The Sweet Dead Life Read online

  One was tall and thin, with a shaved bald head. Manny, of Manny’s Tex Mex: the last place my father had been seen alive, five years ago. The other guy was shorter and muscular, with hairy arms sticking out of his short sleeved shirt. I didn’t know his name. It didn’t matter. He’d waited on me. Or tried. He’d been royally pissed that I was part of a party of four who’d only ordered for one—that crucial one being Zeke, Bryce’s friend, the Zeke who never forgot a face or a fact.

  So here I was, staring at Manny, Hairy-Armed Waiter, and Dr. Renfroe, hollering at each other in front of some office at the top of the Galleria.

  Amber punched the key pad of her cell. “Where the hell are you?” she muttered tightly.

  I assumed she’d called Casey. When she didn’t say anything else, I assumed he hadn’t answered. With one eye on Renfroe and the others, I watched as she switched to texting.

  5th floor she typed.

  She shoved the phone back into her pocket. Then she started cussing to herself in a decidedly non-holy being fashion. The colorful language was directed mostly at my brother. I didn’t catch the specifics, though. Being here felt a lot like the car accident, when the Prius was tumbling and all I could think was that I couldn’t think at all.

  “Hey! Amber! Jenna!” Casey’s voice poked into my ears from somewhere below. He shouted louder. “Hey! I’m here!”

  I turned to the Renfroe gang.

  My heart froze. Casey stood directly below them—on floor four, not floor five. He waved at us across the open air of the atrium, clutching a Bath and Body gift bag in his hand. My brain did some quick mental gymnastics.

  This much was obvious: Casey had no clue that Dr. Renfroe, Manny, and Hairy-Armed Waiter were standing on the floor above him. Additionally, he had stopped to shop. I began to seethe. I was not the only teenage girl who enjoyed the skin-smoothing product line at Bath and Body. (You’d be a moron not to. Mags gave me one of their vanilla lotions as a birthday gift last year. She knew I couldn’t afford it. I was a boot-wearing girl, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t concerned with proper skin care.) No, I’d be willing to gamble that Lanie Phelps did, too. Not that I was the gambling kind. In short: Casey was late to our hot pursuit of Dr. Renfroe because he had stopped to Christmas or date (or both) shop for his possibly no longer ex-girlfriend. Which meant he just possibly might have indulged in a smidgen of cannabis to calm himself.

  Why else would he be waving at us like an idiot? At least he was here. Maybe someday Ryan Sloboda would stop in the middle of a life and death crisis to buy me a present. It could happen. I decided to cut my brother some slack. Although I did briefly ponder why he could calm me down with a touch, but needed a quick toke to do the same for himself. Habit, probably.

  Hairy-Armed Waiter leaned far over the railing. “Hey!” he shouted down to Casey.

  Dr. Renfroe and Manny stepped up beside him. They spotted Amber and me at the same time.

  “Stop!” Amber shouted. “Stay right there!”

  I almost laughed at what happened next. It didn’t seem real in the least. Hairy Arms whipped a pistol out of the back of his jeans. From where I was standing, maybe thirty yards across, it looked like a plastic water gun. Then he aimed at us. I heard the whizzing even before I heard the firecracker pop. Plaster from the wall behind us fluffed out like a little perfume spray.

  Amber slammed me to the floor and flopped on top of me. I bit my tongue. There was blood in my mouth.

  “He’s shooting at us?” I gasped.

  “Just shut up and stay still,” Amber grunted, shielding me with her body.

  I peeked through the railing. Casey had vanished. Dr. Renfroe was now wrestling with Hairy Arms. Manny was trying to pull them apart. With a violent yank, Renfroe pulled the gun from the waiter’s hands. But the gun kept sailing up in midair, free now from all three of them. It bounced on the railing and then over into the empty air of the atrium. I cringed, praying it wouldn’t hit some poor shopper on the head. There was a faint metallic smack as it hit the ground floor.

  Seconds later, a rumble of people started shouting from below.

  “We have to get out of here,” Amber whispered.

  I nodded.

