a full ten minutes after I hung up.
I debated where to start. Maybe with the truth.
“Charla Polaski.”
Hudson turned his head sharply.
“The woman on death row who shot off her husband’s genitals in a middle-school shower?” Was everyone in my life a virtual Wikipedia of crime information?
“The one and only. Currently in the same prison as Anthony Marchetti. She’s been turned into a messenger. Calling me. I figure Marchetti is bribing the guards to make it happen.” I hesitated. “There’s a tracer on this car or those guys behind us aren’t on our side because she just told me our exact location.”
“Or they tracked us by the signal in your damn phone, which you left on even though I asked you nicely not to.”
“Well, there’s that possibility, too.”
“How many times has she called?”
“Three in the last seven days if you don’t count the ten times I didn’t answer.” I was making this sound perfectly logical, the sudden liaison of a Texas murderess and a Chicago mobster legend with me, the magnet in the middle. “Charla says Marchetti wants me to come see him tomorrow during visiting hours.”
I stole a look at Hudson’s face. Redder. About five or so on the volcano scale.
“I’ll go,” he said stiffly. “You won’t.”
“I think she needs protection.” I didn’t mention that he’d announced last night that he was done with me. “Maybe to be moved to another facility. Also-”
“I can’t even express how angry I am with you.”
“She told me to trust no one.”
“Hell, you didn’t need her to tell you that. You’ve been operating that way for years.”
“Hudson…”
“Just shut up and turn off that phone,” he said, his eyes on our tail in the rear-view mirror. “I need to think.”
When I was small, I pictured God sticking His finger down through the clouds into the dust of the earth and drawing all the roads in lines and loops, circles and zigzags, so that we could go wherever we wanted but always end up back in the same place.
I never expected Tuck to die violently on one of those roads while I slept on my favorite pony sheets. Tuck left and I never got to say goodbye and the little girl in me won’t forgive God for not bringing him home.
I never knew Roxy Martin in life, but it was her car wreck on a moonless Wyoming night twenty-two years after Tuck’s death that gave birth to the panic attacks buried inside me.
I was only a hundred yards away shortly after Roxy’s spirit abandoned her body in the ravine. I felt a connection, as if she’d swept by and tried to help me catch my breath before she flew off for good. Sometimes I imagine she still visits me, her ghost as gauzy as the dress she died in. Tuck visits, too, but his energy is dense and thick, like the air before a thunderstorm.
For a week after Roxy’s death, I became her primary voyeur. I walked in a dream through my job at Halo Ranch and devoured every newspaper article about the investigation into the crash, every word of her obituary. She was the best setter on her high school volleyball team, a part-time worker at Burger King, her single mother’s best friend. Ordinary and not, like most of us.
I attended her funeral even though she was a complete stranger, even though the thought of a funeral overwhelms me with dread, like when the bar clamps down before the roller coaster takes off.
I knew, of course, that Roxy broke something loose in me, that my brief obsession with her was rooted in pent-up grief for my brother, who died the same way, a teenager on a night of celebration.