The Last King of Texas - By Rick Riordan Page 0,92

mas cajones, eh?"

She disappeared back through the doorway.

Juan took one more uneasy look at me, then gravity decided the matter. He hefted the box farther up on his gut and lumbered down the driveway toward the Camry.

I went up the stairs and ducked through the tiny doorway of Paloma's apartment.

The room was a triangular attic - the ceiling no more than eight feet high at the apex. The window on the back wall looked out onto the alley. Windows on either side of the front doorway gave a good view of the main house, the backyard, the driveway.

Paloma was stuffing wads of newspaper into a box. Next to her on the floor was a line of assorted ceramics. To the left, a few packed boxes were piled on a stripped twin-bed frame. By the front window, a fruit crate was covered with a lace doily and decorated like an altar - framed photos, Native American fetishes, candles.

"May I come in?" I asked.

"You're here," Paloma grunted, without turning around. "I say no, you will still be here."

She wadded up another sheet of newspaper and stuffed it in her box. I knelt to look at the fruit-crate altar. The largest photo, yellowed, showed a younger Paloma with a man. Standing between them were five boys and a girl, their ages ranging from toddler to teenager.

I picked up an object next to the photo - a thin, irregular loop of bone embroidered with lace. "Deer's eye?"

She turned toward me. Her lower lip stuck out, her expression decidedly masculine. Suddenly she reminded me strongly of Winston Churchill. We shall never surrender.

"My children's," she mumbled. "They wore it during their first year. Miguel also."

"To protect the wearer from evil," I said. "That's an old custom."

Her face softened. "My grandmother made it for my mother, from a deer my grandfather shot in 1910. We are an old family."

"These are your children in the photo? Your husband?"

That question seemed to shut down any social progress we'd been making. Paloma looked away, picked up a ceramic goblet. The handle was crudely fashioned in the shape of a dragon. She stroked its wings gently, then wrapped the goblet in newspaper, placed it in the box.

"She would throw all these things away," she grumbled. "Such a waste."

I straightened up as much as I could against the slanted ceiling. Down in the driveway, Paloma's son Juan was trying to figure out how to wedge one more box into the Toyota's trunk.

"Must've been hard," I said, "seeing what you saw the night of Dr. Brandon's murder."

Down below, Juan was looping rope around the trunk lid of the Toyota. Through the shadeless windows of the main house, strips of afternoon light cut across the bare hardwood floors.

When I turned, Paloma was right behind me. She'd moved with a silence I found frightening in a woman so large. There were deep trenches under her eyes, a streak of flour along her jawline.

She took the deer's eye from my hand. "What is it you want, senor?"

"I want to understand what you really saw that night, Paloma - it doesn't make sense to me."

"I do not want to talk to you."

"Someone else fired those shots into Aaron Brandon. Zeta Sanchez was merely set up for the kill."

Her face flattened. "You call me a liar?"

"Nobody else saw Sanchez that night. Nobody else heard the shots. Only you. A man's life rests on what you say."

Footfalls on the steps outside.

"La policia believe me." Paloma said it evenly.

"The police are licking their lips to put Sanchez away. What really happened, Paloma? Why are you willing to lie?"

From the doorway, her son said, "Leave her alone, mister."

I turned. Juan's face was hard. His red Chris Madrid's T-shirt was untucked from his shorts. His fists were balled.

Paloma kept turning the deer's eye around in her thick fingers like a tiny steering wheel. She darted her eyes at Juan and said, "La caja, mijito."

Juan hesitated, then saw the sternness in his mother's expression. He got the box, hefted it, then carried it out, his dark eyes still cracking the whip at me as he passed.

When he was gone, Paloma sighed. "I saw what I saw, senor. Es todo."

"Somebody put two bullets into Hector Mara. If you think silence will keep you safe, it won't."

Her expression hardened. She picked up another ceramic mug, this one shaped like a man's head with a battered blue hat and grizzled beard and a drunken grin. Paloma wrapped its