Playing Dead (25 page)

He smashed his cigarette out into a green book binding, making a small dark O, like a tiny terrified mouth.

With his free hand, he pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. “Let’s check in with my buddy. See how it’s goin’ there in Texas.”

I had a flashback to Maddie’s body in a hospital bed with tubes feeding in and out right after doctors first discovered the tumor in her brain. Now, thinking of a stranger touching her, I was overcome with the same sickening, helpless rush. Louie removed
his arm from around my shoulders, pressing me against the shelves with his body.

“I’ll give you anything you want,” I said. “Money. Just leave Maddie alone.”

His arm gripped me tighter, enough to make it uncomfortable, but not enough that anyone walking by would think it was anything more than a boyfriend’s casual embrace, a little prelude to sex in the stacks.

He pressed “redial.” My bladder lurched again and I regretted the coffee and a trip to the Coke machine. Fear for Maddie squirmed like an alien life-form in my gut.

“Hey, there,” he said into the phone. “What’s our little kiddo doing? She’s at the concession stand … ordering fried dill pickles, a Dr Pepper … and sour gummi worms. Oh, come on. Tommie here is not going to believe that one. Who would eat
that
?”

Maddie.

Maddie would.

She had a weird thing for pickles. She even put them in macaroni and cheese.

Tears stung my eyes. “Please stop,” I begged. “Please tell your friend to go home. I’ll pay him. I’ll pay you.”

He tilted my chin up and scraped a rough, nail-bitten finger along a trail of my tears. He stuck his finger in his mouth and tasted them. Then, with one slow, sensual movement, he pulled the pencils from my hair and let it fall, arranging it around my breasts. A simple act, but it was the most violated I’d ever felt.

I couldn’t speak. I stood there. Frozen. His eyes and the lump in his crotch confirmed a sexual power trip. No wonder rape victims felt guilty. How could I be letting this happen? I was from Texas. I was a card-carrying member of the NRA. My senior class voted me “Most Likely to Kick A—.”

Because, I reminded myself, he held the glittering key to my
world above his head and was about to drop it in the ocean. He had Maddie.

My tormentor abruptly mutated, as if he knew he’d gotten off track.

“Anthony Marchetti went down for those hits, you little bitch. That’s the way it needs to stay. You and your mother leave it the fuck alone.”

He wrenched the canvas bag off my shoulder and tossed all the work of the last four hours onto the floor. Marchetti’s unsmiling face stared up from a mimeographed photo that fell near my foot, not looking as fierce as I remembered. Could he possibly be innocent? And why did this brute care?

But Louie was done sharing. “You came in looking one way,” he said. “You’ll go out looking another.”

He pulled my hair straight up, until the rest of it fell in a shorter loop at my shoulders. He took off his cap and placed it on my head to hold it in place.

“Instant haircut.” He grinned, as if he’d invented something that hadn’t been practiced by pre-teen girls for years.

He yanked his bright red T-shirt over his head, revealing a white Cubs T-shirt with a sweat stain down the front. He watched my eyes travel to the outline of a gun tucked inside his jeans.

“I lied.” He shrugged. “Bad habit. I used to get beat for it. Put this on, over your shirt.”

I hesitated.

“Do it NOW.”

Here’s what I was desperate enough to think: Pink Lady might have needed a pee herself. She might notice me walking stiffly, awkwardly, down the center staircase with Scarface and postulate that he might not be the love of my life. She might spot his gun. Call a security guard.

“Don’t say shit, got it? Hold my hand. Keep your head down.”

We merged awkwardly into the open reading area in the center of the floor, boyfriend and girlfriend. Loyal Cubs fans. Then he tugged me toward the stacks on the opposite side of the floor. Not to the staircase. He watched my expression morph.

“Oh, come on, you didn’t think I had a plan?” A man at the table in front of us gave us a hard stare.

“Smile at him,” my kidnapper crooned into my ear. “Do it for
Maddie
.” So I did. We both smiled at him, and the man smiled back.

