Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (24 page)

"Yeah, my half brother."

"You didn’t mention—"

"That he’s so much older than me?"

Maia glared at me.

"We got about five minutes," Garrett called
back to us. He swung his chair around and squinted up at the top of
the bridge, where the stone arches made a honey-comb of little caves.
"Then the little peckers start coming out thicker than pig
shit."

A line of retirees was standing in front of us,
watching the bridge with binoculars. When we sat down on the grass
knoll I found myself staring at a row of old butts in pastel prints.
I exchanged looks with Garrett. He grinned.

"Yeah," he said. "Kind of gives you a
different perspective of the world, doesn’t it?"

Maia sat down between us, her left arm pressing
against mine just slightly, very warm. She smelled like amber. But of
course I noticed none of that. She put her other hand on Garrett’s
armrest.

"So, Garrett," she said, "Tres tells
me you can break into high security networks with half your RAM tied
behind your back."

Garrett laughed. He had more teeth than any human
being I’d ever known, most of them yellow and crooked. Maia smiled
back at him like he was Cary Grant.

"Yeah well," he said, "my little
brother tends to exaggerate."

"He also says you could be running the world if
you didn’t spend so much time at jimmy Buffett concerts."

Garrett shrugged. But he had a pleased gleam in his
eyes.

“
A man’s got to have a hobby," he said.
"Just please no jokes about wasting away in Margaritaville. That
one got old faster than Ronald Reagan."

Maia laughed. Then in a very quiet, very passable
voice she started singing "A Pirate Looks at Forty."

Garrett kept smiling, but he looked at Maia as if he
were reevaluating her.

“
My theme song these days," Garrett said.

"Mine too."

It was the first and only indicator I’d ever had of
Maia’s age. Garrett showed his teeth, all hundred of them.

"So, Tres," he said, "where’d you
meet this lady again?"

With that he took out a joint and lit up.

Paranoia was not a concept that existed in Garrett’s
mind. I’d seen him smoking pot in shopping malls, restaurants, just
about anywhere. If questioned he would talk poker-faced about his
"prescription." Nobody ever wanted to argue much with a
paraplegic. The line of retired sightseers froze when the smell of
the
mota
hit them.
They glanced back nervously at Garrett, then dissolved. We no longer
had butts obstructing our view of the bridge.

Maia and I both refused the joint, politely. Then
Garrett spent half an hour telling us about his last Parrot-head tour
of the South, his asshole bosses at RNI, the impending collapse of
Austin society at the hands of Silicon Valley transplants.

"Damn Californians," he concluded.

"I beg your pardon," said Maia.

Garrett grinned. "You can come into the state,
honey. It’s just this ugly bastard you brought with you."

I showed Garrett a hand gesture. Maia laughed.

It got dark and cool. God poured grenadine on the
horizon. Finally, when he was ready to talk business, Garrett said:
"So what’s all this about, little brother?"

I told him. For a minute Garrett blew smoke. He
stared at me, then at Maia’s legs. His expression told me he’d
just reevaluated my IQ downward a hefty percentage.

"So you and Maia are looking for—"

"Lillian," I said.

"More or less," said Maia.

Garrett shook his head. "Unreal."

"Can you look at the disk for us?" I asked
Garrett.

Cameras flashed as the first few bats flitted
overhead like sparrows with hangovers. Garrett glanced up at them,
shook his head to indicate that the real show hadn’t begun yet,
then turned back to us. He pulled his tie-dyed shirt back down over
his belly.

"I don’t guess you want my advice," he
said.

"Not really, " I said.

"Sounds to me like this is your old girlfriend’s
gig," he said. "Turn this shit over to somebody else and
walk, little brother."

Somebody on the bridge shouted. When I looked up, a
woman in pink was leaning over the railing with her arms dangling
into a steady stream of bats.

"They tickle!" she shouted to her friends.
People laughed. More cameras went off.

"Fuckers," said Garrett. "The flashes
disorient the hell out of the bats. They run into cars and shit.
Don’t they know that? Fuckers!"

The last word he shouted into the crowd. Only a few
people turned around. Nobody wanted to argue with him, maybe, but
nobody wanted to pay him any attention, either.

"Tres?"

In the twilight Maia’s face was losing its
features, so it was hard to guess her expression, but her arm still
pressed against mine warmer than ever. She waited for me to say
something. When I didn’t, she turned to Garrett.

"Can you look at it, Garrett?" she asked.

His scowl softened. Maybe it was Maia’s hand on his
armrest. Maybe it was the joint.

"Sure," he said. "Whatever. But it
seems to me you got to get a life, little brother. Picking at old
wounds--fuck, if I spent my life with that they’d’ve locked me up
by now."

He met my eyes only for a second, then he laughed and
shook his head. Whatever pain was there, it had been buried a long
time ago under drug abuse, wildness, testiness, and arrogance—all
the Navarre family values.

I couldn’t help it. I tried again to imagine
Garrett at those dark railroad tracks twenty years ago. The confident
train-hitcher, the intractable hippie, running away from home for the
twentieth and last time—the one time he’d sprinted to the freight
car and missed the rungs. I tried to see his face, pale with shock,
looking desperately at the black glistening lake where his legs had
been. I tried to imagine him for once without that cultivated
son-of-a-bitch smile. But he’d been alone then and he was still
alone with it. There was no way to imagine what Garrett had said or
thought two decades ago, staring at those wet rails that had
mercifully sealed the blood flow. He’d been alone and conscious for
more than an hour by the time my sister Shelley found him.

"Old wounds," he said now. "Fuck
that."

Then the bats came out for real. Cameras stopped
flashing. People’s mouths dropped. We all just stared at the
endless cloud of smoke drifting east into the Hill Country, smoke
looking for a few jillion pounds of insects to eat.

