The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (21 page)

I woke up Thursday morning in a sweat, shaking off
dreams of Erainya looming over me, chastising me for not holding a
Taurus P-11 correctly.

When I opened my eyes, the only one looming over me
was Robert Johnson. He sat on the window ledge above the futon, the
morning sun cutting across his face and making his whiskers glow like
fiber-optic threads.

"Row," he announced.

"I know, I know. Breakfast."

At the magic word, he did a trampoline dismount from
the window to my stomach to the floor, then showed me where the
kitchen was.

Once I'd served him his Friskies, properly fried with
cheese and taco meat on a bed of flour tortilla, I started some
coffee and eggs for myself and pulled down the ironing board to make
a call.

The answering machine was flashing again. I had no
memory of the phone ringing the night before, but that was not
unusual for Tres Navarre, zombie sleeper. The first message was from
my mother, letting me know that everything was fine, though she had
not in fact seen her insignificant-other Jess since the night they'd
argued and if I wasn't too busy, did I want to go to an art opening
tonight? The second was from George Berton. George said he was sorry
for not returning the calls from me and Erainya last night but he
thought he might have something and he wouldn't be reachable today.
Could we meet him at his house tonight?

I called George's number. Sure enough, he wasn't
reachable, though his answering machine did give me a great recipe
for sopa de ajo.

I sat down at the kitchen counter with my coffee and
eggs and my stack of essays. I put on some early B.B. King to help me
concentrate. This was my day to grade.

As I ate, I read the first paragraph of the first
essay four times. I made one mark in the margin that said Good point.
B.B. sang about his woman and his guitar. Robert Johnson ate his
Friskies taco noisily.

I looked at the phone.

"To hell with it."

I went back to the ironing board and called SAPD. Ana
DeLeon's number in homicide rang five rings, clicked, then a man's
voice said, "Kelsey."

I tried to contain my excitement. I told Kelsey who I
was and asked for DeLeon.

"She's not here right now, Navarre. She's
getting her beauty sleep. You want to send her flowers or something,
I can give you the address."

"It's about the Brandon case, Kelsey. It's
important."

"So talk to me."

I tapped my red pen on the essays. "She's going
to want this information, Kelsey. I mean today."

"I'm not hearing anything important yet,
Navarre."

I told him about my evening at the Poco Mas, about
the connection between Del Brandon and Hector Mara.

Kelsey was quiet long enough to write the information
down. "Mary what?"

"Ramirez, maybe. Or Rios."

"Maybe?"

"There's about five surnames in the family. I
don't remember. You can try the sister's address and the friend's.
There's no guarantee she'll be at either place." "Assuming
it's worth looking. Fifteen-year-old witness, a runaway who'll do
anything for a few bucks. Probably drunk when and if she saw anything
— Hector Mara with some white guy with a B name and you planted the
idea the name might've been Brandon. Even a public defender will
laugh his ass off."

I didn't like admitting that he was right.
"Substantiate the link another way."

"You don't think we've looked at Hector Mara? We
spent the day together on Tuesday, Navarre. You don't think we've
looked at Del Brandon? We had Del down here days ago — him and
three of the best Jewish lawyers money can buy. They knew the drill,
made it pretty clear we wanted to stick any shit to Del, we'd have to
mix it with superglue."

I looked down at my unfinished eggs, pushed them
away. "Just tell DeLeon. Mara's the key. Break him the right
way, he'll talk."

"Damn, Navarre, let me write this all down. Can
I share your pointers with the other guys down here in homicide? Is
that okay?"

I hung up the phone.

I looked at Robert Johnson, then at the essays.

"I shouldn't go out," I told Robert
Johnson.

Smack, smack. Carnivorous head shake.

"You're right. Better me than you." I put
my red pen down next to his food dish. "Try to have half of them
graded by the time I get back, okay?"

I got my car keys and went out to see a sick friend.
 

