Rebel Island (2 page)

3

For a guy who was rumored to have killed six men in cold
blood, Jesse Longoria looked downright pleasant.

He stood on the dock of Rebel Island as if he’d been expecting us. A jovially plump Latino in his mid-fifties. Smile lines crinkled around his eyes. He wore a gold A&M college ring, a navy blue summerweight suit with his U.S. Marshal’s badge pinned to the lapel and a satisfied expression as if he’d just enjoyed a stroll with a beautiful woman.

“Tres Navarre,” he said. “If I were you, I’d get back on that boat. Now.”

Wind buffeted the dock. Maia was supervising the hotel manager taking our bags off the ferry. Garrett was setting up his wheelchair. We’d just endured a twenty-minute ride from Aransas Pass through choppy seas and I was tempted to throw up on the marshal’s shoes.

“What brings you here, Longoria?” I asked. “Collecting seashells?”

“I don’t need your interference, son. Not this time.”

Thunder crackled over the Gulf. Storm clouds were piling up, turning the air to a wet stew of salt and electricity.

The hotel manager lumbered over with our bags. He stopped when he saw Longoria’s hand resting on his sidearm. “Uh, problem, gentlemen?”

“There was,” I said. “Two years ago. Never found the body, did they, Longoria?”

The marshal’s eyes glinted. “I heard you quit detective work.”

“Sure. Didn’t you get an invitation to the retirement party?”

He stepped so close I could smell the lemon starch sweating out of his clothes. “Who hired you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Longoria. I’m here on my honeymoon.”

I pointed behind me. Maia and Garrett were just coming up the dock—Maia eight and a half months pregnant, Garrett a bilateral amputee.

Funny, Longoria didn’t look too convinced by my honeymoon story.

“Hey, Marshal,” the hotel manager said. I tried to remember his name. Chris Something-or-other. He was a former pro surfer, tan and well-built, but I doubted he’d dealt with many conflicts worse than deciding what kind of beer to buy on the mainland. “Mr. Navarre isn’t—I mean, they have a reservation, sir. They’re friends with the owner.”

Longoria seemed to weigh his options. The ferry was already pulling out for Aransas Pass. The next boat wouldn’t come until tomorrow afternoon. That meant he could shoot me, throw me off the dock or leave me alone. I’m sure the first two options had their appeal.

“Bad storm coming,” he told me. “I’d make it a one-night honeymoon and get off this island.”

Then he turned and headed toward the hotel, the first few splatters of rain making buckshot patterns on the boards at his feet.

“Old friend?” Maia asked.

“Something like that.” I looked at Garrett accusingly.

“Hey, little bro, you can’t blame me for
that.
Is there any place in Texas where you
don’t
stumble across some cop you’ve pissed off?”

He had a point. Besides, there were plenty of other things I
could
blame my brother for.

We followed the hotel manager up the clamshell path toward a place I had sworn never to revisit.

Rebel Island was a mile long. Most of that was a thin strip
of beach and cordgrass that stretched north like a comet’s tail. The southern end was half a mile wide—just big enough for the lighthouse and the rambling old hotel that had once been home to the island’s most infamous owner.

My father used to relish the island’s history. Every summer when we came here, he’d tell me the stories. To my horror, as I got older, I actually found myself interested in them.

Inconveniently placed near the mouth of Aransas Bay, the island had needled its way into local history like a sticker burr. In the early 1800s, Jean Laffitte had used its treacherous sandbars to lure Spanish ships into the shallows, where they floundered and became easy prey. Laffitte had supposedly buried a treasure here, too, in a grove of live oaks, but if there had ever been live oaks on the island, hurricanes had scoured them away long ago. The only trees now were a dozen palmettos, which according to legend had been planted by Colonel Duncan Bray.

Bray had fought at the final land battle of the Civil War—Palmito Ranch, two hundred miles south. The last irony in a war filled with ironies, Palmito Ranch had been a Confederate victory. Bray considered it the definitive word on the war’s outcome. He planted palmetto saplings from the battlefield on his family’s island, refused to speak of Lee’s surrender or Juneteenth or any of the other new realities. He shot at federal troops who attempted to talk to him about repairing his lighthouse, and he lived the rest of his life in voluntary exile on what he considered the last patch of Confederate soil. The island got its name from him. He wasn’t the last crazy rebel to own the place.

