Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (23 page)

Then the living-room wall rang. Maia frowned. I
pulled down the ironing board and took the receiver.

"Mr. Navarre," the man said.

It took me a minute to recognize Terry Garza’s
voice. It sounded like someone had mixed it with a few quarts of
water, like Garza had been driving around all night in the same
Thunderbird as me and was getting a little shaken up by the company.

"I think it’s time we talked," Garza
said.

I looked at Maia.

Her eyebrows came together. She silently mouthed:
What?

"I’m listening," I said into the phone.

"No. In person," Garza said. "This has
to be in person."

"Because you want me to bring the statuette."

I waited for him to confirm it. Obviously Garza
didn’t feel it was necessary.

"I’m a good employee, Mr. Navarre. I told you
that. But I didn’t sign on for this. I have a family—"

"Who shot Eddie Moraga?"

Behind Garza I heard the drone of highway traffic,
the background buzz of a pay phone connection.

"Let’s just say two parties are interested in
what you have, Mr. Navarre. When the other party breaks into your
apartment in the middle of the night, you won’t wake up the next
morning. Do you understand that?"

I looked at Maia.

“
I’ll be at Earl Abel’s tomorrow morning at
seven,"

Garza said. "I tell you what you need to know
about your girlfriend, you give me what I need to smooth things over.
We might be able to get things . . . back to normal."

"If your employers don’t release Lillian
Cambridge, there’s not going to be any normal."

Garza exhaled sharply. Or maybe it was a nervous
laugh. "We need to have a talk, Mr. Navarre. We really do."

He hung up.

I stared at Maia. She looked at me, her eyes
intensely black.

"Tell me," she said.

I looked down at the front page of the paper again,
where Eddie’s dead face was a circle of fuzz in the bottom corner.
I told Maia what Garza had said. She mixed cream into her coffee by
turning the cup in little horizontal circles.
 

"Garza’s desperate to set things right before
he becomes the next sacrificial lamb," she said.

I nodded.

Maia studied me over the top of her cup. "You
still think we’re not dealing with the mob?"

"It’s convenient. Homicide will look at how
Moraga was killed, then they’ll bring in Vice, then the FBI task
force. Pretty soon everything is focused on Guy White. just like it
was ten years ago, with my father’s murder."

Maia paused, choosing her words carefully. "Tres,
I want you to think about this. What if this is separate from your
father’s death? What if you’ve walked into something that has
nothing to do with that, or your questions about the investigation,
something that isn’t K your fault?"

I stared at her. When I swallowed, it felt as if I
were back in the dentist’s chair, someone’s big awkward hands
rearranging my mouth, sending muted but persistent jabs of pain down
the nerves of my jaw. “Do you think that would matter now?"

She lowered her eyes. Her voice grew hard around the
edges. "I think it should. Lillian has had her own life, Tres,
and she can create her own problems. You’re both grown-ups now.
Maybe you should start thinking about it that way."

"Grown-ups," I repeated. "So why the
hell are you following me around like my damn mother?"

I guess I deserved it. At least the coffee had cooled
off a little before she threw it in my face. Then, since there wasn’t
really any place to go to get away, Maia walked out the back door and
sat down on Gary Hales’s patio. I took a long shower and changed
before I went out to apologize. I put the ceramic road-trip statuette
on the table and sat across from Maia. We both stared at it. The two
skeleton lovers grinned back at us from the front seat of their
little orange car. A few blocks away the ice cream truck went by,
playing a warped rendition of "La Bamba."

“
This is hard," I told Maia. "I’m
sorry."

Her eyes were only a little red. I could almost
convince myself it was just from the sleepless night.

She forced a smile. "I liked you better with the
busted mouth."

"You and half of Texas," I said.

I noticed Gary Hales looking out his bedroom window
at us, his face so drooping and soft with amazement it seemed about
to melt off. I waved. After another minute of silence Maia picked up
the statuette and turned it around. The skeletons in the convertible
kept grinning, grotesque and shiny white.

“
If you’re· right, somebody wants this back very
badly," Maia said. "And not just for the artistic quality."

"So let’s assume the obvious."

"Yes."

I let her do the honors. The statuette hit the
pavement. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find inside when the
ceramic car cracked open. At first I didn’t see anything but clay.
Then I nudged it with my toe and the back seat broke neatly open
along a crack as thin as a piggy bank slot. Maia picked up the small
silver disk by the edges and held it up to her eye, looking through
the hole like a monocle.

"Don’t suppose you have a CD—ROM drive?"
she said. When I heard the slovv shuffle of my landlord’s feet I
looked up.

"I reckon you’ll be cleaning up that mess
now?" Gary Hales asked mildly.

"I reckon," I said.
 

32

"Bats?" I said.

"Bats," said my half brother Garrett.

"I’ll admit," I said, "it’s a word
I often think of when your name comes up."

"I’m not shitting you, little bro. You have to
see this. It’s fucking unreal."

I covered the receiver and looked over at Maia.

"How’d you like to take a little road trip?"
I asked her. She stared at me. "What?"

"Just to Austin. My brother wants to show us the
sights."

Maia’s arms folded. "How many ‘no’ reasons
do you want? Detective Schaeffer wants you in town, your car stands
out on the road like a neon advertisement, you’ve been shot at and
almost run over—"

I uncovered the receiver.

"We’d love to," I told Garrett.

"Cool," he said. "You remember what
the Carmen Miranda looks like?"

"That would be kind of difficult to forget."

"The bridge at eight, little bro."

