Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,35

just a better way of tracking down Johnny Shoes.

Unfortunately, Madeleine’s plan was the best one we had. She’d said looking for Zapata’s men would be easier than looking for the man himself, and she was right. When it came to moving around and avoiding detection, Zapata was slightly more paranoid than your average Third World dictator.

“What was that martial arts style you used on me earlier, anyway?” I asked her.

“Shen Chuan.”

Ralph and I exchanged looks.

“Hell,” I said.

As far as I knew, Shen Chuan was the only native Texas martial arts system. It was also a hard damn style to defend against. It was taught in the East Texas piney woods by one extremely good, extremely unconventional sensei.

“You study with Lansdale?” I asked.

“Did,” Madeleine corrected. “He kicked me out of the dojo. Said I was over-the-top.”

I tried to imagine what Joe Lansdale would consider over-the-top. Chain saws and atom bombs, maybe.

It seemed strange to me that a girl like Madeleine White would’ve taken up martial arts so intensely. Then I remembered something Ralph had told me. Mr. White had come to him for help when Frankie’s problems got so bad they affected the family. I wondered what exactly that meant.

At the Taco Shack counter, the redheaded thug was getting his order.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s interrupt this poor man’s lunch.”

“Hold up,” Ralph said. “He’s moving.”

Sure enough, Mr. Thug had cradled his taco bag like an offensive lineman and was jogging across Roosevelt Avenue.

He didn’t seem to have seen us, but he was moving at a good clip. He cut through the parking lot of San José and headed for the mission gates.

“Pull the car around,” Madeleine ordered the driver.

“Why is he going to San José?” I wondered.

“Damn,” Ralph said.

“What?”

“Zapata’s mother.”

“What are you talking about?”

The limo did a tight one-eighty.

I held the door handle to avoid slamming into Madeleine.

“Zapata’s mom is a parishioner,” Ralph said. “Ana told me once. I forgot. Zapata’s family’s been at the mission for, like, centuries.”

Madeleine snorted. “You think Zapata is in there with his mother? What, praying?”

I tried to imagine Johnny Zapata as a good Catholic boy. Or even a good boy. Or even having a mother. I failed.

“I don’t want this to go down in a church,” Ralph muttered.

The limo stopped in front of the visitors’ center.

Madeleine slipped a new clip into her nine. “Alex was right, Arguello. You are getting soft.”

She kicked open the car door, looked at me expectantly. “Are we kicking someone’s ass or not?”

• • •

AS A PI, I’VE LEARNED YOU get better help from people if you make an effort to like them. It’s not about making them like you. You have to develop a genuine affection for disagreeable people. With the hard-luck cases I meet, often the best way to like them is to find something about them with which you can empathize.

With Madeleine White, that wasn’t easy.

The ass-kicking woman who led us into the mission was as hard to love as the bratty little girl I’d known at Alamo Heights.

The only memory that made me feel any sympathy for her was so unpleasant I’d buried it for years.

My senior year at Heights, I attended my last Howdy Night celebration to kick off the new school term. It was a sultry September evening. Millions of grackles were screeching in the trees. The air was thick with mosquitoes and barbecue smoke and teenage hormones.

The football field had been converted into a carnival ground. Parents and younger siblings milled around everywhere. Teachers worked the standard game booths: the dunking chair, the sponge toss, the cakewalk.

I was supposed to be meeting my girlfriend Lillian, but she was running late, so I fell in with Ralph and Frankie White, who were trying the football toss and drinking Big Red sodas secretly laced with tequila.

Over by the fifty-yard line, Frankie’s dad was talking to one of the city councilmen. Guy White wore jeans and loafers and an Izod button-down, like he was one of the common yuppies. His silver hair contrasted starkly with his deep summer tan. His smile radiated good humor. The field was crowded, but he had an open radius ten feet wide around him. Only little children who didn’t know any better wandered close to him.

Frankie was getting angry because he couldn’t get the football through the tire. He always griped that he should’ve made quarterback, but he couldn’t throw to save his life. He kept giving carnival tickets to our bored English teacher, Mrs. Weems, and kept bouncing footballs off the