Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)

Southtown (Tres Navarre #5) Page 14

“You warn Ms. Paz?”

“She ain’t going nowhere.”

“How do you figure?”

He made a dry, rasping sound that might’ve been a laugh. “You’l see.”

He touched the brim of his hat and ambled back toward his cruiser.

Barrera looked wistful y at his mustard BMW, sitting useless on the side of the two-lane. We hiked into the ranch.

After a few yards, my boots were caked in limestone frosting. I was dripping with sweat. The mosquitoes were having a picnic on the back of my neck.

Barrera looked perfectly cool. His shirt and tie betrayed no speck of mud, not a single wrinkle. Something they taught at Quantico, I guessed. Staying Starched Under Stress, Course 2101.

“You’ve been out here since the trial?” I asked.

Barrera looked at me blankly. He returned his attention to the muddy slope. “No.”

He was never what you might cal a sparkling conversationalist, but during the hour trip to Castrovil e, he’d been even less effervescent than usual.

That could’ve been because he had a lot on his mind, which was a guess. Or because he didn’t like me, which wasn’t.

“Who was the last owner of this place?” I tried.

“Businessman from San Antonio. Died a while back. Don’t remember his name.”

“He let Gloria Paz live here for free?”

No response.

Okay. Thanks, Sam. That clears it up.

I wished I was in Austin with Erainya—getting Jem settled, seeing Maia Lee, keeping the peace between the two heavily armed women in my life.

But Barrera was the key to understanding Stirman. I was sure of that.

He’d brought me out here to tel me something he didn’t want to say in front of Erainya. If I could get through the morning without kil ing him, I might find out what.

I tried to keep my mind off the mud and insects. I appraised the McCurdy spread from a business point of view. It struck me as more scenic and a lot less useful than my own family ranch in Sabinal.

The terrain was rocky and uneven—hil s and limestone cliffs hugging the Medina River Val ey, poorly suited for crops or cattle. Tourism might’ve worked. Summer cabins for tubers. Or goat ranching. Exotic game. But the McCurdy land didn’t appear to have been managed for any purpose in a long time. Cattle feeders stood rusted and empty. The barn was fal ing apart. A single emaciated heifer stood under a mesquite tree. Three vultures waited patiently on the branch above.

We were almost on top of the ranch house before I realized it was abandoned—a limestone shel in a thicket of live oaks. The windows were square holes of crumbling mortar. The doorway was an empty frame.

The roof had been partial y stripped, leaving a patchwork of metal and cedar beam.

Barrera hesitated in the doorway.

He didn’t need to explain why. The place radiated a quiet malevolence.

Inside were three empty rooms, a fireplace, a doorway in back that probably led to the kitchen. A mildewed watercolor of a fly fisherman hung crooked over the mantel. Most of the living room floor had been stripped to beams, revealing a cel ar below. That was unusual in a Texas house. In most parts of the state, the winters were too mild, the soil too close to bedrock to make a cel ar practical.

Barrera stepped careful y across rotten floorboards toward a set of descending stairs. I’d never been a fan of underground, but I fol owed him down.

The back half of the cel ar was stacked with building materials—slabs of Sheetrock and plywood, buckets of paint and caulking, al covered in plastic tarp, tied off with bungee cords. The stuff looked like it had been there for a while. The tarp was tattered, pools of rainwater crusting in the folds. Rats, or maybe cockroaches, had been chewing the labels off the paint cans.

Two black iron hooks protruded from the wal .

The limestone bore stains like rust or moss, but the streaks suggested spray patterns. I’d seen wal s like that before—in a Hil Country abattoir that had served generations of deer hunters.

“The table was here,” Barrera said.

He stood in the center of the room, holding his palms out as if warming them over a fire. “McCurdy thought the room was soundproof. But up in the cel s, they could hear the screaming.”

A raindrop hit my face. I looked up through the open squares in the roof. I reminded myself I was just ten easy steps to the surface. The floor beams above me were not prison bars.

I thought about the businessman who had bought this place after McCurdy’s suicide. I imagined his optimism as he started tearing up the house—thinking he’d gotten an incredible deal. This load of building materials would fix up the place, make it new and clean again.

I understood now why he’d never finished the job, why the materials were stil sitting here unused and the ranch would eventual y revert to the bank.

“Stirman knew what would happen to these women?” I asked.

Barrera picked up a small piece of metal, a broken link from a chain. “Stirman wouldn’t have cared.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Barrera slipped the link of chain into his pocket. “Come on. Gloria wil be waiting.”

He led me back outside, down toward the river. Under the cypress trees stood half a dozen cinder block sheds and a small cabin. The small er structures might have been kennels. Each had a metal gate. In the center of each cement floor was an iron ring, where you might attach an animal’s chain.

Then I noticed the lidless steel toilets.

Barrera didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask.

After almost a decade, a cold acrid smel stil hung in the air. Human misery, like old bloodstains, is hard to wash away.

