CHAPTER 1.

Lars Elder looks like a banker the way I look like a private eye, which is to say, not much.

He was waiting on the porch of my family ranch house, flicking a switchblade open and closed, a computer disk and a can of Budweiser next to him on the railing.

Lars' hairline had receded since I'd seen him last, but he still sported the earring, the Willie Nelson beard. His shirt, vest, and jeans were faded to the colors of a dust storm, and his eyes gave the same impression-dry and turbulent.

"Tres," he said. "Thanks for coming."

"No problema."

What I was thinking: The Navarre family banker drinking beer at ten in the morning is not a good sign.

Lars closed his knife, looked out toward the wheat fields.

Fifty yards away, past the tomato garden, the ranch caretaker was putting hay into the cattle feeder. Harold Diliberto stopped to watch us, his pitchfork suspended, dripping straw.

"Harold showed me the work you've been doing inside," Lars said. "You've been spending a lot of time out here."

"Some," I admitted.

I tried not to feel irritated, like Harold had betrayed a confidence.

Truth was, I'd been out at the ranch every weekend since the end of April-scraping old paint, filling in the spreading cracks in the original section of the house that had been my great-grandfathers homestead in the 1880s. I'd neglected both my jobs in San Antonio, ditched the cell phone, dropped out of my social life with little explanation to my friends.

"Place was overdue for some maintenance," I told Lars. "You ask me out here for the Home Beautiful tour?"

He didn't smile. "Talked to Garrett recently?"

"Maybe four, five months ago."

"But you'll see him soon. You're teaching that summer class in Austin, aren't you?"

Another surge of irritation. "British lit, for six weeks. May I ask how the hell you know about it?"

Lars brought the switchblade up like a conductor's baton. "Look, I'm sorry. I had to talk to you before you left. You know what Garrett's been up to?"

"You mean like Buffett concerts? Smoking pot?"

"His programming project."

"Must've missed it. I tend to phase out when Garrett talks about RNI."

Lars winced, like I'd just told him the price of an expensive gift. "Tres, Garrett isn't working at RNI anymore. He quit over a year ago."

I stared at him. My brother had worked at the same software company for sixteen years. He practically ran the place, took all the days off he wanted, had a retirement package.

"Got himself involved in a start-up company," Lars told me. "That was two years ago-spring of '98. Then last year, May of '99, he decided he couldn't keep working both jobs anymore. Garrett just left RNI-no severance, no benefits."

"Not possible."

"He's working the start-up with Jimmy Doebler."

I studied Lars' eyes, tried to tell if he was joking. Apparently, he wasn't, and beer for breakfast started sounding like a good idea.

Last I'd heard-maybe three years ago-Jimmy Doebler and Garrett hadn't even been speaking to each other. When they were speaking, they got along about as well as electricity and gunpowder.

"You're sure?" I asked him.

Lars picked up the computer disk, handed it to me. "Some files-things I was able to find on the Internet. They're calling themselves Techsan Security Software. Three principals in the company-Jimmy, his wife, Ruby, Garrett. They've been designing an encryption product. The beta-testing started in January."

I wagged the floppy. "It's news to me. Why the dossier, Lars? What's your interest?"

He rubbed his beard with his knuckles.

"I've known Jimmy and Garrett for a long time. I was around when Garrett-" He faltered. "Well, you know. I was around for the bad times. But when I called Garrett last week, I'd never heard him sound so bad. He and Jimmy are fighting again. Jimmy and his wife have separated-all because of this company they've started. I asked Garrett how they were holding up financially. He just laughed. The last few days, he won't even return my calls. I thought maybe you could talk to him."

I looked over the split rail fence, down the pasture toward the woods. The Charolais were grazing in the dry bed of Apache Creek. The water tower glistened gray.

I thought about the hundreds of times I'd watched the sun come up over the Balcones Escarpment from here, the topography like an onion, layer upon translucent layer-my first hunting trip with my dad, a dozen Thanksgiving dinners, my first night with a woman, three hurricanes, two fires, even a snowstorm. I remembered my grandfather, over there by the northern property line, digging holes for fence posts.

And even after six weeks of manual labor, rebuilding my relationship with the ranch, I could still feel that Sunday afternoon last April, down in the clearing, when I'd almost died at the hands of an old friend.

All I wanted was a few more weekends, time to scrape paint.

"Look, Lars, I won't say I'm not worried. But Garrett and Jimmy-what you're describing. Unfortunately, it sounds pretty typical. I appreciate your concern ..."

"You don't understand," Lars said. "Garrett needed capital for his share in the Techsan start-up. A lot of capital. With his financial record, nobody else would help him. I hate even talking to you about this, Tres. I know you don't have a lot of money."

I tried to hand back the computer disk. "If you made my brother a loan, I'm sorry, Lars. I don't see how I can help you."

"I couldn't talk him out of it," he said. "The deed is in his name. He made me promise not to worry you, but when he signed the papers he still had a steady job. Now ... He hasn't made a payment in over a year. It's just-I don't know what I can promise, come July 1st. My boss is breathing down my neck."

My heart twisted into a sailor's knot. "July 1st?"

I wanted to ask what he meant, but unfortunately, I'd begun to understand.

