by Rick Riordan
I tried to step back from the truck, but my boots wouldn't come free of the silt.
I want to stay down here a little longer.
Garrett called again. "Tres?"
I wasn't seeing this.
I've got a lot of time to make up for.
I grasped at that sentence like a burning rope, but it wouldn't pull me out. It couldn't change what my eyes were showing me.
Jimmy Doebler had been shot in the head, and my brother was the one with the gun.
Date: Fri 09 Jun 00 04:18:05 Pacific Daylight Time
From: faqs@ I pal_mail. com
To: ‹recipient list suppressed›
Subject: the tracks
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I've spent years imagining what that night must've been like.
His good buddy taught him the trick, didn't he? It was so easy from where they lived, down in the Olmos Basin. The Union Pacific line went straight through, two times a night, always slowing for the crossings.
He was fighting with his father again-about the length of his hair, maybe. Or drugs.
Maybe his father didn't like his plans to drop out of business school, become a mathematician. That was his plan back then, wasn't it? Straight math. Pure numbers.
So he stormed out of the house on Contour around eleven o'clock, midnight. He'd already made plans to meet his buddy down at the tracks, and his anger must've given way to excitement.
He made his way down to the crossing-to the far side, the signal box where they always meet. He knelt in a clump of marigolds and waited. It might've been cold, that late in October. Or maybe it was one of those unseasonable Texas fall nights-steamy and mild, moths and gnats everywhere, the smell of river mud and garbage from Olmos Creek.
He waited, and his buddy didn't show.
He knew the train schedule. He was a little late. His friend could've caught the last train, could already be on his way north, to the junction of the MKT line-that underpass where they'd stashed a lifetime supply of stolen beer. His friend could be there right now, hanging out in the broken sidecar where, on a good night, they could find the transients with the Mexican hash.
He gets a sudden thrill, because he's never tried to hitch alone, but he knows he can do it. And when he catches those rungs, he'll be Jack Kerouac. He'll be Jimmie Rodgers. And he knows his friend will be there at the junction to hear him brag about it-because it's a shared dream. His friend gave him the itch, reassured him, that first scary time-Look how slow it moves. It's beautiful, man. Just waiting for you. Let's get the rhythm. Count to three So he makes his decision, waits for the rumble of the second train, the glare of the headlamp. He smells diesel, feels the strange, steady rhythm of a million tons of steel in motion.
How could he know that his good buddy has forgotten all about him-that he is already in Austin, tending to his poor mamma, who has called out of the blue, after years of fuckyou good riddance nothing parenting? And his buddy went running to her.
He doesn't know that, so waits for a good car-one of the old fashioned flatbeds. AII he has to do is jump on. When he targets one, his friend could've told him-not that one. Look at the ladder. But there's no one to warn him.
He times it, then runs, catches the metal side rails. His boot hits the bottom rung and slips. His sole drags in the gravel. He should be able to hoist himself back up, but he hasn't planned on the rungs being so wet-cold metal, newly painted. His heel snags a rail tie and his fingers betray him. The last thing he feels is gravel and cold steel as he's pulled underneath, and the slow rhythm is not so slow after all-the giant metal wheel, a smooth disk, covering what-thirty inches?-in the space of a second.
Whatever noise he makes can't be heard above the rumble of the train. There's no pain. No blood loss-every artery sealed perfectly against the tracks.
He lies there in shock, staring at the stars. How long-an hour? Two?
How long before this little brother got nervous, decided to give away the secret of where Big Brother goes when he's angry?
And what did he think about as he lay there?
I hope he thought about his good buddy who'd abandoned him, made him fall in love with trains, gave him a few months of freedom that he would now pay for by being immobile, bound to metal wheels-forever. I hope, somewhere inside, he wished his friend had been the one on the tracks.
Because he's waited twenty years for this train. I want him to enjoy the ride.
CHAPTER 4
Coffee and stale garlic bagels at the Travis County Sheriff's Department didn't improve my frame of mind. Neither did twelve hours of waiting rooms, shoe prints, fingerprints, atomic swab absorption tests, and questions from the lead investigator, Victor Lopez, who was convinced he had a sense of humour.
