by Rick Riordan
Page 7
“Señor—”
“No. ” Huff stuck his finger in her face. “You don’t talk to me. Neither of you. ”
Jose cleared his throat. “But, Señor Huff—”
“Get back downstairs,” he ordered. “Make the guests some food. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear you. ”
He stormed down the hallway and left them alone.
Imelda looked at her husband. “What do we do?”
She was used to Jose having answers. Usually, no matter how bad the situation, he would give her a reassuring smile. She loved the way the edges of his eyes crinkled, his gaze warm and brown. He was a handsome man when he smiled.
Now his expression was grim. He knelt and gathered up the fallen linens. “We make the guests food. ”
“Jose…please. It’s killing him. ”
He folded up the sheets clumsily and stuffed them back into the closet. He was never good with linens. That was her job, folding the corners perfectly, smoothing out wrinkles.
“Señor Huff will survive this,” he promised. “We all will. ”
“We owe him—”
“I know what we owe him,” Jose said. She heard the steel edge in his voice and knew better than to argue.
“We’ll go downstairs,” Jose insisted. “And do our jobs. ”
He trudged off, not waiting to see if she would follow.
Imelda hesitated, staring into the empty guest room. It was room 207. It hadn’t been used in weeks. Every day, Imelda would go in anyway to dust and fluff the pillows. She would open the window to let in fresh sea air. She loved empty rooms. They were clean and full of promise. They had no past. Unlike their own room. Terrible memories could not be smoothed out. They couldn’t be neatly folded and tucked away.
It had all started to go wrong last fall, when the visitor arrived from the mainland. That day, she had known their lives would be shattered yet again. Their hopes of finding peace would be dashed.
She gathered her strength. She could not give up now. The young man, Señor Navarre, might be a new opportunity. She would know, soon enough.
She closed the door of room 207 and followed after her husband.
9
I should’ve followed Lindy’s advice and gone straight to my honeymoon, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesse Longoria’s body in the cellar.
In the hall, I ran into Garrett, who was hand-walking down to check on me.
“Got worried,” he told me. “Lane said something about a bloodstain. ”
“Is Maia all right?”
Garrett shrugged. “She’s calming Lane down. Rather have that job than looking for you, little bro. Lane’s a lot hotter. ”
“Don’t even think about it. ”
He gave me the innocent eyes—a look Garrett doesn’t do very well. “Can’t a guy want to comfort a young lady without people getting ideas?”
“No. Now come on. ”
“Where we going?”
“To visit a dead man. ”
It was rare for a house on the Texas coast to have a basement, but the first owner, Colonel Bray, had insisted on it. The walls were original 1880s shellcrete—a cementlike mixture of sand and ground oyster shells. The floor was damp. The air smelled of mildew and fish.
When I was a kid, Garrett and Alex used to spend a lot of time in that cellar. Some of their time, no doubt, was spent doing drugs, talking about girls, planning great teenage adventures. I wasn’t included in any of that. But most important, Alex made his fireworks there.
As July fourth got near, he would spend every spare moment with his beloved project. He got so preoccupied he forgot to pick on me. He didn’t care if I sneaked downstairs to watch, as long as I touched nothing. He even ignored Garrett, which pleased me more than anything.
The cellar would fill up with plastic tubes, coils of fuse, rolls of aluminum foil and boxes of caps, plugs and Mexican fireworks. Alex would save money all year, then clean out the local roadside stands and cannibalize their chemicals to make his huge mortar displays.
Our last summer, a few weeks before my fateful trip to the lighthouse, I crept down the cellar stairs and watched as Alex rigged up his row of plastic tubes. Garrett sat on a folding chair nearby, drinking tequila from a Coke can and looking bored.
It’s hard for me to remember the way Garrett used to look before he had a wheelchair, but this was long before the accident that took his legs. He was getting ready to graduate from high school. He was just starting to grow his beard. He’d been accepted to MIT (my mother’s idea) but turned them down because he said he would never be a “damn sellout. ” He had plans to drive around the country, maybe go to Europe. He was trying to convince Alex that this was an excellent idea.
Normally, Alex would’ve been encouraging. No matter how crazy Garrett’s schemes got, Alex was always his number one cheerleader, almost as if Alex wanted to see how far he could push Garrett to go. That was the main reason Garrett liked Alex so much. But today, on a fireworks day, Alex was a tougher sell.
“Come on, man,” Garrett said. “You want to stay on this island your whole life?”
Alex looked up briefly from twisting his fuses. “I don’t know. ”
“You got no ambition, man. Whole world’s out there. You want to turn into Mr. Eli, sitting up there in a bathrobe all day?”
“Mr. Eli’s not so bad. He helped my folks out. ”
“Whatever, man. You ask me, it wasn’t much help. ”
Alex didn’t answer. He covered a mortar with aluminum foil and began unwrapping a case of Roman candles.
