Our snitch owed Dimebox four grand in cockfighting bets. He was getting a little nervous about Dimebox’s habit of setting his delinquent debtors on fire, and was anxious to see Dimebox in jail. He had promised us Dimebox was staying with his cousins. He’d also promised us Dimebox had a date with a lady tonight, and if we staked out the cousins’ house, we could easily tail him and snag him in transit.
Six o’clock, the snitch had told us. Seven o’clock, at the latest.
It was now 10:33.
I needed to pee.
I had an empty Coke bottle, but it isn’t tempting to use that trick when your female boss is next to you in the driver’s seat and her eight-year-old son is playing PlayStation 2 in the back.
Jem wasn’t supposed to be with us. The rain had washed out his plans to see the Woodlawn Lake fireworks with his second-grade friends. That left him nothing to do but a boring old stakeout with his mom.
Erainya, with her usual bizarre logic about what was safe for her child, had weighed the risks of a baby-sitter against Lalu and Kiko’s grenades, and decided to go with the stakeout. Of course, given some of the surveillance cases we’d worked involving baby-sitters and day-care workers, I supposed she had a point.
So we had the soothing sounds of Spyro the Dragon in the back seat. We had a dark row of clapboard houses and chinaberry trees to look at. And we had the rain, which had been alternately pouring and drizzling all afternoon, and was now reminding my bladder of flow patterns.
I was about to suggest that we call it quits, that not even the munificent sum Dimebox’s bail bondsman was offering was worth this, when Erainya said, “We’ll wait, honey. He’ll show.”
The longer I knew her, the more Erainya answered my questions before I asked them. It had gotten to the point where she could slug me when I was even thinking about being a smart-ass.
“Little late for a date,” I said.
She gave me those onyx eyes-the Greek Inquisition. “Your payday is Friday, honey. You want a check?”
That I heard loud and clear.
The past few months, since Erainya’s archrival, I-Tech Security, had taken away our last bread-and-butter contract with a downtown legal firm, her finances had been slowly unraveling. We’d given up our office space on Blanco. Erainya’s high-speed Internet line had been shut off twice. Our information broker would no longer work on credit. We were taking whatever cases Erainya could get just to keep afloat-divorce, workers comp, bail-jumpers. The dregs of the PI business.
I’d thought about making us cardboard signs, Will Sleuth for Food, but Erainya had slugged me before I could suggest it.
I reminded myself she had more at stake in the agency than I did.
She’d inherited the business from her husband, Fred Barrow, when he died. Or more accurately, when she’d shot him to death for abusing her, then been acquitted on murder charges.
This was back before I became a calming influence in her life.
After the murder trial, she’d disappeared to the Mediterranean for a year, reclaimed her maiden name and her Greek heritage, and returned to Texas the adoptive mother of a Bosnian orphan boy. She’d taken up Barrow’s PI business with a vengeance and had become arguably the best street investigator in South Texas.
Yet she’d never done more than scrape by, no matter how hard she worked. It was as if Fred Barrow’s ghost hung over the agency, jinxing her luck. The old rivalry with I-Tech became more and more one-sided until I-Tech dominated San Antonio, while we survived off bounties on scumbags like Dimebox Ortiz.
Lately, Erainya had been taking longer vacations with her boyfriend. She put off paperwork. She mused through old case files, which she would close and lock in her drawer whenever I approached.
She’d been one of the two great mentors of my career. She’d gotten me licensed and bonded, terrorized me into good investigative habits for the past four years. Whenever I thought of quitting PI work and using my English PhD to find a full-time college teaching position, which was about every other week, Erainya urged me to stick with it, telling me I was a natural investigator. I had a knack for finding the lost, helping the desperate. I chose to take that as a compliment.
The last thing I wanted to admit was that I was worried about her, that I sensed her spirit going out of the job.
So I tried to act excited about watching the Ortiz house.
Erainya polished a. 45-caliber bullet. I nibbled on some of her homemade spanakopita, which she brought by the sackful whenever we went into the field.
I got tired of PlayStation noises and switched on the radio. We listened to an NPR interview with an artist who turned roadkill into paintings for New York galleries. I imagined my mother’s voice scolding me: See, dear, some people have real jobs.
My mother, one of San Antonio’s few card-carrying bohemians, had been out of town for almost three months now, knocking around Central America with her newest boyfriend, a chakra crystal salesman who had ridiculous amounts of money. It was probably just as well she wasn’t around to lecture me on my career choices.
In the back of the van, Jem said, “Yess!”
I looked at him. “Good news?”
Delayed reaction: “Frozen Altars level. Twenty-eight eggs.”
“Wow. Hard?”
Jem kept playing. The rain battered the windows.
Jem’s silky black hair was cut in bangs, same as it had been since kindergarten, but over the past year his face had filled in considerably. He looked like your typical San Antonio kid-a something-percent mix of Latino and Anglo; black Spurs T-shirt, orange shorts, light-up sneakers. You would be hard pressed to believe that as a one- year-old he had been a Bosnian Muslim orphan, his parents’ mule-drawn cart blown apart by a land mine, his young eyes burned with God-knew-how-many-other images of war.
“Hard level?” I asked again.
No response.
I wanted to tear the game pad out of his hands and fling it into the night, but hey-I wasn’t his dad. What did I expect the kid to do for endless hours in the back of a van? Read?
“Yeah,” he said at last. “The evil panda bears-”
“Honey,” Erainya said, her voice suddenly urgent. “Turn the sound off.”
I looked out the windshield, expecting to see some action at the Ortiz cousins’ house.
Instead, Erainya was focused on the radio. A news brief about the prison break that afternoon-five dangerous cons on the loose. The Floresville Five, the media had instantly dubbed them-Will Stirman, C. C. Andrews, Elroy Lacoste, Pablo Zagosa, Luis Juarez.
“Not a good day for the warden,” I agreed. “You see the pictures?”
Erainya glared at me. “Pictures?”
“On TV this afternoon. Don’t tell me you’ve missed this.”
The news announcer recounted how the cons had been left unsupervised in a religious rehabilitation program. The five had overpowered the chaplain, killed a guard and a fellow inmate, driven straight through the back gate in the preacher’s Ford Explorer after stealing several handguns, a shotgun, and an unknown amount of ammunition from the prison armory. They should be considered armed and dangerous.
No shit.
The alarm hadn’t gone up for almost fifteen minutes, by which time the cons had ditched the SUV in the Floresville Wal-Mart parking lot and vanished, possibly in another car provided by an outside accomplice. A map of Kingsville had been found in one of the cells, leading authorities to believe that at least some of the fugitives might be heading south toward the Mexican border. Police all along the Rio Grande were on alert. The suspected ringleader of the jailbreak, William “the Ghost” Stirman, had been serving ninety-nine years on multiple convictions of human trafficking and accessory to murder. Prison psychologists described him as a highly dangerous sociopath.
“The Ghost,” I said. “He’ll be the one wearing the sheet with the eyeholes.”
Erainya didn’t smile. She turned off the radio, fumbled for her cell phone.
“What?” I asked.
She dialed a number, cursed. With the storm, cell phone reception inside the van, especially here on the rural South Side, was almost nonexistent.
