The Devil Went Down to Austin

Page 15

Finally, Maia and Garrett appeared in the doorway of the club. Maia helped Garrett pop a wheelie, then bump his way down the front steps to the sidewalk.
I told them I was taking Dwight home.
Maia took the news about as well as I had expected. She looked like she wanted to kill me, then like she wanted to throw up, then she gave in.
"I'm going to my hotel," said Maia. "I'm going to eat, take the longest bath in history, and then sleep. And Tres—just take Dwight home. All right? No weapons. No interrogations. No humorous excursions. Please?"
"Trust me," I said.
She closed her eyes, muttered some bitter ancient curse, and then walked toward the taxi stand.
I looked at Garrett, who seemed in a somewhat better mood now, no doubt thanks to the drubbing recently inflicted on Matthew Pena, Inc. "What's your plan?"
"My plan," he said, "is tequila shots on Sixth Street. The Iron Cactus. Pick me up on your way back."
"And then?"
"And then, just maybe, I'll be ready for Ruby."
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I can only go by what she's told me, but she's told me so much— more than she realizes.
I imagine a girl of fourteen.
She's too tall for the boys, developed, impossible to miss with her long hair, her brilliant eyes, her temper. She is so physical, so sexual, that she intimidates her peers, and yet she tries to imitate them as best she can. She studies fashion the way she studies calculus. She wears the right jeans, the right designer tops and shoes. This just sets her apart even more. She has never had a date, or a best friend. Since she turned twelve, she has learned to endure the looks grown men give her—comments from her father's workers at the dock, bits of Spanish they think she doesn't understand.
She understands.
Her discomfort makes her more stubborn, more determined to look mature and feign confidence.
I imagine this girl on a November afternoon at the top of a hill, in the woods, the lake spread out below her, glittering in the long winter light. Today she is not fashionable.
She is wearing a pair of boys' Wranglers, a longsleeve Tshirt, hiking boots, an orange down vest. She is not worried about how she looks now. She is with the one man she is not afraid of.
The air is cold enough to let steam escape from the cavity of the whitetail deer she and her father are field dressing.
She thinks of it as a joint effort. In fact, she does all the work, while her father stands nearby, drinking from a thermos, watching the lake.
He has green eyes, like hers, but they are cloudy, troubled. His hair has thinned over the years to a weak shade of pumpkin. His features are angular, like the eroded ridges of a chewed cuttlebone. She thinks of him as tall and strong, but he has already started his decline. The smoking and drinking, the bouts of depression—all this has begun to take its toll.
She cuts the connecting tissue from the liver of the deer, holds the organ in her gloved hands—a heavy thing, milky black like petroleum, quivering as if it still held life. She checks for disease spots. Finding none, she sets the liver on ice along with the heart.
Her father always insists on this—save the heart. Save the liver.
She tells him that the liver is healthy, hoping this will please him, but he just stares at the lake. She wishes his thermos held coffee, but she knows it is whiskey with lemon and sugar.
Her job done—the entrails scooped out, the carcass cleaned with fresh water—she wedges a stick into the deer's empty chest to keep the rib cage apart.
Her gloves are sticky with blood, but she doesn't mind the work—the cutting, the cleaning. There is something satisfying about seeing the mess, the chaos of organs—and slowly cleaning it out, tying off the tubes, avoiding spills that could spoil the meat, sorting the innards, leaving a clean and empty shell, neatly framed by the symmetry of ribs.
"Would you like me to clean your doe?" she volunteers.
Her smile is sincere. She hopes for a smile in return. She has been so efficient—learned everything he taught her, done everything to make him proud.
She recalls the time when she was about eight, going with her father to Crumley's Store. He had ruffled her hair, told his friends that he needed no son, that he had his best hunting buddy right here. She protects that memory—drinks from it when she's thirsty, keeps her hands cupped around it like an exposed pilot light.
Now, her father is not five feet away from her—wearing the hunting parka she bought him for his birthday, tattered jeans, the deer rifle he has had as long as she can remember, even before her mother died.
It takes him several minutes just to remember she is there. He has been watching the waterline, as if suspecting that even now, so many years later, the lake is rising, eroding what is left of his inheritance. Only recently, a third business failed on his property— another lessee defaulting on their contract. What little money he has invested in stocks is doing poorly. He doesn't share the worst of this with his daughter—not yet—but she knows something is wrong. She knows the lake is sapping his life.
At last he says, "I'm sorry, sweetheart."
And he looks as if he wishes to say something more, but his voice dissipates as quickly as the steam from his mouth.
She remembers that brief moment of clarity in his eyes, twenty minutes before, when he aimed the gun, brought down the doe with a single wellplaced shot. She wishes there were another whitetail deer to kill.
