Southtown tn-5 Read online

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

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

  “What?” I asked.

  She dialed a number, cursed. With the storm, cell phone reception inside the van, especially 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 call-her ENT, Dr. Dreamboat, or whatever the hell 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 call him now.

  I was pondering whether I’d have to shove a cell 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 kill the overhead illumination, found there was no switch. “Shit.”

  “Owe me a quarter,” Jem told me, his eyes still 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.

  I leaned and tapped on Erainya’s window.

  Halfway down the sidewalk, Dimebox Ortiz froze, staring in our direction. The rain was drenching him.

  You don’t see us, I thought. We are invisible.

  Dimebox yelled back toward the house-his cousins’ names, some Spanish I couldn’t catch. He ran for his Lincoln Town Car, and I gave up on discretion.

  “Erainya!” I yelled, pounding on the driver’s-side door.

  She took the phone away from her ear, just catching the fact that something was wrong as Dimebox’s taillights flared to life and Lalu and Kiko came lumbering out their front door, their fists full of things I was pretty sure weren’t wax apples.

  Erainya climbed in, hit the ignition. “Jem, seatbelt!”

  We peeled out, hydroplaning a sheet of water into the faces of the Ortiz cousins, who yelled plentiful contributions to Jem’s cuss jar as they jogged after us, brandishing their army surplus door prizes.

  Dimebox’s Lincoln turned the corner on Keslake as the first explosion rocked the back of our van. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw chunks of wet asphalt spray up from the middle of the street where our tailpipe had been a moment before.

  “Fireworks?” Jem asked, excited.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Get down.”

  “I want to see!”

  “These are the kind you feel, champ. Get down!”

  The twins sloshed after us like a couple of rabid hippos.

  Up ahead, Dimebox’s Lincoln Town Car dipped toward the low-water crossing on Sinclair.

  A few hours ago when we’d driven in, Rosillio Creek had been full, but nowhere near the top of the road. Now, glistening in our headlights, an expanse of chocolate water surged over the asphalt. Clumps of grass, branches and garbage piled up on the metal guardrail. It was hard to tell how deep the water was. There was no other road in or out of the neighborhood, even if we could turn around, which we couldn’t with Senor Dee and Senor Dum lobbing munitions right behind us.

  In the PI business, we have a technical term for getting yourself into this kind of situation. We call it fucking up.

  Dimebox’s brake lights flashed as he approached the crossing.

  “He won’t make it,” I said, as he revved the Lincoln’s engine and plunged hood-first into current.

  Ka- BOOM. Behind us, the low-water-crossing sign splintered into kindling.

  “He’ll make it,” Erainya insisted. “So will we.”

  I started to protest, but she’d already nosed the van into the water.

  The sensation was like a log ride-that stomach-lurching moment when the chain catches under the boat. Water churned beneath the floorboards, hammered the doors. The van shuddered and began drifting sideways.

  Through the smear of the windshield, I saw Dimebox’s Town Car trying to climb the opposite bank, but his headlights dimmed. His rear fender slid back into the torrent, crunched against the guardrail. His headlights went dark, and suddenly the Lincoln was a dam, water swelling around it, lapping angrily at the bottom of the shotgun window.

  “Go back,” I told Erainya.

  She fought the wheel, muttered orders to the van in Greek, eased us forward. We somehow managed to get right behind the Lincoln before our engine died.

  Our headlights dimmed, but stayed on. I could see Dimebox Ortiz in front of us, waving one arm frantically out his window. His driver’s-side door was smashed against the guardrail. Water was sluicing into his shotgun window.

  Behind us, Lalu and Kiko were barely discernible at the edge of the water, watching mutely as our two vehicles were trash-compacted against the guardrail.

  The railing moaned. Our van skidded sideways. The Lincoln’s back left wheel slipped over the edge, and Dimebox’s whole car began to tilt up on the right, threatening to flip over in the force of the water.

  I grabbed Erainya’s cell phone, dialed 911, but in the roar of the flood I couldn’t hear anything. The LCD read, Searching for Signal. The water inside the van was up to my ankles.

  “Rope,” I shouted to Erainya. “You still have rope?”

  “We have to stay inside, honey. We can’t-”

  “I’m getting Ortiz out of that car.”

  “Honey-”

  “He won’t make it otherwise. I’ll tie off here.”

  “Honey, he isn’t worth it!”

  Ortiz was yelling for help. He looked… tangled in something. I couldn’t tell. Nothing but his head was above water.

  I looked back at Jem, who for once wasn’t focused on the PlayStation.

  “Pass me the rope behind your seat,” I told him. “You’re the man of the van, okay?”

  “I can’t swim,” he reminded me.

  His eyes were calm-that creepy calm I only saw when he tried to remember his life before Erainya, his thoughts thickening into a protective, invisible layer of scar tissue.

  I shoved him the cell phone. “It’s okay, champ. Keep trying 911.”

