Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan

by Rick Riordan

  “Lieutenant," said Rivas, forcing out the word. "Can I help you with something?"

  Drapiewski grinned. There was a coating of sugar around his mouth.

  "Just a social call, Detective. Don’t let me interrupt anything. I always like to see you city pros at work."

  Rivas snorted. He looked at me, then back at the door.

  "Maybe another time," he said. "But, Tres, you want to talk about your father, how he played around with people’s lives, screwed their careers to hell, I’d be happy to have that conversation. You’ve got a lot to be proud of."

  Then he started toward the door.

  “And, Jay," I said.

  He turned.

  "Pick up the goddamn sword."

  It was worth it just to see his face. He didn’t pick it up. He wanted to say something. I wanted him to say it.

  Then Drapiewski said: “Good-bye, Detective," and moved his bulk out of the doorway.

  Rivas took the out.

  When the door closed, Drapiewski just looked at me, his bushy red eyebrows raised. Cautiously, Robert Johnson came out of the bathroom, lured by the shower of sugar and crumbs that was falling from the deputy’s berzuelo, then tried to climb Drapiewski’s pants. I don’t think Drapiewski even noticed.

  Larry took a thick bundle of police reports from under his arm and dropped it on the coffee table.

  "Want to tell me about it?"

  19

  By the time I’d told Larry Drapiewski my tale of woe he had relieved me of my leftover lemon chicken, four Shiner Bocks, a couple of beef fajitas, and half a box of the former tenant’s Captain Crunch, dry. Robert Johnson sat on his lap, sniffing the food, but was careful to stay away from the big man’s mouth.

  "Holy hell," Drapiewski said. He put his boots up on the coffee table and the room suddenly seemed smaller. “Lillian Cambridge? As in Zeke Cambridge’s daughter? I guar-un-tee you, if this goes down as a kidnapping, this town will be boiling by tomorrow morning. That’s some large dollars moving, son."

  I’ll give him this, the deputy got my mind off my problems. Now I was thinking about my empty refrigerator and my empty wallet. I was hoping to God that Larry didn’t want something else to eat.

  "If it goes down as kidnapping?" I said.

  Drapiewski shrugged. "Just seems strange I haven’t heard about it over the telex yet."

  "Some kind of waiting period?"

  He laughed, sprinkling Captain Crunch across Robert Johnson’s fur. Robert Johnson vaporized from his lap and reappeared on the kitchen counter, looking indignant.

  “That’s a damn myth, son. The network treats it just like an APB, puts it all over South Texas. You wait twenty-four hours to report something like that, usually the missing person is dead."

  Then he realized who we were talking about.

  “Sorry," he said.

  I swallowed. "What about Guy White?"

  Larry kept looking at me. “It was a damn stupid thing to do, pushing yourself in his face. You don’t do that to somebody who’s had as many people killed as Mr. White has. But if you’re talking about your lady friend disappearing on Sunday, and you didn’t see White until Monday afternoon—"

  “I know. The timing’s wrong."

  I must not have looked too convinced.

  Larry leaned forward, lacing his thick fingers around his beer bottle. "You know how many true abductions San Antonio has had in the last decade, son? I remember exactly two—both kids, neither had anything to do with the mob. If there was any suspicion of kidnapping, ransom demands, anything like that, the Feds would become lead agency immediately. So I can only assume there’s reasonable evidence to let Rivas keep this in-house, to stick with the idea that Lillian disappeared of her own free will."

  "Bullshit," I said.

  Larry looked at me. “You sure?"

  It irritated me that I couldn’t answer. “So why is Rivas on the case? And into everything else I touch?"

  Drapiewski raised his eyebrows. "There’s some fine, decent people at SAPD. Honest cops."

  "And Rivas is not among them," I suggested.

  Drapiewski smiled.

  "So," I said, “either he’s screwing with me for personal reasons or because somebody’s pulled his strings—but either way he’s screwing with me."

  “Listen, son, Zeke Cambridge will get the police to do a damn good job, Rivas or not. Eventually they’ll have to bring the Feds in on this and things will happen."

