Southtown (7 page)

9

Even before the crazy woman picked up the gun, Sam Barrera wasn’t having a good day.

He’d spent the last twenty-four hours making careful notes from his case files, trying to understand what he’d gotten himself into eight years ago. Unfortunately, the information he needed most wasn’t in the files. He wouldn’t have committed incriminating evidence to writing.

After breakfast, his real estate agent called. She had a quarter-million-dollar offer for the Southtown house, but she needed an answer by Friday. He told her he’d have to think about it.

A few minutes later, his doctor called—the goddamn neurologist who’d adopted him.

“Sam, did you visit?” he wanted to know.

“Yeah, I visited.”

“And?”

What was Sam supposed to say? The place had scared him to death.

“It’s your best chance,” the doctor assured him. “It really is. But openings don’t happen often. We have to jump on this right away. I need an answer soon.”

Again, Sam said he had to think about it.

He hung up and drew a picture of the neurologist with devil horns. By the time he’d finished drawing it, he’d forgotten who it was supposed to be.

Then, as if all that wasn’t enough, a courier delivered the videotape.

Sam had watched the video four times, even though it was one of the most horrible things he’d ever seen. He hoped the images would keep his memory from fading, keep his sense of urgency alive.

When he’d called Erainya Manos, he asked for a morning meeting. But she had insisted he come at noon, when her house would be empty.

Words were slippery for Barrera at noon. So far, he had let her do the talking. Mostly, that consisted of ranting.

She spoke with her hands. She was short and wiry and seemed to blame Sam and her late husband for everything, including Will Stirman, her business problems and the state of her housekeeping.

While she paced around, yelling at him, Sam focused on the room. He remembered being in this den before. The old Sony Trinitron with rabbit-ear antennae. The leather reclining chair that smelled of pipe tobacco. The limestone fireplace with the moldy twelve-point buck’s head above the mantel. The watercolor fishing scenes.

This was Fred Barrow’s den. It pleased Sam to come up with the name without looking at his notes. Maybe it was because the woman kept yelling that name.

Fred Barrow and Sam had sat here, in this room. They had made a temporary truce, a plan to catch the man they both hated—Will Stirman.

Sam wondered why the woman hadn’t changed the decor, if she hated her deceased husband so much. Two reasons occurred to him—she didn’t use this room; or changing it would’ve deprived her of something to complain about. The way she slapped the air when she spoke—this woman liked targets. Probably, she kept the den intact for the same reason people keep their boss’s face on a dartboard.

He felt satisfied with his analysis, then found himself staring at the striped pattern of the woman’s dress and he forgot where he was. Goddamn it. He checked his notepad.

“How can you sit there so calm?” the woman demanded. “What—you’re taking notes on me? Jesus, Barrera. What did Stirman say?”

Sam had the videotape in his lap. For lack of a better idea, he said, “Maybe you should watch this.”

The woman grabbed the cassette and stuck it in the VCR.

The dusty old television flickered green, then showed a badly beaten man tied to a chair. Sam had written the man’s name in his notepad—Gerry Far. He’d underlined it once for each time he watched the tape. Sam still didn’t recognize the man’s face. That could have been because there wasn’t much left to recognize.

“Barrera?” An off-screen voice—male, West Texas accent. “You remember Gerry Far? He’s going to give a statement now—little different story than the one he told at my trial. I thought you’d like a preview before I send it to the media in forty-eight hours. You ready, Gerry?”

The camera centered on what was left of Gerry Far’s face.

The woman in the striped dress paced in front of the television, cursing in a language Sam didn’t recognize.

Gerry Far got about ten sentences out of his ruined mouth before the woman snarled, “I won’t listen to this.”

She punched the TV’s
off
button. “Goddamn it, Barrera!”

“Turn it back on,” he said calmly. “You need to see it.”

She made a fist in the air. Then she hit the
on
button.

Gerry Far told his story in slow painful gulps.

Sam had always been best at reading places, reading people. The way the image shook, the jerky zoom motions, meant a handheld camera rather than a tripod. Stirman’s midsection could be seen moving behind Gerry, his hand occasionally patting Gerry’s shoulder. Stirman had an accomplice doing the filming.