Bray’s house, now the Rebel Island Hotel, was a three-story
French Second Empire. It had a mansard roof like reptile skin and cedar-slatted walls painted an odd color that mirrored the sea—sometimes blue, sometimes green or gray. The oldest wooden structure in Aransas County, it had weathered half a dozen hurricanes.

Good karma,
our friend Alex had told me, right before he bought the place. At the time, I’d felt like I was watching somebody buy my childhood—nightmares and all.

The lobby smelled of sandalwood and straw mats. Seashells in nets decorated the walls. In one corner, a Latina maid was trying to calm down a guest—a middle-aged blond woman whose eyes were red from crying. Chris the manager excused himself to go help. The blonde was saying something about a gun and her ex-husband. I really didn’t want to know.

A college-aged guy in a UT football jersey came stomping down the staircase with a bottle of José Cuervo and a fistful of limes. He asked an older gentleman reading a newspaper on the sofa if the ferry had already left. The old man said he thought it had. The kid cursed and bounded back upstairs.

Outside, thunder rumbled. The whole building rattled.

“Remind me again,” I told Garrett. “A quiet honeymoon? Way too early for hurricane season?”

“What, little bro, now global warming is my fault?”

“I think the building is charming,” Maia said.

“See?” Garrett said. “Alex! Yo!”

Alex Huff grinned crookedly as he came around the front desk. The hotel owner gave Garrett a bear hug, lifting him out of his wheelchair before setting him back down again. The whole sight was pretty disturbing.

“Damn, Garrett!” Alex said. “Have you gotten taller?”

“Eat me, Huff. You remember Tres. And this is Maia, his better half.”

Alex and I shook hands. He had a grip like a pecan cracker. He hadn’t gotten any prettier in the past few years. His face was scarred from acne. His wiry blond hair and the wild light in his eyes always made me wonder if he slept with his finger in a light socket.

“Yeah, Tres,” he said, pulling me closer. “Need to ask you a favor later, all right?”

That immediately made me wary, but before I could say anything—like
hell, no,
for instance—Alex’s attention moved on. He gave Maia a hug, admired her third-trimester belly. “Honeymoon, huh? Not a moment too soon.”

“They weren’t gonna take a honeymoon at all.” Garrett wagged a finger at me. “I told Tres, ‘That’s no way to treat a lady. I’ll set the whole thing up for you.’”

“Yeah,” I grumbled. “And then he said, ‘By the way, I’m coming along.’”

Alex and Garrett both laughed like this was a good joke. I wished it was.

Maia squeezed my hand.

“Well, I guess you lovebirds want to see your room.” Alex winked at me. “Garrett’s right next door. I hope that’s okay.”

He ran up the stairs before I could hit him. Garrett cackled and slid out of his chair, then followed Alex, climbing on his hands.

Maia and I got the Colonel’s Suite, a second-floor corner
bedroom with a parlor and a bay window looking out at the lighthouse.

The octagonal brick tower was seventy feet tall, so no matter what floor of the hotel you were on, the lighthouse loomed overhead. It dated from the 1850s. It hadn’t worked in fifty years. As a kid, looking up at the glassed-in top, I’d imagined that the beacon light would mysteriously flicker on. It never happened. But I never got tired of watching for it.

“Ow.” Maia dropped the shirt she was unpacking. She sat down on the canopied bed.

I was at her side in about a millisecond. “What is it?”

“Just my back.” She managed a smile. “Relax.”

“Relax,” I said. “I remember that word…like, eight months ago.”

I put my hand on her belly. The baby wasn’t kicking.

“He’s fine,” she said. “Don’t obsess.”

“Coming here was a bad idea.”

“Will you stop? We needed to get away.”

Thunder boomed.

Get away…
Right. A sunny vacation. One last holiday before the baby arrived.

Maia scooted up on the bed and tried to get comfortable. Even eight and a half months pregnant, she’d never been more beautiful. Her black hair was thick and glossy. Her eyes seemed to trap the light like amber. “So are you going to tell me about the marshal?”

“Jesse Longoria. Just somebody I’ve run across a few times.”

“And?”

“And nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing you want to talk about, you mean.”

Outside, rain was coming down in sheets instead of sprinkles. It probably wasn’t sundown yet, but it looked like midnight. On the bedstand, the cranberry glass lamp flickered.

“You know,” Maia said, “if you wanted to revisit your retirement decision—”

“Okay, now who’s obsessing?”

“It’s been what—six months?”

“Six and a half.”

“But who’s counting?”

“That’s entrapment, counselor.”

She smiled. “Unpack for me? Then I could
really
use a foot massage.”