Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (19 page)

On the corner of Durango and Buena Vista we pulled
into a gravel lot outside the world’s smallest outdoor
cantina
.
Three green picnic tables squatted on a red concrete slab. In the
back, a stack of fruit crates and an old Coca-Cola cooler passed for
the bar. The whole place was ringed by a low cinder-block wall and
covered by sagging corrugated tin, strung with the obligatory
Christmas lights. Nobody had bothered to put up a sign for the
cantina
. It just
naturally radiated
conjunto
music and the promise of cold beer.

Ralph put down the
mota
and picked up a S & W Magnum, almost invisible in the dark. It
disappeared under the linen folds of his olive-green extra-large
guayabera. He smiled at me.

"Subt1e," I said.

"Last offer," he said. "You want a
piece, I got that nice little Delta in the glove compartment?

I shook my head.

"More trouble than it’s worth," I said.
"That shit causes bad karma."

He laughed. “Somebody going to spill your karma
right out the back of your head, my friend, you think like that."

Lydia Mendoza’s voice, badly recorded fifty years
earlier and still sexy as hell, drifted across the patio with the
smells of tobacco and cumin. All three tables were crowded with men
in dirty blue work shirts with their names embroidered on the
pockets. Their brown faces were worn and hardened like pieces of
driftwood. They sat and smoked, watching us as we walked to the bar.

"
Que pasa
,"
Ralph said, totally unfazed by their stares. One of the men smiled
like a jackal, lifted his beer bottle very slightly, then turned back
to his friends. Someone else laughed. Then they ignored us.

Ralph dragged two green metal stools up to the fruit
crates and nodded to the bartender.

"Tito," he said. "Dos Budweisers."

For a minute I was convinced Tito was a work of
taxidermy. Nothing moved—his thick frown, his eyes, his huge
frog-shaped body. Tattooed arms hung limp at his sides. Under the
yellow silk shirt his chest didn’t move. I was tempted to borrow
Ralph’s coke spoon and hold it under Tito’s nose just to see if
he was really breathing. Finally, very slowly, Tito’s eyes drifted
over to me and fixed there. Somewhere in his chest he made a sound
like a motor boat engine getting stuck in mud.

"
De donde sacaste el
gringo
?" he said.

Ralph drank his beer, then looked at me like he’d
never seen me before.

"Who," he said, “this guy? Wants to break
into the pawn business, man. Teaching him everything I know."

Tito didn’t exactly react, but he let his eyes
slide off me like bird shit off a windshield. Behind us, one of the
drinkers finished a joke about a gringo lawyer and a donkey. His
friends laughed.

"So," Ralph said. "I heard about that
white woman last Sunday."

Tito had solidified again. He gave no response at
all, just stared at Ralph blankly;

"Your friend is making me nervous, Ralphas,"
I said in English. "Could you tell him to calm down?"

A tattooed cobra on Tito’s forearm twitched almost
imperceptibly.

"
No se
,
man," Tito told Ralph. "I just open the beers."

Ralph took his glasses off and cleaned them on his
shirt. When he did, he let Tito see the .357 clearly. Then he smiled.

"Man," he said, "how long we known
each other? What was that loan I did you, anyway? Three grand?"

Tito stayed blank, but the cobra twitched again. I
looked back at the other customers. Three of the tougher ones at the
end of the nearest table were paying more attention to us now. They
sat slightly apart from the others, not quite as weathered-looking,
not laughing at the jokes. The only grease on these three was
carefully applied to their hair. Their work shirts were open over
striped tank tops, stretched tight over their pects.

When I glanced at Ralph, he was already looking at
me. His slight nod told me he knew about the competition. Meanwhile
Tito wasn’t talking. He produced two more beers. He turned up the
knob on Lydia Mendoza. Then he played taxidermy.

"Well," said Ralph, "that’s a real
pisser, Tito. A1ady with some class walks into this shithole and you
don’t even want to remember it, man. That’s bad."

"Huh," said Tito. He looked about as
intimidated as a stoned mule.

Then a dirty gray rag appeared in his hand. He
started making lazy circles across the top of the counter. Maybe he
thought he was cleaning it. Ralph looked over at me and started
talking loud enough to be heard at the tables.

"So this friend of mine was here last night,
like I said. And he tells me a couple of the regulars here were
talking about this lady that came in Sunday. It was a big joke over a
couple of beers, he says. But you know,
vato
,
these
hotos
can’t
keep anything in their heads longer than a few minutes unless it’s
somebody else’s
pendejo
.
I guess we’re shit out of luck."

"Ralphas," I said. I was wondering if he’d
laced his joint with something more potent. His will to live, and for
me to live, seemed pretty damn weak at the I moment. He just held up
his fingers to placate me and kept talking.

"Yeah," he said. "Tito, man, you ought
to think about cattle for this place. Eat and drink less than these
cavrons
but more
intelligent, and you could at least make
barbacoa
when you got tired of them."

It got very quiet. Then one of the tough guys started
to get up. He was chewing on something, maybe a stick. When he smiled
his front two teeth flashed silver. His two
compadres
kept their seats, but they turned around to stare at us. Tito’s
other patrons had frozen like mice under a cat’s paw.

Ralph stayed calm, a little too calm for my tastes.
He gave the guy with the silver teeth a smile like they were
long—lost friends.

"So, Tito," Ralph said, not looking at the
bartender. "How you feeling, man? You want to tell me anything?
Like is this the guy she was with?"

Tito still didn’t look like he wanted to chat with
us. He shrugged very slightly.

"
Eh, chingado
,"
Silver-teeth said. "Maybe we should do you up some
barbacoa
,
huh? Maybe you got enough fat to fry."

