Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (43 page)

Inside, the kitchen smelled faintly of banana bread
and fresh-brewed tea. The microwave door was open, giving off just
enough light to make the copper baking molds and the olive-green
counter tiles glisten. I walked down the hallway, turned left into
the main bedroom, and found what I was looking for with no trouble at
all. The gun was in an unlocked nightstand drawer on the right-hand
side of the bed. It was loaded too. No points for safety awareness. I
continued down the hall toward the voices that were coming from the
study.

Five feet from the lighted doorway, I heard one of
the people inside say: "You did the right thing, kid."

The voice belonged to Jay Rivas, my best buddy at the
SAPD. That made things just about perfect. The ripped fingernails on
my right hand were starting to throb against the bandages. My stomach
ached. When I tried to move closer toward the entrance my feet
wouldn’t cooperate. I found myself staring at family photos on the
hallway wall—daguerreotypes of Victorian ancestors,
Easter-egg-colored Sears portraits from the sixties and seventies, a
recent panorama from a family reunion. There was a time when I’d
imagined my wedding pictures hanging here, maybe even pictures of
kids, happily accumulating dust and the odors of Thanksgiving dinners
over the years.

Looking at that photo collection now, I felt as if I
were holding a hammer to it, about to cause a lot of noise and broken
glass that wouldn’t make me feel a damn bit better.

When I stepped into the doorway, Zeke Cambridge was
the first to notice me. He’d apparently had a hard day at the
office. His black suit was rumpled, his collar loosened, and his tie
twisted with the tag side out. His unshaven whiskers made a dark gray
sheen along his jawline. He’d been pacing in front of the baby
grand piano at the far end of the room, and had already been looking
at the doorway before I appeared, as if he were anxiously waiting for
someone. I was not the person he was expecting.

A few feet closer to me, Mrs. Cambridge and Dan Sheff
sat on the couch, consoling one another. Dan had his back to me, but
Mrs. Cambridge saw me. Her hands slipped off Dan’s knee. She stood
up. Her bright yellow sundress and Day-Glo plastic earrings seemed
absurdly incongruous with her permed-up gray hair, her pearl
necklace, her white liver-spotted shoulders, and her morose, weary
face. She looked like she’d been the victim of a failed makeover
attempt by a much younger woman.

Surprisingly, Dan looked better than I’d seen him
in days. He was freshly showered and dressed—his blond hair
gleaming with gel, his khakis creased, his white Ralph Lauren
button-down neatly starched and tucked in. Only his miserable
expression hadn’t changed. Jay Rivas stood behind Dan. Rivas looked
better than I’d seen him in days too, though for Jay that didn’t
mean much. He was sporting brown double-knit slacks and his usual
silver and turquoise belt buckle and a white polyester shirt so thin
that his armpit hair and the lines of his undershirt showed through.
The real fashion statement for me, though, was the side-holstered 9mm
Parabellum, the same kind of gun that had drilled holes in Eddie
Moraga’s eyes.

The second disk, the one that had been taken from the
Hilton over Beau Karnau’s dead body, was sitting casually on top of
a Country Living magazine on the coffee table, next to an untouched
plate of banana bread and a pot of tea. Dan was staring at the CD,
but he was so engrossed in his own thoughts I think he would’ve
stared at anything. Nobody else seemed to be paying the disk much
attention.

Jay patted Dan Sheff’s shoulder roughly and said
again: "You did the right thing."

Then Rivas saw me out of the corner of his eye. He
registered my face, then the .22 in my unbandaged left hand. His
hands stayed where they were, one on Dan’s shoulder, one hooked in
his belt about an inch away from the handle of the Parabellum

Dan was the last to notice me. When he finally looked
up he didn’t seem very surprised. He spoke as if we were continuing
an old conversation.

"I told them about my mother. They had to know."

The Cambridges both looked at me intently, not saying
a word. Even Rivas was silent.

Dan glanced at each of them, frowning when he
realized he was no longer the center of attention. Everybody else
kept looking at me, at the single-shot Sheridan Knockabout I was
holding.

