Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(62)

I’m not sure whether I felt worse or better with Maia leaning up against me, her arms around my waist as we walked to the front porch. I simply didn’t care at the moment about anything except lying down on my futon and going comatose.

That was before I realized that my futon was already occupied.

I should have known when Robert Johnson failed to scold me at the door. I think Maia sensed it first. She froze with her hand halfway to the light switch even before I heard the snick of the revolver cock.

"Everything on the floor in front of you," he said.

The flashlight beam that hit our faces was from no pencil-thin model. I squinted, blind, and raised my hands. Maia dropped her purse. Her key chain hit the floor like a small bowling ball.

"Okay." His voice was slightly familiar now.

"Kneel."

We did.

“You going to knight us, buddy?" I said. "It’s usually done with a sword."

The air moved. Maybe I could’ve dodged the kick if I hadn’t been so tired and so blind. As it was I just had time to turn my newly corrected teeth to keep them from getting rebroken before our guest’s foot stamped Doc Maarten on the side of my face.

I managed to get back on my knees without crying out. My cheekbone didn’t feel broken, but everything was fuzzy now. The left side of my face was going to look like a rotten tomato in the morning.

"That’s strike one," he said. Then he turned on the lights.

The redhead was holding the Colt .45 in his left hand because his right arm, the one I’d broken outside of Hung Fong’s last week, was in a cast. He looked like he hadn’t shaved or slept or even bathed since that encounter. The lit fuses in his eyes told me that this was a man who’d already pulled the pin and had decided this was as good a place as any to stand until he blew up.

"Tell us what you want," said Maia.

She spoke the way she would to a distraught client, and I waited for it to backfire the way it had with Beau. This time, though, it seemed to work. Red lowered the gun slightly. He kept his eyes on me.

"You know," he said. "And don’t even f**king tell me it’s not here. You don’t want to know what strike two is."

I found myself wondering if his eye sockets could really be that dark blue. His face looked so old and leprous now I started to doubt he was the same man who’d attacked me last Tuesday.

I showed him that I was going for my shirt pocket, then with two fingers extracted the disk Garrett had given me. It had scrambled photo data on it, all right—pictures of Garrett’s last fishing trip with the New Mexico branch of the Hell’s Angels. I threw it at Red’s feet.

"Rough week?" I asked.

“Tres, shut up," Maia hissed.

Now Red had a problem. With only one hand, he couldn’t pick up the disk and hold the revolver at the same time. He pointed the gun at Maia.

“Get up."

He made Maia pick up the disk and come toward him, keeping the Colt .45 aimed at her chest where he couldn’t possibly miss. I didn’t think Maia would try anything, and even if she did I wasn’t sure I’d be in much shape to help, but I paid close attention to her body anyway, looking for any sign she was tensing up. It didn’t happen. She slipped the CD into Red’s jacket pocket, then knelt down again. Red seemed to relax to a temperature just under a rolling boil.

"Okay. You want your tea leaves read now, Navarre?"

"More than once a month is bad karma," I said.

His laugh was more like a brief facial spasm.

"Nobody’s going to break any arms tonight. Nobody’s going to write any f**king messages on my shirt or put their f**king elbow in my face."

“Okay," I said.

I looked at Maia out of the corner of my eye. We came to an understanding. We were both looking for a sign that Red was ready to kill. As long as he kept talking we were all right, but more than four seconds of silence meant he would fire. If that happened we went for him, and one of us died for sure, but maybe not both of us.

“You ever been hit by a black talon?" he said.

"Once almost," Maia said.

"Nasty little f**kers," he continued, looking at me as if I’d said it. Red tried to scratch his face, then remembered he was holding a gun. I think it was only then that I realized he was drunk as well as desperate. So his reflexes would be a little slower. At three feet with black talons from a .45, I wasn’t exactly relieved.

He said: "Once they open up they don’t leave much of your chest cavity, man. Makes a ragged son-of-a-bitch hole. One guy I saw got it from the police, he just screamed until his lungs came out his throat."

I nodded. "Not as quick as bullets through the eyes, then?"

That registered in his face like a cattle prod. He aimed the Colt at my head.

"So we’re going to put things right," he said, as if he were just ending a pep speech to the team. "We’re going to give this back, I’m going to get my ass out of this town, and you maybe get to live."

None of us bought that, not even Red. He shrugged. "If this isn’t the disk, it’s going to be a lot more fun, man. A lot more fun for your lady here."

I stared at him, trying to look cooperative and unimpressed at the same time. The way my face was contorting on the bashed-in side, I probably looked more like Bill the Cat.