Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (13 page)

Larry looked at me. “You sure?"

It irritated me that I couldn’t answer. “So why
is Rivas on the case? And into everything else I touch?"

Drapiewski raised his eyebrows. "There’s some
fine, decent people at SAPD. Honest cops."

"And Rivas is not among them," I suggested.

Drapiewski smiled.

"So," I said, “either he’s screwing
with me for personal reasons or because somebody’s pulled his
strings—but either way he’s screwing with me."

“
Listen, son, Zeke Cambridge will get the police to
do a damn good job, Rivas or not. Eventually they’ll have to bring
the Feds in on this and things will happen."

“
Like they did with my father?" I said.

Larry looked at me the way people do to somebody who
grew up while they weren’t looking. He laughed again. "Holy
hell, Tres, I don’t believe you. That face you just made—that’s
your dad’s ‘shit list’ expression, plain and simple."

There was such honest pleasure in his voice I had to
smile. For a second it didn’t matter that Lillian was missing, or
that my father’s murder was coming back like the worst acid
flashback. You heard Drapiewski laugh and you knew there had to be a
nice clean joke in there somewhere. But it only lasted a second.

“
Karnau and Sheff? " I asked.

He didn’t smile at that. He looked back down at the
two photos I’d shown him—the ones with human figures cut out.

“
I don’t know," he said. "I’ll look
into it, but I doubt there’s much to find. Either way, there’s
nothing you can do except sit tight."

“
I can’t stay out of this, Larry. "

He did me a favor and acted like he hadn’t heard
that. Instead he got up and appropriated the last Shiner Bock from
the refrigerator. Then he found my tequila and brought that back to
the table too. We sat there listening to the cicadas and passing the
bottle. Finally Larry leaned back, stared at the bubbled molding on
the ceiling, and started laughing under his breath.

“
Your father—you ever hear that story about the
one-balled flyboy?"

“
Yes," I said.

“
It was my first goddamn time in the field,"
he went on. "Found myself out behind an old ranch house with
this screaming son-of-a-bitch Navy pilot wearing nothing but his
justin shitkickers and a 12 gauge."

Drapiewski laughed, scratching his acne.

“
He’d come home from Kingsville early, I reckon,
snuck into the sack naked to surprise his lady, and laid a big kiss
on something that hadn’t shaved in a week.

By the time I got there he was dragging his girl
across the back forty and hollering. He’d chased that Mexican
salesman all the way to the property line before he shot him in the
leg. The Mexican was just on the other side of the barbed wire with
most of his thigh gone, bleeding all to hell, and this old flyboy
couldn’t decide who to shoot next, me, the Mexican, the wife, or
himself. I thought right there—‘This is it, first and last day on
the job.’

“
Then your father comes huffing up behind us like a
Hereford bull, two more deputies behind him. And he just starts
cussing out the flyboy like there’s no tomorrow, saying ‘Goddamn
fool, why’d you go and let that Mexican get across the line ’fore
you shot him?’ "That naked pilot just looks at him confused
and your father tells him: ‘You shoot him off your property, that’s
attempted murder, you idiot. You shoot him on your property, Texas
law says that’s trespassing. Then the sheriff pulls out his
notebook and says: ‘I’m starting to write this up, boy. You best
get that Mexican back over that fence before I get to my incident
description.’ And you should’ve seen how fast that flyboy ran.
But soon as he started, your father had his .38 in his hand. I never
seen anything come as fast as that—first shot blew the 12 gauge
right out of the old boy’s hand. Second one went straight between
his legs and took his left ball clean off. "

Drapiewski swore in admiration and downed a few more
ounces of my Herradura.

“
So the old boy jumps about six feet up like a shot
jackrabbit and falls over. And your father comes up to him and says:
‘That first shot was for waving a 12 gauge at my deputy. The second
was for being so god-damn stupid.’ After we got that Mexican fixed
up he sent your daddy a case of champagne every Christmas for fifteen
years. That was your daddy, Tres."

