The Devil went down to Austin tn-4

by Rick Riordan

  "Garrett called me, Tres-months ago, when Matthew Pena first approached them."

  "You represented Pena twice-got him off the hook twice."

  She nodded. "And when Garrett asked my advice, I told him as much as I could without breaking attorneyclient privilege. I told him that under no circumstances, ever, should his company deal with Matthew Pena."

  "That worked real well."

  Anger flickered in her eyes. "Garrett kept me posted. When Jimmy Doebler- With what happened Thursday night, I felt responsible. I came down."

  "From San Francisco."

  "Yes, Tres. Modern conveniences, like airplanes, make that possible."

  Her expression gave me nothing to feed on. It was calm, irritatingly professional.

  "You could've at least-"

  "What, Tres? Called? Garrett made it clear he did not want you involved. Frankly, I agreed with him."

  Garrett kept clacking on the keyboard, pretending to ignore us.

  Across the alley, on the secondstory deck of the frat house, a barechested Greek was drinking a beer. Perfect contentment-a lazy Sunday afternoon, one more party day before summer school started. I wondered if I could bean him from here with a rock.

  Instead I reached down, scooped up some of the papers around Garrett's seat.

  There was a list of the companies who were betatesting Techsan's security software.

  Co_op. com, Austin's online health food store. Ticket Time, the local event promoter.

  Four others I'd never heard of-a West Texas petroleum company, two Internet financial service groups, a boating supply retailer-no doubt Ruby McBride's contri bution to their client list. There was a list of reported security leaks, about a dozen in all, most from the petroleum company and the two financial service groups, the companies with the biggest budgets and the most to lose. One letter from the CEO of the oil company formally cancelled the contract with Techsan and warned of a suit. The letter cited three different confidential inhouse reports that had been posted anonymously to a Usenet group-a leak that could cost the company millions. There were more letters like that-horror stories from the betatesters, irate emails, threats to sue Techsan out of existence. There was also one fax to Garrett, on Matthew Pena's letterhead, dated April 1, just before all hell broke loose. The fax read, Look forward to doing business with you. -M. An Austin number was written underneath.

  I stared at the M. for a long time.

  Garrett finally slammed the top of the keyboard shut. He took the joint out of his mouth, smushed it against the back of the monitor.

  Maia said, "I guess that means no luck."

  "There's nothing else I can try from here. I need to get to the office."

  "You go through a lot of laptops?" I asked.

  Garrett glowered at me. "Ruby insists on a meeting tonight. She's scared-wants to sell out. I've got one afternoon to find somethingsome proof that we can isolate the problem."

  "Can you trace the leaked documents?" I asked. "Figure out where they came from?"

  "You don't think I've thought of that, little bro? I'd have to have permission from the betatest companies-get full access to their servers. The ones that were most affected are suing our asses. They aren't letting me anywhere near their machines."

  "Can you get somebody to help you look? Ruby?" "No."

  "The police?"

  "Hell no."

  I held up the fax from Matthew Pena. "Any more love notes lying around?"

  Garrett looked at the fax like he wanted to set it on fire. "You're starting your class tomorrow. I hope that's the only reason you're here-you need a place to stay."

  "But you've already got company."

  Maia stared at me stonily.

  Garrett set aside his computer, brushed the ashes off the cover. "She's staying at the Driskill, little bro. Don't be rude."

  "Let me guess," I said. "Matthew Pena's staying there, too."

  Maia raised her eyebrows. "What makes you so sure?"

  "You'll crowd him. Give him no room to breathe. Try to redirect the police investigation toward him. That's your plan, isn't it?"

  "You assume a lot."

  "You wouldn't come down here to defend Garrett. You're an offensive player.

  Something turned you against Pena. It's Pena you're after."

  Three seconds of silence. "Tres, do us both a favour. Leave now."

  It was the first break in her coldness-when she said the word favour. It wasn't much, nothing I would've caught had I not known her for a decade. Just the slightest indication that she wanted me gone for more reasons than one.

  I folded Pena's fax. "I can't sit this out, Garrett."

  "You and the goddamn ranch."

