Rick Riordan - Southtown

“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.

Tuesday morning, Luis risked a call to tell Pablo about the amputation.

The Guide had insisted on another heist, so they’d picked a sporting goods store in Oklahoma City-right next to the highway, a Monday evening, hardly a car in the parking lot. They’d been driving all day since the convenience store holdup in New Braunfels that morning, but they were still high on adrenaline.

So there was Luis, leaning against the service counter, bullshitting some college girl cashier. Pablo remembered the drill. Luis would smile real good. He’d be all, I love these water skis, but oh, damn, I forgot my wallet. Can you wait till my roommate brings me my money? We live right down the street. It’s really gotta be tonight, ’cause we’re going out of town.

So they let him stay after closing, and he was chatting up the pretty cashier. All the other clerks went home. The manager was impatient, but trying to be polite, because hey, it was a six-hundred-dollar purchase. Luis was dressed in a nice workout suit, gold chains. He looked like he could afford good things. Why not humor the customer?

The sky turned purple. These huge locusts started dropping from the sky, right on the sidewalk. Hundreds of them crawling over the asphalt, like red cigarettes with legs. Luis figured the whole area used to be farmland, and the bugs were wondering where all the crops went.