Southtown

Page 7

You’d think, after twelve years, I would no longer stare.
Everything about her stil startled me—her glossy black hair, the caramel skin of her throat against the V of her silk blouse, her fingers, her lips, her eyes. She was a perfect mix of war and beauty, like a Zhou Dynasty noblewoman—one of the imperial courtesans Sun Tzu had trained to fight.
“It’s been too long,” I said.
She gave me a dry smile. “One week.”
“Like I said.”
“You could solve that problem. A hotshot attorney in Austin has made you a damn good offer.”
“Lee and Navarre . . . your stock value would plummet.”
“I beg your pardon. No one said anything about your name on the bil ing.”
Maia let her offer float in the air, weightless and persistent, where it had lingered during our last few dinners together. She snuck the cat a crabmeat flauta. Every so often, her eyes would track something behind me, and I knew she was keeping watch on Quentin, the glowering ma?tre d’.
“So, the Erainya Manos Agency,” Maia said, trying hard to keep the distaste out of her voice. “Things have been good . . . bounty-hunting and whatnot? Driving into floods?”
The stubborn side of me wanted to rise to Erainya’s defense, but Maia knew me too wel . She had trained me as an unlicensed investigator before Erainya turned me legitimate. During our years together in San Francisco, Maia had used me as a secret weapon to keep cases from going to court, taught me al the dirty, borderline il egal, ruthlessly effective methods of investigative blackmail that Erainya had tried so hard to erase when she got me licensed. Each woman thought the other unprofessional, mostly because they both kept bad company—like me.
“Erainya’s distracted,” I admitted. “Increasingly.”
“Maybe it’s her boyfriend. Men affect one’s judgment.”
I decided not to take the bait. I watched the swol en San Marcos River tumbling into the grotto thirty feet below us. The sky darkened. The water churned red.
“Something’s bothering you,” Maia decided.
“Those escaped convicts yesterday afternoon.”
“The Floresvil e Five.”
“How much have you heard?”
She shrugged. “Just what’s on national news. Fugitive Task Force found a map of Kingsvil e in a cel , so they figured the convicts were heading south. Then there was the holdup this morning in New Braunfels, so maybe the map was a decoy. The cons seem to be staying together and heading north, which is pretty unusual. The ringleader, Wil iam Stirman, sounds like a great human being.”
“Erainya’s husband put Wil Stirman in jail.”
Maia set down her margarita glass. “Fred Barrow. The husband she shot.”
“Fred and another private investigator. Samuel Barrera, his biggest rival. Eight years ago, they col aborated to put Stirman behind bars. Now Erainya’s afraid Stirman wil come after them. Barrera, for sure. Maybe her, too.”
“She told you this?”
“She won’t talk about it. I read some of the agency’s old files, some of her husband’s case notes.”
“Behind her back?”
“I kind of borrowed her file cabinet.”
“How do you kind of borrow your boss’s file cabinet?”
“We closed the Blanco office. A lot of stuff went into storage. I have the keys.”
Maia looked at something across the room. “The news said Stirman was a coyote, smuggled people across the border. He was convicted on six counts of accessory to murder. You find out details?”
I picked at a crabmeat flauta. I was reluctant to recal the images I’d seen in Fred Barrow’s files, copies of old police crime scene photos. “Yeah. I found out details.”
“Knife,” Maia interrupted, suddenly tense. She was looking over my shoulder. Quentin Yates must be coming to say hel o.
I held my fingers three inches apart. “Knife?”
She held her hands apart twelve inches. “Knife. In four, three, two—”
I launched a backward elbow strike at groin level.
Quentin Yates grunted, stumbling forward with his meat cleaver off target. He stabbed the table as I grabbed his shirt and used his own momentum to launch him across our crab flautas—Maia calmly lifting her margarita glass out of the way as Quentin went over our table, over the railing, and into space.
A tiny galosh, the squawk of a startled duck, and al was quiet again except for the sound of the waterfal .
Few patrons had noticed. Those who did quickly went back to their meals. Perhaps, they must’ve thought, this was like cherries jubilee, or a sizzling pan of fajitas brought straight to the table. Perhaps the high-diving ma?tre d’ was a new kind of food delivery panache.
Maia and I were fine, except for a few sprinkles of margarita on her blouse, a knee-print in my guacamole, and the twelve-inch meat cleaver shuddering in the tablecloth.
Robert Johnson said, “Row?”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
Our waitress swept over with an oblivious smile and a leather-bound bil . “Wel ! Anybody save room for dessert?”
The hotel room was too expensive—not even a hotel room, but a ranch-style bungalow with a mauve and crème bed, a canopied frame of rough-hewn oak and a Guatemalan rug on the flagstone floor. The fireplace was fil ed with dried sage and baby’s breath. A nest of birds chirped and echoed somewhere up in the old limestone chimney.
Maia paid cash, signed our names Mr. & Mrs. Smith—her little joke, emulating so many Mr. & Mrs.
