Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (21 page)

"I’m also wondering who the two missing people
in that picture might be, who the blond guy is, and why it might be
worth ten thousand dollars a month to Sheff Construction. I keep
thinking, if I were Beau Karnau, and my art wasn’t selling so well,
and I somehow came across evidence that my studio partner’s fiancé
was up to some very profitable, very illegal insider deals with city
contracts—well, I might just be tempted to take some photos of him
and whoever his partners were. I might just blackmail the hell out of
them."

Garza rested the butt of his little silver gun on the
top of the desk. In the light of the computer screen it looked blue
and translucent, like a water pistol.

“
Is that all, Mr. Navarre?"

"Except for one thing. What size boot do you
wear, Mr. Garza?"

I smiled. Garza smiled. Keeping one eye on me, Garza
slipped my disk into the computer.

"Eleven wide, Mr. Navarre. As to the rest,
assuming you have any business asking, you’d have to talk to Mr.
Sheff. "

"Which Mr. Sheff? The comatose one or the one
with the Looney Tunes glass in his desk? They both seem equally well
informed about the family business."

Garza shook his head, obviously disappointed in me.
He showed me the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, palm out. "You
see these?"

"Fingers," I said. “I count five."

He smiled. "Calluses, Mr. Navarre. Something you
don’t see much these days. A blue-collar man who’s made a decent
living—that’s a dying breed, a dinosaur." He tapped the
family photo with the side of his gun. "Worked construction
since I was fifteen, don’t have much formal education, but I manage
to support my family pretty well. I like my employers for giving me
that. And I don’t have much patience for privileged young Anglo
shits who break into my office at three in the morning and try to
tear it all up."

He was still smiling, his knuckles white on the gun.
Legally, we both knew, he could shoot me right now for trespassing
and the biggest complication he would face would be how to dry-clean
the rug. Then Spider john wove its web across the computer screen one
more time to the tune of "Havana Daydreamin’."

"Now let’s see what you’ve got here,"
Garza said.

"Before I erase it, and decide whether or not I
need to erase you."

That’s when I saw the car.

When the headlights got near enough to shine through
the window behind Garza’s desk, Garza glanced around briefly and
scowled, probably wondering who the new early morning visitor could
be. But he was more worried about me. He turned back to the computer
screen. I couldn’t see anything but headlights, getting big, very
quickly.

Let’s see what happens when it turns toward the
gate, I thought.

Stupid, Navarre. The car didn’t turn toward the
gate. I stood there frozen and watched it come straight through the
fence, past my friend the cow, through the petunias, and down my
throat.

I think I rolled toward the doorway before the window
exploded. I don’t remember. When I opened my eyes, a few hundred
years later, I was wedged between the wall and Garza’s overturned
desk, about four inches shy of having been pressed into a human
tortilla. The back of my head felt like it had rubbed off against the
carpet. Somewhere close by, Terry Garza was groaning. His eleven wide
boot was in my face. From floor level all I could see of the car that
had nearly killed us was the ruined front end—radiator steam
hissing out in several places, blue metal and tangled chrome teeth
that looked like they were trying to eat Garza’s desk. I could
smell gasoline. Finally I looked above me, hazily, and saw three
small holes. It took me a while to realize that two of them were the
security guard’s nostrils. The third was the barrel of his gun.

"Jesus Christ, " Timothy, S. was saying. He
was pointing the gun at me but looking into the car. "Jesus
fucking H. Christ."

I tried to sit up, to see what he was seeing. It
wasn’t one of my better ideas.

"Don’t even do shit, God damn it, "
Timothy, S. said. The quivery sound in his voice told me he was very
close to breaking, even closer to blowing my face off. I sat back and
jarred Garza’s boot. Garza groaned. Timothy, S.’s nostrils kept
dilating. His face had gone totally yellow now, even his eyes.

"Jesus H. Christ, " he said again. Then he
threw up.

"The driver is dead?" I asked.

The guard looked at me and tried to laugh. It came
out as a yelp. "Yeah. Yeah, you might could say that, shithead."

