Texas Hold'em

by Wild Cards Trust

  “You reckon? Didn’t the Highway Patrol impound it?”

  “You watch too much TV, dumbass. It’s just probable credit card fraud. The cops don’t actually give two pinches of sour owl shit about that. They won’t even do a drive-by to look for the truck; clerk said the suspects took off in it.”

  “So it’s not a worry?”

  “Didn’t say that, primo. The video’s still evidence. They find the missing truck, or other crimes start getting reported, it’ll get grabbed right off. You know how prosecutors love to pile criminal charges all on top of each other.”

  I didn’t. But mostly what I was thinking was, Dude’s an ace-powered con man who ripped off some good-natured good ol’ boy for wheels and whatever money he had in his bank account. What’re the odds he’s not doing more crimes?

  I sighed. “Nothing’s ever easy. Except—still no names? No alert for a Runaway who look like that?”

  “Not yet. So I guess you get two bits of good news for the price of one.”

  “Okay, thanks, Florene. Give my love to Oscar and Ruby.” Oscar Ishikawa was her mortal saint of a husband. He worked for a landscaping business in Kerrville and was studying garden and landscape design at the vocational school there. Ruby was their year-old daughter. “I, uh. I owe you one.”

  “Hold that thought, buddy boy. Give my love to your mamacita and the finger to your snooty bitch sisters.”

  I’m not Sherlock—which by the way is the name my older sisters are totally going to hang on me once they get wind of my current gig. (They really aren’t that bitchy. They just don’t like Florene. They are snooty, though. And, well, older sisters.)

  But I didn’t need to be Sherlock to notice that the big front windows of the little gas station store showed nothing but this strange, deep blackness that clearly wasn’t Mylar taped over them inside. Nor did I need to be to realize some ace power was in play, or had been very recently. And that was before I spotted the weird tendril of sight-swallowing black that ran out the top of the window to envelop what I took was the security cam on the store roof in its own tiny cloud o’ impenetrable darkness.

  I turned right down the next side street. I also did not have to be a real detective, much less a wizard fictional one, to realize whoever was responsible for the blackout was up to something they probably wouldn’t feel like leaving by the front door afterward.

  The gas station was located in a settled, lower-middle-class-looking suburban part of Kerrville. The neighborhood was pretty nice, with lawns and established trees. Luckily most people seemed to be at work. Some kids were playing in a sprinkler a block and a half down the side street, but I didn’t see any adults watching them. Which twitches some people out something powerful, a thing I do not understand.

  I parked the RAV4 under a scrawny ash tree alongside the Stop ’n Save—can’t speak to areas outside of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, but convenience stores here got abbreviation issues, it seems to me. I walked up to the back corner of the little cinder-block building as if I was the Kerrville Alley Inspector and peeked around as if I was a not very experienced spy. Which I was.

  Sure enough, a person was emerging from the store’s green-painted metal back door, looking even more guilty than I was sure I did. It was a young black woman, girl maybe, with a short Afro, dressed in a nice black T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She had a little black plastic box, like maybe a video recorder, tucked under one skinny arm.

  She was looking the other way. I started walking toward her. I don’t know if she heard my cowboy boots crunching alley gravel, but she swiveled her head right toward me. She was not hard on the eyes, if in an underfed way.

  “Hold on, there, ms. We need to talk.”

  She opened her mouth and eyes wide, and black stuff poured out at me. Like squid ink but airborne. The world went black. Like, dead black. Like bottom of a coal mine at midnight black. (Coal mines are deep underground, right? I don’t know anything about mining coal other than it’s dirty and dangerous.)

  Too black. I couldn’t see the end of my nose.

  The first thing I thought was, Stop, drop, and roll!

  The second was, That’s for when you’re on fire, which you clearly aren’t, ¡tonto!

  But by then I was already halfway to the ground and noticing, Hey, I can see again! Which just goes to show, you might as well go ahead and give it a shot.

