The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(5)

Garrett paused. "Well, you know about Doebler Oil."

It took Jimmy a moment to react.

Then he leaned forward into the light, frowned, and swiped the margarita thermos.

"Goddamn it, Garrett. You know Doebler Oil didn't cut me a cent."

"Whatever, man," Garrett said. "You had money. So did Ruby. I didn't, and I wanted to be an equal partner."

"So you mortgaged the ranch," I said.

"We expected a quick profit," Jimmy put in. "Our product kicked ass. Tech companies with programs a lot less solid than ours were seeing their public stock offerings quadruple the first hour of trading. All we figured we had to do was keep alive that long— finance the product through betatest phase, keep the investors excited. It's like a poker game, Tres. The longer you stay in, the bigger the pot."

I looked at Jimmy Doebler, then at Garrett. I felt like I'd been dropped into a camp of defective mountain men, trying to figure out how to get beaver pelts traded on Wall Street. I said, "No wonder things went bad."

Garrett glared at me. "As of January, smartass, we were flying high. Mr. Doebler here even convinced himself he was in love— went off and got himself married to our lovely third partner."

Jimmy shoved the thermos back into the dirt, took a slug of his second drink. "Leave her alone, Garrett."

Garrett waved the comment aside. "We convinced half a dozen companies to do a sixmonth betatest—meaning they'd try our product for free, we'd monitor how it went.

Things went well, we could market the program commercially. Man, we rented offices, hired staff, did installation."

"You spent more money you didn't have," I translated.

"Three months in, things were going so well we were turning down buyout offers, little bro. Turning them down."

"And then?" I asked.

"We were sabotaged."

Jimmy shifted his back uneasily against the mesquite. "We don't know that, Garrett."

"The hell we don't. Fucking Matthew Pena."

I made the timeout sign. "Who?"

"Back in April," Garrett said, "we got this buyout offer from an investment banker in Cupertino, guy named Pena. Reminded me of a f**king vampire. He got along great with Ruby, which figures, but me and Jimmy said no way. Right after we turned Pena down, things started to go wrong with our betatesting. The program is supposed to protect traffic on our clients' computers, okay? Email, Internet commerce, important shit."

"That's one of those hightech terms, right? 'Important shit.' "

Garrett ignored me. He'd had a lot of practice at that over the years.

"All of a sudden," he said, "it was like our program sprung leaks. Our clients start reporting documents showing up in weird places—employees getting termination notices in their email before they were officially fired, salary schedules getting posted on the company Web site, business plans emailed to competitors. Worst scenarios you can imagine. We've been busting our asses trying to figure it out, tell the clients the program can't be at fault. The leaks are too malicious, too . . . intelligent. It's got to be somebody—Pena for instance—bribing people to leak files directly from the test sites."

"Yeah," Jimmy mumbled. "Couldn't be Garrett's perfect algorithms."

"Oh, f**k you, man. And what do the betatesters do? They blame us. We're supposed to protect them and we can't, so it's our fault. Three of the six companies have stopped testing and filed lawsuits, and we don't have the money to fight them. The other companies are threatening to do the same. If they do, we lose everything—two years of work, our IPO, any chance at investors. And now the bastard that sabotaged us—f*cking Matthew Pena—comes back to us with a last ditch buyout offer, a fifth of what he offered us three months ago. And his goddamn wife—" Shaking his finger at Jimmy. "His goddamn ￡xwife is telling us we should feel grateful about it."

Jimmy got to his feet. "Maybe she's just smarter than you, Garrett. You ever think of that?"

I didn't like the looks Garrett and Jimmy were giving each other. I'd been in enough bar fights to recognize the prelude music.

"How much money?" I broke in.

"About four million total in the stock," Garrett growled. "Peanuts. Enough to break even, get out of debt. Nothing more."

I tried to visualize an equals sign between the words four million and peanuts. I couldn't do it.

"You're hesitating?" I asked. "Sell."

Garrett pitched his margarita cup into the grass, pushed his wheelchair back from the fire. "Two years of my life, little bro. You walk in here, not knowing shit, and you tell me,

'Sell.' "

"It's the same Ruby's telling us," Jimmy said. "You're just too stubborn—"

Garrett broke down in a miniature seizure—cursing and spitting and patting his arms around his chair looking for something else to throw. He grabbed his bag, and before I knew what was happening he had the gun in his hand.

"Ruby!" he yelled. "All I hear about is damn Ruby. What the hell was your f**king divorce for? Here, Ruby. I got something for you."

The round he fired at the kiln goddess blasted her left arm clean off, sending shards of brick and ceramics out into the night.