Earthquake Weather

LAS VEGAS—A small earthquake rattled Boulder City on New Year’s morning, and workers at the nearby Hoover Dam reported feeling the shock.

—Associated Press,

January 2, 1995

CHAPTER ONE

PANDARUS: …she came and puts me her white hand to his cloven chin—

CRESSIDA: Juno have mercy; how came it cloven?

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

A pay telephone was ringing in the corridor by the rest rooms, but the young woman who had started to get up out of the padded orange-vinyl booth just blinked around in evident puzzlement and sat down again, tugging her denim jacket more tightly around her narrow shoulders.

From over by the pickup counter her waiter glanced at her curiously. She was sitting against the eastern windows, but though the sky was already a chilly deep blue outside, the yellow glow of the interior overhead lighting was still relatively bright enough to highlight the planes of her face under the disordered straw-blond hair. The waiter thought she looked nervous, and he wondered why she had reflexively assumed that a pay-phone call might be for her.

The counter seats were empty where the half-dozen customers who lived in town usually sat chugging coffee at this hour—but the locals could sleep in on this New Year’s Day, and they’d be right back here tomorrow at dawn. This morning the customers were mostly grumpy families who wanted to sit in the booths—holiday-season vacationers, drawn in off of the San Diego Freeway lanes by the spotlit billboards beyond the Batiquitos Lagoon to the north or the San Elijo Lagoon to the south.

The woman sitting in the dawn-side booth was almost certainly a waitress somewhere—when he had taken her order she had spoken quickly, specified all the side-order options without being asked, and she had sat where she wouldn’t be able to see into the kitchen. And she was hungry, too—she had ordered scrambled eggs and poached eggs, along with bacon and cottage fries, and coffee and orange juice and V-8.

…And now she had set something on fire at her table.

The waiter clanked her plates back down on the counter and hurried across the carpet toward her booth, but he quickly saw that the smoking paperback book on the table was just smoldering and not actually flaming, and even before he got to the table the woman had flipped open the book and splashed water from her water glass onto the… cigarette butt!…that had ignited the pages.

The pay telephone was still ringing, but the overhead lights had gone dim for a moment, and a waitress back by the electronic cash register was cussing under her breath and slapping the side of the machine, and nobody else had happened to notice the briefly burning book; and the blond woman, who was now folding the soggy thing closed again, had gone red in the face and was smiling up at him in embarrassed apology—she couldn’t be thirty years old yet—and so he just smiled cautiously back at her.

“Yesterday you’d have been legal,” he said sympathetically; then, seeing that she was confused, he added, “Seven hours ago there’d have been ashtrays on the table, you wouldn’t have had to hide it.”

She nodded, pushing the book away across the tabletop and frowning as though she’d never seen the object until it had started smoldering in front of her. “That’s right,” she said to him sternly. “No smoking in restaurants at all in California now, as of midnight last night.” She looked past him now, with a forgiving, we’ll-say-no-more-about-it air. “Where are your public telephones?”

“Uh…” He waved in the direction of the ringing telephone. “Where you hear. But your breakfast is coming right up, if you want to wait.”

She was hitching awkwardly forward out of the booth and levering herself up onto her feet. “All I ordered was coffee.” The waiter watched as she walked away toward the telephone. Her left leg swung stiff, not bending, and he was uneasily sure that the dark, wet spot on the thigh of her jeans must be fresh blood.

SHE PICKED up the telephone receiver in mid-ring.

“Hello?” Again the restaurant’s lights dimmed for a moment, and the woman’s face hardened. In a harsher, flatter voice than she’d used before, she said, “Do I know you, Susan? Sure, I’ll tell him. Now, I don’t mean to be abrupt, but I’ve got a call to make here, don’t I?”

She hung up and dug a handful of litter out of a jacket pocket and dumped it onto the shelf below the telephone; from among these matchbooks and drywall screws and slips of paper and bits of broken green stucco she selected a quarter, thumbed it into the slot, and then punched in a local number.

After ten seconds of standing with the receiver to her ear, “Hi,” she said, still speaking in her rough new voice. “Is this the Flying Nun?” She laughed. “Gotcha, huh? Listen, Susan says to tell you she still loves you. Oh, and what I called about—I’m going to assume the Flamingo, you know what I mean?” She listened patiently, and with her free hand picked up one of the fragments of green-painted stucco. “Potent pieces of it…persist in percolating in the…what, pasture? Can you spell alliteration? What I’m trying to say, sonny boy, is that even though they did tear it down, I’ve got a chunk of it, and your ass is grass. Don’t waste time chasing the long stories on the front page this morning—skip right to the funny papers.”

After hanging up, she smacked her lips and frowned as if she’d eaten something rancid, then stepped across to the ladies’ room door and pushed it open.

She dug a little bottle of Listerine out of another jacket pocket as she crossed the tile floor to the sink, and by the time she was standing in front of the mirror she had opened the bottle and taken a swig; she swished it around in her mouth, looking down at the chrome faucets rather than into the mirror, and she spat out the mouthwash with a grimace.

She re-capped the bottle and hurried back to her table.

Already the sky had brightened enough outside the window to cast dim shadows from the steaming plates and glasses that now sat on her table, and as she slid carefully into the booth she frowned at the elaborate breakfast. From her open purse she lifted a waitress’s order pad and another, larger bottle of the mouthwash, and for the next half hour, as she ate, she flipped through the pages of the pad, frowning over the inked notes that filled nearly every leaf, and paused frequently to swallow a mouthful of Listerine. She held her fork in her left hand to eat the scrambled eggs, but switched it to her right to eat the poached eggs. The cash register on the other side of the room kept on spontaneously going into its cash-out cycle, to the frustration of the cashier.

When the first ray of sunlight from over the distant Vallecito Mountains touched a pastel painting on the far wall of the restaurant, the blond woman lifted her right hand and made a fist in the new daylight; then she packed up her order pad and mouthwash bottle, got up out of the booth, and tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table next to the soggy, blackened old paperback copy of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

THE WAITER was Catholic, so he caught what she was muttering as she hurried past him: “In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.” Then she had pushed open the glass front door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight.

Through the glass he watched her hobble out to a little white Toyota in the dawn-streaked parking lot; then he sighed and told a busboy to bring along a towel and a spray bottle of bleach to that booth, because there was probably blood on the seat. “The booth where Miss Chock Full o’ Nuts was sitting,” he told the busboy.

