Shadowfires

a man from Mars than he had trying to get a handle on wasted men like this one. He just sighed wearily, tugged on the cuffs of his white silk shirt, and adjusted his pearl cuff links, first the right one, then the left.
    Hagerstrom said, “You know, sometimes it seems like a law of
nature that any potential witness to a homicide in this town has got
to be drunk and about three weeks away from his last bath.”
    “If the job was easy,” Verdad said, “we wouldn't like it so much, would we?”
    “I would. Jesus, this guy stinks.”
    As they talked about him, Percy did, in fact, seem oblivious. He
picked at an unidentifiable piece of crud that had crusted to one of
the sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt, and after a deep rumbling burp, he
returned to the subject of his burnt-out cerebellum. “Cheap hootch
fuzzies up your brain. I swear Christ, I think my brain's shrinkin' a
little bit more every day, and the empty spaces is
fillin' up with hairballs and old wet newspapers. I think a cat sneaks up on me and spits the hairballs in my ears when I'm
asleep.” He sounded entirely serious, even a bit afraid of such a
bold and invasive feline.
    Although he wasn't able to remember his last name or much of anything else, Percy had enough brain tissue left-in there among the hairballs and old wet newspapers-to know that the proper thing to do upon finding a corpse was to call the police. And though he was not exactly a pillar of the community with much respect for the law or any sense of common decency, he had hurried immediately in search of the authorities. He thought that reporting the body in the dumpster might earn him a reward.
    Now, after arriving with the technicians from the Scientific
Investigation Division more than an hour ago, and after fruitlessly
questioning Percy while the SID men strung their cables and switched
on their lights, Lieutenant Verdad saw another rat explode in panic
from the garbage as the coroner's men, having overseen the extensive photographing of the corpse in situ, began to haul the dead woman out of the dumpster. Pelt matted with filth, tail long and pink and moist, the disgusting rodent scurried along the wall of the building toward the mouth of the alley. Julio required every bit of his self-control to keep from drawing his gun and firing wildly at the creature. It dashed to a storm drain with a broken grating and vanished into the depths.
    Julio hated rats. The mere sight of a rat robbed him of the self-
image he had painstakingly constructed during more than nineteen
years as an American citizen and police officer. When he glimpsed a
rat, he was instantly stripped of all that he had accomplished and
become in nearly two decades, was transformed into pathetic little
Julio Verdad of the Tijuana slums, where he had been born in a one-
room shack made of scrap lumber and rusting barrels and tar paper. If
the right of tenancy had been predicated upon mere numbers, the rats
would have owned that shack, for the seven members of the Verdad clan
were far outnumbered by vermin.
    Watching this rat scramble out of the portable floodlights
and into shadows and down the alley drain, Julio felt as if his good
suit and custom-made shirt and Bally loafers were sorcerously
transformed into thirdhand jeans, a tattered shirt, and badly worn
sandals. A shudder passed through him, and for a moment he was five
years old again, standing in that stifling shack on a blistering
August day in Tijuana, staring down in paralyzed horror at the two
rats that were chewing busily at the throat of the four-month-old
baby, Ernesto. Everyone else was outside, sitting in patches of shade
along the dusty street, fanning themselves, the children playing at
quiet games and sipping at water, the adults cooling off with the
beer they'd purchased cheap from two young ladrones who had successfully broken into a brewery warehouse the night before. Little Julio tried to scream, tried to call for help, but no sound would escape him, as if words and cries could not rise because of the heavy, humid August air. The rats, aware of him, turned boldly upon him, hissing, and even when he lunged forward, swatting furiously at them, they backed off only with great reluctance and only after one of them had tested his mettle by biting the meatiest part of his left hand. He screamed and struck out in even greater fury, routing the rats at last, and he was still screaming when his mother and his oldest sister, Evalina, rushed