The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (41 page)

"Not with you, Ozzie."

He still hadn't fired. Diliberto clicked the .357
magazine into place and was frowning back and forth between us like
he wasn't exactly following the conversation.

Ozzie's pale eyes stayed on me. "What are you
saying, kid?"

"I'm saying I'm not going anywhere with you
because you might get a little trigger-happy, the way you did with
George Berton. That social cannibalism you talked about, Ozzie?
Attila the rat? The end product isn't Hector or Del or even Zeta. The
end product is you. Point the .357 at him, Harold. Now."

Harold, God bless him, did not hesitate. Like
everything he'd ever done for me, he did it with unquestioning
loyalty and the same completely good-natured incompetence.

Ozzie swung the Remington toward Harold's chest and
Harold fired first — nothing. A click, a jammed load. The deer
rifle blew a hole in Harold Diliberto's gut and flung him into the
door and sawhorses.

I charged into Ozzie; I might've been made of paper
for all the impact I made. Ozzie grunted, threw me off, and fumbled
to manually load another .243 round. I ran, made it fifteen yards
when I heard the bolt action lock. I fell into a sideways roll as the
blast turned a chunk of limestone on the ground to dust. Another five
feet of blind panic and I hit the edge of the nearest washout —
half rolled, half slid into the dry creekbed below.

Another shot cracked the air. I stumbled over river
stones like marbles, scrambling to put distance between myself and
Ozzie Gerson. My progress seemed insanely loud. My twisted ankle hurt
like hell. I reached a turn where the washout joined the creekbed
proper and stumbled on.

At a turn in the creekbed a massive live oak
levitated against the clay bank on an octopus-shaped tent of roots. I
flattened myself against the far side and scoped the ridge, saw
nothing. The rattle of my breath was as noisy as a jet. I wanted to
curl up inside the hollow underneath the tree and black out, but I
knew I would merely be choosing my corner to die in.

Least you changed out of the boxers and the Wild
Turkey shirt, part of me said. Better to die in flannel.

The rest of me told that part to shut up.

I forced myself to keep running.

I realized I was heading away from the farmhouse —
away from the phone — then realized just as quickly that it didn't
matter. Ozzie would expect me to  double back to the house. He'd
be able to shoot me before I ever made a call, much less got aid from
one. Maybe going in the opposite direction had inadvertently bought
me a few minutes.

Ozzie's rifle fired: a whiff of air puffed against my
thigh. I launched forward, crashed into deadwood, got up, and kept
running.

From somewhere behind me, up on the ridge, Ozzie
yelled, "Bad way to play it, Tres. You think I wanted to shoot
George? Don't do this. Don't force me like he did, kid."

I could hear him reloading. I staggered forward,
around another washout, then another few yards before daring to
scramble up the side of the bank and look back. I clung to live-oak
roots and lifted my head just over the ridge. In his red-and-white
Hawaiian shirt, Ozzie Gerson was easy enough to spot. He was thirty
yards away, sideways to me, feeding another round into his rifle. I
wondered if the women who gave out leis at the Honolulu airport had
nightmares that looked like Ozzie Gerson.

"All I want is what's mine, Tres. You think
anybody mourned the Brandons? Or a scumbag like Mara? Your lady
friend Sandra, she should be thanking me. I just made her life a
whole lot simpler."

Ozzie had the look of a man who was butchering a
large animal — cultivating the inner deadness that was necessary to
convince himself there was nothing repulsive about the hollowed-out
intestinal cavity, the sinews, the exposed ribs. I couldn't double
back. Not enough room between us.

The nearest neighbor, Dr. Farn, was a half mile away
over an open spread of wheat fields.

I clambered down the ridge, continuing along the
creek bank, making enough noise for Ozzie to swing toward me and fire
another shot over my head. I could hear him above me now, swishing
through the whitebrush. Rocks skittered down the bank. Ozzie cursed
as he lost his footing. Then he was up and following again. I'd
gained a few feet.

The creekbed continued its labyrinthine turns. The
dips and rises and heavy underbrush made visibility low. I crashed
over a mound of deadwood and stumbled within feet of a rattler
sunning itself on a rock. It didn't even have time to rattle before I
was gone.

