Southtown

Page 29

She rose to tend the child.
Wil stared down at the silver necklace in his hand. In a flash of resentment, he dropped the medal ion into the space beneath the floorboard where he normal y hid his cash.
Let Saint Anthony stay in San Antonio. Soledad would have no more need of him. Wil would protect her.
He would make sure she never suffered loss again.
He closed up the secret place in the floor, and made his phone cal to Gerry Far. A moment later, the apartment door exploded.
A police siren brought Wil back to the present.
The patrol car was several blocks up Roosevelt, red lights flashing, the cop tapping his bul horn as he pul ed through traffic.
Wil was prepared to turn on a side street, to run if he had to, but a block away from him the police car veered into a residential neighborhood.
Probably nothing to do with him.
He turned on the radio. Immediately, the newscaster said, “—al eged leader of the Floresvil e Five.”
Wil turned it off. He didn’t want to know. His nerves were frayed enough. It was seven in the evening, sun going down. He needed to find a store to rob.
Final y a corner sign caught his interest—ZUNIGA’S PRODUCE. The name sounded familiar, though Wil was sure he’d never seen the place before.
Its wal s were an odd color of stucco, like Chinese skin, so veined with cracks they seemed ready to fal apart. The doors were propped open with Black Diamond watermelons. Heaped outside were wooden crates of other produce—tomatoes, avocados, chili peppers, plantains.
No cars were parked out front. No customers at al , that Wil could see. The store wouldn’t have much cash in the til , but it wouldn’t have surveil ance cameras, either. Maybe the workers would be il egals. The owner would have no great desire to cal the police.
Zuniga.
The name tugged at Wil ’s memory, but he put it down to nerves.
He imagined Reverend Riggs’ laser-blue eyes staring into him, trying to burn a hole in the small part of Wil ’s conscience that stil believed in God.
He parked the car. He’d hesitated long enough.
Inside were two aisles—one for groceries, the other for produce. There was no one behind the counter— just a curtain to a back office, a cigarette rack, a black-and-white television with a Spanish telenovela flickering on the screen.
In the produce section, an aging Latino in a tank top and sweat pants and rubber galoshes was spraying down the fruit. The line of mirrors over the vegetable bins al reflected his bel y.
A cleaver, a heap of rubber bands, and a large mound of green onions sat next to him. The grocer’s eyes were watering like crazy. Like he’d just taken a break from chopping and tying the cebollas into bundles. Or maybe he’d been fol owing the telenovela.
He looked over tearful y as Wil picked up a shopping basket.
“Nice seein’ the sun out there,” Wil told him.
The man shrugged. He went back to spraying his apples.
Wil picked up three dusty soup cans, a loaf of Wonder Bread, Fig Newtons, chocolate bars—whatever didn’t look too stale. He was conscious of the gun under his Hawaiian shirt, the grip digging into his abdomen.
He moved to the produce aisle, where things were much better tended. He picked up an orange, some apples, a pint of strawberries. The smel of the strawberries reminded him of the prison yard—hot summer afternoons, a thousand acres ripening in the fields al around Floresvil e.
Wil brought his basket to the counter.
There were stil no other customers. No one on the street. Just him and the old man.
The grocer looked over lazily. He cal ed, “?Lupe, ven acá!”
Wil felt that uncomfortable memory tugging at the base of his skul . He had the sudden urge to leave.
Before he could, the back office curtain parted. A woman came out to help him.
She had been one of his.
He didn’t recognize her, exactly, but he knew from the way she bore herself—the downcast eyes, careful gestures, as if she were walking through a hot oven. Her hair was prematurely gray, tied back in a bun. Her face, once beautiful enough to warrant a good price, was now drawn tight from years of hard work.
Wil remembered something Gerry Far had told him for a laugh, years ago. Gerry had sold one of their acquisitions to a love-struck grocer, an old man who’d bought the girl for ten times her worth, cleaning out his savings and mortgaging his store to possess her. Wil and Gerry had joked about how much the old man must like to squeeze ripe fruit. The man’s name might’ve been Zuniga.
The woman didn’t look at Wil as she emptied his basket.
She ran her hands deftly over each item—estimating the weight of the produce, clacking prices from memory into an old-fashioned adding machine. She put everything into a brown paper bag for him, told him in Spanish it would be nineteen dol ars and twenty-eight cents.
Wil made up his mind. He would simply pay and leave.
He reached in his pocket, hoping to find some cash. Surely he’d overlooked at least one twenty-dol ar bil .
But he didn’t have time. Lupe looked up at him—straight through the sunglasses and the dyed hair and ten years of her own freedom—and she yelped with fear. “?Es él!”
As if she’d expected him. Wil realized the jailbreak must have dredged up her worst memories. The television would’ve kept his face constantly before her. Like thousands of others he’d brought north, Lupe must’ve been half expecting Wil Stirman, her personal nightmare, to walk back into her life somehow. He had obliged her.
The rest happened fast.
The grocer Zuniga dropped his spray gun and grabbed the onion cleaver. He shouted at Stirman to get away from his wife. He told her to run, cal the police.
