Southtown (2 page)

This was supposed to be a showcase day for Riggs. His prison ministry would turn a dozen juvenile delinquents away from crime and toward Christ. The press would run a favorable story. Riggs would attract some big private donors. He’d shared these dreams with Will, because Will was his proudest achievement—living proof that God’s mercy was infinite.

Will summoned up his most honest smile. “Pastor, you come look at the stained glass now? I think we’re almost done.”

The old preacher went down harder than Pablo had hoped.

Riggs should have understood the point of the glass knife against his jugular. He should’ve let himself be tied up quietly.

But Riggs acted outraged. He said he couldn’t believe everything he’d worked for was a lie—that all of them, for months, had been using him. He tried to reason with them, shame them, and in the end, he fought like a cornered
chupacabra
. Elroy, Pablo and Stirman had to wrestle him down. Zeke got too excited. He smashed the old man’s head with the soldering iron until C.C. grabbed his wrists and snarled, “Damn, man! That’s his skull showing!”

Pablo took a nasty bite on his finger trying to cover the preacher’s mouth. Elroy had blood splattered on his pants. They were all sure Riggs’ yelling and screaming had ruined the plan. Any second the guards would come running.

But they got Riggs tied up with guitar string and taped his mouth and shoved him, moaning and half-conscious, into the corner of the vestry. Still nobody came.

Elroy stood behind the worktable so anybody coming in wouldn’t see the bloodstains on his pants. C.C. and Zeke huddled around him, staring at the stained glass as if they gave a damn about finishing it. Zeke suppressed a schoolboy giggle.

“Shut up, freak,” Luis said.

“
You
shut up, spic.”

Luis started to go for him, but Pablo grabbed his shirt collar.

“
Both
of you,” Stirman said, “cool it.”

“We got Riggs’ car keys,” Elroy murmured. “Don’t see why—”

“No,” Stirman said. “We do it right. Patience.”

Pablo didn’t like it, but he got a D-string ready. He curled the ends around his hands, moved to one side of the door. Luis took the other side.

Stirman sat down in his chair, in plain sight of the entrance. He crossed his legs and read through his testimonial notes. The son-of-a-bitch was cool. Pablo had to give him that.

Pablo’s finger throbbed where the pastor had bit it. The copper guitar string stung his broken skin.

Finally he heard footsteps on gravel. The rookie supervisor appeared with a heaping plate of ribs.

Stirman smiled apologetically. “Pastor Riggs wants to talk to you. Prison major came by.”

“Hell,” said the supervisor.

He started toward the vestry and Pablo garroted him, barbecue and baked beans flying everywhere. The supervisor’s fingers raked at the elusive string around his neck as Pablo dragged him into the corner.

The rookie had just gone limp when Grier came in.

Luis tried to get him around the neck, but the old marine was too wily. He sidestepped, saw Zeke’s soldering iron coming in time to catch the blow on his arm, managed one good yell before Elroy came over the table on top of him, crumpling him to the floor, Grier’s head connecting hard with the cement.

Elroy got up. He was holding a broken piece of white glass and a mess of red rags. The rest of the glass was impaled just below Grier’s sternum.

Grier’s eyes rolled back in his head. His fingers clutched his gut.

C.C. slapped Elroy’s arm. “What the hell you do that for?”

“Just happened.”

They stood there, frozen, as Grier’s muscles relaxed. His mouth opened and stayed that way.

Five minutes later, they had his body and the garroted rookie stripped to their underwear. The rookie was only unconscious, so they tied him up, taped his mouth, crammed him and Grier’s corpse into the tiny vestry with the comatose Reverend.

Elroy and Luis got into the supervisors’ clothes. Grier’s had blood on them, but not that much. Most of Grier’s bleeding must’ve been inside him. Elroy figured he could cover the stains with a clipboard. Luis’ clothes had barbecue sauce splattered down the front. Neither uniform fit exactly right, but Pablo thought they might pass. They didn’t have to fool anybody very long.

Elroy and Luis put the supervisors’ IDs around their necks. They tucked the laminated photos in their shirt pockets like they didn’t want them banging against their chests.