  "It's more than that."

  He stared past the balcony railing, like he was taking aim at something a long way off.

  He didn't reply.

  After a moment, Maia pointed at me, then pointed inside.

  Reluctantly, I followed.

  In the living room, Buffett was still singing his greatest hits. The parrot was bobbing his head, crooning the only words he knew-"dickhead," "noisy bastard," a few other cute obscenities.

  "It would've been more helpful if you were the pizza guy," Maia told me. "I had nothing but peanuts on the plane, went straight from the airport to the homicide office."

  "Pena," I said. "Is he as bad as he looks on paper?"

  She made a boat out of her money. "Worse."

  There were pale Vs on the tops of her feet, remnants of a suntan through flipflops. I wondered if she still spent Saturday afternoons in the Mission, seeking out the only oasis of sunshine in San Francisco.

  "I have to turn the investigation away from Garrett," she said. "If the case goes to the DA the way it is…"

  She didn't finish. She didn't have to. We both understood why she couldn't wait for an indictment, why no defence lawyer would ever want to defend a friend in court. If the police felt confident enough to arrest Garrett, if the case went to trial without a plea bargain-the odds for acquittal got very long indeed.

  "And you still don't want my help," I said.

  "That's Garrett's call."

  "Is it?" I picked up Garrett's phone.

  Maia frowned. "What are you-"

  I hadn't really been expecting any luck-not on a Sunday afternoon-but on the third ring a cheery receptionist's voice said, "Mr. Pena's offices. This is Krystal."

  I knew she spelled it with a K. She sounded like the K variety of Krystal.

  I told her I was the personal assistant to one of Matthew's venture capitalist friends. I knew it was lastminute, but my boss was going to be superpissed if I couldn't squeeze him in for an appointment with Matthew sometime today.

  Maia made an emphatic cut gesture across her throat.

  "Oh, man," Krystal sympathized. "This is such a bummer, but Mr. Pena is out the rest of the afternoon."

  "Out?" I tried to sound devastated.

  "Yeah. I'm really sorry. He took some prospective clients to Windy Point."

  Maia was glaring at me.

  "Windy Point," I said. "Isn't that on the lake somewhere?"

  "Yeah," Krystal agreed. "The scuba place. Mr. Pena is big on that, you know? Likes to impress clients by taking them under, bonding with the fish. Ha, ha."

  "Yeah," I agreed. "Ha, ha."

  "So, like, he's out there teaching these guys to scuba dive. I'm really sorry."

  I winked at Maia. "That's okay, Krystal. In fact, that's just about perfect. Thanks."

  I hung up, told Maia where Matthew Pena was, what he was doing.

  Her reaction was just what I expected.

  She looked nauseated, swallowed deeply. "I'll catch him tomorrow."

  "Sure," I agreed. "Me, I think I'll go out to Windy Point. I'll try not to mess things up for you too bad."

  She glared at the floor, called me several unflattering names in Mandarin. I knew the names well enough. She'd called me them before. "You insist on wedging your way into this, don't you?
"

  I gestured toward the door. "After you?" The pizza man was just coming up the stairs.

  Maia told him to go upstairs, give the pizza to the guy with no legs.

  She said she didn't anticipate being hungry again for a very long time.

  CHAPTER 9

  The man in the wet suit had just finished getting sick.

  He was hunched over on a picnic bench, elbows on his knees, the purged contents of his stomach speckling the grass between his feet. His face glistened with sweat and lake water, the sclera of his eyes an unhealthy shade of egg yolk yellow.

  As Maia and I walked toward him, his expression turned from misery to embarrassment. The message was clear: Please let me suffer in privacy.

  "You okay?" I asked.

  He had pinched features, a Mediterranean tan. He was probably in his late twenties, though he looked older from the sun lines scoring his eyes and mouth. Handsome, in a small, tight way. His hair was a closecropped skullcap of chocolate brown, water trickling off behind his ears. He had eyes like an old lady's poodle-big and dark, filled with mournful selfconsciousness, anxiety over the fact that he wasn't a bulldog.

  "Guess I need a little more practice," he said.

