I didn’t mind bounty-hunting Dimebox Ortiz.
What I minded were his cousins Lalu and Kiko, who weighed three-fifty apiece, smoked angel dust to improve their IQ, and kept hand grenades in a Fiestaware bowl on their coffee table the way some people kept wax apples.
This explained why Erainya Manos and I were waiting in a van down the block from their house, rather than storming the front door.
Our snitch owed Dimebox four grand in cockfighting bets. He was getting a little nervous about Dimebox’s habit of setting his delinquent debtors on fire, and was anxious to see Dimebox in jail. He had promised us Dimebox was staying with his cousins. He’d also promised us Dimebox had a date with a lady tonight, and if we staked out the cousins’ house, we could easily tail him and snag him in transit.
Six o’clock, the snitch had told us. Seven o’clock, at the latest.
It was now 10:33.
I needed to pee.
I had an empty Coke bottle, but it isn’t tempting to use that trick when your female boss is next to you in the driver’s seat and her eight-year-old son is playing PlayStation 2 in the back.
Jem wasn’t supposed to be with us. The rain had washed out his plans to see the Woodlawn Lake fireworks with his second-grade friends. That left him nothing to do but a boring old stakeout with his mom.
Erainya, with her usual bizarre logic about what was safe for her child, had weighed the risks of a baby-sitter against Lalu and Kiko’s grenades, and decided to go with the stakeout. Of course, given some of the surveillance cases we’d worked involving baby-sitters and day-care workers, I supposed she had a point.
So we had the soothing sounds of Spyro the Dragon in the back seat. We had a dark row of clapboard houses and chinaberry trees to look at. And we had the rain, which had been alternately pouring and drizzling all afternoon, and was now reminding my bladder of flow patterns.
I was about to suggest that we call it quits, that not even the munificent sum Dimebox’s bail bondsman was offering was worth this, when Erainya said, “We’ll wait, honey. He’ll show.”
The longer I knew her, the more Erainya answered my questions before I asked them. It had gotten to the point where she could slug me when I was even thinking about being a smart-ass.
“Little late for a date,” I said.
She gave me those onyx eyes-the Greek Inquisition. “Your payday is Friday, honey. You want a check?”
That I heard loud and clear.
The past few months, since Erainya’s archrival, I-Tech Security, had taken away our last bread-and-butter contract with a downtown legal firm, her finances had been slowly unraveling. We’d given up our office space on Blanco. Erainya’s high-speed Internet line had been shut off twice. Our information broker would no longer work on credit. We were taking whatever cases Erainya could get just to keep afloat-divorce, workers comp, bail-jumpers. The dregs of the PI business.
I’d thought about making us cardboard signs, Will Sleuth for Food, but Erainya had slugged me before I could suggest it.
I reminded myself she had more at stake in the agency than I did.
She’d inherited the business from her husband, Fred Barrow, when he died. Or more accurately, when she’d shot him to death for abusing her, then been acquitted on murder charges.
This was back before I became a calming influence in her life.
After the murder trial, she’d disappeared to the Mediterranean for a year, reclaimed her maiden name and her Greek heritage, and returned to Texas the adoptive mother of a Bosnian orphan boy. She’d taken up Barrow’s PI business with a vengeance and had become arguably the best street investigator in South Texas.
Yet she’d never done more than scrape by, no matter how hard she worked. It was as if Fred Barrow’s ghost hung over the agency, jinxing her luck. The old rivalry with I-Tech became more and more one-sided until I-Tech dominated San Antonio, while we survived off bounties on scumbags like Dimebox Ortiz.
Lately, Erainya had been taking longer vacations with her boyfriend. She put off paperwork. She mused through old case files, which she would close and lock in her drawer whenever I approached.
She’d been one of the two great mentors of my career. She’d gotten me licensed and bonded, terrorized me into good investigative habits for the past four years. Whenever I thought of quitting PI work and using my English PhD to find a full-time college teaching position, which was about every other week, Erainya urged me to stick with it, telling me I was a natural investigator. I had a knack for finding the lost, helping the desperate. I chose to take that as a compliment.
The last thing I wanted to admit was that I was worried about her, that I sensed her spirit going out of the job.
So I tried to act excited about watching the Ortiz house.
Erainya polished a. 45-caliber bullet. I nibbled on some of her homemade spanakopita, which she brought by the sackful whenever we went into the field.
I got tired of PlayStation noises and switched on the radio. We listened to an NPR interview with an artist who turned roadkill into paintings for New York galleries. I imagined my mother’s voice scolding me: See, dear, some people have real jobs.
My mother, one of San Antonio’s few card-carrying bohemians, had been out of town for almost three months now, knocking around Central America with her newest boyfriend, a chakra crystal salesman who had ridiculous amounts of money. It was probably just as well she wasn’t around to lecture me on my career choices.
In the back of the van, Jem said, “Yess!”
I looked at him. “Good news?”
Delayed reaction: “Frozen Altars level. Twenty-eight eggs.”
“Wow. Hard?”
Jem kept playing. The rain battered the windows.
Jem’s silky black hair was cut in bangs, same as it had been since kindergarten, but over the past year his face had filled in considerably. He looked like your typical San Antonio kid-a something-percent mix of Latino and Anglo; black Spurs T-shirt, orange shorts, light-up sneakers. You would be hard pressed to believe that as a one-year-old he had been a Bosnian Muslim orphan, his parents’ mule-drawn cart blown apart by a land mine, his young eyes burned with God-knew-how-many-other images of war.
“Hard level?” I asked again.
No response.
I wanted to tear the game pad out of his hands and fling it into the night, but hey-I wasn’t his dad. What did I expect the kid to do for endless hours in the back of a van? Read?
“Yeah,” he said at last. “The evil panda bears-”
“Honey,” Erainya said, her voice suddenly urgent. “Turn the sound off.”
I looked out the windshield, expecting to see some action at the Ortiz cousins’ house.
Instead, Erainya was focused on the radio. A news brief about the prison break that afternoon-five dangerous cons on the loose. The Floresville Five, the media had instantly dubbed them-Will Stirman, C. C. Andrews, Elroy Lacoste, Pablo Zagosa, Luis Juarez.
“Not a good day for the warden,” I agreed. “You see the pictures?”
Erainya glared at me. “Pictures?”
“On TV this afternoon. Don’t tell me you’ve missed this.”
The news announcer recounted how the cons had been left unsupervised in a religious rehabilitation program. The five had overpowered the chaplain, killed a guard and a fellow inmate, driven straight through the back gate in the preacher’s Ford Explorer after stealing several handguns, a shotgun, and an unknown amount of ammunition from the prison armory. They should be considered armed and dangerous.
No shit.
The alarm hadn’t gone up for almost fifteen minutes, by which time the cons had ditched the SUV in the Floresville Wal-Mart parking lot and vanished, possibly in another car provided by an outside accomplice. A map of Kingsville had been found in one of the cells, leading authorities to believe that at least some of the fugitives might be heading south toward the Mexican border. Police all along the Rio Grande were on alert. The suspected ringleader of the jailbreak, William “the Ghost” Stirman, had been serving ninety-nine years on multiple convictions of human trafficking and accessory to murder. Prison psychologists described him as a highly dangerous sociopath.
“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 under, 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.