Southtown (11 page)

“Not here,” she said.

“Will you come back to the house?”

The house.
As if there were only one—with the bright yellow lights across the canyon, shining through the rain.

Ten years ago, this quarry had been the poorest neighborhood in San Antonio. Workers’ shacks lined dusty roads and dump trucks rumbled back and forth, hauling limestone to the rail depot. Now the quarry was a golf course, a clubhouse, a string of fashionable mansions around the canyon rim. Even the old factory with its smokestacks had been transformed into an upscale shopping center.

The very location of J.P.’s house seemed to suggest that anything was possible.

She decided she would tell him everything. She would postpone her hunt, at least until the morning. And if the worst happened, if Stirman got to her first, she would trust this man—a man she had known for such a short time—to do what was necessary to protect Jem.

“Back to our house,” she said. “That would be wonderful.”

His smile was the best reward, the only reward, she’d had for days.

A battered white Chevrolet was blocking the alley behind the restaurant. It idled at a crazy angle, headlights illuminating the dumpsters, fender almost kissing J.P.’s Lexus.

The man sitting on the hood was a Latino in his late twenties—lean and muscular, military haircut, beige shorts and a green camp shirt.

Nice legs,
Erainya thought absently.

Two glasses of ’97 Brunello had taken the edge off her apprehension. It was hard to think about danger when J.P.’s arm was around her.

The young man looked at them sheepishly. It didn’t take Erainya long to see why. There was a deep gash in J.P.’s car door. The sideview mirror had been sheared off.

Erainya had warned J.P. not to park back here. The lane was too narrow, squeezed between the restaurant and the golf course fence, and it was completely shielded from sight, perfect for car thieves. But the front lot had been full, the alley was convenient, and J.P. cared as little about parking conventions as he did wine prices.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the young man said. “I was trying to get around the dumpster.”

He turned up his palms, revealing a crucifix tattoo on his inner arm.

The guy obviously wasn’t a Paesano’s customer. Probably an off-duty waiter, worried he’d get fired for bashing the Lexus.

J.P. looked pained. He knelt down to examine the damage. “Well, it’s fixable, anyway.”

“Really sorry,” the man said again. “Hope we can solve this without insurance.”

“I doubt you want to do that,” J.P. said. “Probably looking at a few thousand dollars.”

Erainya decided the young man wasn’t a waiter. Something about his tattoo was wrong, and the way he held himself—not really sheepish, after all. He was coiled like a spring, as if he were used to watching his back. He was staring at her, almost like he was trying to warn her of something.

“You’ll have to talk to my boss,” the young man said.

He slid off the hood of the Chevrolet and stepped aside.

Erainya realized, too late, what was wrong about him. He moved like a convict.

The Chevrolet’s back door opened.

The man who stepped out was tall, with a triangle of black hair, dark glasses, an expensive leather jacket and pale, pale skin.

He said, “Change of plans, Mrs. Barrow.”

The name froze her.

She should have reached for her Colt, but her hand wouldn’t obey. She watched the glint of the man’s pistol as it emerged from his leather jacket.

J.P. said, “No.”

Erainya tried to warn him, to stop him, but he stepped in front of her, shielding her. The gun fired.

The bullet ripped through the white broadcloth above his belt. Erainya wanted to scream. She wanted to move. But the Colt in her purse might as well have been at home.

J.P. crumpled to his knees.

And Will Stirman turned, pointing his gun at the center of her chest.

14

The last person I wanted to find in the Brooke Army Medical Center waiting area was a homicide detective.

Ana DeLeon was leaning against the reception desk, talking to a couple of uniforms and another plainclothes detective.

She might’ve been mistaken for a young professional—a hospital administrator being hit on by the three male cops—unless you noticed the sergeant’s badge clipped to her belt, or the shoulder holster under her blue silk blazer. Or unless you knew, like every guy in SAPD, that the last cop who tried to hit on Ana DeLeon pulled desk duty for a month and still had trouble sitting down without pain.