  We stood up, only to find ourselves facing a very sweaty Renfroe, Manny, and Hairy-Armed Waiter, sprinting around the circular balcony straight towards us. Amber glanced at me. She looked as scared as I felt. For the first time since I’d met her, I understood chaos theory. Shit happens. You deal with it.

  “If you want to kill us, fine!” I heard myself shout. “But just tell me why.”

  At that, Renfroe stopped in his tracks. Hairy-Armed Waiter spun around and glared at him. Manny kept his beady eyes pinned to us, his scrawny lungs heaving.

  “I had to,” Renfroe choked out. He wiped his dripping, pale face with the back of his hand. A vein throbbed in his forehead. “They made me. Manny found out that your dad was still alive. He—”

  “Shut up, Stuart,” Manny barked.

  “Oh God,” Renfroe croaked. “I was trying to help. I was trying to help.” He shot a furtive stare at Amber and me, then bolted for the balcony’s edge.

  Only when he grabbed the railing did I realize what he was about to do.

  The rest seemed to happen in slow motion. I lunged for his ankles. The momentum of his jump pulled me over with him.

  “Jenna!” I heard Casey scream from somewhere below.

  Stuart Renfroe and I somersaulted through the air.

  The Christmas tree spun below us, the skylight spun above us: a dazzling spiral. We’d left the balcony far behind. My stomach shrunk as we plunged. I squeezed my eyes shut. Weirdly, I felt something not unlike that peaceful feeling that I’d felt whenever Casey or Amber had touched or held me for a while. So this is it. The only thing I regretted was my next thought, which concerned Mr. Collins and his Aggie theories.

  “Don’t worry, Jenna,” he would say. “You haven’t lost. You’ve just run out of time.”

  What happened next was, in fact, a real-life miracle.

  Of course, the possibility of miracles probably increases if you’re already hanging out with angels.

  I’d rather not think too hard about all that right now. Back to what happened:

  Much later that night, after we found out why Renfroe had done it (which I’ll get to in a minute), Casey and I sat cross-legged on his floor, the laptop between us. The You-Tube videos were already starting to go viral. From one angle or another, all of them showed a record crowd of Christmas shoppers at the Houston Galleria, thrilled and mesmerized by an unannounced show of two daredevil indoor stunt-people with wing-shaped parachutes and angel costumes.

  “I don’t freaking believe it,” Casey said with a chuckle. “Let’s watch that last one again.”

  I rested my hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Casey,” I said. “Are you—?”

  “Shh,” he whispered. He threw his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me against him. “Just one more time.”

  Casey started the video again. I watched, remembering, or trying to remember from my perspective. This particular clip had spliced together two different views, one of me and Renfroe hurtling over the balcony, the other of Casey leaping after us even before his wings unfurled. I could see why spectators bought the story that he was an indoor sky diver. How else could they explain that he’d been free-falling and then suddenly soared through the air over a giant Christmas tree?

  The video switched back to my side of the Galleria. By the time Casey’s wings had popped out and open, Amber had leaped over the edge, too. So there it was: Amber, wings spread wide, glowing like a thousand candles, swooping after Dr. Renfroe, who had managed to wrestle his ankles from my grip. She scooped him up and rose so gracefully that even this close to the screen, I couldn’t see her wings flap. She set Dr. Renfroe in front of the security guards, now swooping (wingless) in on Hairy-Armed Waiter and Manny.

  Renfroe’s face was glowing hot red now. The audio on this clip wasn’t the best
, but I could hear him start spouting his confession. The same stuff he eventually wrote out for the cops once they hauled his sorry ass to jail.

  Of course, I didn’t remember any of this. All I remembered was hurtling through the air, then lying in Casey’s arms as he laid me down. I was certain I must have been dead, because I could see his enormous, beautiful wings flapping.

  Now, watching it play out on video, I saw how Casey dropped Lanie’s package, the Bath and Body bag all wrapped up tight with pretty red ribbon and a card dangling from it. He just dove. It vanished in an instant as the camera followed us. If he hadn’t stopped to buy it, maybe he wouldn’t have been there when I needed him.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” my brother whispered for the millionth time, reaching over to press replay. I sniffed the tiniest bit of weed on his otherwise fresh-as-a-daisy breath. “What the hell did you think you were doing, Jenna?”