SHE DROVE west on Leucadia Boulevard, past old bungalows set back under pines and fig trees away from the new, high pavement, and then crossed a set of railroad tracks; the street descended sharply, and she made a right turn onto a wide street with big old eucalyptus trees separating the north and south bound lanes; after driving past a few blocks of dark surfboard shops and vintage clothing stores she turned left, up into one of the narrow lanes that climbed the bluff beyond which lay the sea. Fences and closed garage doors batted back the rattle of her car’s engine.

A long fieldstone wall with pepper trees overhanging it hid a property on the seaward side of Neptune Avenue. At the entrance of the private driveway, by a burly pine tree that was strung with flowering orange black-eyed Susans, the woman pulled over onto the gravel shoulder and switched off the engine. The dawn street was empty except for a couple of dew-frosted cars parked tilted alongside the road, and silent—no birds sang, and the surf beyond the bluff was just a slow subsonic pulse.

Her face was set in a hard grin as she got out of the car, and when she had straightened up on the gravel she began unbuckling the belt on her jeans; and she kept whispering, “Just in the leg, that’s all, settle down, girl! Just in the leg as a warning, and anyway he stabbed himself in the leg already one time, just to have something to talk to some lady about—and he shot himself in the foot before that, with this here very spear. No big deal to him, I swear.” She unzipped her jeans and pulled and tugged them down to her ankles, exposing white panties with SUNDAY embroidered in red on the front, and exposing also a two-foot-long green-painted trident that was duct-taped to her knee and thigh.

It was a short aluminum speargun spear, with three barbless tips at the trident end and three diagonal grooves notched into the pencil-diameter shaft. The tan skin of her thigh was smeared red around several shallow cuts where the points were pressed against her, and it was with a harsh exhalation of relief that she peeled off the tape and lifted the spear away. Gripping it with her elbow against her ribs, she wrapped one length of the tape back around her thigh, covering the cuts, and then she pulled her pants backup and re-buckled her belt.

She stuck the spear upright through the gravel into the loam underneath, and then leaned into the car and hoisted out of the back seat a Makita power screwdriver and a yard-square piece of white-painted plywood with black plastic letters glued onto it. She fished two screws out of her pocket and, with an abrupt shrill blasting of the Makita’s motor, screwed the sign to the trunk of the pine tree.

The sign read:

REST IN PEACE

“THE LITTLE LAME MONARCH”

LATE OF LEUCADIA;

PREVIOUSLY OF SAN DIEGO, SONOMA, LAS VEGAS

AND REMOTER PARTS.

For a moment she just stood there on the dew-damp gravel, with the Makita in her hand still harshly stitching the dawn air with its shrill buzz, and she stared at the sign with a look of blank incomprehension. Then her fingers relaxed and the machine crunched to the gravel, quiet at last.

She plodded over to the upright spear, plucked it free, and strode around the pine tree and down the unpaved private driveway, away from the street.

FIFTEEN MINUTES later and two hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, an earthquake shook the deep-rooted expanse of Hoover Dam, forty-five million pounds of reinforcing steel and four million cubic yards of concrete that stood braced across Black Canyon against the south end of Lake Mead as it had stood for sixty years; morning-shift engineers in the powerhouse wings below the dam thought that some vast vehicle was traversing the highway at the top, or that one of the gigantic turbines had broken under the weight of water surging down through the penstocks buried inside the Arizona-side mountain. Vacationers aboard houseboats on the lake were shaken awake in their bunks, and in the nearby city of Boulder more than two hundred people called the police in a panic.

DAWN-PATROL PROSTITUTES and crack dealers on Hollywood Boulevard reeled and grabbed for walls or parking meters as the sidewalk pavement, already sagging lower than normal because of shoddy tunneling being done for the Metro Rail line, abruptly dropped another inch and a half.

JUST ACROSS the highway from Colma, the gray little cemetery town on the San Mateo Peninsula to which all the evicted burial plots of neighboring San Francisco had been relocated, a pregnant woman wrapped in a bedsheet and screaming nonsense verses in French ran out into the lanes of the 280 Highway.

ALONG OCEAN Beach on the west coast of San Francisco a sudden offshore gale was chopping up the surf, blowing the swells at chaotic angles and wrecking the long clean lines of the waves. The couple of surfers out past the surf line who had been riding the terrifying winter waves gave up and began struggling to paddle back in to shore, and the ill-at-ease men who had been clustering around the vans and pickup trucks in the Sloat Boulevard parking lot cheered up and assured each other that they had stayed out of the water just because it had been obvious that the weather was going to change this way.

Similar abrupt gales split and uprooted trees as far north as Eureka and as far south as San Diego, all on that same morning.

AND IN a bedroom in a run-down old apartment building in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, a fourteen-year-old boy was jolted awake—out of a dream of a woman running madly through rows of grapevines and clutching in her hand an ivy-wrapped staff that somehow had a bloody pinecone stuck on the end of it.

Koot Hoomie Sullivan had sat up in bed at the shock of the vision, and now he swung his bare feet out from under the blankets onto the wooden floor. His heart was still pounding, and his left hand had gone numb though his watchband was comfortably loose.

He glanced out the window, past the lantana branches that pressed against the glass; the carob trees and the parachute-draped van outside were casting long shadows across the broken concrete, and he could hear wild parrots shouting in the tree branches. It could hardly be seven o’clock yet—he was certainly the first person awake in the apartment—but the warm interior air was heavy with the smell of burning coffee.

“Call me Fishmeal,” he whispered, and shivered. He had not smeared mud on the foot of his bed at all this winter, and he had eaten several slices of rare London broil for dinner last night—he had even been allowed to drink a glass of champagne at the stroke of midnight!—but nevertheless he was again, clearly, experiencing the sense of being nearly able to see the whole American West Coast in some off-the-visible-spectrum frequency, as if with eyes underground as well as in the sky, and almost hear heartbeats and whimpers and furtive trysts and betrayals as if through the minute vibrations of freeway-shoulder palm trees and mountain sage and urban-lot weeds. And below the conscious level of his mind, faintly as if from distances remote beyond any capacity of natural space, he thought he could hear shouts and sobs and laughter from entities that were not any part of himself. When he had felt this sense of expanded awareness before, it had generally been in breathless dreams, or at most in the hypnagogic state between sleep and waking, but he was wide awake right now.

He stood up and got dressed, quickly but thoughtfully—Reeboks, and comfortable jeans, and a loose flannel shirt over the bandage taped onto his ribs; and he made sure the end of his belt was rotated into a Möbius twist before he buckled it.

