The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan by Rick Riordan Read Free Book Online Page A

decide they've got
nothing to do with the case and UTSA is safe. And I'm telling you —
this has got nada to do with campus politics. UTSA will be grateful,
you'll get paid for doing squat, we'll get Sanchez in custody,
everybody will be happy."
    "Except Aaron Brandon, his wife, his kid."
    Ozzie's eyes were the color of frozen vodka. "So
the prof had a family. You become a cop, Navarre, you take that
reverse gear and you rip it out of your transmission. You don't go
backward. You don't think about what you can't change."
    "Like the days before you worked patrol?"
    Gerson's doughy face mottled with red.
    "Why'd they demote you, Ozzie? You never talk
about it."
    "Drop it, Navarre. You weren't the son of the
guy that hired me, you'd be walking home right now."
    The Latinos got their cigarettes and paid for their
gas and left. Ozzie looked disappointed. He wadded up his hot dog
paper tray and made a basket in the trash can. "Screw it,
anyway. I protested some bullshit evaluations from the new chief. It
was all fucking politics, okay?"
    He started toward the door, waved for me to follow.
"See you, Mabel."
    "Can't wait," she called.
    We hadn't gone half a mile in Ozzie's unit before the
call came through, not over the radio but on the cell phone, which
meant Dispatch didn't want the media overhearing.
    Ozzie said "Yeah" a few times, then checked
the information that was clicking across his MDT in glowing orange.
"36; P-32. Got it."
    The patrol car was accelerating before he even hung
up.
    "Speak of the devil," he said. "They
just got a warrant. Sanchez is bunking at his brother-in-law's house,
just off Green Road."
    "That's close to here."
    He smiled. "Sheriffs jurisdiction. SAPD is
requesting uniformed presence from us immediately. You up for this?"
    He didn't wait for an answer. We hit eighty mph and
subdivisions started falling away, the land turning to farms, rows of
ripening watermelons, horse ranches.
    "Trees," Ozzie murmured. "I retire,
man, my place is going to have trees in the lot."
    Then we careened in frightening silence onto Green
Road and west toward Zeta Sanchez.
 
 
    SIX
    If you didn't know better, you might think the right
side of Green Road is lined with rolling hills — gray dunes covered
with worn-out toupees of spear grass and skunkweed and now, in late
April, an occasional stroke of wildflowers. But there are no hills in
this part of Bexar County. What lines Green Road are mounds of
landfill, compliments of the BFI city dump. When the wind blows in
your direction, that quickly becomes apparent.
    On the left side of the road were shacks of
impoverished farmers, county welfare recipients, Texas backwoods
families who'd been there for generations before the dump moved in.
Their dirt yards were littered with plastic children's toys bleached
white from the sun, stunted chinaberry trees, and patches of wild
strawberry. Many had handmade cardboard signs in front that read BFI
STINKS! Watermelon fields stretched out behind mobile homes that
leaned and sagged at weird angles on cinder-block foundations.
    On one front porch, a flock of half-naked toddlers,
tanned the color of butterscotch pudding, scampered around, climbing
in and out of an old clawfoot tub. Pale hairy adult shapes, also
half-naked, moved through the interior of the shack.
    Ozzie kept checking the telephone poles for block
numbers, only occasionally finding evidence that we were going the
right way. The idea of these shacks having mailing addresses seemed
about as unlikely as them having Web sites. Click here for a virtual
tour of my hovel!
    After a half mile we got stuck behind a caravan of
yellow BFI garbage trucks. Ozzie cursed and blasted his bullhorn, but
there wasn't much space for the trucks to go on the shoulderless
two-lane. Finally Gerson punched the gas and pulled into oncoming
traffic. In the space of eighty yards we came close to smearing three
truckloads of migrant fieldhands and ourselves all over the road. We
swerved back into the