Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (31 page)

"What neighbors?"

“
Vivians on the north, Gardiners on the south."

Neither name rang a bell.

“
A ranch house burned down?"

Grubb nodded. He told me about the big electrical
storm they’d had back in ’86. Lightning had caused a dozen small
fires, one of them taking the old ranch house up the hill. He looked
at me suspiciously.

"I reckon you’ll want to see that too."

Drapiewski laughed.

"Why not?" I said.

It took a lot of compliments and the promise of a
free dinner to get Grubb up that hill, but we finally made it. There
wasn’t much left of the house, just a thin place in the grass where
the foundation had been. I couldn’t figure out why it looked
familiar. I made a complete circuit around the place.

"Is this gonna get us something besides a
suntan, son?" said Drapiewski after a few minutes.

That’s when I tripped over something large and
metal. Grubb and Drapiewski came up to see while I dug it half out of
the dirt—a piece of black iron piping that had been shaped into
cursive writing about three feet long and a foot high. It said "Lazy
B."

“
Yeah," said Grubb. "I remember that. The
old gates to the place. What do you know."

It took me a minute to place the name. Then something
else clicked.

" ‘Lazy Bastard,’ " I said.

Grubb glared at me. "What was that, boy?"

"Miss Lee and I saw a photo of this place
recently. Taken at night, during a meteor storm."

Grubb nodded, more hot now than interested,
daydreaming of ice cream and shade.

Drapiewski and Maia looked at me, both of them trying
to read my expression. My throat suddenly felt very dry.

“
So this is the angle Karnau shot from," Maia
said. "That only makes sense."

"No," I said. "Lillian said something
before she disappeared. She and Karnau used to go on photography
shoots, sometimes for days at a time. She mentioned camping out on a
godforsaken hilltop in Blanco. She mentioned photographing a meteor
shower."

“
Funny coincidence," Drapiewski said, looking
back into the hollow where Halcomb had been shot. I tried to imagine
Randall Halcomb in the deer blind, curled up with a perfect red hole
between his eyes, but I kept coming up with Lillian’s face.

"Yeah," I said. “Funny."
 

43

When we got back to Queen Anne Street, Maia looked
tired and angry. She lay on the futon, staring into space while I
wrestled off my sticker burr-covered jeans. Finally they flew across
the room and buried Robert Johnson in his bed of dirty laundry. I
don’t think he even noticed.

I lay down next to Maia, hugging her from behind, my
face in her hair. When I reached for her hand it was a clenched fist.

After a few minutes she sighed. "Tres, get out
of here with me. Destroy that damn disk if you need to, but get out
of here."

I tried to pretend she hadn’t said anything. I
wanted to just lie there, keep my eyes closed, listen to Maia
breathing as long as I could. But she pulled away. She sat up and
looked down at me. The anger in her eyes watered down to frustration.

"Two men have died because of that disk, and now
you’ve started advertising you’ve got it. To me that makes the
rest insignificant. Even Lillian. Especially Lillian."

I shook my head. “I can’t just leave it. And I
can’t destroy it. Not if it’s about my father’s killers."

"You want to get yourself killed instead?"

There was no correct answer to that. After another
minute Maia lost the spirit even to glare at me. She sank back into
the cushions.

“
God damn you, " she said.

I lay there for a long time, contemplating how else I
could possibly screw things up. Mentally I started placing bets on
who would be coming through my front door next with a gun.

But of course my life wasn’t complicated enough.
The ironing board rang. When I picked up the receiver I knew I was
either listening to a rock tumbler or an aging smoker trying to
breathe. Carl Kelley, retired deputy, my father’s old buddy.

"Hey, son," he said. "Didn’t hear
from you yet. Thought I’d call."

Yet? Then I realized it was Sunday afternoon again.
I’d been in town exactly one week. In Kelley’s mind I’d started
a tradition when I’d called him.

"Hi, Carl."

I settled in for the duration and opened a Shiner
Bock. Maia watched me curiously while Carl launched into a discussion
of the newest terminal illnesses he’d read about. He talked about
how worthless his son in Austin was. Then he started mentioning past
discussions we’d never had. He repeated himself. Finally I listened
more carefully to the background noises on the other end of the line.

"Carl," I interrupted, "where are
you?"

He was silent for a minute, except for the breathing.

“
Don’t worry about it," he said. His voice
was shaky. His tone asked me to please worry about it.

"What hospital, Carl?"

"I didn’t want to trouble you," he said.
"My neighbor brings me in for a cold and they say I’ve got
pneumonia. Some fucking liver disease. I don’t know what all. Can
you believe that?"

He started to cough so loudly I had to pull the
receiver away from my ear. When the coughing subsided it took a few
moments for his gravelly breathing to start up again.

"What hospital, Carl?" I said again.

"The Nix. But don’t worry about it. They’ve
got a TV set up for me. I’ve got a little money left. I’m okay."

"I’ll come by," I told him.

"That’s okay, son."

He held the line for a minute longer, but he didn’t
need to say anything. I heard the loneliness and the fear even louder
than the hospital TV.

"What?" said Maia when I hung up.

"Somebody from my past," I said.

"Of course."

My look made her sorry she’d said it. The
irritation drained out of her face. She dropped her eyes. I dug
another handful of fifties out of Beau Karnau’s retirement fund and
made sure Maia still had bullets in her .45.

"I’ll be back later," I told her.

Maybe Maia asked me a question. I didn’t wait to
hear it.
 

