Southtown tn-5

by Rick Riordan

  “Paul.”

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

  By that time Paul had run past the ball, let Saint Mark’s intercept, and was busy checking out a really 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 called 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.”

  “He’ll be asking you to serve as best man,” Erainya said. “Just so you’re warned.”

  The sun suddenly felt a lot warmer. “Me?”

  “I’d ask you to be a bridesmaid, honey, but the dress would look terrible on you.” Then she shouted, “Come on, Laura! Good!”

  The ball made another futile loop around the field. It sailed toward Jem. It bounced off Maria.

  Erainya turned to me. “Honey, look, J.P.’s only got his daughter. No male friends he’s really close to. He knows how Jem and I feel about you. He wants you there. Think about it.”

  I felt a weight on my chest, the unresolved need to say something I couldn’t quite say.

  Jem crouched at the goalie net, his hands down, knees bent-the exact position I’d told him to keep. He wore the same crazy grin he always got whenever he was on the soccer field. Saint Mark’s had only scored one goal off him so far. Then again, we’d scored zip.

  “Guess you’re closing the agency?” I asked Erainya.

  She shrugged. “I can’t run it anymore.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  She looked completely unconcerned. “You’ll get along.”

  I had expected this. I should not feel bitter. Maia Lee would be delighted.

  “Besides,” Erainya said, “I’ll be around if you need advice. I ain’t going to turn it over to you just to let you run it into the ground.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t look at me like that, you big idiot. I’m giving you the Erainya Manos Agency. My clients. My files. My fabulous resources. My unpaid bills. With both me and Sam retiring, we’ve got to have one decent PI in town. And if you’re smart, you’ll keep the name. It’s lucky.”

  Paul was taking the ball in the right direction. Somehow, he managed to kick it to Jack.

  “Well?” Erainya asked me. “You’re not gonna disappoint me, are you?”

  Will Stirman was gone. Erainya was happy.

  I could say nothing.

  But the weight was there still, smooth and hard as a river rock.

  “Laura!” I yelled. “To the middle! Help him out!”

  Only because it was her love interest Jack, Laura followed directions.

  Jack passed. Laura kicked. The ball sailed into the net.

  Our team erupted into cheers, dog barks, taunts about Saint Mark’s being poop-butts.

  The ref blew the whistle.

  The kids swarmed us-sixteen hot sweaty little bodies, dying for water and a chance to play forward.

  The last quarter: 1-1. Jem wanted to keep the vest.

  I hated the idea. Saint Mark’s only needed one goal. I didn’t want Jem responsible for losing the game.

  Still, nobody else wanted the job. We ended with seven forwards and Jem as keeper.

  “You doing okay, champ?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.” He looked up a moment longer, squinting into the sun, like he understood he needed to prove to me that he really was okay. Something silver glinted around his neck-a Saint Anthony medallion I’d never seen before. He said, “I’m good. Watch.”

  They went out on the field again.

  Erainya stood next to me, cupping the sun out of her eyes. I thought about how many times she’d whacked me with that hand, or cut the air at some stupid comment I’d made.

  “Stirman talked to Jem,” I said, “the night at the museum.”

  She kept her eyes on the field. “Yeah?”

  “They had maybe a minute alone together, out on the roof.”

  “Miracle Jem wasn’t hurt.”

  “No miracle. Stirman never wanted to hurt him. I wouldn’t have brought Jem along otherwise. Stirman wanted to take him.”

  The ref’s whistle blew. Saint Mark’s kicked off. The ball was lost in a forest of little cleats and shin guards.

  Erainya looked at me the way she normally looked at Sam Barrera-as if I was about to snatch away her last bread-and-butter contract.

  “So,” she said, her tone carefully neutral. “What do you figure he told Jem, in that one minute?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he told Jem the truth.”

  Saint Mark’s drove the ball toward our goal. Their coach yelled for their best kicker to stand ready at the penalty line.

  Erainya was silent, watching me.

  “Jem’s birth date was the same day Stirman was arrested,” I said. “Other than that, the adoption papers were a pretty good forgery. You never went to Greece that year, did you?”

  She hesitated a couple of heartbeats. Then the shield she’d been trying to put up melted. “Fred didn’t want me to keep the baby.”

  “That’s what your last argument was about-why you shot him,” I guessed. “He wasn’t just threatening you. He was threatening the baby, too.”

  She flexed her hand, as if remembering the trigger of the gun. “That night in Stirman’s apartment, the baby had stopped breathing. I guess the shock of the gunfire… I don’t know. I did CPR. I brought him back to life. Fred… well, I wasn’t going to lose the child after all that. After I shot Fred, I sent Jem to stay with a friend of mine, lady named Helen Malski, until the trial was over.”

  “I found a letter she wrote you. Jem was the package she was keeping safe.”