I saw my brother once, from across the homicide office. The betrayed look he gave me made me glad the deputies had separated us.
If Jimmy's exwife made an appearance, I didn't notice her.
The only member of the Doebler clan I spotted was one of Jimmy's cousins from the wealthy branch of the family-Wesley or Waylon, I couldn't remember his name.
Jimmy had introduced us once at a Christmas party, maybe a decade ago. He wore a gray silk suit and three gold rings and a look of professional concern he probably saved for family tragedies and stock devaluations. He spent a few minutes at the opposite end of the room, talking to the sheriff, then gave me a cold glance on his way out.
At 4:30 in the afternoon, I was finally trundled into the backseat of a patrol car next to Detective Lopez and chauffeured toward Garrett's apartment.
We cruised up Lavaca, through West Campus neighbourhoods of white antebellum sorority houses and highrent condominiums. The postrain air steamed with sumac.
Every front yard was strewn with pink and white from blooming crape myrtles.
On Guadalupe across from UT, a cute Asian girl in plaid pants and a tank top was reading a Henry James novel outside Quacken bush's Intergalactic Coffeehouse. Street vendors were selling glass beads and incense in the Renaissance Market. Construction workers were drilling a crater in the middle of 24th Street.
Jimmy's death was expanding inside my rib cage like a nitrogen bubble, but the rest of the world kept right on going. It was enough to make me resent a sunny afternoon in a beautiful city.
The patrol car turned on San Gabriel.
Garrett's apartment building is a threestory redwood box with exterior walkways like a motel. On one side is a $40,000 steelframe handicappedaccess elevator that the landlord recently installed after three years in court. The landlord loves Garrett. Below and on both sides of Garrett's unit are college kids who put up with my brother playing Jimmy Buffett CDs at full volume night and day. The college kids love Garrett. The rest of the building is populated by smalltime drug dealers, angstridden artists and drunks, all of whom spend their time fighting and throwing each other's furniture off the balconies and loving Garrett. The name of the apartment complex is The Friends.
The Carmen Miranda-Garrett's VW safari van with the Caribbean dancing women airbrushed along the sides and the plastic tropical fruit hotglued to the roof-had been returned from the crime scene, special delivery. I guess if I were the Travis County sheriff, I would want to get it away from my crime scene as fast as possible, too.
Parked next to it was my black Ford F150.
"I'll only be a second," Lopez told our driver. "You hang tight."
The deputy glanced in the rearview mirror-shot me a notso veiled fuck you look.
"Whatever you say, sir."
Lopez and I walked toward the apartment complex. Lopez stopped in front of the Carmen Miranda, shook his head in admiration.
"I dig the pineapples," he said.
Lopez's features were satanically pleasant, teaandmilk complexioned, framed by a square jaw and a severe, greasy buzz cut. He had a halfback's build and the eyes of a chess player.
"When does Garrett get released?" I asked.
Lopez feigned surprise. "Should be upsta
irs right now. Why? You thought we would hold him?"
That was a hook I decided not to bite.
"Don't look so down," Lopez said. "Y'all cooperated beautifully. Now we just got to find who whacked your friend, right?"
I leaned against the back of the van, hating how leaden my eyes felt, hating the odour of smoke in my clothes from last night's fire. "Garrett wouldn't kill Jimmy. Even if he wanted to, his wheelchair
…"
Lopez's eyes glittered. "Sure, Mr. Navarre. According to your statement, there's no way. We're just asking questions, you know? Got to explain those nagging details, like why your brother's gun had been fired. Why there was powder residue on his hand."
"I told you-"
"He shot a statue. Happens every day. And we'll have to explain the fact there was no shell casing at the scene. You know. Just some little details like that."
Lopez was watching me the way a fisherman watches the tide, moving across it with a skeining net.
I said, "He's disabled, Lopez."
