The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (38 page)

Then I was on the playground at Jem's new school. I
was frantically searching for Jem, but all the little kids looked
exactly the same — little pastel polo shirts and khakis, black hair
and brown skin, all with the face of Michael Brandon. My eyes opened.
The sky was dark. I focused on a fuzzy patch of yellow — my old
chum the streetlight.

Other senses kicked in. I could smell dried urine and
sweat and cigarette smoke. I was lying on something soft and bumpy —
the broken-down couch in the vacant lot. I was covered with a
blanket. Without much effort I turned my head and got a view of the
street.

It looked like West Commerce, or one of the side
streets around there. Two wide lanes, one way, moderately busy
traffic. The warehouse where I'd been dragged the last time I was
conscious rose to the side, a green cinder-block wall with a heavy
door in the middle and a dumpster at the corner. Across the street
was an old craftsman house, boarded up and ringed with cyclone
fencing, vacant lots on either side. The street and the sidewalk
glittered with broken bottles and syringes.

One of the young men who'd kept watch over me earlier
was at the curb, dealing into a brown Chrysler. The young man
collected cash, slipped something from the pocket of his jacket to
the driver, then retreated to the lamppost and lit a match and a
cigarette as the car pulled away. The next customer didn't take long
to pull up, or the one after that. It was about the same frequency as
the drive-through at Burger King.

A voice closer to me called over to the guy on the
street. It asked, in Spanish, how the supply was. The guy answered:
"Twenty dimes, five large."

The voice nearer to me said, "Bueno."

The speaker was probably leaning against the wall of
the building, not two feet behind me.

A pager went off. At first I thought I was imagining
the sound. Then Porkpie walked into my line of sight.

He was wearing the hat with a different ensemble
today — baggy jeans, army-green-and-maroon shirt, leather bike-grip
gloves, air-pump spaceman shoes. He checked his beeper and then took
out a tiny cell phone, unfolded it, made a call. Meanwhile two more
punks drifted in from down the street, shook hands with the dealer at
the street-lamp, then walked over to the dumpster and hung out,
talking casually, lighting each other's joint. Traffic continued down
the street. Sometimes cars pulled up to the curb. Most just drove by.

I was lying not ten yards from a public street, doped
to the gills, and nobody was paying me any mind. If anyone even
noticed me, they probably figured I was just a wino, some derelict
the punks had allowed to crash in their outdoor office. I wondered
that no police cars went by, that they didn't rush in and find me and
break up the dealing. But I knew better. If a police car had been
anywhere close, signalmen armed with cell phones up and down the
surrounding blocks would've been on to the threat instantly. Beepers
would beep a warning code. The stash would get ditched in the
dumpster and the kids would vanish down the side streets and I'd
either get dragged back in the warehouse or, more likely, killed and
left for the police to find — doped up and murdered, just another
victim of another deal gone bad. Probably make an interesting feature
on page A12, former sheriffs son OD'ed and killed at a West Side drug
spot. The drug business would be back in swing on a different corner
before my blood had even soaked into the stinking fabric of the
couch.

Porkpie kept pacing back and forth. He glanced at me
occasionally, but the fact that my eyes were open didn't seem to
bother him. For all I knew my eyes had been open for days, glazed and
useless while my brain had checked out. I tried to wiggle my toes,
got excited when I felt the fabric of my socks against them. I tried
to move a knee. I couldn't do that. My arms were dead weight. My head
throbbed. I swallowed, then ran my tongue back and forth in my mouth,
got a sensation like licking a sand castle. I was not going to leap
up right away and tackle anybody. But at least I could form the idea
of doing so. The detective as philosopher.

I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to shove
Porkpie's state-of-the-art cell phone down his throat.

Another car slid down the block and pulled over — a
blue Impala, '83, pretty badly banged up. The car windows were tinted
and the interior pitch-black. The dealer disengaged himself from his
two friends at the dumpster and took a wary step toward the Impala,
his hand in his black coat.