  Erainya nodded. “Once I was released, Jem and I disappeared for a while. I’d done enough work on adoption cases. Faking Jem’s paperwork wasn’t hard. I made up his birthday. I kept thinking somebody would question… Stirman would raise hell. Barrera would squawk. But nothing like that ever happened. Eventually, I figured Stirman thought the child was dead, or he just didn’t care enough to protest. I felt safe enough to come back home, take over the agency. I couldn’t have left a baby like that, with his mother dead.”

  “You made Jem’s birth date a clue.”

  “I know. Stupid.”

  “Classic guilt. Part of you wanted to get caught.”

  “Stop talking like a PI.” There was a challenge in her eyes, but it was frail.

  She was a few weeks away from a whole new future. She was about to re-create herself for the second time. I could bring it all crashing down if I wanted to.

  “You caught me,” she said. “Question is: What are you going to do about it?”

  The game caught my attention. I shouted, “Jem, heads up!”

  He crouched, ready for a challenge.

  The Saint Mark’s kicker drove the ball straight toward the goal.

  Jem dove. The ball sailed right past him into the net.

  The other team cheered like crazy.

  Jem picked up the ball, ran it to the line, and threw it like it was still in play. He kept smiling like everything was good. The Saint Anthony medallion had come untucked from his collar. It gleamed silver against his goalie vest.

  “Honey?” Erainya said to me, her voice growing tense. “What do you want to do?”

  Maybe everything was good. I caught Jem’s eye and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  He grinned, delighted.

  I didn’t know what Stirman had told him. It didn’t matter.

  The ref blew the whistle. Game over: a 2-
1 loss.

  “Not as bad as I’d feared.” I looked at Erainya. “For one thing, I’m going to insist on a legal name change.”

  Erainya looked grim, but she managed to keep her composure. “If you seriously think…”

  “The Tres Navarre Agency,” I said. “Much better ring to it.”

  Then I did something I had never done. I kissed Erainya on the cheek, left her startled and blinking, and went out to give her son a big high five.

  27

  A week later, I got a call from Alicia, Sam’s personal secretary.

  She couldn’t reach Sam at home again. He hadn’t reported to the office. She was worried, and I had become the person to call.

  Maia and I were at my apartment, having an argument with Robert Johnson about who made better cheese enchiladas. The cat was playing silent and diplomatic. He wanted a cook-off.

  I hung up the phone and looked at Maia, who was dressed for work. She had a court date in Austin that afternoon.

  “Problem with Sam,” I told her.

  I hadn’t gotten a replacement for my truck yet, so I asked if she could spare an hour to drive me.

  “That depends,” she said. “Are we going to talk on the way?”

  So far, I had successfully avoided the subject of my hypothetical move to Austin. It hadn’t been easy keeping Maia’s mind off the topic. She’d made me work pretty hard at it all night long.

  She knew I’d agreed to take over Erainya’s agency. She’d received that news so graciously I was pretty sure she was contemplating murdering me later.

  What she wanted to know now is where I’d be living.

  She was sure I could run the business from Austin. I could commute to San Antonio a few days a week, maybe hire one of my friends to cover for me part-time. I could slowly shift my clientele base to Austin, where business would be better.

  The agency had no physical office space, anyway. Few assets. Even fewer steady clients. Maia wanted to know what was wrong with her plan.

  I said, “Did I mention how outstandingly beautiful you look this morning?”

  She picked her gun from the counter, pointed it at the front door, and said, “Walk.”

  I had a pretty good hunch where Sam would be.

  We found him sitting on the front porch of his childhood home on Cedar and South Alamo, the photographs from his black duffel bag spread around his feet. It looked like he was trying to group them by subject matter and year.

  “Morning,” he told us.

  He was dressed in a three-piece suit, clean-shaven, marinated with Old Spice. His left arm was in a cast, but it didn’t seem to bother him much.

  I thought I’d taken all his guns away, but he’d found an old Smith amp; Wesson somewhere and stuck it in his shoulder holster. He had a Frosted Flake stuck to his chin.

  “Hi, Sam,” I said. “It’s me, Tres.”

  “I know that, damn it.”

  “This is Maia Lee.”

  I didn’t ask if he remembered her.

  Sam picked up a photograph. “Lot of faces. Some of these are twenty, thirty years old. Nothing more recent than ten, I’d guess.”

  “Your family.”

  Barrera looked up at me. “What would you think-a guy who has a bagful of pictures like this? What’s your read?”

  “Estranged,” I said. “But maybe he doesn’t really want it that way.”

  Sam considered. “Maybe.”

  Foot traffic went by on South Alamo. A paleta seller chimed the bell on his bike. A couple of tattooed, orange-haired Latino kids walked by with artist sketch pads. An Anglo mom chased her toddler, who was waving a half-eaten flour tortilla. The mom paused at the FOR SALE sign in Sam’s yard and took the last flier from his tube.

