The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (20 page)

Then he got up and pushed me off my stool as hard as
he could.

I went toppling backward and on the way down managed
to connect just about every part of my body with something hard and
wooden. I landed with the seat of the stool in my gut, my left leg
laced through the spokes. The floor was sticky. A beer bottle cap was
pressed into my palm.

Mara stood over me. The crowd was silent, waiting for
a fight.

Mara disappointed them.

"Be cool to the homies, gringo," he told
me. "Stick around. See how long before they drag you out with
the trash."

He grabbed his PalmPilot and walked toward the exit,
the old gunshot wound making his gait only slightly stiff. The locos
in the corner laughed at my expense.

I got up, dusted myself off.

In the reflection of the hammered tin, I watched
Hector Mara getting into his old Ford Galaxie and pulling out of the
lot.

When someone humiliates you in a bar, you don't
really have a choice. You've got to sit back down and finish your
drink, just to prove you can. So I did.

I listened to another Shelly Lares tune. I thought
about George Berton, tried to remind myself that George was a big boy
who knew what he was doing, and he'd just yell at me for interfering
if I called him now. I thought about Hector Mara's initiation to Zeta
Sanchez's set until my leg started to ache. I looked at the little
red circle the beer bottle cap had bitten into my palm and thought
about a hundred other places I would rather be than the Poco Mas.

Then another round of laughter erupted at the locos'
table in the back and I decided I might as well add insult to injury.

I grabbed the Budweiser that Hector Mara had refused
and went to talk to a girl I knew.
 

TWENTY-ONE

Her name was Mary. The last time I'd seen her, just
before Christmas, Ralph Arguello and I had rescued her from an
underage prostitution ring by throwing her pimp off the Navarro
Street Bridge. Her liberation had been one of the only good
by-products from my search for a rich client's runaway daughter.

Mary was wearing tonight what she'd worn back in
December, which was a bad sign — partially unbuttoned denim dress,
black hose, thick-soled pumps, way too much makeup in an effort to
conceal her fifteen years. Her hair poured down either side of her
pretty face like slow-motion loops of caramel in a candy bar
commercial. Her ankles were crossed and her shoulders tensed as she
sat on the young man's lap and watched me walk up to the booth.

I looked at the guy in the porkpie hat. "I need
to talk with your lap-warmer for a minute."

Porkpie stared at me, his mouth spreading into a
dazed grin, like he'd just gotten a much bigger birthday present than
he expected. "That a fact?"

His three friends in the booth watched, waiting for
some kind of cue. The one with the Raiders jacket could've been
carrying just about anything underneath. I tried not to dwell on
that.

I set my Budweiser on their table, then held out my
hand for Mary. "That's a fact."

Mary's face was deadly calm except for her eyes,
which kept trying to warn me off. She didn't want to come with me,
but she knew better than to stay between me and Porkpie. She took my
hand, slid off the guy's lap and onto the floor next to me.

"The bar," I told her.

"Hey, chica," Porkpie said. "You
figure he'll take a whole minute?"

"Push him off his stool," one of his
friends suggested.

The others laughed.

Mary brushed past me, her eyes still trying to give
me a warning. I took back my beer and started to follow.

To my surprise, the boys didn't make a move.

I kept walking, the skin on my back tingling, my feet
sensitive to any bump or dip in the floorboards behind me.

Mary perched on the stool where Hector Mara had sat,
her legs crossed, her fingernails resting upright like talons on the
stained oak counter. When I sat down next to her she leaned forward
and whispered harshly, "Jesus, Tres. You trying to get me
killed?"

"What are you doing out here, Mary? You told
Ralph—"

Mary hissed: "Shut up!" then pursed her
lips, closed her eyes tight like she was trying to retract the
statement.

The skin below her eyes was dotted with extra
mascara. Her babyish cheeks were clown-red, her lips pouty and slick
with lipstick. "I got a little behind with some payments, is
all. Don't make a big deal out of it. Buy me a beer, at least."

"You're fifteen."

She burst into a laugh as brief and violent as her
anger. "So? Come on, Tres. You're cool."

"You want me to get you out of here?"

"I was fine until you messed me up. You know
them guys—"

As if on cue, Porkpie slid out of the booth. He
swaggered in our direction, pushed with needless force past a couple
of the older guys at the tables, then came toward me. His friends
threw out encouraging comments.

His arms were lean and smooth, his face round. The
wispy black fuzz around his chin was the only testament to his
graduation from puberty. He walked in an imitation of the joint walk
of ex-cons, a gait he had neither the weight nor the muscles for.

"Yo, pendejo, minute's up. Little mama got to
put out more better than that for me, man."

He leered at Mary, gestured for her to come away.

"Go back and sit down," I told him.

He gave me vacant eyes, a wide smile, his thoughts
already retreating into his chest in a prebattle mode I recognized
well. I saw the tension in his left hand, knew that he was about to
impress me with a weapon-draw he'd probably practiced in his bedroom
mirror a thousand times.

When the switchblade came out of his back pocket,
flashing up in an arc toward my nose, I already had the rhythm of the
move. My hand followed his wrist, caught it from underneath halfway,
then pulled it toward me, dragging his arm across the counter between
Mary and me.

Porkpie's armpit slammed against the bar. With my
free hand I pressed his cheek down onto the sticky oak, crumpling his
hat into a felt wad. My other thumb dug into the nerves of his wrist
until the knife clattered free, falling somewhere behind the bar. The
old bartender started waving his arms at me, protesting about the new
management.