  He passed me the rope-fifty feet of standard white propylene. I didn’t know why Erainya stored it in the van. I suppose you never knew when you’d have to tie somebody up. Or maybe Dr. Dreamboat the ENT had strange proclivities. I didn’t want to ask.

  I made a knot around the steering column, a noose around my waist. Then I rolled down the passenger’s-side window and got a face full of rain.

  I climbed outside, lowered myself into the current, and got slapped flat against the van.

  Up ahead, a few impossible feet, the passenger’s side of the Lincoln was bobbing in the current. I could see Dimebox Ortiz in the driver’s seat, up to his earlobes in water.

  I didn’t so much walk as crawl along the side of the van.

  My efforts spurred Lalu and Kiko into a new round of yelling. I couldn’t make out words. Maybe they were arguing about whether they could blow me up without hurting Dimebox.

  I kept the rope taut around my waist, inching out a step at a time, not even kidding myself that I could keep my footing. The side of the van was the only thing that kept me from being swept away.

  The worst part was between the cars, where the water shot through like a ravine. When I slipped one foot into the full current, it was like being hooked by a moving train. I was ripped off balance, pulled into the stream. My head went und
er, and the world was reduced to a cold brown roar.

  I held the rope. I got my head above water, found the fender of the Town Car, and clawed my way to the passenger’s side.

  The Lincoln’s shotgun window was open, making a waterfall into the car.

  Dimebox’s hands were tugging frantically at something underwater. He was craning his ugly head to keep it above the water. His face was like a bank robber’s, his features all pantyhose-smeared, only Dimebox didn’t wear pantyhose.

  “Can you move?” I yelled.

  He pushed at the wheel as if it were pinning his legs.

  “Lalu!” he shouted. “Kiko! Push!”

  Push?

  Then I realized he wasn’t struggling to get free. He was attempting to start the ignition. He expected his cousins to wade out here and give him a jump start.

  “You’re underwater, you moron!” I told him. “Give me your hand!”

  “Fuck you, Navarre!” he screamed. “Get the fuck away!”

  “Me or the river, Dimebox.”

  “I ain’t going to jail!”

  I didn’t understand his stubbornness. Dimebox was up on some stupid charge like assault. He was constantly going in and out of the slammer, constantly jumping bail, which I guess you can do when your bondsman is your brother-in-law. We’d bounty-hunted him plenty of times. I didn’t see why he was making such a fuss about a couple more weeks in the county lockup.

  Another metallic groan. The guardrail bent, and the Lincoln shifted a half inch downstream. My side of the car began to levitate. For a moment, a ton of Detroit steel balanced on the fulcrum, my armpits the only thing keeping it from flipping.

  “Now!” I told Dimebox. “Over here now!”

  “Mother of Shit!” Dimebox lunged in my direction, wrapped his arms around my neck, damn near pulled me into the car with him.

  A few more seconds-an eternity when Dimebox is hugging you-and I hauled him out the window. The Lincoln seemed to settle with both of us pressed against it, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. We inched our way back toward the van, the rain driving needles into my cheeks, Dimebox reeking a lovely combination of wet sewage and Calvin Klein. On shore, Lalu and Kiko yelled wildly, brandishing their hand grenades.

  We’d just reached the van when Dimebox’s Town Car rose on its side with a huge groan, flipped the guardrail, and crashed upside down in the creek bed, its body submerged, wheels spinning uselessly in the foam.

  The guardrail bent like licorice. Our van would go next.

  Erainya yelled at me, “Throw them the rope!”

  “What?”

  “The cousins!” she yelled. “Throw it to them!”

  Only then did I realize that Lalu and Kiko weren’t waiting around to kill us. They wanted to help.

  Forty minutes later, after Erainya’s van, Jem’s PlayStation, and a bagful of perfectly good spanakopita had been washed into oblivion down Rosillio Creek, Erainya and Jem and I sat in the Ortiz cousins’ living room, wrapped in triple-X terry cloth bathrobes, eating cold venison tamales and waiting for the police, who were coming to pick up Dimebox.

  The guest of honor sat on the sofa, stripped to his jockey shorts and T-shirt, his ankles and wrists tied in plastic cuffs. He kept muttering cuss words, and Jem kept telling him he owed us quarters.

  “You okay,” Kiko told me, smashing the top of my head with his paw. “Save Dimebox’s sorry ass. Put him in jail. Kiko not have t’sleep on the couch no more.”

  “Won’t do you any good, Erainya,” Dimebox snarled. “Bounty money won’t help you worth shit, will it? We’re both screwed.”

  “Shut up, Ortiz.” Her voice was harsher than I’d ever heard it. “Don’t curse in front of my son.”

  “Stirman’s coming. He’s got plenty of friends in the county jail. You lock me up, you’re signing my death warrant.”

  “I said shut up.”

  I looked back and forth between them, wondering what I’d missed, or if my brain was still waterlogged.

  Then the name clicked.

  “Stirman,” I said. “The escaped con on the news.”

  “I ain’t staying in jail,” Dimebox said. “You know what’s good for you, you’ll run, too.”