He blinked as he let his gaze drift over the things in his room—the tasco 300-power reflector telescope in the corner, the framed black-and-white photograph of Thomas Edison on the wall, the coin-collection folders, the desk with clothes and a pair of in-line skates piled carelessly on it.

He jumped in surprise, and an instant later a woman’s voice mournfully exclaimed “Oh hell!” somewhere in the parking lot outside the window.

“It’s bar-time showtime, folks,” Kootie whispered self-consciously, and he opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway that led to the open kitchen and the living room.

He could hear someone moving around in his adopted-parents’ bedroom, but he wanted to have something specific to say before he talked to them—so he hurried to the front door and unhooked the feather-fringed chain and unbolted the door.

The woman who was the property owner was just walking around the corner of the building from the parking lot as Kootie shuffled across the threshold and pulled the front door closed behind him; and her brown face was streaked with tears. “Oh, Kootie,” she said, “all the beasties are dead!”

They were already dead, Kootie thought—but he knew what the woman must mean. The morning air was sharply chilly in his curly, sweat-damp hair, but the breeze was still scented with the night’s jasmine, and he felt ready to deal with this particular crisis. “Show me, Johanna,” he said gently.

“Over by the trash cans and Mr. Pete’s van.” She was plodding heavily back the way she had come, her bathrobe flapping around the legs of her burst spandex tights. Over her shoulder she said, “I gave them some new gravel last night—could that have poisoned them?”

Kootie remembered his dreamed vision of the woman in the vineyard with the bloody, ivy-wrapped staff, and as he followed Johanna around the corner into the slantingly sunlit parking lot, he said, “What killed them was nothing that happened around here.”

He trudged after her across the broken checkerboard of asphalt and concrete, and when he had stepped around the back end of the parachute-shrouded van he stopped beside her.

The beasties were obviously dead now. Three of them were sprawled on the pavement and in the ice plant here, their gnarled old hands poking limply out of the thrift-store shirt cuffs, their mouths gaping among the patchy gray post-mortem whiskers, their eyes flat and sheenless behind the scavenged spectacles.

Kootie shock his head and clumsily ran the still-numb fingers of his left hand through his curly black hair. “Terrific,” he said. “What are we going to do with them?”

Johanna sniffed. “We should give them a burial.”

“These people died a long time ago, Johanna,” Kootie said, “and these aren’t their bodies. These aren’t anyone’s bodies. The coroner would go nuts if he got hold of these. I doubt if they’ve got any more internal organs than, a seaslug’s got…and I always thought their skeletons must be arranged pretty freehand, from the way they walk. Walked. I doubt they’ve even got fingerprints.”

Johanna sighed. “I’m glad I got them the Mikasa glass candies at Christmas.”

“They did like those,” Kootie agreed absently. Her late common-law husband had got into the habit of feeding the shambling derelicts, and for the last three Christmases Johanna had bought decorative glass treats for the things, in his memory. They couldn’t eat organic stuff because it would just rot inside their token bellies, but they had still liked to gobble down things that looked like food.

“Good God,” came a man’s voice from behind Kootie; and then a woman said, softly, “What would they die of?”

Kootie turned to his adopted parents with a rueful smile. “Top of the morning. I was hoping I’d be able to get a tarp over ’em before you guys got up, so I could break it to you over coffee.”

His adopted mother glanced at him, and then stared at his side. “Kootie,” she said, her contralto voice suddenly sharp with alarm, “you’re bleeding. Worse than usual, I mean.”

Kootie had already felt the hot wetness over his ribs. “I know, Angelica,” he said to her. To his adopted father he said, “Pete, let’s get these necrotic dudes stashed in your van for now. Then I think we’d better go to Johanna’s office to… confer. I believe this is going to be a busy day. A busy year.”

He nearly always just called them “Mom” and “Dad”—this use of their first names put a stop to further discussion out here, and they both nodded. Angelica said, “I’ll get coffee cooking,” and strode back toward the building. Pete Sullivan rubbed his chin and said, “Let’s use a blanket from inside the van to lift them in. I don’t want to have to touch their ‘skin.’”

ANGELICA SULLIVAN’S maiden name had been Elizalde, and she had the lean face and high cheekbones of a figure in an El Greco painting; her long, straight hair was as black as Kootie’s unruly mane, but after she put four coffee cups of water into the microwave in Johanna’s kitchen, and got the restaurant-surplus coffee urn loaded and turned on, she tied her hair back in a hasty pony tail and hurried into the manager’s office.

A television set was humming on the cluttered desk, but its screen was black, and the only light in the long room was the yellow glow that filtered in through the dusty, vine-blocked windows high in one wall. A worn couch sat against the opposite wall, and she stepped lithely up onto it to reach the bookshelves above it.

She selected several volumes from the shelves, dropping them onto the couch cushions by her feet, and took down too a nicotine-darkened stuffed toy pig; then she hopped down, sniffed the air sharply, and hurried back into the little kitchen—but the coffee was not burning.

A sudden hard knock at the door made her jump, and when she whirled toward the door she saw Kootie’s face peering in at her through the screened door-window; and then the boy opened the door and stepped in, followed by Johanna and Pete.

“You’re not on bar-time, Mom,” said Kootie, panting. “You jumped after I knocked on the door; and Dad jumped after I flicked cold hose-water on his neck.”

Pete’s graying hair was wet, and he nodded. “Not much after.”

Johanna was staring at Kootie without comprehension, so he told her, “Bar-time is when you react to things an instant before they actually happen, like you’re vibrating in the now notch and hanging over the sides a little. It’s…‘sympathetically induced resonation,’ it means somebody’s paying psychic attention to you, watching you magically.” He looked at Pete and Angelica. “I’ve been on bar-time since I woke up. When Johanna found the beasties, I jumped a second before she yelled, and when we went back to the apartment to wash our hands just now, I reached for the phone an instant before it started ringing.”

Kootie led the three of them out of the kitchen into Pete’s long dim office.

“It was one of your clients on the phone,” Pete told Angelica, “Mrs. Perez. She says her grandparents’ ghosts are gone from the iron pots you put them in; the pots aren’t even magnetic anymore, she says. Oh, and I noticed that your voodoo whosis is gone from the cabinet by our front door—the little cement guy with cowrie shells for his eyes and mouth.”

