Rebel Island (6 page)

“Damn, I would love that.”

She touched the space between my eyebrows—her way of telling me I was scowling too much. “You did the right thing, taking charge.”

“I didn’t take charge.”

“They need you to, Tres. I know you want to switch off that ability—”

“What ability?”

Instead of answering, Maia rested her head on my chest.

The wind outside battered the hotel. I could almost feel the storm pushing us toward the mainland, carving new channels out of the coastline.

“Who do you think killed the marshal?” Maia asked.

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“But you can’t help it.”

I hated that she was right.

“Chris Stowall’s business card was in Longoria’s suitcase,” I said. “And now Chris has disappeared.”

Maia picked at a button on my shirt. “Chris Stowall doesn’t strike me as much of a killer.”

“And yet he’s missing.”

“Whoever the killer is, he’s still in the hotel.”

“Are you sure it’s a he?”

“Unless you think Lane or Imelda did it. Or me.”

“Hmm. Probably not Lane or Imelda.”

She elbowed me. “Lane was telling me some disturbing things about her ex-husband. She made him sound abusive. And relentless.”

“Homicidal?”

“Possibly.”

“I doubt there’s a connection,” I said. “Lane admitted she hasn’t seen her ex here. With this storm, he couldn’t be outside. He’d have been blown all the way to Kingsville by now. And why would he target Longoria?”

“One of the other guests, then? Or the staff? Your friend Alex?”

My friend Alex.

I thought about the time Alex pushed me against a window on the third floor when I was around ten years old. I think I’d asked him what his parents did—some stupid, innocent question like that. He held me so far out my shoulders cleared the windowsill, his fingers digging into my forearms.
None of your goddamn business, mama’s boy,
he’d told me.
Nobody asked you to come here! You got that?

Still, it was difficult to imagine Alex Huff shooting a law enforcement officer at point-blank range. As far as I knew, his only flirtation with guns had been his time in the military, which from his own account had been undistinguished—something about serving breakfast in Kuwaiti mess halls. Since then, his most dangerous hobbies had been his amateur fireworks, buying questionable real estate and hanging out with my brother.

“I don’t know about Alex,” I said halfheartedly. “He got scuffed up pretty bad somehow, and he’s acting nervous. I don’t trust him.”

“Because he’s capable of murder, or because he’s Garrett’s friend?”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

She kissed me. She was pretty convincing. “What about the old lawyer, Mr. Lindy? He had a gun. He was in the hallway.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t understand what he’s doing here. On the other hand, he’s a lawyer. He’s got to be close to eighty. He could barely hold that .45. Did that look like a .45 wound in Longoria’s chest?”

Maia shook her head. She looked a little green.

“Sorry,” I said. “Forgot you were feeling squeamish.”

“It’s okay. But that doesn’t leave many people. At least…people we know of.”

“If the killer wants to get off the island, there aren’t many options.”

“None,” Maia agreed. “It doesn’t make sense that Longoria would bring a fugitive here. This island’s a dead end.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the storm.

The sound was familiar. Then I realized the storm sounded just like a freight train—the way the Kansas-Texas used to roar past the Arguello family house, back in high school. I wished it didn’t sound like that.

“I don’t want to solve this problem,” I said. “I’m an English teacher.”

“You’re thinking about Ralph.”

The image never went away—Ralph lying on the shoulder of Mission Road, staring into the sky. He’d taken a gunshot to protect Maia. He’d died and left a wife and kid behind. No matter how many times I replayed it, trying to convince myself there was nothing I could’ve done…PI work had brought me nothing but pain. It had never been just a job. It had seeped into every part of my life, endangered everyone I was close to.

“Ralph wouldn’t want you to quit,” Maia told me. “That wouldn’t make him feel better.”

“Nothing can happen to you or the baby.”

“Tres, you can’t control everything. You can’t stop things from happening.”

The storm roared. There was a draft somewhere. The candles flickered and guttered.

Maia propped herself up on one elbow. “Did you hear that?”

“What, the wind?”

She listened, looking around the room until her eyes fixed on the door. “Someone’s outside.”

I didn’t ask how she knew. I got out of bed.

“Tres.” Maia pointed to her luggage.

I retrieved the .357 from her suitcase and I went to the door.

I threw it open, but there was no one there. The hallway was dark and silent. I realized I was making a great silhouette if anybody wanted to take aim at me. The candlelight behind me was the only illumination.

As I stepped back inside, paper crumpled under my foot.

“What is it?” Maia asked.

I picked up the envelope. Hotel stationery, cream with brown lettering:
REBEL ISLAND HOTEL
. It was unsealed with the flap folded in, the contents too thick for a single letter.

I should’ve been more careful. It might’ve been a letter bomb for all I knew.

But I opened it and looked inside. Newspaper clippings. I unfolded them—articles from the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
and the
San Antonio Express-News,
a few pieces printed from the national wire services. I scanned the headlines. Among the articles was a white card with a note handwritten in pencil, carefully anonymous block letters.

“Well?” Maia asked.

I showed her the note. Two simple words:

FIND HIM

“A warning,” I said. “About our killer.”

