He was telling Jem something, pointing his gun at the boy’s feet. I could’ve sworn he was giving Jem a lecture.
Stirman saw me. He rose, calmly. We leveled our guns at each other.
I could hear police cars now. Tires slashing through water, turning onto Jones. They were running without sirens, but I knew they were cops. There is something unmistakable about the sound of police engines.
“It’s over,” I told Stirman. “Let Jem go back to his mother.”
Stirman blinked slowly. He seemed to be losing his grip on consciousness.
A single police light flashed-circling once across the neon skywalk and the face of the West Tower. An officer must have hit the switch accidentally while getting out of his car.
The light snapped Stirman back to his senses. He looked around. He was backed into a corner, forty feet in the air.
“Tell me where the money is,” he said.
“It’s too late for that,” I said. “You’ll never get out of the building.”
“I owe Soledad. I can’t give up.”
“It isn’t giving up. It’s deciding to live. If you run, you’ll die.”
Down in front of the museum, car doors were opening.
I had to get Jem away from Stirman. I had to get him out of the line of fire.
Stirman held my eyes. He seemed to understand what I was thinking.
He put his hand on Jem’s shoulder, gently pushed him toward me. “Go on, boy.”
Jem dug in his heels. His hand was closed, as if he were holding something small. “But…”
“Go on,” Stirman ordered.
Jem shook his head stubbornly. “But you told me-”
“It’s all right.” Stirman’s voice cracked. “Just go on, now.”
When Jem was finally safe behind me, Stirman said, “Now tell me about the cash. Quick.”
I didn’t see what difference it would make. I told him where the money was.
Understanding dawned on Stirman’s face-the sense that what I said had to be true. “Goddamn Fred Barrow.”
I imagined the police inside the building, the slow pulse of the glass elevator as it rose through the galleries, filled with heavily armed men.
Stirman took one last look at Jem-hesitating long enough to erase any chance of escape.
“Bear witness, Jem,” he said. “Be good to your mother, hear?”
Then he jumped. The drop should have been enough to break his legs, but he hit the roof of the lower gallery on solid footing and cleared the other side, dropping into the darkness behind the museum. There was at least a square mile of woods and flooded riverbanks back there. The police would have to search it on foot. But they would find him. I was sure of that.
Jem stared at the spot where Stirman had disappeared-wet treetops hissing in the rain.
I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, but I sensed the barrier he was putting up. He wanted no more hand-holding, no comforting.
“He won’t come back,” I said.
“I know.”
His tone wasn’t what I expected from an eight-year-old who’d just had a conversation with evil. He sounded wistful. He wore the same expression he’d worn the night we watched his mother’s van go floating away down Rosillio Creek.
He slipped his hand into his pocket, depositing whatever he was holding.
Before I could ask what it was, I heard a groan from the roof below us. A man’s voice said, “Hell.”
“Stay here,” I told Jem.
I lowered myself over the railing. Stirman had done it. How hard could it be?
I dropped.
Stupid, Navarre.
I lost my footing immediately and slid down the slick roof. I would have gone over the edge and into the skylights below had I not caught the wet bottom rung of a service ladder. Slowly, I managed to crawl back up to where Sam Barrera was lying on his back, his arm bent underneath him at an ugly angle.
“Damn bastard,” he muttered. “You get him, Fred?”
I sat next to him, too exhausted to correct his ragged memory. “Yeah. I got him.”
That seemed to comfort the old man. He put his head back and let the rain fall on his face. Police were popping up in all the windows of the museum now-SWAT team members on the skywalk, aiming assault rifles at me.
“Thanks,” I told Sam, “for trying to save us up there.”
“Did I do that?”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I always was pretty damn brave,” Barrera said. “I don’t know about taking the money, though. It feels wrong.”
“Maybe it is,” I admitted.
“And the baby?”
I looked at him, and asked carefully, “What about him?”
“Did your wife get him out okay?”
I was silent for a long time as the police moved in, DeLeon now visible above us, not looking happy, or in any hurry to call off her firing squad.
“Yeah, Erainya got him out,” I told Barrera. “The baby is fine.”
I looked up at Ana DeLeon in the broken glass and neon. I raised my hands in surrender.
25
The plane was a twin-engine Cessna, so old no self-respecting drug-runner would use it anymore, but it could still make the flight to Mexico below radar in under an hour.
The pilot waited in the drizzle on the tarmac at Stinson Field. He checked his watch. His client was late.
It was a crummy night to fly, but anticipating his payment made him feel better. He imagined the money in his bank account. He would make separate cash deposits, space them out carefully, keep them under the mandatory reporting limit.
He was deep in thought about a comfortable retirement when somebody put a gun to his back.
Long after the police took Erainya Manos away, Pablo had waited in the ventilation shaft.
He expected the woman to sell him out. Any second, the muzzle of an assault rifle would poke its way into his hiding place.
But Pablo kept waiting.
When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he crawled out. No one was waiting in the storage room to ambush him. His gun was still lying on the floor by the window. They hadn’t even bothered bagging it for evidence.
Why would the police leave the scene so fast?
He checked the magazine. Still loaded, minus the bullet Erainya Manos had fired to rattle the police.
Dangerous, he had told her.
It’ll throw them off balance, she said. When they find out I fired the gun, they’ll relax their guard about everything. They’ll believe I’m alone.
He hadn’t trusted her, but he’d gone along. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t surrender. He couldn’t bring himself to kill her.
He crept down the stairs, spotted two uniformed cops at the front entrance. They looked bored, like they’d been put there to keep people out. They weren’t paying any attention to the inside of the building.
Pablo slipped out the back, onto the loading docks.