Twenty yards ahead, I saw the white shell of the old
water tower. The tower was a leftover from one of my father's many
failed ranch development schemes — a cone of pure lead as tall as I
was, lying on its side and rusting in the sun. Just below the cone,
in the creekbed, stood another stand of deadwood even larger than the
rattler's. I ran to it, shed my shirt and snagged it against the top
branch, then scrambled up the ledge to the water tank shell,
flattening myself on the ground behind it.

Cicadas buzzed in the heat. A gnat did a kamikaze
dive into my nostril. Then I heard Ozzie's steps, very near. Grass
scritched. Heavy breathing. I'd hoped for some luck, but he was on my
side of the ridge, not more than fifteen feet away, the water tank
shell between us. There was no way he couldn't see me.

I heard him lock the rifle bolt into place. Silence.

I waited to be shot.

Instead, I heard more skittering rocks, snapping
twigs. Ozzie was slide-climbing down the ridge, toward the shirt on
the deadwood.

His voice was aimed away from me when he called,
"Come on, Tres. Let's talk."

I scrambled to my feet and pushed. All my strength
wasn't much, but the water tank cooperated. It ripped free of its
muddy moorings on the edge of the cliff and barreled down the ridge,
bouncing once before Ozzie turned and yelled and the cylinder crashed
into him with a very satisfying bong. I wanted to believe that Ozzie
had been flattened into a redneck tortilla, but his loud curses of
pain told me otherwise. I started running, on high ground now.

I could see barbed wire just ahead to the right and
past that two hundred acres of Dr. Farn's land, planted with Navarre
wheat. Past that, Dr. Farn's farmhouse in an island of pecan trees,
and fifty yards farther, the tiny shapes of cars and trucks gliding
down the highway. The wheat fields between me and the road would be a
killing zone hundreds of yards long with no cover.

As much fun as that sounded, I turned my back on the
promise and veered left instead. I ripped through white-brush and
cactus, heading back toward the farmhouse.

I bolted forward, tripped over a rusted coil of
barbed wire and lost precious time getting my legs untangled. If I
lived, I'd need a tetanus shot. When I fell out of the underbrush I
found myself once again in the clearing — Harold Diliberto lying
collapsed, facedown and unmoving in the weeds, the door-table tilted
against one sawhorse like a lean-to. Blood soaked the grass.

The .357 was two feet away.

I'd just grabbed it when the rifle boomed and my left
shoulder went cold. My legs gave out from under me. I fell forward,
into Harold, twisting around with my face to the sky.

It was hard to breathe. Harder still to move my arms.
The .357 was in my hands and my fingers kept trying to tighten around
the trigger, trying to reload the magazine correctly. The cold was
spreading from my shoulder into my chest. Ozzie appeared from behind
a tree, back by the ridge, just far enough away that I couldn't quite
make out the color of his eyes.

His left shoulder, the one Zeta Sanchez had shot, was
now bent at an odd angle. The shirt around it glistened with blood
from the ripped-open wound. With his good hand, Ozzie still held the
rifle.

He moved forward, talking in a monotone. "Could've
been pretty simple. Sorry, Tres. You think I want to kill you?"

I aimed the .357 at him.

Ozzie managed a dazed smile. "Even if it wasn't
jammed, kid — even then you couldn't."

He looked around, then took a step toward a small
live-oak sapling. He raised the rifle barrel and set it with great
care into the crook of two branches. He swung the muzzle toward me.

His eyes were drooping, heavy with pain and blood
loss. But not heavy enough to prevent him from finishing. He sighted
the gun.
 
When the shot came the
volume was hideous. I convulsed and so did Ozzie Gerson. He raised
his rifle barrel in slow motion while the rest of him lowered into a
kneeling position. He looked down in disbelief at the hole I'd just
shot in his hip, the bloody change that was dribbling out the front
pocket of his jeans. The terror of it sent me into a fit of giggling.
I felt exhilarated. I loved the sound of the next .357 round that
sawed off the live-oak sapling inches to the right of Ozzie's ear.

I don't know how I did it but I got to my feet.

I staggered forward, trying to aim the gun.

