The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (5 page)

The next article, dated April 1993, announced
Jeremiah Brandon's murder. The details were sketchy. Jeremiah had
been socializing with his workers at a West Side bar on a Friday
night. An unknown assailant had entered the bar, walked up to
Jeremiah Brandon, and fired multiple rounds from a large-caliber
handgun into the old man's chest. The assailant had fled. Despite
numerous eyewitnesses, the police had no positive ID to work with.
Not even a sketch. The witnesses at the Poco Mas Cantina on Zarzamora
had apparently been less than model citizens when it came to
exercising their memories.

There were three follow-up articles, each shorter
than the one before it, each pushed farther away from page Al. They
all said the same thing. Police were without leads. The investigation
had failed to produce a suspect, at least none that the police wanted
to share with the press.

I flipped through a few other pieces of paperwork —
Aaron Brandon's driving records, insurance policies. The lease for
Aaron and Ines' Alamo Heights home was made out in the name of
RideWorks, Inc.

I was still thinking about the murdered father and
son when Deputy Ozzie Gerson knocked on my front-door frame.

"Can't believe it," he said. "You
still live in this dump."

"Good to see you too. Come on in."

He inspected the living room disdainfully.

Ozzie was the kind of cop other cops would like you
to believe doesn't exist. He had a fat ring the size of a manatee
slung around his midsection, powdered sugar stains on his uniform. He
wore silver jewelry with a gold Rolex and his greasy buzz cut covered
his scalp as thinly as boar's whiskers. His face was pale, enormous,
brutishly sculpted so that even in his kinder moments he looked like
a man who'd just attended a very satisfactory lynching.

"You call this an apartment?"

"I tried calling it a love cave," I
admitted, "but it scared the women away."

"This isn't an apartment, kid. This is a holding
cell. You've got no sense of style."

By my standards the in-law looked great. On the
futon, the laundry was clean and folded. Stacks of agency paperwork
were tidily arranged on the coffee table. My tai chi swords were
polished and in their wall rack. Stuck on the refrigerator, like a
normal home and everything, was a kid's watercolor (Jem's) and a
postcard (my brother Garrett's, with the endearing inscription IN KEY
WEST WITH BUFFETT — GLAD YOU AIN'T HERE!!!). The only possible
eyesore was Robert Johnson, who was now lying on the kitchen counter
with his feet curled under his chest and his tongue sticking out.

"Track lighting," Ozzie advised. "White
carpet. A big mirror on that wall. Go for open. Light and airy."

"I feel it," I said. "I really do. You
want to sit down while I call the decorator?"

He pointed over his shoulder. "We can talk and
ride."

I turned to Robert Johnson, who had seen Ozzie too
many times to get excited by him or his designer tips. "Lock up
if you leave."

Robert Johnson curled his tongue in a tremendous
yawn. I took that as an assent.

My landlord, Gary Hales, was now on the front porch
of the main house, cracking pecans into a large metal pail. The
spring afternoon wasn't particularly hot, but Gary had one of those
head-mounted mist sprayers slung across his balding skull. The thing
must've been on full blast. Droplets floated around him like a swarm
of gnats, dripping off his nose and chin and speckling his Guayabera
shirt. Gary looked up apathetically as Ozzie Gerson and I walked by,
then went back to his work. Just Tres Navarre getting picked up by
the police.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

"Last week fucking parade detail," Ozzie
told me. "Today I been on duty an hour and already three calls.
I need a hot dog."

"Life on the edge," I sympathized.

"Balls." He unlocked the passenger's door
of his patrol car, realized he had about sixty pounds of equipment on
the seat, then started transferring it to the trunk with much
grumbling.

Inside, the unit was about as spacious as a fighter
jet cockpit. The area between the seats was filled with cellular
phone and ticket pad and field radio. In front, where the drink
holder and my left leg should've gone, an MDT's monitor and midget
keyboard jutted out from the dashboard. The overhead visors held
about a foot of paperwork, maps, and binders. The big book, the one
with the whole county vectorized, was wedged between Ozzie's headrest
and the Plexiglas shield that sealed off the backseat. I had just
enough room to buckle my seat belt and breathe occasionally.

