The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(36)

Garrett was silent long enough to replay her words several times. "You're buying control."

"I'm sorry, Garrett. I've already called my lawyer."

"You coldblooded—with Jimmy not even in the ground two hours?"

"By tomorrow, I expect to control two thirds of Techsan. You can sign the sellout agreement or not, dear, but I'm afraid you're outvoted. We are selling Techsan to Matthew Pena's client, AccuShield."

Garrett made a fist around his beer bottle, then drained it.

He chunked the empty Shiner off the deck. It spun in the light, a brown pinwheel, landing somewhere below with a metallic CLANKCLANK.

"That better not have been my convertible," Ruby told him.

"I should be so lucky."

Garrett produced a pen from his wheelchair pouch, clicked it, signed the papers.

I looked down at my untouched beer. Condensation had soaked a cold ring through my jeans.

When Garrett finished the signatures, he tossed the papers at Ruby's feet.

"Another divorce, Ruby. That's what this is. Pay me off. Then leave me the f**k alone."

The night air between them was radioactive—glowing with grief and rage and recrimination so intimate I felt like a voyeur. I tried to convince myself two people could make each other so miserable merely through a business deal.

Ruby turned toward me, managed a crooked smile. "Well, Tres. Your ranch is saved."

Garrett's face was murderously calm. "You said the plumbing's working?"

"Yes, dear heart. It is."

"Little bro, I'll be inside. You want to leave, come get me. Something about being in Ruby's place too long—I start feeling sick."

He wheeled himself toward the sliding glass door, spun inside.

The night got intensely quiet.

Ruby rubbed her face. She still had that naturally quizzical look, but the impishness had been replaced with sour dissatisfaction.

"Your brother is impossible," she said.

I imagined her looking like this as an older woman—in her sixties, handsome and stern, the red hair turned to steel, cut short, that

eyebrow still raised in disapproval, her aged eyes like a falcon's, critically watching other people's grandchildren, thanking her stars that she didn't have any.

She fished something out of her pocket—a medication bottle. She popped out three pink pills and swallowed them dry.

I watched the pill bottle disappear back into Ruby's pocket.

She crossed her legs at the ankles, looked up at the stars. "Tonight at Scholz Garten, you almost killed Clyde."

"I wouldn't have killed him."

"The way you say that—like you could have killed him if you wanted to. Tres, why did you get involved?"

"I don't like uneven fights. Too many Underdog cartoons as a kid."

She laughed.

"What were you popping?"

She looked confused, then remembered the bottle. "Popping. God, that sounds so dirty. Just my attitude medicine, Tres. I'm a real nasty redheaded bitch without it, I'm afraid. I know that must be hard for you to imagine."

"Jimmy's autopsy report," I said. "He'd been taking tricyclic antidepressants."

She pushed her legs straight on the deck, pointed her toes toward me. "Jimmy and I were quite a compatible match. Both f**kedup rich kids. You want to know why I couldn't live with him? We were too much alike."

"You got along with Matthew Pena."

She stared at the sellout papers, still untouched at her feet. "Give Pena credit, Tres.

He understands people. He understood how we'd overextended ourselves—how desperate Garrett must have been to mortgage that family ranch, for instance. He can sense immediately what's important to someone. He's the first person I ever met who really understood why I dive."

"And why is that?"

She came back to the railing, looked toward the water. "You have your ranch. Jimmy had that lakeside property—that damn shrine to his mother. I have this."

"The marina."

"Not just the marina, Tres. My family, the McBrides—we used to be big landowners out here on the Colorado River. This was in my grandfather's time, the 1930s, before that.

When the state built Mansfield Dam, they bought out the farms, the orchards—every damn thing. Eminent domain. What you see here, this little point of land, is the one percent that wasn't flooded. That's my inheritance out there—under the lake. That's what I showed Pena, the day he wanted to take me diving. I said, 'Come see the property line.' Our orchards are still down there. Trees my greatgrandfather planted.

Pieces of the original barbed wire fence. Eventually, I intend to map the whole estate."

She stared out at the water as if peeling back the flood, trying to see the land that had been there seventy years ago.

"And Pena understood that," I said.

"He understood why I needed money to build this house, why I'd never had the courage to build before. It's hard to put down roots on land when you've spent your life hearing about a flood."

The lights began to go off at the marina, Clyde Simms shutting down for the night.

"Jimmy's property," I said. "You called it a shrine to his mother. Why?"