C.C., still in prison whites, made a call from Pastor Riggs’ desk phone, pretending he was the Maintenance Department foreman. He told the back gate to expect a crew in five minutes to fix their surveillance camera.

He hung up, smiled at Stirman. “They can’t wait to see us. Damn camera’s been broke for a month. We’ll call you from the sally port.”

“Don’t screw up,” Stirman told him.

“Who, me?”

With one last look, Pablo tried to warn Luis to be careful. He couldn’t shake the image of his cousin getting shot at the gate, his disguise seen through in a second, but Luis just grinned at him. No better than the stupid gringo Zeke—he was having a grand time. Luis threw Pablo the keys to the Reverend’s SUV.

Once they were gone, Stirman picked up the phone.

“What you doing?” Pablo asked.

Stirman placed an outside call—Pablo could tell from the string of numbers. He got an answer. He said, “Go.”

Then he hung up.

“What?” Pablo demanded.

Stirman looked at him with those unsettling eyes—close-set, dark as oil, with a softness that might’ve been mistaken for sorrow or even sympathy, except for the hunger behind them. They were the eyes of a slave ship navigator, or a doctor in a Nazi death camp.

“Safe passage,” Stirman told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

Pablo imagined some Mexican mother hearing those words as the boxcar door closed on her and her family, locking them in the hot unventilated darkness, with a promise that they’d all see
los estados unidos
in the morning.

Pablo needed to kill Stirman.

He should take out his shank and do it. But he couldn’t with Zeke there—stupid loyal Zeke with his stupid soldering iron.

Thunder broke, rolling across the tin roof of the chapel.

“Big storm coming,” Stirman said. “That’s good for us.”

“It won’t rain,” Pablo said in Spanish. He felt like being stubborn, forcing Stirman to use
his
language. “That’s dry thunder.”

Stirman gave him an indulgent look. “Hundred-year flood, son. Wait and see.”

Pablo wanted to argue, but his voice wouldn’t work.

Stirman took the car keys out of his hand and went in the other room, jingling the brass cross on the Reverend’s chain.

Pablo stared at the phone.

Luis, Elroy and C.C. should’ve reached the back gate by now. They should’ve called.

Or else they’d failed, and the guards were coming.

In the corner, wedged between the unconscious supervisor and Grier’s body, Pastor Riggs stared at him—dazed blue eyes, his head wound glistening like a volcanic crater in his white hair.

Out in the chapel, Zeke was pacing with his soldering iron. He’d done an imperfect job wiping up Grier’s blood, so his footprints made faint red prints back and forth across the cement.

Stirman pretended to work on the stained glass. He had his back to the vestry as if Pablo posed no threat at all.

Pablo could walk out there, drive the shank into Stirman’s back before he knew what was happening.

He was considering the possibility when Zeke stopped, looking at something outside. Maybe the lightning.

Whatever it was, his attention was diverted. The timing wouldn’t get any better.

Pablo gripped the shank.

He’d gone three steps toward Stirman when the guard came in.

It was Officer Gonzales.

She scanned the room, marking the trustees’ positions like land mines. Stirman and Zeke stood perfectly still.

Gonzales’ hand strayed toward her belt, but of course she wasn’t armed. Guards never were, inside the fence.

“Where are your supervisors?” she asked.

She must’ve been scared, but she kept an edge of anger in her voice—trying to control the situation, trying to avoid any hint she was vulnerable.

Stirman pointed to the vestry. “Right in there, ma’am.”

Gonzales frowned. She took a step toward the vestry. Then her eyes locked on something—Pablo’s hand. He had completely forgotten the shank.

She stepped back, too late.

Zeke crushed her windpipe with the soldering iron as she tried to scream. He grabbed the front of her shirt, pulled her down, Gonzales gagging, digging in her heels, clawing at Zeke’s wrists.

Stirman got hold of her ankles. They dragged her into the corner where they taped her mouth, bound her hands. Zeke slapped her in the head when she tried to struggle.

Pablo just watched.

He was a statue. He couldn’t do a damn thing.

Stirman rose, breathing heavy.

“Bind her feet,” he told Zeke.

“In a minute,” Zeke murmured.

