Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(4)

Chapter 2

MONDAY MORNING I GOT A PAYING CLIENT.

Wednesday afternoon I killed him.

Friday evening I buried him.

The Tres Navarre Detective Agency is a full-service operation. Did I mention that?

My girlfriend, Maia Lee, drove me home from the funeral. We cruised down Commerce in her BMW, discussing the likelihood of my PI license being revoked. Maia thought the odds were high. Being a lawyer, she probably knew what she was talking about.

“The criminal charges don’t worry me,” she said. “The DA didn’t sound serious about filing.”

“That’s because he wanted your phone number.”

“But the licensing board . . . I mean, killing clients—”

“Generally frowned upon.”

“Tres Navarre: impeccable judge of character.”

“Oh, shut up.”

The guy I’d killed, Dr. Allen Vale, had asked me to find his estranged wife. He said he needed to work out an inheritance problem with her. He hadn’t seen her in five years. They’d never gotten an official divorce. No hard feelings. The relationship was old history. He just needed to sort out a few legalities.

He wore a tailored suit. He laughed at my jokes. He paid cash in advance.

I took the job.

Two days later I located his wife, living in San Antonio under an assumed name. I met Dr. Vale at my office and gave him her new identity and address. He thanked me, calmly walked out to his car, loaded a shotgun and drove away. That’s when I realized I’d made a mistake.

I called the police, sure. But I also grabbed my father’s old .38 and followed Vale straight to his estranged wife’s house.

She was standing in her front yard watering her Mexican marigolds. She dropped the hose when she saw Vale trudging toward her with the shotgun.

No police in sight.

I had the choice of either stopping Vale or watching him murder his wife. I yelled at him to drop the gun. He turned on me and fired.

Three minutes later the police surrounded the house.

They found me standing next to Allen Vale’s Infiniti, a dinner-plate-size shotgun hole in the driver’s side door, two feet to my left. The good doctor was sprawled on the lawn with an entrance wound through the middle of his silk tie, his estranged wife on her knees, her face chalky with terror, her forgotten garden hose spraying blood and marigold petals down the sidewalk.

Maia had asked me why I wanted to go to the memorial service and face Vale’s family. I told her closure. That was a lie. The truth was probably closer to Catholic guilt. I was raised to believe repentance is not enough. One must emotionally flagellate oneself as much as possible.

Maia reached across the car seat and squeezed my hand. “You did what you had to.”

“Would you have shot him?”

She drove another block before answering. “I would’ve talked to the wife before giving her away. I think I would’ve seen through the client’s bullshit at the first meeting.”

“Thanks. I feel better.”

“You’re a guy. What’s obvious to me isn’t to you.”

“A woman who collects assault rifles is lecturing me on sensitivity.”

Maia called me a few endearing pet names in Mandarin. In the years we’d been together, I’d learned all kinds of helpful Chinese phrases like Idiot white boy and My father told me not to date barbarians.

We drove over the Market Street Bridge. Below, the Riverwalk’s fifty-foot cypress trees blazed with Christmas lights like frozen fireworks.

In the multicolored glow, Maia looked unusually pensive.

She was beautiful in funeral black. Her dark ponytail almost disappeared against the linen dress. Her caramel skin was smooth, radiating such obvious health that she might’ve been mistaken for twenty-five rather than forty-five.

There was something timeless about her—a kind of fierce resilience that might’ve been carved from jade. Before losing everything to the Communists, her ancestors had been warlords of Guangzhou Province. I had no doubt Maia would’ve made them proud.

She didn’t seem to notice the holiday lights or the traffic. Her eyes stayed fixed on some point a thousand miles away.

“What’re you thinking?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, a little too quickly.

She turned on South Alamo, headed into Southtown.

First Friday. The usual hordes were out in force for the monthly gallery openings. Cars circled for parking. Drunk socialites and Nuevo Bohemians wandered the streets. It was as if God had upended all the chic restaurants and coffeehouses in town, mixed the patrons thoroughly in alcohol sauce, and dumped them into my neighborhood to find their way home.

Maia parked at the hydrant on the corner of Pecan, in front of my two-story Victorian.

A lady in a mink coat was throwing up in my front yard. She’d set her wineglass on top of my business sign:

TRES NAVARRE DETECTIVE AGENCY

Professional Investigations

(This is not an art gallery)

As our headlights illuminated her fur jacket, the lady turned and scowled at us. She staggered off like a sick bear, leaving her wineglass and a steaming puddle.

“Ah, the romance of San Antonio,” said Maia.

“Stay the night,” I said. “It gets better.”

“I have to get back to Austin.”

I took her hand, felt the tension in her fingers. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Live dangerous. Sam would love to see you.”