Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(53)
Sam felt a twinge of recognition. Al users looked alike. Sam had dealt with hundreds. But something told him he knew this guy in particular.
Piss-face apparently had the same feeling. He went slack-jawed. “Barrera?”
Fred had fired the first shot.
Reggae music. A baby screaming. Sam dropped to a crouch in the doorway and Fred cut to the right.
A young Latina ran toward them, her arms raised as if to stop them. On the far side of the room, interrupted mid–phone cal , a dark-haired Anglo with pale skin, dead eyes, a gun in his belt. Wil Stirman.
Stirman was unprepared for the men busting down his door. He hesitated because of the woman who now stood between him and his enemies.
“Down!” Sam shouted to her. “Get the f**k down!”
The Latina was almost to the door, though what she hoped to accomplish, Sam couldn’t imagine. She had the same grim look as an il egal, halfway across the Rio Grande, when the Border Patrol shows up.
They keep running, knowing they are caught, but they have no choice but to try. It was as if she wanted to push the intruders out of her life.
For a moment, Wil Stirman looked at Sam. Then Wil drew his gun.
Fred Barrow aimed as the woman—who Sam wasn’t sure Fred even registered—stepped in front of the gun, her arms raised like a long-lost relative.
Sam ignored Piss-face and scanned the room. Desolation where there had once been plush furniture, maroon wal paper, reggae music on an expensive stereo. The only thing left was the crepe carpet, now coming apart in patches, water-stained, discolored in places from very old blood.
Piss-face’s hand slid cautiously toward the pocket of his army surplus jacket.
“What are you doing here, Barrera?” he asked. “Scared the shit out of me.”
Sam tried to refocus on the derelict.
Just his luck to find an old col ar—or informant, stool pigeon, whatever the hel this guy was—sleeping in this warehouse, of al places. Then again, Sam had been on the streets so long it was hard to turn over any rock in San Antonio and not find some slimy thing he’d dealt with before.
“Get out,” Sam told him.
He tried to put authority in his voice, but he didn’t feel so good. He was remembering the pattern of the young Latina’s dress, the look on Stirman’s face as his lover fel .
Piss-face licked his lips. Hunger was slowly displacing his fear.
In his better days, Sam would’ve anticipated that shift.
“You remember me, right?” Piss-face asked. “Right, Mr. Barrera?”
His voice was dangerously polite, testing.
Sam counted bloodstains on the old carpet—two large ones, a constel ation of lesser splatters.
Piss-face took a step closer. “Mr. Barrera?”
“Get lost,” Sam murmured.
It didn’t sound like his voice. It sounded like an old man, asking a question.
Piss-face was close enough now that Sam could smel the rotgut on his breath. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Sam had a gun. He knew he should draw it.
“What’s my name, old man?” Piss-face asked. “Tel me.”
The woman had fal en to the carpet. Wil Stirman had fired, his shot taking out a chunk of plaster next to Fred Barrow’s head. The second shot likely would’ve found Barrow’s skul , but Sam opened up—aiming for Stirman’s chest, getting his arm instead, then Stirman’s shoulder as he went down. The couch probably saved Stirman’s life, because as soon as Fred Barrow got over being stunned, he emptied his clip in that direction.
Sam had only shot twice. No more. He had not fired on the woman. He had not continued to fire, in shock, as Fred Barrow had done.
Sam’s ears rang, and the music stil throbbed, but there was a small hole of silence in the room that Sam registered only when Irene Barrow pushed past him, toward the crib. The baby was no longer crying.
In the present, Piss-face drew his gun. It was a small .22, but close enough to kil . He said, “Long as you’re here, old man—how about a loan?”
His breath was downright flammable. His finger was tight on the trigger.
Sam felt something black and hard fil ing his chest. He stepped toward Piss-face, pushed his sternum against the barrel of the derelict’s gun, forced Piss-face to take a step back.
“Do it,” Sam said.
“I swear to God,” Piss-face said.
“Do it!”
Sam slapped the gun out of Piss-face’s hand. He took a handful of the kid’s shirt. With his other hand, he hit the kid in the face, getting blood on his cuff, his coat sleeve, his col ege ring.
He forced himself to stop before he would kil the kid. He released Piss-face, let him fal in a trembling, whining heap.
“Get out.”
Piss-face scrambled to the door and down the metal steps, his hands over his face.
Sam touched his own chest, where the gun had pressed against his heart. It would have been so much quicker than the darkness ahead, the slow painless disease that had begun wrapping around his brain.
He pul ed out his own gun, just to steady his hand. He aimed it at the spot where Wil Stirman had gone down.
After the shooting, reggae music had stil blared: “Tomorrow People,” a song Sam would find ironic in retrospect.
Fred Barrow had stared at the black duffel bag he’d inadvertently shot—one of two, fil ed with blocks of cash. A stray bul et had plowed a groove through the top layer of hundreds.
Rick Riordan's Books
- The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)
- The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)
- The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard #3)
- The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo #1)
- Rick Riordan
- Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)
- Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)
- The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)
- The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)
- The Widower's Two-Step (Tres Navarre #2)