The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(88)

Porkpie kept pacing back and forth. He glanced at me occasionally, but the fact that my eyes were open didn't seem to bother him. For all I knew my eyes had been open for days, glazed and useless while my brain had checked out. I tried to wiggle my toes, got excited when I felt the fabric of my socks against them. I tried to move a knee. I couldn't do that. My arms were dead weight. My head throbbed. I swallowed, then ran my tongue back and forth in my mouth, got a sensation like licking a sand castle. I was not going to leap up right away and tackle anybody. But at least I could form the idea of doing so. The detective as philosopher.

I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to shove Porkpie's state-of-the-art cell phone down his throat.

Another car slid down the block and pulled over — a blue Impala, '83, pretty badly banged up. The car windows were tinted and the interior pitch-black. The dealer disengaged himself from his two friends at the dumpster and took a wary step toward the Impala, his hand in his black coat.

The guy in the passenger's seat cracked open his window. "Azul rife! Y que?"

Old-style cholo greeting: The Blue rules. What're you gonna do about it?

The dealer and his friends relaxed. All flashed a hand sign at the Impala. The dealer walked toward the car's back window, which was just now rolling down. Then the dealer's black coat exploded like an air bag.

The high-caliber shot launched him off his feet into a reverse jackknife, the back of his coat shredding away in a spiral of blood and fabric. He hit the ground just as a shotgun blast from the Impala's open passenger window slammed into his friends by the dumpster — scouring metal and brick and bodies with buckshot. Someone shrieked. Porkpie dropped his phone and ran. He made it over the fence at the back of the lot in two moves.

Then it was quiet except for the sound of two men in misery by the dumpster. One of them kept crawling around, screaming. The other just twitched. The dealer never moved. The dumpster and warehouse wall behind them were freckled with blood and shot.

Ralph Arguello stepped out of the passenger's-side door of the Impala holding a high-powered over-and-under Mossberg. Erainya Manos came from the driver's side, her .38 up next to her ear. Another guy I didn't recognize got out of the back. He carried the snub-nosed .45 automatic that had just drilled the hole in the dealer's chest.

The round lenses of Ralph's glasses glinted in the yellow streetlight like coins. He planted his boot on the chest of one of the guys who was still alive, then lowered the shotgun muzzle against the kid's face. Erainya snarled: "No!"

Ralph glanced back at her, had a brief staring battle, then raised the shotgun and made a golf swing with the barrel against the kid's face hard enough to roll him over. Erainya jogged over to me.

Her hair was a mess. She had red lines on her arms like junkie tracks. Her face was made up even gaunter and darker than usual. She was dressed in an old T-shirt and jeans. She passed very effectively for a strung-out user, a washed-up prostitute maybe, a woman like a hundred others who might visit this spot regularly.

She crooned, "Oh, honey." I'd never heard her sound so kind.

Then she got her arms around me and lifted me up. I was maybe seventy-five pounds heavier than she, but Erainya dragged me all the way back to the car. I could see Ralph, training his shotgun lazily on the wounded second man. The gang-banger's face looked like a rust-eaten car hood — most of his left cheek scoured to blood, his left eye ruptured and the irreplaceable fluid dribbling down his cheek.

Ralph's helper, the man with the .45, was busy stripping the dead young dealer of his heroin.

Erainya got me in the car. Within seconds I was wedged between her and the man with the .45 and Ralph was in the driver's seat, speeding us silently away from the West Side. We heard a siren behind us, a long way off.

When Ralph spoke his voice was so taut with anger I hardly recognized it. He said, "Mi pendejo rife. Y que?"

FORTY-SIX

"Nobody passes a boosted red Barracuda in S.A. without me knowing about it."

Ralph spoke somewhere in the darkness. "Fuck Chich, he thinks he can pull that shit in my town."

"I suppose I had nothing to do with this operation," Erainya griped.

"No offense, senora. You handled it pretty good for a gringa."

Erainya called Ralph some names in Greek. Ralph defended himself in Spanish. I knew neither could understand the other. That was probably just as well.

"I love you both," I mumbled. "Now shut up."

Astoundingly, they did.

I drifted to sleep to the sound of the Impala engine. Sometime during the ride, I think I recalled the mysterious .45 man, whom Ralph called Freeze, being dropped off. Freeze patted me on the shoulder and told me that for another hundred, he'd be happy to drill anybody for me any day.

The next time I woke up I was lying flat, staring at bare cedar rafters and an old ceiling fan. When I tried to move, cot springs clinked and clunked like a broken music box. The fan wobbled precariously.

A thickly accented woman's voice said, "Hol' still, damn it."

Dr. Janice Farn hovered over me, giving me a view of curly white hair and bifocals and the Calvin Klein fedora that Aileen the cow had once driven her hoof through.

I started to say something, but Farn cut me off. "Hol' still and shut up."

I had no recollection of arriving where I obviously was — the Navarre family ranch in Sabinal — but I held still. And shut up. Dr. Farn's hand dabbed at my face.