Smiths we had tailed, photographed, strong-armed into divorce settlements back in the old days.
We stood on the deck, Robert Johnson purring next to us on the railing.
Beneath us, the cedars dropped away into a ravine, the red and silver ribbon of I-35 in the distance, heading north and south to our respective homes. I imagined some poor PI down below us, sweating in his car, pointing his telescopic lens this way, hoping to catch a clear, lurid, unmistakably guilty shot.
I felt the need not to disappoint a hypothetical brother. I pul ed Maia close. We kissed.
“So how would it be,” she said, “if Erainya married this doctor of hers? Got out of the business. Got time to be a mother. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“A scary one, I suppose.”
Our fingers laced. Down in the woods, a few late fireflies were blinking—something I hadn’t seen in San Antonio since I was a kid.
“Then I’d only have the whole city of S.A. to contend with,” Maia decided. “Your roots.”
She said the word roots like she might say cancer. If Maia believed in roots, she never would’ve had the courage to leave Shaoxing as a girl, smuggled aboard a Shanghai freighter by her uncle, who told her she would have to see America for both of them. If she believed in roots, she wouldn’t have left San Francisco, her adopted home, to be close to me.
She never rubbed it in, never mentioned the fact that she’d left everything, come two thousand miles, fol owed me here because I would not stay in the Bay Area. She had resettled in the only palatable Texas port of entry for a Californian—Austin. Couldn’t I close the last seventy-five miles?
“Six deaths,” I said. “Al women, al il egal aliens.”
It took her a moment to fol ow my thoughts. “You mean Wil iam Stirman.”
“The accessory-to-murder charges. Six women were kil ed over a twelve-month period at a ranch in the Hil Country. Chopped to pieces with an ax.”
“Stirman kil ed them?”
“No. The murderer was a rancher named McCurdy. He ate a 12-gauge when the police surrounded his house. Stirman supplied the victims. He supplied slave labor to ranches al across South Texas. He promised immigrants safe passage north. Instead, they were worked to death. This case—the ax murderer —was the only one where Stirman got nailed. He knowingly sold those women to be victims of a kil er.”
Maia leaned against the railing, staring toward the distant highway. “Barrow and Barrera proved that?”
“They worked from different ends, hired by different clients, but they cooperated. Barrow and Barrera broke the case, tied Stirman to the murderer and the victims, hand-delivered him to the police.”
“Stirman won’t hang around,” Maia said. “He’s heading north, probably on his way to Canada.”
I turned the idea around in my head, trying to believe it.
“Besides,” Maia persisted, “why take revenge on the PIs? There must’ve been a lot of people involved in the case—police, attorneys.”
I didn’t bother to answer. We both knew PIs made more satisfying targets—easier to hate, easier to get to. Policemen and lawyers were impersonal parts of the criminal justice machine. Your typical sociopath got little satisfaction from kil ing one, and then the wrath of the whole system came down on you.
Nobody worked up much righteous indignation when a private investigator got smoked. PIs were everybody’s punching bag. In an average week, the Ortiz cousins had lobbed hand grenades at me and Quentin Yates had attacked me with a meat cleaver, al over trivial grudges. In a matter of serious vengeance, I didn’t want to think what a sociopath like Wil Stirman would do.
“You can’t lose sleep over it,” Maia said. “Even if Stirman is coming, he wouldn’t go after Fred Barrow’s widow. And even if he did, what could you do?”
Fireflies blinked in the cedars. The cicadas hummed. In the distance, clouds were choking out the stars. It seemed impossible that it could rain again, but July wasn’t playing by the usual rules.
“You’d stick by Erainya,” Maia answered herself. “I’l give you this, Tres Navarre. You’re loyal. Once someone is in your life, you’d never wil ingly let them down.”
I brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “A compliment?”
“A reminder.”
“It’s hard,” I said. “A hard time for me to just quit.”
She circled my waist, kissed me lightly on the mouth.
“Next week,” I promised. “I’l give you an answer by then.”
But Maia wasn’t hearing me. She was concentrating on the moment—before the rain returned, before the morning separated us for another seven days. She tugged at my fingers, led me inside to the canopied bed, where al night long our slightest movements caused a flutter of birds in the hol ow heart of the chimney.
Chapter 5
Tuesday morning, Luis risked a cal to tel Pablo about the amputation.
The Guide had insisted on another heist, so they’d picked a sporting goods store in Oklahoma City— right next to the highway, a Monday evening, hardly a car in the parking lot. They’d been driving al day since the convenience store holdup in New Braunfels that morning, but they were stil high on adrenaline.
So there was Luis, leaning against the service counter, bul shitting some col ege girl cashier. Pablo remembered the dril . Luis would smile real good. He’d be al , I love these water skis, but oh, damn, I forgot my wallet. Can you wait till my roommate brings me my money? We live right down the street. It’s really gotta be tonight, ’cause we’re going out of town.