Southtown

Erainya opened her eyes just enough to watch Pablo’s face.

He stared at the wal .

He got up, paced, and turned toward Erainya.

She closed her eyes, wil ing herself to breathe deeply.

She heard the big iron door creak open. Pablo walked into the next room.

She wouldn’t get a better chance.

Stirman had been angry when he retied her, which made for sloppy knots. Her fingers had spent the last hour careful y exploring them. She worked herself the rest of the way free with little problem.

She’d tried to keep her legs from going to sleep, but they were sore and stiff when she tried to stand. She wasn’t going to be running anytime soon.

She could hide. She’d been staring at the loose ventilation grate in the corner. It looked big enough to crawl inside, if she could just move it. But there wasn’t time, it wouldn’t be quiet, and she didn’t know if the shaft led anywhere.

Only one other option, even riskier.

What kept her going was the memory of J.P. getting shot. Her anger braided around her spine like an iron coil.

Pablo’s gun was sitting on the table. She heard him in the next room, rummaging around.

Move, she told herself.

She grabbed the gun and walked to the door.

Pablo was kneeling over a milk crate. He was holding a phone, cursing as he tried to dial a number.

Shoot him, she told herself.

She aimed.

This one, Pablo, she didn’t hate enough.

He hadn’t pul ed the trigger on J.P. She could see in his eyes he hated Stirman as much as she did. He’d fed her soup.

So fucking what? Shoot!

Then he turned and saw her. His eyes got small.

“Put it down,” he told her. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ve got the gun, Pablo.”

He took a step toward her. “No bul ets in it.”

She aimed at the center of his chest.

He took another step and she squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

He grabbed her wrist. She managed to punch him in the nose—a weak effort, but enough to loosen his grip. She made it a few steps toward the stairs before he tackled her and dragged her back into her cel .

She screamed, but there was no one to hear.

He flung her onto the mattress, stood over her, breathing heavy, dabbing his bloody nose. On the radio, Diane Rehm was talking about trusting your spouse.

Erainya felt like crying, but she held on to her anger.

She sat up, touched the back of her head where it had struck the wal .

After a long time, she asked Pablo, “Those were your friends who died in Omaha?”

For a moment, he became that young man in the al ey behind Paesano’s again—a contrite, harmless kid.

“One of them . . . my cousin . . . if he’s real y dead.”

“You’ve been keeping in touch,” she guessed. “You just tried to cal him.”

Pablo didn’t answer.

“Stirman wouldn’t approve,” she persisted. “Little harder to trace mobile cal s, but they can do it. They find your cousin’s phone, honey, they find out he’s been making cal s to San Antonio—”

“Shut up.”

“Time’s running out.”

“Just give Stirman his money, and nobody’s going to hurt you. Do that, we’re gone.”

“I don’t have the money.”

“Cooperate, lady. You could go home. So could I.”

“You believe that, Pablo? Is that what Stirman promised your friends in Omaha?”

Blood trickled from his nostril. Pablo didn’t seem to notice.

If Erainya could just get him on her side . . .

“Honey,” she said, more gently, “what were you in prison for?”

Pablo studied her warily, as if he were afraid she’d make fun of him. “I kil ed a man.”

“You’re not a natural kil er. What did this man do?”

“He was . . . I came home, and he was with my wife.”

Aha, she thought. Keep him talking. Be his friend.

“You stil want her back?” she asked. “Wil she stil be waiting?”

Erainya realized she’d made a mistake when she saw the anger in his eyes.

“She didn’t do anything,” he said tightly. “They were talking on the bed, but . . . it wasn’t what I thought.”

“Okay, honey,” Erainya said, trying to placate him. “So what happened?”

Pablo looked at his gun. “Couple of weeks, Angelina had been spending money, going out at weird times. Then a neighbor saw this guy come over to the house twice while I was at work. I came home with a shotgun one night . . . but it wasn’t what I thought. She’d hired a private eye. Somebody like you. Angelina had lost her family coming across the Rio Grande years ago, see. She hired this guy to find them. Didn’t think I’d approve of her spending the money. That’s why she didn’t tel me.”

“You shot the PI.”

“No, see . . . the PI had some luck.” He closed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was heavier, chained with guilt. “Angelina had just started meeting this guy he’d located. They were in the bedroom looking at Angelina’s photos. They were talking about old times, trying to figure out what happened to their mother. The man I shot was Angelina’s brother.”

Diane Rehm’s grandmotherly voice fil ed the room. Sunlight pulsed through the cracks in the boarded-up windows, heating the air like steamed cotton.

Despite the fact that Pablo was holding a gun, Erainya felt so bad for the young man that she had a sudden urge to put a handkerchief to his bleeding nose, the way she would do for Jem.

“Honey,” she said, “does your wife want you back?”

