The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan

by Rick Riordan

  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.

  Anthony "Zeta" Sanchez was still in jail on charges of shooting Gerson and resisting arrest, but was not expected to be charged with any higher crimes. The SAPD brass and the D.A.'s office were praising the homicide detectives in charge of the investigation.

  "This is a case where extra diligence paid off," their PR lady told TV viewers. "If we hadn't gone the extra mile, if the detectives involved had settled for the easy solution—"

  A reporter interrupted, asking if SAPD detectives had ever settled for the easy solution before, if there'd been any pressure from the D.A.'s office to wrap up the Professor Aaron Brandon murder case quickly. The PR spokesman said, "Of course not."

  A last strange twist on the case — Aaron Brandon's widow Ines had come forward and admitted to having a prior relationship with Aaron's supposed killer, Zeta Sanchez. She had, at one time, gone by the name of Sandra Mara-Sanchez. The local news was still chewing on that piece of information, not sure what to do with it, but they reported that Ines Brandon was not at present charged with any crime. After questioning, she had been released to be with her son. In the short clip they showed of Ines, I saw Erainya in the background, along with several high-powered defense lawyers.

  I turned off the TV.

  Harold Diliberto had failed to make the news, unless you count the early morning coffee crowd at the Sabinal General Store. Harold would live, and as Dr. Janice Farn succinctly put it, "He'll only be a little uglier than he was before."

  The hospital room hadn't been quiet for two minutes when my mother appeared in the doorway with a wicker picnic basket. George was snoring, his Panama hat pulled down over his trach tube. Mother was dressed in a beaded denim dress, her neckline dripping with trouble dolls and Zuni fetishes. Her black hair was pulled back, also beaded. She looked like a Shopping Channel advertisement for the Bead-O-Matic appliqué kit.

  "You look fine, dear." She sat down, hoisting the basket onto her lap. "You have a little color back."

  "I feel colorful. And you don't have to whisper. When George sleeps, he sleeps."

  She patted my wrist, then helped me raise the bed to a forty-five-degree angle. "You'll be ready for release this evening, I hear."

  I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. My bandaged shoulder screamed like it was being repierced with a hot glue gun. My not-very-funny doctor had asked me, after some successful minor surgery, whether I'd be wanting a stud or a dangle for the hole.

  "Don't worry," my mother said. "This will cheer you up."

  Out of a little lap table she brought a ceramic plate and soup bowl, a spoon and napkin, a vase filled with baby's breath and dried roses and incense — the whole Bohemian breakfast-in-bed kit. Then with a flourish she extracted a foam cup the size of a Bill Miller extra-large iced tea (which is to say, awfully big).

  The white top was scotch-taped in place, dripping with steam.

  "Caldo res from El Mirador," she announced proudly.

  I stared at her blankly. "But it's not Saturday."

  One of the many absurd rules Texans learn to live with — El Mirador's famous soup cannot be had for love or money except on Saturday.

  "I had a premonition," Mother told me. "I just knew I had to get an order to go this week. It reheated beautifully."

  "Thank you."

  Mother smiled, gratified. She spooned the concoction into my bowl, and watched, pleased, as I slurped it mouthful by greedy mouthful, spilling a good deal of it on my napkin.

  Afterward I sat back, enjoying the warmth, even enjoying my mother's quiet company.

  It seemed like hours before she said, "Jess isn't coming back."

  Her jaw was set, her lips were pressed together in resolution. Her eyes were ever so slightly rimmed with red — from sleeplessness or anger or maybe crying — but she sounded confident, even upbeat.

 
"Apparently he came by and got the last of his things while I was doing my installation at the Crocker Gallery," she continued. "It's amazing — three years together, and amazing just how little he really made a mark on that house."

  "That house," I assured her, "could never be anything but yours."

  She nodded tentatively.

  "And nobody makes a mark on my mama," I added.

  She cracked a smile.

  She gathered her things, replaced the items in her purse, and sat up in a glittery readjustment of denim and black hair and beads.

  "I don't suppose I need to tell you," she said, "you scared me to death again."

  "No, you don't."

  We agreed on dinner next Monday.

  Then Mother left me alone with the afternoon light growing long on the walls of the hospital room. I lay there for a long time, listening to George Berton contentedly mumbling his dead wife's name.

