Rebel Island (16 page)

Alex’s room was just down the hall on the left. The door
was locked, which was a first. I’d started to think nobody at the hotel ever locked doors.

“Alex!” I yelled.

No answer.

The noise of the storm was louder on this end of the hall. It almost sounded like it was inside his room.

I pounded on the door. Still nothing.

Imelda stood next to me, twisting her apron. Jose’s body was turned away from me, like he was trying to evade me, though I wasn’t sure why. It seemed odd that just a few hours ago, I’d thought of him as a man with a perpetual smile. That smile was long gone.

“You have the key?” I asked them.

Imelda’s eyes widened. “Señor Huff is the owner. He told us never to enter without permission.”

“You don’t clean his room?”

“Never.”

“But you have to have a master key.”

“I…Back downstairs,” Imelda said.

“Downstairs.”

She nodded halfheartedly.

I looked at Jose. “You?”

“No, señor. I’m just the cook. I have no master key.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll break down the door.”

Jose tensed. Imelda started to say, “Señor—”

I put my shoulder to the door and smashed it open.

Inside, the room was a wreck. The window had been demolished, but the wood splinters and glass shards pointed toward the storm, as if something had been hurled out. A strip of torn red cloth fluttered from one jagged tooth of glass. The curtain was sprinkled with pink spots, like diluted blood.

I tried to come up with some other explanation, but I kept coming back to the same conclusion. Someone had been pushed out the second-story window. And whoever it was had been wearing a shirt the same color as Alex Huff’s.

26

Maia couldn’t sleep. The pangs had passed, but they’d
scared her worse than she’d let on. She lay on her side, trying to keep still. Lane Sanford was also awake. She was curled in the other bed with Garrett sitting at her feet.

“We used to have storms at the ranch,” Lane said. “Once lightning hit a tree and it burned almost an acre. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Your family ranch?” Maia asked.

“No…Bobby rented the place.”

Lane spoke his name like a cuss word she’d trained herself to say, a word proper ladies weren’t supposed to know.

“You should get a restraining order,” Maia said. “I’d be happy to help.”

“I can’t,” Lane said. “Thank you.”

Her tone was final. There was a secret there she wasn’t ready to share yet. Abuse, probably. Something else, too—something Lane thought she couldn’t bring to the police. The problem with working criminal cases so long: Maia could come up with a whole array of depressing possibilities, all equally plausible and horrible. And yet she could still be surprised. The worst violence, the most awful forms of depravity, always happened in a so-called loving relationship.

At least that made it easier for her to count her blessings. Whatever faults Tres had—however much he tortured himself with guilt or wrestled with his own demons—he was kind. He was a good man. He’d make a good father, Maia had no doubt, whatever happened with the baby. She depended on that. She counted on him so much it scared her. And she tried to tell herself Tres would be safe. They would make it through this weekend.

The storm rumbled overhead like an endless train. Noises from the other rooms eventually died down. Lane closed her eyes and began breathing deeply. Garrett stayed at his post at the foot of her bed, his hand protectively on her ankle.

Maia studied Garrett’s face, looking for similarities to Tres. The hawkish nose and green eyes were the same. Garrett hid his chin behind a scraggly beard, but she imagined it was the same as Tres’s—a strong jawline, hinting at stubbornness. Time had not been as kind to Garrett, though. He was the same age as Maia. She remembered they had talked about that when they first met, how both of them were just turning forty. His complexion had turned sallow from too many years of hard drinking. His eyes were constantly bloodshot. His hair was frosted with gray. But he was still handsome in an unkempt way. He looked at her and smiled, and Maia couldn’t help feeling a little better.

“You doing all right, darlin’?” he asked.

“Worried about Tres.”

“Ah, hell. He’ll be fine. That bastard will drive you crazy if you keep worrying about him.”

“You have a point.”

“I’ve known him longer, darlin’. I just hope that baby gets some of
your
good looks.”

“He’ll be beautiful, I’m sure.”

“He?”

“The last few days, I’ve started to think of the baby as a
he.
”

“A nephew to corrupt. I could handle that.
Uncle
Garrett…”

Maia pictured Garrett with a baby in his lap, the two of them taking joy rides in the wheelchair. The baby would be wearing a tie-dyed jumper, a miniature Jimmy Buffett hat. “Did you ever think about getting married?”

He glanced down at Lane. “I’m not exactly an attractive package, in case you hadn’t noticed. Kind of an extreme fixer-upper.”

“Don’t sell yourself short.”

“You’re telling this to a man without legs?”

“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

Footsteps in the hall. Maia hoped it was Tres coming back, but it was only Mr. Lindy and the college boy Ty. Ty was clutching his stomach as if he were sick, and Mr. Lindy was helping him walk. They didn’t look inside the room as they passed.

“Maia, you’re lucky,” Garrett told her at last. “You and Tres. You stuck with it.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Maia promised.

