Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (27 page)

“
Pull over where?"

"Just pull over."

I got out and leaned against the hood of the Buick,
which was only slightly warmer than the air. Tonight there was no
storm coming through. It was clear and orange with light pollution,
with the only visible stars right at the top of the sky. I wasn’t
sure why I wanted to be here again, without even the defense of a
tequila bottle, but I wasn’t ready to go home either, wherever the
hell that was. Maia got out of the car, uncertain at first what to
do.

She sat down next to me, followed my gaze. "I
used to look at the stars out in the countryside, after my father
went away."

Went away, she still called it. I tried hard to
imagine her as a six—year—old child, crying as her father was
dragged away by the Red Guard for reeducation. I tried to picture her
as a teenager, before she’d been reeducated herself by her
English-speaking uncle, then taken to America, leaving the rest of
the family to suffer the consequences. But it was the opposite
problem I had with Lillian, who I always saw in the past. With Maia,
I couldn’t imagine her any other way than she was now--sensual,
adult, as carefully polished as teak wood.

"In my home village outside Shaoxing," she
continued, smiling sadly, "there was this huge old plum tree I
used to sit in. I’d look up at all those millions of stars and envy
them."

“
Yeah," I agreed.

She shook her head. "No. I envied them because
there were so few. I used to dream about being in such a small
population, being alone and silent like that, with a few glorious
centimeters between you and the next person. You don’t understand
what a billion means unless you’re Chinese, Tres, and you don’t
appreciate zero."

I wanted to argue. I stared at Maia’s face,
watching her force herself not to cry. I thought about death and
absence and memories as foggy and sore as a tequila hangover. Even
stone sober I couldn’t figure out why I’d come home, but I
thought I appreciated zero pretty damn well. Before Maia could stand
up and walk away, maybe for good, I put my hand on the back of her
neck very gently and pulled her forward.

The dam was nearly deserted, but I think two cars
went by before I opened my eyes again. The second one passed with the
horn blating, someone yelling insults at us that faded into the dark
with the taillights. Maia’s eyelids were still wet on my cheek. She
didn’t say anything, but guided my hand under her blouse, up her
back. Her skin was cool. My fingers traced her spine all the way to
her shoulder blades, then undid her bra with a single twist.

Her laugh was shaky, the end of a silent crying
spell.

"You must’ve been a terror in high school,"
she said into my ear.

"I’m a terror now," I said, but it was
muffled.

I held her underneath her blouse and slid down into
the smell of amber and the taste of salty skin, thanking God and
Detroit for the wide smooth hood of the Buick.
 

37

Around 1:30 in the morning, the only light in San
Antonio was from streetlamps, stars, and my landlord’s TV. Looking
upstairs at the one blue eye in Number 90’s paralyzed face, I
wondered what was on television at this time of morning that was so
interesting. Or maybe, since Gary was half-asleep all the time, he
didn’t need to be all asleep any of the time. I think Abraham
Lincoln said that.

I’m not sure whether I felt worse or better with
Maia leaning up against me, her arms around my waist as we walked to
the front porch. I simply didn’t care at the moment about anything
except lying down on my futon and going comatose.

That was before I realized that my futon was already
occupied.

I should have known when Robert Johnson failed to
scold me at the door. I think Maia sensed it first. She froze with
her hand halfway to the light switch even before I heard the snick of
the revolver cock.

"Everything on the floor in front of you,"
he said.

The flashlight beam that hit our faces was from no
pencil-thin model. I squinted, blind, and raised my hands. Maia
dropped her purse. Her key chain hit the floor like a small bowling
ball.

"Okay." His voice was slightly familiar
now.

"Kneel."

We did.

“
You going to knight us, buddy?" I said. "It’s
usually done with a sword."

The air moved. Maybe I could’ve dodged the kick if
I hadn’t been so tired and so blind. As it was I just had time to
turn my newly corrected teeth to keep them from getting rebroken
before our guest’s foot stamped Doc Maarten on the side of my face.

I managed to get back on my knees without crying out.
My cheekbone didn’t feel broken, but everything was fuzzy now. The
left side of my face was going to look like a rotten tomato in the
morning.

"That’s strike one," he said. Then he
turned on the lights.

The redhead was holding the Colt .45 in his left hand
because his right arm, the one I’d broken outside of Hung Fong’s
last week, was in a cast. He looked like he hadn’t shaved or slept
or even bathed since that encounter. The lit fuses in his eyes told
me that this was a man who’d already pulled the pin and had decided
this was as good a place as any to stand until he blew up.

"Tell us what you want," said Maia.

She spoke the way she would to a distraught client,
and I waited for it to backfire the way it had with Beau. This time,
though, it seemed to work. Red lowered the gun slightly. He kept his
eyes on me.

"You know," he said. "And don’t even
fucking tell me it’s not here. You don’t want to know what strike
two is."

I found myself wondering if his eye sockets could
really be that dark blue. His face looked so old and leprous now I
started to doubt he was the same man who’d attacked me last
Tuesday.

I showed him that I was going for my shirt pocket,
then with two fingers extracted the disk Garrett had given me. It had
scrambled photo data on it, all right—pictures of Garrett’s last
fishing trip with the New Mexico branch of the Hell’s Angels. I
threw it at Red’s feet.

"Rough week?" I asked.

“
Tres, shut up," Maia hissed.

Now Red had a problem. With only one hand, he
couldn’t pick up the disk and hold the revolver at the same time.
He pointed the gun at Maia.

“
Get up."