  “Like they did with my father?" I said.

  Larry looked at me the way people do to somebody who grew up while they weren’t looking. He laughed again. "Holy hell, Tres, I don’t believe you. That face you just made—that’s your dad’s ‘shit list’ expression, plain and simple."

  There was such honest pleasure in his voice I had to smile. For a second it didn’t matter that Lillian was missing, or that my father’s murder was coming back like the worst acid flashback. You heard Drapiewski laugh and you knew there had to be a nice clean joke in there somewhere. But it only lasted a second.

  “Karnau and Sheff? " I asked.

  He didn’t smile at that. He looked back down at the two photos I’d shown him—the ones with human figures cut out.

  “I don’t know," he said. "I’ll look into it, but I doubt there’s much to find. Either way, there’s nothing you can do except sit tight."

  “I can’t stay out of this, Larry. "

  He did me a favor and acted like he hadn’t heard that. Instead he got up and appropriated the last Shiner Bock from the refrigerator. Then he found my tequila and brought that back to the table too. We sat there listening to the cicadas and passing the bottle. Finally Larry leaned back, stared at the bubbled molding on the ceiling, and started laughing under his breath.

  “Your father—you ever hear that story about the one-balled flyboy?"

  “Yes," I said.

  “It was my first goddamn time in the field," he went on. "Found myself out behind an old ranch house with this screaming son-of-a-bitch Navy pilot wearing nothing but his justin shitkickers and a 12 gauge."

  Drapiewski laughed, scratching his acne.

  “He’d come home from Kingsville early, I reckon, snuck into the sack naked to surprise his lady, and laid a big kiss on something that hadn’t shaved in a week.

  By the time I got there he was dragging his girl across the back forty and hollering. He’d chased that Mexican salesman all the way to the property line before he shot him in the leg. The Mexican was just on the other side of the barbed wire with most of his thigh gone, bleeding all to hell, and this old flyboy couldn’t decide who to shoot next, me, the Mexican, the wife, or himself. I thought right there—‘This is it, first and last day on the job.’

  “Then your father comes huffing up behind us like a Hereford bull, two more deputies behind him. And he just starts cussing out the flyboy like there’s no tomorrow, saying ‘Goddamn fool, why’d you go and let that Mexican get across the line ’fore you shot him?’ "That naked pilot just looks at him confused and your father tells him: ‘You shoot him off your property, that’s attempted murder, you idiot. You shoot him on your property, Texas law says that’s trespassing. Then the sheriff pulls out his notebook and says: ‘I’m starting to write this up, boy. You best get that Mexican back over that fence before I get to my incident description.’ And you should’ve seen how fast that flyboy ran. But soon as he started, your father had his .38 in his hand. I never seen anything come as fast as that—first shot blew the 12 gauge right out of the old boy’s hand. Second one went straight between his legs and took his left ball clean off. "

  Drapiewski swore in admiration and downed a few more ounces of my Herradura.

  “So the old boy jumps about six feet up like a shot jackrabbit and falls over. And your father comes up to him and says: ‘That first shot was for waving a 12 gauge at my deputy. The second was for being so god-damn stupid.’ After we got that Mexican fixed up he sent your daddy a case of champagne every Christmas for fifteen ye
ars. That was your daddy, Tres."

  The story had evolved a lot since I’d last heard it, years ago, but I didn’t bother pointing that out. I just took the bottle from Larry and finished it off.

  There didn’t seem to be much to say after that, so Drapiewski turned on the afternoon talk shows and waited while I read through the police files.

  Paper-clipped to the coroner’s report were three black and white pictures of something that had once been my father’s body. The corpse looked massive on the metal table, washed out and unreal in the harsh fluorescents, like a stag caught in headlights. The exit wounds, two surprisingly small holes in his chest and forehead, were circled in black Marksalot. It took me a few minutes to focus on the words of the report after putting down the photos, but once I read them there were no surprises about the cause of death.

