“Mr. Lindy is keeping them occupied.”
“This was a bad idea,” he said. “Forget it.”
“Ty, you got me down here. What did you want to tell me?”
He chewed at his thumb. “You should’ve let me leave last night. You don’t understand what they’re into. What they’re doing to me.”
The fear in his voice was beyond claustrophobia.
I thought about the way Markie had sapped Ty with a roll of quarters. No emotion in his face. Just cold efficiency. Few things would make a kid that age develop that kind of ruthless edge.
“Those drugs they sedated you with,” I said. “Where did they get them?”
Ty laughed weakly. “Starting to catch on, huh?”
“You’re trying to tell me Chase and Markie are dealers?”
“Dealers…Man, that sounds so small. For the UT campus, those two are the freaking Wal-Mart of drugs.”
“Chase and Markie can barely open a tequila bottle. Are you sure we’re talking about the same people?”
Ty spit into the water. “That’s what they want you to think. ‘Oh, they’re just stupid kids. It isn’t possible.’ Bullshit. Those two haven’t been kids since elementary school.”
The hall light flickered. I sat next to Ty. Together, we watched foam and dark water course down the hallway.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “They’re your friends.”
“They’re my bosses. They got hooks in me like you wouldn’t believe. I agreed to do this one last trip to clear my debts. I didn’t agree to murder.”
“You think they killed Chris?”
“Chris was part of the system. That money you found? That came from Chase and Markie. They paid him off every time they came down.”
“But why would they kill him?”
Ty shook his head miserably. “This was supposed to be the last run, before the hotel shut down. Chris was pretty bummed about that. Maybe he leaned on Chase and Markie for more money.”
Again, I thought about Chris’s journal, the comments he’d made about escaping to Hawaii, his anger at Alex for closing the hotel. “So you’ve been smuggling in drugs from Mexico. What are we talking about? Heroin? Marijuana?”
“Oh, man, that is old school. We brought in Mexican pharmaceuticals. Ritalin. OxyContin. Codeine. You name it. That’s what the people in the dorms want. Prescribe your own high.”
“You could get pharmaceuticals here.”
“In cheap bulk shipments? Easier to arrange that from Mexico. Warehouse security down there is a joke. Plus the cartels and federales don’t bother you. They’re all focused on the ‘illegal’ stuff.”
“How were the drugs brought in?”
“Fishing boat. See, that’s the thing. You said there was no way off the island until the ferry. Maybe that’s not exactly true. Chase and Markie have this plan—”
Steps in the hallway above. Chase called down, “Yo, Ty. You all right, man?”
Ty closed his eyes and swallowed. “Yeah. I feel like shit. But I’m…I’m better, I guess.”
Chase and Markie came down the steps. They checked us out, trying to read what was going on.
“He’s not making much sense,” I told them. “You gave him too much sedative.”
“He’ll be okay,” Chase said. “Come on, buddy.”
Ty gave me one last look, like a convict going back inside the pen. Then he let his buddies lead him up the stairwell.
I went back to our refugee room, wanting to talk to Maia, but she was still asleep. For once, she looked comfortable. I didn’t want to disturb her. Lane slept more fitfully. She was mumbling something that sounded like a protest. Garrett lay next to her, his arm around her waist.
He glanced up as I came in. We had a brief, silent conversation that went something like this:
Me: No sign of Alex.
Garrett: If I could get up without waking Lane, I’d beat you with a large stick. Search again!
I checked the next room and found Benjamin Lindy asleep on the couch. Chase and Markie sat on the bed having a quiet, earnest conversation with Ty. I decided to move on.
The next bedroom’s door was also open, but Jose and Imelda were nowhere to be seen.
What now?
There was too much to think about, too much trouble besides the storm blowing through this hotel.
I stood at the end of the hall, looking down the stairwell into the shadows. I thought about the story Ty had told me. Given my past luck, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself cooped up with a trio of drug dealers, as well as a paid assassin.
I had no trouble believing that Chris Stowall had been making money by helping drug runners. In South Texas, that was a well-established part of the economy, right up there with ranching, drilling for oil and making acrylic-rattlesnake toilet seats for the tourists.
Still, I doubted Chris had died because of a drug deal. Certainly Jesse Longoria wouldn’t have come down here for anything as petty as a crate of Mexican Valium. Both of them had been playing a much more dangerous game.
I rubbed my eyes. I kept seeing Rachel Brazos’s face carved in wood.
Two bodies downstairs, and the death that haunted me most was a lady I’d never known.
I imagined Ralph Arguello laughing. You hang out with the dead too much, vato.
No contest, I pleaded. Then I turned and headed toward Alex Huff’s bedroom.
Inside, the storm had sprayed everything with broken glass and sand like sugar coating on a pan dulce. Somebody, probably Jose, had nailed a quilt over the smashed window. The wind and rain had already ripped it to shreds.