The little cabin at the end was so different from the cel s that it took a moment for me to realize it was part of the same row of buildings. Two cinder block cel s had been built together, expanded, treated with stucco and painted dark gold. Rust-colored curtains trimmed the windows. Statues of saints lined the roof. River rocks marked off a little garden fil ed with oregano and mint. It could have been any dwel ing on San Antonio’s West Side—poor but cozy, proud of its eccentricity.

Barrera knocked. The plywood door rattled in its frame.

The woman who opened it was probably no more than fifty-five, but her frayed white hair made her look decades older. Her face was deeply etched, her eyes milky. Her determined expression, and the shotgun held loosely across her waist, made her look as if she’d just charged the throne of God and been blasted by divine light. She was obviously blind.

She said, “Se?or Barrera.”

How she knew without seeing him, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps Barrera’s cologne was the not-too-subtle giveaway. She turned toward me, angling the shotgun in the general direction of my chest.

“?Quién es el gringo?”

I hadn’t moved or spoken, but she knew I was there. She knew I was male, and Anglo.

“We came to check on you,” Barrera said in Spanish. “This is a friend of Fred Barrow’s.”

I wasn’t sure why he introduced me that way, but the woman took her finger off the trigger, lowered the barrel.

“They want me to leave because of some rain,” she said. “I had to fire a warning shot at the deputy. Come in. I’l make coffee.”

Inside, the tiny living room was painted cornflower blue, hung with dried garlic and chili ristras. On the stereo turntable, Lydia Mendoza sang “Dos Corazones,” her heartache cutting straight through the scratch and hiss of the old vinyl.

There was no air-conditioning. The windows let in a breeze from the river. The curtains were dappled with raindrops. With the shade of the cypresses, the room felt just warm enough for a nap.

Barrera kept speaking to Gloria in Spanish, simple questions—was she getting enough to eat? Did the locals bother her?

Gloria heated water in a pan on a gas stove. She knew exactly where to find her extra cups, her tin of instant coffee, her spoons.

“Does your friend speak Spanish, Se?or Barrera?” she asked.

I said, “Sí, se?ora.”

She turned to face me—a moment of adjustment as she let me into her linguistic world.

“Ya lo veo,” she said. “Then please tel Mr. Barrow I pray for him.”

I looked at Sam, who seemed to see nothing unusual in the request.

“Se?ora Paz,” I said, “Wil Stirman escaped from jail. One of the men who testified against him has been murdered.”

She poured boiling water into each cup. “You came al this way to tel me? I am sorry to have troubled you.”

“But, se?ora . . .”

An electronic riff of Mozart col ided with Lydia Mendoza’s song. The new music was coming from Sam Barrera’s pocket.

Barrera frowned, fished out his phone. I was surprised he could even get a signal out here.

He said, “Yes?”

A moment of listening. He paled. “Alicia, I’m in Castrovil e . . . Of course I told you.”

He took the phone away from his ear, looked at us with embarrassment. “Excuse me.”

He took his cal outside, leaving me alone with Gloria Paz.

“Would you like milk?” she asked. “It is goat’s milk.”

I glanced at the tin of Folgers Crystals on the stovetop. Plain, or with goat’s milk. The kind of rock-and-a- hard-place decision tough PIs must face. “Why not?”

She brought over a tray, sat next to me on the sofa. She passed me the blue metal cup. Her hands were rough and warm.

“Se?ora Paz,” I said, “you realize you’re in danger?”

“No, se?or. I am done with fear.”

This blind, prematurely aged woman, alone on a ranch, with the dam upriver about to burst and a kil er on the loose, was tel ing me she had nothing to fear. The hel of it was, I believed her.

Her tone was confident, oddly familiar, though I was sure we’d never met.

“A warning shot won’t be enough,” I told her. “Not against Stirman.”

Her milky eyes seemed to stare past my shoulder, as if keeping tabs on an unruly spirit. “Con permiso.”

She reached out and touched my cheek. Her fingertips traced my jaw, my nose, my lips. “An honest face.

Like Mr. Barrow’s.”

Erainya had used many adjectives to describe her late husband. Honest was not one of them.

“I’m not his friend, se?ora, ” I said. “Just a friend of the family.”

“Tel him not to worry. We did the right thing. It was not a lie.”

“Se?ora?”

“Stirman lured many others to a similar fate. It is the same, whether he served this devil or some other.”

It had been a long time since I’d felt unsure of my Spanish, but I wasn’t certain I’d understood her correctly.

I set down my coffee.

“Se?ora, how did you come to this ranch?”

“The Green Highway.”

“?Mande?”

“The power lines.”

I knew what she meant. The power line poles that ran through the South Texas plains were kept clear of brush and cactus, making a perfect path for il egal immigrants who wanted to stay off the roads without getting lost. The Green Highway. A determined il egal could walk for hundreds of miles along those grassy corridors, straight into Uvalde or San Antonio.