Rick Riordan: The Devil went down to Austin

I looked at the halfbuilt little pig house.

I looked at my brother's fingers, scarred and bleeding and crusted with mortar.

My anger drained away, left a taste in my mouth not unlike a TV dinner tray.

I said, "Hand me a trowel."

By seven o'clock, we'd built the exterior walls four feet high around the cook box. The chimney and the doorway arch were finished.

The sun was sinking behind the hills on the far side of the lake. My skin itched from sweat and lime dust, my shoulders felt like sandbags, and I was thinking warm thoughts about cold margaritas.

I can't say I felt any better about being around Jimmy and Garrett, but I'd managed to keep my mouth shut and coexist with them for an afternoon.

Jimmy surveyed our masonry.

"Good," he decided. "Got to place the kiln goddess."

He ambled to his pickup and came back with a ceramic statuette-a misshapen female gargoyle glazed a nasty shade of KoolAid red. With great reverence, Jimmy placed her over the doorway, readjusted her a few times to get the angle right.

Garrett said, "What the hell is that?"

"Kiln goddess. You know-keep my pots from breaking. Keep them from turning out ugly. I'm naming her Ruby."

Garrett grunted. "You're a masochist."

I wasn't sure Jimmy knew what that word meant, but he grinned slowly. "Stayed friends with you, haven't I?"

Garrett let him have the point.

We left Garrett's van and Jimmy's pickup at the kiln site, piled into my Ford F150, and drove back up the gravel road to Jimmy's house.

The white dome was visible from just about anywhere on the lake-an upsidedown radar dish Jimmy had gotten cheap from a military salvager when Bergstrom Air Force Base closed down. He'd hauled the thing up here piece by piece, reassembled it at the top of his six acres, insulated it, wired it for electricity, and bingo: a two thousandsquarefoot fibreglass igloo.

We stayed long enough to use the outhouse, grab barbecue supplies, stock the ice chest. Jimmy loaned me a fresh shirt that said RACAfest '98. We loaded my Ford and rumbled back down to the waterfront, where we proceeded to use Jimmy's new kiln as our cooking pit.

The summer sun had just set. A line of clouds was thickening on the horizon, charging the air with the metallic smell of storm. Around the curve of Jimmy's cove, the wind blew black lines across the water, dipping the buoys in the boating channel. In the distance, I could make out the edge of Mansfield Dam-a concrete monolith turning blue in its own shadow.

Garrett made the fire. Jimmy marinated fajitas in Shiner Bock and jalapeno juice, snapped a branch off the nearest wild sage plant to use as a basting brush. I mixed highoctane margaritas and poured them into Jimmy's handmade ceramic goblets.

We watched the sunset fade to purple and the storm clouds roll in. Nobody said a word about anything important.

After dinner, lightning traced veins in the clouds. The chirr of crickets replaced the daytime hum of cicadas. Flames glowed in the doorway of the kiln, washing the ugly little goddess in orange light.

Leave it to me to ruin a perfectly good ceasefire.

"Techsan," I said. "Give me the full story."

Jimmy reclined against a mesquite, putting himself back into the shadows.

Garrett looked toward the kiln-the shelves of unfired pots, their plastic cover ballooning in the breeze. "You ever make yourself a promise, little bro? Tell yourself someday, you'll do suchand such?"

"Play pro ball," I answered. "Be a Fellow at Christ College. Neither happened."

Garrett nodded. "I told myself years ago I was going to make a quick fortune, get out of programming, spend the rest of my life hitting Buffett concerts and Caribbean islands.

Jimmy, he wanted to settle down making ceramics right here. Am I right, Jimmy?"

"You're right," Jimmy murmured from the shadows.

"Then we turned thirtyfive, little bro. Then we turned forty."

"You quit your job," I said. "Sixteen years, and you quit."

In the firelight, Garrett's face looked as red as the kiln goddess'.

"Maybe you can't understand. We've been in Austin, Jimmy and me, way before the hightech boom. We go back to the Apple lie days-working our little grunt jobs in the big companies, making peanuts. Then suddenly we start seeing twentyyearolds getting signup bonuses for four times our yearly salaries, zitfaced kids at UT writing programs for their undergrad theses and retiring multimillionaires the next year, bought out by venture capitalists. It's fucking unreal. Jimmy and me-we realize we've missed the Gold Rush. We were born too early. You have any idea how that feels?"

"So you decided to risk a startup company," I said. "And you screwed up."

His eyes had a look of vacant anger, like an old soldier struggling to remember the details of a battle. "Mr. Sympathy. All right, yes. We screwed up. Lady named Ruby McBride-somebody Jimmy and I knew from way back. She invited us for drinks at this bar she owns down at Point Lone Star-she owns a whole fucking marina, okay?

Ruby said she had some money to invest. She'd done some programming, had some ideas for a new encryption product. She wanted our help. The three of us agreed we could do something big togethersomething we could control all the way from the planning stages to the IPO. Ruby and Jimmy…"

Garrett paused. "Well, you know about Doebler Oil."

It took Jimmy a moment to react.

Then he leaned forward into the light, frowned, and swiped the margarita thermos.

"Goddamn it, Garrett. You know Doebler Oil didn't cut me a cent."

"Whatever, man," Garrett said. "You had money. So did Ruby. I didn't, and I wanted to be an equal partner."

"So you mortgaged the ranch," I said.

"We expected a quick profit," Jimmy put in. "Our product kicked ass. Tech companies with programs a lot less solid than ours were seeing their public stock offerings quadruple the first hour of trading. All we figured we had to do was keep alive that long- finance the product through betatest phase, keep the investors excited. It's like a poker game, Tres. The longer you stay in, the bigger the pot."

I looked at Jimmy Doebler, then at Garrett. I felt like I'd been dropped into a camp of defective mountain men, trying to figure out how to get beaver pelts traded on Wall Street. I said, "No wonder things went bad."

Garrett glared at me. "As of January, smartass, we were flying high. Mr. Doebler here even convinced himself he was in love- went off and got himself married to our lovely third partner."

Jimmy shoved the thermos back into the dirt, took a slug of his second drink. "Leave her alone, Garrett."

Garrett waved the comment aside. "We convinced half a dozen companies to do a sixmonth betatest-meaning they'd try our product for free, we'd monitor how it went.

Things went well, we could market the program commercially. Man, we rented offices, hired staff, did installation."

"You spent more money you didn't have," I translated.

"Three months in, things were going so well we were turning down buyout offers, little bro. Turning them down."

"And then?" I asked.

"We were sabotaged."

Jimmy shifted his back uneasily against the mesquite. "We don't know that, Garrett."

"The hell we don't. Fucking Matthew Pena."

I made the timeout sign. "Who?"

"Back in April," Garrett said, "we got this buyout offer from an investment banker in Cupertino, guy named Pena. Reminded me of a fucking vampire. He got along great with Ruby, which figures, but me and Jimmy said no way. Right after we turned Pena down, things started to go wrong with our betatesting. The program is supposed to protect traffic on our clients' computers, okay? Email, Internet commerce, important shit."

"That's one of those hightech terms, right? 'Important shit.' "