Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (46 page)

"I don’t know what Guy White’s demands will
be to keep these disks from going into circulation, Councilman, but
here’s mine, for now anyway. Tomorrow morning you call a press
conference and renounce any plans to run for mayor. You’re going to
tell them you’re happy right where you are—a frustrated little
man in a little job. I’m not sure what else you’re going to do
yet, but you’ll hear from me. You can plan on that for the rest of
your life."

"Tres—"

Asante spoke my name as if he were just now realizing
which Navarre I was. I liked the way he said it.

"Enjoy your dinner," I said.

I left him staring at his Cowboys helmet desk lamp,
with his children screaming for him to come to the table. His wife, a
pleasant-looking fat woman, smiled at me on my way out. The table was
set, and the kids were jumping up and down in their seats, anxious to
say grace. I’d never smelled better homemade tamales in all my
life.
 

65

"Do I look all right?" Lillian asked.

We both knew the answer to that was “yes," but
I confirmed it for her anyway.

We’d just made it past the security guard and the
journalists in the lobby and were now in the Northeast Baptist
elevator, going up. Lillian and I were both wearing black for what
lay ahead this afternoon, so I was grateful to be out of the noonday
sun for a while. Even after several minutes in the hospital’s
industrial strength air-conditioning, the inside of my linen jacket
felt like the liner for a bag of microwave popcorn. I made a
conscious effort not to imagine what the inside of Lillian’s
clothes felt like. She was wearing a black sheath, Jackie O. style,
with no stockings and black sling-back leather pumps. Her coppery
hair was pulled back with a wide black grosgrain ribbon. Around the
scoop neckline of her dress she wore her mother’s pearl necklace,
the one Angela Cambridge had worn the night Dan got shot. The last
was a fashion choice I could’ve lived without. After a week of
recuperation, Lillian’s color was healthy again. The summer tan
showed off the freckles  on her shoulders, chest, and face. Her
bare legs looked just line.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly how I could tell,
just from looking at her, that she’d spent the last week crying,
some of it yelling and breaking things, but I could. Her eyes weren’t
red, nothing about her looked shaken or distraught, yet there was a
kind of post-flood quality to her. Her features looked harder,
weathered, as if her face had been scoured of everything that wasn’t
absolutely essential.

The elevator door slid open on the second floor. We
followed signs to the orthopedics wing, down a fluorescent-lit
corridor that was an obstacle course of wheelchairs and food carts.
Toward the end of the hall, one of the private rooms had a security
guard in front of it.

As we headed that way, Lillian took my hand and
squeezed it. "Thank you for coming with me."

I squeezed hers back, then released it. "You’ll
do your part of the deal later."

Lillian managed a smile. "It’s funny. Dan’s
the one I’m nervous about seeing. You’d think . . ."

She let the thought go.

The security guard let us through with no problem.
Inside, Dan Sheff was lying in bed in the middle of what seemed like
a commercial for springtime. The drapes had been pulled back, so the
white walls and newly mopped tile floor glowed with huge squares of
yellow Texas sunshine. Multicolored flower arrangements exploded all
over the windowsill. Dan’s built-in bedside radio was playing
Vivaldi or Mozart or something equally peppy—it wasn’t Lightin’
Hopkins, that’s all I knew. The usual hospital odors were
overpowered by warm flowers and Polo cologne. Everything about Dan’s
bed was white and crisp—his pajamas, his neatly turned down sheets,
the thick gauze bandages that encased his right hand and leg. Even
his IV looked like it had been recently polished.

Dan didn’t look quite so good as his room. His
complexion was pasty, the lines around his eyes tightly drawn from
days of lying around in pain. His hair was all canary—wings. The
way he focused on us, slowly and with great effort, made me suspect
he was on some pretty serious medication.

His smile seemed genuinely friendly, though. “Hello,
Lillian, Tres. Come to see my Purple Heart?"

He wasn’t kidding. Somebody had brought him an old
Purple Heart medal in a little display case and set it on his
nightstand, next to a vase of daisies.

I came up to the side of the bed and shook Dan’s
good hand. Lillian came around on the other side. I looked at the war
medal.

"Your dad’s?"

Dan smiled sleepily. "Mother had one of my
cousins bring it to me. I guess it was her idea of a reminder--where
I come from, where my loyalties are."

"Or it could be a peace offering," I
suggested.

Momentarily, anxiety and anger tightened up his face,
making him look once again like the Dan Sheff I knew. Then the
tension unraveled. Maybe it was the drugs that kept Dan so content.
If so, maybe he’d agree to lend me some for the rest of today.

“
A peace offering." He sounded dryly amused.
"Fat chance."

Dan started telling us about his condition. He
clidn’t sound bitter. He talked about the surgeons at BAMC removing
the destroyed bones in his hand, closing the hole in his leg, telling
him he was very lucky considering the amount of blood he’d lost.
The Sheff family doctor had then arranged a transfer to Northeast
Baptist for recuperation and daily antibiotic cocktails. Dan was due
for reconstructive surgery in a week, then a transfer to Warm Springs
Rehab for several more weeks of rehabilitation, learning to walk with
crutches and to use a right hand that would only have two fingers.
About halfway through his story, Dan reached over and pressed the
little button that self-administered his morphine.

While Lillian listened, her face readjusted itself
several times. She had the alert, almost alarmed expression, the
flickering eyes of a professional juggler who was being thrown a new
knife every fifteen seconds. All her effort went into not losing
control, keeping everything just barely balanced.

“
I don’t know where to start with the apologies,
" she said finally.

Dan shook his head. "Maybe I should start. I
should tell you—the D.A. visited me this morning. I plan on
cooperating. "

Lillian’s expression stayed tightly controlled
while she readjusted her interior rhythm to that new knife in the
air. "That’s all right."

