Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(60)

Wil brought his basket to the counter.

There were stil no other customers. No one on the street. Just him and the old man.

The grocer looked over lazily. He cal ed, “?Lupe, ven acá!”

Wil felt that uncomfortable memory tugging at the base of his skul . He had the sudden urge to leave.

Before he could, the back office curtain parted. A woman came out to help him.

She had been one of his.

He didn’t recognize her, exactly, but he knew from the way she bore herself—the downcast eyes, careful gestures, as if she were walking through a hot oven. Her hair was prematurely gray, tied back in a bun. Her face, once beautiful enough to warrant a good price, was now drawn tight from years of hard work.

Wil remembered something Gerry Far had told him for a laugh, years ago. Gerry had sold one of their acquisitions to a love-struck grocer, an old man who’d bought the girl for ten times her worth, cleaning out his savings and mortgaging his store to possess her. Wil and Gerry had joked about how much the old man must like to squeeze ripe fruit. The man’s name might’ve been Zuniga.

The woman didn’t look at Wil as she emptied his basket.

She ran her hands deftly over each item—estimating the weight of the produce, clacking prices from memory into an old-fashioned adding machine. She put everything into a brown paper bag for him, told him in Spanish it would be nineteen dol ars and twenty-eight cents.

Wil made up his mind. He would simply pay and leave.

He reached in his pocket, hoping to find some cash. Surely he’d overlooked at least one twenty-dol ar bil .

But he didn’t have time. Lupe looked up at him—straight through the sunglasses and the dyed hair and ten years of her own freedom—and she yelped with fear. “?Es él!”

As if she’d expected him. Wil realized the jailbreak must have dredged up her worst memories. The television would’ve kept his face constantly before her. Like thousands of others he’d brought north, Lupe must’ve been half expecting Wil Stirman, her personal nightmare, to walk back into her life somehow. He had obliged her.

The rest happened fast.

The grocer Zuniga dropped his spray gun and grabbed the onion cleaver. He shouted at Stirman to get away from his wife. He told her to run, cal the police.

The woman didn’t move.

Wil drew his gun. He told the old man to stop, to drop the knife.

Zuniga kept coming.

It’s a f**king gun, Stirman thought. Stop, you idiot.

But there were years of the stored vengeance in the old man’s eyes—resentment, poverty, desperate love for a woman Stirman had scarred. The old man wasn’t going to stop.

Wil fired a warning shot, but the grocer was already on top of him. The knife slashed into Wil ’s shoulder.

Wil ’s second shot was involuntary, a reflex from the pain. It caught the old man in the throat.

Zuniga went down on his knees, drowning as he tried to breathe. He crumpled onto the green mat. The spray gun he’d dropped hissed water, pushing a wave of red across the cement floor.

The woman didn’t scream. She cupped her hands over her mouth and waited to die.

Wil should have kil ed her. She could identify him. But his shoulder was on fire. Blood was soaking his shirt. The room turned the color of beer glass. He staggered outside, back toward his Camaro.

He was three blocks away before he realized he’d forgotten his groceries.

He pul ed into a flea market parking lot. He stripped off his bloody shirt and wrapped it around his shoulder as tightly as he could. He wasn’t sure how deep the cut was, or whether he’d stopped bleeding.

He made sure he stil had bul ets in his gun. Then he ditched the Camaro. He got lucky, found a decrepit Ford station wagon with keys in the ignition.

By the time he was on the road again, sirens were al around him, police cars racing toward the grocery store. The checkpoints would be going up soon. He had to get the hel away.

He tried to breathe deeply, lifting his bad shoulder so the pain would keep his senses sharp. Somehow, he made it back onto I-37.

He drove al the way south to Braunig Lake, then pul ed over on a farm road, tried to control the rattle in his chest.

He pul ed out his cel phone and cal ed Pablo.

Five rings. Six. By the time Pablo picked up, Stirman was real y pissed.

“You sleeping?”

Pablo hesitated. “No. Fuck you.”

“Tel me you’re holding the gun on her.”

A longer silence. Pablo was probably looking for his goddamn gun. “Yeah.”

“Point it at her head.”

“What for? She’s asleep.”

“Pablo, tel me you’re pointing the gun at her goddamn head.”

“Okay. I am.”

“It’s going to go down faster than I thought. An hour, maximum, and I’l be back with the cash.”

“It’s only just getting dark.”

“Don’t turn on the radio. If I don’t cal back in one hour, shoot her. Listen for cops. You hear sirens, you think they might be coming for you, don’t wait. Shoot her. You understand? Then get the hel out. You let her live, I swear to God, I’l find you.”

“Slow down, man. I mean—shit.”

“Pablo.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I understand. But listen—”