The guy in the passenger's seat cracked open his
window. "Azul rife! Y que?"

Old-style cholo greeting: The Blue rules. What're you
gonna do about it?

The dealer and his friends relaxed. All flashed a
hand sign at the Impala. The dealer walked toward the car's back
window, which was just now rolling down. Then the dealer's black coat
exploded like an air bag.

The high-caliber shot launched him off his feet into
a reverse jackknife, the back of his coat shredding away in a spiral
of blood and fabric. He hit the ground just as a shotgun blast from
the Impala's open passenger window slammed into his friends by the
dumpster — scouring metal and brick and bodies with buckshot.
Someone shrieked. Porkpie dropped his phone and ran. He made it over
the fence at the back of the lot in two moves.

Then it was quiet except for the sound of two men in
misery by the dumpster. One of them kept crawling around, screaming.
The other just twitched. The dealer never moved. The dumpster and
warehouse wall behind them were freckled with blood and shot.

Ralph Arguello stepped out of the passenger's-side
door of the Impala holding a high-powered over-and-under Mossberg.
Erainya Manos came from the driver's side, her .38 up next to her
ear. Another guy I didn't recognize got out of the back. He carried
the snub-nosed .45 automatic that had just drilled the hole in the
dealer's chest.

The round lenses of Ralph's glasses glinted in the
yellow streetlight like coins. He planted his boot on the chest of
one of the guys who was still alive, then lowered the shotgun muzzle
against the kid's face. Erainya snarled: "No!"

Ralph glanced back at her, had a brief staring
battle, then raised the shotgun and made a golf swing with the barrel
against the kid's face hard enough to roll him over. Erainya jogged
over to me.

Her hair was a mess. She had red lines on her arms
like junkie tracks. Her face was made up even gaunter and darker than
usual. She was dressed in an old T-shirt and jeans. She passed very
effectively for a strung-out user, a washed-up prostitute maybe, a
woman like a hundred others who might visit this spot regularly.

She crooned, "Oh, honey." I'd never heard
her sound so kind.

Then she got her arms around me and lifted me up. I
was maybe seventy-five pounds heavier than she, but Erainya dragged
me all the way back to the car. I could see Ralph, training his
shotgun lazily on the wounded second man. The gang-banger's face
looked like a rust-eaten car hood — most of his left cheek scoured
to blood, his left eye ruptured and the irreplaceable fluid dribbling
down his cheek.

Ralph's helper, the man with the .45, was busy
stripping the dead young dealer of his heroin.

Erainya got me in the car. Within seconds I was
wedged between her and the man with the .45 and Ralph was in the
driver's seat, speeding us silently away from the West Side. We heard
a siren behind us, a long way off.

When Ralph spoke his voice was so taut with anger I
hardly recognized it. He said, "Mi pendejo rife. Y que?"
 

FORTY-SIX

"Nobody passes a boosted red Barracuda in S.A.
without me knowing about it."

Ralph spoke somewhere in the darkness. "Fuck
Chich, he thinks he can pull that shit in my town."

"I suppose I had nothing to do with this
operation," Erainya griped.

"No offense, senora. You handled it pretty good
for a gringa."

Erainya called Ralph some names in Greek. Ralph
defended himself in Spanish. I knew neither could understand the
other. That was probably just as well.

"I love you both," I mumbled. "Now
shut up."

Astoundingly, they did.

I drifted to sleep to the sound of the Impala engine.
Sometime during the ride, I think I recalled the mysterious .45 man,
whom Ralph called Freeze, being dropped off. Freeze patted me on the
shoulder and told me that for another hundred, he'd be happy to drill
anybody for me any day.

The next time I woke up I was lying flat, staring at
bare cedar rafters and an old ceiling fan. When I tried to move, cot
springs clinked and clunked like a broken music box. The fan wobbled
precariously.

A thickly accented woman's voice said, "Hol'
still, damn it."