The woman didn’t move.
Wil drew his gun. He told the old man to stop, to drop the knife.
Zuniga kept coming.
It’s a fucking gun, Stirman thought. Stop, you idiot.
But there were years of the stored vengeance in the old man’s eyes—resentment, poverty, desperate love for a woman Stirman had scarred. The old man wasn’t going to stop.
Wil fired a warning shot, but the grocer was already on top of him. The knife slashed into Wil ’s shoulder.
Wil ’s second shot was involuntary, a reflex from the pain. It caught the old man in the throat.
Zuniga went down on his knees, drowning as he tried to breathe. He crumpled onto the green mat. The spray gun he’d dropped hissed water, pushing a wave of red across the cement floor.
The woman didn’t scream. She cupped her hands over her mouth and waited to die.
Wil should have kil ed her. She could identify him. But his shoulder was on fire. Blood was soaking his shirt. The room turned the color of beer glass. He staggered outside, back toward his Camaro.
He was three blocks away before he realized he’d forgotten his groceries.
He pul ed into a flea market parking lot. He stripped off his bloody shirt and wrapped it around his shoulder as tightly as he could. He wasn’t sure how deep the cut was, or whether he’d stopped bleeding.
He made sure he stil had bul ets in his gun. Then he ditched the Camaro. He got lucky, found a decrepit Ford station wagon with keys in the ignition.
By the time he was on the road again, sirens were al around him, police cars racing toward the grocery store. The checkpoints would be going up soon. He had to get the hel away.
He tried to breathe deeply, lifting his bad shoulder so the pain would keep his senses sharp. Somehow, he made it back onto I-37.
He drove al the way south to Braunig Lake, then pul ed over on a farm road, tried to control the rattle in his chest.
He pul ed out his cel phone and cal ed Pablo.
Five rings. Six. By the time Pablo picked up, Stirman was real y pissed.
“You sleeping?”
Pablo hesitated. “No. Fuck you.”
“Tel me you’re holding the gun on her.”
A longer silence. Pablo was probably looking for his goddamn gun. “Yeah.”
“Point it at her head.”
“What for? She’s asleep.”
“Pablo, tel me you’re pointing the gun at her goddamn head.”
“Okay. I am.”
“It’s going to go down faster than I thought. An hour, maximum, and I’l be back with the cash.”
“It’s only just getting dark.”
“Don’t turn on the radio. If I don’t cal back in one hour, shoot her. Listen for cops. You hear sirens, you think they might be coming for you, don’t wait. Shoot her. You understand? Then get the hel out. You let her live, I swear to God, I’l find you.”
“Slow down, man. I mean—shit.”
“Pablo.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I understand. But listen—”
Stirman didn’t have time for more. He hung up.
Wil knew what he had to do. He cal ed the prearranged number. When Sam Barrera came on the line, waiting faithful y for instructions, Stirman told him how it would happen.
Chapter 20
I almost didn’t go home.
Looking back, I wonder which lives and deaths might’ve been exchanged had I driven straight toward the money.
But Jem and I both needed to use the little caballeros room. I figured we could make a pit stop at 90 Queen Anne and make our plans from there.
Besides, the radio news from Medina Lake was making me nervous. The Department of Public Safety had announced they could no longer guarantee the structural integrity of Medina Dam, which had been built in 1911 and never reinforced. Water was pouring 10.4 feet over the spil way.
My friend the Castrovil e deputy got a quote in, when asked how worried people should be. “That dam breaks, y’al can expect a sixty-foot-high wal of water. You tel me. “ Four towns downriver were being evacuated. Most of those half-mil ion folk would be heading into San Antonio. It was no time to be on the highway.
Up next, the radio announcer promised, a breaking story about the Floresvil e Five. I glanced over at Jem and turned off the radio.
As he ran into my apartment, Jem yel ed, “Cat!”
Robert Johnson opened one indignant eye.
Jem had long ago refused to believe cats could have surnames, so he’d taken to cal ing Robert Johnson by his species. It was one of the many humiliations Robert Johnson would endure from Jem without drawing blood, because he knew I would pay him off later with a king’s ransom in kitty Tex-Mex.
“Do you have a paper bag?” Jem asked me, delighted.
As much as Robert Johnson loved playing sack-the-cat, I noticed the light on my answering machine was blinking.
I said, “Why don’t you use the restroom first, champ?”
Jem was clearly more interested in tormenting my pet, but he’d started doing the cross-legged dance pretty bad. He dashed off to the john and rol ed the door shut behind him.
Robert Johnson glared at me.
“It builds character,” I said.
The answering machine told me I had two messages.
The first had come in at 1:35 P.M.
“Fred.” Sam Barrera’s voice sent a pang of guilt through my chest. I’d neglected checking on him much too long today. “I’ve found Stirman’s hideout—North Cherry at Rosa Parks. Big brick building, Carrizo Ice Co. There’s been nobody in or out, but I’m pretty sure he’s keeping the woman there. I’l sit on the building as long as I can, but I need backup. Tel the field office to make it quiet this time.”