He tugged at Gonzales’ belt. He started pulling off her pants.

“Zeke,” Stirman said.

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“Fucking her.”

Gonzales groaned—dazed but still conscious.

Zeke got her pants around her thighs. Her panties were blue.

The phone in the vestry rang.

“Zeke.” Stirman’s voice tightened.

Officer Gonzales tried to fight, huffing against the tape on her mouth.

Pablo wanted to help her. He imagined himself driving the shank into Stirman’s back, coming up behind Zeke, taking him, too.

He imagined the back gates opening, himself at the wheel of the Reverend’s SUV, the plains of South Texas unfolding before him, Zeke’s and Will Stirman’s crumpled bodies far behind in his wake. He just wanted to get back to his wife.

The vestry phone rang again.

“Zeke,” Stirman said. “Get off her.”

“Only take a minute.” He was untying the drawstring of his prison pants. His hands, arms and neck were pale sweaty animal muscle.

Pablo took a step forward.

Stirman’s kidneys,
he told himself.
Then Zeke’s carotid artery.

Stirman turned. He saw the shank, locked eyes with Pablo.

“Give me that,” Stirman ordered.

Pablo looked for his courage. “I was just . . .”

Stirman held out his hand, lifted his eyebrows.

Pablo handed over the shank.

Stirman walked behind Zeke, who was now in his underwear, straddling Gonzales’ huge bare thighs.

Stirman grabbed his cell mate by the hair, yanked his chin up, and brought down the shank in one efficient thrust.

It should have ended there, but something inside Stirman seemed to snap. He stabbed again, spitting cuss words, then again, cursing the names of people Pablo didn’t know, swearing that he had tried, he had fucking tried to forget.

Afterward, Gonzales lay with her clothes half off, her gold-rimmed glasses freckled with blood. Zeke’s body trembled, waiting for a climax that was never going to happen.

“Get the phone,” Stirman said.

Pablo started. The vestry phone was still ringing.

He stumbled into the pastor’s office, picked up the receiver.

“Damn, man.” C.C.’s voice. “Where you been?”

C.C. said the way was clear. They’d taken down two more guards—one at the gate, one in the watchtower. The keys to the armory had yielded five 9mm handguns, a 12-gauge shotgun, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. Elroy and Luis were manning the sally port, waiting for the SUV.

Pablo put down the receiver. His hands were cold and sweaty. Some of Zeke’s blood had speckled his sleeves. He took one last look at the bound supervisor, Pastor Riggs, Grier’s body slumped at their feet.

No other choice,
he told himself.

He went into the chapel.

Stirman was kneeling next to Officer Gonzales, dabbing the blood from her glasses with a rag. Zeke’s dead arm was draped across her waist. Gonzales was shivering as Stirman told her it was okay. Nobody was going to hurt her.

Stirman rose when he saw Pablo. He pointed the shank at Pablo’s chin, let it glitter there like Christmas ornament glass. “I
own
you, amigo. You are my new right-hand man. You understand? You are mine.”

No,
Pablo thought.

As soon as they got through those gates, Pablo and Luis would take off by themselves. They would head west to El Paso, as far from Will Stirman as they could get.

But Stirman’s eyes held him. Pablo had blown his chance. He’d frozen. Stirman had acted. Stirman had saved Gonzales. Pablo had done nothing.

Pablo clawed at the fact, looking for leverage. He said, “Who are Barrow and Barrera?”

Stirman’s jaw tightened. “What?”

“You were saying those names when you . . .” Pablo gestured to Zeke’s corpse.

Stirman looked down at the body, then the terrified face of Officer Gonzales. “Couple of private investigators, amigo, ought to be worried today. Now get the SUV.”

Eleven minutes later, right on schedule, Pastor Riggs’ black Ford Explorer rolled out the back gate of the Floresville State Penitentiary, straight into a summer storm that was starting to pour down rain.

2

I didn’t mind bounty-hunting Dimebox Ortiz.

What I minded were his cousins Lalu and Kiko, who weighed three-fifty apiece, smoked angel dust to improve their IQ, and kept hand grenades in a Fiestaware bowl on their coffee table the way some people kept wax apples.

