The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(16)

It was DeLeon's voice. A single shot ricocheted off brick, followed by more scuffling noises.

I locked eyes with Kelsey and just for an instant I saw what the bastard was thinking, what options he was weighing. Only one of those options was running to DeLeon's assistance. Then he was up and moving but I was already ahead of him, ripping through the brush and stickers.

When we got to the back of the house it was already over.

A second Latino man was kneeling with his chest and the side of his face slammed into the back wall of the house. He wore only jeans and huarache sandals. He was an enormous man, dark-skinned and hairy as a timber wolf. It was hard to tell much else about his looks because they were mostly ruined by the pistol-whipping he'd received. Nearby in the dirt lay car keys and a gun — a long-barreled .38.

Detective DeLeon didn't look much better than her apprehendee. Her skirt was torn and her panty hose reduced to amber cobwebs. Her white blouse was ripped. Her blazer floated in the tall grass nearby like some kind of pointy scarecrow. She had shiny red cross-hatching on her cheek and a line of blood down the side of her mouth.

She also had her Glock 23 pressed decisively under Timber Wolf's ear and was in the process of cuffing him one-handed.

Kelsey looked at her, looked at me, then lowered his weapon. He shouted our status to the officer at the front of the house.

Three seconds later the young uniform came busting out the back door with his gun drawn. He took one look at DeLeon and the apprehendee I assumed was Zeta Sanchez and was so surprised he nearly backed up into the house.

DeLeon got up and wiped her bloody mouth with the back of her hand. She let the uniform take over with Zeta Sanchez, then stumbled toward Kelsey and muttered, "Thanks for the front door."

She stumbled again as she walked past us. Sirens were already wailing in the distance.

Kelsey watched her go. In a tone of grudging admiration he muttered, "I'll be damned."

I turned and punched him hard in the gut.

It was a tai chi upper cut, only slightly less forceful than a pile driver. By the time I regained the feeling in my hand, Kelsey was doubled over, contemplating the pool his lunch had made in the dirt.

Then I walked back around the corner of the house, figuring I should try to help stop the bleeding of another guy I didn't like much either.

SEVEN

That evening after the Eyewitness News I owed Andy Warhol a reimbursement check for two and a half minutes.

With a concerned face, KENS anchorman Chris Marrou told San Antonio all about my day — how a pipe bomb this morning had nearly killed a private investigator, a UTSA administrator, and an SAPD homicide investigator; how the incident had spurred police into swift action this afternoon, leading to a bloody standoff and finally the arrest of longtime fugitive Anthony "Zeta" Sanchez. Police would not officially comment on Sanchez's connection with this morning's bombing or the recent murder of UTSA's Professor Aaron Brandon, but unnamed sources confirmed that indictments on both counts were imminent. Rumors had surfaced about Sanchez's onetime employment by the Brandon family and Sanchez's possible role in the 1993 murder of Aaron's father, Jeremiah, none of which the SAPD would comment on.

"But the UTSA campus," Chris Marrou assured me, "is breathing a collective sigh of relief tonight."

Chris seemed mildly disappointed that he couldn't offer a more detailed explanation for Zeta Sanchez's actions, but what the heck. The footage was good. The news cameras kept zooming in on Hector Mara's bloody front porch, the bloody back wall of his house, the bullet holes in the door. Grade A local news. A mug shot of Anthony "Zeta" Sanchez looked a lot better than Zeta had in person — a handsome, sharply angular face, mustache and beard no thicker than marking pen around his jaw and mouth. He had the heavy-lidded eyes and deceptively calm expression of a well-fed carnivore.

Marrou told us that Deputy Oswald Gerson was in critical but stable condition at Brooke Army Medical Center, that Hector Mara of 11043 Green Road had been questioned and released by police, and that the D.A. was praising the efforts of the detectives involved in today's arrest. I turned off the news. I fixed myself a margarita, took it out to the back patio, and sank into my well-worn butterfly chair.

I sipped painkiller-on-the-rocks while the sun went down over Mrs. Geradino's garage. The webworm patches in her pecan tree glittered orange. Her sprinkler sliced across the yard. The Geradino babies — six Chihuahuas that resembled boiled and shucked armadillos — yapped mutely at me from the other side of their mother's glass patio doors. Your basic romantic sunset at 90 Queen Anne.

I thought about Jeremiah Brandon — the old turkey buzzard with his seedy connections to the carnival circuit and his appetite for underage women that had eventually gotten him killed. I kept envisioning his face from the 1967 photograph, stuck on a body with no chest — a broken pinata thrown into the corner of a West Side barroom, surrounded by stone-faced employees who hadn't seen a thing. I thought about Jeremiah's two sons, Del and Aaron, and what it might've been like growing up in a family that made amusement rides. A kid's dream. Maybe Aaron Brandon had fond memories. Maybe he'd taken his own five-year-old son Michael to Uncle Del's shop from time to time to try out the products.

Or maybe growing up around the carnival business had been an endless series of encounters with people like Zeta Sanchez, carny owners with the same hungry eyes as Jeremiah Brandon. Maybe that kind of childhood produced an adult who studied medieval gore and monster stories and Crusade massacres. Maybe Aaron Brandon kept his little boy the hell away from that shop.