"I’m going to set this right." Sheff
tried to put some steel into his voice. "I don’t care if it is
my mother. I—I called Lieutenant Rivas. I’ve told him
everything."

My own voice sounded papery. "Must be a real
load off your conscience. I suppose the lieutenant suggested you talk
with Lillian’s parents. Rivas wanted to be present, of course."

Dan sat up a little straighter. "My mother lied
to them about Lillian. She tried to keep the police away. She might
have even taken Lillian herself. She lied to me and I can’t—I
can’t just—" He made it that far without taking a breath,
saying each sentence with the intense concentration of a toddler
trying to stack blocks. Then his composure dissolved. He shut his
eyes, his nostrils dilated, and he curled himself inward until his
forehead was resting on his knees. He let out a quivery sound, like
he was trying to match his pitch to a tuning fork.

He cried for about a minute. Nobody comforted him.
Very slowly, Rivas let his hand slip off of Sheff's shoulder.

"You’re breaking and entering, Navarre,"
Rivas said. It was the most calm, reasonable tone I’d ever heard
him take. Somehow that didn’t comfort me any.

“
You’re holding a gun in somebody else’s house
and there’s a police officer present. I’d be very careful if I
were you. Fact, unless you shoot real well with your left hand, I’d
set that gun down on the carpet before I said another word."

"Tres," Angela Cambridge said gently, "if
you care for Lillian—"

Zeke Cambridge told his wife to be quiet. The
banker’s watery eyes were staring intently at my forehead. Maybe he
was imagining a bullet hole opening there.

Dan sat up. I could see him slowly stacking those
mental blocks again, trying to get control over his face, his
emotions, his voice. Finally he wiped his wet cheeks with the base of
his arm so forcefully he left scratches from his gold watchband. “Go
ahead, Navarre. You’re here to get even with me, this is your big
chance. Tell them how stupid I was. I thought I could handle Garza,
then Karnau—"

"I’m not here to talk about your mistakes,
Dan."

"I put Lillian in danger and probably got those
other people killed and all the time my mother was—she was telling
me—" He faltered, looking at Mr. Cambridge.

"At least believe me that I didn’t know. If
I’d known about her—about her and the mob—"

Mr. Cambridge’s cold expression didn’t change.

“
Don’t be too hard on yourself, son."

"Absolutely," I said. “Don’t be too
hard on your mother, either. Her biggest mistake was confiding in the
wrong people, Dan. Like you are."

Dan’s blond eyebrows knit together. His body was
swaying just slightly, counterclockwise, like he was magnetically
correcting for true north. "What are you talking about, Navarre?
Lillian’s parents deserve to know what’s going on. It’s my
responsibility to tell them."

He turned toward Zeke Cambridge for support.
Cambridge offered none. Dan looked away, eyes a little hungrier. It
reminded me of the time I was eight, watching a
javelina
die in the woods and wondering if skinning the ugly thing would
finally merit a positive response from my dad’s impassive face.

"He can’t give it to you, Dan."

Dan looked at me, puzzled.

"Approval," I said. "Somebody to pat
your head and give you permission for what you did and tell you how
proud they are. Mr. Cambridge can’t give you that. Go ahead,
Lieutenant, tell Dan he did the right thing a few more times. Call
him ‘kid.’ He needs the safety net."

Rivas’s hand stayed relaxed next to the Parabellum.
The only sign that Jay was tense was the tendon on the left side of
his neck, which pulsed out every few seconds. Dan was swaying a
little more. He brought his hand up to his cheeks, absently, and ran
his fingers along the scratches, like he was just realizing they were
there.

“
How do you know your mother went to the mob?"
I asked him. “How do you know that’s who she’s protecting? Did
she tell you that?"

Dan closed his eyes tight. "She didn’t need
to, did she? After seeing Beau Karnau in the Hilton like that, after
what you said—it’s obvious."

“
You told me what was obvious when we talked at
Little Hipp’s, Dan. Turned out the obvious was wrong."

Mr. Cambridge was still boring an imaginary hole
through the center of my head. Angela Cambridge was crying silently.