10

Alex crouched in the attic. He hammered the last support
beam in place, but he had no illusions that it would help. The ribs of the building were trembling. Leaks were sprouting in so many places he felt like he was in the hull of the
Titanic.

The attic was crammed with Mr. Eli’s old leather suitcases. They smelled of lilacs. The old man had once been a traveler. He’d crossed Europe on trains and sailed a steamer to China. He’d visited Istanbul and Cairo. And then for reasons he never explained, Mr. Eli settled on Rebel Island, stowed his luggage, his clothes and his mementos in the attic. He threw away all his shoes except his slippers and vowed never to leave.

Above Alex’s head, there was a ripping sound, more of the mansard roof getting scoured away. Soon Mr. Eli’s things would be exposed to the wind, swept off to Refugio County.

Let them get ruined,
the old man would’ve said.
A man’s better off without his baggage.

Alex climbed down the ladder and closed the trapdoor. He stood in the hallway, his wet clothes dripping on the carpet. He should’ve run away from this place months ago. What the hell was he still doing here, pretending he could make things right?

He stared at the doorway of Jose and Imelda’s room. It had always been the servants’ room, probably as far back as Colonel Bray’s time. Once, Alex’s parents had lived there. His mother had been bedridden during her final years. Alex would leave the window open so she could hear the sea. The room would be filled with light, the sounds of gulls and the smell of salt. On days when his father took out the fishing boat, she would close her eyes and listen to the sound of his engine as it receded into the Gulf.

Years later, when Alex had finally gotten up the courage to leave the island, his father hadn’t understood. Why join the army? Why leave the coast? Even Mr. Eli had told him it was a mistake.

There’s nothing out there for you, Alex.

But they’d let him go, and it didn’t take him long to realize they were right. Eventually he had come straggling home. He’d reconnected with his old friends. He’d tried to help them, the way Mr. Eli would’ve wanted him to.

And in exchange, he’d been deceived, betrayed, used. His fists tightened.

Alex
had
to stop trusting people. He’d thought Tres could help, but who was he kidding? He should have left this island when he first suspected the truth. Yet here he was, paralyzed. All he could do was go on fixing leaks, hoping the hotel didn’t collapse around him.

He wanted to tell the Navarres the truth, at least. He owed them that much. Yet whenever he tried, the words stuck in his throat.

From the attic came an ominous creaking—wood being strained to the breaking point. But instead of going up again, Alex went downstairs.

There was one thing left he could do: one more leak he needed to fix.

11

I’d heard of Calavera and his big mistake.

No single article told the whole story. Journalistic etiquette, such as it was, prevented reporters from telling the most grisly details. But I pieced them together, inferring some things, remembering others that I’d heard from various cops.

Six months ago, Corpus Christi District Attorney Peter
Brazos had been in the middle of a career-making case. He was prosecuting five members of a South Texas drug cartel for trafficking, kidnapping, accessory to murder. He had everything he needed for a conviction. If things went his way, Brazos would gain national attention. He could write his own ticket—a job with the state attorney’s office. Maybe even a federal appointment.

On New Year’s Eve, two weeks before the trial, Brazos sequestered himself at his weekend house in Port Aransas to prepare his case and collect his thoughts. This was his habit. He was well known for going on such retreats. The fact that it was New Year’s Eve meant nothing to Brazos. He did not celebrate such things. He had no time for anything except his work and—as time allowed—his family.

Brazos’s weekend house was in a bayside community of million-dollar homes with a boating channel between every block. There was no security. No gate, no surveillance. Island mentality. Most of the residents didn’t even lock their front doors. Brazos left his retreat only twice that day, once for a jog on the beach, once for groceries in the afternoon. During one of those times, the assassin must have set his trap.

Around sunset, Peter Brazos was cooking a quiet supper for himself when he was surprised by his wife, Rachel, and their two daughters, ages nine and seven. A spur-of-the-moment decision. Daddy should not spend New Year’s Eve alone. Brazos was irritated at first. Rachel knew better than to interrupt him while he was on retreat. But he couldn’t stay mad at her or the girls, so he set aside work. Plans were changed. They shared a dinner of shrimp and filet mignon, chicken strips and sparkling cider for the girls. The clock ticked toward midnight. The girls tried to stay up for the television broadcast from Times Square, but they fell asleep in the master bedroom, curled between their parents. Peter Brazos kissed his wife and asked her if it would be all right if he snuck away to study his case notes one more time.

Rachel Brazos smiled. She knew her husband too well to argue. She wished him a happy New Year, and Brazos took his laptop out to the back deck.

The winter air was cool and pleasant. Across the channel, a few of the neighbors’ houses were lit up for parties. That didn’t bother Peter Brazos. He read through his notes and thought about how much better South Texas would be when the men he was prosecuting were finally put behind bars.

He was proud that he hadn’t bowed to the pressure from nervous politicians, reluctant police, death threats from the mob. So what if these drug barons were well connected? Brazos knew the cartel had several rural sheriff’s departments on their payroll, possibly a few Corpus Christi cops and city council members, too. That didn’t matter. Brazos was doing the right thing.

He was relishing the idea of a conviction when the fireworks started down at the beach.

