Adesina, Kimmie, and Peter had taken refuge under the bridge. Some of the patrons had joined the kids under there, but they looked like they were ready to bolt as soon as it was safe. Vendors were frantically packing up their wares or ducking under their tables. Michelle heard sirens in the distance.
Adesina, Kimmie, and Peter were huddled together, Adesina’s wings no longer wrapped around them.
“What in all the hells are you doing out here?” she snapped. “You’re supposed to be in bed. Instead I find you’ve snuck out. And now you get caught in the middle of a shooting. Which, I’d like to add, might have been aimed at you!”
The three kids didn’t meet her eyes. It was for the best because Michelle was pretty sure they would be smoking ash heaps if they did. “I don’t think anyone was shooting at us,” Adesina said.
“Do you seriously want to get into a debate with me about this?” Michelle snarled. “That is such an epically bad idea.”
Adesina pursed her lips, but stopped talking. She crossed her arms. Michelle wasn’t sure if Adesina was pouting or ashamed.
“And dammit now we’re going to have to talk to the police. Again.”
The seizure test of flashing red and white lights played across the sidewalk from street level. A couple of police officers came down the Presa Street bridge Michelle had gone up. They looked extremely pissed.
“We hear there were gunshots down here,” said the first officer. A bit of middle-age pooch pushed against his belt. His uniform was neatly pressed, as if he’d just come on duty. He had dark eyes and his skin had a golden-brown sheen in yellow light. The other cop’s raven hair was tied back into a neat bun. Her eyes were lighter, a color similar to Michelle’s, but her skin was a little darker than her partner’s.
Michelle wanted nothing more than to stay the hell out of this, but like everyone else, she’d have to make a statement.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Two shots. One hit here—” She pointed at a chunk of paint stripped away from the metal. “And the other went in the dirt, I think. I went the way I thought the shots had come from—where you came down, but no one was there except a couple of goth kids. Really drunk.”
“Can I get your name?” the officer asked.
“Michelle Pond,” she replied.
The cop had to look up at her. She had a good six inches in height on him. “Yeah, we heard you were in town. Officer Reyes got to spend some time with you today. Poor bastard. Susannah, you wanna start talking to those folks over there?”
“Hey,” Michelle began.
The cop held up his hand. “Something always seems to happen when aces are around. Not saying it’s your fault, just seems like bad luck follows you.” He jerked a thumb at Adesina, Kimmie, and Peter. “Those belong to you?”
“Yes, they’re in the band competition at the Tobin Center,” she replied. “I’m chaperoning.”
“I can see you’re doing a bang-up job. Isn’t it a little late for them to be out?”
Michelle had had quite enough. “I’m sorry, I don’t see how us taking a turn around the River Walk is cause for attitude. What does this have to do with the shooting? What’s your name?”
“I’m Officer Leos,” the cop replied. “I doubt this had anything to do with your kids. Probably some drunken asshole.
“I hate it when this kind of stuff happens. No obvious perp. Random. It scares the tourists. Everything is going to be cordoned off until tomorrow. You going to be in town for a while?”
“Until Sunday.”
“Give me your cell number in case I need to contact you.” She gave him her number and he wrote it down. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. “If you think of anything helpful, call me.”
Michelle took the card and slid it into the back pocket of her pants. “Thanks, Officer Leos, I will.”
Michelle pounded on the door to Rusty’s room.
“Wally! Robin! Get up!”
Bleary-eyed Wally opened the door. “Oh gosh, Michelle,” he said, his voice cracking and grating. “What’s the problem?”
“My room. Now.”
Sharon’s door opened and she gave a low whistle and signed,
“My room.” Michelle’s calm you-need-to-stop-talking-and-do-what-I-say-right-now voice had kicked in.
She held the door to her room open and everyone shuffled inside. “These three”—she pointed at Adesina, Peter, and Kimmie—“decided to sneak out and go to the River Walk tonight. And someone shot at them.”
