Tres Navarre’s dating advice: If you’re going to meet your girlfriend for dinner, you might as well do it in the middle of a flood, when there are dangerous convicts on the loose.
While you’re at it-go to a restaurant where the maitre d’ wants to kill you. It makes your romantic outing so much more special.
The forty-five-minute drive to San Marcos took me three hours, thanks to a flooded stretch on I-35 and a police roadblock north of New Braunfels. By the time I got to Pig Falls Cafe, the rain clouds had broken for the first time in twenty-four hours, and an insultingly beautiful sunset was bleeding to purple.
I spotted Maia Lee at a balcony table overlooking the waterfall. Robert Johnson in his carrying case was tucked discreetly under her chair. Since Maia moved to Texas, we’d had to work out a joint custody arrangement. It was now my week to play servant to the Cat Almighty.
Maia was tapping her fingers on a menu, nursing what probably wasn’t her first margarita.
I was working up my nerve to walk over, formulating my most sincere apology, when the maitre d’ put his hand on my arm. “May I help- Whoa, shit.”
He was in his mid-twenties, stocky and bald, with freckles the color of nacho-flavored Doritos.
I spun the mental Rolodex, came up with a name. “Quentin Yates.”
“If I had a fucking gun…”
“Tough break,” I agreed. “How’s life on the lam?”
He started to make a fist.
“Careful,” I said. “Bet your employer doesn’t know your history.”
His orange brow furrowed… kill Navarre or stay out of jail. A decision that has troubled greater criminal minds.
“You gonna snitch me out?” he demanded.
“Of course I’m going to snitch you out. But I want to eat first. Gives you a good head start, doesn’t it? See you, Quent.”
I strolled out to the balcony and sat across from Maia Lee.
She pretended to study her menu. “Trouble at the low-water crossings?”
“Don’t say those words.”
Under her seat, Robert Johnson said, “Row.”
Maia arched an eyebrow, glanced over my shoulder. “What’s your history with Freckles?”
Very little escapes Maia’s notice. I had no doubt that if the need arose three weeks from now, she would be able to tell me what I was wearing tonight, how much the meal cost, and what most of the people around us had been talking about.
“That’s Quentin Yates,” I told her. “He isn’t running away in terror yet?”
“No. He just…” She muttered what must’ve been the Chinese word for ouch. “He just seated an old lady, gave her the Heimlich maneuver. Now he’s glowering at you.”
“Quent was a buddy of mine for two weeks, a few years ago, while I was working undercover at his boss’s restaurant.”
Maia’s beautiful face turned grim at the word undercover. “Embezzlement?”
“Credit cards. Quentin was the bartender.”
“Capturing account information,” she guessed.
“Well, hey-you got these perfectly good numbers, why not charge a home entertainment system or two? After I turned him in, he skipped bail, beat up his ex-boss with an aluminum bat, threatened to come after me. Then he disappeared. Apparently Pig Falls doesn’t do background checks.”
“You want to call the police?”
“Dinner first. I’d recommend we pay in cash.”
“Sensible.”
Maia, I soon discovered, had already arranged things. At a nod from her, the waitress cranked into high gear, bringing plates of crabmeat flautas, bowls of tortilla soup, Gulf Coast shrimp with fresh avocado slices. Having spent the whole day staring at a computer monitor and sorting through paperwork, I should’ve been more interested in the food, except that Maia herself was pretty damn distracting.
You’d think, after twelve years, I would no longer stare.
Everything about her still startled me-her glossy black hair, the caramel skin of her throat against the V of her silk blouse, her fingers, her lips, her eyes. She was a perfect mix of war and beauty, like a Zhou Dynasty noblewoman-one of the imperial courtesans Sun Tzu had trained to fight.
“It’s been too long,” I said.
She gave me a dry smile. “One week.”
“Like I said.”
“You could solve that problem. A hotshot attorney in Austin has made you a damn good offer.”
“Lee and Navarre… your stock value would plummet.”
“I beg your pardon. No one said anything about your name on the billing.”
Maia let her offer float in the air, weightless and persistent, where it had lingered during our last few dinners together. She snuck the cat a crabmeat flauta. Every so often, her eyes would track something behind me, and I knew she was keeping watch on Quentin, the glowering maitre d’.
