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 pulled 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, followed 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. “All women, all illegal aliens.”
It took her a moment to follow my thoughts. “You mean William Stirman.”
“The accessory-to-murder charges. Six women were killed over a twelve-month period at a ranch in the Hill Country. Chopped to pieces with an ax.”
“Stirman killed 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 all 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 killer.”
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 killing 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, all over trivial grudges. In a matter of serious vengeance, I didn’t want to think what a sociopath like Will 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’ll give you this, Tres Navarre. You’re loyal. Once someone is in your life, you’d never willingly 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’ll 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 all night long our slightest movements caused a flutter of birds in the hollow heart of the chimney.
5
Tuesday morning, Luis risked a call to tell 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 all day since the convenience store holdup in New Braunfels that morning, but they were still high on adrenaline.
So there was Luis, leaning against the service counter, bullshitting some college girl cashier. Pablo remembered the drill. Luis would smile real good. He’d be all, 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.
So they let him stay after closing, and he was chatting up the pretty cashier. All the other clerks went home. The manager was impatient, but trying to be polite, because hey, it was a six-hundred-dollar purchase. Luis was dressed in a nice workout suit, gold chains. He looked like he could afford good things. Why not humor the customer?
The sky turned purple. These huge locusts started dropping from the sky, right on the sidewalk. Hundreds of them crawling over the asphalt, like red cigarettes with legs. Luis figured the whole area used to be farmland, and the bugs were wondering where all the crops went.
He thought of that story Pastor Riggs used to tell-Pablo remembered the one-how the locusts came as a plague to Egypt.
Luis thought: God must be fucking pissed. But he kept smiling and bullshitting the cashier, because the plan depended on him being so damn charming they wouldn’t kick him out.
The van pulled up, right by the entrance. His make-believe roommate, C.C., got out.
Pablo interrupted the story: C.C.? They opened the door for C.C.?
Yeah, Luis said. He cleaned up pretty good for a scrawny-ass nigger.
Anyway, C.C. was wearing this flashy Italian suit, like a damn lawyer. He came to the door, looked straight through the glass at Luis, and shook his head like he was irritated. He held up a wallet. Naughty, naughty.
The manager turned the key and let him in.
The manager started to say, “Normally I wouldn’t-” when C.C. drew a gun and shot him in the face.
The cashier screamed.
The manager knelt, hands going out to break his fall even though he was already dead. He curled into fetal position at C.C.’s feet.
Elroy and the Guide busted inside, both wearing ski masks, carrying shotguns.
They took the flanks, rounded up a couple of stock boys from the back of the store.
Luis told the girl cashier, “We’re going into the office now and open the safe.”
“He-” The girl pointed toward the thing that used to be her boss. “He’s the only one who knows how.”
The Guide looked at C.C. “What the fuck you shoot him for?”
“Fuck you,” C.C. said, but it was an act. C.C. was getting off on being the bad-ass, and the Guide was happy to let him.
We make a little mess, the Guide had told them their first day heading north. Every once in a while, we surface and give them a new headline. That’s the price for your freedom.
C.C. loved it. He thought he was goddamn Jesse James. He’d taken to wearing two pistols. He was the one who shot the convenience store clerk in New Braunfels, and a gas station attendant Sunday night in Seguin that the
