Southtown

Page 28

“Wel ?” Maia demanded.
It would’ve been best to tel her.
I knew Maia would help me, if I explained. She would come to San Antonio, watch my back, fight my battles, do whatever she could to help save Erainya.
But it would be a mistake. I was already treading too far over the invisible line that separated our relationship from my work in San Antonio—the job Maia quietly resented. If I relied on her for more help, I’d be pushing us in the wrong direction. On some level she might never admit, Maia would take it as a sign of disrespect.
“Jem has to come with me,” I said. “He’s right. It may be the only way to resolve this without blood.”
“You’re absolutely insane.”
“Stirman won’t hurt him.”
“You’re sure of that.” Her words were like mist off a glacier. “You’re wil ing to risk his life.”
Out her window, a hawk circled through the slow persistent drizzle over Barton Creek.
For the first time, I understood Erainya’s dilemma as a parent—her sometimes crazy choices about what was best for Jem. The safest thing, the right thing, was rarely obvious.
I knew now why I had come to Austin. I knew exactly why Jem had to come back with me.
And I knew something else, too.
Standing in Maia’s kitchen, so much like her old kitchen on Potrero Hil , looking out at the vista she swore was not the ghost image of her lost home, I knew where to find Fred Barrow’s seven mil ion dol ars.
Chapter 19
Wil didn’t mean for it to happen.
Al he wanted was food and cash.
He passed up two convenience stores, convincing himself he needed to get farther away from the hideout.
He got on I-35, cruised down to Hot Wel s Boulevard, turned into the South Side neighborhood he knew so wel .
At the corner of South New Braunfels, the blue jeans factory he’d once used as a holding facility had been burned to crossbeams. The adobe house that belonged to his friend the Guide had been repainted lime green.
Farther down, on a ridge overlooking a swol en creek, the Estrel a Barbecue Pit stood abandoned, its back deck sagging over the water.
Wil had done business on that deck. He’d smoked cigars and drank Bacardi with clients while the air fil ed with brisket smoke, sulfur from the hot springs bubbling up in the creek bed, making soft milky rings in the mud.
Wil and his clients would sit around the picnic table, negotiating the price of women.
Panamanian girls fought harder than Guatemalans. Girls from Coahuila turned the best short-term profit.
The ones from the central mountains lasted longer. Twelve was too young to be reliably trained. Eighteen, too old. Glossy hair was a sign of health. Good teeth were a premium. Stirman wrote special orders on a yel ow legal pad.
The fol owing weekend, when Wil got across the Rio Grande, he would find every girl on his shopping list, as if writing their descriptions made them appear—hopeful and eager and wil ing to believe his lies.
He made a right on South Presa, passed several more ice houses. He rejected one because he used to know the owners; another, because too many kids were Rol erblading outside.
His own hesitation irritated him. He should just pick a place and hit it.
He wasn’t worried about being recognized. Since kidnapping Erainya Manos, he’d bleached his hair and shaved his five-day stubble. He’d gotten himself a pair of black rubber sunglasses, a blue Hawaiian shirt and jeans, boots that made him an inch tal er. He doubted anyone would identify him right away, even in his old home turf.
Stil he kept driving.
He turned on Dimmit Street because the name sounded familiar, and realized why only when he found himself in a dead end, facing a pink clapboard house. The hand-painted sign in the front yard read: TEXAS PRISON MINISTRY.
Wil stopped his car in the middle of the cul-de-sac. He stared at the sign.
Pastor Riggs had always cal ed his ministry headquarters Dimmit Street. Like it was some great central command, like the Pentagon or the White House.
But Wil had never pictured it. He’d never realized where it was.
The front window had two bul et holes for eyes. Empty beer bottles littered the flower bed. Parked in the driveway was the Reverend’s black Ford Explorer, a dent in the fender where Elroy had backed into the Floresvil e Wal-Mart dumpster the first day of their escape.
Wil ’s jaw tightened. He remembered Pastor Riggs fighting them in the chapel, forcing them to get violent.
Al of Wil ’s plans had started to unravel from that moment.
After the head-bashing they’d given Riggs, the old man couldn’t be alive. None of the news reports Wil heard ever mentioned Riggs’ fate. But if Riggs was alive, if he saw Wil here . . .
Back up, Wil ’s instincts told him.
He didn’t.
He sat there stupidly as the door of the ministry house opened.
The tip of a bamboo cane appeared first, then Pastor Riggs, tapping at the stoop. Behind him, a scowling black dude, an ex-con judging from his posture, held the door as the preacher climbed down onto the porch.
Riggs had aged a decade in a week. The pastor’s head was shaved and bandaged where Zeke’s soldering iron had split the scalp. The left side of his face drooped like a Hal oween mask.
The black dude carried a stack of books under one arm. Wil wondered if they were donations for a prison library. Surely Riggs couldn’t be doing outreach work anymore. His program was ruined. He’d been disgraced, discredited. No warden would let him within a mile of an inmate.
Suddenly, Riggs looked up. The preacher’s eyes were unchanged—pale and startling blue. They stared straight at Wil .
