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Luisa opens her mouth to shoutFreeze!but hesitates. She remembers the first motorcycle rider. She jumps up onto a stone planter in front of a restaurant for a better view. She can make out the bike but not the man.
Then the man runs out of the jewelry store, the duffel bag—now stuffed—slung over his shoulder. He mounts the bike and kicks it to life.
Luisa understands.
It’s a robbery.
The dynamited boats were a distraction in case any police were patrolling the area. But the real objective was to rob the jewelry store.
Behind her, a good fifteen or twenty yards away, there’s another explosion of dynamite, but Luisa ignores it. She races toward the site of the robbery. No one knows the labyrinth of the River Walk like she does, and she calculates where the rider might be going. If he’s on a bike, he’ll most likely avoid stairs. He might be able to go down them, but not up. He’s going to have to follow a certain way to get out.
Luisa knows a shortcut.
She turns down a passageway between two buildings, heading to a long stairway going up and out of the River Walk. She sprints up the stairs, her lungs heaving, her heart pounding. When she arrives at the top, she doesn’t slow down. She banks left onto the sidewalk and races along the empty storefronts at street level. Just ahead of her, on the other side of the four-lane roadway, is the world-famous Alamo, the familiar facade pale in the early morning light.
She rounds a corner, and just as she suspected, the motorcycle comes zipping out of a passageway from the River Walk. What she isn’t expecting is another motorcycle rider there waiting. They don’t see her yet, and the two bikes pull alongside each other, stopping for a moment.
The biker with the dynamite couldn’t have gotten here that fast, so it must be that they’re waiting for their third accomplice.
There’s nothing she can do about that right now.
“Freeze!” Luisa shouts, aiming her gun at them with both hands.
She’s out of breath and dripping with sweat, but her hands are steady.
Neither rider makes a move as she approaches. They simply stare at her through the black visors of their helmets.
She notices one of them has a submachine gun slung over his shoulders, but he makes no move to reach for it.
“Get off the bikes!” she shouts to them, but neither moves. “Get on the ground!”
Her ears are still ringing, but she makes out the sound of an approaching motorcycle, coming up behind her. She doesn’t dare turn around, so she shifts her position, stepping out into the street, with the Alamo at her back, where she can keep her gun on the two bikers while the other approaches.
The new bike skids to a halt, and the rider, straddling it, pulls up a submachine gun. Luisa jerks her gun toward the newcomer.
But she isn’t fast enough.
Flame spits from the barrel of the submachine gun, and a burst of bullets thump into Luisa, slamming her onto her back in the street. She’s wearing her vest, but at this range, she knows it wasn’t enough. She can feel the wet warmth of her own blood soaking her clothes and pooling on the blacktop. She feels the hot, searing pain of multiple bullets lodged inside her. She coughs out blood, and when she tries to inhale, her airway is clogged and wet.
She turns her head and watches as the three motorcyclists race by the Alamo and disappear around the corner. She has the strange thought that it’s appropriate she, a lifelong Texan, made her last stand next to the old mission where so many Texans lost their lives. She feels guilty and disappointed for not being able to stop the robbers. She always prided herself on keeping her little piece of Texas safe. But she doesn’t dwell on her failure. She did her best.
The pain is gone. Now she’s just tired. So unbelievably tired. She thinks of the blackout curtains back at her apartment, how, when they’re drawn, she can sleep through anything.
As the darkness comes, she imagines she’s just pulling the curtains to take a nap.
CHAPTER 32
MEGAN, WILLOW, AND I spend the early hours of the morning helping my parents clean the house so my mom can feel okay about life getting back to normal. We clean up Dad’s study, salvaging what we can from the wreckage, but don’t stop there. We go ahead and sweep and mop the other rooms—then, after the sun’s been up for about an hour, we decide we ought to have a good meal together as the last step toward putting the events of the night behind us.
Megan and Willow help Mom make a big spread of breakfast tacos, French toast casserole, and cinnamon rolls with honey butter. Dad and I offer to help, but we’re pretty much just in the way. So while the women are cooking, he takes me outside into the warm glow of morning and says, “Rory, you’ve got a hell of a problem on your hands.”
“I know,” I say, thinking he’s talking about the home invasion and what I must be embroiled in at work.
If only.
“As far as I can tell,” he says, “you’ve got two good women here who both love you very much. I think what you’ve got to decide is, which one doyoulove?”
I have no idea what to say in response, so I’m relieved when my phone buzzes with an incoming call from Carlos. I tell Dad I’ve got to get it and he goes back in the house.
