Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan

by Rick Riordan

  "With Eddie every lady’s in trouble," he said. "She didn’t scream or help or anything, man. Nothing like that."

  "Did Eddie have a piece?"

  Carlos looked helpless. "I didn’t even think about it, man. I don’t think so. I know he carries sometimes. He does some work for some friends of his sometimes; that’s what I hear."

  “What friends?" Ralph said.

  "I don’t have any idea, man. That’s the truth. He just said—yeah, he said one thing. That he had to get up early tomorrow, ’cause the lady had to make a phone call for him. That’s it, man."

  Monday morning, when Lillian had supposedly left her message with Beau about Laredo. I pictured her making it with a gun pressed against her neck. I pictured Beau not giving a damn.

  That’s when I heard sirens in the distance, coming from downtown. Ralph yawned. He slid off his stool. Then he stretched his arms leisurely and put the gun away.

  "You see Eddie," Ralph said, “tell him he’s been dead since Sunday. Rigor just hasn’t set in yet."

  Lydia Mendoza had finished her last song, but nobody changed the tape. We walked out to the parking lot in silence, then we disappeared down Durango in the maroon U-boat. On the dashboard, the tip of Ralph’s joint hadn’t even gone out yet.

  After a few minutes I said: "You know this Eddie?"

  He shook his head. “You?"

  I nodded. "I had to kick him in the balls outside Hung Fong."

  Ralph glanced over at me, impressed. We drove a few more blocks in silence.

  "Why would you take a girl you’d just kidnapped to a bar?" I said. "It’d make more sense to get out of sight and stay there."

  "You afraid the lady was with him by choice?"

  I didn’t say anything. Ralph smiled. "No, man. Guys like this Eddie, they don’t need to make sense. Long as they make a good show."

  I thought about that. Then I said: "Just this morning I told a friend of mine in California how you like a low profile, Ralphas. That was before I saw your Annie Oakley routine."

  Ralph laughed. "You know how many bar fights and shootings go on in this side of town every night, vato? That was low profile."

  "Oh."

  Ralph inhaled about an inch of the mota, then blew it out through his nose. We drove for a long time. But when I closed my eyes I saw Tito’s pulverized face, Lillian with a bloody eye, a red cement floor chipped and splattered on. And still Ralph looked out his window, watching the multicolored yards of the South Side and sighing like a hopeless romantic. A romantic with blood on his boots.

  "Besides," Ralph said after a while, "I always wanted to be Annie Oakley, man."

  We both laughed about that for a long time.

  28

  Three hours later I should’ve been asleep on the futon with Robert Johnson snoring on my head. Instead I was crouching outside a chainlink fence in the weeds.

  "No accounting for intelligence," I told the cow next to me.

  She grumbled in agreement.

  Except for my bovine friend and occasional gunshots from the nearby apartment projects, it was quiet. The guard inside the glass doors of Sheff Construction looked about as excited to be here as I was. His mouth was open. He had his feet up on the desk, his face lit up blue from the portable TV on his belly. In the binoculars his name tag said "Timothy S."

  I’d circled the grounds and watched for almost forty-five minutes before I was relatively sure that Timothy S. was alone in the building. From there it was easy.

  "Cover me," I told the cow.

  Two minutes to clip along the base of the fence and roll under, then thirty seconds across the petunias and up to the side of the building. Contact paper on the bathroom window, a small muffled break next to the latch, and a minute later I was inside standing on the urinal.

  Once my eyes adjusted to the dark I slipped into the hallway. Down on the left, I could hear Lucy and Ricky having it out on the guard’s TV set. I went right, into a room of work cubicles. On my way through I put a garbage can in the doorway, just in case the guard decided to do something radical like patrol the area. A door in the back said "D. Sheff. " It wasn’t locked.

  After a few minutes inside I saw why. Dan had no computer on his desk, no files in the cabinet, no paperwork of any kind except a few dog-eared novels. There was a decanter of Chivas in the side drawer of the desk and a Looney Tunes glass like the kind Texaco used to give with a fill-up. The closet was less friendly: an extra Bill Blass jacket, no matching slacks, and a box of .22 ammunition, no matching gun.

