The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (6 page)

Ozzie watched the houses go by, his big glassy eyes
deconstructing the architecture and the landscapes and the people in
the yards with the same dispassionate criticism.

"Not enough trees," he said.

"Pardon?"

"I couldn't live here. Not enough trees. And all
the garages in the front. Makes
for an ugly
facade."

"What happened to Zeta Sanchez after he killed
Jeremiah?"

Ozzie's gaze kept sliding over the lawns and garages.
"Disappeared. Word was he ran to Mexico to escape a hit by
Brandon's older son, Del, who took over the business. Or maybe
Sanchez got hit and was buried in the countryside somewhere. The
manhunt yielded exactly nothing. There never was any hard evidence to
connect Sanchez to the kill — no shells. No prints. None of the
witnesses would break no matter how hard we questioned, not and risk
retaliation from Sanchez's veterano friends on the West Side. Sanchez
just vanished. Jeremiah Brandon's murder case stayed open — still
is, but you know how it goes. Old Jeremiah wasn't exactly a great
loss to society. Then about three weeks ago, Sanchez reappeared. Just
showed up at the Poco Mas. Walked in after six years like he was a
regular guy, ordered a tequila shot, and told the bartender to call
some of his old vatos, tell them the 'Z' was back in town."

"And a few days after that, Aaron Brandon,
Jeremiah's younger son, was shot to death in his living room."

"That's about the size of it."

"Aaron was an English professor."

"Maybe now. But six years ago? Back then he was
snarled up good in the family business. My guess, he was helping his
brother Del put a knife in Sanchez's back."

"You got anything more than a guess?"

Ozzie's head jerked back in a silent laugh. "You
know what the M.E. pulled out of Aaron Brandon's fireplace last
Saturday?"

".45 slugs."

"Better than that. Hollow-tipped bullets,
mercury-filled. Not many sons of bitches ever used that kind of
artillery in San Antonio."

"Still—"

"And there's a witness. The professor's wife and
kid were out of town but they got this maid lives above the garage.
Everybody else in the neighborhood is pretty much deaf old retirees,
but the maid heard the two shots, gave a pretty good description of
the guy she saw coming out of Brandon's back door just afterward. She
made a positive ID on Sanchez in a photo lineup."

"Two shots with a .45, in a quiet residential
neighborhood. Sanchez just strolls out the back door and is nice
enough to leave a witness. This after he was smart enough to stay
hidden since when — '93?"

"Revenge makes you stupid. Thing about
gang-bangers, they're smart only in the ways that they're smart. Kind
of like academics."

"Hey—"

"I'm telling you, Navarre. I know Sanchez. He's
good for the murder. SAPD looks where I told them to look, they'll
nail his ass. Let's get some food." Ozzie cut across Military
Drive and pulled into the parking lot of a Circle K that squatted at
the entrance of a particularly bleak subdivision.

When the big-haired cashier saw Ozzie, she rolled her
eyes. "Where the hell you been all week?"

"Busy, Mabel. Hot dogs warm? Damn near gave me
E. coli last time."

"Oh, the hell they did," Mabel grumbled.
"You wish some bacteria'd eat off that extra flesh of yours,
Ozzie Gerson."

"Balls." Ozzie went behind the counter and
pulled two foam cups from the special cop dispenser.

I kid you not. There is a special cop dispenser. The
cups say FOR POLICE USE ONLY.

He tossed me one. "You're honorary today,
Navarre. Help yourself."

I got some Big Red. Ozzie went for Pepsi. For police
use only. Do not try this at home. We are trained professionals. We
know how to pour soda into these special cups.

Ozzie grabbed two hot dogs and offered me one. I
declined.

Ozzie began chewing on both of them. He eyed a couple
of large Latinos in construction clothes who were buying cigarettes
from Mabel.

"What about the pipe bomb at UTSA?" I asked
him. "The death threats?"

Ozzie kept chewing. "You mean was that Sanchez?
Why not? Solidox bomb is an old gang scare tactic. Lot of the
veteranos know how to make them."

