Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(20)

“He’s hiding something,” I told Maia.

“Maybe you just don’t like him.”

“Yeah, I don’t like him. But he’s also hiding something. He used to make fireworks when he was a teenager. Fuses. Timers.”

“Tres, a hit man using explosives and a kid playing with fireworks are two very different things. Something is a little fractured about Alex. I’ll give you that. But he doesn’t seem dangerous.”

“I don’t believe he’s never heard of Calavera.”

“What if he’s the one who gave you the articles?”

“That doesn’t make sense either,” I said. “I don’t think Alex reads.”

Maia rolled her eyes. “You really don’t like him.”

The plastic and boards and duct tape billowed and creaked against the ruined door, like some kind of artificial lung. I wondered if it was my imagination, or if the wind sounded like it was lessening a bit.

“If Calavera is here,” Maia said, “he’ll need to leave. And if he knows that we know he’s here—”

“Somebody knows.” I tapped the envelope in her hand. “And Longoria was shot. We have to assume Calavera is already desperate.”

“He can’t have us raising the alarm. He can’t risk getting quarantined on this island.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re in serious danger. All of us.”

“Pretty much.”

She took my hand. “Want to go to dinner?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Dinner sounds good.”

12

Benjamin Lindy pointed his gun at the mirror.

How had he gotten so old? He recognized his eyes, sharp as ever, but his hair was thin and ghostly white. His face looked like the moon’s surface, all scars and craters. The year he’d met his wife, 1963, seemed like yesterday. So did his daughter’s birth. How had he allowed so many years to pass? To get this old and have nothing to show for it…Nothing but desolation, the loneliness of having outlived everyone he’d ever cared about.

The gun shook in his hand. He swung it to the left, then the right. He found that if he did this, he could swing the barrel back to center and find his mark. He’d practiced on the ranch, just to be sure.

Thunder shook the mirror and his reflection rippled. He lowered his hand. He hadn’t realized how tight his finger had been on the trigger.

The photo album lay open in front of him. All the happy moments were there. He tried to concentrate on them, but what he saw were other scenes: faces from photographs he’d burned. He saw his wife the day she left. The sun caught her hair and turned it from brown to gold. She wore a white cotton dress that showed off the freckles on her shoulders.

The baby was crying in the house, but Benjamin ran out the front door, after his wife. She didn’t turn when he called to her, but he caught her in the driveway and tried to grab the suitcase—the same brown leather case she’d taken to Italy on their honeymoon. It spilled open and her few possessions tumbled out—a few extra dresses, some lingerie he’d never seen. The only thing he recognized: a photograph taken of her on vacation, standing in front of the Bray Mansion on Rebel Island.

“Goodbye, Ben,” she said.

He was too stunned to stop her as she got in the car, leaving her things behind on the front lawn. Afterward, what stuck in his mind were her earrings: silver seashells. She never wore the jewelry he gave her. But she was wearing those, a gift from another man.

I told you not to trust her, Jesse Longoria’s voice spoke in his head.

Longoria thirty years ago, sitting in his San Antonio office, cigarette smoke swirling through the hot light slanting through the window. He looked smug and confident in his caramel suit, his eyes black as a crocodile’s. Longoria had counseled revenge.

You let her walk out on you…You’re going to live with the fact that she’s laughing at you every day, sharing another man’s bed, raising his children instead of yours?

Benjamin had refused, but the words irritated him for years, like a grain of sand at the core of a pearl. And this spring, he had called Longoria again.

This time, Longoria said, we do it my way.

Benjamin remembered the hotel staff dragging Longoria’s body through the kitchen on a plastic tarp. Longoria’s eyes had still glittered darkly, as if being alive or dead made absolutely no difference to him. The gunshot wound was right where a tie clip should have been.

So much for doing it Longoria’s way.

Benjamin heard footsteps in the hallway outside his room. “Mr. Lindy?”

It was one of the college boys: the burly one, Markie. The boy seemed like the calmest of the three, the most polite, but there was a cruel light in his eyes that Benjamin didn’t trust. Markie reminded him strongly of a young Jesse Longoria.

“You lose your way, son? The liquor cabinet is in the parlor.”

Markie’s eyes registered the gun. “Dinnertime, sir. You want me to say you’re not coming?”

“I’m coming,” Benjamin said.

He set down the gun. He closed the photo album, still seeing the picture that he’d burned long ago: his wife smiling in front of the Rebel Island Hotel, smiling for another man.

13

I had to give Jose and Imelda credit. It’s difficult to set an elegant dinner with the dining room windows boarded up and the floor littered with broken glass, but they’d done their best.