Page 33 of Ransom
We'd been made. In front of hundreds of witnesses. Rex knew we were here. Rex knew I was with a Ranger. Rex had called us out, put us on display, and now he wanted to "talk" after the show.
We were fucked. We were so fucked I wasn't going to be able to find a word for the kind of fucked we were until tomorrow when the dust settled and I had a quiet minute with a beer.
"Drink your Coke," Winston said, still smiling, eyes sharp, scanning the arena, Rex, the security along the walls. "We're fine. We're just two guys on a date who enjoy a show."
"We're not fine," I said.
"We are." He took a long drink of his milkshake. "Because now he thinks he's got us rattled. Thinks he's in control. And maybe he is. But he's also going to talk to us, and when he does, we're going to find out exactly what he knows about Roy Castillo."
He said it like it was simple. Like we hadn't just walked into the lion's den and had the lion point us out to everyone watching.
Billy arrived with our food. The Outlaw Experience turned out to be two platters the size of hubcaps, loaded with burgers, fries, onion rings, and something fried I didn't recognize. He set them down with a flourish.
"Courtesy of Mr. Rawlins," he said. "Enjoy!"
Winston picked up his burger and took a bite.
"Eat," he said around a mouthful. "We've got a show to watch."
I picked up a fry and frowned at it. "What're the odds the kitchen spat in our food?"
Winston reached across the table and took two fries off my plate without looking at me. "Don't taste like spit to me."
"I need to use the bathroom," I said.
Winston glanced at me, then nodded. "I'll hold down the fort."
I stood up and made my way toward the back of the theater, past tables of families eating and watching the show, past servers in costume carrying trays of food. The bathrooms were marked with wooden signs: OUTLAWS and SALOON GIRLS.
I walked past them.
The hallway opened up into a wider space near the entrance. Part lobby, part trophy room. And there, covering the entire west wall, were the photos of the people who'd finished the Billy Burrito challenge, each picture dated, framed, mounted in neat rows under a hand-painted sign that said "LEGENDS WALL" in dripping red letters meant to look like blood.
I started scanning and found the picture of Judge Roy Castillo, grinning at the camera with his arms spread wide in victory.A massive, empty plate in front of him. The date stamp in the corner read two days before we'd found his body.
The man who'd put up the photo had killed him within thirty-six hours of taking it, and was selling t-shirts about it ten feet from the spot where I was standing. Jesus Christ, Rex. You are a sick son of a bitch.
I pulled my phone out and took a picture. Then another, zooming in on the date.
"See somebody you know?"
I looked up.
Otis Peabody stood at the end of the hallway. We'd crossed paths twice over the years, once at a livestock auction in Las Cruces and once at a gas station outside Hatch, and neither time had we said a word to each other. We hadn't needed to. Otis worked for Rex the way I worked for Rafe, and men in our position recognized each other without paperwork. He stood six-three and went two-forty, broad enough through the shoulders to take up most of a doorway. His hands hung loosely at his sides. They were big and scarred across the knuckles and used. A toothpick rode the corner of his mouth.
"Just looking," I said.
"At Roy Castillo." Otis didn't move from the end of the hallway. He didn't have to. "They found him out on Pae Saco land."
"That right?"
"That's right." He worked the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. "Funny coincidence. The judge eating at Mr. Rawlins's table for six years and turning up dead on your boss's fence line. The kind of coincidence makes a man wonder which fence line he wandered across last."
"I wouldn't know."
"I would." He let that sit. "Mr. Rawlins is gonna want to talk to you and your Ranger friend after the show."
"We'll see."
