Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(42)

They weren’t interested in hanging back, either. I hadn’t even had enough time to say a "Hail Mary" before the Chrysler pulled around the intervening cars and went into high gear, coming around on my left. When I saw the shotgun window roll down I remembered why they call it the shotgun window. Then I yanked on the wheel, hard.

I’ll say this for the VW. It handles sidewalks a lot nicer than your average Chrysler. I was across two front lawns, a parking lot, and into an alley before the enemy managed to pull their boat around. Thank God for my high school years, revving around these streets with Ralph like we were James Dean’s drunk and ugly younger brothers. I still knew the turns and I took them. Another good thing about the VW: The engine’s in the back so you aren’t blinded when it starts burning to hell and billowing black smoke.

After ten minutes without seeing the Chrysler I slowed down to fifty in the twenty zone on Nacodoches and took inventory. That’s when I noticed the new ventilation in the ragtop. Three holes the size of .45 bullets on the left side, three identical holes on the right side. The nearest one was about six inches south of my head. I hadn’t even heard them.

"So much for not being willing to kill me," I said, cursing Maia Lee.

I’d like to say I was calm when I got back to Queen Anne. The truth was, when I found that Robert Johnson still hadn’t eaten his Friskies taco, I kicked it across the living room. The dish, that is, not Robert Johnson.

"Enough is enough, " I told him.

Something under my dirty laundry in the closet said:

"Row."

Then the phone rang.

I must have sounded like a man who’d just gotten shot at and spurned by his pet, because Ralph Arguello paused for a second before responding: "Mother of God, vato. What cavron spit in your huevos this morning?"

Behind him, the sounds of the Blanco Cafe were all much louder than they had been that morning—more shouting waitresses, more customers talking, more blaring conjunto from the jukebox.

"I’ve had a great day, Ralph," I said. "Somebody just drilled me a skylight in the VW with a .45."

There were a lot of ways somebody could respond to that. For Ralph there was only one choice: he laughed long and hard.

"You need a beer and a shot of real tequila," he suggested. "Come out with me tonight."

"Maybe another time, Ralphas."

I could almost hear his Cheshire cat grin over the phone.

"Even to a little cantina where your lady friend was on Sunday night?" he said.

Silence.

"What time?" I asked.

27

Ralph’s maroon Lincoln slid down South St. Mary’s like a leather-upholstered U-boat.

" ’Scuse me if I hit a few pedestrians," he said. He laughed. I didn’t. With the black window tinting, the moonless night, and the haze of bay rum and mota smoke in the car, I couldn’t see a damn thing out the front windshield. And I didn’t wear prescription glasses. Ralph just smiled and took another hit off his cigar-sized joint.

We turned down Durango and cruised through a neighborhood of neon-colored clapboards. Their front  yards, not much bigger than Ralph’s backseat, were decorated with cola caps in the trees, statues of saints in the painted gravel, plastic milk jugs filled with colored water along the sidewalks. An old lady in a worn-out muumuu stood in the orange square of porch light on her front steps, slicing potatoes and watching us as we passed by.

Ralph sighed like a man in love. "Home again."

I stared at him. "You were raised North Side, Ralphas. You went to Alamo Heights, for Christ’s sake."

His smile didn’t waver. "All that means is my momma cleaned for a better class of folk, vato," he said. "Doesn’t mean shit about where your home is at."

On the corner of Durango and Buena Vista we pulled into a gravel lot outside the world’s smallest outdoor cantina. Three green picnic tables squatted on a red concrete slab. In the back, a stack of fruit crates and an old Coca-Cola cooler passed for the bar. The whole place was ringed by a low cinder-block wall and covered by sagging corrugated tin, strung with the obligatory Christmas lights. Nobody had bothered to put up a sign for the cantina. It just naturally radiated conjunto music and the promise of cold beer.

Ralph put down the mota and picked up a S & W Magnum, almost invisible in the dark. It disappeared under the linen folds of his olive-green extra-large guayabera. He smiled at me.

"Subt1e," I said.

"Last offer," he said. "You want a piece, I got that nice little Delta in the glove compartment?

I shook my head.

"More trouble than it’s worth," I said. "That shit causes bad karma."

He laughed. “Somebody going to spill your karma right out the back of your head, my friend, you think like that."

Lydia Mendoza’s voice, badly recorded fifty years earlier and still sexy as hell, drifted across the patio with the smells of tobacco and cumin. All three tables were crowded with men in dirty blue work shirts with their names embroidered on the pockets. Their brown faces were worn and hardened like pieces of driftwood. They sat and smoked, watching us as we walked to the bar.

"Que pasa," Ralph said, totally unfazed by their stares. One of the men smiled like a jackal, lifted his beer bottle very slightly, then turned back to his friends. Someone else laughed. Then they ignored us.