Southtown (18 page)

21

Erainya dreamed of J.P.

He stood over her, telling her not to worry—he’d have the ropes off in a moment. She could smell his cologne. She was grateful for the familiar silver stubble on his cheeks, the strong line of his jaw against the broadcloth collar. His hands worked deftly at the knots.

But J.P. had been murdered. She had seen him fall in the alley behind Paesano’s.

The man over her became Fred Barrow. He tugged at the ropes, clumsy and insistent, a gun in one hand, which made it impossible for him to get anywhere.

“Goddamn it, Irene.” He smelled of cigars and bourbon. His belly pressed against her ribs, crushing her as it had the night she’d killed him. “Wake up. Come on.”

Son-of-a-bitch.

She brought up her legs and kneecapped him in the face, sending him sprawling.

Erainya blinked, and came fully awake.

She was lying on a dirty pile of blankets, her arms bound behind her, her dress soaked with sweat. The man she’d just kneed in the head was the young fugitive—Pablo.

He got up, cursing, went to the table and exchanged his gun for a knife.

“Hold still,” he growled, “or I’ll cut your hands off.”

Erainya felt the cold metal blade slip between her wrists. Pablo tugged, and the ropes snapped. She sat up, tried to move her arms. She felt like someone had poured boiling water into her veins.

Pablo stepped back, retrieved his gun. “Do the rest yourself.”

Her fingers were numb. She managed to peel back the duct tape from her mouth.

“Get up.” Pablo stood by the plywood-barricaded window, peeking out a sliver of sunset at something below. “We don’t have much time.”

She fumbled with the knots that bound her ankles. She wanted to feel hopeful about being untied, but she didn’t like the urgency in Pablo’s voice. He had that wild, angry look in his eyes he got every time Will Stirman yelled at him.

She must have missed something. Had Stirman called? Erainya cursed herself for falling asleep.

“Stand up,” Pablo ordered.

“My legs are numb.”

He turned toward her, the light from the window making a luminous pink scar on his left cheek. “Get over here if you want to live. You need to see this.”

Erainya got unsteadily to her feet.

At the window, Pablo put the gun against her spine. “Quietly.”

The evening air felt good on her face—better than the stifling heat inside anyway.

At first, Erainya saw nothing special—train tracks, a half-flooded gravel parking lot freckled with rain, empty loading docks and gutted warehouses. The sun was going down through a break in the clouds.

Then she noticed the blue van with tinted windows, parked under a chinaberry tree at the end of the block. She caught a flicker of movement on a rooftop across the street. A glint of metal in an upper window that should’ve been empty.

“Cops,” Pablo told her. “Your friends broke faith.”

The muzzle of his gun dug between her vertebrae.

Erainya tried to steady her breathing. “I don’t see anything.”

“You won’t see them until they break down the door, huh? They’re setting up a perimeter. We’ve been screwed.”

His breath was sour from lack of sleep and canned food, his eyes red with shame, like a kid who’d just been beat up in the locker room.

Give him options,
Erainya told herself.

Pablo had used the word
we
. He was desperate and alone. He was looking for help.

“Get away from the window,” she told him. “You’re giving the snipers a target.”

He pulled her back, shoving her toward the mattress. “Your friend thought I wouldn’t shoot you? Is that what he thought?”

“You’re not cold-blooded, honey. You just cut me loose.”

“I can’t shoot a woman sleeping and tied up.” His voice quivered. “I wanted you to see them out there. This ain’t my fault.”

A big rig rumbled by outside, drawing Pablo’s attention to the window.

Erainya could try to disarm him, but her limbs were sandbags. She’d grab for the gun only as a last resort. She was afraid that decision might be just a few seconds away.

“Shooting me won’t help,” she said. “Don’t listen to Stirman.”

Pablo’s face was beaded with sweat.

“I can still run,” he said. “The loading dock in back—”

“They’ll kill you as soon as you step outside.”

“I’m not going to mess with a hostage, miss. I’m sorry.”

“Let me go out there,” she said. “I’ll tell them Stirman forced you. That’s true, isn’t it? They’ll treat you fair. I’ll stay with you, honey.”

Pablo blinked.

It had probably been a long time since anyone had offered to stay with him in a crisis.

He raised the gun. “I’m not going back to jail.”

“You don’t have to kill me.”

“If I don’t, Stirman will find me—doesn’t matter if I’m in jail or out. I have to get home. My wife . . .”

Erainya imagined a SWAT team moving silently into position. A flash-bang grenade would roll in the door first. Maybe tear gas. It wouldn’t be soon enough. Pablo and she were both going to die.

“There’s another way,” she told him. She tried her best not to make it sound like a lie. “I have an idea.”

His finger was white on the trigger. “No time, miss.”

“Listen to me.”

Pablo shook his head, his eyes bright with anger as if he were still hearing Stirman’s voice giving him orders.

Erainya started explaining anyway, describing her last-resort idea as Pablo took aim at her heart.

22

The Art Museum was supposed to be closed for flood repairs, but when Jem and I got there the entranceway blazed with light. The glass front doors were propped open with a trash can.