TWENTY-THREE

Ozzie Gerson's apartment was everything mine wasn't —
modern, stylish, devoid of character. It sat off Thousand Oaks Drive
and Highway 281 in a housing development still new enough to have the
plastic multicolored pennants flapping out front and the banners that
said NOW LEASING and MODEL UNITS and IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME
RIGHT NOW. That last had always sounded like some kind of Zen threat
to me.

The neighborhood was about as far from the West Side
and the Poco Mas as you could get — wide boulevards cut from the
hill country, glistening with Lexuses and SUVs. New upscale strip
malls with Starbucks and Le Boulanger, the Texas elements of cactus
and limestone and live oak neatly carved down to median strips and
parking lot entrances.

Ozzie's apartment was on the third floor of Thousand
Trails Villa, overlooking the street. There was a hibachi grill and a
pair of muddy police shoes on the landing and a Bexar County
Sheriff's Department sticker below the door knocker. I rapped loudly,
called out my name, then let myself in.

"Bedroom, Tres," Ozzie hollered. "Take
off your shoes and come on back."

I looked down. Three pairs of boots were lined up
neatly on a linoleum strip by the door. The rest of the living-room
floor was pristine white carpet — not a grease mark or spill or
streak of dirt anywhere. I put my present for Ozzie down momentarily,
pulled off my boots, and left them next to Ozzie's.

Walking across the living-room carpet was like
walking across marshmallow. There was a cream-colored couch and
matching love seat placed at a V in front of the fireplace, a neat
stack of Handloader and Police Ammo magazines on the glass coffee
table next to a vase of fresh-cut bluebonnets. On the mantel were
years of photos from Ozzie's ex-wife and two kids in California. The
ex-wife, Ozzie'd once told me, was very dependable about sending
photos every Christmas, but each one had her in it, too, along with
the kids. Every year, Ozzie carefully cut her out with an X-Acto
knife and inserted a picture of himself instead. The photos were odd
to look at — Ozzie floating between his kids, slightly off in color
and size and resolution, overlapping their Christmas Day like some
alien beaming in from Star Trek.

The dining room was dominated by a state-of-the-art,
polished oak-and-glass gun locker filled with every manner of hunting
rifle and handgun. Around it were more gold-framed pictures — Ozzie
with my father at our family ranch in Sabinal, standing on either
side of a dead buck; a much younger, slimmer Ozzie receiving his
detective's shield from my dad; Ozzie with his latest girlfriend
Audrey, the large redheaded manicurist who Ozzie swore "had a
shot at Miss Texas once."

I walked back to the bedroom.

Gerson was propped up in bed amid enough down
comforters and pillows to break a free fall. There were two
prescription bottles, a TV remote control, and a can of Sprite on the
bedstand. The drapes were open and sunlight flooded in, making the
daytime soap opera on TV almost impossible to see.

Ozzie looked pretty good for a man who'd recently
come out of the ICU. His color was back. His upper body was bare —
Buddha-belly and flabby tits and massive arms swirling in coarse
black hair, an old Marines tattoo on his right biceps. His left
shoulder was heavily padded and taped, but there was no hint of
bleeding. Ozzie's face was its usual brutish slab of pink — a
bull's visage, shaved and smiling.

"You ever watch these shows?" he demanded.
"Audrey likes them. She tells me they're good — I don't know."

On the screen, a doctor was talking to a woman in a
low-cut evening dress. I placed Ozzie's present on the bedstand.
"Hope you're feeling better."

His smile widened. He turned the little bonsai plant
around. "What's this?"

"A tree. You said you wanted a place with
trees."

He laughed. "Nicest fucking gift I've gotten so
far. Not counting what Audrey gave me last night. Thanks, Navarre."

"One can't outdo Audrey."

"One sure as shit can't. Pull up a chair."