44

The Nix looked like exactly the kind of building
Superman would’ve loved to jump over in the 1940s. After saying a
few Hail Marys and grinding up twelve floors in the antique elevator,
I found Carl’s semi-private room at the end of a narrow blue-lit
hallway.

I thought I’d been prepared to see Carl as an old
man. I was wrong. I couldn’t find his face anywhere in the thinly
coated skull that looked up at me. Oxygen tubes ran from his nostrils
like an absurdly long mustache. If he had been any more frail they
would’ve had to weight him down to keep him from floating out of
bed. The only thing still heavy was his voice.

"Hey, son," he croaked.

At first I didn’t see how those watery white eyes
could focus on me enough to recognize who I was. Maybe he thought I
really was his son. Then his eyes slid back over to the TV screen and
he started talking about the old days with my father. After a while I
interrupted.

"Jesus, Carl. How could you not’ve known you
were sick?"

He looked away from the TV and tried to frown. He put
his hand out for mine.

"Hell, son," he said.

But he didn’t have an answer for me. I wondered how
long it had been since Carl looked in a mirror, or had somebody pay
him a visit so they could tell him he was wasting down to a skeleton.
I made a mental note to find his son in Austin and have that
discussion, if I lived long enough.

"Tell me how it’s going, " Carl said.
"About your daddy."

“
You should rest, Carl. They got you on vitamins or
anything?"

He opened his mouth, rolled his tongue into a tunnel,
and coughed so hard he sat up. In the state he was in I was afraid
he’d broken his ribs, but he just sank back into the pillows and
tried to smile.

"I want to hear, son."

So I told him. There wasn’t much point in hiding
anything. I asked him if he remembered my dad saying anything about
Travis Center, or Sheff, or even vague comments about a big
investigation he wanted to do. I told him I couldn’t figure out how
my father would’ve stumbled onto the scheme to fix the bidding.

I’m not sure Carl even heard half of what I said.
His eyes were fixed lazily on the television. When I was finished he
offered no comments. He was staring at some Cowboy cheerleaders in a
beer commercial.

"Your daddy and the ladies," he said. "I
guess you never heard the stories."

"Too many stories, Carl."

His hand looked so fragile I was surprised how hard
he gripped my fingers.

“
Don’t you doubt he loved your mama, son. It’s
just—"

"Yeah, he loved the ladies too much."

"Naw," said Carl. "Just Ellen."

I don’t know why the name still made me
uncomfortable. I’d heard it so many times from people outside the
family. At home it had never been an issue. No big deal, really. just
every Thanksgiving, my father used to get a little teary-eyed after
his third bourbon and Coke. Then he’d raise his glass and Garrett
and Shelley would raise theirs too. Nobody said anything. Nobody
invited my mother or me to ask. But we knew who they were drinking
to. That momentary cease-fire between the three of them was all that
was left of Ellen Navarre, my father’s first wife. But the name
still made me feel like an unwelcomed guest in my own family.

The studio audience cheered the winner of jeopardy.

"Nothing ever took root for your daddy after
Ellen died," Carl said. "Not really."

I wished he would go back to talking about
Alzheimer’s, or maybe prostate cancer. Anything but my father’s
love life.

"Right before he got shot," Carl said, “he
finally thought something was working out, you know. Course he always
thought something was working out with some lady."

I nodded politely, then realized what he was saying.
“I don’t remember anybody like that."

Carl just looked at me and breathed gravel. I got the
point.

" She was married."

"Eh," he said. "They usually were."

For a minute his eyes drifted off, as ·if he’d
forgotten what we were talking about. Then he continued.

"Your dad was a hard-nosed son of a bitch, son.
But, Good Lord, he could turn soft over a woman. You should’ve seen
the roses he bought once for a Laredo whore—"

“
Carl," I said.

He stopped. I guess he saw well enough to read my
expression in the blue light of the television.

"Yeah, you’re right, son. Enough said."

I sat with him for a while and watched the game
shows. The nurse brought in some applesauce and I helped him eat it,
spooning the excess up his chin and into his mouth like you would a
baby.

After an hour he said: "I guess you need to go."

"I’ll try and come back tomorrow."

"You don’t need to do that," he said. But
his hand wouldn’t let go of mine. He looked at me for a minute and
said: "You look just like your mama. Just like Ellen."

I didn’t tell him he was wrong. I just nodded,
swallowing hard.

"You find this girl of yours," Carl said,
squeezing the words into my hand, "and you hang on to her,
Jackson."

Maybe he was talking to me, maybe to my father. At
that point it didn’t matter. When I left him he was still
recounting the old days, telling Vanna White what a son of a bitch my
father had been.

"Roses for a Laredo whore," he told her. "
Some kind of roots."

Carl Kelley held on feebly to his oxygen tubes like
they were the only things still anchoring him down.
 

45

Maia acknowledged my existence long enough to throw a
notepad at me. Then she went back to pretending to read the
newspaper.

"He called about an hour ago," she said.
"Right after Detective Schaeffer."

The note said: "Carlon—5 hours and counting.
Talk to me. " I tore off the note and threw it in the trash can.
I missed.

"And Schaeffer is interested in talking about
Terry Garza," Maia said. "I stalled him as much as I
could."

"Any more good news?"

Maia dropped the paper longer this time, enough for
me to see that her eyes were red. She sat on the futon with her legs
tucked under her, wearing a black pantsuit with sequins. Her ponytail
was tied back in a new way, with a small cluster of red and blue
ribbons. It all looked slightly familiar, but not on her. I frowned.

"What else happened?" I asked. "Did
you go somewhere?"