  Sam pointed his thumb toward the front door. “I used to live here.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Second bedroom upstairs. Downstairs, when I was first retired, I thought about putting my PI office in here, you know? But the neighborhood was going downhill then. Bad place for a business.”

  He looked at Maia, who smiled in a daughterly way. If she was anxious about being late for her court date, she didn’t show it. Patience was one of her great investigative assets, which explained why she was still dating me.

  “Now they call the neighborhood Southtown,” Sam told her. “Look at this traffic. When did the center of town move south again?”

  I needed to get Sam home. I just wasn’t sure how to do it yet. The gun wasn’t the hardest part. It was moving the photographs. He would get upset about that.

  “What would you charge,” he asked me, “for a job like this?”

  “What job, Sam?”

  He waved at the photos. “Finding them. Putting names back to the faces. It’s bothering me.”

  “Look, Sam,” I said, “the folks at the office are worried about you.”

  “My office?”

  “Yeah. I-Tech. You were supposed to go in today and sign some papers.”

  “I’m retiring,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Before they kick me out.”

  His eyes showed no hint of confusion-just the sadness of a man who knew exactly what was happening to him.

  “Alicia and my doctor have it all planned,” he said. “I’m supposed to sell my properties. The money will pay for this assisted living program. They do studies with new drugs, like on rats. They say it’s my best shot. I don’t want to live with a bunch of people like me.”

  “Sam-let’s get you home.”

  “This is my home.”

  Down on South Alamo, conjunto music played from a car stereo. The morning air was heating up, filled with the smell of wet magnolia leaves from Sam’s front yard.

  Sam picked up a tintype of an old Latino in a starched shirt, suspenders and a bowler. It could’ve been Sam’s grandfather.

  Right then, I knew what I would do. I realized I’d been thinking about it for days.

  I wasn’t excited. I figured I might as well make myself a T-shirt that said COACH FOR LIFE on one side and KICK ME on the other side. But I knew I had to do it. I’d never forgive myself otherwise.

  I looked at Maia.

  I kept looking until I thought I’d conveyed my question right.

  She hesitated, then leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I think I’ll stroll down the block for a while, gentlemen. Nice meeting you, Mr. Barrera.”

  When it was just Sam and me, I said, “You want all of those people found?”

  “Yeah.” Sam studied the old picture. “Names to faces, you know? Bothering the hell out of me.”

  “Big job. Lot of hours, plus expenses.”

  “I’ve got money.”

  “I was thinking more like a trade.”

  He scratched his ear. “Like what?”

  “This house. We split it. I take the downstairs for my office, rent-free. You keep upstairs to live in.”

  He stared at me.

  “But no deal if you don’t live here,” I said. “I want the landlord close, in case I have a problem. Plus, you know, this’ll be a private eye agency. I’ll be just starting out. I’ll expect free consultations with you.”

  Sam looked away. A group of college girls chatted their way down the sidewalk, heading toward the coffeehouse.

  “We got a deal, Sam?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was hoarse. “We got a deal, Fred.”

  “My name is Tres.”

  “I know that, damn it.”

  “I’ve got to go talk to Maia Lee. You want to come with me, Sam?”

  “No. I’ll wait here. I like the porch.”

  “You’ve got some cereal on your chin.”

  He brushed it off.

  When I got to the bottom of the steps, he called, “Tres.”

  I turned, surprised that he’d remembered my name.

  “Call the FBI for me, will you? Tell them I’m going to work at home today. I just got an idea.”

  “I’ll tell them, Sam. Be right b
ack, okay?”

  He didn’t acknowledge me. He was too busy rearranging his photos, as if he’d just figured out how to break the case wide open.

  Maia Lee stood across the street, looking in the window of Tienda Guadalupe. She was admiring the folk art devils.

  “The one with the furry butt looks like you,” she said.

  I told her about my deal with Sam. I got the feeling she wasn’t exactly surprised.

  “I think I’ll buy that devil to hang on my back porch,” she decided. “By the neck, maybe.”

  “I love you.”

  She turned toward me, gave me a long kiss. A family of tourists walked the long way around us. A couple of Chevy-cruising vatos made some appreciative catcalls.

  Maia gently pushed away from me. She said, “I won’t ask if you understand what you’re getting yourself into. I know you better than that. But if you need any help with the legal stuff…”

  “I’ve still got a hotshot attorney in Austin?”

  She looked down at the grimy sidewalk, the same brick path San Antonians had been walking since the 1800s. “You can’t get free of this place, any more than Sam Barrera can. I might as well admit that.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “Long-distance,” she said. “I’ve got to go now.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  She kissed me once more for the road. “You don’t need one, Tres. You’re home.”

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