“Mom, that’s not what happened,” Adesina said. “C’mon, we were just having a Pekinese, sorry, a peek at the River Walk. And Officer Leos said those bullets weren’t meant for us.”
Michelle’s eyes narrowed and she cocked her head to one side as she spoke. “Are you talking? Really, you’re talking right now? And you can’t see what a bad idea that is?”
Sharon signed.
“Who knows how long it’ll be before the whole thing is up on YouTube.” Michelle glared at everyone in the room.
Kimmie looked like she had swallowed a bug.
“Mom,” Adesina said, “no one bothered us. Like, Kimmie’s a nat. Peter’s hella cute, and I’m super-pretty. We’re not like other jokers. People aren’t afraid of us. And who knows who they were shooting at? Maybe someone else, maybe they were just showing off. Mom, it’s Texas!”
“All the more reason for us to shut this thing down,” Michelle said. “We should withdraw from the competition and go back to New York. It’s just too dangerous.”
“Mom, no!”
“Ms. Pond, no!” Peter said. “How could they have known we were going out? If we leave it’ll look like it’s because of the smoke bomb. And then they win. I grew up in Jokertown. After what goes on there, none of this stuff could freak me out.”
Ghost floated through the door to the bathroom. “Wally, I don’t want to leave either,” she said. “And yes, I was listening in. I came through the wall of the bathroom.”
“Rusty, honestly, have you never had a conversation about this? I mean it’s fine around friends, but here?”
Wally looked ashamed and Michelle felt terrible. She thought Wally was the best, and now she was being mean to him.
“You,” she said, pointing at Adesina. “You’re staying with me now.”
“Mom!”
Michelle gave Adesina a look that could have melted glass. “You’ve blown your privileges. And you…” She turned to Peter. “I better not hear a peep from you for the rest of the competition. You…” She turned to Kimmie. “I’m going to get you to your room, and you better hope your mother isn’t anywhere around.
“As for the adults here—we’ve really dropped the ball chaperone-wise. Myself included.
“Now everyone, out. Except for you.” She pointed at her daughter.
“Kimmie,” she said, “let’s go. And Adesina, you better not move from that spot until I get back.”
I may just bury her and dig her up when she’s thirty.
Dust and the Darkness
by Victor Milán
Part 1
“¡HIJO LA!” I SAID, stopping my fork with a load of hash browns just shy of my mouth. “He gave them his truck?”
“Yeah,” Fabio said in his funny accent. “And his credit card.”
“He told all this to you, a stranger? A cowboy from Brazil? Dang, maybe it’s no big deal he gave away his truck and credit card to a pair of runaway kids.”
“He seemed pretty, what do you say? Broke up about it. So, like, I don’t think this happens all the time.”
Fabio Fernandes was an old Professional Bull Riders junior circuit buddy of mine, from the days when we were both up-and-comers. He’s still up-and-coming. I’m looking for alternative opportunities, ever since a bull named John Dortmunder rolled on me and dislocated my spine.
Which is how I wound up playing detective by sitting in a Truck-R-Nation coffee shop outs
ide New Braunfels, trying to track down this famous seventeen-year-old high school music prodigy—the Mozart of Modesto, USA Today called her. And the drifter who’d bragged to everybody at the Gunter Hotel where he was tending bar how he was an ace, before smooth-talking her into running away from some big jazz band contest happening there. Where she was fixing to sign a deal with a big record label, no less.
It’s my abuela’s fault—my grandmother’s. Stuff like this usually is.
“But he told you all about it,” I said.
Fabio shrugged. He was a long, narrow drink of water with a dark, kind of chubby face, curly black hair, and a pencil-thin mustache like some kind of old Latino heartthrob movie star. He was dressed like any other cowboy in the place, with pearly snap buttons on his shirt, battered and faded jeans, and cowboy boots.
“He was sitting in a booth. He was telling everybody who slowed down long enough how he’d offered these two broke kids a ride, only to have them jack his pickup and strand him right on the asphalt. Like a character in one of those old Russian novels, you know?”
