Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(63)

"You and Eddie worked for Sheff," I said. "That’s who we’re going to?"

The idea amused Red so much he decided to kick me again, this time in the gut. When I got my face out of the carpet, a few centuries later, I saw one and a half redheads with guns hovering in front of me, smiling.

"Now unless you’ve got more questions, let’s go."

We left in Maia’s car. Whatever Gary Hales was watching on television, it must’ve been more interesting than your run-of-the-mill abduction at gunpoint. He never even looked out the window.

I played chauffeur while Red sat in back, his .45 aimed lazily at Maia’s head. We turned off Eisenhower onto that stretch of Austin Highway where the strip malls that hadn’t been abandoned yet housed head shops, heavily barred pawn and liquor stores, beauty salons that still had faded pictures of beehive models in the windows.

Every few seconds I glanced back at Red in the rearview mirror and watched his eyelids drooping. Once, when his chin dipped an inch, I almost made a move. Before I’d even taken my hand off the wheel, the Colt barrel was in my ear.

"Don’t," he said, no sleep in his voice at all.

I smiled in the mirror, then concentrated on the road. It must’ve been 2 A.M. The drunks were starting to stumble out of taverns like the Starz N Barz or the Come On Inn to find their cars to sleep in, preparing to wait out the unendurable six hours until the bars would open again. Bikers clustered in the parking lots, invisible except for the glint of Harley steel and the orange tips of their joints.

"Next left," Red said.

We passed a row of mobile home parks and pulled into one where the plywood sign on the Cyclone fence out front said "Happy Haven." The gravel and strips of corrugated steel and broken patio furniture that littered the courtyard said something else entirely. There were five other cars in the lot, all in various stages of disassembly. The courtyard was lit only by a yellow car repair lamp draped over the branch of a dead elm tree.

I handed the Buick keys to Red, then he and Maia got out first. We walked to the third trailer, a dented white and green metal canister that looked like an oversized hatbox. Red opened the screen door, then waved me inside.

This time I knew something was wrong the instant the air hit my face. It was cold as a meat locker inside, and it smelled just about as bad. Refrigerated animal waste overpowered the other smells of bourbon and cigarettes. It was also pure black except for the yellow square of light from the door we’d opened. Somewhere off to the right, a window unit air conditioner hacked and wheezed to keep the room under sixty degrees. I tried not to gag. Then I went inside and began talking as if there were really someone there.

"Long time no see," I said to the blackness.

Maia followed my lead, then rolled away to the left. I went right and nearly tripped over something soft and wet. As I slid down against the cheap wood paneling on the wall, I could feel a few dozen splinters shooting up into my arm. I made myself not move.

Red was only two steps behind us, but he was in the light now and we weren’t. It only took two or three seconds for him to realize something was very wrong and decide to blow holes in the dark with his Colt. In that time both Maia’s feet hit his kneecap at a ninety-degree angle. The cartilage snapped like celery. Red shot a two-foot-wide hole in the trailer roof as he staggered forward. Before he could shoot again with better aim I got his good forearm in "play biwa" posture. It’s called that because when you twist the two bones of the forearm across each other and keep twisting, they snap with a sound resembling a plucked string on a Chinese lute. At least that’s what Sifu Chen had told me. It sounded more like a percussion instrument to me. Red screamed and dropped the gun. But he didn’t go down until I double-chopped his neck just below the jawline. Then he melted into the shag carpet and started snoring.

Maia was already crouching down in the corner with Red’s .45. She closed the front door of the trailer with her foot. After a few minutes staying absolutely still, listening to the air conditioner whine, I groped up the wall until I found the light switch.

The first thing I noticed when the light came on was the color of my hand. Then the thing I was sitting on. I’d thought it was a waterbed mattress, the way it gave under me, but waterbeds aren’t covered in blue silk and they don’t have white hair. I got up, turned it over, then made a face as contorted as the corpse’s.

Terry Garza was four hours early for our appointment. Blood had flowed out of his neck so freely it had finally blossomed and crusted over into a huge, grotesque rose on his neck. The anticucho skewer that had brought it into bloom still sprouted from the center.

I tried to remind my stomach that it belonged inside my rib cage, not my mouth. It didn’t listen very well. Look someplace else, I told myself. I stared at the flower-patterned sofa Garza had rolled off of, the stripped mattress in the far corner, the three empty beer cans rattling on top of the air conditioner. There was nothing else in the trailer.

Maia unfroze more quickly than I did. Without speaking, she retrieved her keys and purse from Red, then killed the overhead light. With her flashlight and a handkerchief, she started going over Garza’s body, checking pockets, looking at his hands and feet. Garza’s face had a twisted, almost puzzled expression. His eyes stared out the ragged skylight Red had blown in the roof. At the moment Garza looked like he had even more questions than I did.