The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(63)

Jem ran back to his mother's desk and climbed into Erainya's lap. Erainya was also on the phone, talking to the hospital. She looked up and gave me a shake of the head. No change.

Jem put his head on her shoulder and his body went limp.

The toys had been carefully collected off the rug and put to the side in a huge plastic bucket, making the center of the office strangely empty. On George Berton's desk, the Styrofoam hat holder was bald. His paperwork had been removed and added to the stack on my desk.

When Kelly finished her call, she sat staring at the empty space in the middle of the office. Then she looked away, sniffling.

"We're out of Kleenex," she told me. "Wouldn't you know it?"

I reached over and pulled one of George's silk handkerchiefs out of his drawer. "George would probably say, 'You can wipe your nose on my hanky anytime, chiquita.'"

Kelly laughed brokenly, pinched her nose into the handkerchief. "God, I hate this. I hate this."

"I know."

She took my hand, squeezed it hard, tried telling me details, lists of things she'd done since she'd gotten in this morning. She told me about her long phone conversations with Jenny at George's title office, about scrambling to find names of George's kin and coming up with nothing. Friends — hundreds of them. But family? The little information anybody could volunteer was slim and contradictory — an aunt in Monterey, a half-brother in El Paso, a niece in Chicago. Nobody really knew. A dead wife, everybody knew.

I let her talk, only cueing into the words occasionally.

Then the doorbell chimed and Ralph Arguello came in.

In the two years I'd worked at the office, Ralph had come by exactly once, on an evening when he was certain Erainya would be out. Ralph knew how Erainya felt about him and he'd always chosen to respect her feelings. At least until today.

Ralph had forgone the usual XXL Guayabera and jeans for a raw silk suit — milk white, with a black bolo and black ostrich-skin boots. Under the loose cut of his jacket he could've concealed enough weapons to arm his own cult.

His hair was braided into a tight cord. His thick round glasses shimmered as he examined the office — Berton's cleared desk, Erainya and Jem. He zeroed in on Kelly's hand in mine, then after a very long half second seemed to dismiss the sight.

"Vato." He acknowledged me.

He picked off his glasses. This in itself was a rare event, and his na**d eyes looked huge and dark, as if the lenses had somehow contained them. Ralph might've been close to legal blindness, but his stare revealed a fierceness you never saw through his glasses — an honest warning of the kind of violence he was capable of.

He held out his arms. Kelly went to him, tried for a stiff, perfunctory hug, but Ralph wouldn't let her pull away. He held her until she melted against him in earnest and started crying.

He looked at me over her shoulder. There was one question in his face, a calm demand that I'd seen before and understood perfectly. When?

Back at her desk, Erainya said a few weary "thank-yous" to the ICU nurse and hung up the phone.

She ruffled Jem's hair, then stared across the room at us. Surprisingly, she did not throw anything at Ralph to drive him from the office. She merely said, "Mr. Arguello."

Ralph nodded, acknowledging the truce. "Ms. Manos. Quepasa?"

"You have to ask?"

He shook his head, then disengaged from Kelly. "And you, mi chica?"

"I'll be okay," Kelly whispered.

He gathered the back of Kelly's hair in his fist — a gesture that would've seemed threatening, proprietary, from anyone else. From Ralph, the gesture was still proprietary, but the tenderness and affection for his niece was unmistakable. He let the glossy black hair fall through his fingers, then nodded at me. "Let's talk."

Erainya said, "Wait."

The silent demand in her eyes was as clear as Ralph's. We will not do anything rash. We will not make things worse.

I nodded assent. "It's okay, Erainya."

She closed her hand around Jem's small fingers, hugging his shoulder tight with the other arm. "Honey, nothing is okay," she told me.

Outside, the afternoon was heating up, the air scented with roasting lamb and pepper from Demo's Greek restaurant next door.

Ralph said, "Sorry about your car."

"The car is nothing."

He looked at me dubiously. Ralph knew about me and the VW. He'd known me when I'd first gotten it from my mother, my third year of high school. He'd driven in it with me drunk, sober, in danger, on dates. He'd teased me about it mercilessly while he went yearly from luxury car to luxury car and I continued clunking along in my mother's hideous orange hand-me-down. And he knew that the car had been part of who I was.

"Tell me the score," Ralph said.

He listened while I told him of my last few days.

When I was done he took a joint and a lighter from his shirt pocket and lit up. He took a long toke before speaking. "I don't know much about the chiva business, vato. Some things, I got no desire to learn. But I got some ideas where we can find the guy you want."

"Chicharron?"

He nodded.

"And Chich will happily give us a confession?"

"Shit, no, vato. That we take."

The ferocity in his eyes made me shudder.