Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(48)

She thought she had him, until he pul ed a clip of ammo from his pocket and slid it into the gun.

“Shut up,” he told her again, softly. “Just shut up.”

This time, his eyes told her she’d better do it.

She saw the capacity for rage that had put him in jail. She saw he was capable of murder.

The news came back on—unconfirmed reports from a source close to the investigation: The Floresvil e Five may not have stayed together as previously thought.

Pablo leaned forward to listen. His newly loaded gun cast a long shadow across the cement.

Chapter 16

After dropping off Sam Barrera, I spent hours rifling through Erainya’s house, looking for seven mil ion dol ars.

I opened every locked drawer in Fred Barrow’s office. I wiggled every stone in the fireplace. I poked random holes in the wal s and dug around behind the Sheetrock. I was rewarded with a 1963 phone book and a Jax beer bottle.

In desperation, I even went through Erainya’s bedroom closet.

For a guy, even a private eye, there is nothing more disconcerting than looking through the bedroom closet of a woman you respect. You just never know what you’l find that might ruin her image.

I found nothing incriminating. Not even the dominatrix suit I’d long suspected Erainya might own.

On second thought, perhaps that did ruin my image of her a bit.

I ended the evening with a tequila bottle, doing my thinking and drinking on top of the Olmos Dam— something I hadn’t done in a very long time. The last time I’d been there, the water level hadn’t been nipping the soles of my shoes.

I tried to concentrate on Erainya, but my mind kept coming back to Sam Barrera, the perplexed look he’d given me from his living room window as I’d driven off in his BMW.

The old curmudgeon probably had family somewhere who could look after him. The fact that he lived alone, that he had absolutely no photographs of relatives in his house . . . Forget it. I had other problems.

I chunked a rock into the flooded basin. It made a deep sploosh.

My father, Bexar County Sheriff Jackson Navarre, had been a contemporary of Barrera and Barrow. He hadn’t lived as long. One summer when I was home from col ege, my dad had been gunned down in front of my eyes by a drive-by shooter, an assassin hired by one of his enemies. At the time, I’d gotten a lot of support and sympathy from my friends. Nobody could imagine going through anything so terrible.

But in the last few years, something funny had happened. My older friends’ parents had started aging.

Now, many of them were dealing with their parents’ cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s, assisted living nightmares. When my friends talked to me about these problems, I could swear they were giving me wistful looks, suppressing a guilty kind of resentment.

I would never have to go through what they were going through. I wouldn’t have that lingering hel to deal with. My dad had died quickly, stil in his prime. My mom—wel , she was much younger. She never seemed to age. She had told me many times that she intended to go off a cliff in a red sports car as soon as she began doubting her own faculties, and I had no doubt she was tel ing the truth.

My friends didn’t have quite so much sympathy for Tres Navarre these days. I’d had it pretty easy when it came to parents. Death in a drive-by? Piece of cake. In fact my last argument with Ralph Arguel o—almost two years ago, after the death of his mother—had been along those lines. But the more I saw of what my friends with aging parents went through, the more I tended to agree—I’d had it easy.

Which didn’t explain why I felt so damn empty, or why Sam Barrera’s unraveling bothered me so much.

I took another swig of Herradura A?ejo.

I stayed on the dam, watching emergency lights flash al across the city, until a National Guard patrol came by and chased me off.

I probably would’ve slept through the rest of July had the phone not woken me up the next morning.

I opened my eyes. There was a cat on my head. Sunlight was baking my mouth.

Much to Robert Johnson’s displeasure, I crawled off the futon, made it to the ironing board, and yanked down the receiver. “Yeah.”

“Oh . . .” A female voice, on the edge of panic. “Coach Navarre, I didn’t expect you to be home . . .”

Several things went through my head.

First: Where the hel else would I be at—Jesus, did the clock real y say ten?

Second: Why was this woman cal ing me coach?

Behind the cal er, children were screaming. Then it hit me. I realized why she was close to panic. It was Thursday morning. Jem’s summer school volunteer soccer coach was late to practice again.

“Crap,” I said. “I mean darn. Um . . . Mrs. . . .”

“Toca,” she said. “Carmen’s mother? If you can’t make it today, I suppose I can watch the children . . .” A pregnant pause—letting me imagine torture with soccer cones, mass destruction in the goalie’s box. “But the first game is Saturday. I didn’t know if you had the uniforms . . .”

Uniforms. Damn.

Game. Damn.

In my mind, my commitment to soccer had ceased as soon as Jem wasn’t able to make practice anymore. Apparently, I’d forgotten to share that assessment with the other fifteen players and their families.

I should have taken up Mrs. Toca’s offer to watch the kids. I could make up an emergency excuse. Like I didn’t have an emergency excuse.