In the flickering of red and blue starbursts, something caught Peter Brazos’s eye. At the edge of his dock was a small white lump that looked like an ice cube.

He wasn’t sure why, but he set down his computer and went to see what the thing was. A tiny skull made from rock candy—a
calavera,
like children got for treats on the Day of the Dead. Brazos picked it up and stared at it, baffled by what it was doing on his dock.

Then something began nagging at the back of his mind—stories he’d heard. A hired killer. A calling card at the scene of a crime. But those kinds of hits happened to Mafia informants, people on the other side of the law…

Later, he would blame himself for those precious seconds he wasted, paralyzed by disbelief, before he ran toward his house and shouted his wife’s name.

As his house erupted in flames.

By the next afternoon the overwhelmed Port Aransas
Police Department had turned the arson investigation over to the FBI.

Lab techs found evidence of six incendiary devices in the house. The wiring was consistent with the type of device used by the most notorious hired assassin in South Texas—a man known only as Calavera. High-grade materials, completely un-traceable, timed to explode precisely at midnight. The work of a craftsman. Only this time, the craftsman had missed his mark.

The agent in charge’s comments to the press were cryptic, but she couldn’t help revealing some of her rage. The explosion was needlessly elaborate. The assassin was an incompetent show-off. Now a mother and two children were dead.

But Peter Brazos didn’t believe this assassin was incompetent. The explosion should’ve worked. The assassin had studied Brazos, knew exactly where he would be. The only thing Calavera hadn’t counted on was Rachel and the girls’ spur-of-the-moment visit, an act of love.

The murder method had been superbly chosen. It had been meant to send a message to other prosecutors in a way that a simple bullet through the eyes wouldn’t do:
Try to touch us, and we will burn you to the ground.

Brazos did not quit his drug cartel case. His grief enraged him. His rage made him determined. He prosecuted the South Texas Mafia leaders with redoubled vigor because he knew they would blame the assassin for not doing his job. They hadn’t gotten what they paid for.

Calavera, who had acted with impunity for years and carried out dozens of hits, had finally screwed up.

I passed the articles to Maia.

While she read them, I looked again at the handwritten note:

FIND HIM.

I wanted to open our door and yell down the hallway,
Find him your own damn self!

But I doubted that strategy would work.

Maia looked up. “You’ve heard of this Calavera?”

“Some. Just stories.”

“Two little girls. Nine and seven.”

“Yeah.” I suddenly wished I hadn’t shown Maia the articles. Her eyes had that steely glint they got whenever she wanted to beat up someone—like me, for instance.

“Tres, if this is the guy Marshal Longoria was after, and if he’s in the hotel—”

“What the hell would he be doing here? And who slipped me this note?”

Maia was about to say something when there was a knock on our door.

I picked up Maia’s .357 again and moved to the side of the door. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Navarro?” One of the college kids. Chase, the leader.

I opened the door. Chase didn’t look good. His skin was blanched and his eyes were so bloodshot they were the same color as his hair. He had that consternated expression that comes from trying to solve problems while drunk.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“I just wanted…” He saw Maia. “Oh, hi.”

“Hello,” Maia said.

“Damn,” Chase said, “you
are
pregnant.”

“Chase,” I said, “is there something we can do for you?”

He scratched his ear. “Um, yeah. It’s my friend Ty.”

“Latino kid?” I said. “Shaggy hair, looks like he’s going to throw up most of the time?”

“That’s him. He’s not doing so well. With the killing and the blood and all…there’s something I thought you should—”

The building groaned like a sailing vessel listing in a storm. There was a crashing sound. The floor shuddered.

“What the hell was that?” Chase asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but we’d better go see. This night just keeps getting better.”

As it turned out, there was nothing to worry about. Part of
the second story had caved in, collapsing onto a ground-floor bedroom on the west side of the house, but no one had been staying there. Maia, Chase and I found Alex Huff busily sealing the door to the destroyed room with extra lumber and plastic tarp.

“Hated that room anyway,” Alex grumbled.

“Damn,” Chase said. “A whole room collapsed? Damn!”

“We’re gonna have dinner,” Alex said, wiping the grime off his forehead. “In the dining room. You know…everybody. A nice, late dinner. Jose figured out the food.”

The wild look in his eyes bothered me.

“Chase,” I said, “why don’t you go get your buddies and we’ll meet you in the dining room.”

“But, um—”

“It’s all right,” Maia assured him. She gave him her I’m-practicing-to-be-a-mother smile. “We’ll talk later. Go get your friends.”

Chase nodded with reluctance. “All right. But that guy Garrett’s up there teaching Markie to slam tequila. Not sure I can tear them away.”

“We need to talk,” I told Alex.

“I don’t have time, Tres. I’ve got this demolished room, no electricity, and the guests—”

“Alex.” Maia used her best calm, lawyerly voice. “We have a problem.”

“A problem?” He laughed in a brittle way. “You don’t say.”

Maia showed him the envelope with the newspaper clippings. I explained to him about the attempt on Peter Brazos’s life, the murder of his wife and children.

Alex looked at us like we were explaining a technical diagram in Japanese. “What does that have to do—”