"Not polite to stare, dude," Ramon said.
But he smiled when he said it. Ramon Cabrera was only six years older than Andy, but the hard life he had lived and the tattoos on his body had aged him. Ramon had practiced what he preached: his entire upper body was a mobile mural commemorating Austin and Mexico, Latino culture and the Catholic religion, the Aztec sun god and the Tejano goddess Serena. It was beautiful and weird at the same time.
Ramon Cabrera was an artist with a tattoo needle.
The thing sounded like a dentist's drill, which made Andy's skin crawl. With his left hand Ramon stretched the skin on the girl's bottom tight and with his right hand he moved the needle from spot to spot on the stenciled outline of the yellow rose in rhythm with the Latino music playing in the background. The tattoo machine drove the needle into her skin-actually through the epidermis and into the dermis, the second layer of skin-puncturing her bottom hundreds of times per minute and depositing a drop of insoluble ink upon each insertion.
It hurt like hell.
But the girl had iPod buds stuck in her ears and her eyes closed, oblivious to the pain and the world around her… including Andy admiring her butt. After a long, wonderful moment, he broke eye contact and sat in front of Ramon's computer. He logged onto his email account and checked his messages. He shook his head.
"All I get is spam promising to make my penis longer."
"Don't waste your money," Ramon said. "None of that stuff works."
Andy logged onto the Chronicle 's website and clicked "Classifieds" then "Personals" and then "Lovers Lane." He checked for responses to his ad. There were none. So he looked for new ads from "women seeking men." All were from women over forty hoping to find their Prince Charming (since the first two hadn't worked out) and live happily ever after. He wondered if it ever really worked. His mother said she had fallen in love with his father when she was a grad student at UT and saw him on stage at the Broken Spoke. It was love at first sight. They had married three months later and were still married thirty-five years later. Those kind of relationships weren't found in the personal ads. But Andy still looked.
"Man, you ain't gonna find a woman in those ads," Ramon said. "You gotta find a woman the old-fashioned way-in a bar."
"Like that worked for you."
Ramon had met his wife in a bar two years ago. She left him a year later for another man she had met in a bar. Which reminded Andy: he had promised Tres the phone number of a private investigator.
"Ramon, who's that PI you hired to tail your wife?"
"My ex — wife."
"She was your wife when you hired the PI."
"She was a cheating, no-good, two-peso…"
Andy was never sure what bothered Ramon more, that she was cheating on him with another man or that she was cheating on him with another tattoo artist. She had allowed her lover/artist to finish the mural that Ramon had begun on her body. Once he got started, Ramon could go on about his ex-wife like Andy's mother could about football.
"The PI's name?"
"Lorenzo Escobar, down Congress a few blocks."
Andy logged off, took one final glance at the coed's bottom, and headed to the door.
"Wake up, Max."
But he stopped short when Ramon said, "Oh, dude was here looking for you. In a limo."
Andy turned back.
"A limo? Down here? Looking for me? "
"What'd I say?"
"Who?"
"White dude. In a suit. Checked out my flash"-his standard tattoo designs displayed on a flip rack like art stores used for prints-"asked did I know where you were at. I said, 'I look like a secretary?' "
"These tickets his?"
"Didn't leave a ticket."
"Who was he?"
Ramon wiped blood from the girl's butt then pointed the needle end of the tattoo machine at a newspaper on the counter.
"Him."
Andy picked up the paper. On the front page was a photograph of three middle-aged white men wearing suits and a younger white woman: the mayor of Austin, the governor of Texas, a famous billionaire, and his beautiful blonde wife, all faces well known in Austin.
"The mayor was here?"
Ramon laughed. "What the hell would the mayor want with you?"
"The governor?"
A bigger laugh. "What've you been smoking?"
That left only one, the least likely of all.
"Russell Reeves was here?"
Ramon nodded without looking up from the girl's butt.
"When?"
"Couple hours ago."
"What'd he want?"
"You."
"Why?"
"Didn't say. I didn't ask. I mind my own business."
"Since when?"
Ramon gave him a look over his glasses and a half-smile.
"Okay if I borrow the paper?"
A nod. "Later, bro."
Andy and Max climbed the stairs to his office. Max turned around three times and curled up on his pad in the corner. Andy sat and read the newspaper article. Russell Reeves had just donated $100 million to a scholarship fund so low-income students could attend college. He was being hailed as a visionary philanthropist by the governor and the mayor, the latest in a long line of politicians to honor Russell Reeves.
Russell Reeves was an Austin legend, like Michael Dell. When Reeves was only twenty-two, he invented a computer gizmo that had revolutionized the Internet; he sold it for billions in stock during the high-tech boom years on Wall Street. He then invested in other high-tech companies and made billions more as the NASDAQ climbed to 5000. But he saw the technology boom about to bust, so he sold everything right before the stock market crash of 2000. He walked away from the nineties with over $20 billion in cash. Everything he touched had turned to gold.
Then he gave the gold away.
He gave money to liberal politicians and poor people, environmental causes and alternate energy research, the arts and AIDS; he gave money to build low-income housing and health clinics in East Austin and to buy computers for the public schools and parkland for the people; he gave money to fight global warming and defeat Republicans. Russell Reeves was a devout do-gooder with a heart of gold and a bank account to match. To date, the Russell and Kathryn Reeves Foundation had donated over $2 billion to make Austin a better place.
Reeves was forty now and married to a former Miss UT. Seeing him standing there next to his beauty queen wife in the photo while the governor called him a Texas hero and the mayor said he was Austin's favorite son, and knowing he was worth $15 billion according to the latest Forbes ranking, you'd probably think Russell Reeves was the luckiest man on the face of the Earth… unless you knew about his son.
His seven-year-old son was dying.
Zachary Reeves had a rare, incurable form of cancer. All known medical therapies-chemo, radiation, bone marrow transplant-had failed. So his father had established the Reeves Research Institute on the UT campus, a state-of-the-art cancer research laboratory dedicated to finding a cure for his disease. Russell Reeves had hired renowned scientists from around the world and brought them to Austin. He had spent money and spared no expense. But five years and $5 billion later, there was still no cure. The doctors gave the boy a year.
Consequently, while Russell Reeves was beloved and admired by everyone, he was envied by no one. He was viewed as a tragic figure in Austin. And he was standing in Andy's doorway.
"May I come in?"
Andy dropped the newspaper and stood. Max sensed something was up, so he stood, too.
"Mr. Reeves. Yes, sir. Please come in."
Reeves glanced over at Max. "Does it bite?"
"Only Jo's muffins. Name's Max." Andy stuck his hand out. "I'm Andy Prescott."
Andy had never before shaken the hand of a billionaire. Or even a millionaire, except for Tres.
"Andy, I'm Russell Reeves."
Russell Reeves' net worth made him seem bigger than life, but he was actually no bigger than Andy. His suit was tailored and expensive and draped like silk over his shoulders. He had once worn thick glasses, but Andy had read that he had gotten laser eye surgery. His black hair, once famously thick and curly, was now thinner and shorter and gray on the sides. None of the girls at Whole Foods would call him handsome, but they'd be all over him like politicians on special-interest money. Especially Suzie. Fifteen billion dollars in the bank improved a man's looks.