Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(22)

"Wait for tomorrow morning," I told myself.

Maybe she had decided to stay an extra night in Laredo; maybe she was on her way back right now. I pictured her coming home and finding me in her house uninvited, or learning that I’d questioned the neighbors on her comings and goings. The "I was worried" argument wouldn’t carry much weight with a woman who had recently accused me of trying to control her affairs.

I weighed that against the unlocked door, the unread mail and newspapers, the ha1f-washed dishes. I didn’t like it. On the other hand, it wasn’t totally out of character for Lillian to leave any of those things in her wake. I locked the front door behind me.

The thunderstorm was directly overhead now, but there was no rain, just churning dry electricity. The Rodriguez children had finally abandoned the street. Exhausted as I was, I still couldn’t face the idea of going back to Queen Anne and trying to sleep. I drove back to the Olmos Dam, then parked the car where there really wasn’t a shoulder and sat on the edge of the drop-off with my bottle of Herradura, my feet dangling above the treetops.

I watched the storm move south for almost an hour. I tried not to think about where Lillian was, or about my earlier soiree with Red and Tattoo, or about the package of clippings on my father’s murder. It felt like there was a huge slow spider crawling back and forth inside my head, trying to connect those things with tenuous, unwelcomed threads. Every time something started taking shape, I took another drink of tequila to wash it away.

I’m not sure how I got home, but when I woke up early Wednesday morning the ironing board was ringing. I yanked it down from the wall and fumbled with the receiver. ·

"Hola, vato, " the man on the other end said, then he insulted me rapidly in Spanish.

I rubbed my eyes until the walls came into focus. It took my brain a second to switch languages, then I placed the voice.

“That doesn’t sound like a real hygienic position, Ralph," I said. "Haven’t you guys heard about AIDS?"

Ralph Arguello laughed.

"So I heard right," he said. "You’re back in town and speaking Espanol, no less. How the hell am I supposed to insult you to your face now?"

If there had been a spider in my head last night, this morning it felt like the thing had crawled into my throat and died. I sat on the floor and tried not to throw up.

“So how’s the pawnshop business, Ralphas?"

I’d known Ralph since varsity in high school. Even then he was a con man of epic proportions. He’d once stolen the coach’s pickup truck and sold it back to him in a different color, so the legend went. About the time I went off to college Ralph had started buying pawn-shops all around the West Side, and by the time I’d gotten my BA, I’d heard rumors that Ralph was worth a million dollars, not all of it from honest loans.

“How do you feel about visiting my side of town today?" Something in his tone of voice had changed. It made me wish I could concentrate more on his words without the pounding in my head.

"There’s a lot going on right now, Ralph. Maybe we cou — "

“Yeah," he interrupted, "I heard about Lillian, and I heard she’s out of town. This isn’t exactly a social call."

I waited. It didn’t surprise me that Ralph knew all this, any more than that he’d known I could now speak Spanish. Ralph could just drive through town and news would cling to him the way lint clings to velvet. Still, the mention of Lillian’s name woke me up fast.

"Okay," I said finally. "What is it?"

“One of my girls just showed me a purse she found out on Zarzamora a few nights ago. It’d been run over a couple of times. The driver’s license says ‘Lillian Cambridge’. "

16

By the time I parked the VW on the curbless street in front of the Blanco Cafe, my hangover had been replaced by a colder kind of nausea. I was afraid I’d go completely numb with it if I didn’t keep moving.

A sign inside the grimy window of the cafe read "Abierto." I stepped over two emaciated brown dogs that were snoring in the doorway and went in.

The air inside was thick, lubricated with the smell of peppers and old grease. It was only seven-thirty in the morning, but at least twenty men crowded the counter along one side of the tiny room to wolf down steaming fried migas and black coffee. Huge waitresses, their hair the color of chorizo, were shouting at each other in Spanish. They carried plates the size of hubcaps four at a time from the kitchen. It was the only place in town I knew where you could get a meal two plates wide that cost under three dollars.

Some of the men at the counter looked over at me, their brown eyes sleepy, slightly annoyed when they saw I was a gringo. Then they went back to their migas. Only one person was sitting away from the counter. At a yellow Formica table in the back corner, under a huge black velvet painting of a Mayan warrior, Ralph Arguello was drinking a Big Red. He was grinning at me.

“Vato, " he said, then motioned for me to come back.

If John Lennon had been born Hispanic and then overfed on buttered gorditas, he would’ve looked like Ralph. His hair was long and tangled, parted in the middle and tied back in a ponytail, and his eyes were invisible behind the sheen of his thick round glasses. Ralph’s face was as round and smooth as a baby’s, but when he smiled, there was a demonic glee there that made men nervous.