Ralph spread his hands in a friendly gesture. “A
man can only try, my friend. Or maybe if you got a story for me, we
can hear that. Then we can all have another beer. "

"You want a beer?" Silver-teeth leaned over
and broke his bottle on the cinder—block wall. Then he held up the
jagged neck and smiled.

"Shit, man," said Ralph. He was already
holding his revolver, eight inches of black steel that reflected the
colored Christmas lights beautifully. "You want to play with me
you got to get better toys."

Then he fired twice, which from a .357 is only
slightly less impressive than a cannon barrage. Beer bottles exploded
on the table, sending glass fragments and brown foam into the faces
of Silver-teeth’s pals. There was one yelp of pain, then silence.
Silver-teeth almost fell back over the edge of the wall. The rest of
the bar patrons stayed very very still.

"That’s how you break glass," Ralph told
them.

"Now, who wants to tell me something?"

I wouldn’t have believed that Tito could move so
fast. He had the double-barrel half out of the Coca-Cola cooler and
was turning toward Ralph when I slammed the metal seat of my stool
into his face. Crude but effective. Tito’s nose flattened like a
paper tent and he went down.

Ralph whistled. "They teach you that in
kung
fu
c1ass?"

I shrugged.

Then I stepped back around the bar and unloaded the
shotgun. Tito was making his motor boat sound again, blowing red
bubbles against the red cement.

"
Hijo
,
" said Silver-teeth.

Ralph smiled and turned the gun on him. "So
what’s your name,
vato
?"

"Carlos, man."

"You got a bedtime story for us, my friend
Carlos?"

Carlos’s dark face drained out until it was the
color of heavily creamed coffee. He dropped his broken bottle-neck
and held up his empty palms. He said: "You’re looking for
Eddie, man. He ain’t here tonight. And I swear to God, I just heard
about it. "

Carlos’s two friends were getting up now, wiping
the blood and foam out of their faces. One had an inch-long fragment
of beer glass sticking from his forehead like a rhino horn. I don’t
think he even felt it, but he was pissed as hell.

"Jaime," Carlos murmured. "Cool it,
man."

But Jaime wasn’t interested. He came at Ralph fast
and stupid. Fortunately for him, Ralph was in a good mood now.
Instead of putting a bullet in his face, Ralph just implanted the tip
of his boot in Jaime’s gut. In slow motion, the wounded man curled
up at Ralph’s feet like a faithful old dog.

Ralph turned back to Carlos. "Okay. Let’s try
that again."

Carlos swallowed.

"Eddie Moraga," he said. "I heard he
was in here a few nights ago with this lady. He’s a friend of
Tito’s, man, a regular here."

Under my feet, Tito started making wet,
half-conscious grunts.

"And?" Ralph asked.

"That’s it. "

Ralph waited, smiling.

"Shit, man," Carlos pleaded, "a friend
told me about it. I don’t know."

Ralph’s next shot took out a healthy chunk of
concrete in front of Carlos’s left foot. By sheer luck, none of the
fragments killed anybody.

"You’d better tell me about Eddie," Ralph
suggested. I thought I was hearing beer pouring off the tables from
the broken bottles. Then I saw the stream coming out the bottom of
Carlos’s jeans.

"
Jesus, man," he said. “Eddie’s ex-Air
Force. He’s a construction worker. What the fuck else do you want?"

I handed Ralph the photos of suspects from Larry
Drapiewski's files. Ralph glanced at them, then held them up for
Carlos to see, one at a time, leisurely.

"Which one is he?" Ralph said.

Carlos looked, then shook his head, almost
reluctantly. “No, man. None of these. He’s about twenty-six, crew
cut, kind of light-skinned. Tattoo. Heavy on top, you know? Pumps
iron. Drives a green Chevy. Eddie’s here most nights by this time,
man. I don’t know where the fuck he is."

Tattoo. Construction worker? Wait a minute. I tapped
on the bar to get Carlos’s attention. "

"This tattoo," I said. “About here, eagle
and a snake?"

Carlos glanced over at me, then nodded, very slowly.

“
Que padre," said Ralph. "Now how about
the story?"

Carlos addressed Ralph’s gun as he talked. "Eddie
comes in Sunday night, I don’t know when, late. He’s got this
girl by the arm, kind of skinny but good-looking, sort of blond hair.
And she’s stumbling like she’s really wasted, so Eddie jokes with
us that she’s got to go puke. She had jeans and a black shirt on,
nice tits. So they go back to the Porta-john and he waits for her to
come out. The pay phone’s right over there, you know? So he makes a
call. Says to us he can’t stick around. But the funny thing is this
lady kicks Eddie on the shin as they’re going back to the car, and
we all start laughing. Then he sort of slaps her, you know, cuts her
across the eye with his ring, and they get in the car. That’s it."

He said it matter-of-fact, like it happened every
night at Tito’s. I swallowed. Maybe I would’ve gotten more
emotional, but something about Ralph and that .357 kept me cool and
sober.

"How did the girl act?" I asked. "Besides
wasted."

Carlos looked at me like the question was in
Japanese. "Her? Shit, I don’t know. Like they always act, you
know? Pissed off, I guess—arguing, hitting him."

Instead of using my stool on him, I said: "Did
it cross your mind she might be in trouble?"

He almost laughed at that, then he remembered the
gun.

"With Eddie every lady’s in trouble," he
said. "She didn’t scream or help or anything, man. Nothing
like that."

"Did Eddie have a piece?"

Carlos looked helpless. "I didn’t even think
about it, man. I don’t think so. I know he carries sometimes. He
does some work for some friends of his sometimes; that’s what I
hear."

“
What friends?" Ralph said.

"I don’t have any idea, man. That’s the
truth. He just said—yeah, he said one thing. That he had to get up
early tomorrow, ’cause the lady had to make a phone call for him.
That’s it, man."