Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(37)

"The problem with this country," Carl Wiglesworth was saying, "is the socialists who are running our schools."

Ah, Texas. For a moment I wished Maia were there. She would’ve gone into the cutest little apoplexy over Carl.

On the way downtown I watched Dan’s taillights from a hundred yards back and thought about my quality time with the Sheffs. First there was the problem of somebody—the cops, the Sheffs, maybe even the Cambridges—trying to downplay things. For some reason, Lillian’s disappearance hadn’t yet gone down as a potential kidnapping.

Don’t worry, she might just he out of town.

No way would Rivas pull that shit on a big-name family without a seriously good reason and a seriously  greased palm. If he had pulled back the reins on the investigation, somebody with heavy clout had made it happen.

Then there was Dan. He was lying about Beau. And he wasn’t exactly stable. Maybe it was just Lillian’s disappearance that had gotten to him, but I had the feeling there was more wrong with Dan Sheff’s life than one lady could cause, unless that lady was his mother.

I still needed Dan alone, away from Kellin and a thirty-second Dominion Security response time, to ask him why he was pursuing a relationship that Lillian’s datebook had pronounced dead months ago.

But first, we did our day at the office.

It started at a huge construction site where Basse Road met McAlister Highway—a half-finished strip mall on the grounds of the defunct Alamo Cement Company, right down the street from my mother’s house. Dan pulled in next to a trailer with Sheff Construction’s black and white logo on its side. I looked around at the changed terrain and said:

"God damn."

Of course my mother had told me about the real estate changes in the old neighborhood, even sent me some news clippings from time to time, but still I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

The Alamo Cement Company had been the largest single piece of private property in Alamo Heights for as long as I could remember. Its front borders along Tuxedo and Nacodoches had been carefully sculpted with acres of trees, trails that nobody ever hiked, and shady groves that were strictly for show behind a square mile of storm fencing. Only if you went around back, next to the Basse Road train tracks, did you see the uglier side of the cement business—four beige smokestacks and a massive wedge of factory, dusty trucks, and freight cars that never seemed to move, floodlights that stayed on twenty-four hours and made the place look like a rocket launch site on a particularly desolate part of the moon. In the center of the quarry the Latino workers lived in an area dubbed Cementville, a collection of shacks so squalid that they could have been directly transplanted from Laredo or Piedras Negras.

Of course hardly any of the wealthy Anglos in the neighborhood ever saw that part. We’d just seen the Cementville kids at school—dirt-poor worker children, dark and hungry-looking, dropped with the greatest irony into the richest public school district in town. They would sit on the steps of the high school, clustered together for protection, surrounded by Izod shirts and new Cutlass Supremes. Ralph Arguello was one of the few who had broken out of the pack by playing football. Most of them had simply disappeared back into the quarries after graduation.

Now, four years after the land had been sold off, only the factory itself had yet to be developed, and it looked like the Sheffs were about to remedy that. The shell of the building and the smokestacks were still there, as were a few broken-down freight cars and trucks, and about twenty odd acres of weeds surrounded by barbed wire. Everything else had already changed. The road to McAlister Highway went right through the old plant grounds past a huge man-made canyon, once the quarry, now lined with million-dollar homes. The shacks of Cementville had been swept away in favor of a golf course, a church, several restaurants. The strip mall Dan’s company was constructing was right in the shadow of the old factory.

Dan got out of the BMW and spent about five minutes talking to the foreman. The foreman talked slowly, going over a blueprint, and Dan frowned and nodded a lot, like he was pretending he understood. Then, to the foreman’s visible relief, Dan got back into the Beamer and left.

"A day’s work well done," I said, figuring we’d be on our way back to the Dominion now.

Only we drove the wrong way—onto I-35 and then south, almost to the city limits, then exited into a war zone of apartment projects. The last time I’d passed them, fluorescent seventies’ daisies had adorned the sides of the buildings. Now it was scrawling neon spray paint advertising the Alacranes and the Diablitos.

"The youth of America is the key," Carl told me.

"When will we stop accepting these deviant lifestyles that are destroying our kids?"

"Go deviance," I told the radio.

Not looking like a tail was getting difficult now. It hadn’t been easy to begin with in an orange monstrosity like mine. But when you’ve covered thirty miles from one side of town to the other, it’s almost impossible. Fortunately for me, Dan seemed about as aware of his surroundings as a dug-in armadillo. Otherwise I might as well have flashed my high beams and waved a lot. We drove through the projects, past a mixture of condemned industrial lots and sickly pastures grazing sickly cattle, toward a glass and prefab office complex that looked about thirty seconds old. It squatted defensively in the wastelands of the far South Side, surrounded first by thick, ridiculously out-of-place rows of salvias and petunias, then on the outside by a more honest ten-foot fence topped in barbed wire. A huge white stylized "S" in a black circle was emblazoned on the front gates.