Rebel Island (5 page)

The maid raised her hand. “Señor, where could this man hide? It is a big house, but—”

“We could search it,” Alex suggested, a glimmer of new hope in his eyes. “Me and the staff. I bet we won’t find anybody. Then we can all rest easier.”

I thought about that. I didn’t like the idea of more people roaming around the hotel. Then again, I didn’t like the idea of spending the night in the parlor, either.

“All right,” I told Alex. “Why don’t you and your staff, Jose and—”

“Imelda,” the maid provided.

“Imelda,” I said. “Why don’t the three of you search. Alex, you have any kind of weapon?”

“Here,” Lindy said, and offered his .45.

Alex didn’t look too happy about it, but he took the gun.

“You know how to use that, son?” Lindy asked.

Alex nodded. “I was in the army, but…”

Whatever he was thinking, he didn’t say it. He nodded at Jose and Imelda, who followed him out.

“Well, ain’t this cozy?” Garrett winked at the blond lady. “You mind being my bathroom buddy, darling?”

The blond lady squeezed her eyes shut, like she was hoping we’d all disappear. When we didn’t, she grabbed her pillow and ran out of the room.

Garrett’s smile dissolved. “Aw, hell, I didn’t mean—”

“I’ll go after her,” Maia said.

“No,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

Maia raised her eyebrows.

“Please,” I said. “Just…I’d rather you and Garrett stay where it’s safe.”

Maia muttered something in Chinese, probably a curse on her overprotective husband. “Fine. If I start labor, I’ll just have Garrett help me out.”

“Now wait a minute, sister,” Garrett protested.

I was about to go search for the blond lady when Mr. Lindy said, “Mr. Navarre?”

“Sir?” The
sir
came automatically—South Texas breeding. Something about the old man brought it out in me.

“You failed to mention the most obvious place for this murderer to hide,” he said. His eyes were frosty blue. “Right here. As one of the guests. How do we know it’s not one of us?”

The blond lady was sitting in the empty dining room.

A row of five tables with white linen cloths ran down the middle of the room. In the dark, they reminded me of gurneys in a morgue. Damaged windows were covered with tarps and hastily hammered boards, but rain leaked in the edges, soaking the carpet. The floor was strewn with silverware and overturned flower vases.

I sat down across from the lady.

“Tough night,” I said.

She brushed a carnation off the table. “Tough year.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lane.”

“That your first or last name?”

“First. Lane S—” She pursed her lips. “Lane Sanford.”

She was younger than I’d first thought: in her late twenties, pretty the way a sun-bleached cotton dress is pretty—comfortably worn, slightly faded. The roots of her hair were ginger brown.

“Okay, Lane. The thing is, we should be sticking together. I’m a little worried about you.”

She hugged her arms. “A little worried…”

“You’re staying alone at the hotel?”

“I
thought
I was alone.”

“I heard you talking to Chris and the maid this afternoon. Something about your ex?”

“I tried to warn them. Bobby will do anything. He’s been tracking me and…” She started breathing shallowly. “And that marshal who was shot—”

“Lane, I want you to take a deep breath and hold it.”

She gave me a desperate watery look, but she tried to hold her breath.

“Good,” I said. “Now let it out slowly, and tell me about your ex.”

She exhaled. “You don’t understand. You don’t know him.”

“Do you have any evidence your ex is here? Have you seen him?”

“I…No, but—”

“Was there some reason he would’ve targeted Longoria?”

“Longoria?”

“The marshal who got shot.”

“I don’t…I don’t know. I
told
Chris I shouldn’t have come.”

“So the hotel manager, Chris…you know him personally?”

She stared at the boarded-up windows. “I told him I couldn’t run anymore. I’m so tired of hiding from what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

Before she could answer, the college guys came tromping into the room. “Yo, Navarro,” the redheaded guy said.

“Navarre,” I corrected.

