Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(32)

“Too many people around,” Madeleine said, scoping out the scene. “I don’t want more blood on the car.”

“Sensitive type, aren’t you?” I asked.

She glared at me like she was about to kick me in the face again.

Screw it.

Now that I realized who she was, I couldn’t take her seriously.

I remembered her, all right. Frankie’s little sister.

When I’d known her before, she’d been a ten-year-old kid with a dirty blond ponytail, a shrill voice and painter’s pants decorated with Magic Markers. She always had bruises on her arms from getting into fights with her classmates. She used to sit in the bleachers during football practice and throw tennis balls at me. The coach never had the nerve to run her off because of her dad’s reputation. Frankie called her the Brat.

Now, she must’ve been pushing thirty, but she looked closer to twenty. Proof positive she had Guy White’s genes.

She didn’t stick out her tongue anymore, but her I-hate-you expression hadn’t changed.

“Listen,” she told me, “I don’t care if we draw attention. I’m not the one running from the police.”

I wished I had a good comeback, or maybe just a better way of tracking down Johnny Shoes.

Unfortunately, Madeleine’s plan was the best one we had. She’d said looking for Zapata’s men would be easier than looking for the man himself, and she was right. When it came to moving around and avoiding detection, Zapata was slightly more paranoid than your average Third World dictator.

“What was that martial arts style you used on me earlier, anyway?” I asked her.

“Shen Chuan.”

Ralph and I exchanged looks.

“Hell,” I said.

As far as I knew, Shen Chuan was the only native Texas martial arts system. It was also a hard damn style to defend against. It was taught in the East Texas piney woods by one extremely good, extremely unconventional sensei.

“You study with Lansdale?” I asked.

“Did,” Madeleine corrected. “He kicked me out of the dojo. Said I was over-the-top.”

I tried to imagine what Joe Lansdale would consider over-the-top. Chain saws and atom bombs, maybe.

It seemed strange to me that a girl like Madeleine White would’ve taken up martial arts so intensely. Then I remembered something Ralph had told me. Mr. White had come to him for help when Frankie’s problems got so bad they affected the family. I wondered what exactly that meant.

At the Taco Shack counter, the redheaded thug was getting his order.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s interrupt this poor man’s lunch.”

“Hold up,” Ralph said. “He’s moving.”

Sure enough, Mr. Thug had cradled his taco bag like an offensive lineman and was jogging across Roosevelt Avenue.

He didn’t seem to have seen us, but he was moving at a good clip. He cut through the parking lot of San José and headed for the mission gates.

“Pull the car around,” Madeleine ordered the driver.

“Why is he going to San José?” I wondered.

“Damn,” Ralph said.

“What?”

“Zapata’s mother.”

“What are you talking about?”

The limo did a tight one-eighty.

I held the door handle to avoid slamming into Madeleine.

“Zapata’s mom is a parishioner,” Ralph said. “Ana told me once. I forgot. Zapata’s family’s been at the mission for, like, centuries.”

Madeleine snorted. “You think Zapata is in there with his mother? What, praying?”

I tried to imagine Johnny Zapata as a good Catholic boy. Or even a good boy. Or even having a mother. I failed.

“I don’t want this to go down in a church,” Ralph muttered.

The limo stopped in front of the visitors’ center.

Madeleine slipped a new clip into her nine. “Alex was right, Arguello. You are getting soft.”

She kicked open the car door, looked at me expectantly. “Are we kicking someone’s ass or not?”

AS A PI, I’VE LEARNED YOU get better help from people if you make an effort to like them. It’s not about making them like you. You have to develop a genuine affection for disagreeable people. With the hard-luck cases I meet, often the best way to like them is to find something about them with which you can empathize.

With Madeleine White, that wasn’t easy.

The ass-kicking woman who led us into the mission was as hard to love as the bratty little girl I’d known at Alamo Heights.

The only memory that made me feel any sympathy for her was so unpleasant I’d buried it for years.

My senior year at Heights, I attended my last Howdy Night celebration to kick off the new school term. It was a sultry September evening. Millions of grackles were screeching in the trees. The air was thick with mosquitoes and barbecue smoke and teenage hormones.

The football field had been converted into a carnival ground. Parents and younger siblings milled around everywhere. Teachers worked the standard game booths: the dunking chair, the sponge toss, the cakewalk.

I was supposed to be meeting my girlfriend Lillian, but she was running late, so I fell in with Ralph and Frankie White, who were trying the football toss and drinking Big Red sodas secretly laced with tequila.