Playing Dead by Julia Heaberlin Read Free Book Online

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 saythe 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.
    Betty Lou and I went through our usual routine: She handed me three hot environmentally incorrect Styrofoam containers loaded with thousands of heart-stopping calories and I handed over forty-five dollars, which included a generous tip. “How’s your Ma?” she asked. “Tell her I miss her. I tucked in the last piece of chocolate pie for Maddie, so don’t you put your fork in it.”
    “Thanks, Betty Lou. Mama’s about the same. I’ll tell her you said hi.” Also part of the routine. I loved that it was still not pointless to Betty Lou.
    Five minutes later, I