Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(104)

Finally Larry called from the living room: “You okay, Tres?"

I told him I was. Then I shut off the faucet and looked for dish towels. There were none.

When I joined Larry on the leather couch, he was pouring whiskey into four glass tumblers that all said JACK. Garrett was smoking a joint and looking out the screen door at the fading afternoon. I asked Harold if he’d get some wood for the fireplace.

Larry and Garrett looked at me strangely, but they didn’t say anything. Harold went out to the wood pile. By the time Harold had stacked the wood and started the fire with one of our Bics from the bucket-o-lighters, I was on my second glass of Jim Beam and the shivery feeling in my gut had just about faded. The fire burned it away completely. The mesquite wood, left over from last winter, was so dry after three months of summer that it ignited instantly and burned like a forge. The room got uncomfortably warm, until my fingertips felt almost alive again. I didn’t even mind the smoke rolling out the front of the mantle from the poorly working flue. Harold excused himself to go work on the water pump outside. Sweat started beading on Larry’s fore-head, but he didn’t complain. Garrett wheeled himself a little further away and sat watching the flames.

After finishing my second drink, I got up, went to the bathroom for my duffel bag, and came back out with my father’s notebook. I removed the letters and set them aside. Then I squatted down and propped Dad’s notebook against one of the burning logs.

Nobody protested. The smoke rolled through the pages of the binder, sucked inside by the cooler air. One canvas corner caught fire. Then the outside cover fell open, letting one page burn at a time, each blackening at the edges and curling inward to reveal the next.

Dad’s handwriting looked lively in the red light. The pictures he’d drawn of Korean planes and tanks for my bedtime stories seemed to jump right off the page. After a while the binder was reduced to a mass of black cotton candy at the edge of the fire.

When I turned, Garrett saw my eyes watering.

“Smoky?"

I nodded.

Garrett squinted, then blew pot smoke toward the ceiling. He kept looking up at the cedar rafters.

"Yeah. Me too."

Larry poured us all some more whiskey. "I suppose that notebook might’ve been potential evidence."

"I doubt it," I said. "But maybe."

Larry grunted. "I suppose after what I helped you do last night, I shouldn’t complain."

I had to think for a moment. Then fuzzy snapshots started coming into my head—Drapiewski getting me away from the investigation early, the two of us taking a long drive into Olmos Park, me having a conversation with someone on Crescent Drive, making a deal. I reached for my wallet, opened it, and found the hand-written piece of paper still inside. I put it back. Larry propped his boots up on the coffee table. He stared at the fire, then started laughing easily, as if he were remembering all the clean jokes he’d heard that week.

“Last time I was out here with your daddy, boys, Good Lord it must’ve been ’82 . . ." He proceeded to tell us about the big tornado that had ripped through Sabinal that year and how Dad had invited Larry out to help inspect the damage. The ranch house had been spared, but my father and Larry had spent the afternoon trying to extract a dead cow from the top of a mesquite tree with a chain saw. Larry thought it was so funny I couldn’t help but laugh along, although last time I’d heard the story it’d been a horse in the tree, and a hurricane instead of a tornado that had done the damage.

64

For once, Garrett seemed in no mood to speed. We started following Larry’s red jeep back toward town, but quickly lost sight of the deputy’s taillights when he turned onto Highway 90. The Carmen Miranda drove on leisurely while a brilliant Texas sunset flared up over the edge of the plains. When Garrett dropped me back at Queen Anne Street, I found a courtesy copy of today’s Express-News on the doorstep. I took it inside and tried to read the front page while Robert Johnson, after one unenthusiastic "roww" of greeting, began practicing his "slide-into-home-plate" routine with the other sections, seeing how many square feet of the living-room carpet he could effectively cover with paper.

"Don’t you have anything better to do?" I asked.

He looked up, wide-eyed, like he was shocked by the very idea.

The Express-News said that Dan Sheff, Jr., heir to Sheff Construction, had apparently uncovered a scheme by his own family and their associates to defraud the city of millions in bond monies for the proposed fine arts complex. Dan Jr. had, in the process of heroically confronting the alleged conspirators, been shot once. A policeman was involved in the incident, name not yet released, and there was some indication that the construction scam might extend back as far as ten years. The mayor was already being hounded for an extensive investigation to ferret out any wrongdoing on the part of local officials. I was mentioned briefly as being at the scene of the shooting. The article said Dan was presently in critical but stable condition at the Brooke Army Medical Center, where he was receiving flowers and praise from a number of well-wishers. The location of Lillian Cambridge, who had been missing for several days and whose parents were implicated in the scheme to defraud the city, was still unknown.

I threw section A to Robert Johnson. He used it for a triple play.

When I pulled down the ironing board and checked my answering machine I found about half an hour of messages. Bob Langston, Number 90’s former tenant, claimed he now had enough pinhead friends together to effectively kick my ass. Carlon McAffrey warned me I’d better get him that exclusive interview with Dan Sheff soon in case Dan decided to die. Carolaine Smith, the TV news lady I’d knocked into the river, said KSAT was willing to forgive the whole incident in exchange for an interview with Dan Sheff, if I could arrange it. Detective Schaeffer from the SAPD had left several messages—wondering where the hell I’d disappeared to last night, letting me know that the Cambridges had signed a testimony about some disks that had turned up missing at the scene. Schaeffer wanted to know if I had any ideas about the disks or if he just needed to arrest me. One message from my mother, pleading for me to come over to dinner and please bring Jess’s truck back with me. One from Ralph that simply said: "She’s fine. Que padre, vato."