Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(75)

tables outside, heading into the crowds.

I stayed twenty feet back as we moved down the Riverwalk. Baja didn’t look back. The Paseo was so narrow and thick with people I couldn’t get at an angle to see his face. We passed the Market Street Bridge and ke t going toward La Villita. For a minute I lost Baja behind a slow-moving Oompa band. They had "Pride of Fredericksburg” stitched into their green Bavarian britches and painted on the side of their tuba, but they sure weren’t in a hurry to get to whatever performance they had in mind. It’s usually worth the time just to hear German spoken with a Texas twang, but not when you’re chasing somebody. I finally got rude and shoved past. The guy with the hairy white legs and the bass drum almost went into the river.

"Gawdamn scheisskerl!" he shouted after me.

The one with "Johann" on his feathered hat tried to bean me with a handful of funnel cake. From the squeal behind me I assume he hit a nearby call girl or debutante instead. I kept moving.

The music changed from polka to full brass mariachi as we rounded the corner and crossed another bridge, then ducked through an alleyway and into the Arneson River Theater. We had somehow come up on the performers’ side. There was a concert in progress, like there is most nights. The spotlights were on, the band’s panchos were Technicolor, and their horns were well polished. Across the river, the old stone seats of the amphitheater were almost full. Baja stopped for a minute, considering his options. Then he sped up. So did I.

That’s when I made the mistake of running into another old friend. Slamming into an old friend, actually. Carolyn Smith was directing the KSAT mobile camera on its tripod at the wrong moment to catch a particularly enthusiastic crowd response to my favorite tune, "Guantanamera." What she caught instead was my shoulder as I tried to squeeze past. That in itself probably would’ve been okay, but as I kept running forward she stepped back to get her balance and executed a beautiful piece of unintentional tai chi. Her leg went under mine and my foot stopped. The rest of me kept going.

A lot happened in that live seconds. Carolyn looked up and recognized me.

"Tres!" she said.

She probably didn’t mean to yell it so loud, but part of that was shock as she realized a few hundred pounds of camera equipment was starting to topple. Then she realized the camera’s power cord was wrapped around her ankle and she was toppling with it. I didn’t even have time to wave at the other TV station’s camera before the two of us and the KSAT mobile unit went headfirst into the river.

Considering it was the first day of August, the water was downright chilly. The bottom was so slick with algae I fell down the first three times I tried to stand up. It didn’t help that Carolyn was trying to climb to safety over my body. As I stood up in the crotch-high water, the crowd erupted in applause. The mariachis, gratified by the response, launched into my second favorite tune, "La Bamba." I waved, feeling like a fresh mound of bat guano and smelling just about as good.

Not being deaf, the man in the Baja shirt had noticed me. By the time I located him, he’d already decided it would take too long to fight his way through the crowds to the bridge. Instead he took a more creative exit. He made the jump onto the first dinner barge and stood precariously on the center table while fifty tourists spilled their margaritas. The waiters and operator no longer looked bored. Since the second barge passed only a few inches away, heading the other direction, it was a short jump to that for Baja. More drinks spilled. Another group of German nuns in fluted hats, possibly the same ones I’d seen earlier, looked up to see a man on their dining table, then he was gone, sprinting up the steps of the Arneson River Theater.

His hood came off just for a moment as he dodged through the tourists with all the grace of a former athlete. Long enough for me to notice that Dan Sheff had gotten a hair cut since we’d talked last. Then he reached the iron gates at the top of the amphitheater and disappeared into the darkness of La Villita.

Carolyn was yelling at me as she slipped and slid over to the riverbank.

"What the hell do you call that?" she demanded.

The guy at the KENS camera offered a suggestion: "I call that a take."

47

Fortunately Corporal Hearnes remembered my father. Unfortunately Hearnes was among the majority of the SAPD who had hated my father’s guts. It took me some serious tap dancing and a grudging admission from Carolyn that perhaps I was not a rabid lunatic before Hearnes agreed not to lock me in Detox.

"Maybe I did step back at the wrong time," Carolyn mumbled.

"Wrong time?" I said. "Hell, I want you to teach me that move, Carolyn."

Her fine blond hair had turned into greenish licorice cords in the river. She pushed a few strands out of her face and smiled despite herself. I tried to visualize her as the reclusive computer nerd I remembered from our journalism classes at A & M. But all I saw was a TV model with a babyish face, nice lips, and fashion contacts that had come loose and were slipping into her corneas like dark blue eclipses.

"Carolaine," she corrected me.

"What?"

She tried to straighten her once-white blazer.

“I’m a media personality now, or at least I was until you ruined my spot. I go by Carolaine."

"Is it Smythe instead of Smith?"

She frowned. If she hadn’t been over twenty-five I would’ve called it a pout. "I’ve heard that one too many times."