"I prefer to think of him as differently abled, don't you? But don't worry-I'm sure we'll find the casing sooner or later. Ballistics has the projectile now-probably find out it was from a completely different gun. Some anonymous killer in the night, I imagine."
"Garrett needs a lawyer."
Lopez bopped his fists together, hotpotato style. " 'Course not, Mr. Navarre. I appreciate y'all's candour. And I promise you: I will nail Jimmy Doebler's killer."
"You treat every case with this much enthusiasm?"
"I knew Jimmy. I liked Jimmy. I used to work patrol out at the lake, knew all the folks out that way."
"And his family has a few gazillion dollars," I added. "Jimmy's cousin was talking to the sheriff today."
A safety valve clicked shut in Lopez's eyes.
"W.B. Doebler isn't my concern." Lopez gave the initials their proper Texas pronunciation, dubyabee. "You know Jimmy, you know he had a pretty shitty life-that family of his, the stuff with his mom, the clinical depression. Seemed like he was finally coming out of it when he got roped into this business deal with your brother."
He let his smile creep back to full intensity. "But hey, that doesn't matter. Jimmy and Garrett were quarrelling, your brother was mad enough to discharge a weapon, I'm sure that's not important."
I looked back at our driver, who was staring at me through the windshield-giving me the look of death.
"Don't mind him," Lopez said. "Some of the guys, they heard about that little accident down in Bexar County, you shooting that deputy. Doesn't play well with the uniforms.
You understand."
"And with you?"
Lopez made a pish sound. "I got no sympathy for bad cops. That asshole was corrupt: you took him down. Good for you. I believe in weeding out the bad, Navarre. Don't care if it's a friend or a relative or what. I hope we're on the same page with that."
I looked up toward Garrett's apartment door.
"I'm on your side, man," Lopez assured me. "I wouldn't want this to get around, but the people I know in San Antonio-they say you're all right. They say when it comes down to a fight, you're a guy who can be counted on to choose the right team."
"I see your point," I said. "We wouldn't want that to get around."
"You got my card." Lopez turned to go, then looked back, as if he'd forgotten something. I hate it when cops do that. "And Navarre? The discrepancies in those statements you and your brother gave us? I'm not thinking much of them. For instance- were you with your brother when you heard the shot or not?"
I didn't answer.
"I don't know why your brother failed to mention that he and Jimmy were arguing at dinner, like you told me. It's probably nothing. Just-bad form when the statements don't agree, isn't it? I hate going back later, using WiteOut."
"I know my brother."
Lopez smiled. "Of course you do. Where does he work again- RNI? Oh, no. That's right. He quit that job over a year ago."
Up on the secondfloor walkway, one of the apartment residents waddled out in his jockey shorts and a tattered Waterloo Tshirt. He yelled down to us that his neighbour was throwing his sofa off the back balcony and we should stop him.
Lopez grinned. He told the guy he would have to phone it in to the APD dispatcher.
The guy began cursing at us.
Lopez gave me a wink. "My point is-an okay guy like you, you could help me out a lot, maybe help your brother, too. We could be straight with each other and get this thing resolved. You could give Garrett some advice on how to play it.
If there were hard choices to make, I trust you would make them."
"You want my brother in jail, Lopez?"
He laughed. "They told me you had a sense of humour. That's great. See you around, Mr. Navarre."
Then he climbed into the patrol car.
I watched it back up, disappear around the corner of 24th.
The guy on the second floor kept yelling at me to come stop his neighbour from pitching his furniture off the balcony.
Every day is a love fest when you live at The Friends.
CHAPTER 5
Garrett hadn't hired a maid since my last visit, five months ago.
Fastfood containers littered the kitchen counter. The living room was a tornado zone of paperback novels, electronics parts, CDs, laundry. A dead tequila bottle stuck out from the seat of our father's old leather recliner and the carpet was fuzzy with birdseed from Dickhead the parrot, who scuttled back and forth on the window ledge at the top of the vaulted ceiling.
Garrett sat in the far corner of the room, staring at his twenty oneinch computer monitor.
"Computers get static?" I asked.