  I slipped out of the office and tried another door. This one said "T. Garza." And it was locked, for a few seconds anyway.

  Once inside I sat down in Garza’s leather chair, behind his oak desk, and looked at his picture of the wife and kids. An attractive Hispanic woman in her forties, two sons about six and nine. Garza stood behind them smiling, a thin, athletic-looking man with silver hair and mustache, a nervous smile, eyes as dark as an East Indian’s. He was the man I’d seen Dan arguing with in front of the office that afternoon.

  His desk drawers were unlocked and the computer terminal was still on. Damn accommodating. At least it seemed that way until I was denied access to every file tried to open.

  I studied the dimmed screen. If I were an ordinary schmuck I would’ve spent the next few hours hunting for passwords in Garza’s desk and file cabinets. Instead I took out the disk my big brother had traded me six months ago for a pair of Jimmy Buffett tickets.

  "Mr. Garza," I said quietly, "meet Spider John."

  Good old Garrett. When my half brother wasn’t smoking pot or following Jimmy Buffett around the country, he made innocuous system extension programs for an Austin computer firm called RNI. When he was smoking pot and following Jimmy Buffett around the country, he made not-so-innocuous programs like Spider john. I never figured out how it worked. Garrett had talked to me about weaving temporary logic webs around command functions until I went cross-eyed.

  Finally I’d said: "Give it to me in three words or less."

  Garrett gave me one of his toothy grins. "Ganja for computers, little bro."

  Whatever it did, when I put the disk in and Spider john’s black web wove across the screen, to the muted tune of "Havana Daydreamin’," Mr. Garza’s computer suddenly smiled at me and mellowed out something considerable. Anything I punched in for a password seemed perfectly groovy now. MICKEY MOUSE, I typed. COOL, it said, and showed me Sheff Construction’s personnel files.

  Eddie Moraga was listed on the payroll as a half-time carpenter. No health benefits. No special duties noted, such as abducting women from their homes or intimidating English Ph.D.s in front of Chinese restaurants. Twelve thousand dollars a year. But that wasn’t including a ten-thousand-dollar monthly item labeled “expenses".

  A carpenter with an expense account. Not since Jesus, I figured.

  I tried to access a description for that field, hit another roadblock, typed EAT ME for a password. Even then the computer didn’t offer much of an explanation for what Sheff Construction expected Eddie to spend his petty cash on, just a familiar address--HECHO A MANO GALLERY, 21 LA VILLITA WAY. The expense account had been drawn on at the end of each month for the last year, in regular cash installments, and was authorized by the man whose chair I was borrowing--Terry Garza. The date for the next withdrawal was marked "7/31." I took out the two cut-up photos I’d retrieved from Beau’s portfolio. They were marked on the back in black pen: "7/31."

  I looked up at Garza’s picture.

  "Supporting the arts?" I asked him.

  Garza’s picture smiled back, looking a little nervous. I typed a few more insults for passwords and started skimming through the Sheffs’ financial spreadsheets. There wasn’t much to look at—very few jobs had been done this year, very little money was coming in. In fact, Sheff Construction seemed to have been surviving until last year on one bread-and-butter contract alone: Travis Center. Hmm.

  I looked at the company profits for the last decade. From �
��83-’85 there hadn’t been any. Just some fairly massive debts, probably some fairly nervous corporate creditors. Then, almost overnight, the debts disappeared quietly and completely. In their place had been the Travis Center project.

  Sheff’s long and healthy profit margin for the past decade until last year suggested that Travis Center had gone way over budget and way behind schedule. Your tax dollars at work. But now Travis Center was completed and it looked like Sheff Construction was heading back into the red.

  I looked at their projections for next year—there was only one pending deal. The entire resources of the company were already committed to building the city’s new fine arts complex. Sheff Construction had done their cost estimates based on the bidding price the city had approved, figured their payroll based on that income, and had a pretty good estimated timetable for their sub-contractors. They would be back in the black again easily.

