know. Perhaps she would be waiting for him. Perhaps the Mexican police would.
He had sent her instructions many times in his letters-always indirect references that she alone would understand. If she’d read the letters, if she wanted him back, she would know what to do.
She was to tell her friends and family to look for a yellow cloth tied around the front porch post-the kind people left out for soldiers overseas. That would be her signal to them-the only goodbye she could give-to let them know she had disappeared on purpose, gone to join him.
Pablo wondered if she would do that.
The Cessna climbed higher, above the flooded farms and the dark ranch land of South Texas.
Pablo thought of El Paso, and his wife’s face.
For the first time since Floresville, since the last morning circle when he’d joined hands with his five brethren and Pastor Riggs, Pablo prayed.
26
That bastard Will Stirman stole my truck.
While I was busy getting chewed out by DeLeon, and the paramedics were tending to Sam Barrera, and the police were fanning out across every square foot of riverfront behind the museum, Stirman crept around the side of the building-exactly where it was most suicidal to go. He found my F-150 by the river, found the extra key I kept in the wheel well, pulled away over the Grand Avenue Bridge and disappeared.
It was twenty minutes before I noticed the truck was missing and we figured out what had happened.
By then, Stirman was long gone.
That same night, two hours later and twenty-five miles northwest of town, in the lightest rainfall of the month, Medina Dam broke.
The old McCurdy Ranch was right in the path of forty billion cubic feet of water. Century trees were uprooted. Boulders disappeared. New gorges and ravines were carved into the rock, and the cabin of Gloria Paz was reduced to a concrete slab and a few dark gold cinder blocks.
I don’t know what happened to Gloria. I’d like to think she got out, but somehow I imagine her standing on her front porch with her shotgun and her tin cup of goat’s milk and coffee, her milky eyes staring north as the wall of water came toward her. I imagine her smiling, thinking of her long journey on the Green Highway.
Perched on its high hill, the McCurdy ranch house itself was spared.
I didn’t need to go into the basement to see that Will Stirman had been there. The tarp had been stripped off the abandoned building supplies. Dug out from the middle of the lumber and paint cans was a lockbox-now busted open and empty, a box the perfect size to fit a duffel bag full of cash.
Fred Barrow was the San Antonio businessman who had purchased the McCurdy property. The mildewed fishing painting over the mantel was one of his, just like the ones hanging in Erainya’s study.
After shooting Will Stirman, Barrow had only lived a few weeks, but in that time he had managed to buy the land, set up a trust, and allow Gloria Paz a safe place to live for the rest of her life. Barrow had planned to use his stolen millions to cleanse and remake the murderer’s ranch. A feeble, guilty gesture, but I knew Fred had been trying to put the victims’ spirits to rest, to make amends.
This did not make Fred Barrow a good man. It did not excuse the way he treated Erainya, or make me sorry that the asshole was dead. But he had redeemed one life, one small cinder block cabin. He’d been remembered as honest by an aging blind woman. It made me wonder if I could’ve done any better with dirty money.
Much to the Fugitive Task Force’s relief, Will Stirman’s body was found forty miles downriver. The Green Highway had, for once, reversed course, its cleared lanes providing the path of least resistance for thousands of tons of flotsam swept south by the flood. Many of the dead were never recovered, their bodies buried deep under a new geological layer of silt and debris. But Stirman’s body was easily identified-tangled in downed power lines, his arms wrapped around the cables as if he had intentionally held on-as if he wanted to be sure there was no public doubt about his death.
My truck, being heavier, had not been carried quite so far. It had melded into a sandbank half a mile downstream from the McCurdy Ranch entrance. Only the back fender showed.
Will Stirman had found his money. He died reclaiming something from Fred Barrow. But the duffel bag was not in the truck, nor on his person. Whatever was left of Stirman’s seven million dollars floated away in the flood, and is still buried somewhere in the South Texas landscape.
The final incidents in the Floresville Five case were pretty unsatisfactory for law enforcement. The first was a shoot-out at a Wisconsin hunting cabin where an unidentified man resisted arrest, opened fire on police and was killed by an FBI sniper. The slain man was not, as originally thought, one of the escaped convicts, but he fit the description of an Anglo who had been seen in the company of Elroy Lacoste and Luis Juarez in Omaha. Perhaps he was one of Stirman’s old associates. Embarrassed police were still working to establish his identity.
The fourth convict, C. C. Andrews, was discovered when rain eroded his shallow grave in an Oklahoma riverbank. A farmer went out to dig some new fence posts one morning and was startled to find a dead African- American in an expensive Italian suit floating in the middle of his creek.
This left only one escapee unaccounted for-Pablo Zagosa. Publicly, police remained confident of his eventual capture, but when pressed, they admitted they had no solid leads. Pablo’s estranged wife in El Paso had disappeared, and family members said it was because she feared her husband’s vengeance. But this did not explain the yellow cloth police found tied to Angelina Zagosa’s front porch rail. Privately, Ana DeLeon told me the Task Force was baffled. They were starting to reconcile themselves to the idea that Pablo Zagosa might be the little fish that got away.
As for Dimebox Ortiz, he was spending a few nights in the county jail, but he was confident that his brother- in-law would eventually soften and bail him out. And I was confident I would be bounty-hunting him again soon after that.
Saturday, two days after the Medina Dam broke, the sun blazed down at the Lady Bird Johnson YMCA field.
After six billion dollars in damage, thirty-seven lives lost, the attention of the network news, the president, the governor and the National Guard, the floods decided they’d had enough fun. Like spoiled children, they went off to throw a tantrum somewhere else.
Jem manned the goalie box in his yellow vest.
The rest of my team clumped midfield around the ball as the Saint Mark’s coach yelled orders to his kids about crossovers and wings and a bunch of other maneuvers I’d never heard of.
“Get ’em!” Erainya yelled next to me.
Which pretty much summed up our strategy.
Technically, parents weren’t allowed on the players’ side of the field, but Erainya had decided she was now my assistant coach.
The Garcia twins slammed into each other, but got up before the ref could halt play. Jack fell down in one of his slide-into-home kicks, shooting the ball straight toward the Saint Mark’s guards, who just shot it right back.
“I love this,” I said. “So much more relaxing than a firefight.”
Erainya said, “Huh.”
Her dark eyes glittered as she scanned the field. “All right, honey. What’s that kid’s name-Peter?”
“Paul.”
“ That’s it, Paul!” she shouted. “To the goal!”
By that time Paul had run past the ball, let Saint Mark’s intercept, and was busy checking out a really cool rock he’d found on the field.
“J.P. got off the ventilator today,” Erainya told me. “We talked a whole ten minutes.”
I heard the relief in her voice-the return of that love-struck optimism that had infuriated me for months