Garrett smiled like a kid at the matinee.

"Un-fucking-real," he said.

In ten minutes more bats passed over our heads than
the total number of people in South Texas. Somewhere in that time
Maia had taken my hand and I hadn’t pulled it away.

The tourists unfroze. Then one by one, growing bored
with the bats, they drifted off to the parking lot. Maia and I stayed
perfectly still. Finally Garrett wheeled his chair around and pushed
himself up the hill. Maia stood and followed him. Then I followed
her. It was hard to miss Garrett’s VW safari van. In the dark, the
mound of plastic pineapples and bananas that was hot-glued to the
roof made the van look like it had hair. When we got closer I saw
that the paint job was just the way it had been years ago, rows of
Ms. Mirandas along the sides, all in outrageous Caribbean dresses.

"They don’t dance like Carmen no more?"
Maia suggested.

Garrett grinned at her as he slipped his chair into
the lift grooves. "Will you marry me?"

A few minutes later we were sitting on beanbags and
drinking Pecan Street Ale from Garrett’s cooler. My eyes teared
over from the smell of
mota
and very old
patchouli
.
Garrett had booted up his "portable" computer—several
hundred pounds of wires and hardware that had years ago taken over
the van’s backseat and whose generator required most of the luggage
compartment. Then he stuck in our mystery CD.

Garrett frowned. He thought about it for a minute. He
tried a few commands. He cracked open some files and looked inside.

“
Slice and dice," he pronounced. "Easy to
fix if you’ve got the other disk."

Maia looked at me, then at Garrett. "The other
disk?"

"Yeah. You split your data between two disks.
The program to reassemble it’s pretty simple. But you read one disk
alone, it’s all nonsense codes, man, scrambled eggs. Pretty safe
way to store sensitive stuff."

I took a drink of my Pecan Street and thought about
that. "So you can’t tell anything about what’s on there?"

Garrett shrugged. “It’s big. That much data
usually means detailed graphics."

“
As in photographs?

Garrett nodded.

Maia stared at the dingo balls around Garrett’s
windows.

"Garrett," she said, "if I was using
photos to blackmail somebody--"

He grinned. "You just keep looking better,
honey."

"If I was, why a CD? Why not just keep the
negatives?"

Garrett took a long drag on his joint. His eyes
glittered. You could tell he was enjoying figuring out the devious
possibilities.

"Okay. You can’t encrypt negatives. You can’t
lock them so that nobody but you can make copies. Somebody finds
them, then they’ll know exactly what they’re looking at, right?
If it was me, shit yes, I’d scan everything in, keep that as my
master print, then shred the negatives. You got your two disks, you
got your program to reassemble. In a couple of minutes you can print
up as many hard copies as you need, or, even better, upload those
suckers onto the net and pretty soon they’re printing out at every
news desk and police station in the state, if that’s what you want.
But if somebody comes looking through your stuff, unless they’re
very good or they know exactly what they’re looking for, they don’t
find shit."

Garrett stopped and took another hit. "So who’s
got the other disk?"

I took out a flier that had been folded in my pocket
for a long time. I looked at the date—July 31, tonight. Nine to
midnight. Driving like bats out of hell, we could be there just when
things started cooking. No offense to the bats.

Besides, Garrett was leering at Maia’s legs again
and about to offer her another beer. If I didn’t make a
counteroffer we’d be here all night.

"You like art openings?" I asked her.
 

34

Even with the windows rolled down at ten at night the
Buick felt like the inside of a blow drier. I sat shotgun and watched
the subdivisions go by while a cold triangle of sweat glued my shirt
to the back of my seat. The smell of dead skunks and brushfires blew
through the car.

I guess I was being too quiet. When we passed Live
Oak, Maia finally reached out and touched my arm.

“
You still thinking about Garrett?"

I shook my head.

In fact I hadn’t thought about much else since we’d
left Austin. I’d been foolish to think I’d get away from Garrett
without one of his lectures. While Maia retrieved the rental car from
the Marriott parking lot, Garrett had given me his philosophy on old
girlfriends. Then for the millionth time he’d cataloged Dad’s
offenses against the family; how Dad had basically abandoned Garrett
and Shelley after their mother had died, left them with his abusive
second wife for years while he went out drinking, politicking,
falling in love with whores and junior Leaguers. How Garrett took to
running away and Shelley took to abusive men.

"By the time he married your mom it was too
fucking late to make any difference," Garrett said. "Shelley
and I were out of the house and your mom was too damn nice to change
him. She never told you the last straw, did she? You were in
what--tenth grade? The bastard took your mom to some party at the
McNay Museum, then disappeared. When your mom and her friends finally
found him, he was down in the woods by the old fish pond screwing the
lights out of junior Leaguer number seven. He just smiled, zipped his
pants, and went back into the party to get another drink."

Garrett laughed weakly. Then he looked down at where
his lap should’ve been. "Let the bastard stay dead, little
brother. It’s the only thing that’s ever given me a sense of
justice."

Maia exited in downtown San Antonio. We drove past
the decaying mansions of the King William District, then across East
Arsenal where the San Antonio River flowed by sluggish and polluted
with tourist left-overs. Its banks this far south were empty except
for the crack addicts.

When we pulled up in front of Blue Star the gravel
lot was already full to bursting with BMWs and Ferraris. Women in
evening dresses did coke on the hoods of their cars; men in black
sweated in the heat and drank champagne on the old loading docks of
the renovated warehouses. An apathetic handwritten sign in front of
one of the larger galleries announced Beau’s opening upstairs at a
loft space called Galleria Azul, perched at the top of a narrow iron
fire escape.