  I landed hard, which gave the mostly healed-up microfractures in my lumbar spine a twinge, but nothing I hadn’t felt before. The woman was hightailing it the other way down the alley. So I resorted to the good old playground trick of scooping up a fistful of dust and tossing it in her face.

  Now if you’ve been paying attention, you likely noticed that I was sitting on my butt watching her a good thirty feet from me and receding fast. Meaning that I was in precisely no position to go grabbing up dust with my hand and throwing it in her face.

  But I don’t have to use my hand. I’m an ace too. Dust’s my power. Really, it’s the sort of power that strikes most people as a deuce. But I figured out a few uses for it long before it ever dawned on me that other people couldn’t just make little bits of fine powder dance around on command.

  It was a good thing she wasn’t any farther, or she’d have been out of reach. But I got her dead-on. She stumbled and fell headlong, coughing. The recorder squirted out from under her arm and went skittering along the gravel like a startled squirrel.

  I picked myself up and ran after her. She had obviously used the same ace on me she’d used to black out the surveillance camera out front, and the store’s inside. I didn’t know if she was fixing to use it again—nor what to do about it if she did. So I did what my abuela always accuses me of doing, which is lead with my face and hope for the best.

  Hey, sometimes it works. It did now. I hauled her up off the ground by one arm—she was heavier than she looked, suggesting some wiry muscles packed on that skinny frame—just as a siren began to sing its doo-wop song, not right nearby, but not too far and getting not-farther in a hurry.

  “Whether he could see you or not, looks like the clerk in there had the presence of mind to hit the silent alarm. We gotta get out of here.”

  She glared at me. Which was not too effective, given that her right eyelid was blinking furiously all on its lonesome. The eye behind it was red. “‘We’?” she demanded.

  “I don’t wanna answer their questions. I’d just as soon you not either.” I let go her arm and retrieved the recorder. “Come with me. My car’s right around the corner.”

  “Aren’t we enemies?” She had an odd little accent. Thought it was French.

  I waved the recorder at her. “Fact we’re after the same thing sounds to me like we might be allies. Come on. Talk on the run.”

  “No, I can take care of mys—ow! Shit, shit, shit, shit. Merde!”

  “Doesn’t that just mean—”

  “Shut up! This is your fault. I got a piece of dust under my eyelid and it feels like a knife on my eyeball. It won’t let me concentrate. I can’t call the Darkness.”

  You could hear the capital letter.

  “Then come with me, all right?”

  She didn’t argue anymore but followed, blinking her right eye like she had a serious tic, with tears running down her cheek.

  We jumped in the RAV4. You know those horror movies when the kids are fleeing the cabin with the chainsaw murderer hot on their trail, and they pile in a car, and the car doesn’t start? Yeah, fortunately the RAV4 didn’t see those movies. It started right up and purred right on down the street toward the kids hopping obliviously around in the Rain Bird spray.

  My passenger was pulling her right eyelid down with a finger and sticking her head up in the rearview to see it. “Stop that,” I said. “You’re getting in the way.”

  “But I need to get this out of my eye.”

  “Been there. There’s a mirror on your sunshade.”

  She glared at me again, but sat back in her seat and flipped the shade down. />
  “When you get a chance,” I said, “you might put your seat belt on. The car yelling at me about it gets tiresome in a hurry.”

  She did, then went back to trying to extract the grit from her eye. Had to be feeling like a jagged boulder by now. “Can’t you drive this piece of shit faster?”

  “Not without looking suspiciously as if I’m fleeing the scene of untoward events at the convenience store. Which reminds me of Bill and Ted. Did you ever see—”

  “No! What’s wrong with you?”

  “Well, to start with, I’m a permanently out of work bull rider who got roped into doing a job I got not the first inkling of how—”

  “No! I mean, why are you here? And why are you helping me escape?”

  “Wave to the kids, now, real nice.” I turned left, after signaling, of course. Nothing to see here. Just a West Texas Latino kiboy with an angry young black woman whose kidnapper he was. Or accomplice, depending. “I was fixing to answer that first part. But like I say, we seem to be in the same business.”