  The only problem was that the bidding process for the fine arts complex project, according to my radio chum Carl Wiglesworth, hadn’t even started yet. I stared at the computer screen, wondering how Sheff had monopolized a huge city works project like Travis Center. And, more importantly, how they could be so damn sure they would get the next one. I was just about to ask the computer those questions when the office door swung open.

  "Before I call the security guard," the man in the doorway said, "maybe you’d explain why you’re sitting at my desk."

  Terry Garza didn’t look as good as his picture. His silver hair was flat on the left side and he had red lines on his cheek like he’d just been sleeping on a corduroy-covered pillow. He was wearing the same dark blue suit pants he’d had on that afternoon, half untucked from his gray justins. His shirt was wrinkled and his tie was hanging loose around his neck. In the picture he also wasn’t holding a tiny silver .22.

  I shut down Spider John and spit out the disk. Then I stood up very carefully.

  "Sorry," I said. "I talked to Dan earlier, said I’d be coming by tonight. I thought he’d cleared it with you. Tim out front didn’t mention you were still here." I held up my key chain, as if it were proof that I’d come in legitimately. I looked innocent, meeting Garza’s stare.

  Garza’s dark eyes narrowed. The gun lowered a few inches, then came back up again.

  "I don’t think so," he said.

  "Maybe if I was wearing a tie?"

  A smile flickered across the left side of Garza’s mouth. "Timothy is his last name. Sam Timothy. Nobody calls him Tim."

  "Shit. Missed the comma."

  "Yeah."

  Garza motioned for me to come around the desk, turned me around, then did a pretty professional job of patting me down with one hand. He took the computer disk out of my pocket.

  "They teach you frisking in contractors’ school?" I asked.

  He gave me another half smile. We were buddies now. Then he went around the desk to reclaim his leather chair and left me standing on the other side. His face looked calm, still half-asleep, but his dark eyes were alert, maybe a little anxious. They got more anxious when they saw Beau Karnau’s photos on the desk. Garza looked quickly from me to the photos, to the computer, then back at me.

  "So," he said thinly, "who have we got here?"

  "We’ve got Jackson Tres Navarre. No comma."

  Garza stared at me for a minute. Then he actually smiled all the way. "No kidding."

  I didn’t like the way he said that. Garza must’ve read my expression. He just shrugged.

  "You made Dan angry this morning, Mr. Navarre."

  So I said to him, ‘I’ll keep my eyes open.’ I close my eyes for a while and—" He snapped his fingers, then pointed at me. "I just think that’s funny."

  He met my eyes and tried to look relaxed, like he was in charge. His teeth were as white as his mustache. His fingers had tightened on the gun a little too much for my taste.

  "Hysterical," I agreed. I looked down at the family picture on his desk. "No other place to sleep, Mr. Garza? Problems at home, maybe?"

  Garza’s smile hardened. His face turned the rusty color of Hill Country granite.

  “Let’s talk about you," he said.

  I was thinking about options for leaving Garza’s office without a police escort or a bullet in my anatomy. At the moment the alternatives seemed slim. I decided, for the moment, to confuse him with the truth.

  "Dan wanted to hire me," I told him. “We talked this morning about Lillian Cambridge."

  Garza stroked his mustache. "Do you always start a job by investigating your boss, Mr. Navarre?"

  "Only when I have questions."

  Garza leaned back in his chair. He propped one foot on the edge of the desk. I couldn’t help noticing the bottom of his boot—no grooves, pointed toe, maybe a ten and a half wide.

  "Such as?" he asked.

  "For starters, how you got the contract on Travis Center, and how you managed to win the fine arts complex before the bidding process even started. Last I checked, fixing city contracts was a legal no-no."

  Garza said nothing. His smile had frozen.

  "I’m also wondering who the two missing people in that picture might be, who the blond guy is, and why it might be worth ten thousand dollars a month to Sheff Construction. I keep thinking, if I were Beau Karnau, and my art wasn’t selling so well, and I somehow came across evidence that my studio partner’s fiancé was up to some very profitable, very illegal insider deals with city contracts—well, I might just be tempted to take some photos of him and whoever his partners were. I might just blackmail the hell out of them."

  Garza rested the butt of his little silver gun on the top of the desk. In the light of the computer screen it looked blue and translucent, like a water pistol.

