Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)

Southtown (Tres Navarre #5) Page 35

Sanchez would be in the hospital for weeks, physical therapy for months, but his long-term prognosis was good.

“I’m glad,” I said. And then, when she gave me a skeptical look, I added: “Seriously.”

“He’l be asking you to serve as best man,” Erainya said. “Just so you’re warned.”

The sun suddenly felt a lot warmer. “Me?”

“I’d ask you to be a bridesmaid, honey, but the dress would look terrible on you.” Then she shouted, “Come on, Laura! Good!”

The bal made another futile loop around the field. It sailed toward Jem. It bounced off Maria.

Erainya turned to me. “Honey, look, J.P.’s only got his daughter. No male friends he’s real y close to. He knows how Jem and I feel about you. He wants you there. Think about it.”

I felt a weight on my chest, the unresolved need to say something I couldn’t quite say.

Jem crouched at the goalie net, his hands down, knees bent—the exact position I’d told him to keep. He wore the same crazy grin he always got whenever he was on the soccer field. Saint Mark’s had only scored one goal off him so far. Then again, we’d scored zip.

“Guess you’re closing the agency?” I asked Erainya.

She shrugged. “I can’t run it anymore.”

“Oh. Right.”

She looked completely unconcerned. “You’l get along.”

I had expected this. I should not feel bitter. Maia Lee would be delighted.

“Besides,” Erainya said, “I’l be around if you need advice. I ain’t going to turn it over to you just to let you run it into the ground.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t look at me like that, you big idiot. I’m giving you the Erainya Manos Agency. My clients. My files. My fabulous resources. My unpaid bil s. With both me and Sam retiring, we’ve got to have one decent PI in town. And if you’re smart, you’l keep the name. It’s lucky.”

Paul was taking the bal in the right direction. Somehow, he managed to kick it to Jack.

“Wel ?” Erainya asked me. “You’re not gonna disappoint me, are you?”

Wil Stirman was gone. Erainya was happy.

I could say nothing.

But the weight was there stil , smooth and hard as a river rock.

“Laura!” I yel ed. “To the middle! Help him out!”

Only because it was her love interest Jack, Laura fol owed directions.

Jack passed. Laura kicked. The bal sailed into the net.

Our team erupted into cheers, dog barks, taunts about Saint Mark’s being poop-butts.

The ref blew the whistle.

The kids swarmed us—sixteen hot sweaty little bodies, dying for water and a chance to play forward.

The last quarter: 1–1. Jem wanted to keep the vest.

I hated the idea. Saint Mark’s only needed one goal. I didn’t want Jem responsible for losing the game.

Stil , nobody else wanted the job. We ended with seven forwards and Jem as keeper.

“You doing okay, champ?” I asked him.

“Yeah.” He looked up a moment longer, squinting into the sun, like he understood he needed to prove to me that he real y was okay. Something silver glinted around his neck—a Saint Anthony medal ion I’d never seen before. He said, “I’m good. Watch.”

They went out on the field again.

Erainya stood next to me, cupping the sun out of her eyes. I thought about how many times she’d whacked me with that hand, or cut the air at some stupid comment I’d made.

“Stirman talked to Jem,” I said, “the night at the museum.”

She kept her eyes on the field. “Yeah?”

“They had maybe a minute alone together, out on the roof.”

“Miracle Jem wasn’t hurt.”

“No miracle. Stirman never wanted to hurt him. I wouldn’t have brought Jem along otherwise. Stirman wanted to take him.”

The ref’s whistle blew. Saint Mark’s kicked off. The bal was lost in a forest of little cleats and shin guards.

Erainya looked at me the way she normal y looked at Sam Barrera—as if I was about to snatch away her last bread-and-butter contract.

“So,” she said, her tone careful y neutral. “What do you figure he told Jem, in that one minute?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he told Jem the truth.”

Saint Mark’s drove the bal toward our goal. Their coach yel ed for their best kicker to stand ready at the penalty line.

Erainya was silent, watching me.

“Jem’s birth date was the same day Stirman was arrested,” I said. “Other than that, the adoption papers were a pretty good forgery. You never went to Greece that year, did you?”

She hesitated a couple of heartbeats. Then the shield she’d been trying to put up melted. “Fred didn’t want me to keep the baby.”

“That’s what your last argument was about—why you shot him,” I guessed. “He wasn’t just threatening you.

He was threatening the baby, too.”

She flexed her hand, as if remembering the trigger of the gun. “That night in Stirman’s apartment, the baby had stopped breathing. I guess the shock of the gunfire . . . I don’t know. I did CPR. I brought him back to life. Fred . . . wel , I wasn’t going to lose the child after al that. After I shot Fred, I sent Jem to stay with a friend of mine, lady named Helen Malski, until the trial was over.”

“I found a letter she wrote you. Jem was the package she was keeping safe.”