Her buck is a much greater trophy, but she is willing to field dress his doe as well. She wants to be shoulder to shoulder with her father in the work, touch his hands, smell his breath, even if it reeks of whiskey.
Instead, he sets his gun against the tree. He kneels, grasps a handful of dry leaves and cedar nettles, lets them slip through his fingers. There, at the highest point of their property, at a place where the food can never touch, he seems to be praying, and she knows instinctively that whatever his prayer, it will not be answered. Fourteen years on the lake have taught her to expect that.
So she cleans her knife blade—the sharp steel, four inches, well weighted. She goes to the doe and turns it belly up, feels along the white fur until she finds the point for incision below the sternum.
She makes the cut as her father once showed her—inserting her fingers under the skin, making a V, cutting with the blade up, being careful not to puncture the intestines.
She can tell the doe was nursing, and she knows she must remove the mammary organs right away. Milk goes bad quickly. Nothing will spoil the taste of the meat worse than that.
She works with the knife, trying to be hopeful, trying to believe that she is drawing closer to her father, that he is not slipping away, becoming less and less present the more deer tissue she slices through.
She ignores the smell and the blood. She cuts away the mess— lets the offal spill out, prepares her father's doe lovingly.
And the less he pays attention, the more meticulous she is, the more she needs the knife and the wellmade incision, the liver without spots, the heart cut away and drained of blood.
Imagine her on that hill, and you will realize why she treats men as she does. Her affections were cut away long ago, examined for impurities and set on ice, claimed at the point of a hunting knife.
CHAPTER 13
"I can't talk to you," Dwight Hayes said.
He'd already helped himself to one lukewarm bottle of beer from the sixpack on the floor of my truck, and was starting on his second.
"Of course you can't," I said. "Which way on 135?"
"North."
We did a U on San Gabriel, went under the highway, took the entrance ramp. I said,
"What was your little disagreement with Pena?"
One street lamp went by. Two. We passed the UT campus on the left, the Longhorn stadium lit up for an event.
"Bastard hit me," he said. "He hit me."
"Relax. You're in better company now."
Dwight was silent for a few hundred street lamps. "Is it true what Miss Lee said about—you and her?"
"I don't know. What did Miss Lee say?"
"Never mind," he decided.
We kept driving. Dwight directed me east on Highway 290.
"How long have you worked for Pena?" I asked.
His eyes were heavylidded from all the beer, irritated, as if I'd just woken him up.
"Forever. I'm his technical adviser."
"I take it you're not talking about scuba gear."
"I sniff out the most promising software startups. I look for market potential, point him in the right direction."
"Like the startup in Menlo Park. Like Techsan."
He looked at me, miserable. If guilt had a smell, it was permeating the truck.
"You've seen what happens to the people Pena attacks," I guessed. "The people you sicced him on. Over and over."
"You want to kick me out?" he asked. "It's okay."
Unlit subdivisions went by, closedup malls, empty fields.
"Maia Lee is right," I suggested. "She's a good person. You should think about talking with her, Dwight."
It was too dark to see his face.
"I thought Techsan would be different," he said. "There was no reason . . . Ruby and Matthew got along so well at first."
"Got along how, exactly?"
"Ruby was the one Matthew approached, back in March. She took him diving out on the lake. They seemed to like each other, came to some kind of agreement in principle.
I thought—the program was solid. The algorithms were excellent. I thought Matthew would make them a fair offer, make an easy buy."
"But your employer doesn't enjoy easy buys."
Another mile of darkness. Dwight pointed ahead to a blinking yellow light, told me to take that exit.
"You were with Pena the night Adrienne Selak drowned," I said. "I suppose you can't talk about that either."
"She was nice. She was good for Matthew. I don't think— He wouldn't have killed her.
No way."
"You don't think. I thought you saw Adrienne Selak fall. You made a statement on Pena's behalf."
"I meant— He never would have hurt her."
"You sure that's what you meant?"
Dwight let my question die in the air.
We ended up in an aging subdivision of northeast Austin, just south of 290. The houses were 1970s prefab, the lawns all gone to crabgrass. It was the kind of neighbourhood that looked best at night, which is exactly the time the local police would tell you not to go there.
Dwight drank his lukewarm beer, told me where to turn.
"The police talk to you about Jimmy Doebler?" I asked.
"A detective came to Pena's suite at the Driskill. That Lopez guy. Matthew was working late the night of Jimmy's murder— video conference."
"And you?"
"I was home. Too many goddamn witnesses."
Before I could ask what he meant, he directed me into the driveway of a greentrimmed twostory. Television light glowed behind curtained windows. A strip of duct tape ran up one cracked pane like a lightning bolt. The yard was dirt with a few sad clumps of dandelions and one sickly pecan tree filled with webworms, a tippedover tricycle on the sidewalk. A bangedup gray Honda sat next to the curb.