“The Eleggua figure?” said Angelica, collapsing onto the couch. “He’s—what, he’s the Lord of the Crossroads, what can it mean that he’s gone? He must have weighed thirty pounds! Solid concrete! I didn’t forget to propitiate him last week—did I, Kootie?”

Kootie shook his head somberly. “You spit rum all over him, and I put the beef jerky and the Pez dispenser in his cabinet myself:’

Pete was sniffing the stale office air. “Why does everywhere smell like burning coffee this morning?”

“Kootie,” said Angelica, “what’s going on here today?”

Kootie had hiked himself up to sit on the desk next to the buzzing black-screened television set, and he pulled his shirt up out of his pants—the bandage taped to his side was blotted with red, and even as they looked at it a line of blood trickled down to his belt. “And my left hand’s numb,” he said, flexing his fingers, “and I had to rest twice, carrying the dead beasties, because I’ve got no strength in my legs.”

He looked up at his adopted mother. “We’re in the middle of winter,” he went on, in a tense but flat voice. “This is the season when I sometimes dream that I can…sense the American West Coast. This morning—” He paused to cock his head: “—still, in fact—I’ve got that sense while I’m awake. What I dreamed of was a crazy woman running through a vineyard, waving a bloody wand with ivy vines wrapped around it and a pinecone stuck on the end of it.” He pulled his shirt back down and tucked it in messily. “Some balance of power has shifted drastically somewhere—and somebody is paying attention to me; somebody’s going to be coming here. And I don’t think the Solville foxing measures are going to fool this person.”

“Nobody can see through them!” said Johanna loyally. Her late husband, Solomon “Sol” Shadroe, had bought the apartment building in 1974 because its architecture confused psychic tracking, and he had spent nearly twenty years adding rooms and wings onto the structure, and re-routing the water and electrical systems, and putting up dozens of extraneous old TV antennas with carob seed-pods and false teeth and old radio parts hung from them, to intensify the effect; the result was an eccentric stack and scatter of buildings and sheds and garages and conduit, and even now, more than two years after the old man’s death, the tenants still called the rambling old compound Solville.

Pete Sullivan was the manager and handyman for the place now, and he had dutifully kept up the idiosyncratic construction and maintenance programs; now his lean, tanned face was twisted in a squinting smile of apprehension. “So what is it that you sense, son?”

“There’s a—” Kootie said uncertainly, his unfocused gaze moving across the ceiling. “I can almost see it—a chariot—or a…a gold cup? Maybe it’s a tarot card from the Cups suit, paired with the Chariot card from the Major Arcana?—coming here.” He gave Johanna a mirthless smile. “I think it could find me, even here, and somebody might be riding in it, or carrying it.”

Angelica was nodding angrily. “This is the thing, isn’t it, Kootie, that was all along going to happen? The reason why we never moved away from here?”

“Why we stopped running,” ventured Pete. “Why we’ve been…standing our little ground.”

“Why Kootie is an iyawo,” said Johanna, sighing and nodding in the kitchen doorway. “Why this place was first built, from the earthquake wreck of that ghost house. And the—”

“Kootie is not an iyawo,” Angelica interrupted, pronouncing the feminine Yoruba noun as if it were an obscenity. “He hasn’t undergone the kariocha initiation. Tell her, Pete.”

Kootie looked at his adopted father and smiled. “Yeah,” he said softly, “tell her, Dad.”

Pete Sullivan pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and cleared his throat. “Uh, ‘it’s not a river in Egypt,’” he told his wife, quoting a bit of pop-psychology jargon that he knew she hated.

She laughed, though with obvious reluctance. “I know it’s not. The Nile, denial—I know the difference. How is this denial, what I’m saying? Kariocha is a very specific ritual—shave the head, cut the scalp, get three specially initiated drummers to play the consecrated bata drums!—and it just has not been done with Kootie.”

“Not to the letter of the law,” said Pete, shaking out a cigarette and flipping it over the backs of his fingers; “but in the…spirit?” He snapped a wooden match and inhaled smoke, then squeezed the lit match in his fist, which was empty when he opened it again. “Come on, Angie! All the formalities aside, basically a kariocha initiation is putting a thing like an alive-and-kicking ghost inside of somebody’s head, right? Call it a ‘ghost’ or call it an ‘orisha.’ It makes the person who hosts it…what, different So—well, you tell me what state Kootie was in when we found him two years ago. I suppose he’s not still an omo, since the orisha left his head, voluntarily…but it did happen to the boy.”

“I saw him when he was montado,” agreed Johanna, “possessed, in this very kitchen, with that yerba buena y tequila telephone. He had great ashe, the boy’s orisha did, great luck and power, to make a telephone out of mint and tequila and a pencil sharpener, and then call up dead people on it.” She looked across at the boy and smiled sadly: “You’re not a virgin in the head anymore, are you, Kootie?”

“More truth than poetry in that, Johanna,” Kootie agreed, hopping down from the desk. “Yeah, Mom, this does feel like it.” His voice was unsteady, but he managed to look confident as he waved his blood-spotted hand in a gesture that took in the whole building and grounds. “It’s why we’re here, why I’m what I am.” He smiled wanly and added, “It’s why your Mexican wizard made you give a nasty name to this witchery shop you run here. And this is the best place for us to be standing when it meets us. Solville can’t hide us, but it’s a fortified position. We can…receive them, whoever they might be, give them an audience.”

Angelica was sitting on the couch, flipping through the pages of her battered copy of Kardec’s Selected Prayers. Among the other books she had tossed onto the couch were Reichenbach’s Letters on Od and Magnetism, and a spiral-bound notebook with a version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida hand-copied into it, and a paperback copy of Guillermo Ceniza-Bendiga’s Cunjuro del Tobaco.

“How far away are they?” she snapped, without looking up. “Like, are they coming from Los Angeles? New York? Tibet? Mars?”

“The…thing is…on the coast,” said Kootie with a visible shiver. “Sssouth? Yes, south of here, and coming north, like up the 5 Freeway or Pacific Coast Highway.”

CHAPTER TWO

Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.

—William Shakespeare,

Richard II

THE caged clock high on the green-painted wall indicated exactly eleven, and most of the patients were already filing out the door to the yard for their fifteen-minute smoking break, following the nurse who carried the Bic lighter, and Dr. Armentrout was glad to leave the television lounge in the care of the weekend charge nurse. The big, sunny room, with its institutional couches and wall-mounted TV sets, looked as though it should smell of floor wax and furniture polish, but in fact the air was always redolent with low-rent cooking smells; today he could still detect the garlic-and-oil reek of last night’s lasagna.

