Tres Navarre 01 - Big Red Tequila by Rick Riordan

Author:Rick Riordan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

the rungs. I tried to see his face, pale with shock,

looking desperately at the black glistening lake where

his legs had been. I tried to imagine him for once

without that cultivated son-of-a-bitch smile. But he’d

been alone then and he was stil alone with it. There

was no way to imagine what Garrett had said or

thought two decades ago, staring at those wet rails

that had merciful y sealed the blood flow. He’d been

alone and conscious for more than an hour by the

time my sister Shel ey found him.

"Old wounds," he said now. "Fuck that."

Then the bats came out for real. Cameras stopped

flashing. People’s mouths dropped. We al just stared

at the endless cloud of smoke drifting east into the Hil

Country, smoke looking for a few jil ion pounds of

insects to eat.

Garrett smiled like a kid at the matinee.

"Un-fucking-real," he said.

In ten minutes more bats passed over our heads than

the total number of people in South Texas.

Somewhere in that time Maia had taken my hand and

I hadn’t pul ed it away.

The tourists unfroze. Then one by one, growing bored

with the bats, they drifted off to the parking lot. Maia

and I stayed perfectly stil . Final y Garrett wheeled his

chair around and pushed himself up the hil . Maia

stood and fol owed him. Then I fol owed her. It was

hard to miss Garrett’s VW safari van. In the dark, the

mound of plastic pineapples and bananas that was

hot-glued to the roof made the van look like it had

hair. When we got closer I saw that the paint job was

just the way it had been years ago, rows of Ms.

Mirandas along the sides, al in outrageous

Caribbean dresses.

"They don’t dance like Carmen no more?" Maia

suggested.

Garrett grinned at her as he slipped his chair into the

lift grooves. "Wil you marry me?"

A few minutes later we were sitting on beanbags and

drinking Pecan Street Ale from Garrett’s cooler. My

eyes teared over from the smel of mota and very old

patchouli. Garrett had booted up his "portable"

computer—several hundred pounds of wires and

hardware that had years ago taken over the van’s

backseat and whose generator required most of the

luggage compartment. Then he stuck in our mystery

CD.

Garrett frowned. He thought about it for a minute. He

tried a few commands. He cracked open some files

and looked inside.

“Slice and dice," he pronounced. "Easy to fix if you’ve

got the other disk."

Maia looked at me, then at Garrett. "The other disk?"

"Yeah. You split your data between two disks. The

program to reassemble it’s pretty simple. But you

read one disk alone, it’s al nonsense codes, man,

scrambled eggs. Pretty safe way to store sensitive

stuff."

I took a drink of my Pecan Street and thought about

that. "So you can’t tel anything about what’s on

there?"

Garrett shrugged. “It’s big. That much data usual y

means detailed graphics."

“As in photographs?

Garrett nodded.

Maia stared at the dingo bal s around Garrett’s

windows.

"Garrett," she said, "if I was using photos to blackmail

somebody--"

He grinned. "You just keep looking better, honey."

"If I was, why a CD? Why not just keep the

negatives?"

Garrett took a long drag on his joint. His eyes

glittered. You could tel he was enjoying figuring out

the devious possibilities.

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