Maia looked back down at her wineglass and swore under her breath, something about me being a stupid white devil. "Damn it, Tres. Do you think Lillian gave you that statue accidentally? Do you think she didn't know what would happen when it turned up missing? How can you keep seeing her as just the victim?"

I stared out at the river. "Maybe."

"Maybe," she repeated. "What if, just maybe, Lillian disappeared on purpose? If it were me, once I realized the person I'd been trying to blackmail was really the mob, I'd admit I was in over my head and I'd run like hell. Maybe first I'd send up the only distress signal I could think of-to you. How are you going to know the truth when you see it?"

"The truth." I looked at her. "Maia, I know you're trying to help. The truth is you're distracting the hell out of me."

I think I wanted it to sound angry, but it didn't come out that way.

Maia started to answer, then pressed her lips together. For a moment she looked cold in the sunshine, hugging her knees and curling up her toes under her beige sundress.

"Tell me to go home then," she said.

I looked down. We sat silent for a while and threw bread to some sickly-looking ducks. Sometimes they ate it. Most of the time they just stared at us and let the pieces hit them in the face. No points for intelligence. At the moment I empathized.

"Okay, then," Maia said. "Tell me you'll come back."

The paddleboaters laughed. Ralph the Pig grinned at me. I looked at Maia's sad half smile and listened to the devil talking on my shoulder. I was chasing ghosts through a town I barely remembered, dealing with people I could barely see through emotional scar tissue. Maia could be right. I'd only made things different for the worse. And a beautiful woman was offering me escape from the first twenty years of my life. It would've taken a stupid man to tell Maia Lee no.

"No," I said.

Maia just nodded. She gave me a hand and pulled me up.

We looked at each other for a minute. Then she turned and headed toward the car.

I beaned a mallard with the last of the bread. He stood there for a minute with the same dazed expression I probably had. Then he honked and went skittering into the San Marcos River like he'd seen a ghost.

33.

Around eight we pulled into the Marriott parking lot off Riverside in Austin and walked down to the water. You could barely see the city because of the sunset. Town Lake was a half-mile sheet of corrugated silver. Beyond it, behind a few wooded hills, downtown blazed with a dozen mirrored office buildings I'd never seen before. About the only things that looked the same as in 1985 were the red dome of the Capitol and the white UT tower.

The cement underside of the Congress Avenue Bridge echoed with chatters from a few million bats and only slightly fewer sightseers. When I spotted Garrett, he'd just pulled his wheelchair up to a newly erected plaque that honored the "bats of Austin" and was staring with distaste at the army of camera-toters. His tie-dyed shirt was stretched a little tighter these days and he'd gone almost completely gray, but he still looked like the love child of Charles Manson and Santa Claus, minus the legs.

"Man," he said, by way of greeting, "this is worse than fucking Carlsbad. They've discovered this place."

We shook hands. Garrett looked at Maia for a moment longer than he needed to, scratching his beard. Then he nodded.

"Last time I was here," he said, "it was me, couple of Hell's Angels, three kayakers, and a lady with a poodle. Now look at this shit."

He led the way down the grassy slope, waving gnats out of his face and running over as many people's feet as he could. Maia and I followed a few yards back.

"That's-" Maia started to whisper. She looked at me, then at Garrett's rainbow-clad back.

"Yeah, my half brother."

"You didn't mention-"

"That he's so much older than me?"

Maia glared at me.

"We got about five minutes," Garrett called back to us. He swung his chair around and squinted up at the top of the bridge, where the stone arches made a honeycomb of little caves. "Then the little peckers start coming out thicker than pig shit."

A line of retirees was standing in front of us, watching the bridge with binoculars. When we sat down on the grass knoll I found myself staring at a row of old butts in pastel prints. I exchanged looks with Garrett. He grinned.

"Yeah," he said. "Kind of gives you a different perspective of the world, doesn't it?"

