Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(51)

So much for the intrepid hero of the tempest.

Most of my dreams were surreal, kind of like my life. Unfortunately, this time I dreamed about the day I quit private investigations, and that dream was always exactly true-to-life.

I was in my office—the converted dining room of our Victorian on South Alamo. It was winter in San Antonio. The wall furnace hissed. Outside, the sky was heavy gray and the bare pecan trees looked like charred bones.

I’d just returned from San Fernando Cemetery, from my encounter with U.S. Marshal Longoria at Ralph’s graveside. Longoria’s words kept coming back to me: If you can’t stop feeling guilty, son, maybe you should find a different line of work.

I had a pile of paperwork on my desk. A few skip traces. A divorce case. An undercover job I needed to set up with a local jewelry store. I also had a stack of essays to grade from my part-time teaching gig at UTSA. I was trying to decide whether I wanted to write a report about my client’s cheating husband or grade sophomore papers on Chaucer’s use of alliteration. The fun factor seemed about the same, either way.

Maia was in the living room, talking on the phone with her doctor. She’d been on the phone since I got home. I tried not to think about that. She was constantly telling me not to worry. The doctor was probably trying again to convince her to do amniocentesis. She was politely but firmly saying no.

She wasn’t showing too much yet. She had white paint flecked on her fingers. She’d spent the morning painting the baby’s room upstairs, even though I’d told her she should take it easy.

I checked my email. I had a lot of messages. My boss at UTSA, asking again if I wouldn’t reconsider taking another course. They were shorthanded as usual. He could easily move me to a full-time position. He mentioned the magic words: health care.

There was a message from a client, thanking me for finding her runaway daughter. There was an email from Ana DeLeon, Ralph’s widow, with a photo attachment of their baby girl, Lucia. Lucia had her father’s crazy grin as she dumped the candy out of her Christmas stocking.

Worst of all, there was a Happy New Year e-card from Rosa Gomez, the lady who had hired me to find her fugitive husband. I didn’t know why Rosa kept me on her holiday list. She claimed I was the only one who listened to her, the only one who even tried to help her husband. I’m not sure I would’ve been so generous in her position. I had failed her miserably.

I shouldn’t have tortured myself, but I found the file on Julio Gomez and looked through it again. Like homicide detectives, PIs get certain cases that just won’t let you go. They are never resolved. They haunt you.

I’d never even met Julio Gomez, but I knew him well.

His photo showed a thin Latino in his late twenties. A good smile. Intelligent eyes. He didn’t look like a criminal. You wouldn’t latch your door if you saw Julio Gomez walking down your street. When he was seventeen, he’d been messing around on a highway overpass with some friends, throwing rocks down at cars. One rock went through a Ford pickup’s windshield with the force of a cannonball and killed a passenger. Julio had been tried as an adult, but he managed a plea deal—involuntary manslaughter. Light sentence. That had been his first strike. When he was twenty-one, he’d gotten in a fight at a bar. Unfortunately, the man had been an off-duty cop. This got Julio an assault conviction and a bad reputation among the city’s police.

When he got out of jail again, Julio married his longtime sweetheart, Rosa. Julio tried to go straight, despite the fact that the cops often harassed him, knowing he had a short temper. Julio was doing all right—holding down a job, thinking about community college. Then the gas station where Julio worked was burned to the ground a few days after Julio had argued with his boss. Julio was brought up on arson charges. He made bail, panicked and ran. He told Rosa he couldn’t take another felony count. More jail time would kill him.

Rosa was our down-the-street neighbor. She passed my business sign every day on her way to work. She came to me, begging me to find her husband. Julio was innocent of arson. Julio had to come back and stand trial.

I never found him. Within a few days, rumors started surfacing about Jesse Longoria. The marshal had been asking questions about Julio, following the same trail I had. Except Longoria had been more efficient and more ruthless.

What bothered me most was that I never found the body. I couldn’t prove what had happened. I couldn’t give Rosa any closure. All I had were suspicions. But that morning at the cemetery, Longoria’s smile had given me all the proof I needed. I thought about his pleasant eyes, his black wool coat, his gold college ring. He was a hunter with no remorse. He had found Julio Gomez, probably put a bullet through his head, dumped the body and gone out afterward for dinner and a show. He would’ve done the same for Ralph Arguello, or me for that matter, if we’d happened to cross him.

Why did I want people like that in my life?

I slipped Julio Gomez’s file back into my cabinet. I stared at the picture of my dead best friend’s daughter Lucia on my computer screen. Ana DeLeon’s brief note: Love from both of us.

I closed the email program.

In the living room, Maia hung up the phone. She sat with her fingers laced, staring at the coffee table. I knew she was gathering her composure before she came to talk to me. Especially during the first trimester, pregnancy had played hell with her hormones. She got emotional much more easily than usual, and she hated it. She spent a lot of time alone at the coffee table.