“Whatever,” he said, but he wasn’t pulling off his angry-young-man routine very well. His face was ashen. His two friends looked queasy. “We, um, found something maybe you should see.”

In the back of the kitchen was a triple-wide stainless-steel
refrigerator. The college kids—who strangely enough possessed names: Chase, Markie and Ty—had decided to raid it looking for snacks. They’d lost their appetites when they saw what was on the floor.

“You were all together?” I asked.

Chase, the redhead, glanced at his friends. “Well, we were kind of…not.” He nodded at the sickly-looking Latino kid. “Ty was throwing up.”

“Too much information,” I said. “And you two?”

“Markie was getting glasses from the cabinet over there,” Chase said. “I was gonna get the food. Then I saw
that.
”

“It’s blood, isn’t it?” Lane Sanford’s voice trembled.

“Chase,” I said, “you and your friends take Miss Sanford back to the parlor, please. Tell my wife…” My voice faltered.

I was used to relying on Maia’s opinion, but she already felt queasy. I couldn’t ask Maia to look at this. “On second thought, ask Mr. Lindy to come in here.”

I finally convinced Lane to go with the college guys, which left me alone, staring at the skid mark of red on the white tiles.

I didn’t hear Mr. Lindy come up behind me until he spoke. “Blood, all right,” he said. “Someone slipped in it. Partial shoeprint, there.”

I looked at the old man. “Are you retired law enforcement, Mr. Lindy?”

“Criminal lawyer. Thirty-seven years. I’ve seen my share of blood.”

His voice was as dry as a South Texas creek bed.

“Maybe this is from when they were moving Longoria’s body,” I said hopefully.

Lindy shook his head. “I stumbled across Chris Stowall and the cook, Jose, while they were doing that. I tried to convince them it, ah, wasn’t a good idea…but Mr. Stowall was not entirely rational. He insisted he couldn’t let the guests see the body. At any rate, the cellar where they took the body is around the corner there. They didn’t come through this way, and no one tracked blood as far as I could see. They used a plastic tarp.”

I crouched next to the red smear. Sure enough, the edge of a shoeprint was visible—a man’s shoe, I thought. Smooth sole, about a size 11. There were no other red prints on the floor, though, as if the man had slipped in blood, then taken his shoe off to avoid leaving a trail. But if that was the case, why had he left this stain?

“I don’t want to think this is someone else’s blood,” I said. “I mean, besides Longoria’s.”

Lindy’s eyes glinted. “Mr. Huff said you’d retired from private investigations. I take it you’ve dealt with murders before?”

Had I dealt with murders?
Under different circumstances, I might’ve laughed. “Yes, sir. A few.”

“And you knew Marshal Longoria?”

I wondered if Lindy was grilling me. I suspected he was the kind of lawyer who could set his victims at ease, then work out a confession before they realized what had happened.

“I knew him,” I admitted. “And I don’t want anything to do with solving his murder. You’ve got more experience than I do.”

The old man shook his head. “Until the police can be called, you do what you think is best, son. I’ll back you up. The others looked to you naturally, you know. There was no doubt that you would be in charge.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “And now we have a bloodstain along with a dead body. How am I doing so far?”

Lindy patted my shoulder. “You go find that wife of yours, try to relax a little. Lock your bedroom door. I’ll call you if anything else happens.”

“We should all stay together.”

Lindy smiled. “Too late for that, son. These people are not the types that stay together well. Now, go salvage what you can of the first night of your honeymoon. I’ll get my gun back from Alex Huff. I’m increasingly beginning to wonder if I will need it.”

8

Imelda watched nervously as Señor Huff ransacked the
building. He muttered to himself, throwing open doors and clutching his borrowed gun. She had seen him in many moods, but never like this before.

“Where is he?” Señor Huff growled. He pulled sheets out of the linen closet and dumped them at Jose’s feet, then moved to the next guest room and kicked open the door. “Where is the bastard?”

