Southtown

Page 31

 

  She must have missed something. Had Stirman cal ed? Erainya cursed herself for fal ing asleep.

  “Stand up,” Pablo ordered.

  “My legs are numb. ”

  He turned toward her, the light from the window making a luminous pink scar on his left cheek. “Get over here if you want to live. You need to see this. ”

  Erainya got unsteadily to her feet.

  At the window, Pablo put the gun against her spine. “Quietly. ”

  The evening air felt good on her face—better than the stifling heat inside anyway.

  At first, Erainya saw nothing special—train tracks, a half-flooded gravel parking lot freckled with rain, empty loading docks and gutted warehouses. The sun was going down through a break in the clouds.

  Then she noticed the blue van with tinted windows, parked under a chinaberry tree at the end of the block.

  She caught a flicker of movement on a rooftop across the street. A glint of metal in an upper window that should’ve been empty.

  “Cops,” Pablo told her. “Your friends broke faith. ”

  The muzzle of his gun dug between her vertebrae.

  Erainya tried to steady her breathing. “I don’t see anything. ”

  “You won’t see them until they break down the door, huh? They’re setting up a perimeter. We’ve been screwed. ”

  His breath was sour from lack of sleep and canned food, his eyes red with shame, like a kid who’d just been beat up in the locker room.

  Give him options, Erainya told herself.

  Pablo had used the word we. He was desperate and alone. He was looking for help.

  “Get away from the window,” she told him. “You’re giving the snipers a target. ”

  He pul ed her back, shoving her toward the mattress. “Your friend thought I wouldn’t shoot you? Is that what he thought?”

  “You’re not cold-blooded, honey. You just cut me loose. ”

  “I can’t shoot a woman sleeping and tied up. ” His voice quivered. “I wanted you to see them out there.

  This ain’t my fault. ”

  A big rig rumbled by outside, drawing Pablo’s attention to the window.

  Erainya could try to disarm him, but her limbs were sandbags. She’d grab for the gun only as a last resort.

  She was afraid that decision might be just a few seconds away.

  “Shooting me won’t help,” she said. “Don’t listen to Stirman. ”

  Pablo’s face was beaded with sweat.

  “I can stil run,” he said. “The loading dock in back—”

  “They’l kil you as soon as you step outside. ”

  “I’m not going to mess with a hostage, miss. I’m sorry. ”

  “Let me go out there,” she said. “I’l tel them Stirman forced you. That’s true, isn’t it? They’l treat you fair.

  I’l stay with you, honey. ”

  Pablo blinked.

  It had probably been a long time since anyone had offered to stay with him in a crisis.

  He raised the gun. “I’m not going back to jail. ”

  “You don’t have to kil me. ”

  “If I don’t, Stirman wil find me—doesn’t matter if I’m in jail or out. I have to get home. My wife . . . ”

  Erainya imagined a SWAT team moving silently into position. A flash-bang grenade would rol in the door first. Maybe tear gas. It wouldn’t be soon enough. Pablo and she were both going to die.

  “There’s another way,” she told him. She tried her best not to make it sound like a lie. “I have an idea. ”

  His finger was white on the trigger. “No time, miss. ”

  “Listen to me. ”

  Pablo shook his head, his eyes bright with anger as if he were stil hearing Stirman’s voice giving him orders.

  Erainya started explaining anyway, describing her last-resort idea as Pablo took aim at her heart.

  Chapter 22

  The Art Museum was supposed to be closed for flood repairs, but when Jem and I got there the entranceway blazed with light. The glass front doors were propped open with a trash can.

  Two cars sat at the curb—an old Ford station wagon and an ’83 Chevy Impala with naked-lady-silhouette mud flaps. Neither struck me as a typical art patron vehicle.

  “I’ve been here on a field trip,” Jem informed me.

  “That’s good,” I said. “So you know where the bathrooms are?”

  He nodded. With his active bladder, Jem had men’s room radar.

  “If I tel you to run,” I said, “go to the bathroom. Lock the door if you can, and cal 911. Okay?”

  “Okay. ” He slipped his mother’s cel phone into the pocket of his shorts. “Next time we do a heist, can we go to Malibu Castle?”

  “Rendezvous, champ. Heists are what the bad guys do. ”

  I pul ed my truck up to the Grand Avenue Bridge and parked behind a dark stand of cottonwoods next to the swol en river. I wasn’t sure why. I just didn’t feel right leaving the truck in plain sight.

  We walked back to the museum entrance.

  I used my Swiss army knife to puncture the tires on the Chevy and the Ford. I was tempted to cut off the Chevy’s naked-lady mud flaps, but we were in a hurry.

  Jem took my hand. It was the first time he’d done so in almost a year. We looked up at the two towers rising into the night, the glass skywalk between them, crisscrossed with neon. I wished they stil made beer here. I needed one.

  Together we walked up the front steps.

  The night watchman was slumped over the security desk. His gun holster was empty. He had a nasty lump on the side of his head. Spots of blood dribbled from his earlobe onto the security monitor.