“So, the Erainya Manos Agency,” Maia said, trying hard to keep the distaste out of her voice. “Things have been good… bounty-hunting and whatnot? Driving into floods?”
The stubborn side of me wanted to rise to Erainya’s defense, but Maia knew me too well. She had trained me as an unlicensed investigator before Erainya turned me legitimate. During our years together in San Francisco, Maia had used me as a secret weapon to keep cases from going to court, taught me all the dirty, borderline illegal, ruthlessly effective methods of investigative blackmail that Erainya had tried so hard to erase when she got me licensed. Each woman thought the other unprofessional, mostly because they both kept bad company-like me.
“Erainya’s distracted,” I admitted. “Increasingly.”
“Maybe it’s her boyfriend. Men affect one’s judgment.”
I decided not to take the bait. I watched the swollen San Marcos River tumbling into the grotto thirty feet below us. The sky darkened. The water churned red.
“Something’s bothering you,” Maia decided.
“Those escaped convicts yesterday afternoon.”
“The Floresville Five.”
“How much have you heard?”
She shrugged. “Just what’s on national news. Fugitive Task Force found a map of Kingsville in a cell, so they figured the convicts were heading south. Then there was the holdup this morning in New Braunfels, so maybe the map was a decoy. The cons seem to be staying together and heading north, which is pretty unusual. The ringleader, William Stirman, sounds like a great human being.”
“Erainya’s husband put Will Stirman in jail.”
Maia set down her margarita glass. “Fred Barrow. The husband she shot.”
“Fred and another private investigator. Samuel Barrera, his biggest rival. Eight years ago, they collaborated to put Stirman behind bars. Now Erainya’s afraid Stirman will come after them. Barrera, for sure. Maybe her, too.”
“She told you this?”
“She won’t talk about it. I read some of the agency’s old files, some of her husband’s case notes.”
“Behind her back?”
“I kind of borrowed her file cabinet.”
“How do you kind of borrow your boss’s file cabinet?”
“We closed the Blanco office. A lot of stuff went into storage. I have the keys.”
Maia looked at something across the room. “The news said Stirman was a coyote, smuggled people across the border. He was convicted on six counts of accessory to murder. You find out details?”
I picked at a crabmeat flauta. I was reluctant to recall the images I’d seen in Fred Barrow’s files, copies of old police crime scene photos. “Yeah. I found out details.”
“Knife,” Maia interrupted, suddenly tense. She was looking over my shoulder. Quentin Yates must be coming to say hello.
I held my fingers three inches apart. “Knife?”
She held her hands apart twelve inches. “Knife. In four, three, two-”
I launched a backward elbow strike at groin level.
Quentin Yates grunted, stumbling forward with his meat cleaver off target. He stabbed the table as I grabbed his shirt and used his own momentum to launch him across our crab flautas-Maia calmly lifting her margarita glass out of the way as Quentin went over our table, over the railing, and into space.
A tiny galosh, the squawk of a startled duck, and all was quiet again except for the sound of the waterfall. Few patrons had noticed. Those who did quickly went back to their meals. Perhaps, they must’ve thought, this was like cherries jubilee, or a sizzling pan of fajitas brought straight to the table. Perhaps the high-diving maitre d’ was a new kind of food delivery panache.
Maia and I were fine, except for a few sprinkles of margarita on her blouse, a knee-print in my guacamole, and the twelve-inch meat cleaver shuddering in the tablecloth.
Robert Johnson said, “Row?”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
Our waitress swept over with an oblivious smile and a leather-bound bill. “Well! Anybody save room for dessert?”
The hotel room was too expensive-not even a hotel room, but a ranch-style bungalow with a mauve and creme bed, a canopied frame of rough-hewn oak and a Guatemalan rug on the flagstone floor. The fireplace was filled with dried sage and baby’s breath. A nest of birds chirped and echoed somewhere up in the old limestone chimney.
Maia paid cash, signed our names Mr. amp; Mrs. Smith-her little joke, emulating so many Mr. amp; Mrs. Smiths we had tailed, photographed, strong-armed into divorce settlements back in the old days.