  “Saving the day,” I whispered back. “Just like you.”

  I bit my lip, not wanting to ask the natural next question, given what Amber had told us about wings and A-words. (Was I ready to say angels yet? Maybe I was.)

  Casey smiled, his eyes still on the screen. “I’m not going anywhere, Jenna. I just used up my earthly flight is all.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. I was worried I might start crying.

  Casey shrugged. “I don’t. Look, all I care about right now is that Mom has slept through this whole freaking insanity. Can you imagine what she’s gonna say?”

  I tried to laugh, but my eyes moistened. “Stop trying to change the subject. What if you need them again? What if I need them? What if—”

  Casey’s cell rang. When he answered, I could hear Lanie shouting from her end. “I saw you on the news! Was that really you? Since when have you become a stuntman?”

  I decided to leave him alone then and get some sleep, too. I reminded myself that with or without boots, I was a Texas girl. I would take things as they came.

  IT WAS A good thing that Amber Velasco—EMT, bartender, and maybe not so annoying angel—preferred cleavage-showing shirts, body hugging jeans, and kick-ass pointed boots. Because when she’d sashayed into the police station that same night to do a little recon, she was able to convince them not to press charges for the “indoor skydiving stunt.” It had certainly not been authorized by the Galleria, and the Galleria owners were extremely pissed off. Somehow, she was able to convince them that she and Casey and I were in fact “indoor skydivers.” In other words, a bunch of young idiots wandering around on the fifth floor of the Galleria looking for a place to do our stunt, when we happened to run into a bunch of crooks. And since those crooks recognized Casey and me, well, the extraordinary series of coincidences paid off.

  The kicker? She was also able to finagle a copy of Renfroe’s confession. It was scrawled in his own shaky handwriting, and without any prompting, apparently. The guy had a lot to get off his hairy chest. Amber appeared at our door with it just about sunrise. Mom was still asleep, thankfully. The three of us retreated to Casey’s room and sat on the bed in a row, reading together as Amber flipped the pages.

  All I ever wanted was to improve memory for my patients. The FDA wasn’t moving fast enough. They never do. I was on the verge of a cure for Alzheimer’s! They should have jumped at the chance. How many people in this country would give everything they have not to watch someone they love waste away? But instead the government kept testing.

  So, yes. I did a preliminary trial on my own. I didn’t have any other choice. I’m not crazy. I was helping. Can’t you see that? Sometimes there’s collateral damage. I didn’t mean for it to go so far. You have to believe that.

  No one died at first. If someone had died, I would have stopped, even if I knew that I would succeed down the line. But I was working on my own and I had to keep it quiet. Secrecy wasn’t that hard to maintain, because nobody on my staff questioned what I was doing, except for one person. Holly Samuels was the X factor in my whole equation. She was the only one who mentioned the meds I seemed to be giving to patients that didn’t come straight from a pharm company.

  Then her husband Mike started asking around, too.

  If she had minded her own business, it all would have worked out. But she didn’t. I respected Holly Samuels. I trusted Holly Samuels. But I couldn’t have her ruining everything.

  In the first round of baseline testing, five patients regained most of their short-term memory when ingesting the drug I called M1. At first I was elated. But a week into that first trial, their other cognitive functions began fading. It’s a common problem with memory-enhancing drugs: You gain in one spot and you lose in another. The brain is tricky that way. I don’t mean any disrespect, but this is something the law enforcement community and legislature will never understand.

  Back to the sequence of events, as you’ve asked me to transcribe: As I continued testing, they began to forget more. By the tenth trial dose, they forgot the things most important to them, even their names. I knew I had to work harder. No good in remembering what you ate for breakfast if you can’t remember your children. So I reconfigured the chemical compounds but something went wrong. One patient died. But he was 88. He had a heart condition.

  Then another died. And another. And ten more after that.

  I was and still am convinced I could crack the secret. I couldn’t stop. I was too far in debt. I’d been a poker player since college, great at figuring the odds. It made no sense to me. Patients were dying and I was losing at cards. I tried to make it up at blackjack and slots. No use. I’d lost the touch. But you have to understand, I was sure I’d get it back. Luck turns. Things change. And I was trying to do something good.

