Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(73)

"Any more good news?"

Maia dropped the paper longer this time, enough for me to see that her eyes were red. She sat on the futon with her legs tucked under her, wearing a black pantsuit with sequins. Her ponytail was tied back in a new way, with a small cluster of red and blue ribbons. It all looked slightly familiar, but not on her. I frowned.

"What else happened?" I asked. "Did you go somewhere?"

She tried to look hurt. Then the tension became unsustainable. She cracked a smile. “Your mother came by," she admitted.

My expression must’ve been good. She started laughing.

"You ass**le," Maia said. "I’m still mad at you."

Her eyes said otherwise.

"And—what did my mother say?"

" She was mad at you too," Maia said. The smile was evil. "We commiserated. We--talked."

I sat down on the futon next to her, still frowning. I tried to look threatening. "Talked?"

She did a bad job of covering up her smile. "We buried the hatchet, more or less. She took me out as a peace offering. This was right after you left."

I looked at the pantsuit again, the ribbons in Maia’s hair.

"No!"

She nodded her head enthusiastically. “We went shopping at Solo Serve."

"It’s over," I said. "Homicides, disappearances, and now you’re going to Solo Serve with my mother."

Maia shrugged. Then she kissed my cheek.

"I was going to rell you that I’d decided to leave tomorrow," she admitted. "I even made  reservations. Now that I’ve seen the clearance rack, I may never go away."

I needed a beer very badly. Of course Maia and my mother had drunk them all.

"And here I thought you’d been crying," I yelled into the refrigerator. "Your eyes are just red from looking at price tags."

"Serves you right," she said. "And this is for you."

She produced a yellow plastic Solo Serve bag from under the futon, then pulled out an extra-large T-shirt that said “WELCOME TO SAN ANTONIO" on the front in neon colors was a depiction of San Antonio’s one claim to heavy metal history: Ozzie Osbourne urinating on the Cenotaph in front of the Alamo.

"It spoke to us," she said. "It just screamed ‘Tres’. "

"It’s lovely. How do you say ‘She-devil’ in Mandarin?"

I guess I looked suitably angry. Maia walked up, pressed against me, and kissed my chin. "Okay, you’re forgiven now."

"I’m forgiven?"

She smiled. "Show me the Riverwalk, Tex?"

Neither Carlon McAffrey nor Detective Schaeffer were thrilled to hear from me, especially since I answered most of their questions with "I don’t know," or promises to call them back in the morning. My right ear hurt from the insults by the time I hung up, but I was otherwise intact.

After the week I’d had, it was difficult to find clothes without blood or Mexican food on them, but I still declined to wear my new T-shirt to the Riverwalk. Maia just smiled, enjoying her revenge as I searched the dregs in my closet. Robert Johnson played kamikaze, dive-bombing my clothes from the kitchen counter every time I made a pile. Otherwise he was no help as a fashion consultant.

By sunset we were driving south on Broadway, into downtown, Maia looking like several thousand dollars and me looking like spare change. The streetlamps were just coming on and the sunset was longhorn orange when we walked down the stairs of the Commerce Avenue Bridge into the crowds on the Riverwalk.

Take away the glitz and tourist dollars and the Paseo del Rio is basically a deep trench that winds through the center of downtown San Antonio. just south of East Houston, the river gets diverted from its course and makes a huge lowercase "b," looping all the way east to the Convention Center, then back past La Villita to Main, where it reconnects with itself.

Put back the glitz and the tourist dollars, and even a native has to admit it’s pretty impressive. Tonight the air was warm and the mariachi music was everywhere. Colored lights reflected off the murky green water and made the river look festive despite itself. About a hundred thousand people were strolling the flagstone banks past the fountains, stone bridges, and pricey new restaurants.

The kitchen smoke of ten or fifteen different cuisines drifted up past the yellow and green patio umbrellas. Tourists with cameras and souvenir sombreros, basic trainees on leave, rich men with high-priced call girls, all happily stepping on toes and spilling drinks on each other. This is what a San Antonian thinks of when you say “river." I remember how much trouble I had reading Huck Finn as a child, trying to imagine how the hell that raft made it past all those restaurants and crowds, in water only three feet deep and thirty feet across, without anybody noticing the stowaway slave. Maybe that’s why I became an English major—sheer confusion.

Maia held on to my hand so we didn’t get separated. In one of the rare moments when there was enough room for us to walk side by side she pointed at the river and said: "I want to eat on one of those."

A dinner barge went by—a huge red shoe-box lid with an outboard motor. Fifty tourists smiled and raised their margaritas from the white linen tablecloth. The waiters looked bored.

"No you don’t," I told her.

The operator in back turned the outboard just enough to avoid an oncoming barge from a rival restaurant by a few inches.