The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (25 page)

George Berton was not dead.

George's ambulance had been long gone by the time I'd
arrived on the scene. The body in George Berton's house, the body
SAPD wasn't in any hurry to move, wasn't George's.

The sergeant told me George's condition was critical.
And no, I could not leave immediately to see him. The sergeant
insisted on taking the rest of my statement, refused to answer
further questions, then left me locked in the backseat of the patrol
car with the detective's thermos of hot chocolate. I didn't want any
hot chocolate, which was just as well. My hands were shaking too
badly to unscrew the cap.

I smelled of mothballs and wet garbage. My hair felt
shellacked. The throbbing in my head synchronized itself to the pulse
of siren light from the unit across the street.

I closed my eyes.

After a few minutes the car dipped from the weight of
someone sinking into the front seat.

I looked up expecting to see the night CID detective.
Instead I found the Bexar County medical examiner.

As usual, Ray Lozano looked way too nice for your
average dissector of dead people. His hair was a huge well-plowed
field of black, thick but immaculately trimmed around the edges. He
wore a dark blue silk suit covered in a lab wrap. Surgical gloves
covered his wedding band and his Swiss Army watch.

Normally Lozano would've been smiling way too much
for an M.E., too. But not tonight.

"Hey, ese." He didn't offer his hand, just
a very long look of shared anger that glowed like the belly of a
furnace.

"Ray," I said. "Lucky call for you
tonight."

Under his breath, Lozano swore. "They tell you
about it yet?"

I shook my head.

"You want to know?"

"What do you think?"

Lozano looked strange without a laugh ready to burst
out. For the first time, he looked his age.

"I can't tell you much about George. He was
already en route to BAMC when I got here. As for inside, there's a
dead guy named Hector Mara lying faceup in the living room. Any idea
why?"

"The shooting was between him and Berton?"

"No. No way. Shooter was a third person. Signs
of forced entry on the back door. They lifted half a boot print in
the alley. Shooter came in and interrupted Berton's and Mara's
conversation. Mara drew a revolver but never got a chance to fire it.
Caught one round in the chest, close range, I'm saying a .357."

I closed my eyes, tried to concentrate on my
breathing.

"You sure you want to hear this?" Lozano
asked.

I nodded.

"We don't have George here, so it's hard to
reconstruct the whole story unless—" Lozano stopped, then went
on. "Until he gets out of surgery. I know he was shot twice in
the back, probably same caliber that hit Mara. My guess, we're
looking at one shooter. The guy plugs Mara when Mara draws his
revolver, then turns on George. George is armed but he doesn't try
anything. I don't know why. The shooter tells George to turn around,
or maybe George turns to run. When he does, the shooter fires twice.
Berton goes down in the kitchen doorway. Shooter walks back over to
Mara, makes sure Mara is dead with a shot to the head, contact wound.
Then, for some reason, he doesn't take the same precaution with
Berton. Most likely he's scared off the scene before he can."

"When Erainya and I arrived."

"Maybe. The timing is good. This didn't go down
very long before you two showed up. Both entrance wounds on Mara were
atypical, disproportionately large for the tissue damage and exit
wounds. I was wondering about the caliber until I noticed the muzzle
imprint on the head wound— erythematous rather than abraded."

"Which means in English?"

"Which means in English a silencer. A .357
semiauto handgun with a silencer. Our shooter came in prepared to do
some killing."

"You keep describing one person. One shooter."

"Based on what you saw — the van, multiple
people — there must've been more guys at the scene, right? But I'm
still saying one shooter went into the house. And why the back-door
entry? I don't know. It just seems things would've played differently
if there'd been a crowd in the room."

I closed my eyes again, tried to squeeze out the
burning sensation in them.

"You look like shit," Lozano said. "I
heard about your car, man. You're crazy not letting them take you to
the ER."

"I'm fine."

"Like hell," Lozano said. "Look at
me."

When I didn't he grabbed my jaw and twisted my face
toward his, took a penlight from his pocket and shined it in my eyes.
He grunted, put the penlight away, and dug his fingers around my
scalp at various points.

"Ouch," I said.

"Relax. My patients never complain." He
withdrew his hands. "You start feeling dizzy or nauseous, get
your ass to the hospital. Otherwise go home."

"I got to see—"

"Don't even try seeing George, ese. Not tonight.
I told Erainya the same thing. Brooke Army Medical Center won't let
you close to him even if you go down there. Best-case scenario he'll
be in surgery until dawn, ICU for at least two or three days. You
want to see him tomorrow, go home and rest tonight."

He made me promise.

"There's one other thing," Lozano said.
"Got a message for you from one of the homicide dicks. Lady
named DeLeon."

"Yeah?"

"She said to tell you she couldn't be here
tonight. It's not her call. But she also said you should phone her.
She said it might be time to talk. That make sense to you?"

"Yeah. Maybe."

The paramedics were now moving a full body bag down
the front steps of the house. The crime-scene photographers were
wrapping up their work on the peripheries, taking down the
floodlights from around Hector Mara's Ford Galaxie where it sat
parked at the end of the block. There was still no media on the
scene. Just another West Side homicide, I thought bitterly. What's
the hurry?

"Whoever did this," Lozano said softly,
"these same people have any reason to be pissed off with you?"

I looked at him and didn't see a friend. I saw a
whole lot of deaths in his eyes, a whole lot of scalpels cutting
impersonally through cold muscle. It was somehow reassuring.

"If they don't yet," I told him, "just
give me a couple of days."
 

TWENTY-EIGHT

Erainya knows best.

She will often tell me this. The fact that it is
frequently true does nothing to help my annoyance level.

