Mission Road (2 page)

Carefully, he said, “You’re not serious.”

“You left a trail.” Ana’s voice was heavy with anger, as if he had let her down. “You were sloppy. How could you think I wouldn’t find you?”

Her expression stirred bad memories—memories he couldn’t tolerate.

“You have any idea what you’re saying?” he asked. “
Me,
for Christ’s sake?”

She nodded to the computer. “Read my notes.”

He glanced at the morgue photo on the screen. He touched the keyboard, brought up a minimized document—Ana’s draft report on the investigation.

It didn’t take long to see that she’d done her homework. Every mistake he’d made, then and now—neatly documented.

He felt claustrophobic, dizzy, like he was waking up inside a coffin.

The irony was horrible. Yet she’d done good detective work, maybe even enough to convict.

“Ralph Arguello is poison,” he managed. “You don’t know who your friends are anymore.”

“I’m telling you first because a confession would be easier. We can get you some kind of deal. Protection. Otherwise, once word gets out, you’re a dead man.”

His jaw tightened. She wasn’t going to change her mind. She would risk a confrontation, her career, everything, rather than see something happen to that goddamn criminal she’d married.

He put his hand at his waist, felt the butt of the .357 under his coat. “You’re right.”

“Give me a statement, then.”

“I’m a dead man.” He brought out the gun. “If word gets out.”

Her face paled. “You won’t shoot me. I’m going to call now. We’ll get you a lawyer.”

She walked to the hallway phone—tension still in her shoulders, but damn, she was keeping it together well.

The thing was: She might be right. He wasn’t sure he could hurt her. Her, of all people.

She picked up the receiver.

“Put it down,” he ordered.

“I’m calling dispatch.”

Eighteen years of fear, shame and anger boiled to the surface—eighteen years of living with that worthless kid’s blood on his conscience.

Ana would never understand what had happened that night. He had sworn to die rather than let the truth come out.

“Put the phone down,” he pleaded.

“No choice.” She started to dial.

The first shot surprised him almost as much as it did her. The bullet tore through her pants leg. She dropped her Sprite and stood there, stunned, as a line of blood trickled down her ankle. Sprite gurgled from the overturned can on the hardwood floor.

She stared at him, silently saying his name.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. And he meant it. Goddamn it, he had never wanted this.

Ana reached for her own weapon, but of course her shoulder holster was empty.

She did not believe in guns around the baby. This house was a sanctuary.

Which may have been why his second shot, leveled at her chest, rang out so alarmingly loud.

MONDAY MORNING I GOT A PAYING CLIENT.

Wednesday afternoon I killed him.

Friday evening I buried him.

The Tres Navarre Detective Agency is a full-service operation. Did I mention that?

My girlfriend, Maia Lee, drove me home from the funeral. We cruised down Commerce in her BMW, discussing the likelihood of my PI license being revoked. Maia thought the odds were high. Being a lawyer, she probably knew what she was talking about.

“The criminal charges don’t worry me,” she said. “The DA didn’t sound serious about filing.”

“That’s because he wanted your phone number.”

“But the licensing board . . . I mean, killing clients—”

“Generally frowned upon.”

“Tres Navarre: impeccable judge of character.”

“Oh, shut up.”

The guy I’d killed, Dr. Allen Vale, had asked me to find his estranged wife. He said he needed to work out an inheritance problem with her. He hadn’t seen her in five years. They’d never gotten an official divorce. No hard feelings. The relationship was old history. He just needed to sort out a few legalities.

He wore a tailored suit. He laughed at my jokes. He paid cash in advance.

I took the job.

Two days later I located his wife, living in San Antonio under an assumed name. I met Dr. Vale at my office and gave him her new identity and address. He thanked me, calmly walked out to his car, loaded a shotgun and drove away. That’s when I realized I’d made a mistake.

I called the police, sure. But I also grabbed my father’s old .38 and followed Vale straight to his estranged wife’s house.

She was standing in her front yard watering her Mexican marigolds. She dropped the hose when she saw Vale trudging toward her with the shotgun.

No police in sight.

I had the choice of either stopping Vale or watching him murder his wife. I yelled at him to drop the gun. He turned on me and fired.

Three minutes later the police surrounded the house.

They found me standing next to Allen Vale’s Infiniti, a dinner-plate-size shotgun hole in the driver’s side door, two feet to my left. The good doctor was sprawled on the lawn with an entrance wound through the middle of his silk tie, his estranged wife on her knees, her face chalky with terror, her forgotten garden hose spraying blood and marigold petals down the sidewalk.

Maia had asked me why I wanted to go to the memorial service and face Vale’s family. I told her closure. That was a lie. The truth was probably closer to Catholic guilt. I was raised to believe repentance is not enough. One must emotionally flagellate oneself as much as possible.

