Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(71)

After shooting Wil Stirman, Barrow had only lived a few weeks, but in that time he had managed to buy the land, set up a trust, and al ow Gloria Paz a safe place to live for the rest of her life. Barrow had planned to use his stolen mil ions to cleanse and remake the murderer’s ranch. A feeble, guilty gesture, but I knew Fred had been trying to put the victims’ spirits to rest, to make amends.

This did not make Fred Barrow a good man. It did not excuse the way he treated Erainya, or make me sorry that the ass**le was dead. But he had redeemed one life, one small cinder block cabin. He’d been remembered as honest by an aging blind woman. It made me wonder if I could’ve done any better with dirty money.

Much to the Fugitive Task Force’s relief, Wil Stirman’s body was found forty miles downriver. The Green Highway had, for once, reversed course, its cleared lanes providing the path of least resistance for thousands of tons of flotsam swept south by the flood. Many of the dead were never recovered, their bodies buried deep under a new geological layer of silt and debris. But Stirman’s body was easily identified— tangled in downed power lines, his arms wrapped around the cables as if he had intentional y held on—as if he wanted to be sure there was no public doubt about his death.

My truck, being heavier, had not been carried quite so far. It had melded into a sandbank half a mile downstream from the McCurdy Ranch entrance. Only the back fender showed.

Wil Stirman had found his money. He died reclaiming something from Fred Barrow. But the duffel bag was not in the truck, nor on his person. Whatever was left of Stirman’s seven mil ion dol ars floated away in the flood, and is stil buried somewhere in the South Texas landscape.

The final incidents in the Floresvil e Five case were pretty unsatisfactory for law enforcement. The first was a shoot-out at a Wisconsin hunting cabin where an unidentified man resisted arrest, opened fire on police and was kil ed by an FBI sniper. The slain man was not, as original y thought, one of the escaped convicts, but he fit the description of an Anglo who had been seen in the company of Elroy Lacoste and Luis Juarez in Omaha. Perhaps he was one of Stirman’s old associates. Embarrassed police were stil working to establish his identity.

The fourth convict, C. C. Andrews, was discovered when rain eroded his shal ow grave in an Oklahoma riverbank. A farmer went out to dig some new fence posts one morning and was startled to find a dead African-American in an expensive Italian suit floating in the middle of his creek.

This left only one escapee unaccounted for—Pablo Zagosa. Publicly, police remained confident of his eventual capture, but when pressed, they admitted they had no solid leads. Pablo’s estranged wife in El Paso had disappeared, and family members said it was because she feared her husband’s vengeance.

But this did not explain the yel ow cloth police found tied to Angelina Zagosa’s front porch rail. Privately, Ana DeLeon told me the Task Force was baffled. They were starting to reconcile themselves to the idea that Pablo Zagosa might be the little fish that got away.

As for Dimebox Ortiz, he was spending a few nights in the county jail, but he was confident that his brother-in-law would eventual y soften and bail him out. And I was confident I would be bounty-hunting him again soon after that.

Saturday, two days after the Medina Dam broke, the sun blazed down at the Lady Bird Johnson YMCA field.

After six bil ion dol ars in damage, thirty-seven lives lost, the attention of the network news, the president, the governor and the National Guard, the floods decided they’d had enough fun. Like spoiled children, they went off to throw a tantrum somewhere else.

Jem manned the goalie box in his yel ow vest.

The rest of my team clumped midfield around the bal as the Saint Mark’s coach yel ed orders to his kids about crossovers and wings and a bunch of other maneuvers I’d never heard of.

“Get ’em!” Erainya yel ed next to me.

Which pretty much summed up our strategy.

Technical y, parents weren’t al owed on the players’ side of the field, but Erainya had decided she was now my assistant coach.

The Garcia twins slammed into each other, but got up before the ref could halt play. Jack fel down in one of his slide-into-home kicks, shooting the bal straight toward the Saint Mark’s guards, who just shot it right back.

“I love this,” I said. “So much more relaxing than a firefight.”

Erainya said, “Huh.”

Her dark eyes glittered as she scanned the field. “Al right, honey. What’s that kid’s name—Peter?”

“Paul.”

“That’s it, Paul!” she shouted. “To the goal!”

By that time Paul had run past the bal , let Saint Mark’s intercept, and was busy checking out a real y cool rock he’d found on the field.

“J.P. got off the ventilator today,” Erainya told me. “We talked a whole ten minutes.”

I heard the relief in her voice—the return of that love-struck optimism that had infuriated me for months whenever she talked about her boyfriend.

J. P. Sanchez had beaten the odds. His friends at the Medical Center had cal ed in a few favors. They’d imported the best specialists from Houston and Los Angeles to oversee the reconstructive surgery.

Sanchez would be in the hospital for weeks, physical therapy for months, but his long-term prognosis was good.

“I’m glad,” I said. And then, when she gave me a skeptical look, I added: “Seriously.”