Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) by Craig McDonald Page A

said, "I loved Tony."
    Alicia looked at the poet.
    Bud said, "Tony. You know --- Tom Mix's horse."
    Alicia mouthed, "Oh..."
    "It's a guy kind of thing," I said.
    21
    Our new place came furnished --- two bedrooms, small kitchen. Came with a radio, too --- a big old floor model Motorola with tubes and lights. Bud fiddled around with the dial on that monstrosity and coaxed loose a newscast.
    The morning's shooting was being passed off as flaring Mexican gang violence; the Skull and Bones crew was presumed by police to have been confused for some rival gang. The ghosts of the Zoot Suit Wars loomed.
    It strained credulity, but, hell, at least we were kept out of it. No arrests were reported, so I could only deduce that Fierro and his surviving crony had walked off from the wreck before the cops spotted them. Fierro seemed to have been granted more lives than a litter of bastard cats.
    Bud and me went to the garage and retrieved Pancho's skull. I brought along the fake head, too --- the best of the phony skulls with the underbite --- for good measure.
    Alicia said, "What are you doing with those heads?"
    "Full disclosure time," I said. "You two should know some other legends about Pancho's head and some of his lost loot. Stuff about treasure maps and the like. Stories that might make us all richer." As I toyed with Pancho's skull, I filled my friends' heads with Tex-Mex treasure folklore.
    I thought maybe she would closet herself while I fooled around with Pancho's head, but Alicia stayed close by the action. She brewed us up some coffee while Bud and I looked over the head. If there was ever a tattoo on the scalp, well, it was lost now. No carvings there in bone that any of us could detect, either.
    Took me about six minutes, but I finally found this hairline bump trailing down out of the wispy, remaining hair, down the forehead toward the nose and then veering off and into the orbit of Pancho's right eye. The bump was just raised a bit from the surface of the skull and of slightly different hue.
    Granted Pancho wasn't embalmed well, but looking at the skull now, I thought about the steps that would have to have been taken to hide something all those years ago in that much fresher head. I figured Emil and his cronies must have had pretty strong stomachs to skin down to bone whatever was left of Villa's mummified soft tissue; to maybe have to clear material out of the eye sockets and whatever was left in the head in order to accommodate whatever they might have hidden inside the skull.
    I took out my Swiss Army knife and used the dull edge of my bottle-opener to scrape away at the bump. The surface of the welt flaked off like old plaster or something similar to it. There was a thin string hidden under there --- something like fishing line, maybe.
    I slipped the flat edge of my blade under the string and raised it and the rest of the welt crumbled away as the pressure I was exerting on the string popped it loose. I grabbed the end of the string where it disappeared into the eye socket and coaxed loose the other end. It emerged secured to a small glassine tube, about the width of a cigarillo and maybe an inch-and-a-half long. I detached the tube from the end of the string. I said, "There's some kind of paper rolled up inside there."
    Alicia loaned me her tweezers and I teased the paper loose and carefully unrolled it. It was square. Unfolded and unfurled, the scrap of paper measured maybe three inches by three inches. The paper was yellowed with age and appeared to be blank on both sides. There was a notepad of blank paper by the phone. I asked Fiske to fetch the pad. I carefully traced the outline of the hidden scrap of paper and cut out a match from the notepad. "An eventual replacement," I said to Alicia when she arched an inquiring eyebrow.
    Bud leaned in and looked at the old scrap of paper. "The map?"
    "Must be. Or must have been: nothing to be seen on it now."
    "Invisible ink maybe?"
    "Only thing it could be."
    "Great," Fiske