Maia reached across the car seat and squeezed my hand. “You did what you had to.”

“Would
you
have shot him?”

She drove another block before answering. “I would’ve talked to the wife before giving her away. I think I would’ve seen through the client’s bullshit at the first meeting.”

“Thanks. I feel better.”

“You’re a guy. What’s obvious to me isn’t to you.”

“A woman who collects assault rifles is lecturing me on sensitivity.”

Maia called me a few endearing pet names in Mandarin. In the years we’d been together, I’d learned all kinds of helpful Chinese phrases like
Idiot white boy
and
My father told me not to date barbarians.

We drove over the Market Street Bridge. Below, the Riverwalk’s fifty-foot cypress trees blazed with Christmas lights like frozen fireworks.

In the multicolored glow, Maia looked unusually pensive.

She was beautiful in funeral black. Her dark ponytail almost disappeared against the linen dress. Her caramel skin was smooth, radiating such obvious health that she might’ve been mistaken for twenty-five rather than forty-five.

There was something timeless about her—a kind of fierce resilience that might’ve been carved from jade. Before losing everything to the Communists, her ancestors had been warlords of Guangzhou Province. I had no doubt Maia would’ve made them proud.

She didn’t seem to notice the holiday lights or the traffic. Her eyes stayed fixed on some point a thousand miles away.

“What’re you thinking?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, a little too quickly.

She turned on South Alamo, headed into Southtown.

First Friday. The usual hordes were out in force for the monthly gallery openings. Cars circled for parking. Drunk socialites and
Nuevo
Bohemians wandered the streets. It was as if God had upended all the chic restaurants and coffeehouses in town, mixed the patrons thoroughly in alcohol sauce, and dumped them into my neighborhood to find their way home.

Maia parked at the hydrant on the corner of Pecan, in front of my two-story Victorian.

A lady in a mink coat was throwing up in my front yard. She’d set her wineglass on top of my business sign:

TRES NAVARRE DETECTIVE AGENCY

Professional Investigations

(This is not an art gallery)

As our headlights illuminated her fur jacket, the lady turned and scowled at us. She staggered off like a sick bear, leaving her wineglass and a steaming puddle.

“Ah, the romance of San Antonio,” said Maia.

“Stay the night,” I said. “It gets better.”

“I have to get back to Austin.”

I took her hand, felt the tension in her fingers. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Live dangerous. Sam would love to see you.”

She gave me a look I couldn’t quite read. “I have to catch up with work. I’ve been busy bailing out my no-good boyfriend.”

“Men,” I said.

She leaned in closer. “Some of them, anyway.”

We kissed.

I tried my best to convince her that one night together really wouldn’t hurt.

She pulled away. “Tres . . .”

“What is it?”

She dabbed her lipstick. “Nothing.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“I have to go—”

“Maia?”

“—if I want to get home before midnight.”

We sat there with the car idling. A group of drunk art gallery patrons parted around us.

“Multiple choice,” I offered. “Work or personal?”

Maia’s eyes betrayed a glint of desperation—like a cage door was closing on her. “I’ll call you, okay?”

It wasn’t okay. Even
I
was sensitive enough to see that. But I also knew better than to press her.

I kissed her one last time. We said an uneasy good night.

Maia’s BMW pulled away down South Alamo. I fought an urge to follow her—an instinct almost as strong as when I’d grabbed my father’s gun and tailed Dr. Vale.

“Hey,” a passerby called to me. “Gotta restroom in there?”

He was an art gallery cowboy—grizzled ponytail and black denim, too much New Mexican jewelry. Judging from his slurred words, he was about three beers shy of a keg.

“I got a restroom,” I admitted. “Last visitor who used it, I just got back from his funeral.”

The cowboy laughed.

I stared at him.

He muttered something about not needing to pee that bad and stumbled off down the street.

I glanced at my business sign, wondering how much longer it would be there if my license got revoked. The art patrons might have the last laugh. By the next First Friday, this place
might
be a gallery.

I headed up the sidewalk, feeling like I was still walking behind somebody’s coffin.

•                           •                           •

SAM BARRERA AND OUR HOUSEKEEPER, MRS.
Loomis, were playing Hearts in the living room.

When I’d moved in last summer, I promised my accountant the whole first floor of the house would be used for business. The residential space would be confined to upstairs. Unfortunately, Sam and Mrs. Loomis did a lot more residing here than I did business.

Slowly but surely, my waiting room had reverted to living room. Mrs. Loomis’ crystal knickknacks multiplied like Jesus’ loaves. My carefully placed stack of
Detective Industry Today
got shoved aside for Sam’s medication tray. Framed photos of the Barrera family proliferated on the walls, with sticky note names and arrows next to all the faces so Sam could remember who was who. A crochet basket lived on my desk, right next to the skip-trace files.