  FIFTY

  To my knowledge, Ralph Arguello had never lived in any one location for longer than six months. He began life moving from shack to shack in the slums of Cementville, a factory-run shanty town where his father worked. After his father's death and his mother's success as a maid, they moved into a small cottage off Basse, behind the Alamo Gun Club, but Ralph, as much as he loved his mother, was constantly shifting from friend's house to cousin's house to God knows where, lying low when the cops were around, making money any way he could.

  The habit proved hard to break once Ralph became a successful pawnshop king. Today, he would still move into the offices of acquired shops for a few weeks, to get a feel for the land, he claimed, and then move to another apartment or rental house. He had several homes in his name, several more in other names, but none of them were his home. He traded in and out of living quarters with the same kind of rootlessness the items in his pawnshops experienced.

  Ralph's inseparable possessions were few.

  This week he was living in the old Broadway Apartments in Alamo Heights. The units were dingy blocks, with narrow, perpetually shaded courtyards smelling of chinaberries and Freon and damp earth. The metal window frames had not been replaced since the Johnson administration. It was a place you could drive past a thousand times and never notice, which is exactly what appealed to Ralph, I was sure.

  I paid off the taxi driver and walked through the courtyard of the nearest building. On the sidewalk, a couple of Anglo boys in striped shirts and corduroy shorts and paper Burger King hats were fighting over a Mr. Potato Head. There were fiesta leftovers scattered across the ground — colored eggshells and confetti from busted cascarones. A Night in Old San Antonio T-shirt was hanging over somebody's wall AC unit.

  Ralph answered the buzzer at number five. He looked relaxed, his braid over his shoulder, his green Guayabera pulled sideways so his buttons made a diagonal line, his slacks wrinkled, his boots nearby on the carpet, and his feet in black socks. His glasses were in his shirt pocket, so his eyes again had that large, dark look that made me think of a night animal — a raccoon or a possum, something cute and silent and vicious.

  "Come on in, vato."

  The place had obviously come furnished. Brown shag carpet, white plastic furniture in seventies outer-space mod, an old Sony TV, a walnut veneer bookshelf that was mostly empty. The kitchen smelled like beer and fresh tamales and copal incense — three of Ralph's essentials.

  I followed Ralph into the living room. The sliding-glass door was open and the small back porch was ringed in stone, furnished with an enormous jade plant and a hibachi grill, on which two pieces of flank steak were grilling. Ana DeLeon sat on the stone wall, drinking a glass of red wine and watching me approach. She looked beautiful. Her short black hair was cowlicked on one side. She wore black leggings and one of her white silk blouses, untucked, the top two buttons undone to reveal the inward curves of her breasts. She was barefoot.

  She said, "Tres."

  I nodded.

  Ralph said, "I'll get you the Barracuda keys."

  He left for the kitchen.

  "You didn't return my calls," I told Ana.

  The steaks hissed. Music started up from Ralph's boom box inside — the bright guitar and basso of a ranchera,

  "I don't owe you, Tres."

  "That's right," I agreed. "No special privileges."

  "It wasn't smart — you and me."

  I let the idea hang between us until Ana's anger started to crumble. "No," she decided. "That's the easy way out. The truth is I feel bad. But what happened out in Sabinal—"

  "You won't have to live with it, Ana."

  Ana stared into her wineglass. "I suppose my judgment is no better. I don't think I can explain to you why I'm here, Tres. Or explain it to myself." She met my eyes. We had a silent conversation that lasted about five seconds and told me all I needed to know. There was no anxiety, no concern for career, no real desire for an explanation. Instead I recognized that kind of fractured heat — that reckless energy I had glimpsed in a few women before, and on a few very lucky occasions, seen directed toward me. But not this time.

  "I'm sorry," Ana said.

  The fact that she meant it, that she wasn't just being polite, hung awkwardly between us.

  "SAPD won't hear anything from me."

  She pursed her lips, nodded. Then the smell of bay rum intensified behind me. Ralph handed me a Shiner Bock and a set of car keys.

  "Back lot, vato. I got a couple of Chich's boys to touch up the paint and wax it for you."

