Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,68

own was a two-bedroom clapboard, painted the color of provolone cheese. It wasn’t really so small, but it looked that way surrounded by fields of spear grass.

In the spring, the back acre would be flooded with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, but now, in the winter, there was nothing but yellow grass.

Etch’s target range was an old olive Frigidaire, sitting in the field between his house and the church. At least once a week, he opened the refrigerator and loaded it with cans, bottles, boxes, whatever he had left in the pantry. Etch still did grocery shopping, though somehow he never got around to eating much. He liked to shoot the contents of the refrigerator, then hose out the remains.

He worked his first clip. He took out three cans of sardines, blew up a two-liter soda bottle, plugged a few shots into the door and watched the recoil whap it back and forth on its hinges.

He knew he was putting off what he had to do this morning. Eight o’clock already. He had to get going before people started waking up and the hospital shift changed. He had arranged to take over starting at nine. That would give him a good hour before the doctors came in to check on Ana—plenty of time to make his decision.

He imagined Lucia, sitting just behind him. If he looked back, she would be there at the picnic table under the huisache tree. She’d be holding a cup of coffee, wearing her patrol uniform.

You can’t murder my daughter, Etch.

“She betrayed you. She isn’t yours.”

She is, Lucia said. You’re not going to win, love.

He feared she was right. He couldn’t carve a victory out of this. He’d been buying time for eighteen years, but if it came down to keeping himself alive or keeping his secrets hidden, he wasn’t sure which he would choose.

Etch checked his gun. One round still chambered.

He thought about Ana lying in her hospital bed, heart monitor bleeping steadily. The more he had tried to love her, help her, see her mother’s qualities in her, the more he hated her.

He remembered a meeting he’d had with Ana, shortly before her mother died.

She’d invited him to coffee. He had gone, feeling a bit uneasy. And irritated.

Ana was twenty-six, just out of college after the Air Force, her first month into the SAPD police academy. By all accounts, she was excelling. There was no doubt she was worthy of her mother’s legacy. There was also little doubt that Ana DeLeon wouldn’t be spending her entire career on patrol.

It rankled Etch every time someone said that, as if the work Lucia and he had been doing since Ana was a little girl was meaningless. A job for the unmotivated.

They’d met at the Pig Stand, down the street from Lucia’s. Etch wondered if Ana had picked the spot as some kind of message. Etch hadn’t been there in almost three years. After Frankie’s death, his old routines with Lucia had slowly unraveled. Everything seemed tainted by the night of the murder.

Ana insisted on buying his coffee, as if with the seventy-five cents, she was proving her adulthood, her independence. Etch never paid for anything at the Pig Stand anyway, but he let her put down the money.

She was only a few years younger than Lucia had been when Etch started patrolling with her. Ana had the same glossy black hair, chopped short in a utilitarian wedge. She had the same plum-colored lips, the same challenge in her eyes, though that look that had been draining from Lucia’s eyes over the last few years.

“I’m worried about my mother,” Ana said.

Etch counted to ten before answering, trying to keep his anger inside.

“Maybe you should go see her,” he suggested. “How long has it been?”

In truth, he knew exactly how long. Six and a half months, since the huge fight when Ana had poured all her mother’s liquor into the river behind her house.

Ana set her coffee cup on the counter. “She doesn’t want to see me.”

“You sure? Or do you not want to see her?”

“She’s destroying herself. She won’t talk to me about it. I thought maybe you could—”

“Ana, your mother’s a strong woman.”

“With a great reputation in the department. A real role model. Yeah, Etch. I know. Everybody is so goddamn busy protecting her reputation, they’re not helping her. She’s drinking herself to death.”

Mike Flume, the fry cook, was putting orders on the pickup counter, getting a little too close to the conversation. Etch stared at him