Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(29)

“Yes," I said.

“It was my first goddamn time in the field," he went on. "Found myself out behind an old ranch house with this screaming son-of-a-bitch Navy pilot wearing nothing but his justin shitkickers and a 12 gauge."

Drapiewski laughed, scratching his acne.

“He’d come home from Kingsville early, I reckon, snuck into the sack na**d to surprise his lady, and laid a big kiss on something that hadn’t shaved in a week.

By the time I got there he was dragging his girl across the back forty and hollering. He’d chased that Mexican salesman all the way to the property line before he shot him in the leg. The Mexican was just on the other side of the barbed wire with most of his thigh gone, bleeding all to hell, and this old flyboy couldn’t decide who to shoot next, me, the Mexican, the wife, or himself. I thought right there—‘This is it, first and last day on the job.’

“Then your father comes huffing up behind us like a Hereford bull, two more deputies behind him. And he just starts cussing out the flyboy like there’s no tomorrow, saying ‘Goddamn fool, why’d you go and let that Mexican get across the line ’fore you shot him?’ "That na**d pilot just looks at him confused and your father tells him: ‘You shoot him off your property, that’s attempted murder, you idiot. You shoot him on your property, Texas law says that’s trespassing. Then the sheriff pulls out his notebook and says: ‘I’m starting to write this up, boy. You best get that Mexican back over that fence before I get to my incident description.’ And you should’ve seen how fast that flyboy ran. But soon as he started, your father had his .38 in his hand. I never seen anything come as fast as that—first shot blew the 12 gauge right out of the old boy’s hand. Second one went straight between his legs and took his left ball clean off. "

Drapiewski swore in admiration and downed a few more ounces of my Herradura.

“So the old boy jumps about six feet up like a shot jackrabbit and falls over. And your father comes up to him and says: ‘That first shot was for waving a 12 gauge at my deputy. The second was for being so god-damn stupid.’ After we got that Mexican fixed up he sent your daddy a case of champagne every Christmas for fifteen years. That was your daddy, Tres."

The story had evolved a lot since I’d last heard it, years ago, but I didn’t bother pointing that out. I just took the bottle from Larry and finished it off.

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that, so Drapiewski turned on the afternoon talk shows and waited while I read through the police files.

Paper-clipped to the coroner’s report were three black and white pictures of something that had once been my father’s body. The corpse looked massive on the metal table, washed out and unreal in the harsh fluorescents, like a stag caught in headlights. The exit wounds, two surprisingly small holes in his chest and forehead, were circled in black Marksalot. It took me a few minutes to focus on the words of the report after putting down the photos, but once I read them there were no surprises about the cause of death.

The other files traced a series of dead-end leads in the case. The Pontiac used in the drive—by was found among the burned-out shells of stolen cars that littered the West Side each week, then traced to .a retired Buttercrust baker who had actually watched it get stolen from in front of his house. The baker told the police bitterly ‘he’d just assumed it was another creditor repo and hadn’t even bothered to report it. Things looked up briefly for the investigation when the old man tentatively IDed the thief as Randall Halcomb, the ex-deputy who’d been arrested by my father for manslaughter, then been paroled a week before my father’s murder.

That line of questioning ended two months later in a deer blind outside Blanco, where Halcomb was found in a bloody fetal position with a .22 hole between his eyes. His body was badly decomposed by the time a local rancher stumbled across it, but the coroner estimated the time of death to be no more than a week after my father’s.

Heavy pressure on Guy White and the other known drug traffickers in South Texas, trying to connect them to the murder, yielded exactly nothing. White had gotten most of the attention. Every agency in town had conducted raids on White’s properties, tied up his assets in court, slammed anyone who associated with him for the smallest misdemeanor, all to no avail in the Navarre case. just like Rivas had told me: Everyone suspected the connection; no one could prove it.

The compiled list of my father’s other enemies and Halcomb’s associates also yielded nothing.

Finally, the investigation turned back to Randall Halcomb. The revenge motive was nice and clean, the timing and the ID that connected Halcomb to the Pontiac very convenient. The fact that some other party had killed Halcomb was a minor glitch. Maybe Halcomb was killed for reasons unrelated to the murder: Maybe my father’s friends in the department had gotten to Halcomb before the Feds could. It had been known to happen. Either way, the FBI liked dead murderers, probably a lot more than they had liked my father. They sold it to the press as a vengeance killing, classified the case as "ongoing," and quietly shelved it. It was eight o’clock and getting dark before I resealed the folder and handed it back to Larry, minus a few items I’d lifted while his head was in the refrigerator. My eyes felt like melting ice cubes.

“Well?" he said.

"Nothing," I said. “At least nothing that makes sense yet."