Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (20 page)

Monday morning, when Lillian had supposedly left her
message with Beau about Laredo. I pictured her making it with a gun
pressed against her neck. I pictured Beau not giving a damn.

That’s when I heard sirens in the distance, coming
from downtown. Ralph yawned. He slid off his stool. Then he stretched
his arms leisurely and put the gun away.

"You see Eddie," Ralph said, “tell him
he’s been dead since Sunday. Rigor just hasn’t set in yet."

Lydia Mendoza had finished her last song, but nobody
changed the tape. We walked out to the parking lot in silence, then
we disappeared down Durango in the maroon U-boat. On the dashboard,
the tip of Ralph’s joint hadn’t even gone out yet.

After a few minutes I said: "You know this
Eddie?"

He shook his head. “You?"

I nodded. "I had to kick him in the balls
outside Hung Fong."

Ralph glanced over at me, impressed. We drove a few
more blocks in silence.

"Why would you take a girl you’d just
kidnapped to a bar?" I said. "It’d make more sense to get
out of sight and stay there."

"You afraid the lady was with him by choice?"

I didn’t say anything. Ralph smiled. "No, man.
Guys like this Eddie, they don’t need to make sense. Long as they
make a good show."

I thought about that. Then I said: "Just this
morning I told a friend of mine in California how you like a low
profile, Ralphas. That was before I saw your Annie Oakley routine."

Ralph laughed. "You know how many bar fights and
shootings go on in this side of town every night,
vato
?
That was low profile."

"Oh."

Ralph inhaled about an inch of the
mota
,
then blew it out through his nose. We drove for a long time. But when
I closed my eyes I saw Tito’s pulverized face, Lillian with a
bloody eye, a red cement floor chipped and splattered on. And still
Ralph looked out his window, watching the multicolored yards of the
South Side and sighing like a hopeless romantic. A romantic with
blood on his boots.

"Besides," Ralph said after a while, "I
always wanted to be Annie Oakley, man."

We both laughed about that for a long time.
 

28

Three hours later I should’ve been asleep on the
futon with Robert Johnson snoring on my head. Instead I was crouching
outside a chainlink fence in the weeds.

"No accounting for intelligence," I told
the cow next to me.

She grumbled in agreement.

Except for my bovine friend and occasional gunshots
from the nearby apartment projects, it was quiet. The guard inside
the glass doors of Sheff Construction looked about as excited to be
here as I was. His mouth was open. He had his feet up on the desk,
his face lit up blue from the portable TV on his belly. In the
binoculars his name tag said "Timothy S."

I’d circled the grounds and watched for almost
forty-five minutes before I was relatively sure that Timothy S. was
alone in the building. From there it was easy.

"Cover me," I told the cow.

Two minutes to clip along the base of the fence and
roll under, then thirty seconds across the petunias and up to the
side of the building. Contact paper on the bathroom window, a small
muffled break next to the latch, and a minute later I was inside
standing on the urinal.

Once my eyes adjusted to the dark I slipped into the
hallway. Down on the left, I could hear Lucy and Ricky having it out
on the guard’s TV set. I went right, into a room of work cubicles.
On my way through I put a garbage can in the doorway, just in case
the guard decided to do something radical like patrol the area. A
door in the back said "D. Sheff. " It wasn’t locked.

After a few minutes inside I saw why. Dan had no
computer on his desk, no files in the cabinet, no paperwork of any
kind except a few dog-eared novels. There was a decanter of Chivas in
the side drawer of the desk and a Looney Tunes glass like the kind
Texaco used to give with a fill-up. The closet was less friendly: an
extra Bill Blass jacket, no matching slacks, and a box of .22
ammunition, no matching gun.

I slipped out of the office and tried another door.
This one said "T. Garza." And it was locked, for a few
seconds anyway.

Once inside I sat down in Garza’s leather chair,
behind his oak desk, and looked at his picture of the wife and kids.
An attractive Hispanic woman in her forties, two sons about six and
nine. Garza stood behind them smiling, a thin, athletic-looking man
with silver hair and mustache, a nervous smile, eyes as dark as an
East Indian’s. He was the man I’d seen Dan arguing with in front
of the office that afternoon.

His desk drawers were unlocked and the computer
terminal was still on. Damn accommodating. At least it seemed that
way until I was denied access to every file tried to open.

I studied the dimmed screen. If I were an ordinary
schmuck I would’ve spent the next few hours hunting for passwords
in Garza’s desk and file cabinets. Instead I took out the disk my
big brother had traded me six months ago for a pair of Jimmy Buffett
tickets.

"Mr. Garza," I said quietly, "meet
Spider John."

Good old Garrett. When my half brother wasn’t
smoking pot or following Jimmy Buffett around the country, he made
innocuous system extension programs for an Austin computer firm
called RNI. When he was smoking pot and following Jimmy Buffett
around the country, he made not-so-innocuous programs like Spider
john. I never figured out how it worked. Garrett had talked to me
about weaving temporary logic webs around command functions until I
went cross-eyed.

Finally I’d said: "Give it to me in three
words or less."

Garrett gave me one of his toothy grins. "Ganja
for computers, little bro."

Whatever it did, when I put the disk in and Spider
john’s black web wove across the screen, to the muted tune of
"Havana Daydreamin’," Mr. Garza’s computer suddenly
smiled at me and mellowed out something considerable. Anything I
punched in for a password seemed perfectly groovy now. MICKEY MOUSE,
I typed. COOL, it said, and showed me Sheff Construction’s
personnel files.

Eddie Moraga was listed on the payroll as a half-time
carpenter. No health benefits. No special duties noted, such as
abducting women from their homes or intimidating English Ph.D.s in
front of Chinese restaurants. Twelve thousand dollars a year. But
that wasn’t including a ten-thousand-dollar monthly item labeled
“expenses".

