Rebel Island (17 page)

Despite his temper, Alex Huff was a sentimentalist. He kept old things. He remembered people he’d known as a child. He’d spent his life savings to buy this hotel because it had been dear to his father.

And yet this room looked like any other room in the hotel. Except for the wooden statue of the dead woman.

I got up and went to the window. The wind was definitely slacking now. Its howl was less insistent. Woven Guatemalan pictures rippled across the tattered quilt—men with machine guns, helicopters over a rain forest.

On an impulse, I ripped it down.

I was standing there, staring into the angry edge of the dying hurricane, when the hotel’s power went out again.

As my eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, I noticed something out in the storm—a flicker of light, and then it was gone.

I might’ve imagined it. Storms can play a lot of tricks with the light. But I was pretty sure I’d just seen a candle extinguished in the top window of the old lighthouse.

28

Calavera squatted in the dark stairwell, listening to the
noises of the house. Four in the morning was a good time for murder. He would not normally choose to work in a house that was occupied. This had already caused him problems, almost given him away. But under the circumstances, he had no choice.

He set his hand on the unpainted timbers. The walls here were so close together his shoulders touched on either side.

He remembered his first job, so much like this one.

A police commander, a judge and a lawyer walked into the brothel. It sounded like the beginning of a joke, but the three men would never come out alive. Calavera had spent weeks studying their habits. He knew they would stay overnight on Sunday, as they always did, and so Calavera had visited on Saturday as a client. In the early morning, when everyone was asleep, he had laid the trap.

Monday at 4
A.M.,
he watched from the building across the street. He lay on the roof with a rifle, just to be sure. The brothel’s back doors were barricaded. He had seen to that. If anyone came out the front, or made it through a window, he would take care of them. He did not like loose ends.

He needn’t have worried. The explosion was beautiful: flame blossoming simultaneously in the windows. The screams were short-lived. And no one came out of the building.

The display was better than fireworks. Blood rushed through his veins. He felt more alive than he had in years.

Soon, setting bombs had become his addiction. The money was good, necessary for his survival, but he would have done the work without pay. He had finally found something he was good at.

Now, he wished he could recapture that thrill. But this time was different. Necessary, yes, but he would take no pleasure from it.

He connected the last wire to a simple timer. So much could be accomplished with a single electrical pulse.

He sat for a few moments listening to the sounds of sleepers on the other side of the wall—gentle snoring, restless turning in bed. Tomorrow, he would be away from here. He would start again, and this would be his last display. A work of necessity, hastily done. He didn’t like that. But the beauty of fire wiped out one’s imperfections. Fire was very forgiving.

He set the candy skull on the timer, knowing no one would ever see it. But he would know it was there, small sugary eyes watching as the seconds ticked down in the dark.

29

I meant to venture out into the storm to investigate the
lighthouse. Instead, I went to check on Maia, lay down next to her thinking it would only be for a few minutes and ended up falling asleep.

So much for the intrepid hero of the tempest.

Most of my dreams were surreal, kind of like my life. Unfortunately, this time I dreamed about the day I quit private investigations, and that dream was always exactly true-to-life.

I was in my office—the converted dining room of our
Victorian on South Alamo. It was winter in San Antonio. The wall furnace hissed. Outside, the sky was heavy gray and the bare pecan trees looked like charred bones.

I’d just returned from San Fernando Cemetery, from my encounter with U.S. Marshal Longoria at Ralph’s graveside. Longoria’s words kept coming back to me:
If you can’t stop feeling guilty, son, maybe you should find a different line of work.

I had a pile of paperwork on my desk. A few skip traces. A divorce case. An undercover job I needed to set up with a local jewelry store. I also had a stack of essays to grade from my part-time teaching gig at UTSA. I was trying to decide whether I wanted to write a report about my client’s cheating husband or grade sophomore papers on Chaucer’s use of alliteration. The fun factor seemed about the same, either way.

Maia was in the living room, talking on the phone with her doctor. She’d been on the phone since I got home. I tried not to think about that. She was constantly telling me not to worry. The doctor was probably trying again to convince her to do amniocentesis. She was politely but firmly saying no.

She wasn’t showing too much yet. She had white paint flecked on her fingers. She’d spent the morning painting the baby’s room upstairs, even though I’d told her she should take it easy.

I checked my email. I had a lot of messages. My boss at UTSA, asking again if I wouldn’t reconsider taking another course. They were shorthanded as usual. He could easily move me to a full-time position. He mentioned the magic words:
health care.

There was a message from a client, thanking me for finding her runaway daughter. There was an email from Ana DeLeon, Ralph’s widow, with a photo attachment of their baby girl, Lucia. Lucia had her father’s crazy grin as she dumped the candy out of her Christmas stocking.

Worst of all, there was a Happy New Year e-card from Rosa Gomez, the lady who had hired me to find her fugitive husband. I didn’t know why Rosa kept me on her holiday list. She claimed I was the only one who listened to her, the only one who even tried to help her husband. I’m not sure I would’ve been so generous in her position. I had failed her miserably.

I shouldn’t have tortured myself, but I found the file on Julio Gomez and looked through it again. Like homicide detectives, PIs get certain cases that just won’t let you go. They are never resolved. They haunt you.

I’d never even met Julio Gomez, but I knew him well.

His photo showed a thin Latino in his late twenties. A good smile. Intelligent eyes. He didn’t look like a criminal. You wouldn’t latch your door if you saw Julio Gomez walking down your street. When he was seventeen, he’d been messing around on a highway overpass with some friends, throwing rocks down at cars. One rock went through a Ford pickup’s windshield with the force of a cannonball and killed a passenger. Julio had been tried as an adult, but he managed a plea deal—involuntary manslaughter. Light sentence. That had been his first strike. When he was twenty-one, he’d gotten in a fight at a bar. Unfortunately, the man had been an off-duty cop. This got Julio an assault conviction and a bad reputation among the city’s police.

