Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(7)

The last thing I wanted to admit was that I was worried about her, that I sensed her spirit going out of the job.

So I tried to act excited about watching the Ortiz house.

Erainya polished a .45-caliber bul et. I nibbled on some of her homemade spanakopita, which she brought by the sackful whenever we went into the field.

I got tired of PlayStation noises and switched on the radio. We listened to an NPR interview with an artist who turned roadkil into paintings for New York gal eries. I imagined my mother’s voice scolding me: See, dear, some people have real jobs.

My mother, one of San Antonio’s few card-carrying bohemians, had been out of town for almost three months now, knocking around Central America with her newest boyfriend, a chakra crystal salesman who had ridiculous amounts of money. It was probably just as wel she wasn’t around to lecture me on my career choices.

In the back of the van, Jem said, “Yess!”

I looked at him. “Good news?”

Delayed reaction: “Frozen Altars level. Twenty-eight eggs.”

“Wow. Hard?”

Jem kept playing. The rain battered the windows.

Jem’s silky black hair was cut in bangs, same as it had been since kindergarten, but over the past year his face had fil ed in considerably. He looked like your typical San Antonio kid—a something-percent mix of Latino and Anglo; black Spurs T-shirt, orange shorts, light-up sneakers. You would be hard pressed to believe that as a one-year-old he had been a Bosnian Muslim orphan, his parents’ mule-drawn cart blown apart by a land mine, his young eyes burned with God-knew-how-many-other images of war.

“Hard level?” I asked again.

No response.

I wanted to tear the game pad out of his hands and fling it into the night, but hey—I wasn’t his dad. What did I expect the kid to do for endless hours in the back of a van? Read?

“Yeah,” he said at last. “The evil panda bears—”

“Honey,” Erainya said, her voice suddenly urgent. “Turn the sound off.”

I looked out the windshield, expecting to see some action at the Ortiz cousins’ house.

Instead, Erainya was focused on the radio. A news brief about the prison break that afternoon—five dangerous cons on the loose. The Floresvil e Five, the media had instantly dubbed them—Wil Stirman, C.

C. Andrews, Elroy Lacoste, Pablo Zagosa, Luis Juarez.

“Not a good day for the warden,” I agreed. “You see the pictures?”

Erainya glared at me. “Pictures?”

“On TV this afternoon. Don’t tel me you’ve missed this.”

The news announcer recounted how the cons had been left unsupervised in a religious rehabilitation program. The five had overpowered the chaplain, kil ed a guard and a fel ow inmate, driven straight through the back gate in the preacher’s Ford Explorer after stealing several handguns, a shotgun, and an unknown amount of ammunition from the prison armory. They should be considered armed and dangerous.

No shit.

The alarm hadn’t gone up for almost fifteen minutes, by which time the cons had ditched the SUV in the Floresvil e Wal-Mart parking lot and vanished, possibly in another car provided by an outside accomplice. A map of Kingsvil e had been found in one of the cel s, leading authorities to believe that at least some of the fugitives might be heading south toward the Mexican border. Police al along the Rio Grande were on alert.

The suspected ringleader of the jailbreak, Wil iam “the Ghost” Stirman, had been serving ninety-nine years on multiple convictions of human trafficking and accessory to murder. Prison psychologists described him as a highly dangerous sociopath.

“The Ghost,” I said. “He’l be the one wearing the sheet with the eyeholes.”

Erainya didn’t smile. She turned off the radio, fumbled for her cel phone.

“What?” I asked.

She dialed a number, cursed. With the storm, cel phone reception inside the van, especial y here on the rural South Side, was almost nonexistent.

She opened her door. The van’s overhead light blinked on.

“Erainya—”

“Got to find a clear signal.”

“It’s pouring.”

She slid outside in her rain jacket, and waded into the glow of the only street lamp, where everybody and God could see her.

Since the day I apprenticed to her, she had harped on me—getting out of the car while on stakeout was an absolute no-no. You jeopardized your position, your ability to move. Otherwise I would’ve peed a long time ago.

I knew only one person she might break the rules to cal —her ENT, Dr. Dreamboat, or whatever the hel his name was, whom she’d met during a romantic prescription for cedar fever last winter and had been dating ever since.

But I couldn’t believe she would cal him now.

I was pondering whether I’d have to shove a cel phone up Dr. Dreamboat’s sinus cavity when the porch light came on at the Ortiz cousins’ house.

A heavyset man in a silky black warm-up suit stepped outside. Dimebox Ortiz.

I tried to kil the overhead il umination, found there was no switch. “Shit.”

“Owe me a quarter,” Jem told me, his eyes stil glued to his game.

“Put it on my account.”

My “bad word” account was already enough to buy Jem his first car, but he didn’t complain.