The room had brick walls, large rectangular windows. Two of the windows were boarded up, but one was not. The bad quality of the video bleached the view outside, but Sam could just make out one cabled support column of the Alamodome. Clouds obscured the angle of the light, but Sam guessed the film had been shot in the late afternoon. If he read the orientation correctly, the building was somewhere just northeast of downtown. A brick warehouse near St. Paul Square. A leap of deduction, maybe, but he was hardly ever wrong.

“Did I do anything to you, Gerry?”
Stirman was saying.
“Did I deserve this?”

“I’m sorry, Will,”
Gerry Far whimpered.
“I’m sorry.”

“Was I innocent?”

“You were innocent. It was their idea. Their idea.”

“You hear that, Sam?”
Stirman asked.
“You tell Fred’s widow—she’s not off the hook either. Forty-eight hours.”

That’s when the woman opened the desk drawer and took out the gun.

Barrera didn’t think she would shoot him. Then he flashed on a memory—she
had
shot someone, hadn’t she? In this very room. Her husband.

How had he known that?

“Gerry,”
Stirman said.
“Tell them I’m serious.”

“You’re serious, sir,”
Gerry said.
“You are fucking serious.”

“I think they need proof.”
Stirman pressed the muzzle of a gun to the man’s temple.

Gerry Far blinked furiously, his lips trembling.

Just as Sam was about to watch him die for the fifth time, the woman raised her own pistol and blew out the television screen. Glass cracked. Electronic innards sparked.

The woman ripped the video from the machine and started tearing out long silky loops of ribbon.

Two men burst into the den.

“Erainya?” The older of the two men stared at the gun, then at Barrera, accusingly, as if Sam had done something wrong. “What the hell’s going on?”

He was a gray-haired Latino in an expensive blue suit. Soft hands, gold school ring, silver pen in his lapel pocket. Sam pegged him for a doctor. His accent was buried deep under years of affluence, but Sam recognized it—Southtown Spanish. A local boy, a self-made
vato,
like Barrera himself.

The woman said, “Everything’s fine, J.P. Just go. Tres, you, too.”

The younger guy was in his mid-thirties, Anglo, dark-complexioned, jeans and a white American flag T-shirt that said
YMCA COACH
.

Barrera had seen this guy before.

He was a PI. He worked for Erainya. She’d just said his name, but Sam hadn’t been prepared to catch it.

“Put the gun down, Erainya,” the coach said. “Jem’s taking a nap.”

She threw the pistol on the desk, which gave her two free hands to better destroy the videotape. She cracked it across the edge of the TV, wrapped it in a section of newspaper, tossed it into the fireplace. She took a box of matches off the mantel.

From a professional point of view, Sam was thinking this was a highly inefficient way of destroying evidence. Acid would be better. Or a wood chipper.

The doctor was still glowering at him. Must be her boyfriend, Sam figured. Meanwhile, the young coach was zeroing in on the important stuff—the battered courier’s envelope, the video in the fireplace, Barrera’s notepad.

He tried to read Barrera’s expression.

Good luck,
Sam thought.

Sam calmly picked up his pen and wrote,
YMCA Coach
.
Erainya’s PI.

He underlined it. He’d had a run-in with this guy in the past. He was sure of that.

The woman crouched by the fireplace, striking matches. She lit the corners of the newspaper.

The coach scooped up the woman’s gun, unloaded it. “Videotape won’t burn that way.”

She said, “I know what I’m doing.”

“Erainya, we need to talk. Jem’s all right. He’s fine. But we had a visitor at school.”

Her eyes blazed. Sam was suddenly glad the coach had taken her gun.

“J.P.,” she said, her voice tight, “would you check on Jem, please?”

The doctor started to come toward her. “Erainya . . .”

“Please, J.P. Go see about Jem. I’ll only be a minute.”

Sam could tell the doctor wasn’t used to feeling unwanted. He swallowed, nodded reluctantly, then closed the door on his way out.

“All right, what happened?” the woman demanded.

The coach told them about Will Stirman visiting the school soccer field, trying to take Jem.

Sam took notes—put a question mark after the name
Jem
. The woman’s son?