“Yeah. I hate those. So where’d you see him last?”
The second I’d disconnected from my grandmother browbeating me into playing detective the night before, I mass-texted all my old contacts from PBR days. I figured, if the kids I was looking for had blown out of San Antonio for L.A. like her family thought they had, they were likely doing it on Interstate 10.
My pal Fabio was first to respond, with a tale of a strange encounter the day before at the Timberwood Park Truck-R-Nation, right there on 10 heading northwest out of San Antonio. Truck-R-Nation is as popular on the circuit as it is with truckers. It’s clean, and the food is cheap, plentiful, and good enough, if not a touch better. I was trying to finish off a delayed and much-needed breakfast of pork chops, eggs, biscuits, and sausage gravy. I’d had to bolt the house all the way over near the New Mexico border with just a cup of predawn coffee burning a hole in my stomach to start my kid-genius hunt.
“I left him there, gazing out the big old front window like a lost soul. He called his daughter to come pick him up. He lives right nearby. Said she was gonna ream him a new one.”
“Thanks, amigo. Uh, muito obrigado.” I stood up and scooped up the check. Grandma said the girl’s family promised to pay expenses, which I certainly planned to hold them to. “How’s the family?”
“Still back home in Paraná, where I like them. Yours?”
“Hanging in there on the ranch outside Lamesa. Where I wish I wasn’t stuck living.”
He stood up, too. He frowned and scratched his right eyebrow. “Be careful, man. I gotta wonder if you’re maybe getting into something here that’s gonna get over your head in a hurry.”
“Me too, my friend. Me too.”
“So, yeah,” the old dude said, “it was the damnedest thing I ever did see.”
My informant was not what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected, but a little old guy with brick-colored hair that was going all grizzled, who looked like you put Lyle Lovett in one of those dehydrators and shriveled him up some, was not it. He insisted I call him Rooster, because of course.
“I mean, these were some good-lookin’ kids. Boy coulda been a movie star, if he’d lose that East Texas bayou trash accent. And the girl put him in the shade: six feet tall in her sneakers, big brown eyes, brown hair in pigtails, knockers out to here.”
It took me a minute to remember what knockers were in old-person talk, while he blew smoke out the open window of my twenty-year-old RAV4 five-door at the passing suburban scenery of Timberwood Park. Which looked like the suburban scenery everywhere else in southwest Texas, except newer and tackier. Rooster insisted I drive him to the Circle-K from his daughter’s house, where the folks at the truck stop said I’d find him, and buy him a pack as the price of talking. Man, those things are expensive. I don’t know if I can afford this detectiving.
“Said they were headed to Hollywood to follow their dreams. I told ’em sorry, I was nigh home already, and I’d get in dutch with the daughter if I got home late. Next thing I know, the boy holds out his hand, and like this rainbow thing shines out of it right in my eyes. And the next thing after that, I’m standing in the parking lot, breathin’ diesel fumes and wondering where my pick-’em-up went to.”
“He shone a light in your eyes?”
“Colored light. Couldn’t look away. Didn’t want to. Like a rainbow, it was. Purty. Only gave him the one card. Noticed it was missing right away, once I came out of it. Bank card—don’t have no ID photo. Yeah.”
“They didn’t force you or anything?”
“No. I recollect a little now—him asking real nice and proper if he could borrow a few things. And—it seemed reasonable. I really wanted to help, you know?”
Great, I thought. He really is an ace.
“So what’s your interest in this gal and her friend with the rainbow hands?”
“I’m trying to talk her into going back to her parents.” That seemed the simplest explanation. “Just doing a favor for some bingo-playing buddies of my granny’s.”
“Word to the wise: Don’t look at that blond kid’s hands, whatever you do.”
Good advice, I thought. “Good advice,” I said.