"They learn how to craft political hate mail,
too?"

Ozzie dabbed the ketchup off his jowls with a Circle
K napkin. He kept his eyes on the Latinos at the register, who were
now asking for a fill-up on number four.

"I don't know, Navarre. Don't waste your time
trying to figure out Zeta Sanchez. He's a gang-banger. He passed the
exit for humans a long time ago." "Bullshit."

Ozzie shrugged. "You don't want to hear it,
don't. Jeremiah and Aaron Brandon weren't white, we wouldn't even be
having this conversation. We'd let Sanchez go on killing his own.
Tell me it ain't so."

I tried to control the swell of anger in my throat,
the feeling that I was back in my father's patrol car again, arguing
social issues until common sense started to bend like light around a
black hole. Ozzie was one of the last of my father's generation on
the force, the last who could give me that feeling. Maybe that's why
I'd kept in touch with Ozzie over the years. A sort of negative
nostalgia. Ozzie met my eyes, tried to soften his look of obstinance.
"Listen, kid. It's like I told Erainya — leave this murder to
the SAPD. All your friend Berton's got to do is dig around UTSA a
little, talk to some Mexican activist groups, decide they've got
nothing to do with the case and UTSA is safe. And I'm telling you —
this has got nada to do with campus politics. UTSA will be grateful,
you'll get paid for doing squat, we'll get Sanchez in custody,
everybody will be happy."

"Except Aaron Brandon, his wife, his kid."

Ozzie's eyes were the color of frozen vodka. "So
the prof had a family. You become a cop, Navarre, you take that
reverse gear and you rip it out of your transmission. You don't go
backward. You don't think about what you can't change."

"Like the days before you worked patrol?"

Gerson's doughy face mottled with red.

"Why'd they demote you, Ozzie? You never talk
about it."

"Drop it, Navarre. You weren't the son of the
guy that hired me, you'd be walking home right now."

The Latinos got their cigarettes and paid for their
gas and left. Ozzie looked disappointed. He wadded up his hot dog
paper tray and made a basket in the trash can. "Screw it,
anyway. I protested some bullshit evaluations from the new chief. It
was all fucking politics, okay?"

He started toward the door, waved for me to follow.
"See you, Mabel."

"Can't wait," she called.

We hadn't gone half a mile in Ozzie's unit before the
call came through, not over the radio but on the cell phone, which
meant Dispatch didn't want the media overhearing.

Ozzie said "Yeah" a few times, then checked
the information that was clicking across his MDT in glowing orange.
"36; P-32. Got it."

The patrol car was accelerating before he even hung
up.

"Speak of the devil," he said. "They
just got a warrant. Sanchez is bunking at his brother-in-law's house,
just off Green Road."

"That's close to here."

He smiled. "Sheriffs jurisdiction. SAPD is
requesting uniformed presence from us immediately. You up for this?"

He didn't wait for an answer. We hit eighty mph and
subdivisions started falling away, the land turning to farms, rows of
ripening watermelons, horse ranches.

"Trees," Ozzie murmured. "I retire,
man, my place is going to have trees in the lot."

Then we careened in frightening silence onto Green
Road and west toward Zeta Sanchez.
 
 

SIX

If you didn't know better, you might think the right
side of Green Road is lined with rolling hills — gray dunes covered
with worn-out toupees of spear grass and skunkweed and now, in late
April, an occasional stroke of wildflowers. But there are no hills in
this part of Bexar County. What lines Green Road are mounds of
landfill, compliments of the BFI city dump. When the wind blows in
your direction, that quickly becomes apparent.

On the left side of the road were shacks of
impoverished farmers, county welfare recipients, Texas backwoods
families who'd been there for generations before the dump moved in.
Their dirt yards were littered with plastic children's toys bleached
white from the sun, stunted chinaberry trees, and patches of wild
strawberry. Many had handmade cardboard signs in front that read BFI
STINKS! Watermelon fields stretched out behind mobile homes that
leaned and sagged at weird angles on cinder-block foundations.