Instead of terminating my life, Maia compromised with
me. She agreed to go to Austin; I agreed to let her rent a car for
the trip. By early afternoon we were heading north on I-35 in a brown
Buick so nondescript it was almost invisible. Maia kept having to
honk at people to keep them from drifting into us on the highway. By
the time we passed Live Oak I was convinced we were not being tailed.

"I would’ve preferred a white Cadil1ac,"
I protested.

"Asshole," she said.

When we hit Selma I discovered that the universe as I
knew it had come to an end—the old Selma Police Department building
had been turned into a bar and grille. For decades the terror of all
motorists wanting to drive above fifty-five and a half mph, the town
had finally cashed in its speed trap reputation for tourist dollars.
The sign out front promised free appetizers with any proof of moving
violation. And that was only the first surprise. The 1-35 corridor
was almost nonstop developments now. There were outlet malls where
cow pastures and ranch houses had once been, fast-food restaurants in
knolls once filled with barbed wire and stands of mesquite trees. As
we moved along the edge of the Hill Country I found myself less and
less sure where I was. Even the few remaining cattle along the side
of the highway looked confused.

When we stopped for a late lunch at a restaurant I
remembered on the San Marcos River we found the place had closed four
years ago. So we settled for a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a
billboard of Ralph the Swimming Pig in the park across from Wonder
World. Paddleboats went by on the river; a few unambitious wet suit
divers braved the ten-foot-deep green waters; Ralph the Swimming Pig
and Maia kept looking at me.

"You haven’t told me what you’re thinking,"
Maia said.

I chewed on my bread and cheese and watched the
river. It had taken me a few minutes to realize why I felt so bad
being here again. Then I’d remembered that time with Lillian,
Christmas break, when we’d gotten stupid drunk and gone
skinny-dipping around midnight just a few yards upriver from here
with a band of coked-up bluegrass players. The water had been so cold
our lips turned purple. I remembered Lillian. Then I looked at Maia,
sitting there in the sunlight, her eyes almost gold. The part of my
mind that was trying to put the facts together felt like it was
threading a needle with a pair of cooking mitts on.

"Tres?"

"Yeah, I know. I just don’t have an answer
yet."

She ran her finger along the edge of her wineglass.

"Do you want to hear mine?"

She waited. I kept eating flavorless bread. Maia
looked back down at her wineglass and swore under her breath,
something about me being a stupid white devil. "Damn it, Tres.
Do you think Lillian gave you that statue accidentally? Do you think
she didn’t know what would happen when it turned up missing? How
can you keep seeing her as just the victim?"

I stared out at the river. “Maybe."

"Maybe," she repeated. "What if, just
maybe, Lillian disappeared on purpose? If it were me, once I realized
the person I’d been trying to blackmail was really the mob, I’d
admit I was in over my head and I’d run like hell. Maybe first I’d
send up the only distress signal I could think of—to you. How are
you going to know the truth when you see it?"

"The truth." I looked at her. "Maia, I
know you’re trying to help. The truth is you’re distracting the
hell out of me."

I think I wanted it to sound angry, but it didn’t
come out that way.

Maia started to answer, then pressed her lips
together. For a moment she looked cold in the sunshine, hugging her
knees and curling up her toes under her beige sundress.

“
Tell me to go home then," she said.

I looked down. We sat silent for a while and threw
bread to some sickly-looking ducks. Sometimes they ate it. Most of
the time they just stared at us and let the pieces hit them in the
face. No points for intelligence. At the moment I empathized.

"Okay, then," Maia said. "Tell me
you’ll come back ."

The paddleboaters laughed. Ralph the Pig grinned at
me. I looked at Maia’s sad half smile and listened to the devil
talking on my shoulder. I was chasing ghosts through a town I barely
remembered, dealing with people I could barely see through emotional
scar tissue. Maia could be right. I’d only made things different
for the worse. And a beautiful woman was offering me escape from the
first twenty years of my life. It would’ve taken a stupid man to
tell Maia Lee no.

"No," I said.

Maia just nodded. She gave me a hand and pulled me
up.

We looked at each other for a minute. Then she turned
and headed toward the car.

I beaned a mallard with the last of the bread. He
stood there for a minute with the same dazed expression I probably
had. Then he honked and went skittering into the San Marcos River
like he’d seen a ghost.
 

33

Around eight we pulled into the Marriott parking lot
off Riverside in Austin and walked down to the water. You could
barely see the city because of the sunset. Town Lake was a half-mile
sheet of corrugated silver. Beyond it, behind a few wooded hills,
downtown blazed with a dozen mirrored office buildings I’d never
seen before. About the only things that looked the same as in 1985
were the red dome of the Capitol and the white UT tower.

The cement underside of the Congress Avenue Bridge
echoed with chatters from a few million bats and only slightly fewer
sightseers. When I spotted Garrett, he’d just pulled his wheelchair
up to a newly erected plaque that honored the "bats of Austin"
and was staring with distaste at the army of camera-toters. His
tie-dyed shirt was stretched a little tighter these days and he’d
gone almost completely gray, but he still looked like the love child
of Charles Manson and Santa Claus, minus the legs.

"Man," he said, by way of greeting, “this
is worse than fucking Carlsbad. They’ve discovered this place."

We shook hands. Garrett looked at Maia for a moment
longer than he needed to, scratching his beard. Then he nodded.

“
Last time I was here," he said, "it was
me, couple of Hell’s Angels, three kayakers, and a lady with a
poodle. Now look at this shit."

He led the way down the grassy slope, waving gnats
out of his face and running over as many people’s feet as he could.
Maia and I followed a few yards back.

"That’s—" Maia started to whisper. She
looked at me, then at Garrett’s rainbow-clad back.