She saw me approaching, told her colleagues something on the order of:
Here comes Navarre. Get lost or I’ll make you talk to him.

They got lost.

“I stayed at the office until seven last night,” she told me. “I keep wondering—if you’d showed, would we be here now?”

“What’s the word?”

“No change in condition. And no leads on the shooter, unless you’re bringing me something.”

I used to have a martial arts instructor who could press his hand very softly on the center of my chest, and no amount of effort could dislodge him. I’d swear he was barely making contact, but after thirty seconds, his touch left a bruise. DeLeon’s eyes were like that.

“I’m going upstairs,” I told her.

“No visiting hours for ICU.”

“The hell with visiting hours.”

She studied my face. “I suppose I’ll chaperone, in case you need arresting.”

After a few conversations with nurses and some badge-waving from DeLeon, we were admitted to the gunshot ward.

J. P. Sanchez lay cocooned in linen and bandages, hooked up to so many tubes and monitors the machines seemed to be feeding off him rather than keeping him alive. His eyes were bruised, his skin as gray as his hair.

“They’re trying to stabilize him,” DeLeon told me. “They’ll do another round of surgery if he makes it through the night.”

“Did he talk at all?”

“Tres, he flat-lined in the ambulance. He wasn’t in a talkative mood.”

I touched the guardrail of his bed. Even through the hospital odors, I could smell his cologne.

I imagined his wry smile.
Give me a chance, Tres.

“Come on.” DeLeon’s hand gripped my shoulder. “Buy me coffee.”

She steered me toward the elevator.

In the hospital food court, I was vaguely aware of the other plainclothes detective—an Anglo guy built like a linebacker—falling in behind us. He kept his distance, out of earshot.

I bought two tall coffees. DeLeon and I took a corner booth. I drank while DeLeon emptied sugar packets into her cup, three at a time.

“That’ll kill you,” I told her.

“I’ve been promised faster deaths.” She stirred, sipped without even making a face. “So where is Stirman?”

“Ask your Fugitive Task Force.”

“Yesterday, you said he was in town.”

I stared into my coffee.

My day had begun with Folgers and goat’s milk, prepared by a blind woman on a ranch. Here it was evening, and I felt like I was still drinking from the same cup, no wiser than I had been before.

Erainya was missing. An innocent man was upstairs dying. Sam Barrera was cracking under stress. And I’d been asked to tell the police nothing.

“Around five this evening,” DeLeon said, “patrol got a call. One of Erainya’s neighbors reported seeing her in her front yard with a gun. She was pointing it at Dr. Sanchez. Then Sanchez calmed her down. They left together before patrol could get there. Two hours later, we found Sanchez bleeding to death behind Paesano’s. Erainya was missing. One possibility: She shot her boyfriend and fled.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s also Major Cooper’s working theory.” She nodded toward the linebacker, who sat two tables away, feigning interest in the bluebonnet paintings.

“Major,” I said. “That’s a Department of Criminal Justice rank.”

“Fugitive Task Force,” she said. “I asked him to come with me. Just in case you had something to say. For the record, Major Cooper does not believe Stirman would stay in San Antonio.”

“He wants a few more people to die?”

“He needs convincing.”

I tried to look her in the eyes, but it was damn uncomfortable.

In the year since I’d seen her last, her face had filled out. Her skin had taken on that healthy glow you see in new mothers, her hair cut short to keep little baby hands from grabbing fistfuls.

She seemed more confident, balanced. Maybe that came from the marriage, or the baby, or the promotion. I didn’t know. The fact that I didn’t know made me sad.

I told her about my encounter with Stirman at the soccer field, the videotape he’d sent to Barrera, the McCurdy Ranch, Barrera’s admission that Stirman had been framed.

DeLeon listened, and drank her coffee. I knew she was mentally recording every statement.

