"What the fuck are you doing here?" he said.

Mickey was the closest human equivalent to the Pillsbury Doughboy I'd ever come across. He had no skin pigment to speak of, and his hair was so yellow it was almost white. He was big all over, an over-inflated kind of big, and although he looked soft, in our days at Alamo Heights I'd seen plenty of high school fullbacks bounce off Mickey's body without leaving a mark. I'd never quite gotten up the nerve to poke him in the stomach to see if he would laugh. I had a feeling he wouldn't.

Mickey had also dated Lillian for a brief time when we'd broken up our senior year. Until I'd stolen back her heart. Or, rather, until I'd stolen Mickey's pickup. Lillian's very brief flirtation with kicker dancing in general and Mickey in particular had come to an abrupt halt when they'd had to walk halfway home from the Blue Bonnet Palace in Selma.

"Mickey," I replied, grinning.

He looked at me suspiciously. His pasty face flushed red. Then he tried his line again: "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Came to see you, old buddy."

He looked behind him. Probably he was checking for the hidden camera.

"Go away," he said. "I like my job."

"Come on," I said, "that was a long time ago."

"I didn't work for a fucking year after that time at Maggie's."

Maia smiled, not having a clue what we were talking about. I shrugged as innocently as I could.

"How should I know Ms. Pacman could pick up so much momentum going down one flight of stairs?"

Mickey appealed to Maia. "Fucker destroyed three booths and nearly killed the general manager."

"I didn't make you push it."

" 'Just tip this up while I look for my quarter,' " he quoted.

I shrugged and took out two fifties. I put them on his desk.

"I'll get out of your way as soon as you tell me which room Mr. Karnau's in tonight."

Mickey stared. I smiled and set down another two fifties. Mickey looked down very briefly. "You want the keys too?" he said.

46.

"Karnau," said Mickey. "Room 450. Books that suite every weekend, pays in cash."

He slapped the keys into my hand. "And, Tres, you fuck with me-"

I smiled. "Would I do that?"

"Shit." Mickey shook his head like his job was as good as lost.

We watched the door to 450 from the service closet at the end of the hall. The door stayed put. The freshly vacuumed maroon rug in the hall outside was devoid of footprints.

Then somewhere around the corner at the end of the hall another door opened and closed. The man who walked across the hall and into the stairwell was wearing jeans and a striped Baja shirt with the hood pulled up. He was moving briskly.

Maia and I exchanged looks.

"A suite," she said.

"451," I said.

We raced each other down the hall. Maia's gun was out by the time she stopped at the door. I threw her the keys and pushed into the stairwell, not even sure who I was following.

From the echoes he was about two floors below me, going just fast enough to get the hell out without someone thinking he might be running. I'll say one thing for my worn-down deck shoes-they're quiet. I managed to follow him down without giving him reason to speed up. When the blue-striped Baja exited on the Riverwalk level, I was only twenty feet above him.

I came out into a service hallway and dodged a fat tourist in a sombrero. I almost knocked a margarita pitcher out of the waitress's hand as I ran into the bar. The comatose folk trio was now doing the funeral dirge version of Cat Stevens's greatest hits. Baja Man still had his hood up. He was navigating through the patio 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 kept 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 five 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."

"Sorry."

I stood and made my apologies to the cameraman. He just stared at me. I thanked Corporal Hearnes for his time and compassion. I left Carolaine my phone number so we could talk about the damages.

"Hey," she said. "What the hell is your hurry?"

I looked behind me at the Hilton and thought about Maia and her .45 alone in Beau Karnau's suite. Or maybe not alone.

"Duty calls," I said.

"Great," said Carolaine. "See if I share my bath towel with you again."

It was difficult to look dashing as I sloshed down the Riverwalk, leaving a trail of puddles, but the smell cleared a path for me pretty effectively. I waved at Mickey as I jogged past the Hilton concierge desk. His mouth dropped open and stayed that way while the elevator doors closed.

The door to Room 450 was closed, but Maia opened it before I could even knock. When she lowered the gun out of my nostril and stood aside, I saw why she looked so grim.

The room decor was straight out of Versailles. Champagne chilled on the dresser in a silver bucket. The balcony curtains opened onto a perfect summer night sky and all the lights of the Paseo del Rio. The man in the bed was wearing his best velour robe and his comfiest slippers. He lay back, totally relaxed, with two black eyes and the red mark of an East Indian on his forehead. Only Beau Karnau was neither East Indian nor relaxed. He was just dead.

In Maia's other hand was a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. She sat down next to Beau and took a swig. Then she looked at me. Only the way she breathed, shallowly from her mouth, told me that she was pretty unnerved, and only because I knew her well. Otherwise her face might've been made of polished wood, for all the expression she revealed.

I took a soggy index card out of my back pocket-the message Guy White had given us that afternoon.

I said: "Nice of Mr. White to invite us up tonight. Don't you think?"

I sat down on the other side of Beau. His ponytail had been loosened so that his hair had opened up around his head like a black and gray peacock tail when he fell back. The bruised skin around his eyes was shiny and purple. He had a slight wet smile on his face like somebody had just told him a funny but tasteless joke. Thank God his viscera hadn't loosened up yet. There was no smell.

"It was Dan," I told Maia. "I lost him."

"You still think he's not a player?"

I didn't feel like arguing the point.

On the dresser was Beau's photo portfolio, open to the first page. The article "Dallas Native Follows Dream" had been carefully removed from the plastic and stuck onto the mirror, maybe where Beau could see it when he woke up every morning. Next to that was a black and white photo of nineteen-year-old Lillian-smiling over her shoulder at the photographer, her mentor. Her eyes were full of adoration. On the floor at my feet was an open, empty CD case. It was cracked as if someone had stepped on it.

"Someone finally got what they wanted," Maia said softly. "Without a payment."

"Half of what they want," I corrected.

Maia handed the champagne over Beau's body. Beau didn't request any. I finished just enough of the bottle to belch the nausea out of my system. Only then did Maia seem to notice my appearance.

"You're wet," she said.

"Don't ask." Maia nodded, not in the mood to argue, either.

"White gets us here," she said. "Dan leaves us here. And your friend Mickey knows where we are. We can't just walk away."

When I didn't respond, Maia went to the phone and calmly made three calls. First to the house detective, second to Detective Schaeffer, third to Byron Ash.

"Got any plans tonight?" I asked. Neither Maia nor Beau seemed to.

The Hilton chief of security, a large black man named Jefferies, took one look at Beau, then helped us finish off the champagne.

"I don't get paid enough," he said. Then he sat down in the Louis XIV chair in the corner and started mumbling into his walkie-talkie.

Two patrolmen arrived, then the detectives, then forensics. Tape went up, the media arrived, maids, interested guests, everybody but the jugglers, the nuns, and the dancing bear. Detective Schaeffer finally came dragging in too, looking as usual as if he'd just woken up.

"Take these two into the next room," he told a uniform. "They can wait."

And we did.

Maia's "favored" status with Mr. Ash must've been running thin. An hour after she'd called him, we discovered that Lord Byron would be declining a personal appearance. Instead a junior associate who looked about fifteen showed up and introduced himself as Hass. Hass smiled. Shaking his hand was like squeezing a damp Kleenex.

"Don't worry," Hass said, "I come highly recommended from Mr. Ash. I've handled several criminal actions."

Schaeffer decided to notice us then. He lumbered in with red eyes, managed not to bump into anything, then stared at each of us in turn. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose slowly, meticulously.

"Okay," he grumbled. "Tell me it's a coincidence."

"Ah, before we start-" said Counselor Hass.

Schaeffer and I exchanged glances.