Wil ’s hand went to the transmission.
His stolen Camaro had a tinted windshield. The setting sun shone straight against it. Riggs shouldn’t be able to see through it any easier than through aluminum foil.
Stil , their eyes seemed to meet. Wil remembered prison Bible studies, moments when the heat and the preaching would wear through his pretense and Wil would feel God. Or late at night, sketching Bible scenes on a yel ow pad, when it almost seemed as if the rage could final y leave his mind, travel straight down to the tip of his pencil and onto the paper.
Wil was sure, absolutely sure, that the Reverend could see him in this car.
He gunned the engine.
The Reverend raised his hand. Wil slammed the Camaro into reverse. He fishtailed out of Dimmit Street, the pit of his stomach sloshing like a vat of sour milk.
He drove up South Presa, reassuring himself he hadn’t made a mistake. It didn’t matter. Stumbling across the old preacher didn’t matter.
In a few hours, Wil would have his money. He’d be on a chartered jet to Mexico, and from there, anywhere he pleased.
Navarre and Barrera would make the exchange, one way or another. They would bring the money, and the boy . . .
Wil ’s hands felt sweaty on the wheel.
He wondered what Pastor Riggs would say if he knew his intentions.
You came to me on purpose, Brother Stirman. You want to be cleansed of that hatred.
Wil wished it were so. But he knew what he had to do. He knew he couldn’t be satisfied, couldn’t put Soledad’s spirit to rest unless Erainya Manos never saw her son again.
He pul ed his Camaro over the railroad tracks and onto Roosevelt, passing storefront signs without reading them, fighting a desire to drive straight to the highway and head south—leave now, fol ow the road he knew so wel to the Mexican border.
Eight years ago, his last night with Soledad, she had tried to get him not to run. She sat next to him on the sofa while he loaded his gun. She took his hands, and placed them on her chest.
“If you run, mi amor, ” she said, “you’l be doing what they want. Why please them?”
He could feel her heartbeat through the cotton dress. Childbirth had swol en her breasts to a pleasant size, fil ed out her face so she looked younger and healthier than when he first brought her north from the burning sugar fields.
She smel ed of honeysuckle she’d clipped that morning—a fragrant clump of white and yel ow flowers now blooming in a water jar by the window. She’d taken such care with it, as if she’d be here long enough to watch it grow roots.
Wil had their bags almost packed. One for clothes; two fil ed with enough cash to last a lifetime. He had three guns, two phones, and an assortment of passports and fake IDs stil to pack. He’d already told Dimebox Ortiz he was leaving. He had one last cal to make—to Gerry Far, warning him to keep his head down for a few days. Wil and Soledad’s plane would be in the air in half an hour.
“I have to finish packing,” he told her.
She careful y shifted her weight on top of him, her arms circling his neck. The warmth of her thighs pressed against his legs. She kissed the bridge of his nose, the space between his eyebrows. Her Saint Anthony medal dangled against his chin.
“Stay,” she told him.
A Ziggy Marley song played—one of Soledad’s favorites. She always said the music reminded her of heat and salt water, of a trip she’d made as a child to the beach near Matamoros. Soon, Wil promised her, she would live on the beach. She would have heat and the ocean every day.
He touched her necklace. “You never finished tel ing me about Saint Anthony.”
She kissed him. “San Antonio, loco boy. My protector. He’s the patron saint of lost things.”
“What have you lost?”
She smiled, a little sadly. “Maybe I’m what was lost.”
He realized his question had been stupid. She’d left her homeland, her aging father, her childhood. Al for the sake of a better life in the north. And now Wil was taking her away from that.
She unclasped the necklace, pressed it into his hand. “Stay with me here, mi amor. Cancel the flight.”
She kissed him again.
He felt the blood stop pounding in his temples, start col ecting lower in his body, stirring a different kind of pressure.
They hadn’t made love since the baby arrived. It was probably stil too soon.
She had not delivered in the hospital, of course. Stirman wanted no paper trails, no legal questions.
Soledad was his creation. Their marriage had been secret for the same reason. He would not share her, or her child, with anyone.
But the delivery had been difficult. The old curandera midwife had commented on the amount of blood.
For the first time, Wil had seen fear and pain in Soledad’s eyes, and he resented the child for that.
She slipped her hand underneath his belt, bit his ear.
Then the baby started crying, setting Wil ’s nerves on edge.
He didn’t want to take the child with them. He wished she had agreed to his idea of giving the baby away.
He felt no guilt about this, only the need to not offend Soledad.
“Go on,” he said, seeing her attention divided. “Tend to him.”
Her lips brushed his forehead. “Let your enemies break against you, mi amor. They cannot hurt you.”
“Don’t forget to make an extra bottle.”
She looked in his eyes for what would be the last time—the same undaunted look she always gave him, mutely reminding him that she had faced every horror a woman could face, some of those because of Wil , yet she was not afraid. She had stayed with him this far. She didn’t want to leave, but she would go into exile with him, or walk into gunfire. She would do whatever was needed to protect him, because as much as he claimed to own her, she had purchased him.