The Last King of Texas - By Rick Riordan Page 0,110

longer.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing. You're going to be okay, is all. I'm glad for that."

"You make it sound like a good-bye."

DeLeon came over and gave me a swift kiss on the lips. Then she was gone. I listened to her car engine start, the sound of gravel pinging under her wheels as she drove off.

After a few minutes I sat up, waited for the black spots to clear, then tried to stand. I felt like I'd just dismounted from an unfriendly bull. I looked down at the black socks and Wild Turkey T-shirt.

"No," I decided.

I made my way through the bedrooms until I found some spare clothes I'd left on my last visit - jeans, a flannel shirt. After a year or two I managed to get dressed.

I checked the cupboard for something easy on the stomach and found nothing except ammo boxes and rat poison. The refrigerator held Budweiser and some cow drugs, massive syringes half full and dirty with blood from their last use. I settled for a large glass of tap water. On second thought, I didn't drink that either. After finding my boots, I opened the front door and did a quick duck underneath the wasp nest forming there. Harold was as good about keeping up the property as he was at stocking the larder.

The morning gray had burned off. The air smelled of steamed grass and cow dung. A Mexican eagle circled over the trees that lined the creek in the center of the property.

The Navarre ranch isn't much of a spread by South Texas standards - 250 acres, about the size of a King Ranch bathroom. The usually dry Apache Creek snakes through its middle, with wheat fields to the north and west, grazing lands and deer-hunting woods to the south and east. Where the land isn't cultivated it's choked with white-brush and cactus, littered with limestone chunks, the topography around the creek gouged with sinkholes and gullies and washouts from years of unpredictable flooding.

I found Ozzie and Harold in a clearing where the mouth of the road dipped down into the trees between the creekbed and the man-made cow pond. Ozzie was dressed in civilian clothes - jeans, white-and-red Hawaiian shirt, boots, white Stetson. A side arm and several extra magazines were spread across a table made from an old door and two sawhorses. Harold Diliberto stood next to him with the Remington 700.

The usual line of beer cans was set up on a hay bale fifty yards downrange. Ozzie had also set out a professional target - a small metal disk designed to rock back on its base when hit and make a resounding ping.

Ozzie grinned when he saw me walking up. "Well - it's alive."

I accepted his congratulatory pounding on my back, which was marginally less painful than an electric nail driver.

Harold Diliberto offered me a hit from his breakfast whiskey flask. I declined.

"Just getting my aim back," Ozzie told me.

His side arm was a .357 semiautomatic that had seen a lot of use. The muzzle was scored as if it had once been fitted with the wrong end sight.

I watched Ozzie aim at the metal target, then fire.

I flinched at the sound, even though I knew it was coming. There is nothing quite so loud as a gun fired by someone else.

There was no subsequent ping against the target. I kept my eyes on the gun. "Used to be the recoil on this thing didn't bother me at all," Ozzie said. "You get stiff in one arm, even if it's not your good arm, it completely fucks you up.

Give me that old rifle, Harold."

Harold looked from the rifle to Ozzie. "You serious?"

Ozzie took the Remington from Harold and clamped the stock under his bad shoulder, released the bolt with his good hand. The loading spring dangled uselessly underneath. It would be one shot at a time forevermore with the Remington.

With some effort, Ozzie pushed a .243 bullet into the magazine, slid the bolt forward to chamber the round, locked the handle down.

"Yeah," he said with satisfaction. "In the old days I could fire one of these with my good arm in a cast. Just prop it on a fence. I'm getting old. So, Tres - feel good to be done with the Brandon family?"

I looked down the reservoir road. Clouds of gnats floated over the little bridge of land between the creekbed and the water tank. I remembered