The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(87)

"If it's so f**king incidental, think I'll just take it back."

"I don't have it."

"You got Mrs. Sanchez, don't you?"

A pain slid through my head like a shard of glass. I closed my eyes and heard myself whimper, hating myself for it.

When I forced my eyelids open again Chicharron had his hand raised, as if to signal his pals to be quiet.

"You fought well," Chich said. "I have three men who will not be healed for several days because of you."

"Good," I croaked. The intrepid detective gracefully accepts a compliment.

"Be a shame to kill you. Tell me where Sandra Sanchez is."

"I don't know."

"Let me kill him." The eager voice sounded like Pork-pie's.

Chicharron thought about it for a full seven seconds. I know: I counted. Then he stood up, nodded to someone behind me. Suddenly I was falling  sideways — my chair'd been yanked out from under me. I lurched around on the floor, but it was like swimming through cement. The needle in the crook of my arm was the first sharp sensation I'd experienced since becoming conscious, and as the cement thickened around me I knew this needle would be the last.

"We'll visit again tomorrow," I heard Chicharron say. "If you have any brain left by then, you will be wise and use it for me."

As I went under, someone's voice muttered, "A shame."

Might have been my voice.

Then footsteps receded and the closing metal doors clanged shut like an earthquake.

FORTY-FIVE

I had a series of nightmares. In one my mother's house was on fire, and she was urging me and her muscular troop of Marlboro men to bucket-brigade armloads of knickknacks out the front door. My mother kept running back and forth down the sidewalk, her silk kimono on fire at the edges, imploring us to work faster. I would hand a basket of glass paperweights to the guy next to me, then a roll of Dia de los Muertos posters, then some Ghanaian burial masks. I was in the doorway and the fire kept intensifying until finally the knickknacks were being handed out to me by guys whose arms and legs were on fire and whose skin was melting from their faces.

Then I was on the playground at Jem's new school. I was frantically searching for Jem, but all the little kids looked exactly the same — little pastel polo shirts and khakis, black hair and brown skin, all with the face of Michael Brandon. My eyes opened. The sky was dark. I focused on a fuzzy patch of yellow — my old chum the streetlight.

Other senses kicked in. I could smell dried urine and sweat and cigarette smoke. I was lying on something soft and bumpy — the broken-down couch in the vacant lot. I was covered with a blanket. Without much effort I turned my head and got a view of the street.

It looked like West Commerce, or one of the side streets around there. Two wide lanes, one way, moderately busy traffic. The warehouse where I'd been dragged the last time I was conscious rose to the side, a green cinder-block wall with a heavy door in the middle and a dumpster at the corner. Across the street was an old craftsman house, boarded up and ringed with cyclone fencing, vacant lots on either side. The street and the sidewalk glittered with broken bottles and syringes.

One of the young men who'd kept watch over me earlier was at the curb, dealing into a brown Chrysler. The young man collected cash, slipped something from the pocket of his jacket to the driver, then retreated to the lamppost and lit a match and a cigarette as the car pulled away. The next customer didn't take long to pull up, or the one after that. It was about the same frequency as the drive-through at Burger King.

A voice closer to me called over to the guy on the street. It asked, in Spanish, how the supply was. The guy answered: "Twenty dimes, five large."

The voice nearer to me said, "Bueno."

The speaker was probably leaning against the wall of the building, not two feet behind me.

A pager went off. At first I thought I was imagining the sound. Then Porkpie walked into my line of sight.

He was wearing the hat with a different ensemble today — baggy jeans, army-green-and-maroon shirt, leather bike-grip gloves, air-pump spaceman shoes. He checked his beeper and then took out a tiny cell phone, unfolded it, made a call. Meanwhile two more punks drifted in from down the street, shook hands with the dealer at the street-lamp, then walked over to the dumpster and hung out, talking casually, lighting each other's joint. Traffic continued down the street. Sometimes cars pulled up to the curb. Most just drove by.

I was lying not ten yards from a public street, doped to the gills, and nobody was paying me any mind. If anyone even noticed me, they probably figured I was just a wino, some derelict the punks had allowed to crash in their outdoor office. I wondered that no police cars went by, that they didn't rush in and find me and break up the dealing. But I knew better. If a police car had been anywhere close, signalmen armed with cell phones up and down the surrounding blocks would've been on to the threat instantly. Beepers would beep a warning code. The stash would get ditched in the dumpster and the kids would vanish down the side streets and I'd either get dragged back in the warehouse or, more likely, killed and left for the police to find — doped up and murdered, just another victim of another deal gone bad. Probably make an interesting feature on page A12, former sheriffs son OD'ed and killed at a West Side drug spot. The drug business would be back in swing on a different corner before my blood had even soaked into the stinking fabric of the couch.