Southtown (16 page)

19

Will didn’t mean for it to happen.

All he wanted was food and cash.

He passed up two convenience stores, convincing himself he needed to get farther away from the hideout.

He got on I-35, cruised down to Hot Wells Boulevard, turned into the South Side neighborhood he knew so well.

At the corner of South New Braunfels, the blue jeans factory he’d once used as a holding facility had been burned to crossbeams. The adobe house that belonged to his friend the Guide had been repainted lime green.

Farther down, on a ridge overlooking a swollen creek, the Estrella Barbecue Pit stood abandoned, its back deck sagging over the water.

Will had done business on that deck. He’d smoked cigars and drank Bacardi with clients while the air filled with brisket smoke, sulfur from the hot springs bubbling up in the creek bed, making soft milky rings in the mud.

Will and his clients would sit around the picnic table, negotiating the price of women.

Panamanian girls fought harder than Guatemalans. Girls from Coahuila turned the best short-term profit. The ones from the central mountains lasted longer. Twelve was too young to be reliably trained. Eighteen, too old. Glossy hair was a sign of health. Good teeth were a premium. Stirman wrote special orders on a yellow legal pad.

The following weekend, when Will got across the Rio Grande, he would find every girl on his shopping list, as if writing their descriptions made them appear—hopeful and eager and willing to believe his lies.

He made a right on South Presa, passed several more ice houses. He rejected one because he used to know the owners; another, because too many kids were Rollerblading outside.

His own hesitation irritated him. He should just pick a place and hit it.

He wasn’t worried about being recognized. Since kidnapping Erainya Manos, he’d bleached his hair and shaved his five-day stubble. He’d gotten himself a pair of black rubber sunglasses, a blue Hawaiian shirt and jeans, boots that made him an inch taller. He doubted anyone would identify him right away, even in his old home turf.

Still he kept driving.

He turned on Dimmit Street because the name sounded familiar, and realized why only when he found himself in a dead end, facing a pink clapboard house. The hand-painted sign in the front yard read:
TEXAS PRISON MINISTRY.

Will stopped his car in the middle of the cul-de-sac. He stared at the sign.

Pastor Riggs had always called his ministry headquarters Dimmit Street. Like it was some great central command, like the Pentagon or the White House.

But Will had never pictured it. He’d never realized where it was.

The front window had two bullet holes for eyes. Empty beer bottles littered the flower bed. Parked in the driveway was the Reverend’s black Ford Explorer, a dent in the fender where Elroy had backed into the Floresville Wal-Mart dumpster the first day of their escape.

Will’s jaw tightened. He remembered Pastor Riggs fighting them in the chapel, forcing them to get violent. All of Will’s plans had started to unravel from that moment.

After the head-bashing they’d given Riggs, the old man couldn’t be alive. None of the news reports Will heard ever mentioned Riggs’ fate. But if Riggs was alive, if he saw Will here . . .

Back up,
Will’s instincts told him.

He didn’t.

He sat there stupidly as the door of the ministry house opened.

The tip of a bamboo cane appeared first, then Pastor Riggs, tapping at the stoop. Behind him, a scowling black dude, an ex-con judging from his posture, held the door as the preacher climbed down onto the porch.

Riggs had aged a decade in a week. The pastor’s head was shaved and bandaged where Zeke’s soldering iron had split the scalp. The left side of his face drooped like a Halloween mask.

The black dude carried a stack of books under one arm. Will wondered if they were donations for a prison library. Surely Riggs couldn’t be doing outreach work anymore. His program was ruined. He’d been disgraced, discredited. No warden would let him within a mile of an inmate.

Suddenly, Riggs looked up. The preacher’s eyes were unchanged—pale and startling blue. They stared straight at Will.

Will’s hand went to the transmission.

His stolen Camaro had a tinted windshield. The setting sun shone straight against it. Riggs shouldn’t be able to see through it any easier than through aluminum foil.

