The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(19)

She didn't finish. She didn't have to. We both understood why she couldn't wait for an indictment, why no defence lawyer would ever want to defend a friend in court. If the police felt confident enough to arrest Garrett, if the case went to trial without a plea bargain—the odds for acquittal got very long indeed.

"And you still don't want my help," I said.

"That's Garrett's call."

"Is it?" I picked up Garrett's phone.

Maia frowned. "What are you—"

I hadn't really been expecting any luck—not on a Sunday afternoon—but on the third ring a cheery receptionist's voice said, "Mr. Pena's offices. This is Krystal."

I knew she spelled it with a K. She sounded like the K variety of Krystal.

I told her I was the personal assistant to one of Matthew's venture capitalist friends. I knew it was lastminute, but my boss was going to be superpissed if I couldn't squeeze him in for an appointment with Matthew sometime today.

Maia made an emphatic cut gesture across her throat.

"Oh, man," Krystal sympathized. "This is such a bummer, but Mr. Pena is out the rest of the afternoon."

"Out?" I tried to sound devastated.

"Yeah. I'm really sorry. He took some prospective clients to Windy Point."

Maia was glaring at me.

"Windy Point," I said. "Isn't that on the lake somewhere?"

"Yeah," Krystal agreed. "The scuba place. Mr. Pena is big on that, you know? Likes to impress clients by taking them under, bonding with the fish. Ha, ha."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Ha, ha."

"So, like, he's out there teaching these guys to scuba dive. I'm really sorry."

I winked at Maia. "That's okay, Krystal. In fact, that's just about perfect. Thanks."

I hung up, told Maia where Matthew Pena was, what he was doing.

Her reaction was just what I expected.

She looked nauseated, swallowed deeply. "I'll catch him tomorrow."

"Sure," I agreed. "Me, I think I'll go out to Windy Point. I'll try not to mess things up for you too bad."

She glared at the floor, called me several unflattering names in Mandarin. I knew the names well enough. She'd called me them before. "You insist on wedging your way into this, don't you?"

I gestured toward the door. "After you?" The pizza man was just coming up the stairs.

Maia told him to go upstairs, give the pizza to the guy with no legs.

She said she didn't anticipate being hungry again for a very long time.

CHAPTER 9

The man in the wet suit had just finished getting sick.

He was hunched over on a picnic bench, elbows on his knees, the purged contents of his stomach speckling the grass between his feet. His face glistened with sweat and lake water, the sclera of his eyes an unhealthy shade of egg yolk yellow.

As Maia and I walked toward him, his expression turned from misery to embarrassment. The message was clear: Please let me suffer in privacy.

"You okay?" I asked.

He had pinched features, a Mediterranean tan. He was probably in his late twenties, though he looked older from the sun lines scoring his eyes and mouth. Handsome, in a small, tight way. His hair was a closecropped skullcap of chocolate brown, water trickling off behind his ears. He had eyes like an old lady's poodle—big and dark, filled with mournful selfconsciousness, anxiety over the fact that he wasn't a bulldog.

"Guess I need a little more practice," he said.

We were at the last picnic table on Windy Point, next to the metal stairs that led down a twentyfoot limestone cliff to the water. Dragonflies zagged in drunken orbits over the grass. A strong, steady breeze blew off the headlands—the kind of wind that would hide a sunburn on a day like this, not let you know you'd become fried and dehydrated until it was too late.

Behind us, in the woods, several dozen scuba campers had set up their tents, equipment trailers, barbecue pits. I could smell hamburgers cooking. Red and white dive flags decorated everything. Swimsuits and dive skins were draped over lawn chairs. The black rubbery hoses of regulators hung in live oak branches like trophy kill octopi.

The little gravel road ended at our feet. There was nothing farther but the dropoff and the lake.

Maia Lee didn't look much better than the scuba diver. She'd looked progressively worse the closer we'd gotten to the lake. Apparently, though, she remembered scuba training better than I did. She noticed the sick man's air tank standing upright on the table— a big nono in the world of diving. She picked up the tank and laid it on the ground sideways, where it couldn't fall over and cause mischief.

"Thanks," the man murmured. "Forgot."

And then he took another look at her, squinting to make out her face in the sun. "Don't I— Miss Lee?"

"Hello, Dwight."

If it was possible for Dwight to look any more nauseated, he did. "Oh my God. Matthew called you out here?"

I placed the name. Dwight Hayes—the AccuShield employee who had supported Matthew Pena's statement about his girlfriend falling off the dinner yacht.

"Dwight," Maia said, "this is a friend of mine, Tres Navarre."

He looked surprised by my proffered hand, reached for it, then almost immediately pulled back. "Navarre?"