“I used to think there was a perfect match out there for everybody, you know? Alex told me that. Older I get, I realize there’s just matches you make work, and matches you give up on. Ain’t nothing perfect about it.”

“You’ll find the right person, Garrett.”

He scratched his beard. “That’s not what worries me. Question is, will the right person stick around?”

In the dim light, the lines on his face seemed deeply etched. His hair looked even more gray than usual. He gazed down at Lane Sanford as she slept, as if trying to memorize her face.

Maia felt the baby kick. She put her hand against her belly.

A boy,
she thought. And though she had never been religious, she prayed:
Please, let him be healthy.

“Why don’t you get some sleep, darlin’?” Garrett told her. “I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

She wanted to stay up. She wanted to wait for Tres to return safely. But her eyelids were as heavy as lead. She closed them and drifted off, imagining Tres holding the hand of the baby as he took his first step away from her.

27

“Tell me,” I said.

Jose took his eyes from the broken window. “Señor?”

“You didn’t want me to come in here. What happened to Alex?”

He shook his head, no longer evasive. Just bewildered. “I don’t know.”

A shard of glass shook loose from the window frame. It flew past us, embedding itself in the wall.

“Señor, we must leave,” Imelda said. “Señor—”

I pushed toward the window, screening my face with my hands. The dark shape of the lighthouse loomed through the horizontal rain. The ocean churned below, waves surging against the side of the house. If Alex had fallen into that maelstrom, there was no chance of finding him.

I yanked the piece of red fabric off of the window. A piece of Alex’s shirt. No doubt about it.

“Señor!” Imelda shouted over the storm. “
Please!
”

Wind buffeted me back into the room.

I didn’t want to leave, but the glass and debris were too dangerous to contend with.

I stepped back and tripped over something hard.

I looked down. It was a wooden statue of a woman, about two feet tall, carved from cedar. The details, especially the face, were amazingly intricate. She had her arms crossed, one hand raised palm up, as if she were asking a question.

My mouth tasted like metal.

I was sure of two things about the statue—two things that were impossible to reconcile. First, this was the same statue I’d seen Alex Huff carving when I was a child, the day I’d surprised him in the lighthouse. Second, the woman’s face looked a lot like a young mother I’d recently seen in a photograph.

She looked like Rachel Lindy Brazos.

Garrett crumpled the piece of red fabric. “You’re telling
me Alex jumped?”

“I doubt it was suicide. If he went out that window, he was pushed.”

“No way, little bro. So his window was broken. So what? Half the windows in the place are broken.”

“It was busted from the inside.”

“He’s not dead,” Garrett insisted. “We gotta search the house.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t mention the wooden statue I’d left in the bedroom. I still couldn’t process what I’d seen—the adult face of Rachel Brazos, carved in cedar by Alex Huff when Rachel and he would’ve both been teenagers.

“Fine,” Garrett said. He glanced over at the beds, where Maia and Lane were both asleep. “I’ll search outside. Little bro, you stay here for a change.”

“Garrett, you can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

His stare was a little on the crazy side. “I’m not gonna sit here if something’s happened to Alex.”

“We’ll find him,” I promised, but I was thinking about the ocean pounding the walls of the house, washing over the entire island.

There was a loud knock behind me. “Tres.”

Benjamin Lindy stood in the doorway, looking weary and rumpled from his time with the college guys. He’d lost his tie. A strand of gray hair curled over his forehead, geriatric Superman-style. “I need to talk to you.”

“What a coincidence,” I said. I turned to Garrett. “Give me two minutes. We’ll figure it out.”

Garrett glared at me like I’d just suggested torching a Jimmy Buffett album, but he nodded grudgingly. “Two minutes.”

At the end of the hall, Lindy looked around to make sure we were alone. “That young man, Ty. I took him to the bathroom just now.”

“That’s terrific news.”

“You don’t understand. He asked me to take him to the bathroom in his own room to get some Tylenol. He orchestrated that so he could talk to me away from his friends.”

“And?”

Lindy’s eyes were as cold as steel. “He has something to tell you privately. He says it has to do with Chris Stowall’s murder.”

Ty sat at the bottom of the stairwell, watching the water lap
against the steps. In the dim light of the hallway fixture, he looked like a wax figure, his face soft and sallow.

“Chase and Markie?” he asked nervously.

“Mr. Lindy is keeping them occupied.”

“This was a bad idea,” he said. “Forget it.”

“Ty, you got me down here. What did you want to tell me?”

He chewed at his thumb. “You should’ve let me leave last night. You don’t understand what they’re into. What they’re doing to me.”

The fear in his voice was beyond claustrophobia.

I thought about the way Markie had sapped Ty with a roll of quarters. No emotion in his face. Just cold efficiency. Few things would make a kid that age develop that kind of ruthless edge.

“Those drugs they sedated you with,” I said. “Where did they get them?”

Ty laughed weakly. “Starting to catch on, huh?”

