AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Maybe Manuelo was frightened away by what he saw,” she said. “He ran.”
“Without taking any clothes or personal belongings? Without a car? Without the half million cash? Unlikely, Mrs. Speakman. But, on the outside chance that he ran from something that scared him out of his wits, I’ve had cops calling on every Ruiz in the Dallas phone book. Fort Worth, too.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Want to know something funny? We weren’t the first to call those folks today, asking did they know Manuelo.”
“No?”
“No. Come to find out, somebody beat us to the punch. A man has been calling the same people, looking for Manuelo Ruiz.”
“Griff Burkett?”
He spread his hands at his sides and smiled.
She removed her sunglasses, carefully folded down the stems, and studied them for several moments before lifting her head and looking up at him. “Well, which is it, Detective Rodarte?”
“Which is what?”
“If Griff Burkett killed Manuelo, as you allege, then why has he been calling people named Ruiz, looking for him?”
She held his gaze for several moments, then turned her back to him and started walking toward the house.
Rodarte stared after her, trying to control the anger pulsing through him. All right, she’d got him on that one, and he had no one to blame but himself for the blunder.
Truth be told, he hadn’t dwelled a lot on the fate of Manuelo Ruiz because he didn’t give a flying fuck what had happened to him. Whether Burkett had killed him or was trying to chase him down because he had witnessed a murder and needed to be silenced, it mattered not in the least to Rodarte.
He would either find the wetback’s body or run him down and get him to testify against Burkett. Whichever, he had Burkett for Foster Speakman’s murder. Burkett’s ass belonged to Stanley Rodarte.
And so does the widow’s.
Chuckling to himself, he thought of the payback he’d extract for her snooty condescension. After the funeral. After the folderol had died down. After Burkett was locked behind bars. Using the prison grapevine, he’d make sure Number Ten heard about his attentions to the lady. Every salacious detail.
Jesus, was that gonna be fun, or what?
CHAPTER
26
FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE AFTERNOON, GRIFF PACED THE dismal room, wondering how in hell he’d sunk so low. When had this unstoppable decline started? When he accepted Vista’s first bribe? Or before that, when he began placing bets while at UT? Or had he been irreversibly ill-fated when his mother had abandoned him to run off with her boyfriend Ray?
Sometimes he thought he’d been doomed even before he was born.
During the weeks between his conviction and the day he reported to Big Spring to begin his sentence, he’d conducted a search for his parents. Wasn’t it natural for a child to turn to his parents when he was in trouble?
Thanks to the Internet and websites dedicated to linking lost relatives, it hadn’t taken him long to track down his father. After serving his jail sentence in Texas, he’d left the state, alighting several places but never staying anywhere for long, until he eventually wound up in Laramie, Wyoming. He died there in a local hospital at the age of forty-nine. Hospital records said he suffered from several maladies related to alcoholism.
It took more time to locate his mother. She had either committed bigamy and married men without first securing divorces or simply assumed the names of the various men she lived with.
As the day of Griff’s incarceration approached, he frequently asked himself why he was bothering to try to find her, why he was even curious about her life now, when she’d left him without a shred of remorse. To his knowledge she had never tried to learn what happened to him, so why was reconnecting with her so important?
He didn’t know what drove him. It was a compulsion he couldn’t explain, even to himself, so he gave up and just went with it.
His doggedness paid off. On the day before he was to begin serving his sentence, he found her in Omaha. He obtained an address and a telephone number. Before he could talk himself out of it, he called the number.
It was a decision he came to regret.
Quite a send-off to prison, he thought now, caustically.
Why today, when he was in worse trouble than ever, was he conjuring up all this crap about his parents? Maybe because thinking about them reinforced what he strongly suspected: He had been on this path to self-destruction before he even left the womb.
Which didn’t bode well for the eventual outcome.