“Stop that,” the woman snapped.

Sam looked up, realized she was talking to him.

“Put away the damn notebook,” she said. “You should have killed Stirman when you had the chance. You and Fred couldn’t even do that right.”

“We weren’t out to kill anybody,” Sam said. He felt pretty confident it was the truth.

The woman rose. “We are now. We have to find Stirman.”

The flue of the chimney must’ve been closed. The smell of burning paper and melted tape filled the room. A rag of ash sailed past the woman’s head.

The coach said, “You seriously think the two of you can track him down alone? You think you could pull the trigger?”

Judging from the woman’s expression, Sam thought he could answer the second question.

“You’re not thinking straight,” the coach said. “Call the police.”

The woman slapped the air. “I
can’t
.”

“No police,” Sam agreed.

The coach picked up the courier envelope. There was nothing inside. No sender’s address. Sam Barrera’s office address had been typed.

“You refused police protection,” the coach said. “You knew Stirman was coming. Now he’s threatening Jem. And you won’t call the police. Why?”

“They won’t catch him,” the woman said. “Even if we told them he was here, even if they believed us, Stirman would vanish. He’d be back next month, next year, five years from now. I won’t live like that, knowing he’s out there. I won’t risk my son.”

The coach could probably sense there was more, just as Sam could. The woman, Sam remembered, had never been a good liar. It was one of her professional liabilities.

“What’s on the video?” the coach asked.

“Gerry Far’s execution,” Sam put in. “Stirman’s old lieutenant.”

“One of the men who testified against him,” the coach said.

Sam nodded. The young man was making him uncomfortable. He was a little too intelligent, a little too curious. He was the kind of detective who would dig for the sake of digging, who wouldn’t abide loose ends even when he was told to. If he’d worked for I-Tech, Sam decided, he would’ve been fired long ago—insubordination, breach of policy, something. Sam decided he would never let himself be alone with the coach. The coach would dig into him. He would sense the cracks.

“There were two other witnesses,” the coach said. “What about them?”

“Dimebox Ortiz,” the woman said weakly. “He skipped bail again yesterday. He’ll be long gone.”

“And the illegal alien woman?”

“Long gone as well,” Erainya said.

“Gloria Paz,” Sam said. “That was her name.”

It bothered Sam that he suddenly remembered that, the same way he’d remembered Erainya Manos had shot somebody in her den. His mind seemed to spit out only the most dangerous facts, like rocks from a lawn mower.

“Ana DeLeon can help us,” the coach said. “I told her I’d come by.”

“You’ve already talked to her?” the woman demanded.

“I haven’t told her anything yet, but she can be trusted.”

“No.”
The woman was adamant. “I’ll take care of this myself. With Sam, if he’s got any guts. But you can’t go to the police, honey. You can’t do that to me.”

Her tone made the coach hesitate.

The coach put his hand inside the courier envelope. “If Stirman just wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. He’s pressuring you. What does he want?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured.

The coach wasn’t buying it.

Sam wished he could lie for her. He wished like hell he could remember what they were trying to hide. Most of all, he wished the woman had fired this young man a long time ago. No wonder she did so badly in the business. Never hire operatives who are better than you are.

“I’ll wait on talking to DeLeon,” the coach decided. “And
you
two won’t do anything stupid. That’s the trade-off.”

The woman wiped her nose. “I have to take care of Jem.”

“Austin.”

She winced.

“There’s no one better suited to protect him,” the coach said. “You know that. And Jem likes her.”

He offered Erainya the phone.

Reluctantly, she placed a call.

“Maia,” she said into the receiver. “It’s Erainya Manos. Yeah, I bet you didn’t. Listen, I . . . Tres and I . . . we have a favor to ask.”

Another minute making arrangements, and the woman hung up.

“I’ll take him up in the morning,” she said. “Jem and I can spend tonight at J.P.’s.”

The coach nodded.

He looked at Sam. “One more condition. You tell me what you’re holding back. Now.”

He hadn’t asked Erainya Manos. He had picked out Sam as the weak link, just as Sam would’ve done in his place.

Sam tried to keep the panic off his face. He stared at his notes, but he knew they wouldn’t help him.