“You’re trying to tell me Chase and Markie are dealers?”

“Dealers…Man, that sounds so
small.
For the UT campus, those two are the freaking
Wal-Mart
of drugs.”

“Chase and Markie can barely open a tequila bottle. Are you sure we’re talking about the same people?”

Ty spit into the water. “That’s what they want you to think. ‘Oh, they’re just stupid kids. It isn’t possible.’ Bullshit. Those two haven’t been kids since elementary school.”

The hall light flickered. I sat next to Ty. Together, we watched foam and dark water course down the hallway.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “They’re your friends.”

“They’re my
bosses.
They got hooks in me like you wouldn’t believe. I agreed to do this one last trip to clear my debts. I didn’t agree to murder.”

“You think they killed Chris?”

“Chris was part of the system. That money you found? That came from Chase and Markie. They paid him off every time they came down.”

“But why would they kill him?”

Ty shook his head miserably. “This was supposed to be the last run, before the hotel shut down. Chris was pretty bummed about that. Maybe he leaned on Chase and Markie for more money.”

Again, I thought about Chris’s journal, the comments he’d made about escaping to Hawaii, his anger at Alex for closing the hotel. “So you’ve been smuggling in drugs from Mexico. What are we talking about? Heroin? Marijuana?”

“Oh, man, that is
old school.
We brought in Mexican pharmaceuticals. Ritalin. OxyContin. Codeine. You name it. That’s what the people in the dorms want. Prescribe your own high.”

“You could get pharmaceuticals here.”

“In cheap bulk shipments? Easier to arrange that from Mexico. Warehouse security down there is a joke. Plus the cartels and
federales
don’t bother you. They’re all focused on the ‘illegal’ stuff.”

“How were the drugs brought in?”

“Fishing boat. See, that’s the thing. You said there was no way off the island until the ferry. Maybe that’s not exactly true. Chase and Markie have this plan—”

Steps in the hallway above. Chase called down, “Yo, Ty. You all right, man?”

Ty closed his eyes and swallowed. “Yeah. I feel like shit. But I’m…I’m better, I guess.”

Chase and Markie came down the steps. They checked us out, trying to read what was going on.

“He’s not making much sense,” I told them. “You gave him too much sedative.”

“He’ll be okay,” Chase said. “Come on, buddy.”

Ty gave me one last look, like a convict going back inside the pen. Then he let his buddies lead him up the stairwell.

I went back to our refugee room, wanting to talk to Maia,
but she was still asleep. For once, she looked comfortable. I didn’t want to disturb her. Lane slept more fitfully. She was mumbling something that sounded like a protest. Garrett lay next to her, his arm around her waist.

He glanced up as I came in. We had a brief, silent conversation that went something like this:

Me:
No sign of Alex.

Garrett:
If I could get up without waking Lane, I’d beat you with a large stick. Search again!

I checked the next room and found Benjamin Lindy asleep on the couch. Chase and Markie sat on the bed having a quiet, earnest conversation with Ty. I decided to move on.

The next bedroom’s door was also open, but Jose and Imelda were nowhere to be seen.

What now?

There was too much to think about, too much trouble besides the storm blowing through this hotel.

I stood at the end of the hall, looking down the stairwell into the shadows. I thought about the story Ty had told me. Given my past luck, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself cooped up with a trio of drug dealers, as well as a paid assassin.

I had no trouble believing that Chris Stowall had been making money by helping drug runners. In South Texas, that was a well-established part of the economy, right up there with ranching, drilling for oil and making acrylic-rattlesnake toilet seats for the tourists.

Still, I doubted Chris had died because of a drug deal. Certainly Jesse Longoria wouldn’t have come down here for anything as petty as a crate of Mexican Valium. Both of them had been playing a much more dangerous game.

I rubbed my eyes. I kept seeing Rachel Brazos’s face carved in wood.

Two bodies downstairs, and the death that haunted me most was a lady I’d never known.

I imagined Ralph Arguello laughing.
You hang out with the dead too much,
vato.

No contest,
I pleaded. Then I turned and headed toward Alex Huff’s bedroom.

Inside, the storm had sprayed everything with broken glass
and sand like sugar coating on a pan dulce. Somebody, probably Jose, had nailed a quilt over the smashed window. The wind and rain had already ripped it to shreds.

I wondered if it was just wishful thinking, or if the storm sounded a little less intense now. It wasn’t much louder than your average booster rocket.

I picked up the wooden statue and set it on the dresser. She still looked like Rachel, her hand out, asking some question I couldn’t answer.

I went through Alex’s dresser drawers, then his closet. After ten minutes of turning his room upside down, I’d found nothing remarkable. Nothing except the statue.

And that bothered me.

I knew Alex well enough to know that I should’ve found some memorabilia: the photos he’d once shown me from his fishing expeditions, his dad’s army knife, maybe the signed Jimmy Buffett poster Garrett had given him for his twentieth birthday.