  “How do you think that?” She took a finger away and blinked experimentally. “Fuck.”

  “See, I happen to know the clerk at that store back there just happened to call in an attempt to pass a debit card reported stolen not too long ago. I come here to talk to the person, and what do I find? A whole mess of unnatural darkness, and a person creeping out the back door with the very evidence of that attempt tucked under her arm.” I gave her a little frown. “Unless that’s the decoy. Sometimes these stores—”

  “It’s not the decoy, you—you hayseed. It’s the real thing. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Yeah. Your subtle little ninja act back there proved that. The back-door creep that shouted to the world, ‘I’m stealin’ stuff here!’ That weird darkness that adds, ‘And I’m an ace while doin’ it! Woo-hoo!’”

  “You’re an ace, too,” she said accusingly.

  “Guilty. Name’s Jesse, by the way, since we’re confessing our life stories here.”

  She sat back in her seat and looked sulky. “I’m Candace. People call me the Darkness.”

  “You must be a big hit at parties.”

  “What is that supposed to mea—”

  “So what I am doing here is, the family of a girl called Mindy-Lou hired me to bring her back to a band competition in San Antonio, from which she was lured away by a sweet-talking lowlife goes by the name of Billy Rainbow. He’s an ace.”

  I was trying to drive without running into anything, but also I was looking around. Playing a hunch. We’d turned back onto the bigger street the Stop ’n Save fronted on. A police cruiser with its light bar going passed us heading the other direction.

  I glanced at the rearview. “That big old cloud of Darkness filling the Stop ’n Save is gonna clue them in there’s a little more going on than a robbery.”

  “No. It melts away. Like fog. Police usually don’t believe the people I use it on.” She squinted at me. “My job is to bring the girl back as well.”

  “Her family didn’t hire you, too? Honestly, I don’t know anything about ’em, other than her aunt plays bingo with my abuel—my grandma.”

  “The record label hired me.”

  I slapped the top of the steering wheel. “Who-ee! Then we’re not rivals after all!”

  She looked at me narrowly. Her eye wasn’t doing its semaphore-signaling thing anymore, suggesting she’d got the last fleck of dust out. “How do you arrive at that? Aren’t we after the same thing?”

  “Exactly! And when we find this girl, and deliver her back to the big-band thing—quietly—”

  “Which is how my employers want it, too.”

  “Then we each get paid, and we go our merry ways. It’s two for the price of one! Or one for the price of two? Or something!”

  “Don’t you ever shut up?”

  “Sometimes. My mama always taught me it’s rude to chew with my mouth open.” I glanced past her, kicked the brakes, and yanked the wheel right into a sudden strip mall. The harness brought her up pretty hard as she rocked forward.

  “See?” I said. “Seat belts.”

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned right again, around a walk-in barbershop at the front of the lot. “Now, what is this I see to my right?”

  “A bunch of cars? Mostly outsized American pickup trucks?”

  “Yep. And you will notice among them a faded red 2010 Ford F-150, four-door, with a V8 engine, approximate size of the flight deck on the USS Leo Barnett. Whose license plate happens to match the one on the truck our boy Billy Rainbow allegedly used his ace to get a citizen to hand over to him in the San Antone suburbs. Billy ditched it once he realized it was reported stolen, just like I thought.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “That’s what I do. I drink soda pop and I know things. Or at least it’s what I do since my grandmother called me up on the phone last night and informed me I was going into the detective business if I knew what was good for me.”

  She twisted around in her shoulder harness to look. “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “I am going to carefully note the location and inform a good old boy who calls himself Rooster—you met him, you’d know why—where to get his truck back. And add the towing fee to my bill to the family, since he’s agreed not to press charges if I make him whole, as the saying goes. And you are being not subtle again. Will you sit down? You act like you’re as new to this crime business as I am to detectiving.”

  “I am a very experienced criminal,” she said stiffly. But she sat back again.

  I put my blinker on and turned back onto the road.

