Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(48)

"Jesus Christ, " Timothy, S. was saying. He was pointing the gun at me but looking into the car. "Jesus f**king H. Christ."

I tried to sit up, to see what he was seeing. It wasn’t one of my better ideas.

"Don’t even do shit, God damn it, " Timothy, S. said. The quivery sound in his voice told me he was very close to breaking, even closer to blowing my face off. I sat back and jarred Garza’s boot. Garza groaned. Timothy, S.’s nostrils kept dilating. His face had gone totally yellow now, even his eyes.

"Jesus H. Christ, " he said again. Then he threw up.

"The driver is dead?" I asked.

The guard looked at me and tried to laugh. It came out as a yelp. "Yeah. Yeah, you might could say that, shithead."

Very slowly I put up my hands.

"Look," I said. "I need to get up. You smell the gasoline, right?"

Timothy, S. just stared at me, his gun leveled.

Okay, I thought. I kept my hands in plain view while I got up. Then I hobbled out from behind the desk, bent over like a question mark. Garza kept moaning from underneath a pile of books and unpotted plants.

I looked over at where Garza’s office wall had been. The car was an old blue Thunderbird convertible, or it had been before it was driven through the wall. The hood was crumpled like a contour map of the Rockies. The windshield was shattered. Somebody had tied the wheel straight and laid a slab of granite over the accelerator. The T-bird probably would have barreled right on through the building it if hadn’t lost an axle when it jumped up onto the foundation.

The driver’s seat was occupied.

My intestines started dissolving and trickling down into my shoes. I could still see the eagle killing the snake on Eddie Moraga’s forearm. Eddie was wearing the same denim shirt he’d had on the night he attacked me outside Hung Fong. Except for that he was hard to recognize. A person can be that way when his eyes have been tunneled out with a pistol at point-blank.

I’m not sure what happened after that. I do know that when the police arrived, the guard and I were sitting in the broken glass, staring into space, talking like old friends about the living and the dead. Garza groaned like a chorus in the corner. I didn’t care about Detective Schaeffer asking me questions. I didn’t even care when Jay Rivas arrived, dragged me into a room, and slapped me across the side of the face. I just spat blood and teeth and kept staring into the headlights that I still saw coming at me, running over everything and everyone that mattered.

29

Chen Man Cheng once said that if your movements were refined enough you should be able to practice tai chi in a closet. He never said anything about doing it in a jail cell.

When I rose to meet the new day with my usual exercise routine, my head was pounding, my stomach was empty and sore, and my mouth had swollen to the size of a small cantaloupe. The stink of old urine and se**n from the bunk mattress had rubbed off on my clothes. My tongue tasted like Robert Johnson’s food dish. In short, I was looking and feeling my best as I started my first set.

"What the f**k is that?" my cellmate said.

One of his parents had obviously been a Weimaraner. He was incredibly thin and desperate-looking, with splotchy skin and a face that was almost all nose. He hunched over in the top bunk, staring down at me with a pained smile. He wheezed when he spoke.

Maybe I could’ve moved my mouth enough to respond to his question, but I didn’t try. It was taking all my concentration just to keep from falling over or throwing up. After the first set he lost interest and laid back down.

“Goddamn nutcase," he wheezed.

By the time I started my low form routine I’d managed to work up a good sweat. I’d like to say I felt better. The truth is my mind was just clearer and more able to appreciate how screwed up things really were. We had the talented Mr. Karnau, whose photographs, even if they were poo-pooed by the art world, were still fetching ten grand a month from certain interested patrons. It seemed a lot to pay for an original Karnau, unless the shot was one the buyers didn’t want publicized, and the payment was blackmail money to protect—say—some illegally contracted construction jobs worth millions. Then a little payoff, a little abduction, maybe a little murder, started looking cost-effective. And Beau had started this line of work last year about the same time Lillian had demanded out of their business. Back then Beau had gotten sufficiently violent to warrant a restraining order. Now that Lillian wanted out of the business again, she had disappeared altogether.

We had the dashing Mr. Sheff, who seemed eager to lead his company to greatness as soon as his mother combed his hair and tied his shoes. I couldn’t see a nineteen-year-old Dan initiating the Travis Center scheme ten years ago. I could barely see a twenty-nine-year-old Dan carrying on the family tradition now by fixing the bidding on the new fine arts complex. Nevertheless, he’d lied to me about Beau, had just about gone apoplectic when I mentioned the name, and he certainly had a strong desire to claim Lillian as his territory months after Lillian started having other ideas. Either Dan Jr. or someone else in Sheff Construction--his mother, or maybe Garza acting on his own—had arranged Karnau’s payment, then Lillian’s kidnapping, then Garza’s desperate search for whatever it was they wanted so badly. And Sheff Construction wasn’t in this alone. There had been two people cut out of Karnau’s blackmailing photo, and two copies of it in his portfolio, which meant somebody else was getting Karnau’s bill too. Maybe that somebody was getting pissed at their partners in Sheff Construction. Maybe that’s why Eddie Moraga came back to work last night dead.