Alex had to stop trusting people. He’d thought Tres could help, but who was he kidding? He should have left this island when he first suspected the truth. Yet here he was, paralyzed. All he could do was go on fixing leaks, hoping the hotel didn’t collapse around him.
He wanted to tell the Navarres the truth, at least. He owed them that much. Yet whenever he tried, the words stuck in his throat.
From the attic came an ominous creaking—wood being strained to the breaking point. But instead of going up again, Alex went downstairs.
There was one thing left he could do: one more leak he needed to fix.
11
I’d heard of Calavera and his big mistake.
No single article told the whole story. Journalistic etiquette, such as it was, prevented reporters from telling the most grisly details. But I pieced them together, inferring some things, remembering others that I’d heard from various cops.
Six months ago, Corpus Christi District Attorney Peter Brazos had been in the middle of a career-making case. He was prosecuting five members of a South Texas drug cartel for trafficking, kidnapping, accessory to murder. He had everything he needed for a conviction. If things went his way, Brazos would gain national attention. He could write his own ticket—a job with the state attorney’s office. Maybe even a federal appointment.
On New Year’s Eve, two weeks before the trial, Brazos sequestered himself at his weekend house in Port Aransas to prepare his case and collect his thoughts. This was his habit. He was well known for going on such retreats. The fact that it was New Year’s Eve meant nothing to Brazos. He did not celebrate such things. He had no time for anything except his work and—as time allowed—his family.
Brazos’s weekend house was in a bayside community of million-dollar homes with a boating channel between every block. There was no security. No gate, no surveillance. Island mentality. Most of the residents didn’t even lock their front doors. Brazos left his retreat only twice that day, once for a jog on the beach, once for groceries in the afternoon. During one of those times, the assassin must have set his trap.
Around sunset, Peter Brazos was cooking a quiet supper for himself when he was surprised by his wife, Rachel, and their two daughters, ages nine and seven. A spur-of-the-moment decision. Daddy should not spend New Year’s Eve alone. Brazos was irritated at first. Rachel knew better than to interrupt him while he was on retreat. But he couldn’t stay mad at her or the girls, so he set aside work. Plans were changed. They shared a dinner of shrimp and filet mignon, chicken strips and sparkling cider for the girls. The clock ticked toward midnight. The girls tried to stay up for the television broadcast from Times Square, but they fell asleep in the master bedroom, curled between their parents. Peter Brazos kissed his wife and asked her if it would be all right if he snuck away to study his case notes one more time.
Rachel Brazos smiled. She knew her husband too well to argue. She wished him a happy New Year, and Brazos took his laptop out to the back deck.
The winter air was cool and pleasant. Across the channel, a few of the neighbors’ houses were lit up for parties. That didn’t bother Peter Brazos. He read through his notes and thought about how much better South Texas would be when the men he was prosecuting were finally put behind bars.
He was proud that he hadn’t bowed to the pressure from nervous politicians, reluctant police, death threats from the mob. So what if these drug barons were well connected? Brazos knew the cartel had several rural sheriff’s departments on their payroll, possibly a few Corpus Christi cops and city council members, too. That didn’t matter. Brazos was doing the right thing.
He was relishing the idea of a conviction when the fireworks started down at the beach.
In the flickering of red and blue starbursts, something caught Peter Brazos’s eye. At the edge of his dock was a small white lump that looked like an ice cube.
He wasn’t sure why, but he set down his computer and went to see what the thing was. A tiny skull made from rock candy—a calavera, like children got for treats on the Day of the Dead. Brazos picked it up and stared at it, baffled by what it was doing on his dock.
Then something began nagging at the back of his mind—stories he’d heard. A hired killer. A calling card at the scene of a crime. But those kinds of hits happened to Mafia informants, people on the other side of the law…
Later, he would blame himself for those precious seconds he wasted, paralyzed by disbelief, before he ran toward his house and shouted his wife’s name.
As his house erupted in flames.
By the next afternoon the overwhelmed Port Aransas Police Department had turned the arson investigation over to the FBI.
Lab techs found evidence of six incendiary devices in the house. The wiring was consistent with the type of device used by the most notorious hired assassin in South Texas—a man known only as Calavera. High-grade materials, completely un-traceable, timed to explode precisely at midnight. The work of a craftsman. Only this time, the craftsman had missed his mark.
The agent in charge’s comments to the press were cryptic, but she couldn’t help revealing some of her rage. The explosion was needlessly elaborate. The assassin was an incompetent show-off. Now a mother and two children were dead.
But Peter Brazos didn’t believe this assassin was incompetent. The explosion should’ve worked. The assassin had studied Brazos, knew exactly where he would be. The only thing Calavera hadn’t counted on was Rachel and the girls’ spur-of-the-moment visit, an act of love.