Maia sat down between us, her left arm pressing against mine just slightly, very warm. She smelled like amber. But of course I noticed none of that. She put her other hand on Garrett's armrest.

"So, Garrett," she said, "Tres tells me you can break into high security networks with half your RAM tied behind your back."

Garrett laughed. He had more teeth than any human being I'd ever known, most of them yellow and crooked. Maia smiled back at him like he was Cary Grant.

"Yeah well," he said, "my little brother tends to exaggerate."

"He also says you could be running the world if you didn't spend so much time at Jimmy Buffett concerts."

Garrett shrugged. But he had a pleased gleam in his eyes.

"A man's got to have a hobby," he said. "Just please no jokes about wasting away in Margaritaville. That one got old faster than Ronald Reagan."

Maia laughed. Then in a very quiet, very passable voice she started singing "A Pirate Looks at Forty." Garrett kept smiling, but he looked at Maia as if he were reevaluating her.

"My theme song these days," Garrett said.

"Mine too."

It was the first and only indicator I'd ever had of Maia's age. Garrett showed his teeth, all hundred of them.

"So, Tres," he said, "where'd you meet this lady again?"

With that he took out a joint and lit up.

Paranoia was not a concept that existed in Garrett's mind. I'd seen him smoking pot in shopping malls, restaurants, just about anywhere. If questioned he would talk poker-faced about his "prescription." Nobody ever wanted to argue much with a paraplegic. The line of retired sightseers froze when the smell of the mota hit them. They glanced back nervously at Garrett, then dissolved. We no longer had butts obstructing our view of the bridge.

Maia and I both refused the joint, politely. Then Garrett spent half an hour telling us about his last Parrot-head tour of the South, his asshole bosses at RNI, the impending collapse of Austin society at the hands of Silicon Valley transplants.

"Damn Californians," he concluded.

"I beg your pardon," said Maia.

Garrett grinned. "You can come into the state, honey. It's just this ugly bastard you brought with you."

I showed Garrett a hand gesture. Maia laughed.

It got dark and cool. God poured grenadine on the horizon. Finally, when he was ready to talk business, Garrett said: "So what's all this about, little brother?"

I told him. For a minute Garrett blew smoke. He stared at me, then at Maia's legs. His expression told me he'd just reevaluated my IQ downward a hefty percentage.

"So you and Maia are looking for-"

"Lillian," I said.

"More or less," said Maia.

Garrett shook his head. "Unreal."

"Can you look at the disk for us?" I asked Garrett.

Cameras flashed as the first few bats flitted overhead like sparrows with hangovers. Garrett glanced up at them, shook his head to indicate that the real show hadn't begun yet, then turned back to us. He pulled his tie-dyed shirt back down over his belly.

"I don't guess you want my advice," he said.

"Not really," I said.

"Sounds to me like this is your old girlfriend's gig," he said. "Turn this shit over to somebody else and walk, little brother."

Somebody on the bridge shouted. When I looked up, a woman in pink was leaning over the railing with her arms dangling into a steady stream of bats.

"They tickle!" she shouted to her friends. People laughed. More cameras went off.

"Fuckers," said Garrett. "The flashes disorient the hell out of the bats. They run into cars and shit. Don't they know that? Fuckers!"

The last word he shouted into the crowd. Only a few people turned around. Nobody wanted to argue with him, maybe, but nobody wanted to pay him any attention, either.

"Tres?"

In the twilight Maia's face was losing its features, so it was hard to guess her expression, but her arm still pressed against mine warmer than ever. She waited for me to say something. When I didn't, she turned to Garrett.

"Can you look at it, Garrett?" she asked.

His scowl softened. Maybe it was Maia's hand on his armrest. Maybe it was the joint.

"Sure," he said. "Whatever. But it seems to me you got to get a life, little brother. Picking at old wounds-fuck, if I spent my life with that they'd've locked me up by now."

He met my eyes only for a second, then he laughed and shook his head. Whatever pain was there, it had been buried a long time ago under drug abuse, wildness, testiness, and arrogance-all the Navarre family values.