Still, their eyes seemed to meet. Will remembered prison Bible studies, moments when the heat and the preaching would wear through his pretense and Will would feel God. Or late at night, sketching Bible scenes on a yellow pad, when it almost seemed as if the rage could finally leave his mind, travel straight down to the tip of his pencil and onto the paper.

Will was sure, absolutely sure, that the Reverend could see him in this car.

He gunned the engine.

The Reverend raised his hand. Will slammed the Camaro into reverse. He fishtailed out of Dimmit Street, the pit of his stomach sloshing like a vat of sour milk.

He drove up South Presa, reassuring himself he hadn’t made a mistake. It didn’t matter. Stumbling across the old preacher didn’t matter.

In a few hours, Will would have his money. He’d be on a chartered jet to Mexico, and from there, anywhere he pleased.

Navarre and Barrera would make the exchange, one way or another. They would bring the money, and the boy . . .

Will’s hands felt sweaty on the wheel.

He wondered what Pastor Riggs would say if he knew his intentions.

You came to me on purpose, Brother Stirman. You want to be cleansed of that hatred.

Will wished it were so. But he knew what he had to do. He knew he couldn’t be satisfied, couldn’t put Soledad’s spirit to rest unless Erainya Manos never saw her son again.

He pulled his Camaro over the railroad tracks and onto Roosevelt, passing storefront signs without reading them, fighting a desire to drive straight to the highway and head south—leave now, follow the road he knew so well to the Mexican border.

Eight years ago, his last night with Soledad, she had tried to get him not to run. She sat next to him on the sofa while he loaded his gun. She took his hands, and placed them on her chest.

“If you run,
mi amor,
” she said, “you’ll be doing what they want. Why please them?”

He could feel her heartbeat through the cotton dress. Childbirth had swollen her breasts to a pleasant size, filled out her face so she looked younger and healthier than when he first brought her north from the burning sugar fields.

She smelled of honeysuckle she’d clipped that morning—a fragrant clump of white and yellow flowers now blooming in a water jar by the window. She’d taken such care with it, as if she’d be here long enough to watch it grow roots.

Will had their bags almost packed. One for clothes; two filled with enough cash to last a lifetime. He had three guns, two phones, and an assortment of passports and fake IDs still to pack. He’d already told Dimebox Ortiz he was leaving. He had one last call to make—to Gerry Far, warning him to keep his head down for a few days. Will and Soledad’s plane would be in the air in half an hour.

“I have to finish packing,” he told her.

She carefully shifted her weight on top of him, her arms circling his neck. The warmth of her thighs pressed against his legs. She kissed the bridge of his nose, the space between his eyebrows. Her Saint Anthony medal dangled against his chin.

“Stay,” she told him.

A Ziggy Marley song played—one of Soledad’s favorites. She always said the music reminded her of heat and salt water, of a trip she’d made as a child to the beach near Matamoros. Soon, Will promised her, she would live on the beach. She would have heat and the ocean every day.

He touched her necklace. “You never finished telling me about Saint Anthony.”

She kissed him. “San Antonio,
loco
boy. My protector. He’s the patron saint of lost things.”

“What have you lost?”

She smiled, a little sadly. “Maybe
I’m
what was lost.”

He realized his question had been stupid. She’d left her homeland, her aging father, her childhood. All for the sake of a better life in the north. And now Will was taking her away from that.

She unclasped the necklace, pressed it into his hand. “Stay with me here,
mi amor
. Cancel the flight.”

She kissed him again.

He felt the blood stop pounding in his temples, start collecting lower in his body, stirring a different kind of pressure.

They hadn’t made love since the baby arrived. It was probably still too soon.

She had not delivered in the hospital, of course. Stirman wanted no paper trails, no legal questions. Soledad was his creation. Their marriage had been secret for the same reason. He would not share her, or her child, with anyone.

But the delivery had been difficult. The old
curandera
midwife had commented on the amount of blood. For the first time, Will had seen fear and pain in Soledad’s eyes, and he resented the child for that.

She slipped her hand underneath his belt, bit his ear.

