Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(68)

“It’s over,” I told Stirman. “Let Jem go back to his mother.”

Stirman blinked slowly. He seemed to be losing his grip on consciousness.

A single police light flashed—circling once across the neon skywalk and the face of the West Tower. An officer must have hit the switch accidental y while getting out of his car.

The light snapped Stirman back to his senses. He looked around. He was backed into a corner, forty feet in the air.

“Tel me where the money is,” he said.

“It’s too late for that,” I said. “You’l never get out of the building.”

“I owe Soledad. I can’t give up.”

“It isn’t giving up. It’s deciding to live. If you run, you’l die.”

Down in front of the museum, car doors were opening.

I had to get Jem away from Stirman. I had to get him out of the line of fire.

Stirman held my eyes. He seemed to understand what I was thinking.

He put his hand on Jem’s shoulder, gently pushed him toward me. “Go on, boy.”

Jem dug in his heels. His hand was closed, as if he were holding something small . “But . . .”

“Go on,” Stirman ordered.

Jem shook his head stubbornly. “But you told me—”

“It’s al right.” Stirman’s voice cracked. “Just go on, now.”

When Jem was final y safe behind me, Stirman said, “Now tel me about the cash. Quick.”

I didn’t see what difference it would make. I told him where the money was.

Understanding dawned on Stirman’s face—the sense that what I said had to be true. “Goddamn Fred Barrow.”

I imagined the police inside the building, the slow pulse of the glass elevator as it rose through the gal eries, fil ed with heavily armed men.

Stirman took one last look at Jem—hesitating long enough to erase any chance of escape.

“Bear witness, Jem,” he said. “Be good to your mother, hear?”

Then he jumped. The drop should have been enough to break his legs, but he hit the roof of the lower gal ery on solid footing and cleared the other side, dropping into the darkness behind the museum. There was at least a square mile of woods and flooded riverbanks back there. The police would have to search it on foot. But they would find him. I was sure of that.

Jem stared at the spot where Stirman had disappeared—wet treetops hissing in the rain.

I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, but I sensed the barrier he was putting up. He wanted no more hand-holding, no comforting.

“He won’t come back,” I said.

“I know.”

His tone wasn’t what I expected from an eight-year-old who’d just had a conversation with evil. He sounded wistful. He wore the same expression he’d worn the night we watched his mother’s van go floating away down Rosil io Creek.

He slipped his hand into his pocket, depositing whatever he was holding.

Before I could ask what it was, I heard a groan from the roof below us. A man’s voice said, “Hel .”

“Stay here,” I told Jem.

I lowered myself over the railing. Stirman had done it. How hard could it be?

I dropped.

Stupid, Navarre.

I lost my footing immediately and slid down the slick roof. I would have gone over the edge and into the skylights below had I not caught the wet bottom rung of a service ladder. Slowly, I managed to crawl back up to where Sam Barrera was lying on his back, his arm bent underneath him at an ugly angle.

“Damn bastard,” he muttered. “You get him, Fred?”

I sat next to him, too exhausted to correct his ragged memory. “Yeah. I got him.”

That seemed to comfort the old man. He put his head back and let the rain fal on his face. Police were popping up in al the windows of the museum now—SWAT team members on the skywalk, aiming assault rifles at me.

“Thanks,” I told Sam, “for trying to save us up there.”

“Did I do that?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I always was pretty damn brave,” Barrera said. “I don’t know about taking the money, though. It feels wrong.”

“Maybe it is,” I admitted.

“And the baby?”

I looked at him, and asked careful y, “What about him?”

“Did your wife get him out okay?”

I was silent for a long time as the police moved in, DeLeon now visible above us, not looking happy, or in any hurry to cal off her firing squad.

“Yeah, Erainya got him out,” I told Barrera. “The baby is fine.”

I looked up at Ana DeLeon in the broken glass and neon. I raised my hands in surrender.

Chapter 25

The plane was a twin-engine Cessna, so old no self-respecting drug-runner would use it anymore, but it could stil make the flight to Mexico below radar in under an hour.

The pilot waited in the drizzle on the tarmac at Stinson Field. He checked his watch. His client was late.

It was a crummy night to fly, but anticipating his payment made him feel better. He imagined the money in his bank account. He would make separate cash deposits, space them out careful y, keep them under the mandatory reporting limit.

He was deep in thought about a comfortable retirement when somebody put a gun to his back.