The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)

"Understandable."

In the main room, bedsheet curtains had been ripped down. Shafts of dust-moted light sliced across an old television set, a bare plywood bookshelf, a beanbag chair that had been cut open, its polyfoam guts spread across the cement floor. The tiny kitchen had been ransacked. Bathroom likewise, even the top of the toilet tank removed.

The first bedroom was filled with antique furniture too solid to destroy. Against one wall was a teak sideboard with the glass removed. A sewing table charred from the long-ago fire, an old foot-pedal Sears machine on top. A stripped bed frame. A basket of faded quilt remnants. Hung on the wall was a small cross studded with silver milagro charms. Men's clothing was heaped in the corner — sweats, tank tops, running shorts, the kind of clothes Hector Mara wore. The room smelled of old perfume and sweat. Neither the clothes nor the smell of sweat went with the rest of the room. It looked as if Hector had moved in after his grandmother's death and never bothered to redecorate.

There was a second bedroom down the hall at the end of the L.

Despite the police ransacking, I knew whose room it was the moment I entered — Sandra Mara's.

A young woman's clothes that hadn't seen the light of day in years were now disgorged from a closet in the corner — Jordache jeans, fuzzy sweaters, moccasin shoes, the kind of pastel tourist T-shirts you get from Solo Serve and La Feria. The upturned dresser drawers had spilled silver bangles, random stud earrings, a few sparse items of makeup. Not much for a teenage girl. There were no CDs, no magazines, few personal effects. Most notable was the ankle-deep pile of books and loose papers that had been swept off the shelves against one wall.

I toed through some of the book titles — Heller, Marquez, Vonnegut, Bronte. An African American poetry anthology, a Latin American one, Sylvia Plath. Good assortment. Very good for a high schooler.

I picked up the Sylvia Plath. The library pocket pasted to the inside cover said JUDSON ISD. The book had been due May 12, seven years ago. Hell of a late fee. Of course, before Sandra Mara had checked it out, the book had been borrowed exactly once, in 1975. Probably JUDSON ISD hadn't missed it yet. The loose papers looked like pages of high school essays — double-spaced cursive, most dated spring, 1992. One was on "The Wife of Bath." I scanned half a paragraph and was depressed to find it better than most of the college papers I'd been looking at that morning.

I picked up another book — this one with a gold marbleized cover, no title. A writing journal. The first half of the book was filled with tiny cursive handwriting, distinctly feminine. I read a line or two.

When I looked up again, Ana DeLeon was standing at the window.

On the sill next to her were three porcelain mugs, all shaped like grotesque sailors' faces with long noses and cherry cheeks and glazed rum-sodden smiles. Ana DeLeon was circling her finger absently around the rim of one.

"Mind if I check this out?" I asked.

It took her a while to focus on me. "What?"

"This journal. Hector's sister's. I thought I would borrow it."

"Let me see it."

DeLeon flipped some pages. She looked at the words without reading them, traced the edges of the cover.

She handed the journal back to me. "I should tell you no. But I can't see that it'll be missed."

"No photographs."

"What?"

"No photographs anywhere," I told her. "None of Sandra. None of anybody else, for that matter. Did you find any during the search?"

"I don't recall any."

I looked out the window. Under a stand of cedars, half a dozen chickens were clucking and pecking around the feet of some SWAT guys.

One of the men, an assault rifle on his knee and greasepaint under his eyes, glanced in my direction. I smiled. He didn't smile back.

I looked down at the grinning sailor's-head mugs. The mugs didn't offer any advice.

I looked toward the closet.

"What?" DeLeon asked immediately.

I walked over to the closet, crouched down, tugged the tiny glinting piece of red and gold paper from the crack in the cement.

DeLeon stood over me. "What is it?"

I kept the paper wrapper curled in my palm while my finger traced the almost invisible seam on the closet floor — the square outline I would've missed if not for the paper. "Trapdoor."

DeLeon said, "Stand back."

DeLeon yelled out the window for some assistance, somebody with a crowbar.

Thirty seconds later the little room was filled with cops.

A minute after that the excitement was over. DeLeon and I were alone in the room again, staring down at a crawl space that smelled of cool damp earth and was absolutely empty.

"So much for that," she said.

"Let me call Ralph."

"No."

"In another twenty-four hours, Mara will be gone. An APB won't accomplish anything and you know it."

"I said no, Tres."

The use of my first name caught me off guard as much as the tone of her refusal.

"Ana, I want to see you win on this. Let me help."

She turned away. After a ten-count she surprised me. She said, very softly, "Let me think about it."

I didn't push it. I walked to the window and looked out at Hector's smashed garden, the apple tree with the muddy tracks of his Ford Galaxie still fresh underneath, the white mobile home in the field of spear grass. I tried to imagine a young woman, Sandra Mara, at this bedroom window every day — looking up from a book of poetry or from a journal she was writing in, being surprised every time that the scene outside was not the asphalt-and-brick housing of the Bowie Courts.

I flicked a slip of paint off the window ledge, watched it helicopter into a sailor's-head mug. "I could maybe get used to it here. The quiet. The country."

