Playing Dead Read Online Free

on Chicago’s North Shore. Anthony Marchetti still sat in prison. She’d never divorced him. According to various society columns, she was a generous contributor to AIDS causes, missing persons organizations, and library charities.
    But I could find only her name. After the wedding photo, there were no more pictures.
    My eyes glazed a little. I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night in two weeks, not since Sadie’s pre-dawn phone call saying Daddy was gone.
    I should go. This would be the first night I’d spend at theranch instead of at Sadie’s, and there weren’t sheets on a single bed or anything in the fridge but Miller Lites and Cokes for Daddy’s friends who dropped by the ranch to hunt. Daddy asked our longtime housekeeper to shut down the house six months ago, and Daddy had worked here, showered here, and slept here, unless he took a suite at the downtown Worthington.
    It was at least a forty-five-minute drive home. Maybe the Worthington was a good idea for tonight.
    I could see nothing but inky black out of the windows that lined the west wall, not even the brick of the building next door, so close I could touch it if I leaned out. The other offices in Daddy’s building—an insurance agency, an orthodontist, and a law practice—had emptied by 6 p.m., so I was alone with the ghosts. The air-conditioning clunked on and my heart did a little frog jump.
    Still, one more nagging thought.
    It took only a few more strokes to find out where Anthony Marchetti wound up.
    Twenty days ago, he had been moved from the Level 1 maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois, to a jail cell in Fort Worth, Texas. Marchetti was up for parole. And he was about a five-minute drive away.
    Someone was messing with me, either up there or down here.
    My tired eyes processed movement, a blur of green.
    Someone was in the room, at the door.
    My right hand automatically took hold of the Beretta M9 my father kept in a special holster attached under the desk and I whipped it up, evening it directly at the head of a man I’d never seen before. This took approximately three seconds. Good muscle memory.
    A long time ago, Sadie and I taught our little hands this move with a squirt gun. The object then: to get the other player wetand to wipe up the floor before Daddy returned from his conference room.
    “Whoa.” The stranger stopped short, about a foot in.
    This guy had to be a lost tourist. Not bad-looking, but not my type. An aging frat boy. He wore a lime-green polo shirt like a flag from another country, with a tiny pink pony on his left bicep. His ripped $150 jeans were made to look as if he’d worked a lot of cattle, but had instead been beaten and distressed by slave labor in Vietnam.
    He was a pretender.
    As a Levi’s devotee, who’d worked cattle since age six, I counted this as the first strike against him. There were other strikes, like short hair moussed into an unnatural state.
    “Are you lost?” I asked carefully. “This is a private business.”
    Eyes on the Beretta, he plopped himself in the leather chair facing me. He set a small digital recorder on the desk and a briefcase on the floor.
    “I’d feel better if you put that thing away,” he told me. “I’m from
Texas Monthly
magazine. We have a mutual acquaintance. Lydia Pratt? I didn’t mean to scare you but I thought I’d try to catch you here and set up a time for us to meet. Here’s my card. You weren’t answering your cell.” He tossed the card across the desk.
    His story rang a few true notes, but the man himself set my nerves screeching like teenage cheerleaders. I lowered the gun, returned it to its safe place under the desk, and picked up his card.
    Jack Smith. Senior reporter.
Texas Monthly
magazine. Two phone numbers and a fax number with an Austin prefix, and an email address.
    “Call me Jack,” he said, grinning, sticking out a hand I didn’t take.
    Get out
. The words screamed in my head. I glanced down at my cell phone and considered