The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(47)

"You're welcome, Mary."

"They'll kill me, they see me again!"

"Sounds like a good reason not to see them again."

"You're such a f**ker."

"How much do you need?"

"What?"

Her caramel curls were coming undone in the wind.

"I don't have much. I can give you maybe thirty in cash."

She drew her knees up on the seat and hugged them, a move a larger girl, a woman, couldn't have done. "I don't want your money."

"You wanted fuzz-face's instead?"

"Man, just lay off. Okay? You're not my dad. You're not even old enough."

Her real dad, I knew, had not been old enough to be her dad either, but I didn't bring that up.

We turned on Woodlawn and started east. "Your stepsister still live on Agarita?"

"They kicked me out, man. I don't stay there no more."

"You got a friend to stay with?"

She hugged herself a little tighter. Finally, mumbling into her knees, she gave me the address of a girl she knew near Jefferson High, a girl who was still living with her parents and going to school. "But they put me up already this month. I don't know if they'll go for it."

"They'll go for it. Call your social worker in the morning."

"Social worker don't do shit, Tres. My old man came back three times and she don't do shit, no more than my mother."

"Call Ralph, then. Promise me you'll do that."

Mary mumbled some unflattering and untrue things about why Ralph Arguello liked to help wayward girls. I chose not to respond.

Finally Mary's shoulders deflated. "Yeah. Okay. I'll call him."

We drove back toward Jefferson, into the old neighborhoods of tiled porches and palm trees and once-majestic Spanish homes that had long ago been divided into units, fitted with burglar bars. Their front yard patches of nopalita cactus were carved with gang graffiti on the oval blades. In my headlights the sidewalks and curbs glowed with spray-painted gang symbols. Pitchfork up, one block. Pitchfork down the next. Make a pitchfork hand gesture the wrong way on the wrong block and you died.

"Tres, why were you at that place tonight, talking to Hector?"

"You know him?"

She poked at her lip, then looked at the greasy spot of lipstick on her finger, wiped it on her knee. "I see him there a lot. Sometimes with Chich. Week ago he was in with this big guy with a beard and ponytail and shit — looked like a big-time dealer. Scarier than Chicharron."

"Zeta Sanchez."

She nodded hesitantly. "I didn't mess with them. The Sanchez guy was all talking about his wife, looking to find her. And the other guy, Hector, he was saying like, 'This ain't going to get you nowhere, man.' I wouldn't have talked that way to Ponytail, the way he looked."

When we got to the address on Jefferson Drive where Mary's friend lived, Mary insisted on going in by herself.

She got out of the car, then turned and leaned back in. "Hector's badder than he looks, Tres. I think you should watch it."

"What makes you say that?"

"He nearly killed this other guy I saw him talking to in the Poco Mas. Couple of weeks before. A white guy."

My throat tightened. "Who?"

The porch light of the house came on behind Mary and she said, "I gotta go."

I reached over and caught her wrist gently. "This Anglo. Describe him."

"Chunky. Dark hair. One of those orange tropical shirts. I don't know."

"You hear a name?"

"B—Branson?"

"Brandon?"

"Maybe that was it."

A woman called Mary's name from the porch and Mary winced apologetically. She leaned all the way into the car and gave me a sticky kiss on the cheek. She smelled of at least three different kinds of cheap perfume.

"Call Ralph," I told her.

She tried for a smile, then trotted up the sidewalk to meet her friend. With her back turned, without the conscious effort in her walk, she almost looked fifteen. I pulled away from the curb, hoping the wind would push the scent of her perfume away.

TWENTY-TWO

I woke up Thursday morning in a sweat, shaking off dreams of Erainya looming over me, chastising me for not holding a Taurus P-11 correctly.

When I opened my eyes, the only one looming over me was Robert Johnson. He sat on the window ledge above the futon, the morning sun cutting across his face and making his whiskers glow like fiber-optic threads.

"Row," he announced.

"I know, I know. Breakfast."

At the magic word, he did a trampoline dismount from the window to my stomach to the floor, then showed me where the kitchen was.

Once I'd served him his Friskies, properly fried with cheese and taco meat on a bed of flour tortilla, I started some coffee and eggs for myself and pulled down the ironing board to make a call.

The answering machine was flashing again. I had no memory of the phone ringing the night before, but that was not unusual for Tres Navarre, zombie sleeper. The first message was from my mother, letting me know that everything was fine, though she had not in fact seen her insignificant-other Jess since the night they'd argued and if I wasn't too busy, did I want to go to an art opening tonight? The second was from George Berton. George said he was sorry for not returning the calls from me and Erainya last night but he thought he might have something and he wouldn't be reachable today. Could we meet him at his house tonight?