Two cars sat at the curb—an old Ford station wagon and an ’83 Chevy Impala with naked-lady-silhouette mud flaps. Neither struck me as a typical art patron vehicle.

“I’ve been here on a field trip,” Jem informed me.

“That’s good,” I said. “So you know where the bathrooms are?”

He nodded. With his active bladder, Jem had men’s room radar.

“If I tell you to run,” I said, “go to the bathroom. Lock the door if you can, and call 911. Okay?”

“Okay.” He slipped his mother’s cell phone into the pocket of his shorts. “Next time we do a heist, can we go to Malibu Castle?”

“
Rendezvous,
champ. Heists are what the bad guys do.”

I pulled my truck up to the Grand Avenue Bridge and parked behind a dark stand of cottonwoods next to the swollen river. I wasn’t sure why. I just didn’t feel right leaving the truck in plain sight.

We walked back to the museum entrance.

I used my Swiss army knife to puncture the tires on the Chevy and the Ford. I was tempted to cut off the Chevy’s naked-lady mud flaps, but we were in a hurry.

Jem took my hand. It was the first time he’d done so in almost a year. We looked up at the two towers rising into the night, the glass skywalk between them, crisscrossed with neon. I wished they still made beer here. I needed one.

Together we walked up the front steps.

The night watchman was slumped over the security desk. His gun holster was empty. He had a nasty lump on the side of his head. Spots of blood dribbled from his earlobe onto the security monitor.

“Is he okay?” Jem asked.

“Oh, sure.” I squeezed Jem’s hand and pulled him away. “Probably just tired.”

Dripping water echoed in the vastness of the Great Hall. Three stories above, damaged skylights sent a steady stream of runoff onto the café tables and the chocolate Saltillo tiles, completely missing the buckets. At the top of the staircase, two windows had been blasted out by the storms, replaced with plastic sheeting. The hanging catamaran sculpture that always reminded me of a da Vinci contraption was wrapped in a tarp.

I glanced into the gift shop. No crazed killers.

The other direction, plastic-wrapped statues of Marcus Aurelius and Vishnu flanked the entrance to the Ancient Cultures wing.

A man’s voice crackled with static: “Upstairs.”

It came from the unconscious guard—or rather, from the two-way radio clipped to his belt.

“Hope you’re not as empty-handed as it looks,” Stirman’s voice said. “Mr. Barrera hopes so, too. West elevator. All the way up.”

I looked around for a security camera. I didn’t see one.

“Let’s go,” I told Jem.

“You sure this isn’t a heist?” he asked.

The West Tower elevator was one of those see-through glass and steel jobs, set in the center of the room amidst Anubis statues and Middle Kingdom hieroglyphics. Getting inside made me feel like I was becoming one of the displays.

We ascended past Chinese porcelain and samurai armor. The pulley system went by, its brass wheels and silver weights clicking. We stopped on the fourth floor. Tahitian masks and Aboriginal fertility statues stared at us from the shadows.

The gallery space was tiny at the top of the tower. There was no place to go but the skywalk.

Will Stirman stood at the far end, holding a two-way radio and a gun. Sam Barrera sat cross-legged in front of him, a black duffel bag at his side.

“Come across halfway,” Stirman told us.

We stepped out over the void between the towers.

To the north, past the rooftops of the smaller galleries, Highway 281 cut a glittering arc around the woods and the river. To the south glowed all of downtown—the Tower of the Americas, the enchilada-red library, the old Tower Life Building.

Stirman hadn’t needed a security camera to see us approaching. From this vantage point, you could see straight down to the front of the building, and inside the Great Hall through the skylights.

It was difficult to say whether he or Barrera looked worse.

Sam was dressed in his suit and tie, but looked like he’d been broiling in a hot car all afternoon. His face glistened. His expression was blank with pain. His hand appeared to be broken. He cradled it in his lap, the fingers purple and swollen.

At least he wasn’t covered in blood.

Stirman’s shoulder wound made him look like something out of a Jacobean tragedy. I tried to convince myself the amount of blood soaking through his makeshift bandages wasn’t as much as it appeared, but it looked pretty damn bad.

His feverish eyes studied me for a moment, then rested on Jem. “I see the child, but not the money. Why is that, Navarre?”

“You need a doctor, Stirman.”

He swayed back about five degrees. The guy had to be going into shock. If I could just wait for the right moment . . .

“Don’t get ideas,” Stirman warned. “Barrera got ideas. You can see they didn’t help him.”

“You okay, Sam?” I asked.

Barrera tried to move his swollen hand, winced. “Where’s Fred?”

“Dead, Sam. Dead eight years.”

Stirman threw his walkie-talkie against the window so hard the glass shuddered. Next to me, Jem flinched.

“The old man keeps yammering about Barrow like he’s still alive,” Stirman complained. “He looks at me like he doesn’t know who I am.”

“Barrera’s ill.” I tried to keep my voice even. “He’s losing his memory.”

I could tell from Stirman’s face that he didn’t want to believe me. He wanted to buy into Sam’s dementia—to think Fred Barrow really was coming back from the dead, that he would show up any minute to get his just deserts.

