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Temeke was restless, but then he always was in a crowd. He had the sense Gabriel Mann was only a few steps ahead, hopefully waiting by the book stand on the opposite side of the street.
A bead of sweat ran down one side of his face and he stopped for a moment, glanced over the crowds at the families with their strollers, a live band and a lone straw hat browsing the book stall.
Jarvis was forty yards ahead dressed in jeans and an old army fatigue jacket. He was sitting at a table with Maggie Watts sharing a plate of Navajo tacos, while Officers Hinkley and Toledo were on the other side of the street admiring a 1964 purple Impala.
It was warm for March ‒ fifty-six degrees and climbing. There were people dressed in psychedelic colors, some barely dressed at all, cruising the strip and looking for a new squeeze.
As for Temeke...You’re too bloody conspicuous, he thought to himself, slackening his stride a little and then pausing to take in the aroma of fresh roasted chile.
Bald, black and British, he wasn’t fooling anyone in his lackluster clothes and leather boots. Too tense. He attracted the attention of three young boys who were urging a young woman to touch him.
She and that dreamy expression got up too close, lips wrapped around a popsicle. “Kiss me,” she slurred, lips red and shiny.
He was maddened by two intoxicated eyes and a huff of rancid breath. “I’ve got an unsavory reputation, love, like the toilets downtown.”
Lifting both hands, he made a half circle around her, keeping his eyes on the street and the passersby. A small child pushed past him wearing green scrubs and a stethoscope made from a pair of first generation IPod headphones and a suction cup. His mouth was smeared in chocolate.
Gabriel Mann wasn’t invisible, he was here somewhere and although Temeke’s eyes ranged from left to right, passing over the crowd and stopping to scan the book stall, he could see no one who resembled a half dead corpse on the run.
The sun rose high in a sky where one half was clear blue and the other a blanket of gray rolling in from the west. People milled beneath the awnings, mothers carrying toddlers on their hips, father’s staring longingly at the antique cars, and the elderly hovering over an open-air restaurant in the hope of finding an empty chair.
Temeke wiped his head and felt the phone vibrate inside a cargo pocket. He moved towards the shade of a cottonwood tree and listened to Malin’s voice.
“Not seeing him,” she said, flicking through the pages of a book she was pretending to read. “But I am seeing a her. Three females standing in front of a table. But here’s the thing. Two of the females came off a hayride four minutes ago, heavy-set brunettes and the third, a skinny blonde, tacked along behind and then started talking like she knew them?”
Temeke heard the rise at the end of the sentence, realized he had to give his two cents worth. “Maybe she came late. Maybe she’s an old friend.”
“Blonde hair, as in platinum blonde. Five feet seven, one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Khaki sweater, blue jeans. Was wearing a beige hat. Now it’s red. Something about her, sir. Watchful, you know?”
An essence, Temeke thought, pulse spiking. There would definitely be an essence.
He lowered his head, sunglasses hiding the direction of his gaze. A school group appeared to be listening intently to a teacher, a middle-aged man with a dog in a working harness, two heavyset women and a blonde wearing a red hat.
“Got her,” he said, and hung up.
Straight back, rigid thighs, feet pointing forward as if they were pegged into the ground. She was slightly behind the other two, following but not following, browsing but not browsing.
The casualness of her pose did nothing to disguise the vigilance, gaze floating up from the book she was reading to examine the street. The posture was already mapped in his mind, even before the left knee turned sideways and the figure started forward slowly along the line of tables.
He made his way through the crowds, almost colliding with a man in a Smokey the Bear costume handing out forest fire leaflets to a group of teenagers. Temeke scanned right and left, and then straight ahead.
Under the awning he could see Malin ten yards to the left of him, Jarvis and Watts to his right, and he could sense Hinkley and Toledo behind him. They had been alerted by his sudden race across the street.
He couldn’t see the blonde woman in the red baseball cap and he was baffled. His head was burning, sun glaring in his face as he studied the crowds, calculating which direction she would have taken. She had been so close, only a matter of yards, and now he had lost her.
He latched on to the most obvious conclusion and the throbbing in his chest began to slow. She knew they were there, knew they were cops, and knew exactly how to dodge them. Funny thing was, he could still feel her.
He brushed his forehead with a wrist and glanced at the hay rides as they trundled south along the street. Raw instinct made him follow them, eyes taking in each tiny detail.
Three white baseball hats, two blue, four yellow and one red, all bobbing above the hay bales in the tractor carts.