This explained why Erainya Manos and I were waiting in a van down the block from their house, rather than storming the front door.

Our snitch owed Dimebox four grand in cockfighting bets. He was getting a little nervous about Dimebox’s habit of setting his delinquent debtors on fire, and was anxious to see Dimebox in jail. He had promised us Dimebox was staying with his cousins. He’d also promised us Dimebox had a date with a lady tonight, and if we staked out the cousins’ house, we could easily tail him and snag him in transit.

Six o’clock, the snitch had told us. Seven o’clock, at the latest.

It was now 10:33.

I needed to pee.

I had an empty Coke bottle, but it isn’t tempting to use that trick when your female boss is next to you in the driver’s seat and her eight-year-old son is playing PlayStation 2 in the back.

Jem wasn’t supposed to be with us. The rain had washed out his plans to see the Woodlawn Lake fireworks with his second-grade friends. That left him nothing to do but a boring old stakeout with his mom.

Erainya, with her usual bizarre logic about what was safe for her child, had weighed the risks of a baby-sitter against Lalu and Kiko’s grenades, and decided to go with the stakeout. Of course, given some of the surveillance cases we’d worked involving baby-sitters and day-care workers, I supposed she had a point.

So we had the soothing sounds of Spyro the Dragon in the back seat. We had a dark row of clapboard houses and chinaberry trees to look at. And we had the rain, which had been alternately pouring and drizzling all afternoon, and was now reminding my bladder of flow patterns.

I was about to suggest that we call it quits, that not even the munificent sum Dimebox’s bail bondsman was offering was worth this, when Erainya said, “We’ll wait, honey. He’ll show.”

The longer I knew her, the more Erainya answered my questions before I asked them. It had gotten to the point where she could slug me when I was even thinking about being a smart-ass.

“Little late for a date,” I said.

She gave me those onyx eyes—the Greek Inquisition. “Your payday is Friday, honey. You want a check?”

That I heard loud and clear.

The past few months, since Erainya’s archrival, I-Tech Security, had taken away our last bread-and-butter contract with a downtown legal firm, her finances had been slowly unraveling. We’d given up our office space on Blanco. Erainya’s high-speed Internet line had been shut off twice. Our information broker would no longer work on credit. We were taking whatever cases Erainya could get just to keep afloat—divorce, workers comp, bail-jumpers. The dregs of the PI business.

I’d thought about making us cardboard signs,
Will Sleuth for Food,
but Erainya had slugged me before I could suggest it.

I reminded myself she had more at stake in the agency than I did.

She’d inherited the business from her husband, Fred Barrow, when he died. Or more accurately, when she’d shot him to death for abusing her, then been acquitted on murder charges.

This was back before I became a calming influence in her life.

After the murder trial, she’d disappeared to the Mediterranean for a year, reclaimed her maiden name and her Greek heritage, and returned to Texas the adoptive mother of a Bosnian orphan boy. She’d taken up Barrow’s PI business with a vengeance and had become arguably the best street investigator in South Texas.

Yet she’d never done more than scrape by, no matter how hard she worked. It was as if Fred Barrow’s ghost hung over the agency, jinxing her luck. The old rivalry with I-Tech became more and more one-sided until I-Tech dominated San Antonio, while we survived off bounties on scumbags like Dimebox Ortiz.

Lately, Erainya had been taking longer vacations with her boyfriend. She put off paperwork. She mused through old case files, which she would close and lock in her drawer whenever I approached.

She’d been one of the two great mentors of my career. She’d gotten me licensed and bonded, terrorized me into good investigative habits for the past four years. Whenever I thought of quitting PI work and using my English PhD to find a full-time college teaching position, which was about every other week, Erainya urged me to stick with it, telling me I was a natural investigator. I had a knack for finding the lost, helping the desperate. I chose to take that as a compliment.

The last thing I wanted to admit was that I was worried about her, that I sensed her spirit going out of the job.

So I tried to act excited about watching the Ortiz house.

Erainya polished a .45-caliber bullet. I nibbled on some of her homemade spanakopita, which she brought by the sackful whenever we went into the field.

