Rick Riordan: Southtown

In the PI business, we have a technical term for getting yourself into this kind of situation. We call it fucking up.

Dimebox’s brake lights flashed as he approached the crossing.

“He won’t make it,” I said, as he revved the Lincoln’s engine and plunged hood-first into current.

Ka- BOOM. Behind us, the low-water-crossing sign splintered into kindling.

“He’ll make it,” Erainya insisted. “So will we.”

I started to protest, but she’d already nosed the van into the water.

The sensation was like a log ride-that stomach-lurching moment when the chain catches under the boat. Water churned beneath the floorboards, hammered the doors. The van shuddered and began drifting sideways.

Through the smear of the windshield, I saw Dimebox’s Town Car trying to climb the opposite bank, but his headlights dimmed. His rear fender slid back into the torrent, crunched against the guardrail. His headlights went dark, and suddenly the Lincoln was a dam, water swelling around it, lapping angrily at the bottom of the shotgun window.

“Go back,” I told Erainya.

She fought the wheel, muttered orders to the van in Greek, eased us forward. We somehow managed to get right behind the Lincoln before our engine died.

Our headlights dimmed, but stayed on. I could see Dimebox Ortiz in front of us, waving one arm frantically out his window. His driver’s-side door was smashed against the guardrail. Water was sluicing into his shotgun window.

Behind us, Lalu and Kiko were barely discernible at the edge of the water, watching mutely as our two vehicles were trash-compacted against the guardrail.

The railing moaned. Our van skidded sideways. The Lincoln’s back left wheel slipped over the edge, and Dimebox’s whole car began to tilt up on the right, threatening to flip over in the force of the water.

I grabbed Erainya’s cell phone, dialed 911, but in the roar of the flood I couldn’t hear anything. The LCD read, Searching for Signal. The water inside the van was up to my ankles.

“Rope,” I shouted to Erainya. “You still have rope?”

“We have to stay inside, honey. We can’t-”

“I’m getting Ortiz out of that car.”

“Honey-”

“He won’t make it otherwise. I’ll tie off here.”

“Honey, he isn’t worth it!”

Ortiz was yelling for help. He looked… tangled in something. I couldn’t tell. Nothing but his head was above water.

I looked back at Jem, who for once wasn’t focused on the PlayStation.

“Pass me the rope behind your seat,” I told him. “You’re the man of the van, okay?”

“I can’t swim,” he reminded me.

His eyes were calm-that creepy calm I only saw when he tried to remember his life before Erainya, his thoughts thickening into a protective, invisible layer of scar tissue.

I shoved him the cell phone. “It’s okay, champ. Keep trying 911.”

He passed me the rope-fifty feet of standard white propylene. I didn’t know why Erainya stored it in the van. I suppose you never knew when you’d have to tie somebody up. Or maybe Dr. Dreamboat the ENT had strange proclivities. I didn’t want to ask.

I made a knot around the steering column, a noose around my waist. Then I rolled down the passenger’s-side window and got a face full of rain.

I climbed outside, lowered myself into the current, and got slapped flat against the van.

Up ahead, a few impossible feet, the passenger’s side of the Lincoln was bobbing in the current. I could see Dimebox Ortiz in the driver’s seat, up to his earlobes in water.

I didn’t so much walk as crawl along the side of the van.

My efforts spurred Lalu and Kiko into a new round of yelling. I couldn’t make out words. Maybe they were arguing about whether they could blow me up without hurting Dimebox.

I kept the rope taut around my waist, inching out a step at a time, not even kidding myself that I could keep my footing. The side of the van was the only thing that kept me from being swept away.

The worst part was between the cars, where the water shot through like a ravine. When I slipped one foot into the full current, it was like being hooked by a moving train. I was ripped off balance, pulled into the stream. My head went under, and the world was reduced to a cold brown roar.

I held the rope. I got my head above water, found the fender of the Town Car, and clawed my way to the passenger’s side.

The Lincoln’s shotgun window was open, making a waterfall into the car.

Dimebox’s hands were tugging frantically at something underwater. He was craning his ugly head to keep it above the water. His face was like a bank robber’s, his features all pantyhose-smeared, only Dimebox didn’t wear pantyhose.

“Can you move?” I yelled.

He pushed at the wheel as if it were pinning his legs.

“Lalu!” he shouted. “Kiko! Push!”

Push?

Then I realized he wasn’t struggling to get free. He was attempting to start the ignition. He expected his cousins to wade out here and give him a jump start.

“You’re underwater, you moron!” I told him. “Give me your hand!”

“Fuck you, Navarre!” he screamed. “Get the fuck away!”

“Me or the river, Dimebox.”

“I ain’t going to jail!”

I didn’t understand his stubbornness. Dimebox was up on some stupid charge like assault. He was constantly going in and out of the slammer, constantly jumping bail, which I guess you can do when your bondsman is your brother-in-law. We’d bounty-hunted him plenty of times. I didn’t see why he was making such a fuss about a couple more weeks in the county lockup.

Another metallic groan. The guardrail bent, and the Lincoln shifted a half inch downstream. My side of the car began to levitate. For a moment, a ton of Detroit steel balanced on the fulcrum, my armpits the only thing keeping it from flipping.

“Now!” I told Dimebox. “Over here now!”

“Mother of Shit!” Dimebox lunged in my direction, wrapped his arms around my neck, damn near pulled me into the car with him.

A few more seconds-an eternity when Dimebox is hugging you-and I hauled him out the window. The Lincoln seemed to settle with both of us pressed against it, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. We inched our way back toward the van, the rain driving needles into my cheeks, Dimebox reeking a lovely combination of wet sewage and Calvin Klein. On shore, Lalu and Kiko yelled wildly, brandishing their hand grenades.

We’d just reached the van when Dimebox’s Town Car rose on its side with a huge groan, flipped the guardrail, and crashed upside down in the creek bed, its body submerged, wheels spinning uselessly in the foam.

The guardrail bent like licorice. Our van would go next.

Erainya yelled at me, “Throw them the rope!”

“What?”

“The cousins!” she yelled. “Throw it to them!”

Only then did I realize that Lalu and Kiko weren’t waiting around to kill us. They wanted to help.

Forty minutes later, after Erainya’s van, Jem’s PlayStation, and a bagful of perfectly good spanakopita had been washed into oblivion down Rosillio Creek, Erainya and Jem and I sat in the Ortiz cousins’ living room, wrapped in triple-X terry cloth bathrobes, eating cold venison tamales and waiting for the police, who were coming to pick up Dimebox.

The guest of honor sat on the sofa, stripped to his jockey shorts and T-shirt, his ankles and wrists tied in plastic cuffs. He kept muttering cuss words, and Jem kept telling him he owed us quarters.

“You okay,” Kiko told me, smashing the top of my head with his paw. “Save Dimebox’s sorry ass. Put him in jail. Kiko not have t’sleep on the couch no more.”

“Won’t do you any good, Erainya,” Dimebox snarled. “Bounty money won’t help you worth shit, will it? We’re both screwed.”