Rick Riordan - Southtown

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

“Okay.” He slipped his mother’s cell 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 pulled my truck up to the Grand Avenue Bridge and parked behind a dark stand of cottonwoods next to the swollen 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 still 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 pulled him away. “Probably just tired.”

Dripping water echoed in the vastness of the Great Hall. Three stories above, damaged skylights sent a steady stream of runoff onto the cafe tables and the chocolate Saltillo 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 killers.

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. All 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 pulley 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 gallery space was tiny at the top of the tower. There was no place to go but the skywalk.

Will 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 smaller galleries, Highway 281 cut a glittering arc around the woods and the river. To the south glowed all of downtown-the Tower of the Americas, the enchilada-red library, the old 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 Hall 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 all 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 swollen.

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 swollen 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 still alive,” Stirman complained. “He looks at me like he doesn’t know who I am.”

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

I could tell from Stirman’s face that he didn’t want to believe me. He wanted to buy into Sam’s dementia-to think Fred Barrow really 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 hell is this?”

The zipper split open when it hit the carpet. Paper spilled all over the skywalk.

Not money.

Photographs. Old yellowed 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 all were, a lifetime’s worth, stuffed in an old loot bag.

“More memory problems?” Stirman asked.

“It’s the right bag,” Barrera insisted. “Tell 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’ll take me there.”

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

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

“Jem, no,” I said.

Stirman blinked at me. He was swaying a little more now, his face blue in the walkway’s neon lights. “They took everything from me, Navarre. I mean to collect.”

“You’d take Jem from Erainya.”

“Yes.”

“You’d take revenge on a little boy-”

“It isn’t revenge.”

“-a single mother, and an old man who doesn’t even remember why you’re mad at him. Is that satisfying? Is that what Soledad would’ve wanted?”

For a moment, I thought I’d pushed him too far, misread him completely.

But then he looked at Jem, and Stirman’s face took on that same hunger I’d seen at the soccer field. Again, he forced himself to contain his anger. Stirman had been telling me the truth on the phone-he did need Jem here. The boy’s presence was the only thing keeping him sane.

Stirman told me, “I know what I’m doing.”

“Don’t lie to yourself,” I said. “This isn’t about what Barrow and Barrera took from you eight years ago. This is about what you ran away from. You failed Soledad. You stayed silent about her baby. All this time, you let the past stay buried. You can’t make that right now.”