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Smith had showed up in Daddy’s office last night but that before that, I’d never seen him. I knew nothing about him except that he clearly irritated other people besides me.
    I had no idea why Jack and I ended up in the garage at the same time. It sounded unlikely even to my ears but the McCloud name gave me some clout (“You mean, of
the
McClouds?” one cop asked). I left out the part about my picture on Bubba’s cell phone. That was too complicated to process.
    At the hospital, while my bloody knee dripped onto a pristine hospital sheet, I punched
Jack Smith Texas Monthly
into the search function of my phone.
    Nada.
    All manner of Jack Smiths popped up, dead, alive, and Twittering, but none that appeared to be employed by
Texas Monthly
.
    It took about a half-hour for a resident to cut away the left legof my jeans at the thigh, cleaning and stitching up the messy gap with the precision of Granny’s old Singer sewing machine. Then, an antibiotics prescription in hand, I tracked down Jack, parked on a stretcher in an emergency room cubicle, tied to a morphine drip. His faded gown bared nicely toned, tan arms with defined biceps, reminding me of a Harvard rower I once knew.
    “Who are you?” I demanded. “What do you have to do with me?”
    “Blue popsicle,” he said.
    “What? Is your mouth dry? Do you want me to tell the nurse?” I tried to casually examine the plastic bag that held his personal items, hanging conveniently on one of the bed’s metal rails, courtesy of an efficient nurse.
    “Angel,” he said.
    “I’m
not
your angel.” My surreptitious attempt to dig out his wallet only succeeded in wedging it deeper into the bag. I didn’t see a gun or an ankle holster. Maybe I’d imagined it. More likely, the cops took it. Where
were
the cops, anyway?
    “Chicago,” he mumbled.
    I pulled my hand abruptly out of the bag.
    “What did you say? Stop punching the morphine button. Jack!”
    It was too late. Jack was already drifting off into self-induced slumber.
    Chicago
.
    A word that wouldn’t go away.

CHAPTER 6

    I slipped onto the highway about four, curving the wheels in Sadie’s direction, my knee throbbing in annoying rhythm with a persistent headache at the base of my skull. My eyes checked the rearview mirror every few minutes: No one was following me.
    My scalp still tingled. In the hospital’s bathroom mirror, I’d discovered a raw pink space on the left side of my head, an injury to my ego that bothered me a lot more than my knee.
    A fresh-faced rookie cop, Jeffrey something, was nice enough to retrieve Daddy’s pickup from the garage and drive it to the hospital. He’d brought it to the valet at the front entrance, tucked me inside, asked six times whether I was OK to drive, then handed me his card, doing everything but directly asking for my phone number. Any other day, I’d be interested. I could use a little chivalry in my life.
    I usually loved this drive—the desolate Texas plains dotted with baled hay and cattle, the expansive blue sky that made me feel freer than four shots of tequila, the lazy comfort of going home. Today, all of it flew by in a blur of anxiety.
    I had to tell Sadie about the letter. Why hadn’t I done that already? My mind raced during the forty minutes of familiar highway to Ponder, the small town that abutted our family’s ranch,finally zeroing in on the one thing that bothered me most: Anthony Marchetti, the butcher who sat in a Fort Worth jail cell. I didn’t believe for a second that Marchetti had anything to do with me but I was beginning to think that somebody or several somebodies mistakenly thought so, and that couldn’t be good for my family, not if that scene in the garage was connected to him.
    Maybe Jack Smith was an innocent bystander, just a reporter hanging out by my pickup, and he simply got in the way. Maybe I was their true target. But why? The only weird thing going on in my life was Rosalina’s letter, and she didn’t issue any