“Sorry,” Garrett muttered. “I didn’t mean anything. ”
Alex took out a box cutter and sliced a Roman candle, splitting it open like a bean pod. “You think it’ll be easier meeting the right girl, if you go on this trip?”
Garrett’s face flushed. He’d broken up with a girl named Tracy a few weeks before. I guess he had told Alex about it. She’d hung around our house for maybe a month, and when she finally broke up with Garrett, his moods turned even blacker than usual. At night, he listened to Led Zeppelin and ripped pages out of his yearbook. During the day, he’d take his air gun into the backyard and shoot at soda cans for hours.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Garrett demanded. “You think I won’t meet someone?”
Alex uncoiled a length of wire, measured it against a yardstick. Even at seventeen, his hands were scarred from knife cuts, fishing hooks, rope burns. He was always busy, always creating something.
“Thing about fireworks,” he said, “it’s all in the timing. You got to measure the fuse just right or the ignition is no good. You burn everything up too fast, or it doesn’t go off at all. ”
“I don’t get you, man,” Garrett said. “You’re gonna sit on this island your whole life, waiting like your dad? You think love is gonna come to you?”
The cellar was silent except for water dripping from a busted pipe in the corner. A moth batted at the single bare lightbulb above, casting enormous shadows across the shellcrete walls.
“Get out,” Alex said finally. “I’m working. ”
Garrett looked like he wanted to argue, but then he thought better of it. He cursed and got up to leave. He glowered at me as he passed me on the stairs.
I didn’t move. Alex glanced at me without emotion. I might’ve been another fuse or plastic tube—not something he needed right now, but not something he was going to bother throwing away, either. He went back to work, and I watched in silence as he fused together a row of pipes like a church organ, loading it with chemicals and measuring his fuses to just the right length.
There were no fireworks in the cellar now. Jesse Longoria’s body had been laid out on a butcher-block table.
A single bare lightbulb flickered dimly above us, but we relied mostly on a flashlight, which cast long shadows across Longoria’s face. He didn’t look like a man at peace, even if one ignored the bullet hole in his c
hest. He looked like a man who needed to use the restroom.
“I hate dead bodies,” Garrett mumbled.
I couldn’t tell if my brother was really pale and sweaty, or if it was just the light. His color wasn’t much better than Longoria’s. Of course, Garrett was at a height disadvantage. He’d had to hand-walk his way down into the cellar. Now, sitting in a metal chair, he was eye level with the gunshot wound.
“Hold up the flashlight,” I told him.
The body was wrapped in a plastic tarp. The inside of the tarp was spattered with blood, but there was none that I could see on the outside, or on the floor, or the steps into the cellar. Jose and Chris may have ruined a crime scene, but they seemed to have done it without making a mess. It seemed unlikely that the blood smeared in the kitchen had come from this corpse.
I checked through Longoria’s pockets. I came up with a wallet, car keys, an Aransas Pass ferry schedule and thirty-six cents. In Longoria’s wallet were his badge, sixty-five dollars in cash and the usual credit cards.
“So you knew this guy?” Garrett asked.
“He killed a client of mine. ”
“Before or after the client paid you?”
“You’re just Mr. Sensitive, aren’t you?” I put Longoria’s wallet back in his coat pocket. “Longoria had a reputation in the South Texas Marshal’s Office. He apprehended something like fifty fugitives in twelve years. Once in a while, as he was bringing them back, the fugitives would, ah, try to escape. ”
“And this dude would use force. ”
“Deadly force. Every time, Longoria was cleared of wrong-doing, but—”
“I gotcha,” he grumbled. “Fucking cops. ”
“Dad was a cop. ”
“What’s your point?”
He had me there.
I scanned the room. Chris or Jose or somebody had set the dead man’s suitcase in the corner. I hauled the brown Tourister to the table and opened it at the dead man’s feet.
Garrett shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “So this client of yours…he was a fugitive?”
“Charged with arson. He had a felony record. He panicked and skipped town before his trial. The wife paid me to find him and convince him to turn himself in. I didn’t have time. Longoria found him first and killed him. ”
“You know that for sure?”
“The body was never found. My guy’s officially still listed as a fugitive. But I asked around. The guy had had a run-in with one of Longoria’s SAPD buddies the year before. Longoria took matters into his own hands. Settled the score. ”
Garrett looked down at the dead man’s face. “See, asshole? This is what we call karma. Now can we get out of here, little bro?”
I rummaged through the marshal’s suitcase. I found two changes of clothes. No paperwork, no files from the Marshal’s Office. Nothing interesting, until I checked one of those easy-to-miss side pockets that I’d trained myself not to miss. Stuck inside were a crumbling candy skull wrapped in plastic and a business card that read:
Chris Stowall
Manager