The common telephone was ringing behind him as he puffed down the hallway to his office; each of the patients apparently assumed that any call must be for someone else, and so no one ever seemed to answer the damned thing. Armentrout certainly wasn’t going to answer it; he was cautiously elated that he hadn’t got his usual terrible dawn wake-up call at home today—the phone had rung at his bedside as always, but for once there had been, blessedly, only vacuous silence at the other end—and for damn sure he wasn’t going to pick up any ringing telephones that he didn’t have to answer. Resolutely ignoring the diminishing noise, Armentrout peeked through the wire-reinforced glass of the narrow window in his office door before turning the key in the first of the two locks, though it was nearly impossible that a patient could have sneaked inside; and he saw no one, and of course when he had turned the key in the second lock and the red light in the lockplate came on and he pulled the door open, the little room was empty. On the weekends the intern with whom he shared the office didn’t come in, and Armentrout saw patients alone.

He preferred that.

He lowered his substantial bulk into his desk chair and picked up the file of admission notes on the newest patient, with whom he had an appointment in less than a quarter of an hour. She was an obese teenager with a dismal Global Assessment Score of 20, diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder, Manic. Today he would give her a glass of water with four milligrams of yellow benzodiazepine powder dissolved into it; instantly soluble and completely tasteless, the drug would not only calm her down and make her suggestible but also block the neurotransmissions that permitted memorization—she would remember nothing of today’s session.

A teenager! he thought as he absently kneaded the crotch of his baggy slacks. Obese! Manic! Well, she’ll be going home in a few days, totally cured and with no manic episodes in her future; and I will have had a good time and added some depth-of-field and at least a few minutes to my lifespan. Everybody will be better off.

With his free hand he brushed some patient’s frightful crayon drawings away from the rank of instant-dial buttons alongside the telephone. When the girl arrived he would lift the receiver and punch the button to ring the telephone in the conference room, where he had left good old reliable Long John Beach jiggling and mumbling in a chair by the phone—though it was possible that Armentrout wouldn’t need Long John Beach’s help anymore, if this morning’s reprieve from the hideous wake-up call was a sign of the times, a magical gift of this new year.

The ringing of this telephone, the one on his desk, snapped him out of his optimistic reverie; and under his spray-stiffened white hair his forehead was suddenly chilly with a dew of sweat. Slowly, his lips silently forming the words no, please, no, he reached out and lifted the receiver.

“Dr. Armentrout,” he said slowly, hardly expelling any breath.

“Doc,” came a tinny voice out of the earpiece, “this is Taylor Hamilton? Desk sergeant at the San Marcos County Sheriff’s branch? I’m calling from a pay phone in the back hall.”

Armentrout’s chin sagged into his jowls with relief, and then he was smiling with fresh excitement as he picked up a pen. For the past several years he had been alerting police officers and paramedics and psych techs all over southern California to watch for certain kinds of 51-50, which was police code for involuntary-seventy-two-hour-hold psychiatric cases.

“Taylor Hamilton,” noted Armentrout, consciously keeping the eagerness out of his voice as he wrote down the man’s name on a Post-it slip. “Got it. You’ve got a good one?”

“This lady seems like just what the doctor ordered,” said Hamilton with a nervous laugh. “I bet you anything that she turns out to have gone AWOL from your place yesterday.”

Armentrout had already pulled down an escape-report form from the shelf over the desk, and he now wrote 12/31/94 in the date box.

“I’ll bet you,” Hamilton went on, “one thousand dollars that she’s a runaway of yours.”

Armentrout lifted the pen from the paper. “That’s a lot of money,” he said dubiously. A thousand dollars! And he hated it when his informants made the arrangement sound so nakedly mercenary. “What makes you think she’s…one of mine?”

“Well, she called nine-one-one saying that she’d just half an hour earlier killed a guy in a field above the beach in Leucadia this morning, like right at dawn, stabbed him with a speargun spear, if you can believe that—but when the officers had her take them to where it supposedly happened and show them, there was no body or blood at all, and no spear; in fact they reported that the field was full of blooming flowers and grapevines and it was obvious nobody had walked across it for at least the last twenty-four hours. She told them it was a king that she killed there, a king called the Flying Nun—that’s solid ding talk, isn’t it? The officers are convinced that her story is pure hallucination. She hasn’t stopped crying since she called nine-one-one, and her nose won’t stop bleeding, and she says some guy rearranged her teeth, though she doesn’t show any bruises or cuts. And listen, when they first tried to drive her back here, for questioning?—the black-and-white wouldn’t start, they needed a jump; and when we’ve been talking to her in here the lights keep dimming and my hearing aid doesn’t work.”

Armentrout was frowning thoughtfully. The electromagnetic disturbances indicated one of the dissociative disorders—psychogenic amnesia, fugue states, depersonalization. These were the tastiest maladies he could cure…short of curing somebody of their very life, of course, which was ethically problematic and in any case contributed too heavily to the—

He shied away from the memory of the morning telephone calls.

But a thousand dollars! This Hamilton fellow was a greedy pig. This wasn’t really supposed to be about money.

“I don’t,” Armentrout began—

But she did go crazy on this morning, he thought. She might very well have been reacting to the same thing, whatever it might be, that saved me from my intolerable wake-up call. These poor suffering psychos are often psychic, and a dissociative, having distanced herself from the ground state of her core personality, might be able to sense a wider spectrum of magical effects. By examining her I might be able to figure out what the hell has happened. I should call around, in fact, and tell all my sentries to watch especially for a psychosis that was triggered this morning.

“—see any reason not to pay you a thousand dollars for her,” he, finished, nevertheless still frowning at the price. “Can I safely fax you the AWOL report?”

“Do it in…exactly ten minutes, okay? I can make sure nobody else is near the machine, and then as soon as your fax has cooled off I’ll smudge the date and pretend to find it on yesterday’s spike.”

Armentrout glanced at his watch and then bent over the police-report form again. “Name and description?”

“Janis Cordelia Plumtree,” said Hamilton. “She has a valid driver’s license, and I Xeroxed it. Ready? DOB 9/20/67…”

Armentrout began neatly filling in the boxes on the escape-report form. This morning a manic teenager on benzodiazepine, and, soon, a dissociative who was strong enough to interfere with both AC and DC…and who might also provide a clue to why Armentrout had been, at least for this morning, freed from the attention of all the resentful ghosts and ghost fragments!