  Erainya wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  I remembered her reaction to the radio news, the intense, almost frantic look she’d given me.

  “What?” I asked her. “You helped put this Stirman guy away?”

  Dimebox laughed nervously. “That ain’t the fucking half of it, Navarre. Not the fucking-”

  Lalu whacked his fist against Dimebox’s skull, and Dimebox slumped on the couch.

  Lalu grunted apologetically. “Lady wanted no cussing.”

  I said, “Erainya…?”

  She got up and stormed into the cousins’ bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

  I turned to Jem, who was paying a lot of attention to the pattern in the couch fabric. I asked him if he still had his mom’s cell phone.

  I checked the readout, but the call history didn’t help my confusion. I could make a dozen guesses who Erainya might call in an emergency, if she were truly faced with an urgent dilemma.

  All my guesses were wrong.

  The person she’d been so anxious to talk to when she stepped into the storm wasn’t her doctor boyfriend. It wasn’t the police, or any of our regular helpers on the street.

  She’d called I-Tech Security, the direct line to the company president.

  Her archrival.

  A man she’d sworn never to cross paths with again, until one of them was dancing on the other’s grave.

  3

  Special Agent Samuel Barrera spent breakfast trying to remember the name of the ax murderer.

  The guy had tortured and killed six illegal immigrants on a ranch up around Castroville, left their body parts scattered in the woods like deer corn. What the hell was his name?

  Sam had a feeling it would be important in the case he was working on. He’d talk to his trainee Pacabel when he got to the office. Pacabel would remember.

  The morning was humid after last night’s downpour, just enough drizzle to keep everybody sour-faced, staring at the gray sky, thinking, Enough already.

  Not even Alamo Street Market’s coffee and migas were enough to compensate.

  Sam pulled on his jacket over his sidearm.

  He left a ten on the table, got annoyed when the waiter called, “ Hasta manana, Sam.”

  Like Sam knew the guy. Like they were old friends or something. What the hell was wrong with people these days?

  Down South Alamo, yellow sawhorses blocked the side streets. Asphalt had come apart in huge chunks and washed away. The sidewalk was buried in a shroud of mud.

  Sam picked his way through the debris.

  The last few years, people had started calling this area Southtown. Art studios had opened up in the old barrio houses, funky little restaurants and curio shops in the crumbling mercantile buildings. The changes didn’t bother Sam. He liked seeing life come back to his old neighborhood. But it did make him miss the past.

  His family home at the corner of Cedar was falling apart. He’d owned it since his parents died, back in the seventies. He hadn’t lived there for years, but he always parked in front of it. Force of habit. The FOR SALE was up. The real estate agent called him every day with glad tidings. They had their choice of offers. For this old dump. Sam never suspected he’d grown up in a Victorian fixer-up dream. To him, it had just been la casa. Back then, nobody lived here but the Mexicans, because this was where they could afford to live.

  He opened the door of his mustard-yellow BMW.

  The car was getting old. Like him. But Sam kept putting off a trade-in, irritated by the thought of unfamiliar controls, a different paint job. Too much to keep track of, when you got a new car.

  He drove north to the field office on East Houston, still thinking about that rancher whose name he couldn’t remember. He’d kept the six illegal immigrants as slaves, killed them slowly
, one at a time. It had something to do with Sam’s present case.

  When he got to the FBI suite on the second floor, he walked into the reception area and found some rookie fresh out of Quantico blocking his way to the inner offices. “Sir, can I help you?”

  Sam scowled. There was a time when he would’ve chewed out this asshole for standing in his way, but Sam didn’t feel up to it today. He felt a little off. Preoccupied. “I work here, son.”

  Something disconnected in the kid’s eyes. It wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. “You have identification?”

  Sam patted his jacket, where the ID should be.

  Hell. Was it in the car, maybe? On the coffee table?

  Held up from work by a fucking detail.

  A couple of agents came out from the interior offices and sized up Sam. One of them was an older guy-must’ve been nearing mandatory retirement. He had thinning silver hair, a big nose blazed with capillaries. Sam knew him, couldn’t quite place his name.

  “Must’ve left it at home,” Sam told the rookie. He felt the situation slipping away from him. “Cut me some slack.”

  The agents exchanged looks. By some silent agreement, the silver-haired one stepped forward. “Hey, Sam.”

  “Yeah?” Sam said.

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  “I don’t want a walk.”

  The old guy put a hand on his shoulder and steered him back toward the entrance.

  “You know me?” the old guy asked.

  “Sure,” Sam said.

  “Pacabel,” the guy said.

  Immediately, the name slipped around him like a comfortable shoe.

  “Joe Pacabel,” Sam said, confident again. “Sure, Joe. Let me get to work, will you? Tell these jokers.”

  Pacabel looked at the floor. Beige tiles, which seemed wrong to Sam. It should’ve been carpet. Green industrial carpet.

  The other agents were trying not to stare at him.

  “Look, Sam,” Pacabel said, the words dragging out of him. “You’re a little confused, is all. It happens.”

  “Joe, my case…”