The murder method had been superbly chosen. It had been meant to send a message to other prosecutors in a way that a simple bullet through the eyes wouldn’t do: Try to touch us, and we will burn you to the ground.
Brazos did not quit his drug cartel case. His grief enraged him. His rage made him determined. He prosecuted the South Texas Mafia leaders with redoubled vigor because he knew they would blame the assassin for not doing his job. They hadn’t gotten what they paid for.
Calavera, who had acted with impunity for years and carried out dozens of hits, had finally screwed up.
I passed the articles to Maia.
While she read them, I looked again at the handwritten note:
FIND HIM.
I wanted to open our door and yell down the hallway, Find him your own damn self!
But I doubted that strategy would work.
Maia looked up. “You’ve heard of this Calavera?”
“Some. Just stories.”
“Two little girls. Nine and seven.”
“Yeah.” I suddenly wished I hadn’t shown Maia the articles. Her eyes had that steely glint they got whenever she wanted to beat up someone—like me, for instance.
“Tres, if this is the guy Marshal Longoria was after, and if he’s in the hotel—”
“What the hell would he be doing here? And who slipped me this note?”
Maia was about to say something when there was a knock on our door.
I picked up Maia’s .357 again and moved to the side of the door. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Navarro?” One of the college kids. Chase, the leader.
I opened the door. Chase didn’t look good. His skin was blanched and his eyes were so bloodshot they were the same color as his hair. He had that consternated expression that comes from trying to solve problems while drunk.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“I just wanted…” He saw Maia. “Oh, hi.”
“Hello,” Maia said.
“Damn,” Chase said, “you are pregnant.”
“Chase,” I said, “is there something we can do for you?”
He scratched his ear. “Um, yeah. It’s my friend Ty.”
“Latino kid?” I said. “Shaggy hair, looks like he’s going to throw up most of the time?”
“That’s him. He’s not doing so well. With the killing and the blood and all…there’s something I thought you should—”
The building groaned like a sailing vessel listing in a storm. There was a crashing sound. The floor shuddered.
“What the hell was that?” Chase asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but we’d better go see. This night just keeps getting better.”
As it turned out, there was nothing to worry about. Part of the second story had caved in, collapsing onto a ground-floor bedroom on the west side of the house, but no one had been staying there. Maia, Chase and I found Alex Huff busily sealing the door to the destroyed room with extra lumber and plastic tarp.
“Hated that room anyway,” Alex grumbled.
“Damn,” Chase said. “A whole room collapsed? Damn!”
“We’re gonna have dinner,” Alex said, wiping the grime off his forehead. “In the dining room. You know…everybody. A nice, late dinner. Jose figured out the food.”
The wild look in his eyes bothered me.
“Chase,” I said, “why don’t you go get your buddies and we’ll meet you in the dining room.”
“But, um—”
“It’s all right,” Maia assured him. She gave him her I’m-practicing-to-be-a-mother smile. “We’ll talk later. Go get your friends.”
Chase nodded with reluctance. “All right. But that guy Garrett’s up there teaching Markie to slam tequila. Not sure I can tear them away.”
“We need to talk,” I told Alex.
“I don’t have time, Tres. I’ve got this demolished room, no electricity, and the guests—”
“Alex.” Maia used her best calm, lawyerly voice. “We have a problem.”
“A problem?” He laughed in a brittle way. “You don’t say.”
Maia showed him the envelope with the newspaper clippings. I explained to him about the attempt on Peter Brazos’s life, the murder of his wife and children.
Alex looked at us like we were explaining a technical diagram in Japanese. “What does that have to do—”
“The assassin is called Calavera,” I said. “He leaves a candy skull at the scene of every hit.”
“An assassin. Candy. Did Garrett put you up to this?”
“Look, Alex, Calavera is real. He’s done dozens of hits. All of them explosions. Mostly he works for the drug lords, silencing informants. Knocking off the competition. He took down the leader of a Juárez cartel about a year ago. Then he tried to kill Peter Brazos. You sure you haven’t heard about this?”
Alex shook his head, but I could tell his mind was going a million miles an hour.
“The explosion was in Port Aransas,” Maia said. “It must’ve been big local news. Surely you heard about it.”
“Maybe—maybe I’ve heard the name Brazos or something. But an assassin? Why would someone give those articles to you? What does it have to do with anything?”
“Someone apparently thinks Calavera is here,” Maia said.
“That’s nuts.”
“Jesse Longoria came here for a reason,” I said. “We found Chris’s business card and a candy skull in Longoria’s suitcase. I think Chris tipped him off that Calavera would be here. Today. June fifth.”