Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(14)

“Something’s bothering you,” Maia decided.

“Those escaped convicts yesterday afternoon.”

“The Floresvil e Five.”

“How much have you heard?”

She shrugged. “Just what’s on national news. Fugitive Task Force found a map of Kingsvil e in a cel , so they figured the convicts were heading south. Then there was the holdup this morning in New Braunfels, so maybe the map was a decoy. The cons seem to be staying together and heading north, which is pretty unusual. The ringleader, Wil iam Stirman, sounds like a great human being.”

“Erainya’s husband put Wil Stirman in jail.”

Maia set down her margarita glass. “Fred Barrow. The husband she shot.”

“Fred and another private investigator. Samuel Barrera, his biggest rival. Eight years ago, they col aborated to put Stirman behind bars. Now Erainya’s afraid Stirman wil come after them. Barrera, for sure. Maybe her, too.”

“She told you this?”

“She won’t talk about it. I read some of the agency’s old files, some of her husband’s case notes.”

“Behind her back?”

“I kind of borrowed her file cabinet.”

“How do you kind of borrow your boss’s file cabinet?”

“We closed the Blanco office. A lot of stuff went into storage. I have the keys.”

Maia looked at something across the room. “The news said Stirman was a coyote, smuggled people across the border. He was convicted on six counts of accessory to murder. You find out details?”

I picked at a crabmeat flauta. I was reluctant to recal the images I’d seen in Fred Barrow’s files, copies of old police crime scene photos. “Yeah. I found out details.”

“Knife,” Maia interrupted, suddenly tense. She was looking over my shoulder. Quentin Yates must be coming to say hel o.

I held my fingers three inches apart. “Knife?”

She held her hands apart twelve inches. “Knife. In four, three, two—”

I launched a backward elbow strike at groin level.

Quentin Yates grunted, stumbling forward with his meat cleaver off target. He stabbed the table as I grabbed his shirt and used his own momentum to launch him across our crab flautas—Maia calmly lifting her margarita glass out of the way as Quentin went over our table, over the railing, and into space.

A tiny galosh, the squawk of a startled duck, and al was quiet again except for the sound of the waterfal .

Few patrons had noticed. Those who did quickly went back to their meals. Perhaps, they must’ve thought, this was like cherries jubilee, or a sizzling pan of fajitas brought straight to the table. Perhaps the high-diving ma?tre d’ was a new kind of food delivery panache.

Maia and I were fine, except for a few sprinkles of margarita on her blouse, a knee-print in my guacamole, and the twelve-inch meat cleaver shuddering in the tablecloth.

Robert Johnson said, “Row?”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

Our waitress swept over with an oblivious smile and a leather-bound bil . “Wel ! Anybody save room for dessert?”

The hotel room was too expensive—not even a hotel room, but a ranch-style bungalow with a mauve and crème bed, a canopied frame of rough-hewn oak and a Guatemalan rug on the flagstone floor. The fireplace was fil ed with dried sage and baby’s breath. A nest of birds chirped and echoed somewhere up in the old limestone chimney.

Maia paid cash, signed our names Mr. & Mrs. Smith—her little joke, emulating so many Mr. & Mrs.

Smiths we had tailed, photographed, strong-armed into divorce settlements back in the old days.

We stood on the deck, Robert Johnson purring next to us on the railing.

Beneath us, the cedars dropped away into a ravine, the red and silver ribbon of I-35 in the distance, heading north and south to our respective homes. I imagined some poor PI down below us, sweating in his car, pointing his telescopic lens this way, hoping to catch a clear, lurid, unmistakably guilty shot.

I felt the need not to disappoint a hypothetical brother. I pul ed Maia close. We kissed.

“So how would it be,” she said, “if Erainya married this doctor of hers? Got out of the business. Got time to be a mother. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

“A scary one, I suppose.”

Our fingers laced. Down in the woods, a few late fireflies were blinking—something I hadn’t seen in San Antonio since I was a kid.

“Then I’d only have the whole city of S.A. to contend with,” Maia decided. “Your roots.”

She said the word roots like she might say cancer. If Maia believed in roots, she never would’ve had the courage to leave Shaoxing as a girl, smuggled aboard a Shanghai freighter by her uncle, who told her she would have to see America for both of them. If she believed in roots, she wouldn’t have left San Francisco, her adopted home, to be close to me.

She never rubbed it in, never mentioned the fact that she’d left everything, come two thousand miles, fol owed me here because I would not stay in the Bay Area. She had resettled in the only palatable Texas port of entry for a Californian—Austin. Couldn’t I close the last seventy-five miles?

“Six deaths,” I said. “Al women, al il egal aliens.”

It took her a moment to fol ow my thoughts. “You mean Wil iam Stirman.”