Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(71)

Grubb glared at me. "What was that, boy?"

"Miss Lee and I saw a photo of this place recently. Taken at night, during a meteor storm."

Grubb nodded, more hot now than interested, daydreaming of ice cream and shade.

Drapiewski and Maia looked at me, both of them trying to read my expression. My throat suddenly felt very dry.

“So this is the angle Karnau shot from," Maia said. "That only makes sense."

"No," I said. "Lillian said something before she disappeared. She and Karnau used to go on photography shoots, sometimes for days at a time. She mentioned camping out on a godforsaken hilltop in Blanco. She mentioned photographing a meteor shower."

“Funny coincidence," Drapiewski said, looking back into the hollow where Halcomb had been shot. I tried to imagine Randall Halcomb in the deer blind, curled up with a perfect red hole between his eyes, but I kept coming up with Lillian’s face.

"Yeah," I said. “Funny."

43

When we got back to Queen Anne Street, Maia looked tired and angry. She lay on the futon, staring into space while I wrestled off my sticker burr-covered jeans. Finally they flew across the room and buried Robert Johnson in his bed of dirty laundry. I don’t think he even noticed.

I lay down next to Maia, hugging her from behind, my face in her hair. When I reached for her hand it was a clenched fist.

After a few minutes she sighed. "Tres, get out of here with me. Destroy that damn disk if you need to, but get out of here."

I tried to pretend she hadn’t said anything. I wanted to just lie there, keep my eyes closed, listen to Maia breathing as long as I could. But she pulled away. She sat up and looked down at me. The anger in her eyes watered down to frustration.

"Two men have died because of that disk, and now you’ve started advertising you’ve got it. To me that makes the rest insignificant. Even Lillian. Especially Lillian."

I shook my head. “I can’t just leave it. And I can’t destroy it. Not if it’s about my father’s killers."

"You want to get yourself killed instead?"

There was no correct answer to that. After another minute Maia lost the spirit even to glare at me. She sank back into the cushions.

“God damn you, " she said.

I lay there for a long time, contemplating how else I could possibly screw things up. Mentally I started placing bets on who would be coming through my front door next with a gun.

But of course my life wasn’t complicated enough. The ironing board rang. When I picked up the receiver I knew I was either listening to a rock tumbler or an aging smoker trying to breathe. Carl Kelley, retired deputy, my father’s old buddy.

"Hey, son," he said. "Didn’t hear from you yet. Thought I’d call."

Yet? Then I realized it was Sunday afternoon again. I’d been in town exactly one week. In Kelley’s mind I’d started a tradition when I’d called him.

"Hi, Carl."

I settled in for the duration and opened a Shiner Bock. Maia watched me curiously while Carl launched into a discussion of the newest terminal illnesses he’d read about. He talked about how worthless his son in Austin was. Then he started mentioning past discussions we’d never had. He repeated himself. Finally I listened more carefully to the background noises on the other end of the line.

"Carl," I interrupted, "where are you?"

He was silent for a minute, except for the breathing.

“Don’t worry about it," he said. His voice was shaky. His tone asked me to please worry about it.

"What hospital, Carl?"

"I didn’t want to trouble you," he said. "My neighbor brings me in for a cold and they say I’ve got pneumonia. Some f**king liver disease. I don’t know what all. Can you believe that?"

He started to cough so loudly I had to pull the receiver away from my ear. When the coughing subsided it took a few moments for his gravelly breathing to start up again.

"What hospital, Carl?" I said again.

"The Nix. But don’t worry about it. They’ve got a TV set up for me. I’ve got a little money left. I’m okay."

"I’ll come by," I told him.

"That’s okay, son."

He held the line for a minute longer, but he didn’t need to say anything. I heard the loneliness and the fear even louder than the hospital TV.

"What?" said Maia when I hung up.

"Somebody from my past," I said.

"Of course."

My look made her sorry she’d said it. The irritation drained out of her face. She dropped her eyes. I dug another handful of fifties out of Beau Karnau’s retirement fund and made sure Maia still had bullets in her .45.

"I’ll be back later," I told her.

Maybe Maia asked me a question. I didn’t wait to hear it.

44

The Nix looked like exactly the kind of building Superman would’ve loved to jump over in the 1940s. After saying a few Hail Marys and grinding up twelve floors in the antique elevator, I found Carl’s semi-private room at the end of a narrow blue-lit hallway.

I thought I’d been prepared to see Carl as an old man. I was wrong. I couldn’t find his face anywhere in the thinly coated skull that looked up at me. Oxygen tubes ran from his nostrils like an absurdly long mustache. If he had been any more frail they would’ve had to weight him down to keep him from floating out of bed. The only thing still heavy was his voice.