“Pick up the balls!” I yelled after them, but of course it was too late.
Jem and I cleaned up equipment. The rain came down heavier, sizzling against the grass. We gathered the balls and cones, stuffed everything into the supply sack. Jem skipped around in his muddy yellow goalie vest, punching the air.
“Wasn’t I great?” he asked. “Goalie rocks!”
“We’ll keep working on it, champ.”
“Can I play goalie the whole game, Tres? Please?”
“Remember, you have to give the others a turn.”
“Aw, please?”
We lugged the gear bag to the storage shed, out by the kindergarten parking lot. Rain drummed against the aluminum roof.
I’d just finished padlocking the door when I noticed the silver BMW idling by the curb. The father in the Oxford and khakis was walking toward us.
“Looking for your child?” I asked.
“No, no,” the man said. “Got him in the car.”
The BMW’s windows were so dark he could’ve had the whole soccer team inside and I wouldn’t have been able to see them.
Technically, he shouldn’t have parked in the kindergarten lot. It was off limits for the summer. Everybody was supposed to pick up at the main entrance, where the security booth controlled access. But the back lot was closer to the field, there was easy egress to neighborhood streets, and many parents, like their kids, had trouble believing school rules applied to them.
“I’m Alec’s dad,” the man said. “Jerry Vespers.”
His hand was callused, odd for a BMW driver. His accent West Texas-an oil man, maybe.
“Tres Navarre,” I said.
I tried to picture his son. There were still a couple of kids’ names I was shaky on, but Alec Vespers?
The father’s skin was fish-belly white, his black hair shaved in a severe military cut. His eyes, behind the gold wire rim glasses, were wrong somehow-calm but intense, like he was staring down a rifle scope.
“I don’t know Alec,” I decided. “He isn’t on the team.”
“No,” Mr. Vespers agreed. “Couldn’t get him interested. I told Erainya we’d pick up Jem.”
“Pardon?”
“The play date.” Mr. Vespers smiled thinly. “I’ll have Jem home by supper. Or Erainya can call, if she’d rather come get him. Come on, Jem.”
Jem was looking at Mr. Vespers with a curious expression, as if he’d just been offered a dangerous present. He took a tentative step forward, but I put my hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t know anything about a play date,” I told Mr. Vespers.
“Erainya must’ve forgotten to tell you,” he said. “How about I call the agency? She at the 315 extension?”
He took out a cell phone, started to dial. He seemed keen to prove that he knew Erainya’s business number.
“No need,” I told him. “Jem’s going with me.”
Vespers closed his cell phone. He slipped it into his pants pocket. “You the boy’s parent, Mr. Navarre?”
“I don’t know you. Erainya wouldn’t forget to tell me.”
He shifted his gaze to Jem. “Alec’s in the car, son. How about you come say goodbye to him, at least?”
Jem looked agitated now. He was chewing on his thumbnail.
“Mr. Vespers,” I said tightly. “You need to leave.”
Vespers lowered on his haunches. His eyes narrowed, rain speckling his glasses. “What’s the matter, boy?”
“You’re making my stomach feel queasy,” Jem murmured.
Vespers’ stare was unpleasantly hungry.
“You need to leave,” I told him again, trying to keep my voice level. “Before I call the police.”
Vespers rose.
“You think I’m a predator?” he asked. “You think I like little kids, is that it?”
I took out Erainya’s cell phone. For once, I was grateful she’d made me take it on the trip to San Marcos. “I’m calling campus security.”
“This ain’t personal between you and me, Mr. Navarre,” Vespers said. “Think about that before you insult me. I need to talk to the boy.”
“The hell you do.”
Vespers’ hand drifted toward his side. He had something in his pocket-a lump I should’ve noticed before, maybe large enough to be a small gun.
Fifteen years of martial arts training told me that if I was going to act, I had to do it now.
But Vespers looked down at Jem again, and the rifle-scope intensity of his eyes dissipated, as if something much too close to target had moved into his field of vision.
“Tell your mother you saw me,” Vespers said. “She knows what I want. She’d best give it back.”
By the time I got Chuck Phelps, the school security captain, on the phone, the BMW’s taillights had disappeared onto Hundred Oaks. I gave Chuck the BMW’s model and license plate, told him to call the police.
I could hear Chuck flipping pages in his master directory. “Thing is, Mr. Navarre, that is Mr. Vespers’ car. He does have a kid, Alec, in Jem’s grade. Alec’s in summer art class. Mr. Vespers waits on the street over there all the time.”
“Call anyway.”
Chuck said okay, but I got the feeling my request had just been bumped down to low priority, and I didn’t insist it was an emergency.
I’d have plenty of time to kick myself about that later.
It would be almost a week, long after the worst had happened, before the police would find the silver BMW abandoned in a sorghum field in the north part of the county, the body of the real Jerry Vespers curled in the trunk. His death would become a mere sidebar to the story of the Floresville Five, a life cut short merely because it served Will Stirman’s purpose to assume another identity for a few minutes.
But that afternoon, driving Jem back to his mother’s house, I was slow to process the obvious.
Nothing can prepare you for the moment a child you care about is threatened. Doesn’t matter if you’re a cop or a social worker or a private eye.
My upper brain functions shut down. My senses went feral. I was a cat under attack, crouching and blinking, smelling my own blood, thinking of nothing beyond my claws.
We were halfway to Erainya’s before I realized who I’d been talking to, how close I’d come to dying.
Jem curled up in the cab of the truck, put his head on my lap like he used to in kindergarten.
“That isn’t safe, kiddo,” I told him. “We’re driving.”
But he was already asleep, his body trying to absorb a trauma bigger than he was.
I turned on Nacogdoches to avoid the flooding on Loop 410, but that proved a mistake. The low-water crossing by the YMCA field had become a river, black water cresting at the tops of the speed limit signs. A house was floating across the road.
Dozens of people had left their cars. They stood with umbrellas by the waterside, watching the prefab model sail slowly over the bridge. The house had white aluminum siding, a gray-shingled roof, blue curtains and a sign in the window that read, NO MONEY DOWN!!!
I should have backed up, but I sat in my truck, watching the spectacle, my hand on Jem’s feverish forehead.
I had failed to recognize Will Stirman, even though his disguise had been nothing more than a pair of glasses and the fact that he had appeared out of any context I would’ve anticipated.
I had failed to take him down when I had the chance. I told myself I could have taken him.
But the truth was: Jem and I were alive for only one reason. Will Stirman had let us go to deliver a message.
Tell your mother you saw me. She knows what I want.