The story had evolved a lot since I’d last heard
it, years ago, but I didn’t bother pointing that out. I just took
the bottle from Larry and finished it off.

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that, so
Drapiewski turned on the afternoon talk shows and waited while I read
through the police files.

Paper-clipped to the coroner’s report were three
black and white pictures of something that had once been my father’s
body. The corpse looked massive on the metal table, washed out and
unreal in the harsh fluorescents, like a stag caught in headlights.
The exit wounds, two surprisingly small holes in his chest and
forehead, were circled in black Marksalot. It took me a few minutes
to focus on the words of the report after putting down the photos,
but once I read them there were no surprises about the cause of
death.

The other files traced a series of dead-end leads in
the case. The Pontiac used in the drive—by was found among the
burned-out shells of stolen cars that littered the West Side each
week, then traced to .a retired Buttercrust baker who had actually
watched it get stolen from in front of his house. The baker told the
police bitterly ‘he’d just assumed it was another creditor repo
and hadn’t even bothered to report it. Things looked up briefly for
the investigation when the old man tentatively IDed the thief as
Randall Halcomb, the ex-deputy who’d been arrested by my father for
manslaughter, then been paroled a week before my father’s murder.

That line of questioning ended two months later in a
deer blind outside Blanco, where Halcomb was found in a bloody fetal
position with a .22 hole between his eyes. His body was badly
decomposed by the time a local rancher stumbled across it, but the
coroner estimated the time of death to be no more than a week after
my father’s.

Heavy pressure on Guy White and the other known drug
traffickers in South Texas, trying to connect them to the murder,
yielded exactly nothing. White had gotten most of the attention.
Every agency in town had conducted raids on White’s properties,
tied up his assets in court, slammed anyone who associated with him
for the smallest misdemeanor, all to no avail in the Navarre case.
just like Rivas had told me: Everyone suspected the connection; no
one could prove it.

The compiled list of my father’s other enemies and
Halcomb’s associates also yielded nothing.

Finally, the investigation turned back to Randall
Halcomb. The revenge motive was nice and clean, the timing and the ID
that connected Halcomb to the Pontiac very convenient. The fact that
some other party had killed Halcomb was a minor glitch. Maybe Halcomb
was killed for reasons unrelated to the murder: Maybe my father’s
friends in the department had gotten to Halcomb before the Feds
could. It had been known to happen. Either way, the FBI liked dead
murderers, probably a lot more than they had liked my father. They
sold it to the press as a vengeance killing, classified the case as
"ongoing," and quietly shelved it. It was eight o’clock
and getting dark before I resealed the folder and handed it back to
Larry, minus a few items I’d lifted while his head was in the
refrigerator. My eyes felt like melting ice cubes.

“
Well?" he said.

"Nothing," I said. “At least nothing that
makes sense yet."

"Yet?"

Drapiewski took his boots off the coffee table,
walked stiffly to the refrigerator, then finding it empty, decided it
was time to leave. He took his gun and his hat off the table and
stood looking at me.

“
Tres, Rivas is right about one thing—you don’t
belong in this. Let them find the young lady. Let me look into Karnau
and Sheff for you. You put yourself in the way and it won’t help
anything. "

My look must’ve told him something. He swore under
his breath, then fished out a card and tossed it on the table.

“
Your father was a good man, Tres."

“
Yeah."

Then Drapiewski shook his head, as if I hadn’t
heard:

“
The kind of man who could get you to take your own
gun out of your mouth when you figured nothing else mattered."

I looked up at Drapiewski’s greasy, fifty-year-old
adolescent face. He was smiling again, like he couldn’t help it.
Maybe I hadn’t heard him right. For a second, I had imagined him in
a dark room somewhere, staring down a gun barrel.

“
You need something," he told me, "cal1
that number. I’ll do what I can."