  Ralph went to the hibachi grill and squeezed a lime over the flank steak with a wide arcing gesture like a priest using a censer.

  He winked at Ana. "Quiet neighbors here, chica. I could like it."

  She smiled. "You'd have to get better furniture."

  "Don't need much," Ralph said. Then, out of nowhere, he quoted a stanza of Spanish love poetry — a few lines about a woman who fills a man's every empty room.

  I looked at him. "I didn't know you read Neruda."

  Ana fixed her eyes on the hibachi flames.

  Ralph chuckled. "Can't survive on American Gladiator alone, vato."

  We sat lined on the wall, Ana, Ralph, and I, drinking and listening to the ranchero music and the sizzle of flank steak.

  "I got another one in the refrigerator," Ralph told me. "You want to stay, vato — it isn't every day the King cooks."

  "Thanks. I should go."

  "I'll walk you out." Ralph stood and fished for something in his pocket, then stopped, grinned at himself. "Ana's going to keep me from smoking, vato. How long you think that'll last, eh?"

  "I'm not a betting man."

  "But hey — you understand, vato, she ain't really here, right? She's never here."

  "Of course," I agreed. "I understand that. See you, Detective."

  Ana nodded silently, locking eyes with me with an intense message I couldn't read. Maybe I didn't really try.

  Ralph walked me to the door. He patted me on the shoulder, smiled reassuringly.

  "You still worrying. Don't, vato. It's all cool. Chich Gutierrez got so much heat on him now, he ain't going to have time or energy to fuck with you and me no more."

  "Tell me something. How long you been impressing women with Pablo Neruda?"

  Ralph looked surprised. "Ain't the poetry, baby. It's the whole package, you know? Why — you got a woman in mind?"

  He grinned at me, and then, when I didn't answer, waved and let the door close — shutting off the music, the dinner smells, the sight of Ana DeLeon so completely I had the feeling I was the one who'd never really been there.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The following morning, Ines Brandon, Michael Brandon, and I stood at the entrance to the Bexar County Jail. Ines had stopped at the top of the steps, her fingers wrapped around the metal railing as if she hoped it would keep her stationary.

  "I don't know if I can do this," she told me.

  Days of worry had left her face drawn, her eyes underscored with shadows. It wasn't the legal problems. Those were working the
mselves out. Thanks to the lawyers Erainya had recruited by cashing in favors, and Ines' cooperation with investigators, Assistant District Attorney Canright had apparently decided that bringing charges against a widowed mother who'd assumed a false identity for her own protection and that of her small son was not high on his political agenda.

  The main battle was yet to come, and it wasn't legal.

  "You're not alone," I told Ines. "You've got two studly guys for backup, remember?"

  She gave me a weak smile.

  Her hair was unwashed, tied back in a stiff ponytail that looked like the tip of a calligraphy brush. She wore rumpled black pants and a loose black denim shirt, both streaked with white dust. No makeup, no perfume. Nothing to indicate she'd slept, eaten, or changed her appearance since I'd seen her the night before for a pep talk.

  Little Michael, by contrast, had received his mother's full attention. Ines had dressed him in gray slacks, a newly ironed white button-down, a man's red-and-blue tie, probably his father's, that hung well past his belt. She'd made sure Michael's shoes were tied and his face scrubbed. Only his hair had resisted her ministrations. Michael's cowlicks had sprung back with an unruliness that reminded me of his uncle Del's.

  The three of us stood on the jailhouse steps long enough for a silent prayer. Finally Ines put her hand on Michael's head, then took a deep breath. "Let's go."

  We walked into Visitors Receiving, through security to the room with the divided Plexiglas wall and the green chairs and tables.

  The room was fuller than it had been on my previous visit. There was a large pasty blond woman talking to a skinny African American man on the other side. A young Anglo woman with two babies — one under arm and one in a chest-pack — was chastising her incarcerated boyfriend about somebody named Casey. The boyfriend's dazed expression mirrored the babies' perfectly. Ines and Michael and I went to space "B" in the middle. There was one empty chair. None of us took it.

  The longest five minutes in the universe followed.

  Ines tried to smooth out Michael's hair with her fingers and didn't have much success. Her breath was shaky. Michael did small twists from his waist, swaying back and forth. He kept his eyes on the cement floor.