“It’s their year,” the man said, in library sotto voce, pointing to my hat, and returned to reading his paper.

My hope drained away as we moved out of the man’s sightline, traveling at Louie’s quickened pace through the stacks to the far wall. He pushed open a door labeled “Authorized Personnel Only,” and we entered a chilly concrete stairwell.

“My father can get the floor plan of any building he wants with a single phone call,” he bragged. “There’s a bomb shelter under this place.”

He wasn’t lying this time. He led me down to the basement, a huge, brightly lit room containing countless locked cages of books and artifacts. Shivering, I imagined a closed-door session with Louie in the bomb shelter, but my escort had other ideas. He made a direct line for the heavy black door on the far right wall marked “Tunnel. Emergencies Only.”

I peered into the shadows of the dimly lit corridor and felt a wave of optimism. The playing field would be more even in the dark. Louie read my mind better than Sadie could. In a second, I was down, my cheek pressed against the gritty floor, my arm twisted excruciatingly high behind my back.

“Don’t even think about it.”

He forced me up, stuck the gun in my back, and I stumbled ahead of him, the muffled sounds of honking and construction
shaking the ceiling above us. Louie worked in focused silence, pushing me through the narrow tunnel. In minutes, we stepped into the basement of the building across the street, piled high with office supplies.

Louie quickly found the stairs, shoved me up two flights, through a door and out into the blinding sun, and we were instantly lost in a crowd of tourists on Michigan Avenue. I felt a momentary, unreasonable flash of anger at Hudson, who I’d never bothered to tell I was leaving the state. How could he let this happen?

Louie gripped my arm and urged me through the wall of bodies on the crowded sidewalk. What would happen to Maddie if I escaped? What would happen to her if I didn’t?

“What do you expect to learn from me?” I asked desperately, stumbling beside him. “At least tell me that.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. Mothers and daughters yap about everything.”

“Are you going to kill me?” I purposely stopped at a store window and faked interest in a thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton purse, spotlighted on a pedestal like a rare da Vinci sculpture.

“Shut up!”
This time, it came out in a hiss, and a woman passing us shot Louie a dirty look. To me, the abused girlfriend, she offered a sympathetic one.

“You don’t have to take it,” she said. “There are places that will help you.”

“Mind your own business, lady.” He tightened his grip on my arm, dragging me away. “Come on, we’re crossing here.”

Actually, I had looked forward to coming “here,” to Millennium Park, Chicago’s most divine public place, replete with a stunning open-air band shell that looked like a spaceship had landed. I wished my first view of the Bean sculpture wasn’t under such duress, but, still, it awed me: 110 tons of shiny stainless steel in the shape of a giant kidney bean. Blue sky, floating clouds, the
city skyline, tiny figures of gawkers—all of it reflected back at me in the beautiful distortion.

But the most beautiful thing of all? Staring into the Bean, I swore I glimpsed a tiny pink tracksuit standing out in the crowd of about fifty people behind us. I didn’t know whether pink tracksuits were as popular in Chicago as bright red American Girl bags, but, ludicrously, preposterously, hope surged.

“Stop fuckin’ turnin’ around,” Louie said, glancing behind him. “Move it. Under here.” We stood with about twenty other people under the bottom curve of the Bean, gazing up at our reflections. I looked very far away. And skinny. Like a sad potato stick.

“Do you see how easy this was?” Louie asked me softly. “In the daytime. Out in the open. Imagine me coming at you in the dark.” His arm held me close. “I’m going to let you go this time. But give your mother a message. If she doesn’t keep her mouth shut, if
you
don’t stop your digging, your little Maddie won’t be doing her cheerleader jumps anymore.”

He was going to
let me go
?

Inspired, I twisted his crotch as hard as I could, and my other hand reached for his gun. But his T-shirt, soaked with sweat, stuck to his ribs and I only succeeded in pushing the gun farther into his jeans.

