Rebel Island (25 page)
Authors: Rick Riordan
45
I had some idea how the Taino Indians must’ve felt when
Columbus and his men rowed ashore.
The three Coast Guard guys were only the beginning. An ambulance boat arrived next, followed by the Aransas Sheriff’s Department, followed by the ferry filled with FBI agents and marshals and FEMA personnel. By the afternoon, the island was overrun by strangers. White tents were set up on the beach. Forensics teams combed the wreckage of the hotel. Three bodies were found, photographed, bagged and removed.
Jose and Imelda were separated from the rest of us, led away somewhere. I never saw them leave the island.
I had a series of interviews, most of which I would not remember later. Maia was checked out by a doctor. Some interviews we had to do separately. Some we got to do together. I ate a doughnut and drank a cup of tepid orange juice. Later on, a homicide detective from Corpus Christi gave me a chicken sandwich. He told me something that had happened to him once at a barbecue for Peter Brazos. I don’t remember the story, or why he felt he needed to confide in me.
It’s strange how that happens. Being a witness, a victim, a participant in some terrible event seems to give you some of the qualities of a priest confessor. Instead of people comforting you, people look to you for comfort and understanding, as if you, by virtue of your trials, have gained some insight the rest of the world sorely needs. A capacity to endure.
Or maybe the guy just had a poor sense of social etiquette. I wasn’t in much frame of mind to judge.
A medic who didn’t know better told me all the gossip.
Jose had given a full confession to the police. He’d claimed responsibility for the murders of Jesse Longoria and Chris Stowall. He had cleared his wife of any knowledge or guilt. Imelda, I suspected, would go free. That was the only condition Jose demanded in exchange for telling the FBI all about his employers during the time he worked assassinations. Strangely, Imelda’s dream of relocation under a new name would most likely become a reality. She and Jose would disappear. But they would not be together. Jose would be in prison somewhere. And Imelda…I didn’t know where she would go. She would be swept out of our lives and gone.
Benjamin Lindy had collapsed shortly after hearing about Jose’s confession. The medic told me Lindy was suffering from exhaustion, emotional fatigue. The smallest shock can be a big thing when you’re eighty years old, and the past twenty-four hours on Rebel Island had been more than a small shock.
I’d given a statement about Lindy shooting Alex Huff, but I doubted it would make much difference. The crisis had already broken Lindy. He’d killed the wrong man. Now he would have to watch as the right man slipped out of his grasp, the very thing he’d tried so desperately to avoid. God had done a much better job punishing Benjamin Lindy for his deeds than the courts could ever do.
As for the UT boys, Ty, Chase and Markie had been questioned and released. Ty was given a sedative. The other two had been given Sprites and chicken sandwiches and told to please go away. They were the first to leave the island. I watched them go, and they stared at me nervously from the back of the police boat.
I had no desire to tell on their little drug smuggling problem. They would have enough to deal with when they got back. I would neither help them nor bust them. They weren’t kids after all, I decided. They would figure out a solution, or go to the police, or face some gruesome consequences. It was their problem, not mine.
That left Lane and Garrett—a situation which was not so easy to put on a boat and forget about.
They were sitting in front of the police tent after their
interviews. Garrett’s chair had been cleaned up. He had, too. He’d managed to wash the soot off his face and pull a fresh Hawaiian shirt out of his luggage. Lane was sipping coffee, watching the sun go down. The sunset made her face look healthier, her eyes brighter.
Garrett acknowledged me with a brief nod as I sat on the canvas tarp next to him.
“It’s just now sinking in, little bro. I can’t believe Alex is gone.”
“He was something.”
Garrett drank his beer. The smell of Lane’s coffee drifted by and was blown away by the sea breeze.
“We can leave soon,” I said. “The ferry should be here in half an hour.”
Garrett shook his head. “I’m not going just yet. I need some time to think about the island.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He locked eyes with me. “Alex left it to me.”
I stared at him. I tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying. “You mean…Rebel Island?”
“The papers he gave me last night,” Garrett said. “That was his will. He said if anything happened to him, he wanted me to know. He was leaving the place to me. He named you executor.”
“Me?”
Garrett looked back at the smoldering wreckage. “Congratulations.”
Part of me wondered why Alex would do such a thing. It would make Garrett a suspect. He’d have a strong motive for threatening Alex’s life. But Alex had never thought that way. He hadn’t been a killer, just a lonely man who’d tried to live up to Mr. Eli’s trust.
After all this, coming here to say goodbye to Rebel Island, my brother had ended up owning it. There was a lesson there somewhere—one of life’s little ironies. But I wasn’t sure how to take it.