“He brought me this.” Stirman picked up the black duffel bag, tossed it toward me. “What the hell is
this
?”

The zipper split open when it hit the carpet. Paper spilled all over the skywalk.

Not money.

Photographs. Old yellowed photos. In some of them, I recognized Sam Barrera’s face—a much younger Sam, grinning with his arms around people I didn’t know. There hadn’t been a single photo in Sam Barrera’s house—but here they all were, a lifetime’s worth, stuffed in an old loot bag.

“More memory problems?” Stirman asked.

“It’s the right bag,” Barrera insisted. “Tell him, Fred.”

Stirman raised an eyebrow at me.

“Barrera spent his share of the loot years ago,” I said. “Used it to build up his company. He’s got nothing left.”

Stirman jabbed his gun to the back of Barrera’s head. “Too bad for him. Where’s Fred Barrow’s share?”

“You didn’t give me time to retrieve it.”

“But you know where it is.”

“Yeah.”

“Then you’ll take me there.”

“Look at yourself, Stirman. You’re in no shape to go anywhere.”

“You’ll take me there,” he repeated. “And if you’re lying, you will wish to God you weren’t.” He looked at Jem. “Come here, boy.”

“Jem, no,” I said.

Stirman blinked at me. He was swaying a little more now, his face blue in the walkway’s neon lights. “They took everything from me, Navarre. I mean to collect.”

“You’d take Jem from Erainya.”

“Yes.”

“You’d take revenge on a little boy—”

“It isn’t revenge.”

“—a single mother, and an old man who doesn’t even remember why you’re mad at him. Is that satisfying? Is that what Soledad would’ve wanted?”

For a moment, I thought I’d pushed him too far, misread him completely.

But then he looked at Jem, and Stirman’s face took on that same hunger I’d seen at the soccer field. Again, he forced himself to contain his anger. Stirman had been telling me the truth on the phone—he
did
need Jem here. The boy’s presence was the only thing keeping him sane.

Stirman told me, “I know what I’m doing.”

“Don’t lie to yourself,” I said. “This isn’t about what Barrow and Barrera took from you eight years ago. This is about what you ran away from.
You
failed Soledad. You stayed silent about her baby. All this time, you let the past stay buried. You can’t make that right now.”

Stirman’s jaw tightened. “Be careful telling me what I can and can’t do.”

“Listen to Jem,” I said. “Listen to what he wants.”

“I want my mother back,” Jem managed.

“Your mother . . .” Stirman’s eyes drifted, as if looking at Jem had suddenly become painful. “Boy, if you knew about your mother . . .”

At that moment, Stirman looked very much like Sam Barrera—like a man whose lifelong focus had started to unravel.

“Put down the gun,” I told him. “Surrender to the police.”

Stirman exhaled, a humorless laugh. “That’s your advice, huh? Death Row?”

“You won’t survive another day on the outside. If you want any time to make amends, if it’s really not about revenge, then prison’s your only choice. It’s the only place you belong now.”

Stirman’s face had gone clammy. His bandaged shoulder glistened with new blood. The simple act of holding the gun to Barrera’s head must’ve been torture for him.

“Tell me where the money is,” he said. “Maybe I’ll let you and Barrera go. But the boy comes with me.”

Sam Barrera said, “Like hell.”

He started to get up.

“Sit down, old man,” Stirman ordered, pushing Barrera’s collarbone with the gun.

Barrera ignored him. He got unsteadily to his feet. “I didn’t come this far to let him run, Fred.”

I said, “Sam—”

“Go ahead and shoot me,” Barrera told Stirman. “You think I don’t remember?
I
shot your wife. Don’t take it out on Fred and this little kid. You gonna shoot somebody, shoot me.”

Stirman stared at Barrera in disbelief. “But . . . it was Barrow . . . I saw him. Why are you—”

“Shoot me,” Barrera ordered. “Last chance. I got the whole goddamn FBI surrounding this place.”

Stirman took a step back—a deeply ingrained human instinct: Get away from the crazy person.

Barrera grabbed the gun.

It discharged, cracking the glass wall behind Barrera’s head.

I yelled, “Jem, run!”

He followed my orders too well. With perfect eight-year-old single-mindedness, he ran toward the nearest restroom, which happened to be the wrong way—directly past Stirman, in the East Tower.

“No!”

Another shot drowned out my voice. A tube of red neon exploded. Stirman shoved Sam Barrera against the glass, which buckled, shattered, and Sam Barrera went backward into the void.

Stirman turned as Jem brushed past him. He tried to catch the boy’s shirt. I tackled Stirman. The butt of his gun slammed into my ear.

The next thing I knew I was on the carpet. A photograph was stuck to my cheek.

I got up, my vision doubled. I leaned against the railing, now open to the wet night air, and I saw a pale human shape fifteen feet below, sprawled on the lower gallery roof. Sam Barrera’s body.

I didn’t have time to think about that. Stirman hadn’t stayed to finish me off.

He had gone after Jem.