Southtown

Page 34

He’d assumed the worst, nursed his anger, promised himself that he would get revenge in the long run.
But he’d stayed silent. In his most secret thoughts, he’d been relieved not to be a father anymore. Relieved the child was gone. And his guilt had fueled his anger.
Now . . . what had he accomplished?
He’d left hardly a ripple on the lives of his old enemies. He’d had a chance to settle his debts, salvage something from the past. But here he was again, doing the only thing he was good at—running away. He never had Soledad’s courage for staying put.
Would she forgive him?
Maybe if she’d seen Jem Manos’ face . . .
Wil started the truck’s engine. He set the duffel bag next to him. Al his pleasure at finding the money had drained away.
He realized bitterly that Navarre was wrong on one count. He would not die on the outside. Wil Stirman was too good at hiding and running. Nothing could catch the Ghost.
He would make it across the border, then eventual y down into Central America. He would get the shoulder wound treated and live to a ripe old age on some tropical beach, alone, dreaming every night about the people he had kil ed, waking up every morning with no one, remembering the face of Jem Manos, and wishing he was not a coward.
A distant rumble rattled the truck’s windows. Wil thought at first it was thunder, but the rumble didn’t die. It grew louder, building toward a crescendo. Thunder didn’t do that.
Wil put the truck in drive and eased forward, toward the bridge.
In his headlights, the Medina River was doing strange things. It was churning with foam, waves sloshing over the road. The ground was shaking.
Wil looked upriver. He could see nothing but that single yel ow light on the hil side.
He turned on the radio. Static.
It occurred to him then what might be happening—what they’d said on the news.
But that was impossible.
The roar fil ed his ears.
He looked north again, and this time his heart nearly stopped. The horizon was curling toward him, the earth lifting up like the edge of a carpet.
For a moment, his hand drifted toward the stick shift. He could punch the gas. He could run for higher ground.
Then a sense of calm came over him. He realized Navarre had been right on every count. So much for the uncatchable Wil Stirman.
He kil ed the truck’s engine and got out. He wanted to be standing on his own two feet for this.
The yel ow light on the hil comforted him, letting him know he wasn’t alone.
He heard Soledad’s voice: Maybe I’m what was lost.
He remembered her last kiss, and waited to be scoured away with al the other ghosts of the land.
The Cessna flew above the South Side, angling into the rain.
Pablo did not relax his guard, but he couldn’t help watching the lights below—the great expanse of San Antonio, and south: the small er towns of Poteet, Kenedy, and there, Floresvil e. He was almost sure he could see the prison.
He had no money. No resources. Nothing but a gun and a pilot who would betray him at the first opportunity.
But the airstrip was secluded in the mountains, in territory he knew wel .
He had already used the pilot’s phone to make a cal to El Paso—to an old friend who would relay a message to Angelina. It was risky, revealing his location like that. What Angelina would do with the information, he didn’t know. Perhaps she would be waiting for him. Perhaps the Mexican police would.
He had sent her instructions many times in his letters—always indirect references that she alone would understand. If she’d read the letters, if she wanted him back, she would know what to do.
She was to tel her friends and family to look for a yel ow cloth tied around the front porch post—the kind people left out for soldiers overseas. That would be her signal to them—the only goodbye she could give— to let them know she had disappeared on purpose, gone to join him.
Pablo wondered if she would do that.
The Cessna climbed higher, above the flooded farms and the dark ranch land of South Texas.
Pablo thought of El Paso, and his wife’s face.
For the first time since Floresvil e, since the last morning circle when he’d joined hands with his five brethren and Pastor Riggs, Pablo prayed.
Chapter 26
That bastard Wil Stirman stole my truck.
While I was busy getting chewed out by DeLeon, and the paramedics were tending to Sam Barrera, and the police were fanning out across every square foot of riverfront behind the museum, Stirman crept around the side of the building—exactly where it was most suicidal to go. He found my F-150 by the river, found the extra key I kept in the wheel wel , pul ed away over the Grand Avenue Bridge and disappeared.
It was twenty minutes before I noticed the truck was missing and we figured out what had happened.
By then, Stirman was long gone.
That same night, two hours later and twenty-five miles northwest of town, in the lightest rainfal of the month, Medina Dam broke.
The old McCurdy Ranch was right in the path of forty bil ion cubic feet of water. Century trees were uprooted. Boulders disappeared. New gorges and ravines were carved into the rock, and the cabin of Gloria Paz was reduced to a concrete slab and a few dark gold cinder blocks.
I don’t know what happened to Gloria. I’d like to think she got out, but somehow I imagine her standing on her front porch with her shotgun and her tin cup of goat’s milk and coffee, her milky eyes staring north as the wal of water came toward her. I imagine her smiling, thinking of her long journey on the Green Highway.
Perched on its high hil , the McCurdy ranch house itself was spared.
I didn’t need to go into the basement to see that Wil Stirman had been there. The tarp had been stripped off the abandoned building supplies. Dug out from the middle of the lumber and paint cans was a lockbox— now busted open and empty, a box the perfect size to fit a duffel bag ful of cash.
