Rick Riordan: Southtown

Yet she’d never done more than scrape by, no matter how hard she worked. It was as if Fred Barrow’s ghost hung over the agency, jinxing her luck. The old rivalry with I-Tech became more and more one-sided until I-Tech dominated San Antonio, while we survived off bounties on scumbags like Dimebox Ortiz.

Lately, Erainya had been taking longer vacations with her boyfriend. She put off paperwork. She mused through old case files, which she would close and lock in her drawer whenever I approached.

She’d been one of the two great mentors of my career. She’d gotten me licensed and bonded, terrorized me into good investigative habits for the past four years. Whenever I thought of quitting PI work and using my English PhD to find a full-time college teaching position, which was about every other week, Erainya urged me to stick with it, telling me I was a natural investigator. I had a knack for finding the lost, helping the desperate. I chose to take that as a compliment.

The last thing I wanted to admit was that I was worried about her, that I sensed her spirit going out of the job.

So I tried to act excited about watching the Ortiz house.

Erainya polished a. 45-caliber bullet. I nibbled on some of her homemade spanakopita, which she brought by the sackful whenever we went into the field.

I got tired of PlayStation noises and switched on the radio. We listened to an NPR interview with an artist who turned roadkill into paintings for New York galleries. I imagined my mother’s voice scolding me: See, dear, some people have real jobs.

My mother, one of San Antonio’s few card-carrying bohemians, had been out of town for almost three months now, knocking around Central America with her newest boyfriend, a chakra crystal salesman who had ridiculous amounts of money. It was probably just as well she wasn’t around to lecture me on my career choices.

In the back of the van, Jem said, “Yess!”

I looked at him. “Good news?”

Delayed reaction: “Frozen Altars level. Twenty-eight eggs.”

“Wow. Hard?”

Jem kept playing. The rain battered the windows.

Jem’s silky black hair was cut in bangs, same as it had been since kindergarten, but over the past year his face had filled in considerably. He looked like your typical San Antonio kid-a something-percent mix of Latino and Anglo; black Spurs T-shirt, orange shorts, light-up sneakers. You would be hard pressed to believe that as a one-year-old he had been a Bosnian Muslim orphan, his parents’ mule-drawn cart blown apart by a land mine, his young eyes burned with God-knew-how-many-other images of war.

“Hard level?” I asked again.

No response.

I wanted to tear the game pad out of his hands and fling it into the night, but hey-I wasn’t his dad. What did I expect the kid to do for endless hours in the back of a van? Read?

“Yeah,” he said at last. “The evil panda bears-”

“Honey,” Erainya said, her voice suddenly urgent. “Turn the sound off.”

I looked out the windshield, expecting to see some action at the Ortiz cousins’ house.

Instead, Erainya was focused on the radio. A news brief about the prison break that afternoon-five dangerous cons on the loose. The Floresville Five, the media had instantly dubbed them-Will Stirman, C. C. Andrews, Elroy Lacoste, Pablo Zagosa, Luis Juarez.

“Not a good day for the warden,” I agreed. “You see the pictures?”

Erainya glared at me. “Pictures?”

“On TV this afternoon. Don’t tell me you’ve missed this.”

The news announcer recounted how the cons had been left unsupervised in a religious rehabilitation program. The five had overpowered the chaplain, killed a guard and a fellow inmate, driven straight through the back gate in the preacher’s Ford Explorer after stealing several handguns, a shotgun, and an unknown amount of ammunition from the prison armory. They should be considered armed and dangerous.

No shit.

The alarm hadn’t gone up for almost fifteen minutes, by which time the cons had ditched the SUV in the Floresville Wal-Mart parking lot and vanished, possibly in another car provided by an outside accomplice. A map of Kingsville had been found in one of the cells, leading authorities to believe that at least some of the fugitives might be heading south toward the Mexican border. Police all along the Rio Grande were on alert. The suspected ringleader of the jailbreak, William “the Ghost” Stirman, had been serving ninety-nine years on multiple convictions of human trafficking and accessory to murder. Prison psychologists described him as a highly dangerous sociopath.

“The Ghost,” I said. “He’ll be the one wearing the sheet with the eyeholes.”

Erainya didn’t smile. She turned off the radio, fumbled for her cell phone.

“What?” I asked.

She dialed a number, cursed. With the storm, cell phone reception inside the van, especially here on the rural South Side, was almost nonexistent.

She opened her door. The van’s overhead light blinked on.

“Erainya-”

“Got to find a clear signal.”

“It’s pouring.”

She slid outside in her rain jacket, and waded into the glow of the only street lamp, where everybody and God could see her.

Since the day I apprenticed to her, she had harped on me-getting out of the car while on stakeout was an absolute no-no. You jeopardized your position, your ability to move. Otherwise I would’ve peed a long time ago.

I knew only one person she might break the rules to call-her ENT, Dr. Dreamboat, or whatever the hell his name was, whom she’d met during a romantic prescription for cedar fever last winter and had been dating ever since.

But I couldn’t believe she would call him now.

I was pondering whether I’d have to shove a cell phone up Dr. Dreamboat’s sinus cavity when the porch light came on at the Ortiz cousins’ house.

A heavyset man in a silky black warm-up suit stepped outside. Dimebox Ortiz.

I tried to kill the overhead illumination, found there was no switch. “Shit.”

“Owe me a quarter,” Jem told me, his eyes still glued to his game.

“Put it on my account.”

My “bad word” account was already enough to buy Jem his first car, but he didn’t complain.

I leaned and tapped on Erainya’s window.

Halfway down the sidewalk, Dimebox Ortiz froze, staring in our direction. The rain was drenching him.

You don’t see us, I thought. We are invisible.

Dimebox yelled back toward the house-his cousins’ names, some Spanish I couldn’t catch. He ran for his Lincoln Town Car, and I gave up on discretion.

“Erainya!” I yelled, pounding on the driver’s-side door.

She took the phone away from her ear, just catching the fact that something was wrong as Dimebox’s taillights flared to life and Lalu and Kiko came lumbering out their front door, their fists full of things I was pretty sure weren’t wax apples.

Erainya climbed in, hit the ignition. “Jem, seatbelt!”

We peeled out, hydroplaning a sheet of water into the faces of the Ortiz cousins, who yelled plentiful contributions to Jem’s cuss jar as they jogged after us, brandishing their army surplus door prizes.

Dimebox’s Lincoln turned the corner on Keslake as the first explosion rocked the back of our van. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw chunks of wet asphalt spray up from the middle of the street where our tailpipe had been a moment before.

“Fireworks?” Jem asked, excited.

“Sort of,” I said. “Get down.”

“I want to see!”

“These are the kind you feel, champ. Get down!”

The twins sloshed after us like a couple of rabid hippos.

Up ahead, Dimebox’s Lincoln Town Car dipped toward the low-water crossing on Sinclair.

A few hours ago when we’d driven in, Rosillio Creek had been full, but nowhere near the top of the road. Now, glistening in our headlights, an expanse of chocolate water surged over the asphalt. Clumps of grass, branches and garbage piled up on the metal guardrail. It was hard to tell how deep the water was. There was no other road in or out of the neighborhood, even if we could turn around, which we couldn’t with Senor Dee and Senor Dum lobbing munitions right behind us.