“Señor—”

“No.” Huff stuck his finger in her face. “You don’t talk to me. Neither of you.”

Jose cleared his throat. “But, Señor Huff—”

“Get back downstairs,” he ordered. “Make the guests some food. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear you.”

He stormed down the hallway and left them alone.

Imelda looked at her husband. “What do we do?”

She was used to Jose having answers. Usually, no matter how bad the situation, he would give her a reassuring smile. She loved the way the edges of his eyes crinkled, his gaze warm and brown. He was a handsome man when he smiled.

Now his expression was grim. He knelt and gathered up the fallen linens. “We make the guests food.”

“Jose…please. It’s killing him.”

He folded up the sheets clumsily and stuffed them back into the closet. He was never good with linens. That was her job, folding the corners perfectly, smoothing out wrinkles.

“Señor Huff will survive this,” he promised. “We all will.”

“We owe him—”

“I know what we owe him,” Jose said. She heard the steel edge in his voice and knew better than to argue.

“We’ll go downstairs,” Jose insisted. “And do our jobs.”

He trudged off, not waiting to see if she would follow.

Imelda hesitated, staring into the empty guest room. It was room 207. It hadn’t been used in weeks. Every day, Imelda would go in anyway to dust and fluff the pillows. She would open the window to let in fresh sea air. She loved empty rooms. They were clean and full of promise. They had no past. Unlike their own room. Terrible memories could not be smoothed out. They couldn’t be neatly folded and tucked away.

It had all started to go wrong last fall, when the visitor arrived from the mainland. That day, she had known their lives would be shattered yet again. Their hopes of finding peace would be dashed.

She gathered her strength. She could not give up now. The young man, Señor Navarre, might be a new opportunity. She would know, soon enough.

She closed the door of room 207 and followed after her husband.

9

I should’ve followed Lindy’s advice and gone straight to my
honeymoon, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesse Longoria’s body in the cellar.

In the hall, I ran into Garrett, who was hand-walking down to check on me.

“Got worried,” he told me. “Lane said something about a bloodstain.”

“Is Maia all right?”

Garrett shrugged. “She’s calming Lane down. Rather have that job than looking for you, little bro. Lane’s a lot hotter.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

He gave me the innocent eyes—a look Garrett doesn’t do very well. “Can’t a guy want to comfort a young lady without people getting ideas?”

“No. Now come on.”

“Where we going?”

“To visit a dead man.”

It was rare for a house on the Texas coast to have a basement
, but the first owner, Colonel Bray, had insisted on it. The walls were original 1880s shellcrete—a cementlike mixture of sand and ground oyster shells. The floor was damp. The air smelled of mildew and fish.

When I was a kid, Garrett and Alex used to spend a lot of time in that cellar. Some of their time, no doubt, was spent doing drugs, talking about girls, planning great teenage adventures. I wasn’t included in any of that. But most important, Alex made his fireworks there.

As July fourth got near, he would spend every spare moment with his beloved project. He got so preoccupied he forgot to pick on me. He didn’t care if I sneaked downstairs to watch, as long as I touched nothing. He even ignored Garrett, which pleased me more than anything.

The cellar would fill up with plastic tubes, coils of fuse, rolls of aluminum foil and boxes of caps, plugs and Mexican fireworks. Alex would save money all year, then clean out the local roadside stands and cannibalize their chemicals to make his huge mortar displays.

Our last summer, a few weeks before my fateful trip to the lighthouse, I crept down the cellar stairs and watched as Alex rigged up his row of plastic tubes. Garrett sat on a folding chair nearby, drinking tequila from a Coke can and looking bored.

It’s hard for me to remember the way Garrett used to look before he had a wheelchair, but this was long before the accident that took his legs. He was getting ready to graduate from high school. He was just starting to grow his beard. He’d been accepted to MIT (my mother’s idea) but turned them down because he said he would never be a “damn sellout.” He had plans to drive around the country, maybe go to Europe. He was trying to convince Alex that this was an excellent idea.