“Gerry Far,” she said, “the informant who sold out Stirman eight years ago. We found him this morning—or what was left of him—floating in the San Antonio River. I called the FBI. They weren’t impressed. A guy like Far makes lots of enemies, they told me. Even if Stirman
did
kill him, he did it days ago, on his way north. Their most recent reliable sighting places Stirman last night in Kansas. They get a hundred leads a day, all of them north. Since the Oklahoma City shooting, every crime from Colorado to Missouri, some jittery witness decides he saw the Floresville Five. I’m just another paranoid local cop, in the city where Stirman’s least likely to be.”

“Stirman’s here. I didn’t imagine him.”

“You want me to call Major Cooper over?”

“So he can dismiss me as paranoid, too?”

“Cooper’s good. Best they’ve got on the state task force. He’s skeptical Stirman would be so stupid as to stay here, but he’s willing to listen.”

“If the manhunt moves here in force, the media will find out. They’ll broadcast it. Stirman will feel the net closing. He’ll disappear.”

“Not if we do it quickly and quietly.”

We locked eyes. I wondered if she believed her own words. With a media circus like the Floresville Five, there was no way to handle it quickly or quietly. Every law enforcement officer in the state would want a piece. Catching Will Stirman would be like chasing a speedboat with an aircraft carrier.

“Stirman won’t bother with a hostage if he’s forced to run,” I said. “Erainya will die.”

“If she’s not already dead. I’m sorry, Tres.”

I shook my head. “If he wanted Erainya dead, he would’ve left her in that alley along with Sanchez. He took her alive. She’s got something he wants.”

DeLeon stared at the elevator doors.

“You told me there were rumors,” I said. “About the night Stirman was arrested.”

“Maybe I didn’t give you the worst version.”

“How much worse can it be?”

“After Stirman was shot, he was ranting in the hospital, okay? A couple of cops who were guarding him heard the whole story. For one thing, Stirman claimed the PIs had stolen his money. He was this low-tech guy, you understand. Didn’t trust bank accounts or computers. He said he was about to leave on a chartered jet with two duffel bags full of cash. The PIs supposedly took the money.”

“Assuming it existed, how much would we be talking about?”

“Don’t know. How much could you fit in two large black duffel bags?”

“Jesus.”

I remembered Stirman at the soccer field, his barely restrained rage as he looked down at Jem.
Tell your mother— She knows what I want. She’d best give it back.

“There’s more,” DeLeon said.

“The woman who died was his wife.”

DeLeon looked momentarily impressed. “Yes, but not just that. Stirman claimed the PIs didn’t only shoot her. They shot their baby.”

I stared at her.

DeLeon curled her fingers over the stack of torn sugar packets on the table. “There was no baby at the scene. No sign there had ever been one. But according to Stirman, the mother and child were both killed. Maybe accidentally. Barrow and Barrera let Stirman almost bleed to death while they destroyed the evidence and toted away the cash. There was no cash at the scene when the police arrived.”

“Did anybody believe Stirman’s story?”

“Why should they? Cons say shit about their captors all the time. Of course, Stirman also claimed he was innocent of supplying the women to McCurdy’s ranch. Nobody believed that, either.”

“Killing a child doesn’t sound like Sam Barrera’s style.”

“Neither does framing somebody.”

I glanced over at Major Cooper, who was still admiring the bluebonnet pictures. “Why hide a child’s death and not the mother’s?”

“Killing an illegal immigrant woman is one thing,” DeLeon said. “Killing an infant—that’s something else. Even the shittiest public defender could make use of that in Stirman’s trial. Let’s say Barrow or Barrera panicked. One stray bullet. You’ve just murdered a child. You’re going to live with that on your conscience forever. As soon as the media find out, you’ll be publicly crucified. You can guess what happens. We get a dozen cases like this every year. The child’s body conveniently disappears. A lot easier to conceal that kind of murder than the death of an adult.”

I wanted to say it wasn’t possible.

Then I remembered Barrera’s haunted look as he toured the McCurdy Ranch, as if he needed to remind himself there’d been justification for what he and Barrow had done.

Erainya had killed Fred Barrow only a few weeks after Stirman’s arrest. Fred had been treating her like dirt for years. Maybe something besides the abuse had made her snap—some new proof Fred Barrow was a monster.