I wondered if it was just wishful thinking, or if the storm sounded a little less intense now. It wasn’t much louder than your average booster rocket.
I picked up the wooden statue and set it on the dresser. She still looked like Rachel, her hand out, asking some question I couldn’t answer.
I went through Alex’s dresser drawers, then his closet. After ten minutes of turning his room upside down, I’d found nothing remarkable. Nothing except the statue.
And that bothered me.
I knew Alex well enough to know that I should’ve found some memorabilia: the photos he’d once shown me from his fishing expeditions, his dad’s army knife, maybe the signed Jimmy Buffett poster Garrett had given him for his twentieth birthday.
Despite his temper, Alex Huff was a sentimentalist. He kept old things. He remembered people he’d known as a child. He’d spent his life savings to buy this hotel because it had been dear to his father.
And yet this room looked like any other room in the hotel. Except for the wooden statue of the dead woman.
I got up and went to the window. The wind was definitely slacking now. Its howl was less insistent. Woven Guatemalan pictures rippled across the tattered quilt—men with machine guns, helicopters over a rain forest.
On an impulse, I ripped it down.
I was standing there, staring into the angry edge of the dying hurricane, when the hotel’s power went out again.
As my eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, I noticed something out in the storm—a flicker of light, and then it was gone.
I might’ve imagined it. Storms can play a lot of tricks with the light. But I was pretty sure I’d just seen a candle extinguished in the top window of the old lighthouse.
28
Calavera squatted in the dark stairwell, listening to the noises of the house. Four in the morning was a good time for murder. He would not normally choose to work in a house that was occupied. This had already caused him problems, almost given him away. But under the circumstances, he had no choice.
He set his hand on the unpainted timbers. The walls here were so close together his shoulders touched on either side.
He remembered his first job, so much like this one.
A police commander, a judge and a lawyer walked into the brothel. It sounded like the beginning of a joke, but the three men would never come out alive. Calavera had spent weeks studying their habits. He knew they would stay overnight on Sunday, as they always did, and so Calavera had visited on Saturday as a client. In the early morning, when everyone was asleep, he had laid the trap.
Monday at 4 A.M., he watched from the building across the street. He lay on the roof with a rifle, just to be sure. The brothel’s back doors were barricaded. He had seen to that. If anyone came out the front, or made it through a window, he would take care of them. He did not like loose ends.
He needn’t have worried. The explosion was beautiful: flame blossoming simultaneously in the windows. The screams were short-lived. And no one came out of the building.
The display was better than fireworks. Blood rushed through his veins. He felt more alive than he had in years.
Soon, setting bombs had become his addiction. The money was good, necessary for his survival, but he would have done the work without pay. He had finally found something he was good at.
Now, he wished he could recapture that thrill. But this time was different. Necessary, yes, but he would take no pleasure from it.
He connected the last wire to a simple timer. So much could be accomplished with a single electrical pulse.
He sat for a few moments listening to the sounds of sleepers on the other side of the wall—gentle snoring, restless turning in bed. Tomorrow, he would be away from here. He would start again, and this would be his last display. A work of necessity, hastily done. He didn’t like that. But the beauty of fire wiped out one’s imperfections. Fire was very forgiving.
He set the candy skull on the timer, knowing no one would ever see it. But he would know it was there, small sugary eyes watching as the seconds ticked down in the dark.
29
I meant to venture out into the storm to investigate the lighthouse. Instead, I went to check on Maia, lay down next to her thinking it would only be for a few minutes and ended up falling asleep.
So much for the intrepid hero of the tempest.
Most of my dreams were surreal, kind of like my life. Unfortunately, this time I dreamed about the day I quit private investigations, and that dream was always exactly true-to-life.
I was in my office—the converted dining room of our Victorian on South Alamo. It was winter in San Antonio. The wall furnace hissed. Outside, the sky was heavy gray and the bare pecan trees looked like charred bones.
I’d just returned from San Fernando Cemetery, from my encounter with U.S. Marshal Longoria at Ralph’s graveside. Longoria’s words kept coming back to me: If you can’t stop feeling guilty, son, maybe you should find a different line of work.
I had a pile of paperwork on my desk. A few skip traces. A divorce case. An undercover job I needed to set up with a local jewelry store. I also had a stack of essays to grade from my part-time teaching gig at UTSA. I was trying to decide whether I wanted to write a report about my client’s cheating husband or grade sophomore papers on Chaucer’s use of alliteration. The fun factor seemed about the same, either way.
Maia was in the living room, talking on the phone with her doctor. She’d been on the phone since I got home. I tried not to think about that. She was constantly telling me not to worry. The doctor was probably trying again to convince her to do amniocentesis. She was politely but firmly saying no.