Read Online The Devil Went Down to Austin by Rick Riordan - Free Book Online

level, so soft, intimate, for Garrett's place that it struck me as insulting.
    I walked through the kitchen, into the bedroom. No suitcase on the bed. No unpacked Maia clothes.

    Out on the shoeboxsized deck, Garrett was sitting in a patio chair, the tails of an XXL
    Hawaiian shirt melting around his waist, a John Deere gimme cap shading his eyes.
    Papers littered the deck around him. He had an open beer at his side, a laptop set up on a TV tray, a joint hanging off the corner of his mouth. Hunter S. Thompson does South Texas.
    "I see you made your calls," I told him.
    He missed a stroke on the keyboard, glared up at me. He spoke with the joint still in his mouth. "I'm busy. Wait a minute."
    He went back to typing—the way Garrett always types, with a vengeance, as if the keys needed to learn their lesson.
    I stepped to the railing, tried to put aside the appealing idea of throwing Garrett's laptop off the balcony.
    Of course, I wouldn't have been the first to have that thought at The Friends. The alley below was littered with broken couches, smashed TVs, mounds of clothes still on hangers.
    Floorboards creaked behind me.
    Maia stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, pizza money still crumpled in one hand.
    The sunlight through the canopy of branches
    made her face and shoulders look like camouflage. I resented the fact that she looked even better than I'd remembered.
    She met my eyes—daring me to speak first.
    "Where did we leave off?" I mused. "That's right—you were just telling me how much you hated visiting Texas."
    "Garrett called me, Tres—months ago, when Matthew Pena first approached them."
    "You represented Pena twice—got him off the hook twice."
    She nodded. "And when Garrett asked my advice, I told him as much as I could without breaking attorneyclient privilege. I told him that under no circumstances, ever, should his company deal with Matthew Pena."
    "That worked real well."
    Anger flickered in her eyes. "Garrett kept me posted. When Jimmy Doebler— With what happened Thursday night, I felt responsible. I came down."
    "From San Francisco."
    "Yes, Tres. Modern conveniences, like airplanes, make that possible."
    Her expression gave me nothing to feed on. It was calm, irritatingly professional.
    "You could've at least—"
    "What, Tres? Called? Garrett made it clear he did not want you involved. Frankly, I agreed with him."
    Garrett kept clacking on the keyboard, pretending to ignore us.
    Across the alley, on the secondstory deck of the frat house, a barechested Greek was drinking a beer. Perfect contentment—a lazy Sunday afternoon, one more party day before summer school started. I wondered if I could bean him from here with a rock.
    Instead I reached down, scooped up some of the papers around Garrett's seat.
    There was a list of the companies who were betatesting Techsan's security software.
    Co_op.com, Austin's online health food store. Ticket Time, the local event promoter.
    Four others I'd never heard of—a West Texas petroleum company, two Internet financial service groups, a boating supply retailer—no doubt Ruby McBride's contri
    bution to their client list. There was a list of reported security leaks, about a dozen in all, most from the petroleum company and the two financial service groups, the companies with the biggest budgets and

    the most to lose. One letter from the CEO of the oil company formally cancelled the contract with Techsan and warned of a suit. The letter cited three different confidential inhouse reports that had been posted anonymously to a Usenet group—a leak that could cost the company millions. There were more letters like that—horror stories from the betatesters, irate emails, threats to sue Techsan out of existence. There was also one fax to Garrett, on Matthew Pena's letterhead, dated April 1, just before all hell broke loose. The fax read, Look forward to doing business with you. —M. An Austin number was written underneath.
    I stared at the M. for a long