We stood on the deck, Robert Johnson purring next to us on the railing.
Beneath us, the cedars dropped away into a ravine, the red and silver ribbon of I-35 in the distance, heading north and south to our respective homes. I imagined some poor PI down below us, sweating in his car, pointing his telescopic lens this way, hoping to catch a clear, lurid, unmistakably guilty shot.
I felt the need not to disappoint a hypothetical brother. I pulled Maia close. We kissed.
“So how would it be,” she said, “if Erainya married this doctor of hers? Got out of the business. Got time to be a mother. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“A scary one, I suppose.”
Our fingers laced. Down in the woods, a few late fireflies were blinking-something I hadn’t seen in San Antonio since I was a kid.
“Then I’d only have the whole city of S.A. to contend with,” Maia decided. “Your roots.”
She said the word roots like she might say cancer. If Maia believed in roots, she never would’ve had the courage to leave Shaoxing as a girl, smuggled aboard a Shanghai freighter by her uncle, who told her she would have to see America for both of them. If she believed in roots, she wouldn’t have left San Francisco, her adopted home, to be close to me.
She never rubbed it in, never mentioned the fact that she’d left everything, come two thousand miles, followed me here because I would not stay in the Bay Area. She had resettled in the only palatable Texas port of entry for a Californian-Austin. Couldn’t I close the last seventy-five miles?
“Six deaths,” I said. “All women, all illegal aliens.”
It took her a moment to follow my thoughts. “You mean William Stirman.”
“The accessory-to-murder charges. Six women were killed over a twelve-month period at a ranch in the Hill Country. Chopped to pieces with an ax.”
“Stirman killed them?”
“No. The murderer was a rancher named McCurdy. He ate a 12-gauge when the police surrounded his house. Stirman supplied the victims. He supplied slave labor to ranches all across South Texas. He promised immigrants safe passage north. Instead, they were worked to death. This case-the ax murderer-was the only one where Stirman got nailed. He knowingly sold those women to be victims of a killer.”
Maia leaned against the railing, staring toward the distant highway. “Barrow and Barrera proved that?”
“They worked from different ends, hired by different clients, but they cooperated. Barrow and Barrera broke the case, tied Stirman to the murderer and the victims, hand-delivered him to the police.”
“Stirman won’t hang around,” Maia said. “He’s heading north, probably on his way to Canada.”
I turned the idea around in my head, trying to believe it.
“Besides,” Maia persisted, “why take revenge on the PIs? There must’ve been a lot of people involved in the case-police, attorneys.”
I didn’t bother to answer. We both knew PIs made more satisfying targets-easier to hate, easier to get to. Policemen and lawyers were impersonal parts of the criminal justice machine. Your typical sociopath got little satisfaction from killing one, and then the wrath of the whole system came down on you.
Nobody worked up much righteous indignation when a private investigator got smoked. PIs were everybody’s punching bag. In an average week, the Ortiz cousins had lobbed hand grenades at me and Quentin Yates had attacked me with a meat cleaver, all over trivial grudges. In a matter of serious vengeance, I didn’t want to think what a sociopath like Will Stirman would do.
“You can’t lose sleep over it,” Maia said. “Even if Stirman is coming, he wouldn’t go after Fred Barrow’s widow. And even if he did, what could you do?”
Fireflies blinked in the cedars. The cicadas hummed. In the distance, clouds were choking out the stars. It seemed impossible that it could rain again, but July wasn’t playing by the usual rules.
“You’d stick by Erainya,” Maia answered herself. “I’ll give you this, Tres Navarre. You’re loyal. Once someone is in your life, you’d never willingly let them down.”
I brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “A compliment?”
“A reminder.”
“It’s hard,” I said. “A hard time for me to just quit.”
She circled my waist, kissed me lightly on the mouth.
“Next week,” I promised. “I’ll give you an answer by then.”
But Maia wasn’t hearing me. She was concentrating on the moment-before the rain returned, before the morning separated us for another seven days. She tugged at my fingers, led me inside to the canopied bed, where all night long our slightest movements caused a flutter of birds in the hollow heart of the chimney.