The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(11)

Ozzie took a right on Broadway, then a quick left on Hildebrand.

The week after fiesta and the streets were deserted. Over the weekend, three hundred thousand revelers had trickled out of town, leaving the locals drained, hungover, red-eyed, and stiff from a week of intense partying. The pedestrians all moved a little slower. The curbs were still littered with confetti and beer cups. Pickup trucks passed with empty kegs in their beds. Streamers dangled from trees. It would be at least Friday before San Antonio rebounded for another major party. That, for San Antonio, was an impressive period of austerity.

Ozzie took the McAllister Freeway on-ramp and propelled us south at a speed somewhere between the legal limit and the barrier of sound. The city floated by in detached, tinted silence — Trinity University, Pearl Brewery, the gray and brown skyscrapers of downtown.

"So," Ozzie prompted.

"So. The Brandon family attracts bullets."

Half a mile of silence. "You and Erainya. SAPD. The Feds. Suddenly after six years everybody wants to talk to me about the Brandons."

"We just love you, Ozzie."

Ozzie picked up his transmitter and told Dispatch to show him 10-8, back in service.

"Our unit number's twenty-thirteen," he told me. "Case I get shot or something."

"There's positive thinking."

"I tell the detectives six years ago — I say, 'Look out, this guy will be back.' Three weeks ago, I tell them, 'Hey, there's word on the street he is back.' But do they listen to me? No. They wait until Aaron Brandon is murdered, then they figure it's time to ask me for help. What is that about?"

"Go figure."

"You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Nope. You going to enlighten me?"

"I probably shouldn't."

"Probably not."

The downtown skyline receded behind us, the landscape ahead turning to a mixture of tract housing and salvage yards and acres of scrub brush. Ozzie took the 410 split into the unincorporated South Side. "Jimmy Hernandez down at city homicide, he made it clear he wants a lid on this until his people are ready to move."

"And your career has been a tribute to following orders from the brass." Ozzie's neck flushed. I thought we'd entered dangerous territory until he glanced over and allowed the corner of his mouth to creep up just slightly. "There's that. You put any of the story together yet? "

"SAPD's got two dead UTSA professors on their hands. Everybody is assuming the Brandon murder at least had something to do with campus politics. Except maybe it didn't. SAPD suspects some kind of connection to the murder of the professor's dad six years ago, something to do with a guy named Sanchez. Until they run down that lead, SAPD sees no reason to tip their hand. They're happy letting everybody think the political angle."

"You're warm."

"What I can't figure out, no offense, is why everybody wants to talk to you."

"You know what I did before this, Navarre?"

Before this. Ozzie-code for the unapproachable subject: Before I got busted back to patrol.

"County gang task force," I recalled. "Seventeen years, wasn't it?"

I knew it had been fifteen, but the mistake pleased him. Ozzie let it stand. "The reason everybody wants to talk to me — I'm the expert on Zeta Sanchez."

Ozzie said the first name Say-ta, Spanish for the letter Z. He looked at me to see if it rang a bell.

"Nope."

"First part of Zeta's story reads pretty typical — dad died young. Zeta was raised by his mom down at the Bowie Courts, claimed a gang when he was twelve. Head of his set by age fourteen. By fifteen he'd started piecing out some West Side he**in action."

Dispatch crackled a call for another unit. Ozzie craned his ear to listen: 10-59 — suspicious vehicle report.

"Over by Lackland." Gerson wagged an accusing finger at me. "Probably some damn P.I."

"You were saying?"

Ozzie frowned at the MDT terminal, then back at the freeway. He took the exit for South Presa.

"I arrested Zeta Sanchez so many times when he was growing up, I feel like I practically raised him. When he was about seventeen he left the small stuff behind — the gang-banging, the drugs — and got a job with Jeremiah Brandon."

"Aaron Brandon's father."

"Yeah."

"He made amusement park rides."

Ozzie laughed. "Yeah. You know anything about the carnival circuit?"

"You mean like candied apples? Duck shoots?"

"The carnies are havens for cons. Smugglers. Thieves. Murderers. Grifters. Name your flavor. Jeremiah Brandon did business with all of them. By the time he died, Jeremiah was calling himself the King of the South Texas carnivals. Had the amusement-ride market sewn up all over the Southwest and northern Mexico. And he wasn't just selling rides, kid. Brandon would fence stolen property for his buddies on the circuit, launder their cash, make problem employees go away. A whole network of people all over the country owed him favors. You wanted some goods smuggled out of state, or you wanted to disappear, or you needed to find some hired guns for a quick job, Jeremiah could help. You worked for him, you could make some big money."

"Which Zeta Sanchez did?"