Very slowly I put up my hands.

"Look," I said. "I need to get up. You
smell the gasoline, right?"

Timothy, S. just stared at me, his gun leveled.

Okay, I thought. I kept my hands in plain view while
I got up. Then I hobbled out from behind the desk, bent over like a
question mark. Garza kept moaning from underneath a pile of books and
unpotted plants.

I looked over at where Garza’s office wall had
been. The car was an old blue Thunderbird convertible, or it had been
before it was driven through the wall. The hood was crumpled like a
contour map of the Rockies. The windshield was shattered. Somebody
had tied the wheel straight and laid a slab of granite over the
accelerator. The T-bird probably would have barreled right on through
the building it if hadn’t lost an axle when it jumped up onto the
foundation.

The driver’s seat was occupied.

My intestines started dissolving and trickling down
into my shoes. I could still see the eagle killing the snake on Eddie
Moraga’s forearm. Eddie was wearing the same denim shirt he’d had
on the night he attacked me outside Hung Fong. Except for that he was
hard to recognize. A person can be that way when his eyes have been
tunneled out with a pistol at point-blank.

I’m not sure what happened after that. I do know
that when the police arrived, the guard and I were sitting in the
broken glass, staring into space, talking like old friends about the
living and the dead. Garza groaned like a chorus in the corner. I
didn’t care about Detective Schaeffer asking me questions. I didn’t
even care when Jay Rivas arrived, dragged me into a room, and slapped
me across the side of the face. I just spat blood and teeth and kept
staring into the headlights that I still saw coming at me, running
over everything and everyone that mattered.
 

29

Chen Man Cheng once said that if your movements were
refined enough you should be able to practice tai chi in a closet. He
never said anything about doing it in a jail cell.

When I rose to meet the new day with my usual
exercise routine, my head was pounding, my stomach was empty and
sore, and my mouth had swollen to the size of a small cantaloupe. The
stink of old urine and semen from the bunk mattress had rubbed off on
my clothes. My tongue tasted like Robert Johnson’s food dish. In
short, I was looking and feeling my best as I started my first set.

"What the fuck is that?" my cellmate said.

One of his parents had obviously been a Weimaraner.
He was incredibly thin and desperate-looking, with splotchy skin and
a face that was almost all nose. He hunched over in the top bunk,
staring down at me with a pained smile. He wheezed when he spoke.

Maybe I could’ve moved my mouth enough to respond
to his question, but I didn’t try. It was taking all my
concentration just to keep from falling over or throwing up. After
the first set he lost interest and laid back down.

“
Goddamn nutcase," he wheezed.

By the time I started my low form routine I’d
managed to work up a good sweat. I’d like to say I felt better. The
truth is my mind was just clearer and more able to appreciate how
screwed up things really were. We had the talented Mr. Karnau, whose
photographs, even if they were poo-pooed by the art world, were still
fetching ten grand a month from certain interested patrons. It seemed
a lot to pay for an original Karnau, unless the shot was one the
buyers didn’t want publicized, and the payment was blackmail money
to protect—say—some illegally contracted construction jobs worth
millions. Then a little payoff, a little abduction, maybe a little
murder, started looking cost-effective. And Beau had started this
line of work last year about the same time Lillian had demanded out
of their business. Back then Beau had gotten sufficiently violent to
warrant a restraining order. Now that Lillian wanted out of the
business again, she had disappeared altogether.

We had the dashing Mr. Sheff, who seemed eager to
lead his company to greatness as soon as his mother combed his hair
and tied his shoes. I couldn’t see a nineteen-year-old Dan
initiating the Travis Center scheme ten years ago. I could barely see
a twenty-nine-year-old Dan carrying on the family tradition now by
fixing the bidding on the new fine arts complex. Nevertheless, he’d
lied to me about Beau, had just about gone apoplectic when I
mentioned the name, and he certainly had a strong desire to claim
Lillian as his territory months after Lillian started having other
ideas. Either Dan Jr. or someone else in Sheff Construction--his
mother, or maybe Garza acting on his own—had arranged Karnau’s
payment, then Lillian’s kidnapping, then Garza’s desperate search
for whatever it was they wanted so badly. And Sheff Construction
wasn’t in this alone. There had been two people cut out of Karnau’s
blackmailing photo, and two copies of it in his portfolio, which
meant somebody else was getting Karnau’s bill too. Maybe that
somebody was getting pissed at their partners in Sheff Construction.
Maybe that’s why Eddie Moraga came back to work last night dead.