Erainya nodded. “Once I was released, Jem and I disappeared for a while. I’d done enough work on adoption cases. Faking Jem’s paperwork wasn’t hard. I made up his birthday. I kept thinking somebody would question . . . Stirman would raise hel . Barrera would squawk. But nothing like that ever happened.

Eventual y, I figured Stirman thought the child was dead, or he just didn’t care enough to protest. I felt safe enough to come back home, take over the agency. I couldn’t have left a baby like that, with his mother dead.”

“You made Jem’s birth date a clue.”

“I know. Stupid.”

“Classic guilt. Part of you wanted to get caught.”

“Stop talking like a PI.” There was a chal enge in her eyes, but it was frail.

She was a few weeks away from a whole new future. She was about to re-create herself for the second time. I could bring it al crashing down if I wanted to.

“You caught me,” she said. “Question is: What are you going to do about it?”

The game caught my attention. I shouted, “Jem, heads up!”

He crouched, ready for a chal enge.

The Saint Mark’s kicker drove the bal straight toward the goal.

Jem dove. The bal sailed right past him into the net.

The other team cheered like crazy.

Jem picked up the bal , ran it to the line, and threw it like it was stil in play. He kept smiling like everything was good. The Saint Anthony medal ion had come untucked from his col ar. It gleamed silver against his goalie vest.

“Honey?” Erainya said to me, her voice growing tense. “What do you want to do?”

Maybe everything was good. I caught Jem’s eye and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

He grinned, delighted.

I didn’t know what Stirman had told him. It didn’t matter.

The ref blew the whistle. Game over: a 2–1 loss.

“Not as bad as I’d feared.” I looked at Erainya. “For one thing, I’m going to insist on a legal name change.”

Erainya looked grim, but she managed to keep her composure. “If you seriously think . . .”

“The Tres Navarre Agency,” I said. “Much better ring to it.”

Then I did something I had never done. I kissed Erainya on the cheek, left her startled and blinking, and went out to give her son a big high five.

Chapter 27

A week later, I got a cal from Alicia, Sam’s personal secretary.

She couldn’t reach Sam at home again. He hadn’t reported to the office. She was worried, and I had become the person to cal .

Maia and I were at my apartment, having an argument with Robert Johnson about who made better cheese enchiladas. The cat was playing silent and diplomatic. He wanted a cook-off.

I hung up the phone and looked at Maia, who was dressed for work. She had a court date in Austin that afternoon.

“Problem with Sam,” I told her.

I hadn’t gotten a replacement for my truck yet, so I asked if she could spare an hour to drive me.

“That depends,” she said. “Are we going to talk on the way?”

So far, I had successful y avoided the subject of my hypothetical move to Austin. It hadn’t been easy keeping Maia’s mind off the topic. She’d made me work pretty hard at it al night long.

She knew I’d agreed to take over Erainya’s agency. She’d received that news so graciously I was pretty sure she was contemplating murdering me later.

What she wanted to know now is where I’d be living.

She was sure I could run the business from Austin. I could commute to San Antonio a few days a week, maybe hire one of my friends to cover for me part-time. I could slowly shift my clientele base to Austin, where business would be better.

The agency had no physical office space, anyway. Few assets. Even fewer steady clients. Maia wanted to know what was wrong with her plan.

I said, “Did I mention how outstandingly beautiful you look this morning?”

She picked her gun from the counter, pointed it at the front door, and said, “Walk.”

I had a pretty good hunch where Sam would be.

We found him sitting on the front porch of his childhood home on Cedar and South Alamo, the photographs from his black duffel bag spread around his feet. It looked like he was trying to group them by subject matter and year.

“Morning,” he told us.

He was dressed in a three-piece suit, clean-shaven, marinated with Old Spice. His left arm was in a cast, but it didn’t seem to bother him much.

I thought I’d taken al his guns away, but he’d found an old Smith & Wesson somewhere and stuck it in his shoulder holster. He had a Frosted Flake stuck to his chin.

“Hi, Sam,” I said. “It’s me, Tres.”

“I know that, damn it.”

“This is Maia Lee.”

I didn’t ask if he remembered her.

Sam picked up a photograph. “Lot of faces. Some of these are twenty, thirty years old. Nothing more recent than ten, I’d guess.”

“Your family.”

Barrera looked up at me. “What would you think—a guy who has a bagful of pictures like this? What’s your read?”

“Estranged,” I said. “But maybe he doesn’t real y want it that way.”

Sam considered. “Maybe.”

Foot traffic went by on South Alamo. A paleta sel er chimed the bel on his bike. A couple of tattooed, orange-haired Latino kids walked by with artist sketch pads. An Anglo mom chased her toddler, who was waving a half-eaten flour tortil a. The mom paused at the FOR SALE sign in Sam’s yard and took the last flier from his tube.

Sam pointed his thumb toward the front door. “I used to live here.”