This was already shaping, up to be a fine year, though it was only eleven hours old.

When he finally hung up the telephone he looked at his watch again. He had five minutes before he should send the fax or expect the bipolar girl to be brought in.

He got his feet firmly under the chair and stood up with a grunt, then crossed to the long couch that couldn’t be seen through the door window, and lifted off of the cushions a stack of files and a box of plastic Lego bricks. Clearing the field, he thought with some anticipation, for the cultivation of the bipolar girl’s cure. The plowing and seeding of her recovery. And it would be a real cure, as decisive as surgery—not the dreary, needlessly guilt-raising patchwork of psychotherapy. Armentrout saw no value in anyone dredging up old guilts and resentments, ever.

Finally he unlocked the top drawer of the filing cabinet and rolled it partway out. Inside were only two things, two purple velvet boxes.

One box contained a battered but polished .45-caliber derringer for which he had paid a hundred thousand dollars a year and a half ago, its two stubby barrels chambered to take .410 shot shells as well as Colt .45 rounds; some spiritualist medium had found the blocky little gun on Ninth Street in downtown Las Vegas in 1948, and there was documentation to suggest that the gun had been used to castrate a powerful French occultist there; and Armentrout knew that a woman had killed herself with it in Delaware in October of 1992, shortly before he had acquired it. Probably it had inflicted injuries on other people at other times. The tiny gun was alleged, with some authority, to be able to shoot straight through magical protections that would deflect a bullet shot from a mundane gun: the French occultist had been heavily warded, but the person who had shot him had been his wife and the mother of his children, and so she had been inside his guard and able to wound him—and the gun had thus definitively shared in her privileged position, and was now reputedly capable of shooting the equivalent of supernatural-Teflon rounds.

Armentrout had never fired it, and certainly he wouldn’t be needing it for the bipolar teenager.

The other velvet box he lifted out of the file drawer.

He carried it to the low coffee table carefully. Inside the box were twenty cards from a tarot deck that had been painted in Marseilles in 1933. Armentrout had paid a San Francisco bookseller four hundred thousand dollars for the cards in 1990. Twenty cards was less than a third of the complete tarot deck, and the powerful Death and The Tower cards were not among this partial set—but these twenty cards were from one of the fabulously rare Lombardy Zeroth decks, painted by a now-disbanded secret guild of damagingly initiated artists, and the images on the cards were almost intolerably evocative of the raw Jungian archetypes.

Armentrout had used the contents of this box on many occasions—he had awakened catatonics simply by holding the Judgment card in front of their glassy eyes, realigned the minds of undifferentiated schizophrenics with a searing exposure of The Moon, settled the most conflicted border lines with the briefest palmed flash of The Hanged Man; and on a couple of occasions he had induced real, disorganized schizophrenia by showing a merely neurotic patient the Fool card.

For the bipolar girl today he would try first the Temperance card, the winged maiden pouring water from one jug to another.

And he would avoid looking squarely at any of the cards himself. When he had first got the deck he had forced himself to scrutinize the picture on each card—enduring the sea-bottom explosions they seemed to set off in his mind, clenching his fists as alien images arrowed up to his conscious levels like deep-water monsters bursting up into the air.

The experience had, if anything, only diminished his personal identity, and so he had not been in danger of attracting the notice of his…of any Midwest ghost… but locally he had been a maelstrom in the psychic water table, and for the next three days his phone had rung at all hours with southern California ghosts clamoring on the line, and after a few weeks he had noticed that his hair was growing out completely white.

And like a lock of unruly hair, he thought now as he picked up the escape-report form and turned his chair toward the fax machine, this teenage girl’s mania will be drawn out tight by the urgent attraction of the image on the card, and I will snip that bit off of her—

—and swallow it into myself.

She was at the door; he took the telephone receiver off the cradle, pushed the instant-dial button, and then stood up ponderously to let her in.

IN THE Long Beach apartment building known as Solville, Angelica Sullivan had been having a busy morning; she wanted to hover protectively over Kootie, but she had found that there were other demands on her time.

Over the rental-office door that faced the alley, she had last year hung up—reluctantly, for the business name had not been of her choosing—a sign that read TESTICULOS DEL LEON—BOTANICA Y CONSULTORIO. And it seemed that every client who had ever consulted her here had come blundering up to that rental-office door today, or at least called on the telephone; they were mostly Hispanic and black, dishwashers and motel maids and gardeners, on their lunch breaks or off work or out of work, and nearly all of them were jabbering with gratitude at having been abruptly relieved, at about dawn, of the yarious afflictions that had led them to seek out Angelica’s help in the first place. Most mentioned having been awakened by an earthquake, though the radio news station that Angelica had turned on hadn’t yet mentioned one.

Many of her people had felt that this deliverance needed to be formalized with ritual thanks, and so, with help from Kootie and Pete and Johanna, Angelica had hurriedly tried to comply. In her role as a curandera she had got pots of mint tea brewing, and served it in every vessel in the place that would do for a cup, and Johanna had even dug out some of her late husband’s old coffee cups, still red-stained from the cinnamon tea that Sol Shadroe had favored; as a maja, Angelica had lit all the veladores, the candles in the glass tumblers with decals of saints stuck to the outsides; as a huesera she had got sweaty massaging newly painless backs and shoulder joints; and out in the parking lot, to perform a ritual limpia cleansing, six men in their under-shorts were now crowded into a child’s inflatable pool that Kootie had filled with honey and bananas and water from the hose.

Cures of impotence, constipation, drug craving, and every other malady appeared to have been bestowed wholesale as the sun had come up, and in spite of Angelica’s repeated protests that she had done nothing to accomplish any of it, the desk in Pete’s office was now heaped with coins; whatever amount the pile of money added up to, it would be divisible by forty-nine, for forty-nine cents was the only price Angelica was permitted by the spirit world to charge for her magical services.

A few of her clients, like the one who had called Pete first thing in the morning, were unhappy to find that the spirits of their dead relatives were gone from the iron containers—truck brake drums, hibachis, Dutch ovens—in which they had dwelt since Angelica had corralled and confined them, one by laborious one over the last two and a half years; the candies left out for these spirits last night had apparently not been touched, and the rooster-blood-painted wind chimes that hung from the containers had rung no morning greeting today. Angelica could only tell these people that their relatives had finally become comfortable with the notion of moving on to Heaven. That explanation went down well enough.