  Right around the same time I re-mortgaged Oak View to cover my losses, I met Manny. It wasn’t a coincidence. Manny isn’t just the enchilada king. He’s connected. He keeps an office in the Galleria, so that should be a huge tip-off. How could the owner of a Tex-Mex restaurant afford such swank real estate?

  He never told me who his partners were. I never asked. When someone can recite your bank statements verbatim, you shut the hell up. Manny trolls for people like me, people whose fortunes take a turn for the worse, so he can blackmail them. It’s that simple.

  But I was a special case. And there’s a simple reason for that, too: My mistake was worth more to Manny and his partners than my success. A pill that could make people forget offered exactly what Manny wanted. I should have walked away. But we don’t always do what we should. And that’s when people get scared.

  So when I overheard Holly Samuels on the phone with her husband, talking about dying patients and weird symptoms, I gave into fear. She’d been watching me when she thought I wasn’t looking. But it wasn’t that. It was that her husband was a journalist.

  What would Manny’s men do if they found out an employee was on to me, that her journalist husband was nosing around Oak View? Fear’s a funny thing. I had never been afraid like that. My logic: if I got rid of Mike, Holly would be so grief-stricken that she wouldn’t care about Oak View anymore.

  So I called Mike to set up a meeting, to talk about his wife’s suspicions. I made one condition: he keep our meeting a secret. I almost lost my nerve, but Manny and his boys were watching. They set it all up: the waitress and the spill, so he’d have to take a trip to the men’s room, where I was waiting with a needle. After the injection, Mike Samuels promptly forgot who he was. I’d gotten that good at synthesizing a drug that destroyed the very thing I wanted to save. I’m not boasting. I’m being honest. Manny and his boys were proud. Ask them, if they don’t kill you first.

  That’s the whole point. I couldn’t do what Manny really wanted. I couldn’t kill the guy. So I dumped him on a Grayhound bus and sent him off to LA with no ID in his wallet. If he wasn’t mugged or arrested, something else would happen.

  Of course, Holly came to work the next day hysterical. Mike hadn’t come home. He’d left a note on the counter, but he wasn’t answering his cell phone. What would she tel
l Casey and Jenna? What was she going to do?

  That first day, I was sure she was manipulating me, trying to get me to confess. Fear consumed me. Of course Mike had told her about our meeting. But as the weeks went on, I realized he hadn’t. My plan was working. Holly was in no condition to be suspicious of me anymore.

  You know what I didn’t count on? The guilt.

  I started funneling money into Holly’s bank account. I didn’t want her kids to starve. I’m not a bad man. One of my casino acquaintances knew how to make online transactions without leaving a trail. I never added too much. Just enough to keep them from losing everything.

  But eventually the fear came back. Holly Samuels was a smart woman. Not as smart as I am, but smart enough. She’d say something to those kids of hers. Jenna was too young, but the boy—Casey—he was sharp. What if he began to see the connections? By then the police had almost convinced her that her husband didn’t want to be found.

  I hated seeing her look so sad and defeated, but that’s the way it had to be.

  And that’s the way it stayed for about four years. Time slips by faster than you think. Especially when you’re looking over your shoulder, making sure you’re not about to get caught. My life ceased to be my own. I was a slave to Manny and his boys. Gambling away the money they gave me on the drug I created to make their victims forget. Some life, huh? I’m a caring guy, you see. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Sometimes Holly still cried when she thought no one was looking.

  Then about a year ago, Holly dropped a bomb on me. She was suddenly determined to find Mike’s body, because she was convinced he was dead. “I know I was wrong,” she told me that day. “Mike might leave me. But he’d never leave the kids. I’m thinking about hiring a private detective.”

  That day, I stopped funding their bank account. Two days later, I began supplying Holly with her vitamins. I told her daughter to make sure her mother took her medicine. That might have been the end of it. But the thought of Mike out there kept needling at my brain. What if he was alive? What if his memory had returned? What if he’d figured everything out and was watching us, just waiting for the right moment to strike and get us all? Like I said: fear makes you crazy.