Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(58)

But Wil had never pictured it. He’d never realized where it was.

The front window had two bul et holes for eyes. Empty beer bottles littered the flower bed. Parked in the driveway was the Reverend’s black Ford Explorer, a dent in the fender where Elroy had backed into the Floresvil e Wal-Mart dumpster the first day of their escape.

Wil ’s jaw tightened. He remembered Pastor Riggs fighting them in the chapel, forcing them to get violent.

Al of Wil ’s plans had started to unravel from that moment.

After the head-bashing they’d given Riggs, the old man couldn’t be alive. None of the news reports Wil heard ever mentioned Riggs’ fate. But if Riggs was alive, if he saw Wil here . . .

Back up, Wil ’s instincts told him.

He didn’t.

He sat there stupidly as the door of the ministry house opened.

The tip of a bamboo cane appeared first, then Pastor Riggs, tapping at the stoop. Behind him, a scowling black dude, an ex-con judging from his posture, held the door as the preacher climbed down onto the porch.

Riggs had aged a decade in a week. The pastor’s head was shaved and bandaged where Zeke’s soldering iron had split the scalp. The left side of his face drooped like a Hal oween mask.

The black dude carried a stack of books under one arm. Wil wondered if they were donations for a prison library. Surely Riggs couldn’t be doing outreach work anymore. His program was ruined. He’d been disgraced, discredited. No warden would let him within a mile of an inmate.

Suddenly, Riggs looked up. The preacher’s eyes were unchanged—pale and startling blue. They stared straight at Wil .

Wil ’s hand went to the transmission.

His stolen Camaro had a tinted windshield. The setting sun shone straight against it. Riggs shouldn’t be able to see through it any easier than through aluminum foil.

Stil , their eyes seemed to meet. Wil remembered prison Bible studies, moments when the heat and the preaching would wear through his pretense and Wil would feel God. Or late at night, sketching Bible scenes on a yel ow pad, when it almost seemed as if the rage could final y leave his mind, travel straight down to the tip of his pencil and onto the paper.

Wil was sure, absolutely sure, that the Reverend could see him in this car.

He gunned the engine.

The Reverend raised his hand. Wil slammed the Camaro into reverse. He fishtailed out of Dimmit Street, the pit of his stomach sloshing like a vat of sour milk.

He drove up South Presa, reassuring himself he hadn’t made a mistake. It didn’t matter. Stumbling across the old preacher didn’t matter.

In a few hours, Wil would have his money. He’d be on a chartered jet to Mexico, and from there, anywhere he pleased.

Navarre and Barrera would make the exchange, one way or another. They would bring the money, and the boy . . .

Wil ’s hands felt sweaty on the wheel.

He wondered what Pastor Riggs would say if he knew his intentions.

You came to me on purpose, Brother Stirman. You want to be cleansed of that hatred.

Wil wished it were so. But he knew what he had to do. He knew he couldn’t be satisfied, couldn’t put Soledad’s spirit to rest unless Erainya Manos never saw her son again.

He pul ed his Camaro over the railroad tracks and onto Roosevelt, passing storefront signs without reading them, fighting a desire to drive straight to the highway and head south—leave now, fol ow the road he knew so wel to the Mexican border.

Eight years ago, his last night with Soledad, she had tried to get him not to run. She sat next to him on the sofa while he loaded his gun. She took his hands, and placed them on her chest.

“If you run, mi amor, ” she said, “you’l be doing what they want. Why please them?”

He could feel her heartbeat through the cotton dress. Childbirth had swol en her br**sts to a pleasant size, fil ed out her face so she looked younger and healthier than when he first brought her north from the burning sugar fields.

She smel ed of honeysuckle she’d clipped that morning—a fragrant clump of white and yel ow flowers now blooming in a water jar by the window. She’d taken such care with it, as if she’d be here long enough to watch it grow roots.

Wil had their bags almost packed. One for clothes; two fil ed with enough cash to last a lifetime. He had three guns, two phones, and an assortment of passports and fake IDs stil to pack. He’d already told Dimebox Ortiz he was leaving. He had one last cal to make—to Gerry Far, warning him to keep his head down for a few days. Wil and Soledad’s plane would be in the air in half an hour.

“I have to finish packing,” he told her.

She careful y shifted her weight on top of him, her arms circling his neck. The warmth of her thighs pressed against his legs. She kissed the bridge of his nose, the space between his eyebrows. Her Saint Anthony medal dangled against his chin.

“Stay,” she told him.

A Ziggy Marley song played—one of Soledad’s favorites. She always said the music reminded her of heat and salt water, of a trip she’d made as a child to the beach near Matamoros. Soon, Wil promised her, she would live on the beach. She would have heat and the ocean every day.

He touched her necklace. “You never finished tel ing me about Saint Anthony.”

She kissed him. “San Antonio, loco boy. My protector. He’s the patron saint of lost things.”

“What have you lost?”