Read Online Southtown by Rick Riordan - Free Book Online

for the school summer camp. There were nine cars in front of her.
    The boy had his arm out the passenger’s window. He was drumming his fingers against the Audi’s door. He had a mop of black hair, a coffee complexion that was nothing like his mother’s.
    The people Will had questioned didn’t know much about the kid. He was adopted, they thought. From somewhere overseas. Not Fred Barrow’s blood, anyway. They looked at Stirman through their pain, as if wondering why the hell he cared. What was one more kid to a monster like him?
    Will pulled out of line and parked on the side of the traffic circle. He didn’t have much time to think. He had misjudged the kind of place Erainya Manos would be going to. He had tailed her right into this wooded campus for the ultra-rich, the parking lot full of Hummers and Cadillac Escalades. His stolen Honda Civic stuck out like a skinhead in a Juneteenth parade. Soon, the uniformed security guard directing traffic would wonder what Will was doing.
    It pissed him off that a place like this could make him feel so nervous.
    Maximum security prison was no problem. But a bunch of moms dropping their kids off at soccer camp—that made Will’s palms sweat. It pissed him off that Barrow’s widow sent her son to this school. No way could she afford it. It rubbed Will’s failure in his face, flaunted what Fred Barrow had done to him.
    Seven cars before Erainya Manos reached the drop-off point.
             
    Will thought about the first time he’d met Soledad, in the burning fields.
    It had been one of Dimebox Ortiz’s stupider ideas. He’d decided to let this group of illegals out of the truck just before the Border Patrol checkpoint, let them walk a few miles through the sugarcane fields, then pick them up on the other side. He forgot it was March—burning season.
    Next thing, he was calling Will in a panic. Dimebox was at the rendezvous point and the illegals weren’t there. He saw smoke—the whole area where the group was supposed to walk was on fire. Farmers were burning their crops as part of the yearly harvest.
    Fortunately, Will had been working a deal down in Harlingen, only a couple of miles away. He dropped what he was doing and got there in under ten minutes.
    By that time, he could hear the screaming. And if he could hear it, he figured the farmers and the Border Patrol could, too.
    He ran into the fields, toward the fire, and a young woman burst through the sugarcane. She was coughing, smoke rising from her clothes. She smelled like burnt syrup.
    She crashed right into his arms and said in Spanish, “There are two more! Right in there!”
    Will heard a megaphone in the distance. Border Patrol: instructions in Spanish, warning the illegals to get out of the fields.
    “No tiempo,”
Stirman told the woman.
“La Migra.”
    He started to pull her toward the truck, but she fought him. Her strength surprised him.
    “You
will
get them!” she ordered.
    Will looked at her seriously for the first time. She could have been a special order. She was that beautiful. Maybe seventeen. Mayan complexion, large eyes, long black hair. She wore a man’s denim work shirt and tattered jeans. She was barefoot. But Will could imagine her cleaned up, in a nice dress. Getting her north would be enough to turn a profit from this disaster.
    “All right,” he said. “Wait here.”
    He plunged into the fields. The Border Patrol megaphone was getting louder. If
La Migra
found Will, or Dimebox Ortiz waiting in his truck up the road, they would start asking questions. Will would be screwed.
    He found two older women collapsed in the smoke, and managed to get them to stand. They leaned on him, coughing and stumbling, and together they got away from the fire. The younger woman helped him get them to the truck.
    “What about all the others?” the girl asked.
    Will looked at her, ready to hit her, but he restrained himself. “They are dead, or taken. If we don’t leave now, you will be,