Dr. Janice Farn hovered over me, giving me a view of
curly white hair and bifocals and the Calvin Klein fedora that Aileen
the cow had once driven her hoof through.

I started to say something, but Farn cut me off.
"Hol' still and shut up."

I had no recollection of arriving where I obviously
was — the Navarre family ranch in Sabinal — but I held still. And
shut up. Dr. Farn's hand dabbed at my face.

"Had to cut a little to get at the infection in
your cheek." Her breath smelled distinctly of Jack Daniel's —
not surprising, knowing Farn, but not a smell you wanted on someone
who was giving you urgent medical attention.

Farn must've been past eighty, tough as beef jerky, a
widow and a large-animal vet who'd leased most of her neighboring
wheat fields to the Navarre family for as many years as I could
remember. Now in her retirement, Farn no longer made house calls
unless it was for a sick cow she really cared about. I supposed I
should feel honored.

We were on the back gallery of the ranch. The early
morning air was bleeding through the screens. Outside, ground fog was
turning the yellow huisache trees into hazy sketches. Charolais cows
drifted across the pasture. The old white water tank rose in the
distance. The hay shed. Past that, a hundred acres of stunted Texas
wheat just turning from green to gold. Pastoral.

Farn finished stitching me up, then checked the
dilation of my eyes and the IV that she had attached to my arm. She
yelled into the next room, "Arguello!" Ralph came in,
holding a snifter with my father's name, JACK, printed on the side.
Ralph's hair was freshly washed and unbraided. It fell in a loose fan
of gray and black. With his huge white shirt untucked he looked like
one of the apostles, one of the very bad ones.

"Looking better, vato."

"Better than what?" I managed.

Farn closed up her kit, scowled down at me. "Yer
lucky as hell. Be all right — hell of a headache for a few days,
soreness all over. The drugs they gave you are going to leave you
with the shakes, some nausea. Heroin mixed with some kind of
prescription sedative, near as I can figure. You might black out once
in a while."

"Yay."
 
"You're
going to feel like you been run over on a West Texas highway and left
to dry in the sun, darlin', but trust me — you're damn lucky."

"I want some water," I said.

Farn nodded. "Figures. I'll see y'all later."

She was replaced by Erainya, who stared down at me
critically. She held a glass identical to Ralph's — one of the Jack
snifters.

Ralph took the chair Janice Farn had been sitting in.
He propped some more pillows behind my back.

Erainya drained her whiskey, then grimaced. "So,
what — you think it's easy to get a baby-sitter for two days? You
think Kelly wanted to give up a weekend to mind Jem and our guests
while we bailed you out of trouble?"

"Our guests. Jesus Christ."

"Still at my house," Erainya assured me.
"Little Michael..." She shook her head. "Poor paidi's
never even played Donkey Kong before."

"Can you imagine."

Erainya shook her head again. "Ines isn't too
happy, either. She wanted to bolt out the door when she heard what
had happened to you."

"Why didn't she?"

Erainya glared at me, giving me a taste of the
scolding she had no doubt inflicted on poor unhappy Ines.

"Thank you," I said.

Erainya slapped the air. "She'll stay put for a
few more days anyway."

"Long as you keep the television news turned
off," Ralph added.

"The news?"

"Never mind, vato. Time for that later."
Ralph drained the Jack glass.

I looked into the main house, through the mud-and-log
doorway that had been the original front entrance in the 1870s.
Beyond the archway, the living room was long and low, dimly lit. A
fire was going in the old limestone hearth. Ozzie Gerson and Harold
Diliberto, the ranch caretaker, stood looking down into the flames.
Ozzie wore a side arm and Harold had a deer rifle nestled in his arm.
"Ozzie took early retirement as of today," Erainya informed
me. "He says he'll be here as long as you need him. Diliberto
says he won't put the rifle down until  you tell him to. The old
geezer told me anybody tries to get to you out here, he and Ozzie are
going to use the tiger traps, whatever that means. I got my doubts
about him."