  We were at the last picnic table on Windy Point, next to the metal stairs that led down a twentyfoot limestone cliff to the water. Dragonflies zagged in drunken orbits over the grass. A strong, steady breeze blew off the headlands-the kind of wind that would hide a sunburn on a day like this, not let you know you'd become fried and dehydrated until it was too late.

  Behind us, in the woods, several dozen scuba campers had set up their tents, equipment trailers, barbecue pits. I could smell hamburgers cooking. Red and white dive flags decorated everything. Swimsuits and dive skins were draped over lawn chairs. The black rubbery hoses of regulators hung in live oak branches like trophy kill octopi.

  The little gravel road ended at our feet. There was nothing farther but the dropoff and the lake.

  Maia Lee didn't look much better than the scuba diver. She'd looked progressively worse the closer we'd gotten to the lake. Apparently, though, she remembered scuba training better than I did. She noticed the sick man's air tank standing upright on the table- a big nono in the world of diving. She picked up the tank and laid it on the ground sideways, where it couldn't fall over and cause mischief.

  "Thanks," the man murmured. "Forgot."

  And then he took another look at her, squinting to make out her face in the sun. "Don't I- Miss Lee?"

  "Hello, Dwight."

  If it was possible for Dwight to look any more nauseated, he did. "Oh my God. Matthew called you out here?"

  I placed the name. Dwight Hayes-the AccuShield employee who had supported Matthew Pena's statement about his girlfriend falling off the dinner yacht.

  "Dwight," Maia said, "this is a friend of mine, Tres Navarre."

  He looked surprised by my proffered hand, reached for it, then almost immediately pulled back. "Navarre?"

  "As in Garrett Navarre of Techsan Software," Maia said. "That's right."

  Maia had slipped into her professional tone, the one she used for reluctant witnesses-putting them at ease, reassuring them, letting them know she was a friend.

  Her tone didn't seem to work too well on Dwight.

  "Not again," he moaned. "You're here about-"

  "About Jimmy Doebler's murder," Maia supplied. "Yes."

  "Then Matthew did call you."

  "No. I'm afraid Mr. Pena will need different representation this time. How's he been treating you, Dwight?"

  Hayes looked miserable. He unzipped his wet suit to the waist, peeled his arms out of the sleeves. The warm neoprene let off its unmistakable smell.

  If car tires had armpits, they would smell like that.

  "I couldn't-" He faltered. He made a claw over his nose and mouth, pantomiming an oxygen mask. "I have no control down there. I panic. He asks me to clear my mask, twenty feet down, and the water rushes into my nose-I forget how to breathe."

  I could tell Maia was fighting to keep the professional demeanour intact, trying not to betray her own phobia.

  "It takes a few tries," she sympathized.

  Hayes shook his head dejectedly. "You don't get it. This is the third time. He makes me keep trying-embarrassing myself in front of clients. Matthew enjoys seeing me panic.

  He enjoys it."

  "Sounds like the conversations we had in San Francisco, Dwight. Do you remember?"

  He blushed. "Maia, I shouldn't even talk to you. I could get fired."

  "Then maybe we should talk to Pena directly," I suggested.

  Hayes gave me the apprehensive poodle eyes, then he pointed over the edge of the cliff, down toward the water. "Blue flag."

  The lake was calm-no speedboats in the channel. A hundred feet out, buoys marked off the diving area. Bubbles of submerged divers made glassy scars on the water.

  About twenty feet from the shore, three bubble marks were stationary, right next to a blue donutshaped marker.

  "How long have they been down there?" I asked.

  "Not long," Hayes said. "I panicked right away on this dive. They'll be down another forty minutes, at least."

  "Tres…" Maia started. Her fair warning tone.

  "We're about the same size," I told Dwight. "Mind if I borrow your gear?"

  "No, Tres," Maia said. "We can wait."

  "I'll pay the rental for it. You'll recoup your losses. Think how glad Matthew will be to see me."

  Dwight looked stunned. Then he surprised me, maybe surprised himself, with a faint, queasy smile. His eyes glimmered with a kind of mischief he probably didn't get to practice much. "I'm going to regret this. Take the stuff."

