Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(6)

No, Pablo thought.

As soon as they got through those gates, Pablo and Luis would take off by themselves. They would head west to El Paso, as far from Wil Stirman as they could get.

But Stirman’s eyes held him. Pablo had blown his chance. He’d frozen. Stirman had acted. Stirman had saved Gonzales. Pablo had done nothing.

Pablo clawed at the fact, looking for leverage. He said, “Who are Barrow and Barrera?”

Stirman’s jaw tightened. “What?”

“You were saying those names when you . . .” Pablo gestured to Zeke’s corpse.

Stirman looked down at the body, then the terrified face of Officer Gonzales. “Couple of private investigators, amigo, ought to be worried today. Now get the SUV.”

Eleven minutes later, right on schedule, Pastor Riggs’ black Ford Explorer rol ed out the back gate of the Floresvil e State Penitentiary, straight into a summer storm that was starting to pour down rain.

Chapter 2

I didn’t mind bounty-hunting Dimebox Ortiz.

What I minded were his cousins Lalu and Kiko, who weighed three-fifty apiece, smoked angel dust to improve their IQ, and kept hand grenades in a Fiestaware bowl on their coffee table the way some people kept wax apples.

This explained why Erainya Manos and I were waiting in a van down the block from their house, rather than storming the front door.

Our snitch owed Dimebox four grand in cockfighting bets. He was getting a little nervous about Dimebox’s habit of setting his delinquent debtors on fire, and was anxious to see Dimebox in jail. He had promised us Dimebox was staying with his cousins. He’d also promised us Dimebox had a date with a lady tonight, and if we staked out the cousins’ house, we could easily tail him and snag him in transit.

Six o’clock, the snitch had told us. Seven o’clock, at the latest.

It was now 10:33.

I needed to pee.

I had an empty Coke bottle, but it isn’t tempting to use that trick when your female boss is next to you in the driver’s seat and her eight-year-old son is playing PlayStation 2 in the back.

Jem wasn’t supposed to be with us. The rain had washed out his plans to see the Woodlawn Lake fireworks with his second-grade friends. That left him nothing to do but a boring old stakeout with his mom.

Erainya, with her usual bizarre logic about what was safe for her child, had weighed the risks of a baby- sitter against Lalu and Kiko’s grenades, and decided to go with the stakeout. Of course, given some of the surveil ance cases we’d worked involving baby-sitters and day-care workers, I supposed she had a point.

So we had the soothing sounds of Spyro the Dragon in the back seat. We had a dark row of clapboard houses and chinaberry trees to look at. And we had the rain, which had been alternately pouring and drizzling al afternoon, and was now reminding my bladder of flow patterns.

I was about to suggest that we cal it quits, that not even the munificent sum Dimebox’s bail bondsman was offering was worth this, when Erainya said, “We’l wait, honey. He’l show.”

The longer I knew her, the more Erainya answered my questions before I asked them. It had gotten to the point where she could slug me when I was even thinking about being a smart-ass.

“Little late for a date,” I said.

She gave me those onyx eyes—the Greek Inquisition. “Your payday is Friday, honey. You want a check?”

That I heard loud and clear.

The past few months, since Erainya’s archrival, I-Tech Security, had taken away our last bread-and-butter contract with a downtown legal firm, her finances had been slowly unraveling. We’d given up our office space on Blanco. Erainya’s high-speed Internet line had been shut off twice. Our information broker would no longer work on credit. We were taking whatever cases Erainya could get just to keep afloat—divorce, workers comp, bail-jumpers. The dregs of the PI business.

I’d thought about making us cardboard signs, Will Sleuth for Food, but Erainya had slugged me before I could suggest it.

I reminded myself she had more at stake in the agency than I did.

She’d inherited the business from her husband, Fred Barrow, when he died. Or more accurately, when she’d shot him to death for abusing her, then been acquitted on murder charges.

This was back before I became a calming influence in her life.

After the murder trial, she’d disappeared to the Mediterranean for a year, reclaimed her maiden name and her Greek heritage, and returned to Texas the adoptive mother of a Bosnian orphan boy. She’d taken up Barrow’s PI business with a vengeance and had become arguably the best street investigator in South Texas.

Yet she’d never done more than scrape by, no matter how hard she worked. It was as if Fred Barrow’s ghost hung over the agency, jinxing her luck. The old rivalry with I-Tech became more and more one-sided until I-Tech dominated San Antonio, while we survived off bounties on scumbags like Dimebox Ortiz.

Lately, Erainya had been taking longer vacations with her boyfriend. She put off paperwork. She mused through old case files, which she would close and lock in her drawer whenever I approached.

She’d been one of the two great mentors of my career. She’d gotten me licensed and bonded, terrorized me into good investigative habits for the past four years. Whenever I thought of quitting PI work and using my English PhD to find a ful -time col ege teaching position, which was about every other week, Erainya urged me to stick with it, tel ing me I was a natural investigator. I had a knack for finding the lost, helping the desperate. I chose to take that as a compliment.