“No cop wants to believe a guy like Stirman,” DeLeon said. “None of them spread these rumors outside the department. By the time Stirman got to trial, he’d gone tight-lipped. He never mentioned the dead child or the money again. Like he’d already started planning his own revenge. But if you’re wondering why Barrera and your boss weren’t anxious to bring in the police . . .”

“Give me a few hours,” I said. “Let me talk to Barrera.”

“Major Cooper is willing to listen now. He might not believe you, but if he gets the idea later that you held back information—”

“I could deal with Stirman more effectively my way.”

“You mean Ralph’s way.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to tell her about her husband’s track record for finding his enemies, or what he did with them afterward. I knew she wouldn’t want Ralph to have any part of this.

She sipped her coffee, no doubt trying to contain her anger. “Tres . . . if somebody killed my baby . . . I wouldn’t care how much money they stole from me or where they hid it. Do you understand? I wouldn’t trust myself to keep them alive long enough to find out. And this is me talking, the law-abiding one. When I think about how somebody like my husband might react . . .”

She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to.

“Just a couple of hours,” I said. “I’ll call you tonight.”

She looked at Major Cooper, two tables away. She shook her head.

“You didn’t see what Gerry Far looked like when we pulled him out of the river, Tres.” She slid out from the booth, pulled on her raincoat. “For Erainya’s sake, don’t wait too long.”

When I got home to 90 Queen Anne, the two-story craftsman was dark except for my little in-law apartment on the side. Rainwater streamed down the driveway, carrying away petals from my landlord’s purple sages and blue plumbagos.

Sam Barrera waited on my stoop in the glow of the porch light. He was catching moths and shaking them like dice.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“It’ll cost you.”

Sam studied me.

I tried to remember if I’d ever seen him with a five-o’clock shadow before, or with his tie loosened.

He said, “Cost me?”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir. Two bags full.”

He released his moth, watched it flutter up the side of the screen door. “So you know.”

In my younger days, I would’ve hauled off and decked him, but I’d mellowed over the years. Now I was perfectly willing to breathe deep, thinking rationally, and invest the few extra minutes it would take to invite him inside, find a gun, load it, and shoot him.

“Mi casa es tu casa,”
I told him.

I unlocked the front door, just missed stepping on the dead mouse Robert Johnson had left for me on the carpet.

The offending feline sat smugly on the kitchen counter. He had one paw in the middle of his empty food dish. A subtle hint.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said.

I cleaned up the present and filled Robert Johnson’s dish with tortilla chips and flaked tuna.

Sam Barrera made the grand tour of my apartment. That takes about thirty seconds. Once you’ve seen the futon and the built-in ironing board and the tai chi sword rack above the toilet, you’ve pretty much seen it all.

“Talk,” I told Barrera. “If I have to ask, the bathroom sword is coming unsheathed.”

Barrera sat down on the futon. He opened that annoying notepad of his.

“Sam, it’s not a lecture,” I said. “Put away the notes.”

“Fourteen million dollars,” he said, quietly.

I set down the tuna can. “Fourteen million.”

“How much we stole. Yeah.”

My fingers felt numb. I wanted to say that was a hell of a lot of money. Large change. A truckload of kitty nachos. Two big goddamn duffel bags. All I could say was “Damn.”

“Stirman called an hour ago,” Barrera said. “He wants an exchange for Erainya. Tomorrow night. Any police involvement, she dies.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s fucking great, Sam. So we just hop over to Stop-N-Go with our ATM cards, and we’ve got it covered.”

“I don’t have any money. I used my half to build up I-Tech a long time ago. I don’t know what Erainya did with Fred’s share. She sure as hell didn’t put it into the agency.”

“Erainya’s been scraping for money ever since I’ve known her. She’s got no hidden cash.”

“She had to know.”

I thought about the note to Erainya from H., telling her the package from Fred was safe.

“She would’ve turned it in,” I said, trying to believe it. “
You
should’ve turned it in.”