Fred Barrow was the San Antonio businessman who had purchased the McCurdy property. The mildewed fishing painting over the mantel was one of his, just like the ones hanging in Erainya’s study.
After shooting Wil Stirman, Barrow had only lived a few weeks, but in that time he had managed to buy the land, set up a trust, and al ow Gloria Paz a safe place to live for the rest of her life. Barrow had planned to use his stolen mil ions to cleanse and remake the murderer’s ranch. A feeble, guilty gesture, but I knew Fred had been trying to put the victims’ spirits to rest, to make amends.
This did not make Fred Barrow a good man. It did not excuse the way he treated Erainya, or make me sorry that the asshole was dead. But he had redeemed one life, one small cinder block cabin. He’d been remembered as honest by an aging blind woman. It made me wonder if I could’ve done any better with dirty money.
Much to the Fugitive Task Force’s relief, Wil Stirman’s body was found forty miles downriver. The Green Highway had, for once, reversed course, its cleared lanes providing the path of least resistance for thousands of tons of flotsam swept south by the flood. Many of the dead were never recovered, their bodies buried deep under a new geological layer of silt and debris. But Stirman’s body was easily identified— tangled in downed power lines, his arms wrapped around the cables as if he had intentional y held on—as if he wanted to be sure there was no public doubt about his death.
My truck, being heavier, had not been carried quite so far. It had melded into a sandbank half a mile downstream from the McCurdy Ranch entrance. Only the back fender showed.
Wil Stirman had found his money. He died reclaiming something from Fred Barrow. But the duffel bag was not in the truck, nor on his person. Whatever was left of Stirman’s seven mil ion dol ars floated away in the flood, and is stil buried somewhere in the South Texas landscape.
The final incidents in the Floresvil e Five case were pretty unsatisfactory for law enforcement. The first was a shoot-out at a Wisconsin hunting cabin where an unidentified man resisted arrest, opened fire on police and was kil ed by an FBI sniper. The slain man was not, as original y thought, one of the escaped convicts, but he fit the description of an Anglo who had been seen in the company of Elroy Lacoste and Luis Juarez in Omaha. Perhaps he was one of Stirman’s old associates. Embarrassed police were stil working to establish his identity.
The fourth convict, C. C. Andrews, was discovered when rain eroded his shal ow grave in an Oklahoma riverbank. A farmer went out to dig some new fence posts one morning and was startled to find a dead African-American in an expensive Italian suit floating in the middle of his creek.
This left only one escapee unaccounted for—Pablo Zagosa. Publicly, police remained confident of his eventual capture, but when pressed, they admitted they had no solid leads. Pablo’s estranged wife in El Paso had disappeared, and family members said it was because she feared her husband’s vengeance.
But this did not explain the yel ow cloth police found tied to Angelina Zagosa’s front porch rail. Privately, Ana DeLeon told me the Task Force was baffled. They were starting to reconcile themselves to the idea that Pablo Zagosa might be the little fish that got away.
As for Dimebox Ortiz, he was spending a few nights in the county jail, but he was confident that his brother-in-law would eventual y soften and bail him out. And I was confident I would be bounty-hunting him again soon after that.
Saturday, two days after the Medina Dam broke, the sun blazed down at the Lady Bird Johnson YMCA field.
After six bil ion dol ars in damage, thirty-seven lives lost, the attention of the network news, the president, the governor and the National Guard, the floods decided they’d had enough fun. Like spoiled children, they went off to throw a tantrum somewhere else.
Jem manned the goalie box in his yel ow vest.
The rest of my team clumped midfield around the bal as the Saint Mark’s coach yel ed orders to his kids about crossovers and wings and a bunch of other maneuvers I’d never heard of.
“Get ’em!” Erainya yel ed next to me.
Which pretty much summed up our strategy.
Technical y, parents weren’t al owed on the players’ side of the field, but Erainya had decided she was now my assistant coach.
The Garcia twins slammed into each other, but got up before the ref could halt play. Jack fel down in one of his slide-into-home kicks, shooting the bal straight toward the Saint Mark’s guards, who just shot it right back.
“I love this,” I said. “So much more relaxing than a firefight.”
Erainya said, “Huh.”
Her dark eyes glittered as she scanned the field. “Al right, honey. What’s that kid’s name—Peter?”
“Paul.”
“That’s it, Paul!” she shouted. “To the goal!”
By that time Paul had run past the bal , let Saint Mark’s intercept, and was busy checking out a real y cool rock he’d found on the field.
“J.P. got off the ventilator today,” Erainya told me. “We talked a whole ten minutes.”
I heard the relief in her voice—the return of that love-struck optimism that had infuriated me for months whenever she talked about her boyfriend.
J. P. Sanchez had beaten the odds. His friends at the Medical Center had cal ed in a few favors. They’d imported the best specialists from Houston and Los Angeles to oversee the reconstructive surgery.