Rick Riordan: Southtown

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

The other team cheered like crazy.

Jem picked up the ball, ran it to the line, and threw it like it was still in play. He kept smiling like everything was good. The Saint Anthony medallion had come untucked from his collar. 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.

A week later, I got a call 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 call.

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 successfully 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 all 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 all his guns away, but he’d found an old Smith amp; 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 really want it that way.”

Sam considered. “Maybe.”

Foot traffic went by on South Alamo. A paleta seller chimed the bell 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 tortilla. 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.”

“I know,” I said.

“Second bedroom upstairs. Downstairs, when I was first retired, I thought about putting my PI office in here, you know? But the neighborhood was going downhill then. Bad place for a business.”

He looked at Maia, who smiled in a daughterly way. If she was anxious about being late for her court date, she didn’t show it. Patience was one of her great investigative assets, which explained why she was still dating me.

“Now they call the neighborhood Southtown,” Sam told her. “Look at this traffic. When did the center of town move south again?”

I needed to get Sam home. I just wasn’t sure how to do it yet. The gun wasn’t the hardest part. It was moving the photographs. He would get upset about that.

“What would you charge,” he asked me, “for a job like this?”

“What job, Sam?”

He waved at the photos. “Finding them. Putting names back to the faces. It’s bothering me.”

“Look, Sam,” I said, “the folks at the office are worried about you.”

“My office?”

“Yeah. I-Tech. You were supposed to go in today and sign some papers.”

“I’m retiring,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Before they kick me out.”

His eyes showed no hint of confusion-just the sadness of a man who knew exactly what was happening to him.

“Alicia and my doctor have it all planned,” he said. “I’m supposed to sell my properties. The money will pay for this assisted living program. They do studies with new drugs, like on rats. They say it’s my best shot. I don’t want to live with a bunch of people like me.”

“Sam-let’s get you home.”

“This is my home.”

Down on South Alamo, conjunto music played from a car stereo. The morning air was heating up, filled with the smell of wet magnolia leaves from Sam’s front yard.

Sam picked up a tintype of an old Latino in a starched shirt, suspenders and a bowler. It could’ve been Sam’s grandfather.

Right then, I knew what I would do. I realized I’d been thinking about it for days.

I wasn’t excited. I figured I might as well make myself a T-shirt that said COACH FOR LIFE on one side and KICK ME on the other side. But I knew I had to do it. I’d never forgive myself otherwise.

I looked at Maia.

I kept looking until I thought I’d conveyed my question right.

She hesitated, then leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I think I’ll stroll down the block for a while, gentlemen. Nice meeting you, Mr. Barrera.”

When it was just Sam and me, I said, “You want all of those people found?”

“Yeah.” Sam studied the old picture. “Names to faces, you know? Bothering the hell out of me.”

“Big job. Lot of hours, plus expenses.”

“I’ve got money.”

“I was thinking more like a trade.”

He scratched his ear. “Like what?”

“This house. We split it. I take the downstairs for my office, rent-free. You keep upstairs to live in.”

He stared at me.

“But no deal if you don’t live here,” I said. “I want the landlord close, in case I have a problem. Plus, you know, this’ll be a private eye agency. I’ll be just starting out. I’ll expect free consultations with you.”

Sam looked away. A group of college girls chatted their way down the sidewalk, heading toward the coffeehouse.

“We got a deal, Sam?”