The Tortilla Curtain

the edge of the property. Then she lowered the window and listened. All was still. There was no breeze, no sound anywhere. The shrubs and trees hung against the backdrop of the mountains as if they'd been painted in place, flat and two-dimensional, and the mountains themselves seemed as lifeless as the mountains of the moon. Kyra stepped out of the car, leaving the door open behind her as a precaution.
    Nothing's going to happen, she told herself as she strode up the walk. They were hikers, that was all. And if they weren't, well, they were gone now and wouldn't be back. She concentrated on the little things: the way the grass had been hand-clipped between the flag-stones, the care with which the flowerbeds had been mulched and the shrubs trimmed. She saw that the oleander and crape myrtle were in bloom, and the bed of clivia beneath the library windows. Everything was as it should be, nothing amiss, nothing forgotten. She'd have to remember to compliment the gardener.
    Inside too: everything looked fine. None of the zones had been tampered with and the timed, lights had already switched on in the kitchen and the dining room. There were no realtors' cards on the table in the foyer, and that was a disappointment, a continuing disappointment, but then it would take the right buyer to appreciate the place, and it was bound to move, it was, sure it was-especially if she could convince Patricia Da Ros to drop the price. She checked her watch: five minutes gone. She made a quick circuit of the house--no need to kill herself since nobody had shown the place--then returned to the entrance hall, punched in the alarm code and stepped back out on the porch. One trip round the back and she'd be on her way.
    Kyra always took long strides, even in heels--it was her natural gait. Delaney told her he found it sexy because it made her sway over her hips in an exaggerated way, but she'd never thought a thing about it--she'd always been athletic, a tomboy really, and she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't in a hurry. She went round the north side of the house first, striding over the flagstone path as if she were almost running, her head swiveling back and forth to take in every least detail. It wasn't till she turned the comer to the back of the house that she saw it, and even then she thought it was some trick of the light.
    She stopped as if she'd been jerked on a leash. She was bewildered at first, then outraged, and finally just plain frightened. There, scrawled across the side of the house in six-foot-high spray-painted letters, was a message for her. Black paint, slick with the falling light, ten looping letters in Spanish: PINCHE PUTA *** *** ***
    The sun was distant, a molten speck in the sky, but hot for all that. Delaney was out back of the community center, where he'd been working on his paddleball game, one-on-one with the wall. He was sitting on the back steps, a sweat-beaded Diet Coke in hand, when he became aware of the murmur of voices coming from somewhere inside the room behind him. The shades were drawn, but the window was open a crack, and as the sun flared out from the windows and the inevitable turkey vulture rode the unflagging currents high overhead, the murmur became two distinct and discrete voices, and he realized he was listening to Jack Jr. and an unknown companion engage in the deep philosophic reflections of a torpid late-summer adolescent afternoon.
    “Cal State, huh?” Jack Jr. said.
    “Yup. Best I could do--with my grades.” A snigger. A double snigger.
    “Think you can handle Northridge? I mean, I hear it's like Little Mexico or something.”
    “Yup. That's right. Fuckin' Little Mexico all the way. But you know what the bright side is?”
    “What?”
    “Mexican chicks.”
    “Get out of here.”
    A pause. Slurping sounds. A suppressed belch.
    “No shit, man--they give killer head.”
    “Get out of here.”
    Another pause, long, reflective. “Only one thing you got to worry about--”
    “What's that?”
    “The ten-pounds-a-year rule.”
    A tentative laugh, uncertain of itself, but game. “Yeah?”
    “At sixteen”--slurp, pause--“they're killers, but from then on, every year they gain ten pounds till they wind up looking like the Pillsbury Dough Boy with a suntan--and who wants to stick your dick in something like that, even their mouth?”
    Delaney stood. This was the punch line and it was accompanied by a virtuosic duet of sniggers. Jesus, he thought, and his legs felt heavy