Lars pinched the blade of his knife, threw it toward an old live oak stump, where it stuck straight up.

"Garrett mortgaged this ranch, Tres. And unless I see something-a sign of good faith by the end of this month, I'm going to have to foreclose."

CHAPTER 2.

San Antonio and Austin are like estranged siblings.

San Antonio would be the sister who stayed home, took care of the elderly parents, made tortillas by hand in the kitchen, wore cotton dresses until the colors faded. She's the big-boned one-handsome but unadorned, given to long afternoon siestas.

Austin is the sister who went away to college, discovered rock 'n' roll and dyed her hair purple. She's the one my mother would've warned me about, if my mother hadn't been an ex-hippie.

That afternoon I figured out why God put the two sisters seventy-five miles apart. It was to give irate siblings like me a cooling-off period-an hour on the road to reconsider fratricide.

Around two o'clock, I finally tracked down my brother. A friend of a Hell's Angel of a friend told me he was staying at Jimmy Doebler's place on Lake Travis.

Sure enough, they were down by the water, bricking in a shed that looked like the third little pig's house. It was a kiln-pottery being Jimmy's second oldest hobby, next to getting Garrett in trouble.

From fifteen feet away, Jimmy and Garrett hadn't noticed me.

Jimmy was hunched over, tapping down a line of bricks.

Garrett was up on a scaffold, five feet above, doing the chimney. His ponytail had flipped over the shoulder and gotten stuck in a splot of wet mortar. Sweat glistened in his beard. He made an odd sight up there, with no legs, like some sort of tie-dyed polyp grown out of the board.

The afternoon heat was cooking the air into soup. In the crook of a smoke tree, a jam box was cranking out Lucinda Williams' latest.

"Garrett," I called.

He looked down as if he'd known I was there all along, his expression as friendly as Rasputin's.

"Well," he said. "My little brother."

Jimmy wiped his hands on his tattered polo shirt, straightened.

He hadn't aged well. His face had weathered, his mop of sandcastle hair faded a dirty gray. He had the sun-blasted look of a frat boy who'd gotten lost on Spring Break thirty years ago and never found his way out of the dunes.

"Hey, man." He cut his eyes to either side, wiped his nose. "Garrett said you wouldn't be up until your class started."

"Wasn't planning to," I said. "Then I talked to the family banker. That kind of changed things."

Garrett stabbed his trowel between two scaffold planks. "This ain't the time, Tres."

"When would be the time, Garrett? Next month- when they stick the FOR SALE sign on the front gate of the ranch?"

Lucinda Williams kept singing about her mamma. The bottleneck flew across her guitar.

"What do you want?" Garrett asked. "You want to take a punch at me?"

"I don't know. Are you filled with money?"

Garrett climbed down from the scaffold-one hundred percent upper body strength. He settled into his Quickie wheelchair-the deluxe model with the Holstein hide cover and the Persian seat cushion. He pushed himself toward me. "Come on. You've driven all this way pissed off at me. Take a swing."

He looked terrible. His skin was pasty, his eyes jaundiced. He'd lost weight-Christ, a lot of weight. Maybe fifteen pounds. He hardly had a gut anymore.

I said, "I want an explanation."

"It's my ranch."

"It's our ranch, Garrett. I don't care what it said in the will."

He puffed a laugh. "Yeah, you do. You care a whole shit-load."

He jerked the macrame pouch off the side of his wheelchair, started rummaging through it-looking for his marijuana, his rolling papers.

"Would you not do that?" I asked.

"Do what?"

I grabbed the bag.

He tried to take it away from me, but I stepped back, felt how heavy the thing was, looked inside. "What is this?"

I came out with a handgun, a Lorcin .380.

"What did you do-buy this on the street?" I protested. "I took one of these away from a fourteen-year-old drug dealer last week. Since when do you carry something like this?"

Complete stillness. Even Lucinda Williams paused between songs.

"Look, Tres," Jimmy said. "Back off a little."

I checked the Lorcin. It was fully loaded. "Yeah, you're right, Jimmy. Garrett's got you on his side now. Everything's under control."

It was a cheap shot.

Jimmy shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His face turned the color of guava juice.

"We're working things out," Garrett told me.

"With a gun?"

"Jimmy and I made a pact for the day, man. No arguing. You want to stay here, abide by that rule."

His tone made me remember trips to Rockport when I was in middle school, Jimmy and Garrett college kids, forced to baby-sit me while my dad got drunk down on the jetties. Garrett had resented me tagging along, told me to shut up so they could meet some girls. The memory brought back that irrational anger, shaped in the mind of an eleven-year-old, that this was all Jimmy Doebler's fault-that he had always inserted himself into our lives at the wrong time.

I shoved the Lorcin back into the bag, tossed it back to Garrett. "Lars Elder passed along some headlines you've been making in the high-tech magazines. Beta-testing problems. Glitches in the software. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood several million in debt. Millions, Garrett, with six zeroes. And your friend here wants me to back off?"

Jimmy said nothing.

Garrett rummaged in the bag, found a prerolled joint, stuck it in his mouth. "If we thought it was your business-"

"You pawned the ranch."

"And Jimmy got divorced today," he yelled. The joint fell out of his mouth, into his lap. "Okay, Tres? So shut the fuck up."