In Big Trouble

'He's not charged with anything?'

'The search was no good. They had a warrant for his arrest, but they didn't have a search warrant, and they didn't have any reason to enter the house-Crow was outside, remember?'

She remembered.

'If the shotgun had been out in plain view, things might be different. But it wasn't. And the gun was all they had, which wasn't much to begin with-you can't match shotgun pellets the way you can bullets. The DA knows they can't use it, so they're going to have to build a case without it. End of story. For now.'

Crow was sitting in the lobby with Kristina, who was beaming as if bailing out her favorite musician was the realization of some long-held dream. Crow looked dazed and frightened, yet grimly resolute. Tess had a feeling that Guzman had not been so kind and gentle with him.

'How did you know we were here?' Tess asked Rick.

'I have sources,' Trejo said. 'There are people here who let me know when there are, um, interesting cases in which representation might be required.'

'He pays people,' Kristina said.

'Kristina-that would be illegal. I simply am a generous man with a very long Christmas list. Anyway, Sam from Hector's called me, after Crow called him.'

'We have to go,' Crow said, rising to his feet. 'It's already past eleven.'

'Go where?' Kristina asked.

'In the car,' Rick said, before Crow could say anything more, indicating the desk sergeant with a slight lift of his chin. 'Let's confine all our chatter to the goddamn car.'

Once in the car, a Lexus the same flan color as his skin, Rick wanted to take a meandering course through downtown to make sure the police weren't following them. Crow was much too impatient for that.

'We don't have time,' he said, pressing his hands against the glove compartment as if he could push the car through the streets. 'She's probably already gone.'

'Who's gone where?' Rick asked.

'The Alamo,' Crow said, which didn't answer Rick's question, but told Tess everything she needed to know. 'Just drop me off at the Alamo.'

'Let's show a little discretion, okay? I'll let you off at Rivercenter Mall. Where you go from there is your own business. Just make sure you're not followed.'

Crow didn't ask Tess to accompany him, but when he leaped from the car, she was a half-step behind. He scurried ahead, trying to lose her, but he couldn't break into an all-out run without attracting attention, so she had no problem keeping pace. At last, she could feel a little adrenaline moving through her body.

They left the mall by another entrance, Crow practically jogging now, a determined salmon swimming upstream through the schools of sluggish tourists. In less than a block, they were behind the walls of the Alamo, in a pretty, shaded garden. Crow stopped at a bench, then turned in a circle. He was looking, Tess knew, for a bright blond head, and there were plenty of those to be seen. But it was just a group of Germans passing through, eyes and mouths round with reverential awe. Who had told her, some time ago, that Germans loved the whole cowboy-frontier thing? It had been Crow.

'She's not here,' he said. 'She's not here.'

'Maybe she's back at the house?'

'The cops would have gotten her, then. No, she's gone, and now everything's ruined.' He looked at Tess balefully. 'Everything's ruined because of you. You brought the cops right to us. All I needed was a week to make everything okay and you wouldn't even give me that. One goddamn week. Why couldn't you stay away? Why did you have to come to Hector's and set all this in motion? You know, I keep thinking you won't disappoint me if I don't ask for too much. But I'm always wrong.'

With that, he turned and walked away. She could have run after him. She could have caught him, too, and told him it wasn't her fault, that the cops had simply made the same connection she had, from Marianna to Emmie to him. But she knew he was determined to be alone, or at least without her. Unsure of what to do, or how to hook up with Rick and Kristina, she sank onto a bench and looked around. So this was the Alamo.

It was pretty, although smaller than she thought it would be.

Chapter 14

There comes a point when it's simply too late for sleep. Tess was now so tired that the only thing she had going for her was momentum. A book, Guzman had mentioned a book about the triple murders. He hadn't given its title, but his tone had indicated that its ambitions fell short of In Cold Blood. The library, even if open on Sundays, might not have such a book. Nor would a new bookstore.

But Mrs. Nyguen's near-neighbor, Half Price Books, was a possibility. Tess and Esskay dropped by after their walk that afternoon.

'That dog can come in here only if it can read,' said the clerk, who appeared to be in training for angry young manhood.

'She can,' Tess said, feeling perverse. 'Show her a bag with ‘kibble' written on it, and she'll go crazy.'

He called her bluff, producing a brown bag and a black marker from behind the counter.

'Make the letters large and plain,' Tess said. 'Her eyesight's not so good.'

When the clerk held up the bag, Esskay began leaping around the store in a frenzy. What the clerk couldn't know was that Tess bought Esskay's food from an old-fashioned feed store in Fells Point, and it came in brown bags just like this, with black markings.

'Gee, now you've got her all worked up. Anyway, I'm looking for this book about this triple murder here, about twenty years-'

'The Green Glass?' Good, she had made his day, given him another reason to sneer. 'We got all you could ever want. Cases of ‘em. It's a pretty sleazy book, though. Sloppy, too. The guy didn't even get the name of the restaurant right. Espejo Verde is the Green Mirror.'

'How come you have so many in stock?'

'It was a local book, and the publisher went bankrupt a few years back. My boss bought his stock, which included more than two thousand copies of that piece of trash. Turns out Gus Sterne ordered the bulk of the first print run, sat on the books for two years, then shipped them back and demanded a full refund. The publisher couldn't cover the loss, and that started his slide into bankruptcy.'

'Interesting.' And slightly at odds with the portrait Guzman had sketched of Gus Sterne as the patron saint of San Antonio. 'Why go to all that trouble?'

'I think he wanted the guy to know the boxes had never been open, that he screwed him on purpose. See, Sterne apparently told the guy he would take an order of twenty-five hundred and sell them through his barbecue restaurants, even do some advertising-if he could get a one-month exclusive on it. The guy was a small-timer, he didn't know how things worked.'

'Why did Sterne want to keep the book from distribution?'

The young man leaned forward, his initial antipathy toward Tess forgotten. He might not like providing service, but he obviously loved sharing gossip. 'I always heard he wanted to make sure that his little cousin, the dead woman's daughter, never saw a copy. Because of the photos, you know? They are pretty gross. That's why the boss won't even put it out on the floor.'

'Can you sell me a copy?'

'Sure.' The clerk looked at her shrewdly. 'But it's a collectible, you know. Twenty-five bucks. Cash.'

Tess left Esskay behind the protective glass, curled around Mrs. Nguyen's ankles, then walked across the street to the Vietnam, the one Broadway eatery Mrs. Nguyen never patronized. ('Why should I?' she asked. 'I make that myself.') Midafternoon on a Sunday, the tiny, almost decor-free restaurant was a blessedly quiet place, and the wait staff seemed unperturbed by the braided Occidental who lingered there, drinking sweetened iced tea