Normally, Alex would’ve been encouraging. No matter how crazy Garrett’s schemes got, Alex was always his number one cheerleader, almost as if Alex wanted to see how far he could push Garrett to go. That was the main reason Garrett liked Alex so much. But today, on a fireworks day, Alex was a tougher sell.

“Come on, man,” Garrett said. “You want to stay on this island your whole life?”

Alex looked up briefly from twisting his fuses. “I don’t know.”

“You got no ambition, man. Whole world’s out there. You want to turn into Mr. Eli, sitting up there in a bathrobe all day?”

“Mr. Eli’s not so bad. He helped my folks out.”

“Whatever, man. You ask me, it wasn’t much help.”

Alex didn’t answer. He covered a mortar with aluminum foil and began unwrapping a case of Roman candles.

“Sorry,” Garrett muttered. “I didn’t mean anything.”

Alex took out a box cutter and sliced a Roman candle, splitting it open like a bean pod. “You think it’ll be easier meeting the right girl, if you go on this trip?”

Garrett’s face flushed. He’d broken up with a girl named Tracy a few weeks before. I guess he had told Alex about it. She’d hung around our house for maybe a month, and when she finally broke up with Garrett, his moods turned even blacker than usual. At night, he listened to Led Zeppelin and ripped pages out of his yearbook. During the day, he’d take his air gun into the backyard and shoot at soda cans for hours.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Garrett demanded. “You think I won’t meet someone?”

Alex uncoiled a length of wire, measured it against a yardstick. Even at seventeen, his hands were scarred from knife cuts, fishing hooks, rope burns. He was always busy, always creating something.

“Thing about fireworks,” he said, “it’s all in the timing. You got to measure the fuse just right or the ignition is no good. You burn everything up too fast, or it doesn’t go off at all.”

“I don’t get you, man,” Garrett said. “You’re gonna sit on this island your whole life, waiting like your dad? You think love is gonna come to you?”

The cellar was silent except for water dripping from a busted pipe in the corner. A moth batted at the single bare lightbulb above, casting enormous shadows across the shellcrete walls.

“Get out,” Alex said finally. “I’m working.”

Garrett looked like he wanted to argue, but then he thought better of it. He cursed and got up to leave. He glowered at me as he passed me on the stairs.

I didn’t move. Alex glanced at me without emotion. I might’ve been another fuse or plastic tube—not something he needed right now, but not something he was going to bother throwing away, either. He went back to work, and I watched in silence as he fused together a row of pipes like a church organ, loading it with chemicals and measuring his fuses to just the right length.

There were no fireworks in the cellar now. Jesse Longoria’s
body had been laid out on a butcher-block table.

A single bare lightbulb flickered dimly above us, but we relied mostly on a flashlight, which cast long shadows across Longoria’s face. He didn’t look like a man at peace, even if one ignored the bullet hole in his chest. He looked like a man who needed to use the restroom.

“I hate dead bodies,” Garrett mumbled.

I couldn’t tell if my brother was really pale and sweaty, or if it was just the light. His color wasn’t much better than Longoria’s. Of course, Garrett was at a height disadvantage. He’d had to hand-walk his way down into the cellar. Now, sitting in a metal chair, he was eye level with the gunshot wound.

“Hold up the flashlight,” I told him.

The body was wrapped in a plastic tarp. The inside of the tarp was spattered with blood, but there was none that I could see on the outside, or on the floor, or the steps into the cellar. Jose and Chris may have ruined a crime scene, but they seemed to have done it without making a mess. It seemed unlikely that the blood smeared in the kitchen had come from this corpse.

I checked through Longoria’s pockets. I came up with a wallet, car keys, an Aransas Pass ferry schedule and thirty-six cents. In Longoria’s wallet were his badge, sixty-five dollars in cash and the usual credit cards.