I couldn't help it. I tried again to imagine Garrett at those dark railroad tracks twenty years ago. The confident train-hitcher, the intractable hippie, running away from home for the twentieth and last time-the one time he'd sprinted to the freight car and missed the rungs. I tried to see his face, pale with shock, looking desperately at the black glistening lake where his legs had been. I tried to imagine him for once without that cultivated son-of-a-bitch smile. But he'd been alone then and he was still alone with it. There was no way to imagine what Garrett had said or thought two decades ago, staring at those wet rails that had mercifully sealed the blood flow. He'd been alone and conscious for more than an hour by the time my sister Shelley found him.

"Old wounds," he said now. "Fuck that."

Then the bats came out for real. Cameras stopped flashing. People's mouths dropped. We all just stared at the endless cloud of smoke drifting east into the Hill Country, smoke looking for a few jillion pounds of insects to eat.

Garrett smiled like a kid at the matinee.

"Un-fucking-real," he said.

In ten minutes more bats passed over our heads than the total number of people in South Texas. Somewhere in that time Maia had taken my hand and I hadn't pulled it away.

The tourists unfroze. Then one by one, growing bored with the bats, they drifted off to the parking lot. Maia and I stayed perfectly still. Finally Garrett wheeled his chair around and pushed himself up the hill. Maia stood and followed him. Then I followed her.

It was hard to miss Garrett's VW safari van. In the dark, the mound of plastic pineapples and bananas that was hot-glued to the roof made the van look like it had hair. When we got closer I saw that the paint job was just the way it had been years ago, rows of Ms. Mirandas along the sides, all in outrageous Caribbean dresses.

"They don't dance like Carmen no more?" Maia suggested.

Garrett grinned at her as he slipped his chair into the lift grooves. "Will you marry me?"

A few minutes later we were sitting on beanbags and drinking Pecan Street Ale from Garrett's cooler. My eyes teared over from the smell of mota and very old patchouli. Garrett had booted up his "portable" computer-several hundred pounds of wires and hardware that had years ago taken over the van's backseat and whose generator required most of the luggage compartment. Then he stuck in our mystery CD.

Garrett frowned. He thought about it for a minute. He tried a few commands. He cracked open some files and looked inside.

"Slice and dice," he pronounced. "Easy to fix if you've got the other disk."

Maia looked at me, then at Garrett. "The other disk?"

"Yeah. You split your data between two disks. The program to reassemble it's pretty simple. But you read one disk alone, it's all nonsense codes, man, scrambled eggs. Pretty safe way to store sensitive stuff."

I took a drink of my Pecan Street and thought about that. "So you can't tell anything about what's on there?"

Garrett shrugged. "It's big. That much data usually means detailed graphics."

"As in photographs."

Garrett nodded.

Maia stared at the dingo balls around Garrett's windows.

"Garrett," she said, "if I was using photos to blackmail somebody-"

He grinned. "You just keep looking better, honey."

"If I was, why a CD? Why not just keep the negatives?"

Garrett took a long drag on his joint. His eyes glittered. You could tell he was enjoying figuring out the devious possibilities.

"Okay. You can't encrypt negatives. You can't lock them so that nobody but you can make copies. Somebody finds them, then they'll know exactly what they're looking at, right? If it was me, shit yes, I'd scan everything in, keep that as my master print, then shred the negatives. You got your two disks, you got your program to reassemble. In a couple of minutes you can print up as many hard copies as you need, or, even better, upload those suckers onto the net and pretty soon they're printing out at every news desk and police station in the state, if that's what you want. But if somebody comes looking through your stuff, unless they're very good or they know exactly what they're looking for, they don't find shit."

Garrett stopped and took another hit. "So who's got the other disk?"

I took out a flier that had been folded in my pocket for a long time. I looked at the date-July 31, tonight. Nine to midnight. Driving like bats out of hell, we could be there just when things started cooking. No offense to the bats.