I raised the Sheridan Knockabout. "This is the
gun that killed Randall Halcomb and Beau Karnau. Single-shot pistol,
Dan, out of production since 1962. Not the kind of weapon a serious
violent criminal would favor, but it works all right for an old Navy
marksman who wants personal protection, or some target practice, or
an occasional murder when his back’s against the wall." I
glanced at Mr. Cambridge, then at Jay Rivas. "You folks jump in
anytime you want."

Dan had his hands out, like I was about to rush him.

"Wait a minute . . . you can’t stand there and
tell me . . ."

"I took out the first disk, the one that Maia
and I had found in Lillian’s statuette. I held it up. "This is
half of what you were trying to get from Beau Karnau. The other half
is sitting on the Cambridges’ coffee table. What does that tell
you?"

The muzzle of my borrowed Sheridan swung toward the
right, almost by itself. I hadn’t seen Rivas move, but somehow he
had his 9mm in hand. He was aiming it at my chest.

“
It tells me I’m using my good hand, Navarre. And
I got eight rounds. How many you got?"

I opened my left hand and let the .22 drop.

For the first time in the fifteen-some-odd years that
I’d known him, Zeke Cambridge smiled.
 

62

"I should’ve shot you the first time you left
my daughter."

Mr. Cambridge sounded apologetic, smiling a sour
little smile, like he was regretting a practical joke that went awry
fifty years ago. "I wanted to track you down and kill you for
breaking her heart, Tres. I should’ve done it."

"Don’t feel too bad," I said. “You had
other things to worry about—the S&L crisis, the bad investments
Lillian used to blame your foul moods on. Sheff Construction, for
instance."

I tried to keep my voice even, unconcerned. I’m not
sure I managed it. I had to drop the CD so it wouldn’t be quite so
obvious how badly my hands were shaking. Angela Cambridge stepped
next to Dan and took his arm.

"Dear, why don’t we—" she started to
whisper before he pushed her away.

The muscles in Dan’s face seemed to be conducting a
system-wide test. His cheek twitched slightly, then his jaw, eyebrow,
nose. He was staring at me with a look I would’ve called anger if
his eyes hadn’t been so empty.

"You can’t tell me . . ." he started. He
opened his mouth for the next word but it didn’t come out.

"You get it, don’t you, Dan?" I asked.
"About the time your dad was making those hefty college tuition
payments to SMU, Sheff Construction was so deep in debt they were on
the verge of dragging their main creditor, Crockett S&L, into
bankruptcy with them. Until the Cambridges assumed control of the
company, that is. Then they turned their liability into a gold mine.
With a little help from Fernando Asante at City Hall." I looked
at Mrs. Cambridge. "How many millions did Travis Center make for
your husband, Angela? How much was he figuring on making this time
around, with the fine arts complex?"

She wasn’t bothering to wipe away the tears
anymore. They made her face looked glazed, like a very old pastry.

"Angie Gardiner," I said. "When I saw
the picture of you with the fighter pilot, your maiden name didn’t
mean anything to me. Then I went out to Blanco—the ranch where
Randall Halcomb was killed, right next to land owned by the Gardiner
family. That’s why Lillian and Beau happened to be out there that
night. Your husband and Lillian both had the unfortunate idea of
using the family land that weekend, for different reasons."

Behind her, Mr. Cambridge was absolutely still. His
smile had faded.

For his part, Rivas looked content. He was half
standing, half sitting on the backrest of the couch, resting the butt
of the 9 mm on his knee. He didn’t appear to be in any hurry to
shoot me. Probably he didn’t get to hold people at gunpoint as
often as he’d like.

"Danny Boy," he said pleasantly. "Be a
pal and get that disk at Navarre’s feet. Leave the gun alone, you
hear me?"

Dan didn’t seem to. He stayed where he was, staring
in my direction with bright, completely unfocused eyes.

“
You’re lying, Navarre," Dan decided.
“You’ve been angry at the Cambridges for years and now you’re
trying to blame them for everything that’s happened.