On one front porch, a flock of half-naked toddlers,
tanned the color of butterscotch pudding, scampered around, climbing
in and out of an old clawfoot tub. Pale hairy adult shapes, also
half-naked, moved through the interior of the shack.

Ozzie kept checking the telephone poles for block
numbers, only occasionally finding evidence that we were going the
right way. The idea of these shacks having mailing addresses seemed
about as unlikely as them having Web sites. Click here for a virtual
tour of my hovel!

After a half mile we got stuck behind a caravan of
yellow BFI garbage trucks. Ozzie cursed and blasted his bullhorn, but
there wasn't much space for the trucks to go on the shoulderless
two-lane. Finally Gerson punched the gas and pulled into oncoming
traffic. In the space of eighty yards we came close to smearing three
truckloads of migrant fieldhands and ourselves all over the road. We
swerved back into the right lane nanoseconds before colliding with a
wide-eyed farmer in a Ford.

"Have a nice day," Ozzie grumbled without
slowing down. I pried my fingers loose from the dashboard.

The land flattened to field and fence, shacks and
farmhouses spaced farther apart. We left the dump behind.

"When we get there," Ozzie said, "we
do nothing stupid. If we're the first, we sit on the house and wait
for backup. If it gets bad, you stand behind the passenger's door,
use it as a shield. Got it?"

"What's the brother-in-law like?"

"Hector Mara. West Side veterano like Sanchez.
They go way back."

"Dangerous?"

"Everybody's dangerous. Show me a wife in a
domestic disturbance call, I'll show you dangerous. But Hector Mara?
Next to Zeta Sanchez he's a big old pan dulce."

Then we were on top of 11043 Green, and we weren't
the first. The property sat on the Y intersection of Green and
another, smaller farm road. Thick tangles of banana trees and bamboo
lined both sides. The only visible entrance was blocked by an SAPD
patrol car with both doors open and the headlights on. Two more cars,
unmarked blue Chevrolets, were pulled off the shoulder nearby. Four
people stood in the shade of the banana trees to the side of the
driveway—two SAPD uniforms and my good buddies from homicide,
DeLeon and Kelsey.

We pulled in behind the SAPD unit.

Through the break in the foliage I could see two
houses on the lot. The nearest, about thirty yards up the gravel
drive, was cinder block from the waist down and unpainted drywall
from the waist up, still decorated with the green tattoos of
different building-supply companies. The building made an L around a
covered cement porch that overflowed with mangled bicycles and broken
lawn chairs. Bedsheets covered the windows.

Twenty yards farther out was a small mobile home of
corrugated white metal. The field around both buildings was overgrown
with yellow sticker-burr grass and swarmed with gnats. One car was
visible on the lot — an old silver Ford Galaxie parked under an
apple tree. No signs of life except for three chickens in a coop.
Near that, a well-tended garden patch of sunflowers, cabbages,
tomatoes. Ozzie and I joined the SAPD party in the shade. In the
afternoon heat the huge banana plants exuded sticky, bubbly goo at
the joints and smelled disconcertingly of sex.

DeLeon had changed into new clothes — rust-colored
blazer and skirt, a fresh white silk blouse. She leaned calmly
against a fence post, gently slapping a folder full of paperwork
against her skirt.

Her partner Kelsey had shed his coat. His baby-blue
dress shirt had half-moons of sweat around the armpits and his tie
and collar were loosened. In the sunlight I could see the fine red
network of capillaries in his nose. He glared at me as I walked up.

"What the hell is this doing here?" He
looked at Ozzie Gerson. "You brought a fucking civilian?"

Ozzie took a pack of Doublemint from his shirt pocket
and shook a stick loose, unwrapped it and put it in his mouth. "He's
with me, Detective. Don't worry about it."

"I'm worrying."

"Leave it," DeLeon ordered. "What's
the twenty on the other units?"

One of the uniformed officers spoke into his field
radio, got an answer. "Five minutes, maybe."

"Maybe?"