Read Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan for Free Online Page B

been pursuing that meant nothing to me. There
were grocery lists.
    I still have no idea why I’d taken the scrapbook
from his desk after the funeral, or why I’d kept it, or why I
decided to look at it again now, but I sat down on the futon with it
now and started flipping through. In several places I’d dog-eared
interesting pages, most of which I’d forgotten about. One of them
caught my
attention.
    A yellowed piece of spiral paper, the kind of scrap
my dad was always leaving around the house, filled with rambling
reminders to himself. It appeared to be a list of notes for a trial
testimony he was making against Guy White, a suspected local drug
trafficker. Then at the bottom it said: Sabinal. Get whiskey. Fix
fence. Clean fireplace.
    This page had bothered me the first time I read it
and it bothered me now, though I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just
Guy White’s name. I remembered White’s drug trial vaguely, then
later some speculation that White’s mob connections might have been
behind my father’s murder, but Dad’s testimony notes revealed no
shocking secrets. The seven words Dad had scrawled at the bottom of
the page bothered me more. They sounded like a reminder of what to do
next time we went to the family ranch outside Sabinal. Except we only
went to Sabinal at Christmas, for deer season, and the notes were
written in April, a month before Dad died. I finished off my six-pack
of Shiner Bock while I read, and felt almost grateful when my
father’s shaky cursive started to blur.
    I’m not sure when I actually fell asleep, but when
I woke up it was full dark and the phone was ringing. I almost
impaled myself on the ironing board trying to get to the receiver.
    “ Hello—" I said. My mind was fuzzy, but I
could hear the sounds of a bar in the background—glasses clinking,
men talking in both Spanish and English, a jukebox playing Freddy
Fender. No one said anything into the receiver. I waited. So did the
caller. He waited much too long for a typical prankster, or an
honestly confused drunk with a wrong number.
    "Leave," he said. Then the line went dead.
    Of course it was just the fact that I was
half-asleep, probably still half-drunk, and that I’d been thinking
about things way too much. But the man’s voice sounded familiar to
me. It sounded a little like my father.
 

    10
    The next morning I made the mistake of practicing tai
chi sword in the backyard. By nine o’clock
I had served as breakfast for a small army of mosquitoes and scared
the neighbors half to death. The woman next door came outside in a
blue terry-cloth bathrobe around eight-thirty, dropped her coffee cup
when she saw me swinging the blade, then went back in and locked the
door. She left the coffee cup broken on the back porch. Across the
alley, two pairs of large dark eyes were following my movements
cautiously through the miniblinds on the second floor.
    Finally Gary Hales shuffled out in his pajamas and
asked me, in a listless voice, what I was doing. He might’ve been
sleepwalking for all I could tell. I stopped to catch my breath.
    “ It’s a kind of exercise," I said.
    He blinked slowly, looking at the sword. "With
big knives? "
    "Sort of. It makes you exercise very carefully."
    “ I reckon so. "
    He scratched behind his ear. Maybe he was trying to
remember why he’d come outside.
    "You think maybe it’s better if I don’t
practice out here?" I suggested.
    “ I reckon maybe," he agreed.
    Before I went inside, I looked up at the people
behind the miniblinds and pretended to stab at them with the sword.
The lifted slat flicked down instantly.
    After a shower I tried Lillian’s number and got her
answering machine. I figured she was in transit to work, so I tried
an old number for Carlon McAffrey at the Express-News .
I was bounced back to the main operator for the newspaper, who told
me Carlon was now working for the Friday entertainment section. She
transferred the call.
    “ Yo," McAffrey answered.
    "Yo?" I said.