He blinked. “She’l meet me in Mexico. I wrote her what to do. If she read the letters . . .”

Erainya looked away.

She knew his plans for a happy ending were nothing but smoke. He would never see his wife again. He would be gunned down, or die on Death Row.

“You’l see her,” she lied. “But don’t wait for Stirman. Even if he gets his money, he won’t let either of us go home. This is the only chance we’re going to get, Pablo. Your wife wants you back.”

She thought she had him, until he pul ed a clip of ammo from his pocket and slid it into the gun.

“Shut up,” he told her again, softly. “Just shut up.”

This time, his eyes told her she’d better do it.

She saw the capacity for rage that had put him in jail. She saw he was capable of murder.

The news came back on—unconfirmed reports from a source close to the investigation: The Floresvil e Five may not have stayed together as previously thought.

Pablo leaned forward to listen. His newly loaded gun cast a long shadow across the cement.

Chapter 16

After dropping off Sam Barrera, I spent hours rifling through Erainya’s house, looking for seven mil ion dol ars.

I opened every locked drawer in Fred Barrow’s office. I wiggled every stone in the fireplace. I poked random holes in the wal s and dug around behind the Sheetrock. I was rewarded with a 1963 phone book and a Jax beer bottle.

In desperation, I even went through Erainya’s bedroom closet.

For a guy, even a private eye, there is nothing more disconcerting than looking through the bedroom closet of a woman you respect. You just never know what you’l find that might ruin her image.

I found nothing incriminating. Not even the dominatrix suit I’d long suspected Erainya might own.

On second thought, perhaps that did ruin my image of her a bit.

I ended the evening with a tequila bottle, doing my thinking and drinking on top of the Olmos Dam— something I hadn’t done in a very long time. The last time I’d been there, the water level hadn’t been nipping the soles of my shoes.

I tried to concentrate on Erainya, but my mind kept coming back to Sam Barrera, the perplexed look he’d given me from his living room window as I’d driven off in his BMW.

The old curmudgeon probably had family somewhere who could look after him. The fact that he lived alone, that he had absolutely no photographs of relatives in his house . . . Forget it. I had other problems.

I chunked a rock into the flooded basin. It made a deep sploosh.

My father, Bexar County Sheriff Jackson Navarre, had been a contemporary of Barrera and Barrow. He hadn’t lived as long. One summer when I was home from col ege, my dad had been gunned down in front of my eyes by a drive-by shooter, an assassin hired by one of his enemies. At the time, I’d gotten a lot of support and sympathy from my friends. Nobody could imagine going through anything so terrible.

But in the last few years, something funny had happened. My older friends’ parents had started aging.

Now, many of them were dealing with their parents’ cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s, assisted living nightmares. When my friends talked to me about these problems, I could swear they were giving me wistful looks, suppressing a guilty kind of resentment.

I would never have to go through what they were going through. I wouldn’t have that lingering hel to deal with. My dad had died quickly, stil in his prime. My mom—wel , she was much younger. She never seemed to age. She had told me many times that she intended to go off a cliff in a red sports car as soon as she began doubting her own faculties, and I had no doubt she was tel ing the truth.

My friends didn’t have quite so much sympathy for Tres Navarre these days. I’d had it pretty easy when it came to parents. Death in a drive-by? Piece of cake. In fact my last argument with Ralph Arguel o—almost two years ago, after the death of his mother—had been along those lines. But the more I saw of what my friends with aging parents went through, the more I tended to agree—I’d had it easy.

Which didn’t explain why I felt so damn empty, or why Sam Barrera’s unraveling bothered me so much.

I took another swig of Herradura A?ejo.

I stayed on the dam, watching emergency lights flash al across the city, until a National Guard patrol came by and chased me off.

I probably would’ve slept through the rest of July had the phone not woken me up the next morning.

I opened my eyes. There was a cat on my head. Sunlight was baking my mouth.

Much to Robert Johnson’s displeasure, I crawled off the futon, made it to the ironing board, and yanked down the receiver. “Yeah.”

“Oh . . .” A female voice, on the edge of panic. “Coach Navarre, I didn’t expect you to be home . . .”

Several things went through my head.

First: Where the hel else would I be at—Jesus, did the clock real y say ten?

Second: Why was this woman cal ing me coach?

Behind the cal er, children were screaming. Then it hit me. I realized why she was close to panic. It was Thursday morning. Jem’s summer school volunteer soccer coach was late to practice again.

“Crap,” I said. “I mean darn. Um . . . Mrs. . . .”

“Toca,” she said. “Carmen’s mother? If you can’t make it today, I suppose I can watch the children . . .” A pregnant pause—letting me imagine torture with soccer cones, mass destruction in the goalie’s box. “But the first game is Saturday. I didn’t know if you had the uniforms . . .”