The next morning I decided she was truly insane. She
called me at eight-thirty, succinctly gave me the update that George
was in a coma from blood loss, his condition still critical. Then she
insisted I stick with our original plans — Jem was going to his
kindergarten visit today and by God I was going to take him.

"Jesus Christ, Erainya. George—"

"—is the reason you're taking Jem," she
finished. "I'll be down at the hospital. Me and Jenny from the
title office already got the rotation list worked out for a vigil,
two people at a time. We've already got more help than we need,
honey. You and Kelly go tonight, ten to midnight. Just be ready for
kindergarten in half an hour."

After I'd growled yes and hung up the phone and spent
a few minutes wondering why I'd given in, I realized maybe her
request wasn't so crazy after all. Maybe the annoyance she'd
succeeded in provoking was better than other feelings I might've been
consumed with. Maybe taking Jem to kindergarten the morning after
we'd all been up until two, attending the possibly fatal shooting of
a mutual friend, was better than anything else I might've spent the
morning doing.

By nine Jem and I were driving through Monte Vista in
a car that was even more absurd than our situation — George
Berton's precious baby, his 70 Barracuda.

That too had been Erainya's idea. After my accident
last night, she'd pointed out, I needed a car, a temporary loaner,
and Erainya just happened to know where George kept his spare keys.
She didn't offer her own car to me. Go figure. I'd never driven the
'Cuda before — never done more than glimpse it while Berton
performed his holy rituals under the hood with a chamois cloth and a
lug wrench and an oil can.

The car had nothing in common with the VW except
color, age, and ragtop. The dash was polished oak. The stick shift
and bucket seats were covered in black leather. A gilded Virgen de
Guadalupe statuette hung from the rearview mirror. The disc brakes
responded to the lightest tap and the monstrous 440 motor purred like
a tigress under the shaker hood. I couldn't drive the thing without
hearing War's "Low Rider" in my head.

We pulled over at the corner of East Craig and
McCullough, outside the private school that swallowed up most of the
block. The campus was a series of renovated mansions on a hill,
shaded with live oaks, the thick green lawns immaculate. The
kindergarten building was a plantation-style carriage house on the
corner, directly above us.

Jem and I watched kids on the playground —
scampering over the jungle gym, swinging, playing on the monkey bars.
The kids all looked happy. The teachers in the yard all looked happy.
I felt like I should look happy too but I knew I damn well might
start screaming any minute.

"You might like it here," I told Jem. "Nice
play structure."

Jem nodded.

He was dressed in khaki pants and a little green polo
shirt that made his dark skin glow. His hair was newly cut into a
bowl of black. He pressed the creases in the top of his lunch bag
over and over. He hadn't said much on the way over — a short
treatise on breakfast-cereal toys, a few questions about the
Barracuda.
Those questions stopped as soon as
George's name came up.

"You ready?" I asked him.

Jem nodded again, with no enthusiasm.

We walked up to the white-columned porch of the
carriage-house kindergarten building and did a lot of handshaking
with a pale blond woman in a willowy dress. Mrs. Something-or-Other.
Her name started with T and had about seven syllables and I felt very
inadequate when I heard the kindergartners rattling it off
effortlessly. She wore a lot of perfume. Jem was mostly interested in
her necklace — one of those primary-teacher specials with little
ceramic animals and multicolored alphabet letters designed to capture
the attention of twenty kindergartners at a time. Even I had an
overwhelming urge to fondle it.

"We're so pleased to have you here today,"
Mrs. T. told us.

She called over a sandy-haired kid named Travis and
introduced him to Jem. Thirty seconds later Jem and Travis were in
line to play wall ball.

"See you at one-thirty?" Mrs. T. asked me.

"I'm supposed to leave him?"

She smiled patiently, like she was used to hearing
that question. "Well, it's better for him, to interact with the
children, you know—"

"I knew that."

She smiled some more, then excused herself to go
greet another pair of visitors — an ample redheaded woman with an
equally redheaded, overweight child.

I stepped back against the fence and watched Jem
play. It was the first time I'd seen him with a group of his peers.
He'd never been in day care, never had anybody at his birthday
parties who was under thirty, yet he seemed perfectly at home. Ten
kids were now involved in his wall ball game. Jem and Travis were
rewriting the rules so more could play.

"It's hard," a woman said.

I looked over. It was the redheaded woman who'd just
dropped off her kid. I tried to match her sympathetic smile. "What's
hard?"

"Leaving your child — it's hard, isn't it?"

I opened my mouth, tried to form an explanation about
my non-relationship to Jem, then just nodded. The mother patted my
arm in camaraderie and drifted away.

I looked over at the kindergarten teacher. She was
crouching to talk face-to-face with yet another visitor, a pale child
with messed-up hair and an untucked shirt. My stomach twisted when I
recognized him. It was Michael Brandon, Aaron and Ines's kid. His
mother was standing over him, trying to fix his cowlicks.

Ines wore her usual earth tones — a tan and
chocolate quilt jacket over white blouse, khakis, cord sandals. Her
ancho-colored hair was tied back in a butterfly clasp.

The teacher tried to coax a smile out of Michael.
When that didn't work, she called a kindergartner over. Neither
Michael nor the other kid looked thrilled about the pair-up, but
Michael reluctantly allowed the boy to lead him onto the playground.

As Michael approached the wall ball game, Jem zeroed
in on him and came over grinning. Jem knew a fellow newbie when he
saw one. He took Michael's hand and started explaining the rules of
the game.

Ines Brandon saw me as she turned to leave. She
hesitated, then continued walking.

I followed her down the steps, past a few other
parents. Halfway to the curb, I caught her arm.