“So you knew this guy?” Garrett asked.

“He killed a client of mine.”

“Before or after the client paid you?”

“You’re just Mr. Sensitive, aren’t you?” I put Longoria’s wallet back in his coat pocket. “Longoria had a reputation in the South Texas Marshal’s Office. He apprehended something like fifty fugitives in twelve years. Once in a while, as he was bringing them back, the fugitives would, ah, try to escape.”

“And this dude would use force.”

“Deadly force. Every time, Longoria was cleared of wrong-doing, but—”

“I gotcha,” he grumbled. “Fucking cops.”

“Dad was a cop.”

“What’s your point?”

He had me there.

I scanned the room. Chris or Jose or somebody had set the dead man’s suitcase in the corner. I hauled the brown Tourister to the table and opened it at the dead man’s feet.

Garrett shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “So this client of yours…he was a fugitive?”

“Charged with arson. He had a felony record. He panicked and skipped town before his trial. The wife paid me to find him and convince him to turn himself in. I didn’t have time. Longoria found him first and killed him.”

“You know that for sure?”

“The body was never found. My guy’s officially still listed as a fugitive. But I asked around. The guy had had a run-in with one of Longoria’s SAPD buddies the year before. Longoria took matters into his own hands. Settled the score.”

Garrett looked down at the dead man’s face. “See, asshole? This is what we call karma. Now can we get out of here, little bro?”

I rummaged through the marshal’s suitcase. I found two changes of clothes. No paperwork, no files from the Marshal’s Office. Nothing interesting, until I checked one of those easy-to-miss side pockets that I’d trained myself not to miss. Stuck inside were a crumbling candy skull wrapped in plastic and a business card that read:

Chris Stowall

Manager

Rebel Island Hotel

510-822-9901

Handwritten on the back was a date.

“June fifth,” I read.

“That’s today,” Garrett said.

“Yeah.”

“So what’s important about it?”

“Good question.” I slipped the card in my pocket and examined the candy skull. There was nothing special about it. Any Mexican candy store would sell them.

“That’s one of those Day of the Dead candies,” Garrett said. “Your friend here have a sweet tooth?”

“Maybe,” I said.

But something about the skull bothered me. It reminded me of something I’d read, or heard on the news…

Above us, the lightbulb flickered and went out completely, leaving us with nothing but the flashlight beam shining on the dead marshal’s face.

Garrett took a shaky breath. “Okay.
Now
can we get out of here?”

Maia had lit candles in the Colonel’s Suite.

Against my better judgment, Garrett took charge of Lane Sanford and led her away. He said they’d go find Alex, maybe drop in on the college guys, who’d resumed their hurricane party above us. Garrett would teach them how to make a good margarita. They could listen to Jimmy Buffett until the batteries in Garrett’s boom box wore out. It would cheer Lane right up.

Once they were gone, I lay down on the bed next to Maia and listened to the rain pounding the walls. There was a leak in the corner of the roof. Maia had put a silver cup under it. The drops sounded like tiny bells.

“Are we having a romantic getaway yet?” I asked.

Maia nudged my foot. “With a homicide magnet like you? A girl can’t help but have a good time.”

She snuggled next to me, wincing as she changed positions.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Just my back.”

“You sure?”

“Of course. Stop worrying. Tell me what you found.”

I got the feeling she was just trying to change the subject, but I told her about the bloodstain in the kitchen, and the business card and candy skull in Longoria’s briefcase.

“Bad,” she said.

“That was my expert opinion, too.” I nodded toward the AM radio on the dresser. “Any news come through before the generator went out?”

“Couple of garbled alerts. Power’s been knocked out in Corpus Christi. Some smaller coastal towns are underwater. The rainfall is setting records.”

“So the earliest we could expect the ferry—”

“Twenty-four hours at least. We’ll have to hope the phone lines get reconnected sooner than that. Or maybe a Coast Guard patrol will come by.”