The Tortilla Curtain

neatly severed strap. The thing was wrong somehow in his mother-in-law's hand, anomalous, out of place, but powerfully evocative for all that.
    “I found this in my purse,” Kit said, and her voice rose in surprise and puzzlement. “I can't imagine how it got there.”
    But Delaney could. It came to him all at once, and he glanced at Kyra and saw that she understood too. “Dominick Flood” was all he could say.
    “But why--?” Kyra began.
    Epiphany came to Kit with a force all its own and her eyes sank back into her head in shame and hurt--Dominick Flood had been playing a very nasty game with her, stringing her along, waiting his chance. “I can't believe it,” she said.
    Delaney pictured him, suave and unctuous, Kit clinging to his arm as they watched the spectacle of the fire from the safety of the police line, and the dawning realization coming over him that this was his opportunity. The monitoring device would still be sending out its signal from Arroyo Blanco, even if it wasn't from his own house, and the people at the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service would have known that he'd been evacuated overnight, that there'd been an emergency--it would probably take them days to sort it out. And Flood? A bank account in the Bahamas? A chalet in Switzerland, a beach house in the Seychelles? He would have had all the eventualities worked out.
    Kit drew in a heavy wet gulp of air. She looked as if she was about to break down and Kyra had just crossed the room to sit beside her on the sofa and offer some daughterly comfort when Jordan came tearing into the room, his clothes even dirtier and more disarranged than they'd been twenty minutes ago. “Mom,” he panted, and you could see his ribs heaving against the thin skin of his T-shirt, “I looked all over the place and I just can't find Dame Edith anywhere.”

The Tortilla Curtain

4
    CáNDIDO SAW THE CAT THERE AND AMERICA CRADLING it in her arms like a doll even as her body went rigid with the pain and then relaxed and tensed all over again for the next contraction. His first impulse was to shoo it away, but he stopped himself. If it helped take her mind off the pains, then why not?--and it seemed lost and hungry just like they were, content in the face of all this smoldering disaster to curl up and comfort his wife. All right. But the fire was creeping closer, charged one minute by the winds and then knocked back again when they ran out of breath. It wasn't safe here--they were taking a gamble, a big gamble--but he didn't know what else to do but watch and wait. And pray. Maybe pray too.
    He already knew what was on the other side of the wall, and the prospect wasn't very comforting. In fact, if he let himself think about it his heart raced so much he was afraid it was going to burst. A development of big rich houses lay just a stone's throw away--he'd seen that much from the roof of the shed--and it was as dark as dark and totally deserted. He knew the place now. He'd worked in there one day with Al Lopez on a fence, but he didn't remember the wall--that was new, he was sure of it. What chilled him, though, was the thought that if all these people had been evacuated, abandoning all their things, their fine rich houses and their lawns and gardens and all the rest, then it looked grim for him and America. The fire was coming this way, no doubt about it, and they would be trapped, burned alive, the fat under their skin sizzling like backmeat in a frying pan, their bones charred and broken. He watched her. He sat with her. And he prayed.
    Sometime in the small hours of that insufferable night America called out so sharply it was like a bark, like a dog's bark, and the cat was startled and jumped away from her and she tried to get up from the bed he'd made for her from the bags of seed. “Cándido,” she croaked, “I have to go, I have to move my bowels, I... I can't... hold it in any longer,” and as he tried to lift her up, to help her, he saw it between her legs, against her naked thighs and the red paste of the blood: her baby, his baby, his son. The crown of the baby's head was there between her legs, black wet wisps of hair, and he held her down and lifted her legs and told her to push, it was coming, and to push, push, push. Then there was a sound like gas released from a balloon--_Pffffffft!__--and there he was, his son, lying there all wrinkled in a bag of skin, slick with blood and mucus and what looked like curdled cheese. The noise