But there were too many maybes.

All night long I’d been dreaming about Eddie
Moraga’s blue T-bird, except it was me behind the wheel, or
sometimes Lillian. She would look at me and say: "I’ve been
saving this for you, Tres. " Only one answer made sense to me
about why Lillian disappeared when she did, and why Garza would want
to ransack her house, her gallery, then my apartment. Lillian had
given me something for safekeeping, something I’d inadvertently
given away.

I finished tai chi about the time the guard brought
breakfast.

I tried to eat powdered eggs from a plastic tray. The
pain in my mouth was so bad with every bite I might as well have
tried chewing on staples. Above me the Weimaraner seemed to be
nuzzling his breakfast to death. I held up the rest of mine and he
snatched it instantly.

When I heard the metal gate buzz at the end of the
hallway and two pairs of shoes coming my way, I figured Rivas was
coming to gloat. Maybe he’d found some sadistic friend to bring
along this time. I put on my best mean and stoic look, tried not to
drool out of my busted mouth, and stood to face them.

It was worse than I had imagined. When the guard slid
back the door I was standing face-to-face with my mother. She
instantly grabbed my cheeks for a kiss and sent a wave of hot lava
from my gums all the way to my toenails.

"Oh, Tres," she said, "I’m sorry."

Through tears of pain I managed to nod.

Mother had come prepared. Her vanilla essence was so
strong it even dissolved the stench of the cell. She’d pulled a
colorful Guatemalan patchwork cloak around her to ward off the
institutional green. She was wearing  so much Mexican silver
jewelry I imagined she could’ve hidden several metal files in there
without arousing much suspicion. Fortunately I dicdn’t need to find
out. She stood there, sadly shaking her head. Then she said: "Let’s
go home."

Still dazed, I shuffled out behind her into the light
and bureaucracy of the Bexar County jail Annex. Three or four pounds
of paperwork later, they brought us into a conference room that was
empty except for a table and four chairs. In one of those chairs was
Homicide Detective Gene Schaeffer, looking as sleepy as he’d
sounded the first time I’d talked to him on the phone five days
ago. In the second chair was a fifty-year-old incarnation of a Ken
doll, dressed in a summer-weight white Armani suit.

"Tres," my mother said, looking at the
Armani Ken doll, "this is Byron Ash. Mr. Ash has agreed to
represent you."

It took a minute for the name to sink in. Then I
raised my eyebrows. "Lord Byron," formerly of the King
Ranch, probably the most high-profile corporate lawyer in South
Texas. It was said that when Byron Ash sneezed, the price of oil fell
and state judges caught pneumonia. My mother would’ve had to
mortgage her house just to pay his consultation fee. I looked at her
in amazement. For some reason, she didn’t seem at all pleased with
her accomplishment. In fact, she seemed almost sour.

"I’ll explain later, dear," she muttered.

Ash smiled slicker than Texas crude. "We were
just discussing this unfortunate incident with Detective Schaeffer,
Mr. Navarre. And although criminal law is not my specialty, it would
seem to me—"

He turned that smile on Schaeffer, started talking,
and fifteen minutes later I was a free man. I’m not sure exactly
what happened. Ash established that I was not at present charged with
anything. Certainly I was not under suspicion in the Eddie Moraga
homicide. The Sheffs had decided not to press charges against me for
trespassing. Therefore I could not be held. Ash used the word
"liability" a lot. Schaeffer made a lame admonition for me
to "stay available for questioning? I made a lame promise to
"stay out of police business." Rivas never showed up.