A carpenter with an expense account. Not since Jesus,
I figured.

I tried to access a description for that field, hit
another roadblock, typed EAT ME for a password. Even then the
computer didn’t offer much of an explanation for what Sheff
Construction expected Eddie to spend his petty cash on, just a
familiar address--HECHO A MANO GALLERY, 21 LA VILLITA WAY. The
expense account had been drawn on at the end of each month for the
last year, in regular cash installments, and was authorized by the
man whose chair I was borrowing--Terry Garza. The date for the next
withdrawal was marked "7/31." I took out the two cut-up
photos I’d retrieved from Beau’s portfolio. They were marked on
the back in black pen: "7/31."

I looked up at Garza’s picture.

"Supporting the arts?" I asked him.

Garza’s picture smiled back, looking a little
nervous. I typed a few more insults for passwords and started
skimming through the Sheffs’ financial spreadsheets. There wasn’t
much to look at—very few jobs had been done this year, very little
money was coming in. In fact, Sheff Construction seemed to have been
surviving until last year on one bread-and-butter contract alone:
Travis Center. Hmm.

I looked at the company profits for the last decade.
From ’83-’85 there hadn’t been any. Just some fairly massive
debts, probably some fairly nervous corporate creditors. Then, almost
overnight, the debts disappeared quietly and completely. In their
place had been the Travis Center project.

Sheff’s long and healthy profit margin for the past
decade until last year suggested that Travis Center had gone way over
budget and way behind schedule. Your tax dollars at work. But now
Travis Center was completed and it looked like Sheff Construction was
heading back into the red.

I looked at their projections for next year—there
was only one pending deal. The entire resources of the company were
already committed to building the city’s new fine arts complex.
Sheff Construction had done their cost estimates based on the bidding
price the city had approved, figured their payroll based on that
income, and had a pretty good estimated timetable for their
sub-contractors. They would be back in the black again easily.

The only problem was that the bidding process for the
fine arts complex project, according to my radio chum Carl
Wiglesworth, hadn’t even started yet. I stared at the computer
screen, wondering how Sheff had monopolized a huge city works project
like Travis Center. And, more importantly, how they could be so damn
sure they would get the next one. I was just about to ask the
computer those questions when the office door swung open.

"Before I call the security guard," the man
in the doorway said, "maybe you’d explain why you’re sitting
at my desk."

Terry Garza didn’t look as good as his picture. His
silver hair was flat on the left side and he had red lines on his
cheek like he’d just been sleeping on a corduroy-covered pillow. He
was wearing the same dark blue suit pants he’d had on that
afternoon, half untucked from his gray justins. His shirt was
wrinkled and his tie was hanging loose around his neck. In the
picture he also wasn’t holding a tiny silver .22.

I shut down Spider John and spit out the disk. Then I
stood up very carefully.

"Sorry," I said. "I talked to Dan
earlier, said I’d be coming by tonight. I thought he’d cleared it
with you. Tim out front didn’t mention you were still here." I
held up my key chain, as if it were proof that I’d come in
legitimately. I looked innocent, meeting Garza’s stare.

Garza’s dark eyes narrowed. The gun lowered a few
inches, then came back up again.

"I don’t think so," he said.

"Maybe if I was wearing a tie?"

A smile flickered across the left side of Garza’s
mouth. "Timothy is his last name. Sam Timothy. Nobody calls him
Tim."

"Shit. Missed the comma."

"Yeah."

Garza motioned for me to come around the desk, turned
me around, then did a pretty professional job of patting me down with
one hand. He took the computer disk out of my pocket.

"They teach you frisking in contractors’
school?" I asked.

He gave me another half smile. We were buddies now.
Then he went around the desk to reclaim his leather chair and left me
standing on the other side. His face looked calm, still half-asleep,
but his dark eyes were alert, maybe a little anxious. They got more
anxious when they saw Beau Karnau’s photos on the desk. Garza
looked quickly from me to the photos, to the computer, then back at
me.

"So," he said thinly, "who have we got
here?"

"We’ve got Jackson Tres Navarre. No comma."

Garza stared at me for a minute. Then he actually
smiled all the way. "No kidding."

I didn’t like the way he said that. Garza must’ve
read my expression. He just shrugged.

"You made Dan angry this morning, Mr. Navarre."

So I said to him, ‘I’ll keep my eyes open.’ I
close my eyes for a while and—" He snapped his fingers, then
pointed at me. "I just think that’s funny."

He met my eyes and tried to look relaxed, like he was
in charge. His teeth were as white as his mustache. His fingers had
tightened on the gun a little too much for my taste.

"Hysterical," I agreed. I looked down at
the family picture on his desk. "No other place to sleep, Mr.
Garza? Problems at home, maybe?"

Garza’s smile hardened. His face turned the rusty
color of Hill Country granite.

“
Let’s talk about you," he said.

I was thinking about options for leaving Garza’s
office without a police escort or a bullet in my anatomy. At the
moment the alternatives seemed slim. I decided, for the moment, to
confuse him with the truth.

"Dan wanted to hire me," I told him. “We
talked this morning about Lillian Cambridge."

Garza stroked his mustache. "Do you always start
a job by investigating your boss, Mr. Navarre?"

"Only when I have questions."

Garza leaned back in his chair. He propped one foot
on the edge of the desk. I couldn’t help noticing the bottom of his
boot—no grooves, pointed toe, maybe a ten and a half wide.

"Such as?" he asked.

"For starters, how you got the contract on
Travis Center, and how you managed to win the fine arts complex
before the bidding process even started. Last I checked, fixing city
contracts was a legal no-no."

Garza said nothing. His smile had frozen.