knowing they are caught, but they have no choice but to try. It was as if she wanted to push the intruders out of her life.
For a moment, Will Stirman looked at Sam. Then Will drew his gun.
Fred Barrow aimed as the woman-who Sam wasn’t sure Fred even registered-stepped in front of the gun, her arms raised like a long-lost relative.
Sam ignored Piss-face and scanned the room. Desolation where there had once been plush furniture, maroon wallpaper, reggae music on an expensive stereo. The only thing left was the crepe carpet, now coming apart in patches, water-stained, discolored in places from very old blood.
Piss-face’s hand slid cautiously toward the pocket of his army surplus jacket.
“What are you doing here, Barrera?” he asked. “Scared the shit out of me.”
Sam tried to refocus on the derelict.
Just his luck to find an old collar-or informant, stool pigeon, whatever the hell this guy was-sleeping in this warehouse, of all places. Then again, Sam had been on the streets so long it was hard to turn over any rock in San Antonio and not find some slimy thing he’d dealt with before.
“Get out,” Sam told him.
He tried to put authority in his voice, but he didn’t feel so good. He was remembering the pattern of the young Latina’s dress, the look on Stirman’s face as his lover fell.
Piss-face licked his lips. Hunger was slowly displacing his fear.
In his better days, Sam would’ve anticipated that shift.
“You remember me, right?” Piss-face asked. “Right, Mr. Barrera?”
His voice was dangerously polite, testing.
Sam counted bloodstains on the old carpet-two large ones, a constellation of lesser splatters.
Piss-face took a step closer. “Mr. Barrera?”
“Get lost,” Sam murmured.
It didn’t sound like his voice. It sounded like an old man, asking a question.
Piss-face was close enough now that Sam could smell the rotgut on his breath. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Sam had a gun. He knew he should draw it.
“What’s my name, old man?” Piss-face asked. “Tell me.”
The woman had fallen to the carpet. Will Stirman had fired, his shot taking out a chunk of plaster next to Fred Barrow’s head. The second shot likely would’ve found Barrow’s skull, but Sam opened up-aiming for Stirman’s chest, getting his arm instead, then Stirman’s shoulder as he went down. The couch probably saved Stirman’s life, because as soon as Fred Barrow got over being stunned, he emptied his clip in that direction.
Sam had only shot twice. No more. He had not fired on the woman. He had not continued to fire, in shock, as Fred Barrow had done.
Sam’s ears rang, and the music still throbbed, but there was a small hole of silence in the room that Sam registered only when Irene Barrow pushed past him, toward the crib. The baby was no longer crying.
In the present, Piss-face drew his gun. It was a small. 22, but close enough to kill. He said, “Long as you’re here, old man-how about a loan?”
His breath was downright flammable. His finger was tight on the trigger.
Sam felt something black and hard filling his chest. He stepped toward Piss-face, pushed his sternum against the barrel of the derelict’s gun, forced Piss-face to take a step back.
“Do it,” Sam said.
“I swear to God,” Piss-face said.
“ Do it!”
Sam slapped the gun out of Piss-face’s hand. He took a handful of the kid’s shirt. With his other hand, he hit the kid in the face, getting blood on his cuff, his coat sleeve, his college ring.
He forced himself to stop before he would kill the kid. He released Piss-face, let him fall in a trembling, whining heap.
“Get out.”
Piss-face scrambled to the door and down the metal steps, his hands over his face.
Sam touched his own chest, where the gun had pressed against his heart. It would have been so much quicker than the darkness ahead, the slow painless disease that had begun wrapping around his brain.
He pulled out his own gun, just to steady his hand. He aimed it at the spot where Will Stirman had gone down.
After the shooting, reggae music had still blared: “Tomorrow People,” a song Sam would find ironic in retrospect.
Fred Barrow had stared at the black duffel bag he’d inadvertently shot-one of two, filled with blocks of cash. A stray bullet had plowed a groove through the top layer of hundreds.
Standing over the crib, Barrow’s wife was panicked, her voice desperate: “Christ, Fred. It’s not breathing.”
Sam had tried to forget the rest. He had tried for years.
Now God, with His sense of humor, was answering Sam’s prayer for forgetfulness with a vengeance.
The Barrows had argued. Fred insisted that his wife leave before the police arrive, get the hell away. The two men would clean up.
And they had.
The division of the duffel bags-one each, no discussion. Such a simple matter to haul them downstairs, throw them in the trunk of the car, while Will Stirman was upstairs bleeding, dying, and the sirens were still a long way away.
Sam stared at his gun. He was getting farsighted. The match-grade handle pattern was only clear at a full arm’s length.
His memory was like his vision. He had to hold something at several years’ distance to see it clearly. Soon, he would be living in an eternal present. He would be unable to remember the beginning of a sentence long enough to reach the end.
He thought about the visit he’d taken, at his doctor’s request.
They needed a decision by Friday. When was that-tomorrow?
Sam could live in that brightly lit room, singing “This Land Is Your Land” with a group of old ladies, his name on a kindergarten tag to remind him who he was.
But he suspected the memory of the reggae music would only get clearer, the face of Irene Barrow as she looked into that crib.
He put his gun away.
There was still time to decide.
He walked downstairs, out of the abandoned warehouse, remembering the weight of the duffel bag so clearly it made his shoulders ache.
The car parked outside wasn’t his BMW. It was a Chevy Impala, but it had already been hotwired, so Sam took it.
He drove toward downtown, then east, under Highway 281, until a scent caught him-a current, steering him toward the place he needed.
Will Stirman wouldn’t have gone far from his old home. He would’ve chosen another warehouse, a place very much like the first. Sam had seen something on a video.
Every East Side street held memories for Sam, sunken like land mines. The margarita-green house with the unpainted gables. The chop shop with the tiny American flags stuck on the fence posts. The abandoned lot, its cedar trees tangled with birdhouses and plastic grocery bags, the sidewalk bearded with wild cilantro. Sam had been to all these places. He had saved people, arrested people, discovered bodies. He was tempted to stop at every