  “Is he okay?” Jem asked.

  “Oh, sure. ” I squeezed Jem’s hand and pul ed him away. “Probably just tired. ”

  Dripping water echoed in the vastness of the Great Hal . Three stories above, damaged skylights sent a steady stream of runoff onto the café tables and the chocolate Saltil o tiles, completely missing the buckets.

  At the top of the staircase, two windows had been blasted out by the storms, replaced with plastic sheeting.

  The hanging catamaran sculpture that always reminded me of a da Vinci contraption was wrapped in a tarp.

  I glanced into the gift shop. No crazed kil ers.

  The other direction, plastic-wrapped statues of Marcus Aurelius and Vishnu flanked the entrance to the Ancient Cultures wing.

  A man’s voice crackled with static: “Upstairs. ”

  It came from the unconscious guard—or rather, from the two-way radio clipped to his belt.

  “Hope you’re not as empty-handed as it looks,” Stirman’s voice said. “Mr. Barrera hopes so, too. West elevator. Al the way up. ”

  I looked around for a security camera. I didn’t see one.

  “Let’s go,” I told Jem.

  “You sure this isn’t a heist?” he asked.

  The West Tower elevator was one of those see-through glass and steel jobs, set in the center of the room amidst Anubis statues and Middle Kingdom hieroglyphics. Getting inside made me feel like I was becoming one of the displays.

  We ascended past Chinese porcelain and samurai armor. The pul ey system went by, its brass wheels and silver weights clicking. We stopped on the fourth floor. Tahitian masks and Aboriginal fertility statues stared at us from the shadows.

  The gal ery space was tiny at the top of the tower. There was no place to go but the skywalk.

  Wil Stirman stood at the far end, holding a two-way radio and a gun. Sam Barrera sat cross-legged in front of him, a black duffel bag at his side.

  “Come across halfway,” Stirman told us.

  We stepped out over the void between the towers.

  To the north, past the rooftops of the small er gal eries, Highway 281 cut a glittering arc around the woods and the river. To the south glowed al of downtown—the Tower of the Americas, the enchilada-red library, the ol
d Tower Life Building.

  Stirman hadn’t needed a security camera to see us approaching. From this vantage point, you could see straight down to the front of the building, and inside the Great Hal through the skylights.

  It was difficult to say whether he or Barrera looked worse.

  Sam was dressed in his suit and tie, but looked like he’d been broiling in a hot car al afternoon. His face glistened. His expression was blank with pain. His hand appeared to be broken. He cradled it in his lap, the fingers purple and swol en.

  At least he wasn’t covered in blood.

  Stirman’s shoulder wound made him look like something out of a Jacobean tragedy. I tried to convince myself the amount of blood soaking through his makeshift bandages wasn’t as much as it appeared, but it looked pretty damn bad.

  His feverish eyes studied me for a moment, then rested on Jem. “I see the child, but not the money. Why is that, Navarre?”

  “You need a doctor, Stirman. ”

  He swayed back about five degrees. The guy had to be going into shock. If I could just wait for the right moment . . .

  “Don’t get ideas,” Stirman warned. “Barrera got ideas. You can see they didn’t help him. ”

  “You okay, Sam?” I asked.

  Barrera tried to move his swol en hand, winced. “Where’s Fred?”

  “Dead, Sam. Dead eight years. ”

  Stirman threw his walkie-talkie against the window so hard the glass shuddered. Next to me, Jem flinched.

  “The old man keeps yammering about Barrow like he’s stil alive,” Stirman complained. “He looks at me like he doesn’t know who I am. ”

  “Barrera’s il . ” I tried to keep my voice even. “He’s losing his memory. ”

  I could tel from Stirman’s face that he didn’t want to believe me. He wanted to buy into Sam’s dementia— to think Fred Barrow real y was coming back from the dead, that he would show up any minute to get his just deserts.

  “He brought me this. ” Stirman picked up the black duffel bag, tossed it toward me. “What the hel is this?”

  The zipper split open when it hit the carpet. Paper spil ed al over the skywalk.

  Not money.

  Photographs. Old yel owed photos. In some of them, I recognized Sam Barrera’s face—a much younger Sam, grinning with his arms around people I didn’t know. There hadn’t been a single photo in Sam Barrera’s house—but here they al were, a lifetime’s worth, stuffed in an old loot bag.

  “More memory problems?” Stirman asked.

  “It’s the right bag,” Barrera insisted. “Tel him, Fred. ”

  Stirman raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Barrera spent his share of the loot years ago,” I said. “Used it to build up his company. He’s got nothing left. ”

  Stirman jabbed his gun to the back of Barrera’s head. “Too bad for him. Where’s Fred Barrow’s share?”

  “You didn’t give me time to retrieve it. ”

  “But you know where it is. ”

  “Yeah. ”

  “Then you’l take me there. ”

  “Look at yourself, Stirman. You’re in no shape to go anywhere. ”

  “You’l take me there,” he repeated. “And if you’re lying, you wil wish to God you weren’t. ” He looked at Jem. “Come here, boy. ”