DeLeon met my eyes. She looked surprised, momentarily vulnerable, as if I'd intercepted one of her thoughts.

I said, "If I grew up where Hector and Sandra grew up, I might not want to leave this place once I'd dug in."

She nodded. "I suppose."

"You want to plant tomatoes this fall?"

Grudgingly, Ana smiled.

Then Kelsey's voice called her name from down the hall. My reward evaporated. Ana kept my eyes a moment longer, then left without a word, leaving me in Sandra's room, staring at the hole in the closet floor, crumpling a red and gold George Berton cigar seal between my fingers and wondering about a lot of things.

TWENTY-FIVE

I spent the rest of the afternoon by the phone at 90 Queen Anne, waiting for calls back from my contacts with the local press. I wanted anything on the heroin trade from the last seven years, any articles that might mention the Brandons, the Maras, Zeta Sanchez, Chich Gutierrez, or Detective Thomas Kelsey of the SAPD.

By the end of the day, my contacts hadn't returned my calls, and I'd been forced to actually grade a set of papers for UTSA. Robert Johnson, the lazy bastard, helped not at all.

Over dinner of homemade dolmades and spanakopita, my weekly allotment from Erainya, I read Sandra Mara's journal.

Sandra's cursive was flawless — delicate loops, perfectly slanted, page after page written in the same golden brown ink. It was the kind of cursive that would drive handwriting analysts crazy because it was completely devoid of anomalies. Sandra didn't believe in beginnings. No Dear Diary or I haven't written in a while or Today I have something special to tell you. No dates on the entries or signatures at the end. It was difficult to tell where one entry started and the next stopped. Sandra merely indented for the next paragraph and started writing.

This to Sylvia Plath.

I want to cut your thumb a few more times.

I want to leave off the gauze and

make you squeeze limes instead.

A thrill?

Look at my brother's leg.

Tell me what part of him is white.

Only what the gun splashed open, melted into a star,

smoothed out by a year with demons so that I could live.

Don't impress me with your slip of a knife.

Don't talk to me about soldiers.

No one ever bought your life with an open wound.

Your typical light verse from a seventeen-year-old girl.

Several pages later.

I should have stayed inside this afternoon. The letter came.

Acceptance. Full scholarship. Grandmother and I set a jar of raspberry sun tea under the apple tree and we danced. Grandmother with her cane and all. We laughed at the chickens. I thought of college. And then the car in the gravel drive and Hector walked up with Him. After two years. He was only larger, no less or more frightening. A devil like that can have only His fixed amount of horror, never more or less than 100% — as a child, as a man. I should have stayed inside. I knew His look, the weighing He did. I was naked on a scale. I took my letter and I went inside. My grandmother became old again, hobbling alongside and muttering encouragement about college, but I just felt His eyes on my back. I knew what He was thinking. I should have stayed inside.

The other entries were equally intense. Tiring to read, unsatisfying. They told me about Sandra Mara like an intravenous feeding.

I skipped to the end and read the last paragraph.

How could a few minutes in a hallway shake me so much? He's so unexpected. I still can't write about it without catching my breath. Recognition in a dozen words, maybe less. He'd been standing in the same shadows as I, knew them instantly.

He kissed me today.

I closed the journal. Then I sat watching the light die in the crape myrtle outside the kitchen window.

When the light was gone, I went out to my car.

Fifteen minutes later I was pulling up in front of RideWorks, Inc.

It wasn't any prettier than it had been two nights before, but it was a hell of a lot more crowded. Rusted pickup trucks and low-rider Chevies lined the curb. The chain-link gate was open and the Super-Whirl Erainya and I had seen in pieces in the warehouse on Tuesday was now fully assembled in the yard, workers buzzing around it. The ride's giant metal arms were fully extended, lit with purple and yellow bulbs like dingo balls.

I walked through the gates, one hand in my pocket, the other slapping Sandra Mara's journal against my thigh. When I caught the eye of a worker, I smiled amiably, pointed toward the office door. "Del?"

The worker had a Fu Manchu mustache and a grimy face. On his head was a metal welder's visor the size of a snowboard. He considered my question, shrugged, then went back to his cigarette.

I went up the office steps, past the carousel animals, into the Room of Infinite Gimme Caps. No one was passed out on the secretary's desk this time. Del's office door was open. The restroom door at the other end of the reception area was closed and muffled thumping noises were coming from behind it.

I poked my head into Del's office.

Empty. Jeremiah Brandon smiled coldly at me from the 1940s photograph on the wall, daring me to trespass, double-daring me to sit at his son's desk.

"Screw you, Jerry," I told him.

I made myself comfortable and waited.

A few minutes later, I heard water running in the bathroom. Del's voice muttered something. Then the bathroom door opened and Rita the secretary came out, followed by Del.

Rita had her purse on her shoulder and trotted straight out the door, dabbing her lipstick as she went. Del walked toward the office. He didn't see me until he got in the doorway. Then he turned a lovely shade of magenta. "What—"