Play To Kill

weren't going to like her, not one little bit, all because she'd been born fat into a fat family and didn't have a prayer of changing that.

    So, you carry a little extra baggage. Honey, that ain't such a bad thing. Makes for a softer place for a man to fall, and some day that's going to be a good thing.

    Lisa had been eight at the time and didn't understand much of what her daddy was telling her, but for years she had nightmares about some gray area in her future where really fat hairy men would fall on her and squash her flat.

    It wasn't her daddy's fault, who raised the food she ate, or her mother's, who put it on the table. All they'd ever done was let her know how much they loved her, and that she was pretty and smart and could be just about anything she wanted to be. They meant well, but they didn't have Cassandra Michels' perspective, and that was what she listened to.

    When she was thirteen, her daddy put up a satellite dish and Lisa found the Food Network, where the people who cooked wore snappy white coats and clogs to work, which was totally cool. A lot of them were pretty fat, too, and no one made fun of them, which sealed the deal for her. Lisa was going to be a famous chef. She'd go to the culinary school in Chicago, or maybe Minneapolis, and then she'd buy a new front door for the house that fit so tight her mother wouldn't have to tuck blankets into the crack at the bottom to block the winter winds. And maybe one of those new shiny steel steam cleaners so her dad didn't have to kill himself scrubbing the milkhouse with a hose and a brush twice a day.

    She got an after-school job at the Litde Steer Diner out near the freeway, started out bussing and waiting tables and saving every dime she made. The soybean prices had hit rock bottom, and if she wanted to end up anywhere more glamorous than the high school cafeteria where they still wore those hairnets that fit halfway down your forehead, she was going to have to earn her own tuition. By the time she'd graduated from high school she owned half the menu and managed the place, and was precisely two months from the amount she needed to pay her tuition at the Minneapolis School of Culinary Arts. Her parents were so proud they kept saying how they were near busting, and that made Lisa shine.

    She felt sorry for the other women three times her age who wore support stockings and shuffled from table to table taking orders, whose only dream was to make the monthly mortgage payment. Alma Heberson was having a particularly bad time this year. She'd lost her eldest son to a corn picker last year, and her husband had been knee-deep in the bottle and mean as a copperhead ever since. She'd been dead on her feet tonight and fighting a nasty cold, and Lisa offered to finish up her tables so she could go home early and get some rest. It wasn't a small thing, since Lisa had to be back at the diner before dawn to bake the pastry and make the soup of the day, recipe courtesy of one of the Food Network's newcomers, who Lisa thought would go far.

    It was twenty minutes to closing when the last customer paid his bill and headed out. Maybe she could lock up a little early and get home in time to get a full five hours of sleep.

    She hadn't finished closing the register drawer when the last straggling customer pushed open the door and let in the steamy night heat from the parking lot. Too early to turn him away, especially if the order was easy. It had been a pretty slow day, and the till was hurting. Besides, the customer was attractive and young with one of those pleasant, hopeful faces that made you think a little homemade meatloaf might just change his life.

    'Can I help you?' Lisa smiled and ran her bleach cloth over a section of the Formica counter.

    Deputy Frank Goebel was cruising north on one of those tar two-lanes that doubled as a section line between farm fields, which meant there were no lights other than his own, and the asphalt brandished the ever- present mud trails of whatever tractors had taken the same route during the day. Damn things were invisible at night, impossible to avoid, and the ride home was one long series of bumps. His tires danced and jittered over a thick tread line of mud that the day's heat had hardened into cement and the patrol skidded onto the right shoulder. He eased it back onto the road and sighed, bringing his speed down to thirty.

    Not that he was all that anxious to get home anyway. He'd lived solo in the little boxy rambler since his wife had left last Christmas, and small as it was, the house echoed every move he made, reminding him he was alone.

    Couldn't save his kid, couldn't save his marriage, and lately he'd been wondering if he could save himself, or if it would even be worth the effort.

    He winced at the buzz and click from the radio that announced a call from dispatch, and waited without emotion for Mary to go through the by-the-book introductory identifiers. He'd watched an old movie once where a cop on patrol got a call on the radio, and the dispatcher said, 'Hey, Bill, this is Dispatch and we've got a break-in at the bank.' Now how hard was that? What brainiac decided that Dispatch should have a number, every car should have a number, and every crime should have a number? So damn many numbers to remember that these days talking on the radio was like taking a math test. Hell, he could hardly remember his own car's call numbers at the end of a long shift, and he sure as hell wouldn't be able to guess the kind of call she was going to send him on because she'd never say it flat-out in English. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be good; not this late. Car accident, drunk driver, teenagers having a noisy kegger somewhere, driving the early-to-bed farmers nuts.

    'Frank, are you there?'

    That got his attention. No rigamarole, and a little panic in her voice.

    'Jeez, Mary, you broke protocol. Was there a terrorist attack on the Tom Thumb, or what? Spew out some numbers for me or I'll think you're an imposter.'

    'Shut up, Frank, and listen.'

    Wow. Her voice was actually shaking.

    'I've got a crowd of people from Minneapolis yammering at me over the speakerphone, including an FBI agent, and there's no number in the book for what they say is happening'

    Frank flipped on the roof lights and pulled over onto the shoulder. 'Okay, calm down, Mary, I'm listening.' He heard her take a deep breath.

    'They said someone's going to kill one of the girls at the Litde Steer tonight unless we can stop it.'

'What? How the hell do they-?'

    'Don't ask questions, Frank, just take it as gospel and get the hell over there. We don't have much time.'

    He turned on the siren, cranked the wheel and stood on the accelerator. Shoulder gravel rooster-tailed into the ditch and then the front tires caught tar and the back tires laid twin lines of rubber. 'Jesus, Mary, I'm twenty miles away!' he yelled into the radio. 'Isn't there someone closer?'

    'No! There isn't! So just step on it! And leave your radio open.'

    'You got it.'

    Frank didn't do much talking after that, because he was doing sixty now on the road, trying to dodge the worst of the mud ridges the tractor tires had left, getting thrown from side to side, jerking the wheel, trying to keep the car upright. His palms were sweating, greasy on the wheel, and his heart was hammering.

Nothing you can do, Frank, nothing you can do, just get there in one piece, and who the hell would want to kill one of the girls at the Little Steer, and why, for Chrissakes? Who's on tonight? Alma for sure, she worked every night shift; and Lisa, natch, because she damn near lived at the place, and oh God, no, not Lisa.

    She was a great cook, a great person, his daughter's best friend, a frequent visitor to the house when there had been a family living there, and two plump arms at the funeral wrapping around his waist, squeezing the breath out of him while she tried to hold his heart together, her tears soaking the one and only tie he'd ever owned.

Look at you, Frank, you can handle sixty on these goddamned mud ridges, and that means maybe you can handle seventy, just ease it up slow, pay attention, breathe, goddamnit, breathe…

    A green mile marker flashed by the right side of the car. Fifteen miles to the freeway.

    There were times Grace could remember her heart actually hurting, as if some giant fist had it in its hand, squeezing down harder and harder until she thought it would surely be crushed. Those times all had names - people horribly murdered because of her - kept sacred in her memory like jewels in some Pandora's box that only opened when another name was about to slip inside. Kathy and Daniella, her roommates in college; Marian Amburson and Johnny Bricker, foolish enough to want to be close to her; Libbie Herold, sent to save her, her lifeblood flowing on the other side of a closet door, where Grace cowered, helpless.