Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan by Rick Riordan Page A

but when I woke up
early Wednesday morning the ironing board was ringing. I yanked it
down from the wall and fumbled with the receiver. ·
    " Hola, vato ,
" the man on the other end said, then he insulted me rapidly in
Spanish.
    I rubbed my eyes until the walls came into focus. It
took my brain a second to switch languages, then I placed the voice.
    “ That doesn’t sound like a real hygienic
position, Ralph," I said. "Haven’t you guys heard about
AIDS?"
    Ralph Arguello laughed.
    "So I heard right," he said. "You’re
back in town and speaking Espanol, no less. How the hell am I
supposed to insult you to your face now?"
    If there had been a spider in my head last night,
this morning it felt like the thing had crawled into my throat and
died. I sat on the floor and tried not to throw up.
    “ So how’s the pawnshop business, Ralphas?"
    I’d known Ralph since varsity in high school. Even
then he was a con man of epic proportions. He’d once stolen the
coach’s pickup truck and sold it back to him in a different color,
so the legend went. About the time I went off to college Ralph had
started buying pawn-shops all around the West Side, and by the time
I’d gotten my BA, I’d heard rumors that Ralph was worth a million
dollars, not all of it from honest loans.
    “ How do you feel about visiting my side of town
today?" Something in his tone of voice had changed. It made me
wish I could concentrate more on his words without the pounding in my
head.
    "There’s a lot going on right now, Ralph.
Maybe we cou — "
    “ Yeah," he interrupted, "I heard about
Lillian, and I heard she’s out of town. This isn’t exactly a
social call."
    I waited. It didn’t surprise me that Ralph knew all
this, any more than that he’d known I could now speak Spanish.
Ralph could just drive through town and news would cling to him the
way lint clings to velvet. Still, the mention of Lillian’s name
woke me up fast.
    "Okay," I said finally. "What is it?"
    “ One of my girls just showed me a purse she found
out on Zarzamora a few nights ago. It’d been run over a couple of
times. The driver’s license says ‘Lillian Cambridge’. "
 

    16
    By the time I parked the VW on the curbless street in
front of the Blanco Cafe, my hangover had been replaced by a colder
kind of nausea. I was afraid I’d go completely numb with it if I
didn’t keep moving.
    A sign inside the grimy window of the cafe read
"Abierto." I stepped over two emaciated brown dogs that
were snoring in the doorway and went in.
    The air inside was thick, lubricated with the smell
of peppers and old grease. It was only seven-thirty in the morning,
but at least twenty men crowded the counter along one side of the
tiny room to wolf down steaming fried migas and black coffee. Huge waitresses, their hair the color of chorizo ,
were shouting at each other in Spanish. They carried plates the size
of hubcaps four at a time from the kitchen. It was the only place in
town I knew where you could get a meal two plates wide that cost
under three dollars.
    Some of the men at the counter looked over at me,
their brown eyes sleepy, slightly annoyed when they saw I was a
gringo. Then they went back to their migas .
Only one person was sitting away from the counter. At a yellow
Formica table in the back corner, under a huge black velvet painting
of a Mayan warrior, Ralph Arguello was drinking a Big Red. He was
grinning at me.
    “ Vato, " he said, then motioned for me to come
back.
    If John Lennon had been born Hispanic and then
overfed on buttered gorditas ,
he would’ve looked like Ralph. His hair was long and tangled,
parted in the middle and tied back in a ponytail, and his eyes were
invisible behind the sheen of his thick round glasses. Ralph’s face
was as round and smooth as a baby’s, but when he smiled, there was
a demonic glee there that made men nervous.
    Ralph dressed more expensively than Lennon ever had,
though—today he was wearing a white linen guayabera that