  “So why did you want the recorder?” she asked.

  “I don’t. I wanted to get the clerk to agree that, being as no crime had been committed—both the stolen-truck beef and credit card beef bein’ withdrawn, and all—there was nothing for the video to be evidence of. And to give him a little gift from the Gutiérrez family, if that helped sweeten the deal.”

  “You mean bribe a witness. I thought you were supposed to be a good guy.”

  “I am,” I said, “as I see it. I’ve just always been of the opinion that there’s what’s lawful, and there’s what’s right, and the twain don’t always meet. I reckon if everybody comes out of this fandango as well off as they went in, or maybe un poquito better, then no harm, no foul.”

  She picked up the recorder and stared at it as if it had just fallen out of a flying saucer. “So what am I supposed to do with this?”

  “I guess putting it back where you found it is out of the question? We gotta figure a way to ditch it without it getting tracked back to us—since it’s evidence of the only actual crime that’s been committed here, far as we know.”

  “Listening to you makes my head hurt.”

  “That’s a surprisingly common reaction.”

  “I can get the recorder taken care of.” She took out an iPhone and swiped it on with her thumb.

  Connections started coming together in my mind so hard I was surprised she didn’t hear the clicks. “Wait,” I said. “You got a smartphone. I got a smartphone. All God’s children got a smartphone.”

  She held the phone away from her face and looked at me in irritation. I guess I don’t really need to specify that, since that’s pretty much the only way she had looked at me so far. I’ll let you know when it changes, okay? “Who says that?”

  “Groucho Marx. You got some gaps in your education, Little Ms. Frenchy. Or is it French Canadian?”

  “I am West African.”

  “Okay. Now, if you’d just quit digressing, I was about to say that a modern teenager like Mindy-Lou Gutiérrez most assuredly has a smartphone.”

  She looked worried. Which is different from looking ticked at me, so I thought I’d mention it. “The police can track those by cell phone pings.”

  “Which makes it mighty handy for us nobody reported her as a runaway yet, much less a kidnap victim, giving the police no call to
do that thing.”

  I turned off down another side street—less shady, with some none-too-hospitable-looking apartments on either side—and stopped.

  “What’re you doing now?”

  “Not getting a traffic ticket,” I said as I hit speed dial for the abuela.

  “But you said you didn’t care much about the laws.”

  “I do care much about being found with a self-professed hardened criminal and a boosted video recorder in my car. Now give me a minute.… ¿Abuelita? Yeah, it’s me. Yeah, I know you got caller ID. No, it’s not money this time.…”

  Several minutes later I had my old-ass Galaxy III giving me directions to the nearest I-10 westbound on-ramp in the Google lady’s voice.

  “What are you doing now?” Candace asked.

  An incoming SMS notification popped up. “Scoring!”

  I pulled into a thrift store lot. Getting quite the tour of Kerrville’s finer parking lots and side streets, today. I called the number.

  “What now?”

  “I’m calling Mindy-Lou. Family gave it to my grandma. She’s blocked their numbers. But I’m hoping she’ll take a call from me.”

  “From a complete stranger?”

  “She ran off with a dude who calls himself Billy freaking Rainbow,” I reminded her. Then I held a finger briefly in front of my lips. “Hello, Mindy-Lou? Please don’t hang up! My name’s Jesse Rodríguez, and I want to help you.…”

  “They’re holed up in something called the Motel Hide-a-Way on the far outskirts of Fort Stockton,” I said, putting my phone back on GPS directions and back in my shirt, and the truck back on the road. “Seems she saw through Billy’s rainbow act and is pretty mad at him now.”

  “He’s still with her?”

  “Yeah. Apparently he pointed out to her they’re both in this together.”

  She crossed herself as I slid into the traffic heading to El Paso.

  “Hey!” I said. “You’re Catholic too?”

  “Of course. I am from French West Africa.”

  “I thought everybody there was Muslim or something?”

  “Not my family,” she said sniffily. “So, this girl just told you where they are?”