I let go of Porkpie's head and fished the gun out of
his huge pants pocket before he could get to it. I flipped him around
so he was facing his friends. I had his hand twisted up between his
shoulder blades and his own Taurus P-11 pressed against his ear.

His friends were half standing, half crouching in
their booth seats. All three had guns drawn — a nine, a .38. The
guy with the Raiders jacket had drawn something that looked like a
miniature AK-47. Nice kids.

"It's the need to show off," I said in
Porkpie's ear. His face smelled like an autoshop. "You got this
nice ten-shot and you have to scare me with the switchblade routine
first. That won't earn you the big money from Chich."

"Fuck you." His voice was tight as a rivet.

Mary sat completely frozen. So did three tables full
of patrons between me and the kids with the guns.

"Tell your homeboys to put their pieces down,"
I said, a little louder.

Porkpie said, "You're fucking dead"

I looked at the guys across the room. "I heard
him say put the guns on the table. Did you hear that?"

Enough time passed for a line of sweat to snake its
way between my shoulder blades, for Porkpie to exhale his sour breath
on me six times.

His friends put their guns on the table.

I told Mary, "Outside."

"I ain't leaving," she said hoarsely.

The fear in her voice told me otherwise — that she
knew who the young locos would take their revenge on once I was gone.
I slid off my bar stool and side-walked Porkpie toward the door, his
playmates' eyes drilling holes in me the whole ten feet. I waited
until Mary was out the door behind me, until I heard her steps
crunching over the gravel. She knew my car. I waited until she'd had
enough time to find it.

Then I pushed Porkpie into the cantina, toppling him
against a table and into the lap of a large woman in red. I backed
out the door, dropped the P-11, and ran.

No shots rang out. No one followed. In a way, that
just made me more nervous.

Once we were in the VW, driving north up Zarzamora,
Mary exhaled more air than I would've thought possible for her small
body to contain. "You're a fucker, Tres. Messing me up like
that."

"You're welcome, Mary."

"They'll kill me, they see me again!"

"Sounds like a good reason not to see them
again."

"You're such a fucker."

"How much do you need?"

"What?"

Her caramel curls were coming undone in the wind.

"I don't have much. I can give you maybe thirty
in cash."

She drew her knees up on the seat and hugged them, a
move a larger girl, a woman, couldn't have done. "I don't want
your money."

"You wanted fuzz-face's instead?"

"Man, just lay off. Okay? You're not my dad.
You're not even old enough."

Her real dad, I knew, had not been old enough to be
her dad either, but I didn't bring that up.

We turned on Woodlawn and started east. "Your
stepsister still live on Agarita?"

"They kicked me out, man. I don't stay there no
more."

"You got a friend to stay with?"

She hugged herself a little tighter. Finally,
mumbling into her knees, she gave me the address of a girl she knew
near Jefferson High, a girl who was still living with her parents and
going to school. "But they put me up already this month. I don't
know if they'll go for it."

"They'll go for it. Call your social worker in
the morning."

"Social worker don't do shit, Tres. My old man
came back three times and she don't do shit, no more than my mother."

"Call Ralph, then. Promise me you'll do that."

Mary mumbled some unflattering and untrue things
about why Ralph Arguello liked to help wayward girls. I chose not to
respond.

Finally Mary's shoulders deflated. "Yeah. Okay.
I'll call him."

We drove back toward Jefferson, into the old
neighborhoods of tiled porches and palm trees and once-majestic
Spanish homes that had long ago been divided into units, fitted with
burglar bars. Their front yard patches of nopalita cactus were carved
with gang graffiti on the oval blades. In my headlights the sidewalks
and curbs glowed with spray-painted gang symbols. Pitchfork up, one
block. Pitchfork down the next. Make a pitchfork hand gesture the
wrong way on the wrong block and you died.

"Tres, why were you at that place tonight,
talking to Hector?"

"You know him?"

She poked at her lip, then looked at the greasy spot
of lipstick on her finger, wiped it on her knee. "I see him
there a lot. Sometimes with Chich. Week ago he was in with this big
guy with a beard and ponytail and shit — looked like a big-time
dealer. Scarier than Chicharron."

"Zeta Sanchez."

She nodded hesitantly. "I didn't mess with them.
The Sanchez guy was all talking about his wife, looking to find her.
And the other guy, Hector, he was saying like, 'This ain't going to
get you nowhere, man.' I wouldn't have talked that way to Ponytail,
the way he looked."

When we got to the address on Jefferson Drive where
Mary's friend lived, Mary insisted on going in by herself.

She got out of the car, then turned and leaned back
in. "Hector's badder than he looks, Tres. I think you should
watch it."

"What makes you say that?"

"He nearly killed this other guy I saw him
talking to in the Poco Mas. Couple of weeks before. A white guy."

My throat tightened. "Who?"

The porch light of the house came on behind Mary and
she said, "I gotta go."

I reached over and caught her wrist gently. "This
Anglo. Describe him."

"Chunky. Dark hair. One of those orange tropical
shirts. I don't know."

"You hear a name?"

"B—Branson?"

"Brandon?"

"Maybe that was it."

A woman called Mary's name from the porch and Mary
winced apologetically. She leaned all the way into the car and gave
me a sticky kiss on the cheek. She smelled of at least three
different kinds of cheap perfume.

"Call Ralph," I told her.

She tried for a smile, then trotted up the sidewalk
to meet her friend. With her back turned, without the conscious
effort in her walk, she almost looked fifteen. I pulled away from the
curb, hoping the wind would push the scent of her perfume away.
 

TWENTY-TWO