  "You are not going into the water," Maia insisted.

  I checked the pressure gauge on Dwight Hayes' tank, found that it was just below max at 3,000 psi. "You want to come, Maia? By all means. We're a team, right?"

  Her face turned livid. "You haven't become less of a bastard the last two years, Tres Navarre."

  She turned and stormed off, realized she was heading toward a deadend cliff, strode the other way, down the road.

  It isn't often I get to discombobulate her so thoroughly. I had to smile.

  "Oh, Christ," Dwight said. "I shouldn't have-"

  "Don't worry," I told him. "She just hates it when I get to have all the fun."

  Then I stripped to my Texasflag jockey shorts right there in front of God and everybody.

  Five minutes and thirty pounds later, I was suited up. Dwight's buoyancy compensator-the inflatable vest divers call the BC-was a little tight on me, but everything else fit tolerably well. The lead weights on the belt thudded against my hipbone on the way down the ladder.

  It was a relief to hit the water and go weightless, feel the coolness work its way under the wet suit. I floated away from the ladder, the BC inflated to keep me up, and struggled to get the fins on over the neoprene booties. The water smelled of soil and fish spawn and oily slicks of the baby shampoo divers use to defog their masks.

  From the top of the cliff, Dwight Hayes watched me as I kicked toward the blue floating marker.

  I put in the regulator mouthpiece, sucked in a first dry, cold breath, then raised the deflator hose of the BC and let out the air.

  I had a moment of disorientation as the world flickered white, melted in a soup of green bubbles. Then I was underwater, sinking slowly.

  Sound became a physical force-an insect doing circles around my head, making kamikaze runs into my ears. Every exhale set off a minor earthquake of bubbles. I heard pings and clicks and whines and had no idea where any of them were coming from.

  I pinched the nose pocket of my mask to equalize pressure. I remembered to breathe, to swallow the powdery coldness of the regulator air out of my throat. The skills came back to me-but Dwight

  Hayes was right. It was unsettling. My breakfast had been mercifully light, but even the yogurt and fruit was threatening to retreat up my throat.


  I sank through green and yellow light, following the frayed nylon rope of the marker into the murk below. There was about five feet of visibility.

  I saw bubble streams below me first, then the figures from which they came. Three streaks of oil resolved into human forms. A silver sheen became a floating underwater platform-a railed grid of metal maybe fifteen feet square. Two divers were on their knees on the platform, feeding hot dogs to a frenzy of Guadalupe river bass and catfish. The third diver was floating effortlessly above them, observing. The water around them was cloudy with fish poop, and pieces of hot dog that would soon be converted to fish poop.

  I turned horizontal, aimed my fins, and kicked toward the floating guy. Anybody who could float must be the instructor.

  He was dressed in a Farmer John style wet suit-sleeveless, Uneck. The highlight stripes on the suit were blue, as was his mask frame and the middle of each fin. Even his tank was blue. His arms and neck were smoothly muscled, the rest of his body lean, athletic. His hair was a short black cloud that moved in the water the way smoke boils over a petroleum fire. His hands were clasped lightly over his weight belt and his legs pigeoned, scissoring gently whenever he needed to correct buoyancy.

  When he noticed me he raised his hand-either as a greeting or a sign to stop, I couldn't tell which.

  I looked at the blue man's two companions, gave them the okay sign. Each returned it.

  I pointed at them, then at the platform, telling them to stay put.

  I looked at the blue man.

  Behind the mouthpiece of his regulator, I could see he had a moustache and goatee.

  His skin looked extraordinarily sallow, but that may have been a trick of the water. His eyes were preternaturally clear in the mask's pocket of air-milkwhite corneas, pupils the colour of burnt wood, calm to the point of being scary.

  He pointed at my chest, then pointed away.

  I gestured for the message slate hanging on his belt.

  After a moment's hesitation, he handed it over. I put the black grease pen to the white surface and wrote, Maia sez hello.

  He took the board, read it, then hesitated, the tip of the pen over it, as if he was considering his next move in tictactoe. He crossed out my sentence, wrote, handed it back.