Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

Three seconds of silence. "Tres, do us both a favour. Leave now."

It was the first break in her coldness-when she said the word favour. It wasn't much, nothing I would've caught had I not known her for a decade. Just the slightest indication that she wanted me gone for more reasons than one.

I folded Pena's fax. "I can't sit this out, Garrett."

"You and the goddamn ranch."

"It's more than that."

He stared past the balcony railing, like he was taking aim at something a long way off.

He didn't reply.

After a moment, Maia pointed at me, then pointed inside.

Reluctantly, I followed.

In the living room, Buffett was still singing his greatest hits. The parrot was bobbing his head, crooning the only words he knew-"dickhead," "noisy bastard," a few other cute obscenities.

"It would've been more helpful if you were the pizza guy," Maia told me. "I had nothing but peanuts on the plane, went straight from the airport to the homicide office."

"Pena," I said. "Is he as bad as he looks on paper?"

She made a boat out of her money. "Worse."

There were pale Vs on the tops of her feet, remnants of a suntan through flipflops. I wondered if she still spent Saturday afternoons in the Mission, seeking out the only oasis of sunshine in San Francisco.

"I have to turn the investigation away from Garrett," she said. "If the case goes to the DA the way it is…"

She didn't finish. She didn't have to. We both understood why she couldn't wait for an indictment, why no defence lawyer would ever want to defend a friend in court. If the police felt confident enough to arrest Garrett, if the case went to trial without a plea bargain-the odds for acquittal got very long indeed.

"And you still don't want my help," I said.

"That's Garrett's call."

"Is it?" I picked up Garrett's phone.

Maia frowned. "What are you-"

I hadn't really been expecting any luck-not on a Sunday afternoon-but on the third ring a cheery receptionist's voice said, "Mr. Pena's offices. This is Krystal."

I knew she spelled it with a K. She sounded like the K variety of Krystal.

I told her I was the personal assistant to one of Matthew's venture capitalist friends. I knew it was lastminute, but my boss was going to be superpissed if I couldn't squeeze him in for an appointment with Matthew sometime today.

Maia made an emphatic cut gesture across her throat.

"Oh, man," Krystal sympathized. "This is such a bummer, but Mr. Pena is out the rest of the afternoon."

"Out?" I tried to sound devastated.

"Yeah. I'm really sorry. He took some prospective clients to Windy Point."

Maia was glaring at me.

"Windy Point," I said. "Isn't that on the lake somewhere?"

"Yeah," Krystal agreed. "The scuba place. Mr. Pena is big on that, you know? Likes to impress clients by taking them under, bonding with the fish. Ha, ha."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Ha, ha."

"So, like, he's out there teaching these guys to scuba dive. I'm really sorry."

I winked at Maia. "That's okay, Krystal. In fact, that's just about perfect. Thanks."

I hung up, told Maia where Matthew Pena was, what he was doing.

Her reaction was just what I expected.

She looked nauseated, swallowed deeply. "I'll catch him tomorrow."

"Sure," I agreed. "Me, I think I'll go out to Windy Point. I'll try not to mess things up for you too bad."

She glared at the floor, called me several unflattering names in Mandarin. I knew the names well enough. She'd called me them before. "You insist on wedging your way into this, don't you?"

I gestured toward the door. "After you?" The pizza man was just coming up the stairs.

Maia told him to go upstairs, give the pizza to the guy with no legs.

She said she didn't anticipate being hungry again for a very long time.

The man in the wet suit had just finished getting sick.

He was hunched over on a picnic bench, elbows on his knees, the purged contents of his stomach speckling the grass between his feet. His face glistened with sweat and lake water, the sclera of his eyes an unhealthy shade of egg yolk yellow.

As Maia and I walked toward him, his expression turned from misery to embarrassment. The message was clear: Please let me suffer in privacy.

"You okay?" I asked.

He had pinched features, a Mediterranean tan. He was probably in his late twenties, though he looked older from the sun lines scoring his eyes and mouth. Handsome, in a small, tight way. His hair was a closecropped skullcap of chocolate brown, water trickling off behind his ears. He had eyes like an old lady's poodle-big and dark, filled with mournful selfconsciousness, anxiety over the fact that he wasn't a bulldog.

"Guess I need a little more practice," he said.

We were at the last picnic table on Windy Point, next to the metal stairs that led down a twentyfoot limestone cliff to the water. Dragonflies zagged in drunken orbits over the grass. A strong, steady breeze blew off the headlands-the kind of wind that would hide a sunburn on a day like this, not let you know you'd become fried and dehydrated until it was too late.

Behind us, in the woods, several dozen scuba campers had set up their tents, equipment trailers, barbecue pits. I could smell hamburgers cooking. Red and white dive flags decorated everything. Swimsuits and dive skins were draped over lawn chairs. The black rubbery hoses of regulators hung in live oak branches like trophy kill octopi.

The little gravel road ended at our feet. There was nothing farther but the dropoff and the lake.

Maia Lee didn't look much better than the scuba diver. She'd looked progressively worse the closer we'd gotten to the lake. Apparently, though, she remembered scuba training better than I did. She noticed the sick man's air tank standing upright on the table- a big nono in the world of diving. She picked up the tank and laid it on the ground sideways, where it couldn't fall over and cause mischief.

"Thanks," the man murmured. "Forgot."

And then he took another look at her, squinting to make out her face in the sun. "Don't I- Miss Lee?"

"Hello, Dwight."

If it was possible for Dwight to look any more nauseated, he did. "Oh my God. Matthew called you out here?"

I placed the name. Dwight Hayes-the AccuShield employee who had supported Matthew Pena's statement about his girlfriend falling off the dinner yacht.

"Dwight," Maia said, "this is a friend of mine, Tres Navarre."

He looked surprised by my proffered hand, reached for it, then almost immediately pulled back. "Navarre?"

"As in Garrett Navarre of Techsan Software," Maia said. "That's right."

Maia had slipped into her professional tone, the one she used for reluctant witnesses-putting them at ease, reassuring them, letting them know she was a friend.

Her tone didn't seem to work too well on Dwight.

"Not again," he moaned. "You're here about-"

"About Jimmy Doebler's murder," Maia supplied. "Yes."

"Then Matthew did call you."

"No. I'm afraid Mr. Pena will need different representation this time. How's he been treating you, Dwight?"

Hayes looked miserable. He unzipped his wet suit to the waist, peeled his arms out of the sleeves. The warm neoprene let off its unmistakable smell.

If car tires had armpits, they would smell like that.

"I couldn't-" He faltered. He made a claw over his nose and mouth, pantomiming an oxygen mask. "I have no control down there. I panic. He asks me to clear my mask, twenty feet down, and the water rushes into my nose-I forget how to breathe."

I could tell Maia was fighting to keep the professional demeanour intact, trying not to betray her own phobia.

"It takes a few tries," she sympathized.

Hayes shook his head dejectedly. "You don't get it. This is the third time. He makes me keep trying-embarrassing myself in front of clients. Matthew enjoys seeing me panic.