  “Is that all, Mr. Navarre?"

  "Except for one thing. What size boot do you wear, Mr. Garza?"

  I smiled. Garza smiled. Keeping one eye on me, Garza slipped my disk into the computer.

  "Eleven wide, Mr. Navarre. As to the rest, assuming you have any business asking, you’d have to talk to Mr. Sheff. "

  "Which Mr. Sheff? The comatose one or the one with the Looney Tunes glass in his desk? They both seem equally well informed about the family business."

  Garza shook his head, obviously disappointed in me. He showed me the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, palm out. "You see these?"

  "Fingers," I said. “I count five."

  He smiled. "Calluses, Mr. Navarre. Something you don’t see much these days. A blue-collar man who’s made a decent living—that’s a dying breed, a dinosaur." He tapped the family photo with the side of his gun. "Worked construction since I was fifteen, don’t have much formal education, but I manage to support my family pretty well. I like my employers for giving me that. And I don’t have much patience for privileged young Anglo shits who break into my office at three in the morning and try to tear it all up."

  He was still smiling, his knuckles white on the gun. Legally, we both knew, he could shoot me right now for trespassing and the biggest complication he would face would be how to dry-clean the rug. Then Spider john wove its web across the computer screen one more time to the tune of "Havana Daydreamin’."

  "Now let’s see what you’ve got here," Garza said.

  "Before I erase it, and decide whether or not I need to erase you."

  That’s when I saw the car.

  When the headlights got near enough to shine through the window behind Garza’s desk, Garza glanced around briefly and scowled, probably wondering who the new early morning visitor could be. But he was more worried about me. He turned back to the computer screen. I couldn’t see anything but headlights, getting big, very quickly.

  Let’s see what happens when it turns toward the gate, I thought.

  Stupid, Navarre. The car didn’t turn toward the gate. I stood there frozen and watched it come straight through the fence, past my friend the cow, through the petunias, and down my throat.

  I think I rolled toward the doorway before the window exploded. I don
’t remember. When I opened my eyes, a few hundred years later, I was wedged between the wall and Garza’s overturned desk, about four inches shy of having been pressed into a human tortilla. The back of my head felt like it had rubbed off against the carpet. Somewhere close by, Terry Garza was groaning. His eleven wide boot was in my face. From floor level all I could see of the car that had nearly killed us was the ruined front end—radiator steam hissing out in several places, blue metal and tangled chrome teeth that looked like they were trying to eat Garza’s desk. I could smell gasoline. Finally I looked above me, hazily, and saw three small holes. It took me a while to realize that two of them were the security guard’s nostrils. The third was the barrel of his gun.

  "Jesus Christ, " Timothy, S. was saying. He was pointing the gun at me but looking into the car. "Jesus fucking H. Christ."

  I tried to sit up, to see what he was seeing. It wasn’t one of my better ideas.

  "Don’t even do shit, God damn it, " Timothy, S. said. The quivery sound in his voice told me he was very close to breaking, even closer to blowing my face off. I sat back and jarred Garza’s boot. Garza groaned. Timothy, S.’s nostrils kept dilating. His face had gone totally yellow now, even his eyes.

  "Jesus H. Christ, " he said again. Then he threw up.

  "The driver is dead?" I asked.

  The guard looked at me and tried to laugh. It came out as a yelp. "Yeah. Yeah, you might could say that, shithead."

  Very slowly I put up my hands.

  "Look," I said. "I need to get up. You smell the gasoline, right?"

  Timothy, S. just stared at me, his gun leveled.

  Okay, I thought. I kept my hands in plain view while I got up. Then I hobbled out from behind the desk, bent over like a question mark. Garza kept moaning from underneath a pile of books and unpotted plants.

  I looked over at where Garza’s office wall had been. The car was an old blue Thunderbird convertible, or it had been before it was driven through the wall. The hood was crumpled like a contour map of the Rockies. The windshield was shattered. Somebody had tied the wheel straight and laid a slab of granite over the accelerator. The T-bird probably would have barreled right on through the building it if hadn’t lost an axle when it jumped up onto the foundation.