Then the baby started crying, setting Will’s nerves on edge.

He didn’t want to take the child with them. He wished she had agreed to his idea of giving the baby away. He felt no guilt about this, only the need to not offend Soledad.

“Go on,” he said, seeing her attention divided. “Tend to him.”

Her lips brushed his forehead. “Let your enemies break against you,
mi amor
. They cannot hurt you.”

“Don’t forget to make an extra bottle.”

She looked in his eyes for what would be the last time—the same undaunted look she always gave him, mutely reminding him that she had faced every horror a woman could face, some of those because of Will, yet she was not afraid. She had stayed with him this far. She didn’t want to leave, but she would go into exile with him, or walk into gunfire. She would do whatever was needed to protect him, because as much as he claimed to own her, she had purchased him.

She rose to tend the child.

Will stared down at the silver necklace in his hand. In a flash of resentment, he dropped the medallion into the space beneath the floorboard where he normally hid his cash.

Let Saint Anthony stay in San Antonio. Soledad would have no more need of him. Will would protect her. He would make sure she never suffered loss again.

He closed up the secret place in the floor, and made his phone call to Gerry Far. A moment later, the apartment door exploded.

A police siren brought Will back to the present.

The patrol car was several blocks up Roosevelt, red lights flashing, the cop tapping his bullhorn as he pulled through traffic.

Will was prepared to turn on a side street, to run if he had to, but a block away from him the police car veered into a residential neighborhood.

Probably nothing to do with him.

He turned on the radio. Immediately, the newscaster said, “—alleged leader of the Floresville Five.”

Will turned it off. He didn’t want to know. His nerves were frayed enough. It was seven in the evening, sun going down. He needed to find a store to rob.

Finally a corner sign caught his interest—
ZUNIGA’S PRODUCE
. The name sounded familiar, though Will was sure he’d never seen the place before.

Its walls were an odd color of stucco, like Chinese skin, so veined with cracks they seemed ready to fall apart. The doors were propped open with Black Diamond watermelons. Heaped outside were wooden crates of other produce—tomatoes, avocados, chili peppers, plantains.

No cars were parked out front. No customers at all, that Will could see. The store wouldn’t have much cash in the till, but it wouldn’t have surveillance cameras, either. Maybe the workers would be illegals. The owner would have no great desire to call the police.

Zuniga.

The name tugged at Will’s memory, but he put it down to nerves.

He imagined Reverend Riggs’ laser-blue eyes staring into him, trying to burn a hole in the small part of Will’s conscience that still believed in God.

He parked the car. He’d hesitated long enough.

Inside were two aisles—one for groceries, the other for produce. There was no one behind the counter—just a curtain to a back office, a cigarette rack, a black-and-white television with a Spanish
telenovela
flickering on the screen.

In the produce section, an aging Latino in a tank top and sweat pants and rubber galoshes was spraying down the fruit. The line of mirrors over the vegetable bins all reflected his belly.

A cleaver, a heap of rubber bands, and a large mound of green onions sat next to him. The grocer’s eyes were watering like crazy. Like he’d just taken a break from chopping and tying the
cebollas
into bundles. Or maybe he’d been following the
telenovela
.

He looked over tearfully as Will picked up a shopping basket.

“Nice seein’ the sun out there,” Will told him.

The man shrugged. He went back to spraying his apples.

Will picked up three dusty soup cans, a loaf of Wonder Bread, Fig Newtons, chocolate bars—whatever didn’t look too stale. He was conscious of the gun under his Hawaiian shirt, the grip digging into his abdomen.

He moved to the produce aisle, where things were much better tended. He picked up an orange, some apples, a pint of strawberries. The smell of the strawberries reminded him of the prison yard—hot summer afternoons, a thousand acres ripening in the fields all around Floresville.

Will brought his basket to the counter.

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

The grocer looked over lazily. He called,
“¡Lupe, ven acá!”

Will felt that uncomfortable memory tugging at the base of his skull. 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.