by Saturday. I’ll get to play.”
Maia glared at me as if I’d just sold the kid some real estate at the North Pole.
“I hope so,” I told him. “We’ll hope, okay? Now go get packed.”
He hustled off, showing more energy than he had in days.
“How can you?” Maia asked.
When Maia got angry, she got cold. At the moment, her eyes could’ve frozen mercury.
“I need to use your phone,” I said. “Local call.”
“If you think, for one minute, I’m going to let you-”
“Thanks.” I picked up her phone, dialed a friend of mine at the Texas Department of Human Resources. It took all of four minutes to ask an easy question, and get an easy answer. The organization I was inquiring about didn’t exist. Nor, according to the state’s records, had it existed eight years ago. I hung up, no doubt now, but feeling worse than ever.
“Well?” Maia demanded.
It would’ve been best to tell her.
I knew Maia would help me, if I explained. She would come to San Antonio, watch my back, fight my battles, do whatever she could to help save Erainya.
But it would be a mistake. I was already treading too far over the invisible line that separated our relationship from my work in San Antonio-the job Maia quietly resented. If I relied on her for more help, I’d be pushing us in the wrong direction. On some level she might never admit, Maia would take it as a sign of disrespect.
“Jem has to come with me,” I said. “He’s right. It may be the only way to resolve this without blood.”
“You’re absolutely insane.”
“Stirman won’t hurt him.”
“You’re sure of that.” Her words were like mist off a glacier. “You’re willing to risk his life.”
Out her window, a hawk circled through the slow persistent drizzle over Barton Creek.
For the first time, I understood Erainya’s dilemma as a parent-her sometimes crazy choices about what was best for Jem. The safest thing, the right thing, was rarely obvious.
I knew now why I had come to Austin. I knew exactly why Jem had to come back with me.
And I knew something else, too.
Standing in Maia’s kitchen, so much like her old kitchen on Potrero Hill, looking out at the vista she swore was not the ghost image of her lost home, I knew where to find Fred Barrow’s seven million dollars.
19
Will didn’t mean for it to happen.
All he wanted was food and cash.
He passed up two convenience stores, convincing himself he needed to get farther away from the hideout.
He got on I-35, cruised down to Hot Wells Boulevard, turned into the South Side neighborhood he knew so well.
At the corner of South New Braunfels, the blue jeans factory he’d once used as a holding facility had been burned to crossbeams. The adobe house that belonged to his friend the Guide had been repainted lime green.
Farther down, on a ridge overlooking a swollen creek, the Estrella Barbecue Pit stood abandoned, its back deck sagging over the water.
Will had done business on that deck. He’d smoked cigars and drank Bacardi with clients while the air filled with brisket smoke, sulfur from the hot springs bubbling up in the creek bed, making soft milky rings in the mud.
Will and his clients would sit around the picnic table, negotiating the price of women.
Panamanian girls fought harder than Guatemalans. Girls from Coahuila turned the best short-term profit. The ones from the central mountains lasted longer. Twelve was too young to be reliably trained. Eighteen, too old. Glossy hair was a sign of health. Good teeth were a premium. Stirman wrote special orders on a yellow legal pad.
The following weekend, when Will got across the Rio Grande, he would find every girl on his shopping list, as if writing their descriptions made them appear-hopeful and eager and willing to believe his lies.
He made a right on South Presa, passed several more ice houses. He rejected one because he used to know the owners; another, because too many kids were Rollerblading outside.
His own hesitation irritated him. He should just pick a place and hit it.
He wasn’t worried about being recognized. Since kidnapping Erainya Manos, he’d bleached his hair and shaved his five-day stubble. He’d gotten himself a pair of black rubber sunglasses, a blue Hawaiian shirt and jeans, boots that made him an inch taller. He doubted anyone would identify him right away, even in his old home turf.
Still he kept driving.
He turned on Dimmit Street because the name sounded familiar, and realized why only when he found himself in a dead end, facing a pink clapboard house. The hand-painted sign in the front yard
read: TEXAS PRISON MINISTRY.
Will stopped his car in the middle of the cul-de-sac. He stared at the sign.
Pastor Riggs had always called his ministry headquarters Dimmit Street. Like it was some great central command, like the Pentagon or the White House.
But Will had never pictured it. He’d never realized where it was.
The front window had two bullet holes for eyes. Empty beer bottles littered the flower bed. Parked in the driveway was the Reverend’s black Ford Explorer, a dent in the fender where Elroy had backed into the Floresville Wal-Mart dumpster the first day of their escape.
Will’s jaw tightened. He remembered Pastor Riggs fighting them in the chapel, forcing them to get violent. All of Will’s plans had started to unravel from that moment.
After the head-bashing they’d given Riggs, the old man couldn’t be alive. None of the news reports Will heard ever mentioned Riggs’ fate. But if Riggs was alive, if he saw Will here…
Back up, Will’s instincts told him.
He didn’t.
He sat there stupidly as the door of the ministry house opened.
The tip of a bamboo cane appeared first, then Pastor Riggs, tapping at the stoop. Behind him, a scowling black dude, an ex-con judging from his posture, held the door as the preacher climbed down onto the porch.
Riggs had aged a decade in a week. The pastor’s head was shaved and bandaged where Zeke’s soldering iron had split the scalp. The left side of his face drooped like a Halloween mask.
The black dude carried a stack of books under one arm. Will wondered if they were donations for a prison library. Surely Riggs couldn’t be doing outreach work anymore. His program was ruined. He’d been disgraced, discredited. No warden would let him within a mile of an inmate.
Suddenly, Riggs looked up. The preacher’s eyes were unchanged-pale and startling blue. They stared straight at Will.
Will’s hand went to the transmission.
His stolen Camaro had a tinted windshield. The setting sun shone straight against it. Riggs shouldn’t be able to see through it any easier than through aluminum foil.
Still, their eyes seemed to meet. Will remembered prison Bible studies, moments when the heat and the preaching would wear through his pretense and Will would feel God. Or late at night, sketching Bible scenes on a yellow pad, when it almost seemed as if the rage could finally leave his mind, travel straight down to the tip of his pencil and onto the paper.
Will was sure, absolutely sure, that the Reverend could see him in this car.
He gunned the engine.
The Reverend raised his hand. Will slammed the Camaro into reverse. He fishtailed out of Dimmit Street, the
