The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(49)

I walked back to the bedroom.

Gerson was propped up in bed amid enough down comforters and pillows to break a free fall. There were two prescription bottles, a TV remote control, and a can of Sprite on the bedstand. The drapes were open and sunlight flooded in, making the daytime soap opera on TV almost impossible to see.

Ozzie looked pretty good for a man who'd recently come out of the ICU. His color was back. His upper body was bare — Buddha-belly and flabby tits and massive arms swirling in coarse black hair, an old Marines tattoo on his right biceps. His left shoulder was heavily padded and taped, but there was no hint of bleeding. Ozzie's face was its usual brutish slab of pink — a bull's visage, shaved and smiling.

"You ever watch these shows?" he demanded. "Audrey likes them. She tells me they're good — I don't know."

On the screen, a doctor was talking to a woman in a low-cut evening dress. I placed Ozzie's present on the bedstand. "Hope you're feeling better."

His smile widened. He turned the little bonsai plant around. "What's this?"

"A tree. You said you wanted a place with trees."

He laughed. "Nicest f**king gift I've gotten so far. Not counting what Audrey gave me last night. Thanks, Navarre."

"One can't outdo Audrey."

"One sure as shit can't. Pull up a chair."

Ozzie filled me in on his condition — how he'd survived an infiltrated IV and bad hospital food, survived his first phone call from his kids in three years. How he planned on going back to light duty tomorrow over the doctors' objections. Ozzie said he'd be damned if he'd lose field hours toward his next salary review over a scumbag like Zeta Sanchez.

I was almost convinced Ozzie was really doing fine until he tried to sit up and the blood drained from his face.

"Can I help?"

"Nah. Nah." He took a few careful, slow breaths. "How about that medicine bottle though? The bigger one. Yeah. Thanks."

He downed a couple of painkillers with some Sprite, then stared at the TV. After a minute the glassiness cleared from his eyes again. "So. You screwing up the Brandon case yet?"

"Who, me?"

Ozzie gave me a crooked grin. "Your daddy would kill you. Let's hear what you've got."

I filled him in on the last two days. As he listened, Ozzie's smile faded into a hard line. His eyes drifted back to the television. "You tell Kelsey about Del Brandon and Hector Mara?"

"I told him to tell DeLeon. Kelsey didn't seem to think they could do much to establish the connection."

"He may be right."

Two feminine hygiene commercials played through.

"You worked with Kelsey before—"

"Before I got demoted," Ozzie supplied. "Yeah. Kelsey used to be on city vice. I was county gang task force. We crossed paths."

His voice was less than enthusiastic.

"You trust Kelsey?"

Ozzie worked his mouth like he was tasting the question. "This guy you saw with Hector Mara, the guy with the black fingernails and the trench coat. You know who that was?"

"Chich Gutierrez."

"Kelsey told you that?"

"No. I'd been hearing things about Hector Mara buying he**in from a guy named Chich Gutierrez. I guessed."

Ozzie didn't seem to like that. "By himself Chich would be nothing — a joke. Look at the way the guy dresses, for Christ's sake. But the fact that he's always compared himself to Sanchez, always tried to act that bad... it makes him unpredictable. Chich goes the extra mile to prove he's got what he hasn't got, you know? You chew on an inferiority complex like that long enough, it turns you dramatic."

"Two nights ago, Del Brandon told me Zeta Sanchez had been trying to move he**in through RideWorks back in '93. Del said that's why he was so anxious to push Zeta out of the business. You ever hear anything about that?"

Ozzie's eyes fixed on the woman in the low-cut evening dress. She was weeping and the doctor was comforting her. "You wanted to know how I got demoted. You going to get sore now if I tell you the truth?"

"Probably."

He sighed, then rested his head back in the pillows. "Fall of '92, I started having some ideas along the lines you just described. I figured you take a guy like Zeta Sanchez, with connections to the gangs, big-time access to the he**in pipeline, you put him together with a guy like old Jeremiah Brandon who's got a ready-made distribution network — things are going to happen. You use the carnival circuit, you could move a good amount of stash pretty much anywhere in the nation with very little trouble. So I started asking around."

"And something went wrong."

He looked over at me, anger simmering in his eyes. "About the same time, there was a big internal affairs bust going down. Some of the deputies working at the jail were smuggling in drugs for the prison gangs. Others were getting paid to look the other way. Sixteen deputies were fired. Five criminally prosecuted. A few higher-ranking people in the department were implicated, too, but there wasn't enough proof to fire."

"You were one of the ones implicated?"

"Forced reassignment. Three scumbag cons came forward and fingered me. Guys I had never even heard of, but you can bet your ass they all knew Zeta Sanchez. They got reduced sentences for their cooperation. I went down in the departmental housecleaning. After that, nobody listened to me much on the subject of Zeta Sanchez and RideWorks."