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 grandmotherâs number as I drove the State Highway 46 shortcut from New Braunfels to Boerne, which I-10 passed through. (Kids, donât dial and drive. Iâm an ace detective. Donât do that either.)
She picked up right away. âAbuelita?â
âYou want something.â Luckily she always talks loud, since sheâs 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. âYou always want something when you call me that. Itâs money, right?â
âRight.â
âNo.â
âNot from you,â I told her. âAnd not for me. Itâs business.â
âOkay. Talk to me, Jesse. You have my interest.â
I told her.
âYou want to buy off a witness.â
âNot 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, heâs not gonna press charges, okay?â
âYou actually have his truck?â
âWell ⦠not yet.â
âI never knew whether you were my favorite nieto in spite of being such a devious little shit, or because of it. Iâm beginning to see now. Okay, Iâll talk to the girlâs family in Cali. Theyâre pretty eager to avoid a scandal; they should pony up pronto. And Iâm pretty eager to see if you can actually pull this off.â
Me too, I thought.
She disconnected. âI love you too, Grandma,â 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. Iâd also text-spammed pretty much my entire extended family. Which, if youâre not familiar with Latinos, really leans hard on the extended part. Us RodrÃguezes, and my momâs 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 timeâve been here even longer than that.
âGot good news and bad news for you, primo,â she said.
âAre you chewing gum? Youâre not supposed to do that on duty, are you?â
She popped it in my ear. âWhatâre they gonna do, fire me? Iâm Simple Service. Also, last I heard, our tÃa Luisa is still director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, or did you forget?â
âRight.â It wasnât as if Florene calling me was strictly legal. Or at all. Iâve always been a do-whatâs-right-rather-than-whatâs-legal kind of guy, and Florene ⦠well, my older sisters used to joke her name should be spelled âfluorine,â for the dangerously unstable element.
âWhich do you want first?â
âGive me the good, so I can enjoy a brief moment basking in the sunshine of optimism.â
âSuch a poet.â I could hear the sneer. âYou 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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