I hadn’t dug so awkwardly down a guy’s pants since the senior prom, and I nearly knocked over an elderly woman as I wrestled Louie to the ground.

“Jesus! There are children here,” said a father, who clearly thought our fantasy perversion was a hand-job in the reflection of the Bean. He tugged his two small daughters away in disgust.

Louie yanked my hair back, knocked my face into the concrete, and for an instant I saw my frantic expression contorted back at me like a funhouse mirror.

And then pink. Oh blessed pink.

I
woke up in the back of a car with my head faceup in the lap of Hudson Byrd.

“Get Louie’s cell phone,” I croaked, struggling. “Arrest the last person he called. He’s stalking Maddie at Skatepark.”

One of Hudson’s best qualities was that he didn’t ask a lot of unnecessary questions. He jumped out the door just as Pink Lady slid in the other side, gone so fast I wondered whether I had conjured him up.

“Good, you’re conscious,” she said. I closed my eyes to avoid the psychedelic effect of her pink outfit and my bad decision to sit upright. My head was spinning like a helicopter on its way down.

“The ambulance is almost here.” She patted my shoulder. “Bless your heart. Don’t worry, we got him. He’s in the car behind us, about to take a trip to headquarters.”

“Maddie …” My throat felt like I’d swallowed sand. “My niece. One of his guys is following my niece—”

To her credit, Martha disappeared just as quickly as Hudson, whipping out a walkie-talkie and barking into it as she ran out of my view. Apparently, she wasn’t just a nice mommy with a taste for Russian classics. I could see the shiny Bean in the distance like a huge bubble that had miraculously landed without popping,
tourists cluttered around as if this were a perfectly ordinary day.

The seventh-floor Cubs fan popped his head in the window and grinned.

“How ya doin’, kid? Any decent Cubs fan would have stopped to argue that we have no pitching. Agent Waring is going to ask you a few questions if you’re up to it after this nice young lady here checks out your vitals.”

Agent
Waring. The FBI.

I nodded, wishing everyone would go away.
Find Maddie
.

An EMT with a first-aid kit and a blood-pressure cuff appeared. A large black woman with gentle hands. She checked my pupils with a tiny flashlight and asked me a series of questions for a test that I evidently passed. As she worked, the world stopped dancing around. She responded to my half-hysterical request for antibacterial wipes so I could kill any cooties on my hands that had been living down Louie’s pants. Only this and Maddie seemed important.

“Your blood pressure’s not bad, considering,” she informed me. “And your wounds are fairly superficial. The bump is on your cheek, not your forehead. Your eyes look good. I’m thinking you might have passed out from shock.” She pulled out a kit and went to work on my cheek. “As long as you’ve got someone watching you for the next twenty-four hours, I’d just as soon let you go. The Chicago emergency room on a hot summer day—it’s nothin’ you want to experience if you don’t have to.”

She smoothed on a Band-Aid with cool fingers and got out of the car, closing the door and poking her head back in the open window.

“Any dizzy spells or a sharp headache, you come on in. Somebody should check your eyes every now and then for twenty-four hours to make sure they aren’t dilated. Don’t get up. Wait here.”

“Thanks,” I said tonelessly.

I sat perfectly still, imploring God.

Save Maddie, save Maddie, save Maddie
.

In ten minutes, God answered. A breathless Martha Waring plopped beside me.

“Your niece is OK. Your friend Hudson knows the owner of the Skatepark where she was hanging out. Buford somebody. Buford found a guy in the parking lot and, frankly, I’m not sure I want to know how things went down from there.”

I closed my eyes and pictured Buford Bell. Balding. A potbelly. A former champion skeet shooter and one-time Olympic alternate who still displayed his dusty trophies in the Skatepark lobby five miles outside of Ponder.

“Buford got the guy to admit he was hired anonymously through Facebook to give a scouting report on your niece over the phone. No plans to kidnap. Buford is holding him for the police, who should be there any second.”

Maddie was safe. Hudson was real.

She stared at me directly. “Did you know your attacker?”