Ozzie had fallen on his butt. He was trying to tug
the rifle up onto his bloody legs, to lift his knees so he could get
the barrel high enough to kill me. His face glistened with sweat. He
managed a stuttering wheeze that might have been a distant cousin to
a laugh. He muttered, "Well shit, kid. Well shit. That was good.
Now come here a step — okay? Come here."

The little blood geyser kept bubbling up on the side
of his pants. Ozzie's gun kept trying to slip off his knees.

I managed another step forward, just to be obliging.
Anything for a friend.  Ozzie wheezed again, happily. He fired
his last shot and something a long way off behind me went ping.

For Ozzie's sake, I hoped he'd finally hit that metal
target.

I raised my gun.

Ozzie let the rifle slip and held his hand over his
pants pocket, trying to stop the blood.

Then an unwelcome voice snarled, "Put it down!"

I swung the gun to the left and found the muzzle of
Ana DeLeon's Glock 23 pointing at me. Ana's skirt and blouse were
scratched to hell from a trek through the foliage, her face as cold
as the moon.

"You've got that aimed wrong," I heard
myself saying.

Then I showed her what I meant. I turned the .357
back on Ozzie.

"I'll shoot you, Tres." DeLeon's voice was
steady, louder than I thought it needed to be. "Put the gun on
the ground."

I don't know how many chances DeLeon gave me to drop
it, how many times she gave me that order. In the end, I was saved by
Ozzie himself. He tried to sit up one more time and his face went
silk-white. Then his head lolled back, hit the grass. His eyes
squinted shut.

I lowered the .357, let it clunk into the tall grass.
Then I crumpled into sitting position.

Ana DeLeon kept the Glock trained on me as she
approached Ozzie, inspected him. I think she found him still alive.
She tossed the deer rifle a few feet away, then knelt beside me. Her
eyes burned with anger, but there was something else, too — alarm
as she examined my shoulder wound.

"Key Feo," she said. "Kelsey's gang
informants in vice used to call Ozzie Gerson that. You goddamn —
you set yourself up for this. You stupid bastard."

"There's a doctor," I muttered. "Across
the fields. Phone in the house."

"You wanted me gone while you handled this. If I
hadn't come back—"

"I'm cold," I said.

Then Ana DeLeon was gone. I sat shivering in the
spring sunshine, listening to DeLeon running toward my father's ranch
house, cutting through the brush like a small tireless harvester
blade.
 

FORTY-NINE

For the rest of that week, when I wasn't having
nightmares, I was getting intimate with the acoustic ceiling tile in
my semiprivate room at University Hospital, and with my roommate
George Berton's favorite talk shows. Since George had been upgraded
from critical and moved from BAMC, Erainya said it only made sense
that he and I be roomies. Given our mutual experiences over the last
few weeks, it was unlikely we'd end up shooting each other in
irritation, however much we might wish to.

George could only speak a few words at a time. These
mostly consisted of "No cigars?" when the nurse visited and
"Melissa" when he slept and "Bastard, Navarre"
whenever I tried to change the channel on him. The first thing he'd
done when he'd regained consciousness was to demand his Panama hat.
The second was to call Ozzie Gerson a son of a bitch.

While George was sleeping, which was often, I would
watch the news and learn about what was happening out in the world.

A Bexar County deputy now faced indictment on three
counts of capital murder for the shooting deaths of Hector Mara and
the brothers Del and Aaron Brandon. The Brandon family maid had ID'ed
Sheriff's Deputy Ozzie Gerson as Aaron's killer in exchange for
charges of obstruction of justice against her being
dropped.

Gerson was charged on eleven other counts, including
drug trafficking. A raid on Gerson's home turned up two plane tickets
for Brazil and two packed suitcases, one of which contained over
$80,000 in cash. In Gerson's closet, in a locked gun box, police also
found a substantial amount of black tar heroin. While Gerson made no
comment about the other charges against him, he had happily offered
up the name of Chich Gutierrez as his heroin supplier. Police now had
a warrant out for Gutierrez's arrest. The reporter told us that prior
allegations for drug trafficking in 1992 had resulted in Gerson's
demotion at the sheriff's department. There was "widespread
outrage" that this officer had remained on active duty for the
past seven years. The sheriff's department was promising an immediate
internal investigation.