I got tired of PlayStation noises and switched on the radio. We listened to an NPR interview with an artist who turned roadkill into paintings for New York galleries. I imagined my mother’s voice scolding me:
See, dear, some people have real jobs.

My mother, one of San Antonio’s few card-carrying bohemians, had been out of town for almost three months now, knocking around Central America with her newest boyfriend, a chakra crystal salesman who had ridiculous amounts of money. It was probably just as well she wasn’t around to lecture me on my career choices.

In the back of the van, Jem said, “Yess!”

I looked at him. “Good news?”

Delayed reaction: “Frozen Altars level. Twenty-eight eggs.”

“Wow. Hard?”

Jem kept playing. The rain battered the windows.

Jem’s silky black hair was cut in bangs, same as it had been since kindergarten, but over the past year his face had filled in considerably. He looked like your typical San Antonio kid—a something-percent mix of Latino and Anglo; black Spurs T-shirt, orange shorts, light-up sneakers. You would be hard pressed to believe that as a one-year-old he had been a Bosnian Muslim orphan, his parents’ mule-drawn cart blown apart by a land mine, his young eyes burned with God-knew-how-many-other images of war.

“Hard level?” I asked again.

No response.

I wanted to tear the game pad out of his hands and fling it into the night, but hey—I wasn’t his dad. What did I expect the kid to do for endless hours in the back of a van? Read?

“Yeah,” he said at last. “The evil panda bears—”

“Honey,” Erainya said, her voice suddenly urgent. “Turn the sound off.”

I looked out the windshield, expecting to see some action at the Ortiz cousins’ house.

Instead, Erainya was focused on the radio. A news brief about the prison break that afternoon—five dangerous cons on the loose. The Floresville Five, the media had instantly dubbed them—Will Stirman, C. C. Andrews, Elroy Lacoste, Pablo Zagosa, Luis Juarez.

“Not a good day for the warden,” I agreed. “You see the pictures?”

Erainya glared at me. “Pictures?”

“On TV this afternoon. Don’t tell me you’ve missed this.”

The news announcer recounted how the cons had been left unsupervised in a religious rehabilitation program. The five had overpowered the chaplain, killed a guard and a fellow inmate, driven straight through the back gate in the preacher’s Ford Explorer after stealing several handguns, a shotgun, and an unknown amount of ammunition from the prison armory. They should be considered armed and dangerous.

No shit.

The alarm hadn’t gone up for almost fifteen minutes, by which time the cons had ditched the SUV in the Floresville Wal-Mart parking lot and vanished, possibly in another car provided by an outside accomplice. A map of Kingsville had been found in one of the cells, leading authorities to believe that at least some of the fugitives might be heading south toward the Mexican border. Police all along the Rio Grande were on alert. The suspected ringleader of the jailbreak, William “the Ghost” Stirman, had been serving ninety-nine years on multiple convictions of human trafficking and accessory to murder. Prison psychologists described him as a highly dangerous sociopath.

“The Ghost,” I said. “He’ll be the one wearing the sheet with the eyeholes.”

Erainya didn’t smile. She turned off the radio, fumbled for her cell phone.

“What?” I asked.

She dialed a number, cursed. With the storm, cell phone reception inside the van, especially here on the rural South Side, was almost nonexistent.

She opened her door. The van’s overhead light blinked on.

“Erainya—”

“Got to find a clear signal.”

“It’s pouring.”

She slid outside in her rain jacket, and waded into the glow of the only street lamp, where everybody and God could see her.

Since the day I apprenticed to her, she had harped on me—getting out of the car while on stakeout was an absolute no-no. You jeopardized your position, your ability to move. Otherwise I would’ve peed a long time ago.

I knew only one person she might break the rules to call—her ENT, Dr. Dreamboat, or whatever the hell his name was, whom she’d met during a romantic prescription for cedar fever last winter and had been dating ever since.

But I couldn’t believe she would call him now.

I was pondering whether I’d have to shove a cell phone up Dr. Dreamboat’s sinus cavity when the porch light came on at the Ortiz cousins’ house.

A heavyset man in a silky black warm-up suit stepped outside. Dimebox Ortiz.

