Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(61)

He turned and stared at his empty living room.

He was down to a coffee table and sofa. No television. No knickknacks. No photos.

Over the last year, anticipating retirement, he had slowly pared his possessions down to nothing. Every week, another box went down the street to the church’s donation bin, until his entire life seemed to have dissolved.

Travel had been the idea, originally. Etch told his colleagues he was buying an RV, striking out to see the United States. Except for his college years, and a few business trips here and there to pick up fugitives, Etch had never left San Antonio. He deserved to travel.

The problem was Etch never bought the RV.

He kept just minimizing his possessions without making preparations for anything new. He felt like he was erasing himself, a little at a time, and something about it felt satisfying.

He loaded his nine-millimeter, attached the silencer.

Not many people in San Antonio owned silencers, but Etch had a collection. He enjoyed shooting in the early morning.

The parishioners didn’t want their prayers interrupted. The neighbors didn’t want their dreams punctuated by small arms fire. Etch tried to be sensitive to their wishes.

He loaded a fresh clip. He went out the back door.

Etch’s house sat on a stretch of Basse Road that hadn’t changed much in the last three decades. To the north, the city grew like a cancer, eating up more rural land every year, but here on the West Side, nobody much cared about progress, or strip malls, or adding a Starbucks to every block.

The boulevard was lined with weeds and cactus and scraggly live oaks. The houses on either side were shotgun shacks on huge lots. Etch’s own was a two-bedroom clapboard, painted the color of provolone cheese. It wasn’t really so small, but it looked that way surrounded by fields of spear grass.

In the spring, the back acre would be flooded with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, but now, in the winter, there was nothing but yellow grass.

Etch’s target range was an old olive Frigidaire, sitting in the field between his house and the church. At least once a week, he opened the refrigerator and loaded it with cans, bottles, boxes, whatever he had left in the pantry. Etch still did grocery shopping, though somehow he never got around to eating much. He liked to shoot the contents of the refrigerator, then hose out the remains.

He worked his first clip. He took out three cans of sardines, blew up a two-liter soda bottle, plugged a few shots into the door and watched the recoil whap it back and forth on its hinges.

He knew he was putting off what he had to do this morning. Eight o’clock already. He had to get going before people started waking up and the hospital shift changed. He had arranged to take over starting at nine. That would give him a good hour before the doctors came in to check on Ana—plenty of time to make his decision.

He imagined Lucia, sitting just behind him. If he looked back, she would be there at the picnic table under the huisache tree. She’d be holding a cup of coffee, wearing her patrol uniform.

You can’t murder my daughter, Etch.

“She betrayed you. She isn’t yours.”

She is, Lucia said. You’re not going to win, love.

He feared she was right. He couldn’t carve a victory out of this. He’d been buying time for eighteen years, but if it came down to keeping himself alive or keeping his secrets hidden, he wasn’t sure which he would choose.

Etch checked his gun. One round still chambered.

He thought about Ana lying in her hospital bed, heart monitor bleeping steadily. The more he had tried to love her, help her, see her mother’s qualities in her, the more he hated her.

He remembered a meeting he’d had with Ana, shortly before her mother died.

She’d invited him to coffee. He had gone, feeling a bit uneasy. And irritated.

Ana was twenty-six, just out of college after the Air Force, her first month into the SAPD police academy. By all accounts, she was excelling. There was no doubt she was worthy of her mother’s legacy. There was also little doubt that Ana DeLeon wouldn’t be spending her entire career on patrol.

It rankled Etch every time someone said that, as if the work Lucia and he had been doing since Ana was a little girl was meaningless. A job for the unmotivated.

They’d met at the Pig Stand, down the street from Lucia’s. Etch wondered if Ana had picked the spot as some kind of message. Etch hadn’t been there in almost three years. After Frankie’s death, his old routines with Lucia had slowly unraveled. Everything seemed tainted by the night of the murder.

Ana insisted on buying his coffee, as if with the seventy-five cents, she was proving her adulthood, her independence. Etch never paid for anything at the Pig Stand anyway, but he let her put down the money.

She was only a few years younger than Lucia had been when Etch started patrolling with her. Ana had the same glossy black hair, chopped short in a utilitarian wedge. She had the same plum-colored lips, the same challenge in her eyes, though that look that had been draining from Lucia’s eyes over the last few years.

“I’m worried about my mother,” Ana said.

Etch counted to ten before answering, trying to keep his anger inside.

“Maybe you should go see her,” he suggested. “How long has it been?”

In truth, he knew exactly how long. Six and a half months, since the huge fight when Ana had poured all her mother’s liquor into the river behind her house.