Others with the same kind of problem were not so easily mollified. Frantic santeros from as far away as Albuquerque had telephoned to ask if Angelica, too, had found that her orisha stones had lost all their ashe, all their vitality—she could only confirm it bewilderedly, and tell them in addition about the total disappearance of the cement Eleggua figure that she had kept by her front door; and as the sunlight-shadows in the kitchen had touched their farthest reach across the worn yellow linoleum and begun to ebb back, Angelica began to get the first news of gang warfare in the alleys of Los Angeles and Santa Ana, skirmishes ignited by the absence today of the palo gangas that served as supernatural bodyguards to the heroin and crack cocaine dealers.

“Were those ghosts too?” asked Pete as he carried a stockpot full of small change into the kitchen and heard Angelica acknowledging the latest such bulletin.

“The gangas?” said Angelica as she hung up the phone for the hundredth time and brushed back stray strands of her sweaty black hair. “Sure. The paleros get some human remains into a cauldron, and it’s their slave as long as it stays under their control. That thing that was hassling us in ‘92 was one, that thing that laughed all the time and talked in rhyming Spanish.”

“The canvas bag full of hair,” said Pete, nodding, “with the Raiders cap stapled on the top.” He grunted as he hoisted the pot up and dumped the coins in a glittering waterfall into the oil drum he’d dragged in an hour ago, which was now already a third full of coins. “I call it a good day, when things like that are banished.”

The kitchen, and the office and even the parking lot now, smelled of mint and beer and sweat and burning candle-wicks, but under it all was still the aroma of burning coffee. Angelica sniffed and shook her head doubtfully; she opened her mouth to say something, but a white-haired old grandmother bustled into the kitchen just then, reverently holding out a quarter and two dimes and four pennies in the palm of her hand.

“Gracias, Señora Soollivan,” the old woman said, pushing the coins toward Angelica.

Angelica couldn’t remember now what service this old woman was grateful for—some haunting ended, some bowel disorder relieved, some recurrent nightmare blessedly forgotten.

“No,” said Angelica, “I haven’t—”

But now a man in a mechanic’s uniform blundered into the kitchen behind the old woman. “Mrs. Sullivan,” he said breathlessly, “your amuletos finally worked—my daughter sees no devils in the house now. I got the cundida at work this week, so I can give you two hundred dollars—”

Angelica was nodding and waving her hands defensively in front of herself. She knew about cundidas—a group of people at a workplace would contribute some amount of each paycheck to the “good quantity” fund, and each week a different one of them got the whole pool; among the new-immigrant Hispanic community, to whom bank accounts were an alien concept, the cundidas were the easiest way to save money.

“I didn’t do anything,” she said loudly. “Don’t pay me for your blessings—somebody else has paid the price of it.”

And who on earth can that have been? she wondered.

“But I need to pay,” the man said quietly.

Angelica let her shoulders droop. “Okay,” she said, exhaling. “If I run into your benefactor, I’ll pass it on. But you can only give me forty-nine cents.”

During Christmas week in 1993, Angelica had—finally, at the age of thirty-five—flown alone to Mexico City and then driven a rented car more than a hundred miles southeast to a little town called Ciudad Mendoza. Members of her grandfather’s family were still living in the poor end of the town, known as Colonia Liberacion, and after identifying herself to the oldest citizens and staying with some of her distant relatives until after Christmas, she had got directions to the house of an old man called Esteban Sandoval, whom she was assured was the most powerful mago south of Matamoros. In exchange for the rental car and the cut-out hologram bird from one of her credit cards, Sandoval had agreed to complete and formalize and sanction her qualifications for the career she had fallen into a year earlier.

For three months Sandoval had instructed her in the practices of the ancient folk magics that are preserved as santeria and brujería and curanderismo; and on the night before he put her on the bus that would take her on the first leg of her long journey back to her new American family, he had summoned several orishas, invisible entities somewhat more than ghosts and less than gods, and had relayed to her from them her ita, the rules that would henceforth circumscribe her personal conduct of magic. Among those dictates had been the distasteful name that she was to give to her business, and the requirement that she charge only forty-nine cents for each service.

Pete Sullivan accepted the exact change from the two people and walked over to toss it too into the barrel of coins.

Kootie was at the open kitchen door now, silhouetted against the spectacle of Angelica’s colorfully dressed clients dancing under the sun-dappled palm trunks outside, and his eyes were wide and the hand he was pressing to his side was spotted with fresh blood.

“Mom—Dad—” he said. “They’re here, nearly—block or two away.”

Pete pushed the old woman and the mechanic out of the kitchen, into the crowded office room, and when he turned back to Kootie and Angelica he lifted the front of his untucked shirt to show the black Pachmayr grip of the .45 automatic tucked into his belt.

It was, Angelica knew, loaded with 230-grain hollow-point Eldorado Star fire rounds that she had dipped in an omiero of mint and oleander tea; and Pete had carefully etched L.A. CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL in tiny letters onto the muzzle ring of the stainless-steel slide.

“Take it, Angelica,” he said tensely. “I could hardly even pick it up this morning. My Houdini hands are on extra solid today.”

Angelica stepped forward and pulled the gun out of Pete’s pants, making sure the safety catch was up and engaged. She tucked it into her own jeans and pulled her blouse out to cover it.

Kootie nodded. “We’ll receive them courteously but carefully,” he said.

Through the open kitchen door, from the street, Angelica could now hear an approaching discordant rumble, like bad counterpoint tempo beaten out on a set of bata drums that the orishas would surely reject for being perilously tuned; and when she stepped outside, striding resolutely across the sunlit walk and onto the driveway, she saw a big, boxy red truck turn in from the street and then slowly, boomingly, labor up the gentle slope toward where she stood. Peripherally she noticed that Kootie was now standing at her left and Pete at her right, and she reached out and clasped their hands.

The red truck rocked and clattered to a halt a couple of yards in front of them. It was streaked and powdered with dust, but its red color shone through lividly; and she noticed that an aura like heat waves shimmered around it for a distance of about a foot, and that the leaves of the carob trees on the far side of the driveway looked gray where she viewed them through the aura.

The truck’s driver’s-side door clanked and squeaked open, and a rangy man of about Pete’s age stepped down to the pavement; his worn boots and jeans seemed only deceptively mundane to Angelica, and his lean, tanned face, behind a ragged mustache the color of tobacco and ashes, was tense with care.