All I needed now were lace doilies on the sofa and I’d be trapped in my grandmother’s house forever.

Sam and Mrs. Loomis had taken over the coffee table for their card game.

Sam wore pleated slacks, a dress shirt and a blue tie. His FBI standard-issue shoulder holster was fitted with a black plastic water gun.

The gun was a compromise.

I’d learned the hard way that when Sam got up in the morning, he wouldn’t rest until he found a firearm. I could take them away, lock them up, whatever. He would tear the house apart looking. If he didn’t find one, he would wander around irritated all day. He’d try to sneak out and drive to the gun shop.

Finally Mrs. Loomis suggested the water gun, which was a dead ringer for Sam’s old service pistol except for the bright orange plastic muzzle.

Sam was happy. Mrs. Loomis was happy. Sam could now shoot my cat as much as he wanted and Robert Johnson got nothing worse than a wet butt. Domestic harmony reigned.

“Who’s winning?” I asked.

“Special Agent Barrera,” Mrs. Loomis grumbled. “Five dollars and counting.”

“Go easy on her, Sam,” I said.

Sam looked at me innocently. He stuffed a roll of quarters into his pants pocket. “Hell, Fred. I never play for cash.”

My name isn’t Fred, but that never bothered Sam much.

In the last six months, he’d put on weight. He looked more robust and relaxed than he’d ever looked during his prime. Living at the Southtown office obviously agreed with him.

Of course, it should. He’d grown up in this house.

Through an odd series of circumstances, I’d become Sam’s caretaker and tenant when his memory started going. He didn’t want to give up the family home. He couldn’t maintain it by himself. I needed a cheap place to live and work.

Sam being a legendary former FBI agent and my biggest rival in the local PI market, I figured I was doing myself a favor by helping him retire. Every so often, I trotted him out to meet clients for “high-level consultations.” Sam loved it. So did the clients, as long as I didn’t mention Sam’s mental condition.

“How was the funeral?” Mrs. Loomis asked.

“The sermon was short.” I sank into an armchair. “Good appetizers. Closed casket. Nobody assaulted me.”

She nodded approvingly.

Sam laid his cards on the table. “I win.”

“Agent Barrera,” Mrs. Loomis chided. “I haven’t even bid yet.”

“Can’t beat the master.” Sam plucked another quarter from her change dish.

Mrs. Loomis sighed and reshuffled the cards.

She was by far the best assisted-living nurse we’d had. She got room and board, so she worked cheap. Being the widow of a cop, she was unfazed by the grittier aspects of my work. Sam and I provided her with company and a purpose. In return, she scolded Sam into taking his meds and kept him from interrogating the mailman at water-gun-point.

Out on South Alamo, Friday night traffic built to a dangerous hum. Somewhere, a glass bottle shattered against asphalt.

I needed to get up, change out of my funeral suit. But whenever I stopped moving, numbness set in. I started thinking about the .38 caliber hole I’d put in Dr. Vale’s chest.

What bothered me most wasn’t my remorse. It was that my remorse seemed . . . intellectual. Detached.

I was stunned at how easy it had been to kill a man. I was horrified by the elation I’d felt afterward, when I realized the doctor’s shot had missed me.

I was alive. He was dead.
Damn right.

Perhaps Maia Lee had seen the wildness in my eyes when she’d met me at the police station. Maybe that’s what was bothering her.

My finger curled, remembering the weight of the .38 trigger.

Years ago, I’d asked a homicidal friend if stepping over the moral line got easier each time you killed a man.

He’d laughed.
Only moral line is your own skin,
vato.

That friend now had a wife and kid.

He’d stopped hanging around me because I was a bad influence.

In the kitchen, by the back door, Robert Johnson licked a tuna can. A moth with smoking wings fluttered around the lightbulb.

“Tres?” Mrs. Loomis asked. “Would you like to play?”

When I tried to speak, I realized I’d been clenching my jaw.

“Thanks,” I said. “But I should—”

Bang.

The back door rattled.

Robert Johnson evaporated from the doormat, abandoning his tuna can.

“Not again,” Mrs. Loomis muttered.

We were used to unwelcome visitors on the weekends—stray partiers looking for art, free food and beer, not necessarily in that order. Most came to the front door, but some wandered in from the backyard.

“I’ll deal with ’em,” Sam said, going for his water gun.

Then a familiar face appeared at the kitchen window—the friend I’d just been thinking about.

“Keep playing,” I told Sam. “I’ll take care of it.”

I walked into the kitchen, closing the living room door behind me. I went to the back door and let in Ralph Arguello.