Miguel’s younger brother, Pablo Asuna, had been the only one still waiting when, after four years, Cort Wesley got out of the Walls prison in Huntsville, thanks to an overturned conviction. Back when Cort Wesley was working for the Branca crime family, Miguel Asuna’s body shop had doubled as a chop shop where stolen cars were brought to be disassembled for parts. He’d once heard Asuna boast he could strip a Mercedes in thirty minutes flat.
Miguel Asuna was twice the size of his dead little brother, and by all accounts he was still living and working on the fringe of the law. As a result, his body shop was filled to the brim, every stall and station taken, with not a single license plate to be seen. The shop smelled heavily of oil, tire rubber, and sandblasted steel. But the floor looked polished, shiny. A coat of finish over the concrete showed not a single grease stain or tire mark. For obvious reasons, Asuna kept the bay doors closed and, with the air-conditioning switched off, the whole shop had a sauna-like feel, fed by heat lamps switched on to dry paint faster.
“You mind if we make this fast, amigo?” Asuna resumed.
“Black Cadillac Escalade, almost brand new, that just had some bodywork done. I’d like to know who owns it.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“You told me to make it fast.”
Asuna’s eyes flashed and narrowed, as if someone had just shined a bright light into them. “Black Cadillac Escalade,” he repeated, something changing in his tone. “You got a reason why I should spare the effort, the favors this’ll take?”
“A couple of thugs driving it threatened one of my boys. As in stuck him in the backseat for a little heart-to-heart at knifepoint. They grabbed him out of a McDonald’s in Houston, where he was with his high school soccer team.”
“Bad hombres, that’s your point.”
“My son just turned sixteen, Miguel. You do the math.”
“Tell you what,” Asuna said, hooking his thumbs through the empty belt loops of his grease-splattered overalls, “give me a little time. Get yourself a coffee or something, maybe a doughnut.”
“I thought you wanted to make this fast.”
“A half hour work for you, amigo?”
51
HOUSTON, TEXAS
No one turned toward Caitlin when she entered the Savarese Fight Fit boxing gym on Austin Street, right in the middle of downtown Houston, hardly raising an eye toward a woman with a badge and a gun.
“I’m looking for Cray Rawls,” she told a man behind a reception desk, whose ears and nose looked like patchwork quilts of matching scar tissue. “He’s expecting me.”
He looked up from his magazine, without saying a word, and pointed Caitlin toward a man working a heavy bag.
Rawls’s age and grooming left him looking out of place. He looked like a classic car someone kept meticulously polished to disguise the rust and rot festering just beneath the surface. More fit for a high-end health club than this no-frills boxing gym that smelled of a combination of stale sweat and glove leather, mixed with the processed air circulated by floor fans. She spotted two younger boxers doing interval training on matching treadmills, and two more working with a trainer inside an old-fashioned ring complete with resin-stained canvas discolored in more places than it wasn’t.
“I’m Caitlin Strong, Mr. Rawls,” Caitlin greeted him.
“Yeah,” Rawls said back to her, breathing hard and barely looking up from pounding the bag, “Sam Bob Jackson told me all about you.”
“I doubt that, since we only met a few days ago.”
Rawls didn’t miss a beat with his blows. “You know how many hits I got when I Googled your name?”
“Believe me when I say that tells only a small part of the story,” Caitlin told him, grasping the bag on the opposite side to hold it steady.
“Does it now?”
Rawls stopped his pounding, annoyed by the break in his punching rhythm. He tapped his gloves lightly together and looked at Caitlin closer, breathing already steadying.
“Mr. Jackson informs me you had some questions about my operation in the Balcones Canyonlands.”
“The Comanche Indian reservation, specifically, sir.”
“Because that’s only a small part of my work here, you know,” Rawls said, punching the bag lightly now.
“What work is that, sir?”
“Oil—what else?”
“I did notice a number of leases that had been taken out under your company, REPCO, but that reservation is the only parcel where you got permits up and running.”
“A lot of good that’s been doing me. As you’re well aware, we’ve had some issues with protesters.”
“I am aware of that, yes, sir.”
“Then you’ll be happy to know they’ve been resolved, as of this afternoon.”
“Really?”
Rawls started hitting the bag with a precision one-two motion, the smacks of impact sounding to Caitlin like a medicine ball hitting the floor. “Protesters had a list of demands, and we met each and every one of the reasonable ones. We agreed to fund the construction of two new schools on the reservation, in addition to providing both college and secondary school scholarships to deserving students.”
“At the Village School, maybe,” Caitlin said, something pulling the words up out of her to see how Rawls responded.
One-two … One two … One-two …