He made Maia pick up the disk and come toward him,
keeping the Colt .45 aimed at her chest where he couldn’t possibly
miss. I didn’t think Maia would try anything, and even if she did I
wasn’t sure I’d be in much shape to help, but I paid close
attention to her body anyway, looking for any sign she was tensing
up. It didn’t happen. She slipped the CD into Red’s jacket
pocket, then knelt down again. Red seemed to relax to a temperature
just under a rolling boil.

"Okay. You want your tea leaves read now,
Navarre?"

"More than once a month is bad karma," I
said.

His laugh was more like a brief facial spasm.

"Nobody’s going to break any arms tonight.
Nobody’s going to write any fucking messages on my shirt or put
their fucking elbow in my face."

“
Okay," I said.

I looked at Maia out of the corner of my eye. We came
to an understanding. We were both looking for a sign that Red was
ready to kill. As long as he kept talking we were all right, but more
than four seconds of silence meant he would fire. If that happened we
went for him, and one of us died for sure, but maybe not both of us.

“
You ever been hit by a black talon?" he said.

"Once almost," Maia said.

"Nasty little fuckers," he continued,
looking at me as if I’d said it. Red tried to scratch his face,
then remembered he was holding a gun. I think it was only then that I
realized he was drunk as well as desperate. So his reflexes would be
a little slower. At three feet with black talons from a .45, I wasn’t
exactly relieved.

He said: "Once they open up they don’t leave
much of your chest cavity, man. Makes a ragged son-of-a-bitch hole.
One guy I saw got it from the police, he just screamed until his
lungs came out his throat."

I nodded. "Not as quick as bullets through the
eyes, then?"

That registered in his face like a cattle prod. He
aimed the Colt at my head.

"So we’re going to put things right," he
said, as if he were just ending a pep speech to the team. "We’re
going to give this back, I’m going to get my ass out of this town,
and you maybe get to live."

None of us bought that, not even Red. He shrugged.
"If this isn’t the disk, it’s going to be a lot more fun,
man. A lot more fun for your lady here."

I stared at him, trying to look cooperative and
unimpressed at the same time. The way my face was contorting on the
bashed-in side, I probably looked more like Bill the Cat.

"You and Eddie worked for Sheff," I said.
"That’s who we’re going to?"

The idea amused Red so much he decided to kick me
again, this time in the gut. When I got my face out of the carpet, a
few centuries later, I saw one and a half redheads with guns hovering
in front of me, smiling.

"Now unless you’ve got more questions, let’s
go."

We left in Maia’s car. Whatever Gary Hales was
watching on television, it must’ve been more interesting than your
run-of-the-mill abduction at gunpoint. He never even looked out the
window.

I played chauffeur while Red sat in back, his .45
aimed lazily at Maia’s head. We turned off Eisenhower onto that
stretch of Austin Highway where the strip malls that hadn’t been
abandoned yet housed head shops, heavily barred pawn and liquor
stores, beauty salons that still had faded pictures of beehive models
in the windows.

Every few seconds I glanced back at Red in the
rearview mirror and watched his eyelids drooping. Once, when his chin
dipped an inch, I almost made a move. Before I’d even taken my hand
off the wheel, the Colt barrel was in my ear.

"Don’t," he said, no sleep in his voice
at all.

I smiled in the mirror, then concentrated on the
road. It must’ve been 2 A.M. The drunks were starting to stumble
out of taverns like the Starz N Barz or the Come On Inn to find their
cars to sleep in, preparing to wait out the unendurable six hours
until the bars would open again. Bikers clustered in the parking
lots, invisible except for the glint of Harley steel and the orange
tips of their joints.

"Next left," Red said.

We passed a row of mobile home parks and pulled into
one where the plywood sign on the Cyclone fence out front said "Happy
Haven." The gravel and strips of corrugated steel and broken
patio furniture that littered the courtyard said something else
entirely. There were five other cars in the lot, all in various
stages of disassembly. The courtyard was lit only by a yellow car
repair lamp draped over the branch of a dead elm tree.

I handed the Buick keys to Red, then he and Maia got
out first. We walked to the third trailer, a dented white and green
metal canister that looked like an oversized hatbox. Red opened the
screen door, then waved me inside.

This time I knew something was wrong the instant the
air hit my face. It was cold as a meat locker inside, and it smelled
just about as bad. Refrigerated animal waste overpowered the other
smells of bourbon and cigarettes. It was also pure black except for
the yellow square of light from the door we’d opened. Somewhere off
to the right, a window unit air conditioner hacked and wheezed to
keep the room under sixty degrees. I tried not to gag. Then I went
inside and began talking as if there were really someone there.

"Long time no see," I said to the
blackness.

Maia followed my lead, then rolled away to the left.
I went right and nearly tripped over something soft and wet. As I
slid down against the cheap wood paneling on the wall, I could feel a
few dozen splinters shooting up into my arm. I made myself not move.

Red was only two steps behind us, but he was in the
light now and we weren’t. It only took two or three seconds for him
to realize something was very wrong and decide to blow holes in the
dark with his Colt. In that time both Maia’s feet hit his kneecap
at a ninety-degree angle. The cartilage snapped like celery. Red shot
a two-foot-wide hole in the trailer roof as he staggered forward.
Before he could shoot again with better aim I got his good forearm in
"
play biwa
"
posture. It’s called that because when you twist the two bones of
the forearm across each other and keep twisting, they snap with a
sound resembling a plucked string on a Chinese lute. At least that’s
what Sifu Chen had told me. It sounded more like a percussion
instrument to me. Red screamed and dropped the gun. But he didn’t
go down until I double-chopped his neck just below the jawline. Then
he melted into the shag carpet and started snoring.

Maia was already crouching down in the corner with
Red’s .45. She closed the front door of the trailer with her foot.
After a few minutes staying absolutely still, listening to the air
conditioner whine, I groped up the wall until I found the light
switch.