“You shot the PI.”
“No, see… the PI had some luck.” He closed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was heavier, chained with guilt. “Angelina had just started meeting this guy he’d located. They were in the bedroom looking at Angelina’s photos. They were talking about old times, trying to figure out what happened to their mother. The man I shot was Angelina’s brother.”
Diane Rehm’s grandmotherly voice filled the room. Sunlight pulsed through the cracks in the boarded-up windows, heating the air like steamed cotton.
Despite the fact that Pablo was holding a gun, Erainya felt so bad for the young man that she had a sudden urge to put a handkerchief to his bleeding nose, the way she would do for Jem.
“Honey,” she said, “does your wife want you back?”
He blinked. “She’ll meet me in Mexico. I wrote her what to do. If she read the letters…”
Erainya looked away.
She knew his plans for a happy ending were nothing but smoke. He would never see his wife again. He would be gunned down, or die on Death Row.
“You’ll see her,” she lied. “But don’t wait for Stirman. Even if he gets his money, he won’t let either of us go home. This is the only chance we’re going to get, Pablo. Your wife wants you back.”
She thought she had him, until he pulled a clip of ammo from his pocket and slid it into the gun.
“Shut up,” he told her again, softly. “Just shut up.”
This time, his eyes told her she’d better do it.
She saw the capacity for rage that had put him in jail. She saw he was capable of murder.
The news came back on-unconfirmed reports from a source close to the investigation: The Floresville Five may not have stayed together as previously thought.
Pablo leaned forward to listen. His newly loaded gun cast a long shadow across the cement.
16
After dropping off Sam Barrera, I spent hours rifling through Erainya’s house, looking for seven million dollars.
I opened every locked drawer in Fred Barrow’s office. I wiggled every stone in the fireplace. I poked random holes in the walls and dug around behind the Sheetrock. I was rewarded with a 1963 phone book and a Jax beer bottle.
In desperation, I even went through Erainya’s bedroom closet.
For a guy, even a private eye, there is nothing more disconcerting than looking through the bedroom closet of a woman you respect. You just never know what you’ll find that might ruin her image.
I found nothing incriminating. Not even the dominatrix suit I’d long suspected Erainya might own.
On second thought, perhaps that did ruin my image of her a bit.
I ended the evening with a tequila bottle, doing my thinking and drinking on top of the Olmos Dam-something I hadn’t done in a very long time. The last time I’d been there, the water level hadn’t been nipping the soles of my shoes.
I tried to concentrate on Erainya, but my mind kept coming back to Sam Barrera, the perplexed look he’d given me from his living room window as I’d driven off in his BMW.
The old curmudgeon probably had family somewhere who could look after him. The fact that he lived alone, that he had absolutely no photographs of relatives in his house… Forget it. I had other problems.
I chunked a rock into the flooded basin. It made a deep sploosh.
My father, Bexar County Sheriff Jackson Navarre, had been a contemporary of Barrera and Barrow. He hadn’t lived as long. One summer when I was home from college, my dad had been gunned down in front of my eyes by a drive-by shooter, an assassin hired by one of his enemies. At the time, I’d gotten a lot of support and sympathy from my friends. Nobody could imagine going through anything so terrible.
But in the last few years, something funny had happened. My older friends’ parents had started aging. Now, many of them were dealing with their parents’ cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s, assisted living nightmares. When my friends talked to me about these problems, I could swear they were giving me wistful looks, suppressing a guilty kind of resentment.
I would never have to go through what they were going through. I wouldn’t have that lingering hell to deal with. My dad had died quickly, still in his prime. My mom-well, she was much younger. She never seemed to age. She had told me many times that she intended to go off a cliff in a red sports car as soon as she began doubting her own faculties, and I had no doubt she was telling the truth.
My friends didn’t have quite so much sympathy for Tres Navarre these days. I’d had it pretty easy when it came to parents. Death in a drive-by? Piece of cake. In fact my last argument with Ralph Arguello-almost two years ago, after the death of his mother-had been along those lines. But the more I saw of what my friends with aging parents went through, the more I tended to agree-I’d had it easy.
Which didn’t explain why I felt so damn empty, or why Sam Barrera’s unraveling bothered me so much.
I took another swig of Herradura Anejo.
I stayed on the dam, watching emergency lights flash all across the city, until a National Guard patrol came by and chased me off.
I probably would’ve slept through the rest of July had the phone not woken me up the next morning.
I opened my eyes. There was a cat on my head. Sunlight was baking my mouth.
Much to Robert Johnson’s displeasure, I crawled off the futon, made it to the ironing board, and yanked down the receiver. “Yeah.”
“Oh…” A female voice, on the edge of panic. “Coach Navarre, I didn’t expect you to be home…”
Several things went through my head.
First: Where the hell else would I be at-Jesus, did the clock really say ten?
Second: Why was this woman calling me coach?
Behind the caller, children were screaming. Then it hit me. I realized why she was close to panic. It was Thursday morning. Jem’s summer school volunteer soccer coach was late to practice again.
“Crap,” I said. “I mean darn. Um… Mrs…”
“Toca,” she said. “Carmen’s mother? If you can’t make it today, I suppose I can watch the children…” A pregnant pause-letting me imagine torture with soccer cones, mass destruction in the goalie’s box. “But the first game is Saturday. I didn’t know if you had the uniforms…”
Uniforms. Damn.
Game. Damn.
In my mind, my commitment to soccer had ceased as soon as Jem wasn’t able to make practice anymore. Apparently, I’d forgotten to share that assessment with the other fifteen players and their families.
I should have taken up Mrs. Toca’s offer to watch the kids. I could make up an emergency excuse. Like I didn’t have an emergency excuse.
Ma’am, there’s an escaped fugitive I have to kill. Just tell the kids to work on their passing.
But I heard the team yelling behind her, and the primal fear closing up her throat as she pleaded, “Coach…?”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Oh, okay,” her voice quavered. “Thank God. I mean, we’ll see you in five minutes.”
She either hung up or a child broke the phone.
Seventeen minutes later I was on the field-which again had dried out just enough to avoid canceling practice. It was as if God had declared divine protection over this small patch of ground, and scheduled His Flood around practice times, just so I could get my twice-weekly punishment.
Except for Jem, the whole team was there-fifteen miniature tornadoes who’d been cooped up indoors since the last time I’d seen them, two days ago, and were desperate to unwind every ounce of energy at my expense.
A few mothers waited impatiently on the field. No doubt I’d made them late for their manicures at