“What’ll you do with the place?” My tone probably said what I was thinking:
Why would you want it?
“Do with it?” Garrett looked out at the sea and breathed in, as if clearing the smoke of the ruins out of his lungs. “Don’t know. Maybe a smaller house. Maybe nothing at all. But I like being here.”
“And you?” I asked Lane.
“I’ll stay the night with Garrett,” she answered. “They’re leaving the tents set up until morning. Then I’m going back to the mainland.”
“What about your ex-husband?”
“I’ll confront him,” she said. “And bring charges.”
“If you want help—”
She shook her head. “I appreciate it. But I’ll tell you the same thing I told Garrett. I have to do this myself.”
She looked nothing like the crying lady she’d been at the start of the weekend. I wondered if she was just putting on a brave face, if she would crumble again in the presence of danger, but something told me she would not. She’d left her fear behind in the burning hotel along with most of her luggage—the last reminders of her failed marriage.
“You’ll bring the police,” I said.
She smiled ruefully. “I’m not stupid.”
“And when she’s done,” Garrett said, “whenever that is, she might come back here.”
“I might,” she agreed.
It was tenuous. As tenuous as the idea that my brother could ever live on this island. Or ever have a relationship, for that matter. But at the moment, Lane and he were holding hands. They seemed at peace. And they really didn’t need my presence.
“Good luck,” I said.
I shook my brother’s hand, told Lane goodbye, and walked away toward the ruins of the ferry dock.
“You weren’t even arrested,” Maia observed, “much less
killed.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Kind of disappointing.”
We watched from the ferry’s stern as Rebel Island receded into the distance.
The sunset made a blood-red sky and a copper bay. Without its hotel or lighthouse or palmetto trees, Rebel Island looked like nothing much—a sandbar, a trick of the light. A shallow break where Jean Laffitte might run a Spanish ship aground. The kind of island that vanished in the space of a breath.
And yet…It was still there. It probably looked more now like it did three hundred years ago, when Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked nearby and hunted for lizards with the locals.
The ferry rose and fell on the waves.
“According to the EMT,” Maia said, “I’m due any minute. He was amazed the baby held out through the weekend.”
“Tough kid,” I said.
She kissed me. “Tough parents.”
We watched the island disappear. It didn’t feel like the final goodbye I’d imagined. If the island really was Garrett’s now, I might be forced to come back someday, but that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t so much worried about the things I was leaving behind. I was more interested in what I was going back to.
“I might take a PI case once in a while,” I said. “If the right one came.”
Maia raised an eyebrow. “If it didn’t interfere.”
“It would depend on the case,” I said.
“Oh. Naturally.”
She tried to hold a poker face as long as possible, but finally a smile made its way to the surface. “You almost made it seven months. Not bad.”
“Oh, be quiet.”
“Hey, when we broke up, you stayed away from me a whole year. Should I be insulted?”
“I shouldn’t have brought this up until we were closer to the shore. Twenty minutes trapped on this ferry with you. Gonna be a long ride.”
She kissed me again. Between us, the baby kicked. It felt like a tiny reminder, the kid telling me,
Get a grip, Dad.
“Not such a long trip,” Maia promised. “Tell me what you want to do first when we get home.”
And so we sat together in the stern of the ferry, and we talked about the future.
About the Author
RICK RIORDAN is the author of six previous Tres Navarre novels—
Big Red Tequila,
winner of the Shamus and Anthony Awards;
The Widower’s Two-Step,
winner of the Edgar Award;
The Last King of Texas; The Devil Went Down to Austin; Southtown;
and
Mission Road.
He is also the author of the acclaimed thriller
Cold Springs
and the young adult novels
The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters,
and
The Titan’s Curse.
Rick Riordan lives with his family in San Antonio, Texas.
Also by Rick Riordan
BIG RED TEQUILA
THE WIDOWER’S TWO-STEP
THE LAST KING OF TEXAS
THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN
COLD SPRINGS
SOUTHTOWN
MISSION ROAD
AND THE
P
ERCY
J
ACKSON AND THE
O
LYMPIANS SERIES
THE LIGHTNING THIEF
THE SEA OF MONSTERS
THE TITAN’S CURSE
REBEL ISLAND
A Bantam Book / September 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2007 by Rick Riordan
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riordan, Rick.
Rebel Island / Rick Riordan.
p. cm.
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Fugitives from justice—Fiction. 3. Gulf Coast (Tex.)—Fiction. 4. Hurricanes—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.I5866R43 2007
813'.54—dc22
2007014510
eISBN: 978-0-553-90410-9
v3.0
