Texas Hold 'Em by George R. R. Martin

Texas Hold 'Em by George R. R. Martin

Author:George R. R. Martin [Martin, George R. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-09-18T16:00:00+00:00


I put my smartphone on speaker and hit up my grandmother’s number as I drove the State Highway 46 shortcut from New Braunfels to Boerne, which I-10 passed through. (Kids, don’t dial and drive. I’m an ace detective. Don’t do that either.)

She picked up right away. “Abuelita?”

“You want something.” Luckily she always talks loud, since she’s a bit hard of hearing and too stubborn to get a hearing aid, since I still had the passenger window open to clear the smoke remnants and the wind was rushing something powerful. “You always want something when you call me that. It’s money, right?”

“Right.”

“No.”

“Not from you,” I told her. “And not for me. It’s business.”

“Okay. Talk to me, Jesse. You have my interest.”

I told her.

“You want to buy off a witness.”

“Not a witness. The crime victim. He says we get his bank card charges covered, get him his truck back, give him a little extra for his trouble, he’s not gonna press charges, okay?”

“You actually have his truck?”

“Well … not yet.”

“I never knew whether you were my favorite nieto in spite of being such a devious little shit, or because of it. I’m beginning to see now. Okay, I’ll talk to the girl’s family in Cali. They’re pretty eager to avoid a scandal; they should pony up pronto. And I’m pretty eager to see if you can actually pull this off.”

Me too, I thought.

She disconnected. “I love you too, Grandma,” I told my phone.

I was just tucking it back in my shirt pocket when it played the whistled bit from the theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I fished it right out again.

It was my cousin Florene, who works as a dispatcher for the Texas Highway Patrol in Kerr County, on I-10 northwest of Boerne. I’d also text-spammed pretty much my entire extended family. Which, if you’re not familiar with Latinos, really leans hard on the extended part. Us Rodríguezes, and my mom’s Márquez clan, have been living in this part of the world since San Antonio happened in the early 1700s. The ones who were Comanches at the time’ve been here even longer than that.

“Got good news and bad news for you, primo,” she said.

“Are you chewing gum? You’re not supposed to do that on duty, are you?”

She popped it in my ear. “What’re they gonna do, fire me? I’m Simple Service. Also, last I heard, our tía Luisa is still director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, or did you forget?”

“Right.” It wasn’t as if Florene calling me was strictly legal. Or at all. I’ve always been a do-what’s-right-rather-than-what’s-legal kind of guy, and Florene … well, my older sisters used to joke her name should be spelled “fluorine,” for the dangerously unstable element.

“Which do you want first?”

“Give me the good, so I can enjoy a brief moment basking in the sunshine of optimism.”

“Such a poet.” I could hear the sneer. “You oughta go into fertilizer sales with a line of bullshit like that. Okay. We got a report matching the description of your missing kids as of twenty minutes ago.



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