Ozzie took a right on Broadway, then a quick left on
Hildebrand.

The week after fiesta and the streets were deserted.
Over the weekend, three hundred thousand revelers had trickled out of
town, leaving the locals drained, hungover, red-eyed, and stiff from
a week of intense partying. The pedestrians all moved a little
slower. The curbs were still littered with confetti and beer cups.
Pickup trucks passed with empty kegs in their beds. Streamers dangled
from trees. It would be at least Friday before San Antonio rebounded
for another major party. That, for San Antonio, was an impressive
period of austerity.

Ozzie took the McAllister Freeway on-ramp and
propelled us south at a speed somewhere between the legal limit and
the barrier of sound. The city floated by in detached, tinted silence
— Trinity University, Pearl Brewery, the gray and brown skyscrapers
of downtown.

"So," Ozzie prompted.

"So. The Brandon family attracts bullets."

Half a mile of silence. "You and Erainya. SAPD.
The Feds. Suddenly after six years everybody wants to talk to me
about the Brandons."

"We just love you, Ozzie."

Ozzie picked up his transmitter and told Dispatch to
show him 10-8, back in service.

"Our unit number's twenty-thirteen," he
told me. "Case I get shot or something."

"There's positive thinking."

"I tell the detectives six years ago — I say,
'Look out, this guy will be back.' Three weeks ago, I tell them,
'Hey, there's word on the street he is back.' But do they listen to
me? No. They wait until Aaron Brandon is murdered, then they figure
it's time to ask me for help. What is that about?"

"Go figure."

"You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Nope. You going to enlighten me?"

"I probably shouldn't."

"Probably not."

The downtown skyline receded behind us, the landscape
ahead turning to a mixture of tract housing and salvage yards and
acres of scrub brush. Ozzie took the 410 split into the
unincorporated South Side. "Jimmy Hernandez down at city
homicide, he made it clear he wants a lid on this until his people
are ready to move."

"And your career has been a tribute to following
orders from the brass." Ozzie's neck flushed. I thought we'd
entered dangerous territory until he glanced over and allowed the
corner of his mouth to creep up just slightly. "There's that.
You put any of the story together yet? "

"SAPD's got two dead UTSA professors on their
hands. Everybody is assuming the Brandon murder at least had
something to do with campus politics. Except maybe it didn't. SAPD
suspects some kind of connection to the murder of the professor's dad
six years ago, something to do with a guy named Sanchez. Until they
run down that lead, SAPD sees no reason to tip their hand. They're
happy letting everybody think the political angle."

"You're warm."

"What I can't figure out, no offense, is why
everybody wants to talk to you."

"You know what I did before this, Navarre?"

Before this. Ozzie-code for the unapproachable
subject: Before I got busted back to patrol.

"County gang task force," I recalled.
"Seventeen years, wasn't it?"

I knew it had been fifteen, but the mistake pleased
him. Ozzie let it stand. "The reason everybody wants to talk to
me — I'm the expert on Zeta Sanchez."

Ozzie said the first name Say-ta, Spanish for the
letter Z. He looked at me to see if it rang a bell.

"Nope."

"First part of Zeta's story reads pretty typical
— dad died young. Zeta was raised by his mom down at the Bowie
Courts, claimed a gang when he was twelve. Head of his set by age
fourteen. By fifteen he'd started piecing out some West Side heroin
action."

Dispatch crackled a call for another unit. Ozzie
craned his ear to listen: 10-59 — suspicious vehicle report.

"Over by Lackland." Gerson wagged an
accusing finger at me. "Probably some damn P.I."

"You were saying?"

Ozzie frowned at the MDT terminal, then back at the
freeway. He took the exit for South Presa.