The gray fuzzy light made Garrett's face crawl, his eyes hollow.
"Not usually." He slammed the monitor's off button. "I need a drink."
I waited for him to explain the computer problem. Not that I would've understood the explanation, but that was something Garrett always did. This time, he didn't.
I went to the bar, got down his bottle of Herradura Anejo and a couple of moderately clean glasses. "Detective Lopez just got through telling how much you're not a suspect in Jimmy's murder. He was very agreeable about it. I got the feeling he'd let you plea just about any degree of homicide you wanted."
Garrett took the tequila. "Lopez has had a hardon for me for years."
"Really."
"Don't give me that tone-like you assume I'm stoned. Back when Lopez was on patrol, he made a lot of calls to Jimmy's place, had to chew us out for drunkanddisorderly crap. We got into some namecalling. But you know I didn't kill Jimmy. I couldn't."
I drank my Herradura, found it made a pretty bad chaser for garlic bagels. "Lopez gives you credit for mobility-a lot more credit than he's giving our statements."
Garrett shoved his keyboard drawer closed. "Somebody finally believes in me, and it's a homicide cop."
I ran my finger across the kitchen counter, making a cross with a dustless shadow where a picture frame had stood for a long time. I remembered the photograph. It had been the twin of the one in Jimmy's house-Garrett and Jimmy at the seawall in Corpus, a year or so before Garrett's accident.
"W.B. Doebler was at the sheriff's office," I told him. "If the Doeblers start throwing their weight around, demanding action-"
"Fuck W.B. It's a little late for the Doeblers to decide they care about Jimmy."
"You need help, Garrett."
"And I don't recall asking you for any, little bro. I'll make the calls. I'll take care of things."
"What-you're going to buy a bigger gun?"
"Forget it, man. You didn't like the ranch being mortgaged. You ain't going to like the rest of this."
"I didn't drive up here to build a kiln, Garrett. I sure as hell didn't drive up here to sit on the sidelines while they charge you with murder."
Garrett dug out his wallet, pulled a twenty and wadded it up, threw it at me. "Gas money. Sorry I wasted your time."
I counted silen
tly to ten. Every second was one more I succeeded in not putting my fist through my brother's wall.
The downstairs neighbours cranked up their stereo. Nine Inch Nails throbbed through the carpet. Up on the windowsill, the parrot ruffled his feathers.
"Let's try to cooperate," I said. "For Jimmy's sake. You told them you were with me when that shot was fired. Your book was face down on the sleeping bag when I woke up. You were already gone. Where the hell were you?"
Garrett wore last night's cutoffs, and when he shifted, the stub of his right leg peeked through at the end-a pointed nub of flesh like a mole's nose.
"I was sleeping in my van. With the doors locked."
"Why?"
He rubbed his thumb against his forefingers, rolling an imaginary joint. "In Jimmy's house, I woke up in a cold sweat. I have phantom pains and I get these weird dreams-like somebody has been standing over me in my sleep. I would've felt stupid waking you up. I thought Jimmy was sleeping upstairs. So I went to the one place I feel safe and mobile-behind the wheel of my van. I locked myself in, put my gun on the seat next to me, went to sleep. The shot by the water woke me up. What was I going to tell the police? I was afraid of ghosts so I locked myself in my car?"
"It would've been better than lying, Garrett. I'm going to need an explanation for Detective Lopez."
His eyes flared. "You need an explanation. Well, let's just stop the goddamn world.
Let's drop everything and make sure Tres is okay, because my little brother needs an explanation. He needs the ranch. He needs to know where Garrett is twentyfour hours a day. Well, maybe for once, little brother, you ain't going to get everything you need."
The counting wasn't helping anymore. Downstairs, Nine Inch Nails went into their next song, the bass line massaging the soles of my boots.
"Did you see anyone last night?" I asked.
"No."
"You must suspect someone. The banker guy."
"Matthew Pena," Garrett murmured.
There was something in his voice I hadn't heard often-pure hate.
"You think he's capable of murder," I said. "An investment banker?"