“What seeems to be the problem?” he drawled, and there was at least some exhausted humor in his voice and his squinting brown eyes.

The passenger-side door was levered open now, and a pregnant woman in a wrinkled white linen sundress stepped down onto the driveway-side grass. She too looked exhausted, and her blond hair was pulled back, like Angelica’s black hair, into a hasty, utilitarian ponytail—but Angelica thought she was nevertheless the most radiantly beautiful woman she had ever seen.

“Any problem here,” said Pete levelly, “is one you’ve brought with you. Who are you?”

“Good point,” said the man with the mustache, nodding judiciously. “About us bringing it with us. Sorry—my name’s Archimedes Mavranos, and this lady is Diana Crane.” He looked past Angelica’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “And we sure do apologize to be interrupting your party.”

Angelica glanced behind her, and realized how odd the crowd in the parking lot must look—the kneeling old women giving thanks, the men and women appearing to pantomime swimming and goose-stepping and traffic-directing as they flexed various freshly pain-free limbs, and the six apparently naked men crowded into the Little Mermaid inflatable pool.

“We’re humbly looking,” Mavranos went on seriously, “for a man with a wound in his side that won’t quit bleeding:’

After a moment, Kootie let go of Angelica’s hand; he held up his blood-reddened palm, and then, as slowly as a surrendering man showing a gun to a policeman, lifted his shirttail to show the bloody bandage.

“A kid!” said Mavranos with an accusing glance toward Pete. He peered more closely at Kootie, then stepped forward. Angelica let her right hand brush the hem of her blouse over the .45, but the man had only knelt before Kootie and taken the boy’s left wrist in his gnarled brown hand. “You’ve Möbiused your watchband?” he said gently. “That won’t work anymore, son. Now when you do that you’re just insulating yourself from your own self.” He had been unbuckling the watch strap as he spoke, and now he tucked the watch into Kootie’s shirt pocket. “If you follow me. Oh, and the same with your belt, hey? That I’ll let you fix. Lord, boy,” he said, shaking his head as he lithely straightened up again, “both legs and your left hand! You must have been weak as a kitten all day.”

Kootie seemed embarrassed, as though he’d blundered into a girls’ rest room by mistake. The boy quickly unbuckled his belt, straightened out the twist, and re-buckled it; then he pointed at the truck and asked gruffly, “Why is your truck the color of blood?”

The pregnant woman by the truck closed her eyes, and Mavranos crossed his arms and nodded several times. “The hard way, of course. You take the low road and I’ll crawl in the goddamned dirt, right? That’s the spirit. Oh, that was the wrong question, boy!”

He turned and walked back to the still-open driver’s-side door, and for a moment Angelica hoped these two people, and whatever they might have brought with them in the truck, would now just go away; but Mavranos only leaned in to hook out a can of Coors beer, which, from the way it swung in his hand as he trudged back to where he had been standing, was already half-emptied.

He took a sip from it before speaking. “But since you ask. This lady and a friend painted it red on Ash Wednesday of 1990, in Las Vegas, to elude detection by the police—like the blood of the lamb over the doorposts in Egypt, right?—and ever since then the truck spon-tene-eously turns red every year during Holy Week. Ordinarily it’s blue.”

“This isn’t Holy Week,” ventured Pete. “This is New Year’s Day.”

“Oh, the error of it hadn’t eluded me, honest,” Mavranos said. He looked again at Kootie, and frowned. “You were a street beggar in L.A. a couple of years ago, weren’t you? With an old black guy and a dog? Didn’t I give you five bucks?”

Kootie’s eyes widened, and then narrowed in a slow, shy smile. “Yeah, you did. And it was a blue truck.”

“Sure,” Mavranos said. “I remember now I saw room for the crown on your head even then. I should have figured it would be you we’d find today.” After crouching to put his beer can down on the pavement, he straightened and spat in the palm of one hand and then struck it with his other fist; the spit flew toward the kitchen, and he looked up at the crazy old building for the first time.

He was staring at the sign over the door. “I met Leon,” he said softly; “though he had lost his testiculos years before.”

On top of her anxious tension, Angelica was now embarrassed too. “It means Testicles of the Lion,’” she said. “All consultorios have animal valor names—Courage of the Bull, Heart of the Leopard, things like that. It’s…a custom.”

Mavranos looked down at her, and his eyes were bright until he blinked and resumed his protective squint. “We’re in the choppy rapids of custom every which way you look, ma’am. Now, the random…trajectory of my spit has indicated your building will you give permission for my party to come inside?”

Party? Angelica was suddenly certain that there was a third person in the old red truck—a person, the person, central, to all this—sick or injured or even dead; and suddenly she very strongly didn’t want any of these strangers inside the buildings of Solville. Apparently permission would have to be given for that to happen—and she opened her mouth to deny it—

But Kootie spoke first. “I am the master of this house,” the boy said. “And you have my permission to bring your party inside.”

Angelica wheeled on Kootie, and she could feel her face reddening. “Kootie, what are you—” Then she stopped, and just exhaled the rest of her breath in helpless frustration.

Under the tangled curls of his black hair, Kootie’s face looked leaner, older now; but the apologetic smile he gave her was warm with filial affection, and sad with a boy’s sadness.

Mavranos’s grin was flinty. “Just what you were about to say yourself, ma’am, I know,” he growled. “Oh well—now that the boy’s got the strength in his limbs back, maybe he could help me and this other gentleman with the carrying.” He picked up his beer can and drained it, then tossed it onto the grass. Perhaps to himself, he said, softly, “But why couldn’t the boy have asked me whose truck it was?”

Again Angelica opened her mouth to say something, but Mavranos waved her to silence. “Moot point and rhetorical question,” he said. “It always happens this way, I guess,”

“At least give me forty-nine cents!” Angelica said. If these people pay me and thus become clients of mine, she thought, if I’m following my ita in my dealings with them, we can be protected by the orishas; if there are any orishas left out there, if my ita still counts for anything, after whatever it is that has happened today.

Mavranos grinned sleepily and dug a handful of change out of his jeans pocket. “Look at that,” he said. “Exact.” He dropped the quarter and two dimes and four pennies into her shaky, outstretched palm. He looked past her at Kootie and Pete, and called, “You fellas want to give me a hand? Let me get the back of the truck open.”

He plodded back toward the truck, his hand rattling keys in the pocket of his old denim jacket, and Kootie and Pete exchanged a nervous glance and then stepped forward to follow him.