  The other files traced a series of dead-end leads in the case. The Pontiac used in the drive—by was found among the burned-out shells of stolen cars that littered the West Side each week, then traced to .a retired Buttercrust baker who had actually watched it get stolen from in front of his house. The baker told the police bitterly ‘he’d just assumed it was another creditor repo and hadn’t even bothered to report it. Things looked up briefly for the investigation when the old man tentatively IDed the thief as Randall Halcomb, the ex-deputy who’d been arrested by my father for manslaughter, then been paroled a week before my father’s murder.

  That line of questioning ended two months later in a deer blind outside Blanco, where Halcomb was found in a bloody fetal position with a .22 hole between his eyes. His body was badly decomposed by the time a local rancher stumbled across it, but the coroner estimated the time of death to be no more than a week after my father’s.

  Heavy pressure on Guy White and the other known drug traffickers in South Texas, trying to connect them to the murder, yielded exactly nothing. White had gotten most of the attention. Every agency in town had conducted raids on White’s properties, tied up his assets in court, slammed anyone who associated with him for the smallest misdemeanor, all to no avail in the Navarre case. just like Rivas had told me: Everyone suspected the connection; no one could prove it.

  The compiled list of my father’s other enemies and Halcomb’s associates also yielded nothing.

  Finally, the investigation turned back to Randall Halcomb. The revenge motive was nice and clean, the timing and the ID that connected Halcomb to the Pontiac very convenient. The fact that some other party had killed Halcomb was a minor glitch. Maybe Halcomb was killed for reasons unrelated to the murder: Maybe my father’s friends in the department had gotten to Halcomb before the Feds could. It had been known to happen. Either way, the FBI liked dead murderers, probably a lot more than they had liked my father. They sold it to the press as a vengeance killing, classified the case as "ongoing," and quietly shelved it. It was eight o’clock and getting dark before I resealed the folder and handed it back to Larry, minus a few items I’d lifted while his head was in the refrigerator. My eyes felt like melting ice cubes.

  “Well?" he said.

  "Nothing," I said. “At least nothing that makes sense yet."

  "Yet?"

  Drapiewski took his boots off the coffee table, walked stiffly to the refrigerator, then finding it empty, decided it was time to leave. He took his gun and his hat off the table and stood looking at me.

  “Tres, Rivas is right about one thing—you don’t belong in this. Let them find the young lady. Let me look into Karnau and Sheff for you. You put yourself in the way and it won’t help anything. "

  My look must’ve told him something. He swore under his breath, then fished out a card and tossed it on the table.

  “Your father was a good man, Tres."

  “Yeah."

  Then Drapiewski shook his head, as if I hadn’t heard:

  “The kind of man who could get you to take your own gun out of your mouth when you figured nothing else mattered."

  I looked up at Drapiewski’s greasy, fifty-year-old adolescent face. He was smiling again, like he couldn’t help it. Maybe I hadn’t heard him right. For a second, I had imagined him in a dark room somewhere, staring down a gun barrel.

  “You need something," he told me, "cal1 that number. I’ll do what I can."

  "Thanks, Larry."

  After he left I took a lukewarm shower, then looked again at my father’s notebook. I reread his notes for the testimonies against Guy White, the cryptic reminder at the bottom: Sabina!. Get whiskey. Fix fence. Clean fireplace. It still made no sense. I closed the notebook and tossed it on the table.

  My girlfriend was missing. The other love of her life, who hadn’t been a love of her life for several months, was driving around town with her business partner. And I was sitting on my futon reading my father’s old grocery lists.

  I decided to make my perfect day complete. I called my mother and asked for a loan. She was, of course, delighted. I felt about as good as that flyboy who’d just kissed something hairy.

  20

  In my dreams that night I was hunting with my father at the family ranch in Sabinal. It was Christmas break, my seventh-grade year, one of the coldest winters South Texas ever had. The mesquite trees were bare as TV aerials, and the brush was a dull yellow-gray that matched the clouds. I was kneeling in an orange parka, holding a .22 rifle my father had given me as a gift that morning. The barrel was slightly warm from ten rounds of fire.

