Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan by Rick Riordan Read Free Book Online Page A

from
being off the hook so long. Evidently Beau had finally got tired of
his own voice. I put the receiver back in the cradle.
    I did push-ups and crunches, then decided to tackle
cleaning the kitchen. The memory of Bob Langston lived on in the
fruit keeper of the refrigerator, where several black bananas had
turned into oblong mounds of mush. He’d also left two sandwich bags
filled with some kind of meat slices, congealed in what I assume had
been a barbecue sauce. Not even Robert Johnson was interested.
    The place was looking almost clean by that evening
when the phone rang.
    “ I’m very close to being pissed off," Jay
Rivas said. “In fact, I’m downright perturbed, Navarre."
    "I’m not a qualified therapist," I warned
him. “Maybe there’s some kind of inferiority complex for
incompetent bald fat men with large mustaches."
    "Or maybe there’s some kind of asshole who
keeps smearing his shit all over town where I have to step in it."
    I sighed. "Do you have a point to make, Jay?"
    He blew smoke into the phone. "Yeah, kid, I got
two points. First, yesterday evening you assault a young man whose
family is heavyweight on the Chamber of Commerce. Said young man will
not press charges, otherwise you and I would be having this chat in
person right now. Second, I hear about you digging for information on
a ten-year-old murder, bothering people who have better things to do
than help you come to terms with your fucking manhood."
    I counted to five before answering. "You’re
talking about my father’s murder. I think I’ve got a right to
know."
    “ You had a right to know ten years ago," Rivas
shot back. "Where the fuck were you when it mattered?"
    There were a lot of things I wanted to say to that,
but I waited. Finally Rivas swore under his breath.
    “ Look, Navarre, let me save you some time. On the
record, nobody can prove who whacked your old man, okay? You’re not
going to get the goddamn case files, but if you did, that’s what
they’d tell you. Off the record, it’s no big secret. Your dad
spent the last two years of his life putting thumbscrews on the mob
in Bexar County. It’s one of the few things he did well. The mob
finally hit back. Nobody can prove it; everybody knows it. That’s
the short and shitty truth, and after all this time nobody’s going
to do any time for the killing. So unless you got some indisputable
reason why this case needs to be looked into again, which you don’t,
and the goodwill of the SAPD, which I promise you you don’t, then
you lay off. Go marry your high school sweetheart and get a nice job
teaching college somewhere, but stay the hell out of my sight."
    He hung up.
    I stared at the wall for a while, seeing Jay Rivas’s
face. I thought about Lillian’s sudden trip to Laredo, the way our
reunion wasn’t quite going as I’d planned, the way Maia Lee had
sounded on the phone, and the way people kept sending me these loving
phone calls. When I put my fist through the Sheetrock, I missed the
stud by less than an inch. I think it surprised me more than it did
Robert Johnson. Clearly unimpressed, he stared up at me from his nest
of freshly unpacked clothes on the futon. I checked for broken
knuckles.
    “ Ouch," I told him.
    Robert Johnson got up and stretched. Then he showed
me the kind of sympathy I was used to. He left the room.
 

    11
    Yielding to Robert Johnson’s hungry cries Tuesday
morning, I walked to Leon "Pappy" Delgado’s grocery on
the corner of Army and Broadway. The rest of the block had gone up
for lease years ago, but it restored some of my sense of universal
justice to see Pappy’s Christmas lights still blazing around the
pink doorway of his dilapidated adobe storefront.
    My father, always suspicious of any store larger than
two thousand square feet, had been a patron of Pappy’s for years,
but since I had spoken no Spanish when I left San Antonio and Pappy
knew little English, we had never said a word to each other beyond
" Buenos tardes ".
    He