Ozzie filled me in on his condition — how he'd
survived an infiltrated IV and bad hospital food, survived his first
phone call from his kids in three years. How he planned on going back
to light duty tomorrow over the doctors' objections. Ozzie said he'd
be damned if he'd lose field hours toward his next salary review over
a scumbag like Zeta Sanchez.

I was almost convinced Ozzie was really doing fine
until he tried to sit up and the blood drained from his face.

"Can I help?"

"Nah. Nah." He took a few careful, slow
breaths. "How about that medicine bottle though? The bigger one.
Yeah. Thanks."

He downed a couple of painkillers with some Sprite,
then stared at the TV. After a minute the glassiness cleared from his
eyes again. "So. You screwing up the Brandon case yet?"

"Who, me?"

Ozzie gave me a crooked grin. "Your daddy would
kill you. Let's hear what you've got."

I filled him in on the last two days. As he listened,
Ozzie's smile faded into a hard line. His eyes drifted back to the
television. "You tell Kelsey about Del Brandon and Hector Mara?"

"I told him to tell DeLeon. Kelsey didn't seem
to think they could do much to establish the connection."

"He may be right."

Two feminine hygiene commercials played through.

"You worked with Kelsey before—"

"Before I got demoted," Ozzie supplied.
"Yeah. Kelsey used to be on city vice. I was county gang task
force. We crossed paths."

His voice was less than enthusiastic.

"You trust Kelsey?"

Ozzie worked his mouth like he was tasting the
question. "This guy you saw with Hector Mara, the guy with the
black fingernails and the trench coat. You know who that was?"

"Chich Gutierrez."

"Kelsey told you that?"

"No. I'd been hearing things about Hector Mara
buying heroin from a guy named Chich Gutierrez. I guessed."

Ozzie didn't seem to like that. "By himself
Chich would be nothing — a joke. Look at the way the guy dresses,
for Christ's sake. But the fact that he's always compared himself to
Sanchez, always tried to act that bad... it makes him unpredictable.
Chich goes the extra mile to prove he's got what he hasn't got, you
know? You chew on an inferiority complex like that long enough, it
turns you dramatic."

"Two nights ago, Del Brandon told me Zeta
Sanchez had been trying to move heroin through RideWorks back in '93.
Del said that's why he was so anxious to push Zeta out of the
business. You ever hear anything about that?"

Ozzie's eyes fixed on the woman in the low-cut
evening dress. She was weeping and the doctor was comforting her.
"You wanted to know how I got demoted. You going to get sore now
if I tell you the truth?"

"Probably."

He sighed, then rested his head back in the pillows.
"Fall of '92, I started having some ideas along the lines you
just described. I figured you take a guy like Zeta Sanchez, with
connections to the gangs, big-time access to the heroin pipeline, you
put him together with a guy like old Jeremiah Brandon who's got a
ready-made distribution network — things are going to happen. You
use the carnival circuit, you could move a good amount of stash
pretty much anywhere in the nation with very little trouble. So I
started asking around."

"And something went wrong."

He looked over at me, anger simmering in his eyes.
"About the same time, there was a big internal affairs bust
going down. Some of the deputies working at the jail were smuggling
in drugs for the prison gangs. Others were getting paid to look the
other way. Sixteen deputies were fired. Five criminally prosecuted. A
few higher-ranking people in the department were implicated, too, but
there wasn't enough proof to fire."

"You were one of the ones implicated?"

"Forced reassignment. Three scumbag cons came
forward and fingered me. Guys I had never even heard of, but you can
bet your ass they all knew Zeta Sanchez. They got reduced sentences
for their cooperation. I went down in the departmental housecleaning.
After that, nobody listened to me much on the subject of Zeta Sanchez
and RideWorks."

"There was no truth to the allegations against
you?"

"I'll pretend you didn't need to ask that
question."

On the television, two men in cardigans were lighting
each other's cigarette. Ozzie flicked his thumb against his
forefinger, mimicking them.