  My father, next to me, was also dressed in hunting clothes. He looked like a fluorescent tent for six. His Stetson tilted over his eyes so all I could see were his huge bristly jowls, his nose webbed with red veins, his crooked wet smile half-hidden by a battered Cuban cigar. The mist from his breath mixed with the smoke. In the cold sharp air he smelled like a good meal that was burning.

  Out in the clearing the javelina still quivered. It was a huge animal, all black hair and tooth, much too large and mean to kill with a .22. I’d shot it first out of surprise, second out of anger, then again and again out of desperation to finish the job. All the while my father just watched, only smiling at the end.

  Finally the beast stopped dragging itself along the ground. It made a thick, liquid sound. Then even that stopped.

  "Meanest animal on God’s earth," my father said.

  "And the dirtiest. What you reckon you should do now, son?"

  He could talk like a Harvard graduate when he wanted, but when he tested me, when he really wanted to distance himself, he put on that accent. The familiar, cracker barrel drawl was easy and slow the way a cottonmouth snake is slow, moving toward you in the river.

  I said: "Can we use it?"

  My father chewed his cigar.

  "You can fix up some mighty fine javelina sausage, if you’ve got the mind to."

  He let me take the knife and stood back as I moved up to the warm carcass. It took a long time to gut the thing. From the moment I touched it, my skin began to crawl, but I ignored the feeling at first. I remember the steam from the innards and then the indescribably bad smell—a sour blast of fear, rot, and excitement that beat the worst inner-city alley. That was my first lesson--the gas that a newly dead animal exudes. It nearly knocked me down, nearly forced me to double over, but then I saw my father watching sternly behind me, and knew I had to go on. I’d made my choice.

  After gutting it I tied its feet and pulled it through the brush. Now the itch was intolerable. My father watched as I struggled to get the javelina into the bed of the pickup. My eyes were watering; my entire body crawled. Small red bites were breaking out on my arms like an acid wash. Finally, in desperation, I turned to my father, who was still standing a good distance away. In pain, humiliated, I waited to hear what I had done wrong.

  When he spoke it was almost kind.

  “Every hunter needs to make that mistake once," he said. “And he never makes it again. You get too close to a javelina that’s just shot, the first thing you get is the smell for a good-bye present. But that’s not the worst."

 
He dropped his cigar butt and smashed it into the dirt with one huge boot. When he spoke again, the pain was crawling across my scalp, under my armpits, around my groin. It caused a dull roar in my ears.

  "The body heat," my father said. “It cools off right fast, and all them little fleas, all them chiggers and ticks and every other form of varmint that breeds in that hide, looks for the nearest warm thing to jump on to. You’re it, son. Don’t never approach a dead thing until it’s as cool as the ground, son. Not ever."

  I couldn’t ride back in the truck. I had to walk behind it as my father led me home. I spent one day in the shower, another day bathed in cortisone. And I’d never fired a gun since that Christmas. The other lesson, the one about avoiding the dead, had been harder to learn. Then the scene of the dream changed from Sabinal to the A & M campus. I saw Lillian at eighteen, leaning in the doorway of her freshman painting class, barefoot, her hands behind her. Her denim overalls and her short off-blond hair were both flecked with red acrylic.

  A week earlier we’d had another one of our epic fights. I’d stormed out of the Dixie Chicken in the middle of dinner. Lillian shouted at my back that she’d never talk to me again. Now she just stared at me as I walked closer.

  When I came up to her she brushed my face with her fingers, lightly, and left sticky red acrylic streaks on my left cheek. Then, keeping a straight face, she decorated the other side, like war paint. She laughed.

  “Does this mean I’m forgiven?" I said.

  Her eyes turned bright green. She put her head so close to mine that her lips brushed my chin as she talked. Her breath smelled like cherry Life Savers.

  “Not even close," she said. "But you can’t get rid of me. Remember that next time you walk away."

  The phone was ringing.

  I woke up sideways on the futon with the receiver already in my hand. The blinds above me were open and sunlight was pouring onto my face as strong and hot as gasoline. I squinted. Before I could make my voice work, Robert Johnson was on my head talking for me.