When he got out of jail again, Julio married his longtime sweetheart, Rosa. Julio tried to go straight, despite the fact that the cops often harassed him, knowing he had a short temper. Julio was doing all right—holding down a job, thinking about community college. Then the gas station where Julio worked was burned to the ground a few days after Julio had argued with his boss. Julio was brought up on arson charges. He made bail, panicked and ran. He told Rosa he couldn’t take another felony count. More jail time would kill him.

Rosa was our down-the-street neighbor. She passed my business sign every day on her way to work. She came to me, begging me to find her husband. Julio was innocent of arson. Julio had to come back and stand trial.

I never found him. Within a few days, rumors started surfacing about Jesse Longoria. The marshal had been asking questions about Julio, following the same trail I had. Except Longoria had been more efficient and more ruthless.

What bothered me most was that I never found the body. I couldn’t prove what had happened. I couldn’t give Rosa any closure. All I had were suspicions. But that morning at the cemetery, Longoria’s smile had given me all the proof I needed. I thought about his pleasant eyes, his black wool coat, his gold college ring. He was a hunter with no remorse. He had found Julio Gomez, probably put a bullet through his head, dumped the body and gone out afterward for dinner and a show. He would’ve done the same for Ralph Arguello, or me for that matter, if we’d happened to cross him.

Why did I want people like that in my life?

I slipped Julio Gomez’s file back into my cabinet. I stared at the picture of my dead best friend’s daughter Lucia on my computer screen. Ana DeLeon’s brief note:
Love from both of us.

I closed the email program.

In the living room, Maia hung up the phone. She sat with her fingers laced, staring at the coffee table. I knew she was gathering her composure before she came to talk to me. Especially during the first trimester, pregnancy had played hell with her hormones. She got emotional much more easily than usual, and she hated it. She spent a lot of time alone at the coffee table.

In six months, give or take, I would be a father. When I thought about the legacy I had from my own dad, what did I come up with? His old service revolver, a warped view of law enforcement and some painful memories from a childhood spent on Rebel Island.

I stared at the telephone. Then I picked it up and dialed my boss at UTSA. I told him I was thinking of going full-time. He said he’d start the paperwork immediately.

30

Benjamin Lindy watched the sunrise through a hole in the
wall.

He’d always been an early riser. When he was a child, his job had been to tend the chickens on the ranch. He’d get up before first light and check for eggs, remove snakes from the hutch when necessary and let the chickens out to feed.

Early rising had been bred into him. It was a physical need. Around four in the morning, his feet would start to tingle and the sheets would begin to feel itchy. He
had
to get out of bed. On the rare occasion when he overslept and woke up to daylight, he felt sluggish and out of sorts, cheated of his best time.

This morning, he’d had several hours to think before the sun came up. He’d decided he would have to kill someone today.

The room he was standing in had been a parlor suite. Sometime during the night, a telephone pole had pierced the wall—crossbeams, wires and all. It stuck about five feet into the room, hanging crookedly in the ragged hole it had made, the top of the pole pushing against the ceiling. Lord knew where the telephone pole had come from. There were none on the island, as far as Benjamin could recall. When he came into the room, his first impression was that a sailing ship had rammed the building with its bowsprit.

He slipped his hand into his pocket. The gun was still there. It was his spare sidearm, too small for his hand, but now he was glad he’d brought it. Years ago, he’d bought the gun for his wife, but she’d never touched it—one of the many things she’d left behind. He supposed there was some sort of justice in him using that gun today.

He watched the sky turn from black to steel. He still burned from the indignity of having his .45 taken from him, as if he were a child. A year earlier, the state had tried to take away his driver’s license, simply because he was old. Then a murderer had taken away his daughter, as if old age did not rob a man of enough. Navarre had no right to rule over him. Benjamin had been wrong to trust Navarre. He would do no more than the law.

He remembered his last conversation with Peter Brazos, who of all people should’ve been his ally. Peter had turned all his attention to prosecuting the drug lords. He poured his rage into his work. But Calavera…Peter saw the assassin as a tool, not the real target. When Benjamin had tried to warn him what the Marshals Service was doing, tried to suggest they take action before the assassin could cut a deal, Peter had shut him down.

“Not another word,” Peter snapped. “Ben, this conversation never happened. If they can bring the bastard in, I’m all for it. I want his bosses’ names. All of them. But you will do nothing outside the law. Do you hear me?
Nothing.
”

Benjamin backed down. He pretended compliance. And they had not spoken since.

Outside, the rain still fell, but the storm was dying. Today Calavera would try to escape. Benjamin wasn’t sure how, but he could not allow anyone to leave the island, not until the assassin was dead.

He would have to watch.

He replayed last night in his mind. His brief conversation with Ty had bothered him. Those boys were up to no good. Ty knew something about Stowall’s murder, but he’d wanted to talk to Navarre. He wouldn’t tell Benjamin anything.

Then there was Alex Huff, the way he’d left abruptly last night. And now where was he? Every time Benjamin looked at Huff, he had to constrain his anger. It could not be a coincidence that the trail to his daughter’s murderer had led here, to this vile hotel. The very existence of the place was an insult to him. And Alex Huff…he would have to be found.

Benjamin rested his hand on the telephone pole. He would have to be patient a little while longer. He would have to control his anger. But when the time came, he could not hesitate.

Blood for blood today. No one would take that away from him.