"I arrested Zeta Sanchez so many times when he
was growing up, I feel like I practically raised him. When he was
about seventeen he left the small stuff behind — the gang-banging,
the drugs — and got a job with Jeremiah Brandon."

"Aaron Brandon's father."

"Yeah."

"He made amusement park rides."

Ozzie laughed. "Yeah. You know anything about
the carnival circuit?"

"You mean like candied apples? Duck shoots?"

"The carnies are havens for cons. Smugglers.
Thieves. Murderers. Grifters. Name your flavor. Jeremiah Brandon did
business with all of them. By the time he died, Jeremiah was calling
himself the King of the South Texas carnivals. Had the amusement-ride
market sewn up all over the Southwest and northern Mexico. And he
wasn't just selling rides, kid. Brandon would fence stolen property
for his buddies on the circuit, launder their cash, make problem
employees go away. A whole network of people all over the country
owed him favors. You wanted some goods smuggled out of state, or you
wanted to disappear, or you needed to find some hired guns for a
quick job, Jeremiah could help. You worked for him, you could make
some big money."

"Which Zeta Sanchez did?"

"For a couple of years, Zeta Sanchez was
Jeremiah Brandon's right-hand
man."

"A kid from the Bowie Courts."

"Jeremiah always hired from the West Side. He
set himself up like a feudal lord down there — bought up the local
businesses for his cronies to run, slept with any of the women he
wanted to, recruited the meanest talent from the local gangs. Wasn't
any accident he was killed at that cantina on Zarzamora. That was
where old Jerry held court, bought drinks every night, let his
employees grovel to him. He'd lend them money, get them out of
trouble — whatever they needed, as long as they remembered who
owned them."

"Nice guy."

"I'm probably being too easy on him. The thing
was, King Jerry knew talent when he saw it, and he saw it in Zeta
Sanchez. He started Sanchez on simple stuff — arm-breaking,
fencing, your occasional murder. Pretty soon Sanchez was flying all
over the country collecting from RideWorks' delinquent debtors,
bringing back attaché cases full of cash. Brandon was so pleased he
gifted Sanchez with a gold-plated .45 revolver for a calling card.
Beautiful weapon."

"And they lived happily ever after."

"Until the Brandons screwed Sanchez, yeah.
Jeremiah's sons, Del and Aaron — they started getting a little
jealous about this upstart Mexican getting so tight with their old
man. They decided to sour the relationship, turn Dad against Sanchez.
Pretty soon the favors toward Sanchez were drying up. Sanchez and
Jeremiah argued more and more. Then a rumor got around that old
Jeremiah had been boinking Sanchez's wife, pretty little thing about
seventeen, eighteen years old. Wouldn't have been the first time
Jeremiah did something like that. Most of his mistresses came from
the families he employed. Who'd complain? Like I said, you took
Brandon's money, everything you had belonged to Brandon. Sanchez
forgot that — forgot he was just hired help."

"And when Sanchez heard the rumor about his
wife—"

"Sanchez decided to take a little nighttime
drive down to the Poco Mas, have a chat with the Old Man. Jeremiah
was at his booth like always, polishing off a bottle of Cuervo,
hitting on some chiquitas. Jukebox was going. Place was packed. So
Sanchez walks up to his boss, cool and easy, and draws on him —
that same damn gold-plated .45 Jeremiah had given him. Empties every
damn round into Jeremiah's chest. Hollow-tipped bullets, filled with
mercury. Then Sanchez goes to the bar, takes a shot of tequila, walks
out. Course by the time we come asking, nobody saw anything. Nobody
remembered what the gunman looked like."

"You were at the scene?"

"You ever seen a man with no chest, kid? I mean,
hollowed out like a balloon? You don't forget that too easy. I'm
telling you..."

Ozzie glanced over in weary camaraderie, his smile
pleasant and dead as an open-casket display.

We turned into a worn-down residential area and
cruised the streets. Every white person in every yard waved. The
Latinos and a few African Americans stared at us. None of them waved.