Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(81)

"How’s the well?" he asked.

Harold scratched a rash on his neck. "Got the pump working, but it’d been a few days. Cattle stampeded the trough soon as it was going."

“Great."

Garrett lifted himself back into the seat and led us through the door.

I looked around while Garrett and Harold talked maintenance. Except for being dirtier and older, the place had hardly changed. The Army Corps of Engineers elevation drawing for Highway 90 had turned brown on the living-room wall. The coffee table we’d gotten for Christmas from the Klayburgs down at King Ranch still had boot marks on it from the last time my dad had propped his feet there. There was still a metal pail full of Cricket lighters sitting in the corner from fifteen years before when the Western Union had derailed in the middle of town. Before the Army Reserve had come in to guard the trainload of new Toyotas that had spilled unexpectedly into downtown from that accident, everybody in Sabinal had already helped themselves to the smaller dumped cargo—three boxcars full of lighters. Sabinal still didn’t have a single Toyota on the streets, but it was a good place to go if you needed a light.

I wasn’t quite ready to look in the fireplace. Instead I sat on the couch. I traced the old boot prints on the table. Finally Harold went out to shoot a rattlesnake he’d seen in the back field. Garrett wheeled his chair up next to me. He handed me a warm beer out of the chair’s side pocket, then lit another joint.

“So you checked?" he asked.

“Not yet."

He took a noisy inhale. Together we sat and looked at the limestone fireplace for a while like it was getting great reception, a Cowboys game maybe, deep in the fourth. I stood up.

“Look," Garrett said, “just don’t expect anything, okay, little bro?"

“Okay."

I moved the rock and looked in the stashing hole. No Jim Beam. Nothing but dark, mortar, a few daddy longlegs hanging dead. Then I stuck my hand inside. The hole was almost a foot deeper than I’d thought. I brought an old business-sized envelope into the light. My back was to Garrett. After a while he couldn’t stand the silence.

“Well?" he said.

The envelope had faded from pink to brown, but the original letter was still inside—written on pink stationery that after all these years still smelled faintly of strawberry potpourri. I read the first few lines, then turned and let Garrett see Cookie Sheffs last letter to our father.

“God damn," said Garrett.

“Does your mouth taste funny?" I asked. “Kind of like metal?"

Garrett nodded, then wheeled his chair around to leave.

“And the bastard didn’t even leave us any bourbon to wash it down," he grumbled. “Fucking typical."

51

After reading the letter several times, Garrett and I either needed to get seriously drunk or do something to take our minds off what we’d learned. We opted for both.

First, Harold put us to work worming thirty-three head of cattle. I’d like to say there was something cathartic about it, but there wasn’t. I had the privilege of clamping the victim’s head between metal bars while Garrett pumped a wad of paste that looked suspiciously like K-Y jelly into the side of the cow’s mouth. If you’ve never seen cattle gag, don’t go out of your way.

When we were done, we sat on the porch drinking Harold’s cheap booze and watching the evening come down over the plains. The sunset was orange, except when you looked at it through a liquor bottle. Then it was brown and yellow.

On the way back to town Garrett and I cranked up the Jimmy Buffett. Occasionally we’d look at each other, then decide not to talk. We both had the letter from the fireplace memorized now, and phrases of it kept gnawing at me. Protests that my father had used Cookie, searched her husband’s private files, and only thus found incriminating documents about Travis Center. Pleas not to break her heart with a public scandal that would destroy her family. Promises that Dan Sheff, Sr., really wasn’t to blame, that Cookie would help my father find out who was responsible for using Sheff Construction to embezzle millions. Fervent affirmations of her love, kept from open admission by her duty to her son, to her sickly husband. The letter implied that my father had made Cookie a deal: Leave her husband and have the Travis Center issue forgotten. Garrett was bothered by it as much as I was, though his way of dealing with it was to curse at the semis on the highway and flip off the snowbirds in their RVs as he zoomed past them.

“Learn to drive, sheepdip!" he shouted at an old man whose license plates were from Wisconsin.

Garrett leaned so far out his window, with no legs for ballast, that I was afraid he was going to disappear into the wind. Then he gave the finger to another semi that wouldn’t let him pass. The trucker blasted his horn.

"You ever get worried somebody’s going to get pissed at you?" I asked, when the noise died down. "Somebody with a gun?"

Garrett shrugged. “It’s happened. I’m still here."

We drove for a little longer before Garrett looked over at me again. This time he decided to talk about it.

“He was going to do it, wasn’t he? The son of a bitch was going to ditch a major investigation for a woman. Another guy’s wife, no less."

The Hemisfair Tower appeared on the horizon, sticking up from the orange glow of the city. I stared at it instead of answering Garrett’s question. I wanted to deny the obvious, but the letter was pretty clear.