Rooster blew smoke out the window again. He was having me drive him around. His daughter didn’t want him smoking in her house any more than I wanted him smoking in my dang car. He said she’d ask questions if she caught him hanging around outside talking to some stranger. I’d have called that smart of her, given his propensity for giving his bank card to random strangers, but the rainbow thing put a whole new spin on it. Then again, he’d offered a lift to a couple of hitchhikers at a truck stop, so maybe she was right after all.
“You know,” he said to the hot breeze, “I reckon them kids are in a pack of trouble, since I reported the truck stolen to the Staties and all. And my daughter made me call the bank to put a stop on the card.”
My heart sank. He put words to a tune I was already hearing in my mind.
He flicked his butt out the window and turned back to me with a grin spreading across his narrow withered-up face. “But, you know, if I got my truck back and didn’t take no losses, maybe got a little something for my trouble, I might suddenly remember I did lend those kids that stuff voluntary like, after all.”
I put my smartphone on speaker and hit up my grandmother’s number as I drove the State Highway 46 shortcut from New Braunfels to Boerne, which I-10 passed through. (Kids, don’t dial and drive. I’m an ace detective. Don’t do that either.)
She picked up right away. “Abuelita?”
“You want something.” Luckily she always talks loud, since she’s a bit hard of hearing and too stubborn to get a hearing aid, since I still had the passenger window open to clear the smoke remnants and the wind was rushing something powerful. “You always want something when you call me that. It’s money, right?”
“Right.”
“No.”
“Not from you,” I told her. “And not for me. It’s business.”
“Okay. Talk to me, Jesse. You have my interest.”
I told her.
“You want to buy off a witness.”
“Not a witness. The crime victim. He says we get his bank card charges covered, get him his truck back, give him a little extra for his trouble, he’s not gonna press charges, okay?”
“You actually have his truck?”
“Well … not yet.”
“I never knew whether you were my favorite nieto in spite of being such a devious little shit, or because of it. I’m beginning to see now. Okay, I’ll talk to the girl’s family in Cali. They’re pretty eager to avoid a scandal; they should pony up pronto. And I’m pretty eager to see if you can actually pull this off.”
Me too, I thought.
She disconnected. “I love you too, Grandma,” I told my phone.
I was just tucking it back in my shirt pocket when it played the whistled bit from the theme for The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I fished it right out again.
It was my cousin Florene, who works as a dispatcher for the Texas Highway Patrol in Kerr County, on I-10 northwest of Boerne. I’d also text-spammed pretty much my entire extended family. Which, if you’re not familiar with Latinos, really leans hard on the extended part. Us Rodríguezes, and my mom’s Márquez clan, have been living in this part of the world since San Antonio happened in the early 1700s. The ones who were Comanches at the time’ve been here even longer than that.
“Got good news and bad news for you, primo,” she said.
“Are you chewing gum? You’re not supposed to do that on duty, are you?”
She popped it in my ear. “What’re they gonna do, fire me? I’m Simple Service. Also, last I heard, our tía Luisa is still director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, or did you forget?”
“Right.” It wasn’t as if Florene calling me was strictly legal. Or at all. I’ve always been a do-what’s-right-rather-than-what’s-legal kind of guy, and Florene … well, my older sisters used to joke her name should be spelled “fluorine,” for the dangerously unstable element.
“Which do you want first?”
“Give me the good, so I can enjoy a brief moment basking in the sunshine of optimism.”
“Such a poet.” I could hear the sneer. “You oughta go into fertilizer sales with a line of bullshit like that. Okay. We got a report matching the description of your missing kids as of twenty minutes ago.”
“Sweet! Where are they?”
“A pair matching their descriptions were reported at a convenience store in Kerrville.”
The sun was still shining hot and bright through the open windows—okay, I don’t just keep ’em down to let the smoke out, my AC is todo fregado—but I felt my heart sinking slowly in the west. “I think I can guess the bad news.”
“Who’s telling this? Yeah. The bank card they were trying to use had been reported stolen. So was the big-ass Ford pickup they drove up in.”
“Is there video?”
“Reckon it’s likely.” Pop.
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