The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(96)

I don't know how I did it but I got to my feet.

I staggered forward, trying to aim the gun.

Ozzie had fallen on his butt. He was trying to tug the rifle up onto his bloody legs, to lift his knees so he could get the barrel high enough to kill me. His face glistened with sweat. He managed a stuttering wheeze that might have been a distant cousin to a laugh. He muttered, "Well shit, kid. Well shit. That was good. Now come here a step — okay? Come here."

The little blood geyser kept bubbling up on the side of his pants. Ozzie's gun kept trying to slip off his knees.

I managed another step forward, just to be obliging. Anything for a friend.  Ozzie wheezed again, happily. He fired his last shot and something a long way off behind me went ping.

For Ozzie's sake, I hoped he'd finally hit that metal target.

I raised my gun.

Ozzie let the rifle slip and held his hand over his pants pocket, trying to stop the blood.

Then an unwelcome voice snarled, "Put it down!"

I swung the gun to the left and found the muzzle of Ana DeLeon's Glock 23 pointing at me. Ana's skirt and blouse were scratched to hell from a trek through the foliage, her face as cold as the moon.

"You've got that aimed wrong," I heard myself saying.

Then I showed her what I meant. I turned the .357 back on Ozzie.

"I'll shoot you, Tres." DeLeon's voice was steady, louder than I thought it needed to be. "Put the gun on the ground."

I don't know how many chances DeLeon gave me to drop it, how many times she gave me that order. In the end, I was saved by Ozzie himself. He tried to sit up one more time and his face went silk-white. Then his head lolled back, hit the grass. His eyes squinted shut.

I lowered the .357, let it clunk into the tall grass. Then I crumpled into sitting position.

Ana DeLeon kept the Glock trained on me as she approached Ozzie, inspected him. I think she found him still alive. She tossed the deer rifle a few feet away, then knelt beside me. Her eyes burned with anger, but there was something else, too — alarm as she examined my shoulder wound.

"Key Feo," she said. "Kelsey's gang informants in vice used to call Ozzie Gerson that. You goddamn — you set yourself up for this. You stupid bastard."

"There's a doctor," I muttered. "Across the fields. Phone in the house."

"You wanted me gone while you handled this. If I hadn't come back—"

"I'm cold," I said.

Then Ana DeLeon was gone. I sat shivering in the spring sunshine, listening to DeLeon running toward my father's ranch house, cutting through the brush like a small tireless harvester blade.

FORTY-NINE

For the rest of that week, when I wasn't having nightmares, I was getting intimate with the acoustic ceiling tile in my semiprivate room at University Hospital, and with my roommate George Berton's favorite talk shows. Since George had been upgraded from critical and moved from BAMC, Erainya said it only made sense that he and I be roomies. Given our mutual experiences over the last few weeks, it was unlikely we'd end up shooting each other in irritation, however much we might wish to.

George could only speak a few words at a time. These mostly consisted of "No cigars?" when the nurse visited and "Melissa" when he slept and "Bastard, Navarre" whenever I tried to change the channel on him. The first thing he'd done when he'd regained consciousness was to demand his Panama hat. The second was to call Ozzie Gerson a son of a bitch.

While George was sleeping, which was often, I would watch the news and learn about what was happening out in the world.

A Bexar County deputy now faced indictment on three counts of capital murder for the shooting deaths of Hector Mara and the brothers Del and Aaron Brandon. The Brandon family maid had ID'ed Sheriff's Deputy Ozzie Gerson as Aaron's killer in exchange for charges of obstruction of justice against her being

dropped.

Gerson was charged on eleven other counts, including drug trafficking. A raid on Gerson's home turned up two plane tickets for Brazil and two packed suitcases, one of which contained over $80,000 in cash. In Gerson's closet, in a locked gun box, police also found a substantial amount of black tar heroin. While Gerson made no comment about the other charges against him, he had happily offered up the name of Chich Gutierrez as his he**in supplier. Police now had a warrant out for Gutierrez's arrest. The reporter told us that prior allegations for drug trafficking in 1992 had resulted in Gerson's demotion at the sheriff's department. There was "widespread outrage" that this officer had remained on active duty for the past seven years. The sheriff's department was promising an immediate internal investigation.

Anthony "Zeta" Sanchez was still in jail on charges of shooting Gerson and resisting arrest, but was not expected to be charged with any higher crimes. The SAPD brass and the D.A.'s office were praising the homicide detectives in charge of the investigation.

"This is a case where extra diligence paid off," their PR lady told TV viewers. "If we hadn't gone the extra mile, if the detectives involved had settled for the easy solution—"

A reporter interrupted, asking if SAPD detectives had ever settled for the easy solution before, if there'd been any pressure from the D.A.'s office to wrap up the Professor Aaron Brandon murder case quickly. The PR spokesman said, "Of course not."