I tried to kill the overhead illumination, found there was no switch. “Shit.”

“Owe me a quarter,” Jem told me, his eyes still glued to his game.

“Put it on my account.”

My “bad word” account was already enough to buy Jem his first car, but he didn’t complain.

I leaned and tapped on Erainya’s window.

Halfway down the sidewalk, Dimebox Ortiz froze, staring in our direction. The rain was drenching him.

You don’t see us,
I thought.
We are invisible.

Dimebox yelled back toward the house—his cousins’ names, some Spanish I couldn’t catch. He ran for his Lincoln Town Car, and I gave up on discretion.

“Erainya!” I yelled, pounding on the driver’s-side door.

She took the phone away from her ear, just catching the fact that something was wrong as Dimebox’s taillights flared to life and Lalu and Kiko came lumbering out their front door, their fists full of things I was pretty sure weren’t wax apples.

Erainya climbed in, hit the ignition. “Jem, seatbelt!”

We peeled out, hydroplaning a sheet of water into the faces of the Ortiz cousins, who yelled plentiful contributions to Jem’s cuss jar as they jogged after us, brandishing their army surplus door prizes.

Dimebox’s Lincoln turned the corner on Keslake as the first explosion rocked the back of our van. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw chunks of wet asphalt spray up from the middle of the street where our tailpipe had been a moment before.

“Fireworks?” Jem asked, excited.

“Sort of,” I said. “Get down.”

“I want to see!”

“These are the kind you feel, champ. Get down!”

The twins sloshed after us like a couple of rabid hippos.

Up ahead, Dimebox’s Lincoln Town Car dipped toward the low-water crossing on Sinclair.

A few hours ago when we’d driven in, Rosillio Creek had been full, but nowhere near the top of the road. Now, glistening in our headlights, an expanse of chocolate water surged over the asphalt. Clumps of grass, branches and garbage piled up on the metal guardrail. It was hard to tell how deep the water was. There was no other road in or out of the neighborhood, even if we could turn around, which we couldn’t with
Señor
Dee and
Señor
Dum lobbing munitions right behind us.

In the PI business, we have a technical term for getting yourself into this kind of situation. We call it
fucking up
.

Dimebox’s brake lights flashed as he approached the crossing.

“He won’t make it,” I said, as he revved the Lincoln’s engine and plunged hood-first into current.

Ka-
BOOM
. Behind us, the low-water-crossing sign splintered into kindling.

“He’ll make it,” Erainya insisted. “So will we.”

I started to protest, but she’d already nosed the van into the water.

The sensation was like a log ride—that stomach-lurching moment when the chain catches under the boat. Water churned beneath the floorboards, hammered the doors. The van shuddered and began drifting sideways.

Through the smear of the windshield, I saw Dimebox’s Town Car trying to climb the opposite bank, but his headlights dimmed. His rear fender slid back into the torrent, crunched against the guardrail. His headlights went dark, and suddenly the Lincoln was a dam, water swelling around it, lapping angrily at the bottom of the shotgun window.

“Go back,” I told Erainya.

She fought the wheel, muttered orders to the van in Greek, eased us forward. We somehow managed to get right behind the Lincoln before our engine died.

Our headlights dimmed, but stayed on. I could see Dimebox Ortiz in front of us, waving one arm frantically out his window. His driver’s-side door was smashed against the guardrail. Water was sluicing into his shotgun window.

Behind us, Lalu and Kiko were barely discernible at the edge of the water, watching mutely as our two vehicles were trash-compacted against the guardrail.

The railing moaned. Our van skidded sideways. The Lincoln’s back left wheel slipped over the edge, and Dimebox’s whole car began to tilt up on the right, threatening to flip over in the force of the water.

I grabbed Erainya’s cell phone, dialed 911, but in the roar of the flood I couldn’t hear anything. The LCD read,
Searching for Signal
. The water inside the van was up to my ankles.

“Rope,” I shouted to Erainya. “You still have rope?”

“We have to stay inside, honey. We can’t—”

“I’m getting Ortiz out of that car.”

“Honey—”

“He won’t make it otherwise. I’ll tie off here.”