“
I have to try to salvage something of the
company," Dan explained. “If I can do that by striking a
deal—"

"It’s really all right, Dan."

Lillian said it with conviction, like she was almost
glad. She’d spoken with equal conviction this morning when she’d
told me she wouldn’t press her own charges for the abduction,
wouldn’t volunteer any information for the case against her
patents. She had even helped her mother find a good lawyer.

Dan was probably wondering the same thing I was.
Lillian looked at both of us briefly, seemed to hear the questions we
weren’t asking, then tightened her lips into a perfectly straight
line. When she spoke she addressed Dan’s IV bottle.

"I’ve had ten years," she said. "The
first two or three of those, I almost tore myself apart with mood
swings, private screaming fits—I didn’t know whether to be
resentful that my parents had put me in this position, or angry that
they weren’t the good people I’d thought, or guilty because I
still loved them, or scared because my father was a monster. Beau—"
She stopped, took a few heartbeats to regain her balance. "Beau
actually helped me with that a lot. After a few more years I learned
to build partitions. To stay sane I had to learn how to love my
parents and resent them at the same time." She looked at me,
reticently. "Do you understand that, Tres? I’ve been defending
and prosecuting them simultaneously in my head for years. It’s
stopped being a contradiction for me. I know they’re guilty; I’m
glad they’ll be tried for what they did. But it’s a relief to be
able to give up that side to someone else. Now I can just be the
defense, just concentrate on the side of me that forgave them a long
time ago."

Dan’s eyes were drooping. The morphine had kicked
in.

"I can’t even think about forgiveness."
His tone was oddly pleasant, like the Vivaldi soundtrack that was
still playing merrily along in the background.

"You’ll be testifying against your mother as
much as the Cambridges," I said. "Have you told her?"

"I won’t see her," he said. “I know I
can stand up to her now. It’s just . . ."

"You’re not sure you want to test it, yet."

Dan looked uneasy. "I’ve had the same
relationship with my mother for twenty-eight years, Tres. It’s
going I to be hard not to fall into an old pattern. If that happened
. . . I think part of me would feel like this was for nothing."
He looked down at his bandaged hand affectionately, like it was a pet
curled up at his side. "It’s funny. I should’ve gotten
myself shot a long time ago."

Dan smiled. He’d spoken with a kind of brave,
self-deprecating humor, but there were undercurrents in his tone that
I’m not even sure Dan was aware of—fear, bitterness, uncertainty,
loathing. I knew it was only a matter of time before those things
became more than just undercurrents.

“
We should probably let you get some sleep," I
said. Dan nodded. "All right."

Lillian put her hand on Dan’s shoulder. She
hesitated, then leaned down to kiss his forehead. She straightened up
again so quickly her pearl necklace almost hooked itself on Dan’s
chin.

"I’m sorry, Dan," she said. "I’m
sorry that you got involved the way you did. Until you told me about
the pictures being sent to your family, I didn’t know. I didn’t
see the connection, why our parents were so insistent on us dating. I
blew up at you."

Dan had closed his eyes as if he were trying to
identify a particular instrument in the classical music playing. It
apparently wasn’t an unpleasant task,. but it did take his full
attention.

"Nothing to apologize for," he said.

Lillian pushed a stray lock of coppery hair behind
her ear. Her fingernails were painted red. I tried to think whether
I'd ever seen her fingernails painted before.

"Your mother must’ve been pushing you toward
marriage as hard as my parents were pushing me," Lillian said,
almost hopefully.

“
That’s true." The way Dan said it, he knew
it wasn’t true and so did I. If Lillian believed it, it was only
because she was trying so hard.

“
Get better," she said.

Dan nodded. "Do you mind going ahead? I’d like
to say something to Tres."

I thought about the first time Dan and I had tried to
say something to each other without Lillian, on the front of her
lawn. Lillian’s reaction this time was perhaps not as angry, but
every bit as uneasy.

"Of course," she said, then to me: “Meet
you at the elevator."

She turned and walked away as if she were conscious
that our eyes might be on her. They were.

When she was gone, Dan sighed and let his head sink
into his pillow. His hair made a spiky blond aura against the white
linen.

"I wanted to ask about that night," he
said. “What you told me about coming up against a brick wall."

"Yes."

Dan looked half-asleep, like one more bedtime story
would do it.

"I felt that," he said. “I knew there was
nothing I could do, but I did something anyway."

"You almost died because of it. "

“
I know. " He sounded content. "That’s
not my question. I just wanted to know: Would you be able to do it?"

"Do what?"

"Realize when you’ve hit a brick wall."

"I think so."

“
Would you be able to let go of it, like you said,
and walk away?"

“
Probably not."

He laughed with his eyes closed. "I think I’d
rather get shot."

When he was asleep, he looked content, but his mouth
kept moving, changing expressions, knitting and unknitting the frown
that used to be the main feature of his face.
 

66

If funerals came in sizes, retired Chief Deputy Carl
Kelley’s was extra small. It was me, Lillian, the priest, Larry
Drapiewski, and Carl. No son from Austin. No other friends except
those Carl was about to be buried next to. The only thing Carl left
behind him was the brooch he’d given me just before he died, three
nights ago in the Nix, with directions to give it to his son. I
planned on keeping that promise. If I ever found the bastard, I
planned on giving him a lot more than just the brooch.

After Drapiewski’s red jeep drove off, taking the
priest back to his church, there was nothing stirring in the cemetery
except the cicadas. They droned so persistently I started to doubt my
own sanity at those moments when they suddenly stopped.

Lillian and I sat in a little gazebo outside the
Sunset Mausoleum. It was a hundred degrees in the shade, a hundred
and ten inside my black suit.