"Thanks, Larry."

After he left I took a lukewarm shower, then looked
again at my father’s notebook. I reread his notes for the
testimonies against Guy White, the cryptic reminder at the bottom:
Sabina!. Get whiskey. Fix fence. Clean fireplace. It still made no
sense. I closed the notebook and tossed it on the table.

My girlfriend was missing. The other love of her
life, who hadn’t been a love of her life for several months, was
driving around town with her business partner. And I was sitting on
my futon reading my father’s old grocery lists.

I decided to make my perfect day complete. I called
my mother and asked for a loan. She was, of course, delighted. I felt
about as good as that flyboy who’d just kissed something hairy.
 

20

In my dreams that night I was hunting with my father
at the family ranch in Sabinal. It was Christmas break, my
seventh-grade year, one of the coldest winters South Texas ever had.
The mesquite trees were bare as TV aerials, and the brush was a dull
yellow-gray that matched the clouds. I was kneeling in an orange
parka, holding a .22 rifle my father had given me as a gift that
morning. The barrel was slightly warm from ten rounds of fire.

My father, next to me, was also dressed in hunting
clothes. He looked like a fluorescent tent for six. His Stetson
tilted over his eyes so all I could see were his huge bristly jowls,
his nose webbed with red veins, his crooked wet smile half-hidden by
a battered Cuban cigar. The mist from his breath mixed with the
smoke. In the cold sharp air he smelled like a good meal that was
burning.

Out in the clearing the
javelina
still quivered. It was a huge animal, all black hair and tooth, much
too large and mean to kill with a .22. I’d shot it first out of
surprise, second out of anger, then again and again out of
desperation to finish the job. All the while my father just watched,
only smiling at the end.

Finally the beast stopped dragging itself along the
ground. It made a thick, liquid sound. Then even that stopped.

"Meanest animal on God’s earth," my
father said.

"And the dirtiest. What you reckon you should do
now, son?"

He could talk like a Harvard graduate when he wanted,
but when he tested me, when he really wanted to distance himself, he
put on that accent. The familiar, cracker barrel drawl was easy and
slow the way a cottonmouth snake is slow, moving toward you in the
river.

I said: "Can we use it?"

My father chewed his cigar.

"You can fix up some mighty fine
javelina
sausage, if you’ve got the mind to."

He let me take the knife and stood back as I moved up
to the warm carcass. It took a long time to gut the thing. From the
moment I touched it, my skin began to crawl, but I ignored the
feeling at first. I remember the steam from the innards and then the
indescribably bad smell—a sour blast of fear, rot, and excitement
that beat the worst inner-city alley. That was my first lesson--the
gas that a newly dead animal exudes. It nearly knocked me down,
nearly forced me to double over, but then I saw my father watching
sternly behind me, and knew I had to go on. I’d made my choice.

After gutting it I tied its feet and pulled it
through the brush. Now the itch was intolerable. My father watched as
I struggled to get the
javelina
into the bed of the pickup. My eyes were watering; my entire body
crawled. Small red bites were breaking out on my arms like an acid
wash. Finally, in desperation, I turned to my father, who was still
standing a good distance away. In pain, humiliated, I waited to hear
what I had done wrong.

When he spoke it was almost kind.

“
Every hunter needs to make that mistake once,"
he said. “And he never makes it again. You get too close to a
javelina that’s just shot, the first thing you get is the smell for
a good-bye present. But that’s not the worst."

He dropped his cigar butt and smashed it into the
dirt with one huge boot. When he spoke again, the pain was crawling
across my scalp, under my armpits, around my groin. It caused a dull
roar in my ears.

"The body heat," my father said. “It
cools off right fast, and all them little fleas, all them chiggers
and ticks and every other form of varmint that breeds in that hide,
looks for the nearest warm thing to jump on to. You’re it, son.
Don’t never approach a dead thing until it’s as cool as the
ground, son. Not ever."