The Tortilla Curtain

floor space like the narrow end of a coffin, the head space claustrophobic at best. The car smelled of oil, leather, gasoline. “I feel like I'm in high school again,” Delaney said.
    “It'll only be a minute.” Jack turned the key and pushed a button on the dash and the engine stuttered to life. The car was one of his hobbies. He liked to play with it on weekends, but he reserved the Range Rover for the freeway wars, five days a week, down the canyon road to the PCH and up the Santa Monica and 405 freeways to Sunset and his office in Century City.
    They were silent a moment, the thrum of the car all-encompassing, every bump and dip instantly communicated to their thighs and backsides, and then Delaney said, “So did Dom Flood ever turn up?”
    Jack gave him a quick look and turned his eyes back to the road. He was uncomfortable with the subject, Delaney could see that, and it was a revelation--he'd never seen Jack uncomfortable before. “I only represented him in the, uh, the financial matter, the banking case--he has other attorneys now.”
    “So what are you saying--he ran?”
    Jack seemed even less comfortable with this formulation and he shifted unnecessarily to give him an extra moment to cover himself. “I wouldn't call it running, not exactly--”
    It was Kyra's turn now. “But he is a fugitive, right? And what he did to my mother, that was inexcusable. She couldn't be charged as an accessory or anything, could she?”
    Jack fell all over himself. “Oh, no, no. She had nothing to do with it. Listen”--and he turned to them now, careful to make eye contact--“I really can't defend his actions. As I say, I'm no longer his attorney. But yes, it looks like, from all I hear, he's left the country.”
    And then they were outside the gate and Jack was pulling over in the turn-around they'd constructed to assist those denied admission to the sacrosanct streets of the development. He shut down the engine and climbed out of the car, Delaney and Kyra following suit. “So what is it, Jack?” Delaney was saying, thinking it must have something to do with one or another of the creatures flushed out by the fire, when he looked up and saw the wall. It had been defaced with graffiti on both sides of the entrance gate, big bold angular strokes in glittering black paint, and how could he have missed it on his way back in from the airport? “I can't believe it,” Kyra said. “What next?”
    Jack had gone right up to the wall, tracing the jagged hieroglyphs with his finger. “That's what they use, right? It almost looks like the writing on the stelae outside the Mayan temples--look at this--but then this looks like a Z, and that's got to be an S with a line through it, no? Is this what they wrote on that house you were selling, Kyra? I mean, can you read it?”
    “They wrote in Spanish--_pinche puta__, fucking whore. They had it in for me because I chased them off the property--the same idiots that started the fire, the ones they just let off because we might be infringing on their rights or something, as if we don't have any rights, as if anybody can just come in here and burn our houses down and we have to grin and bear it. But no, this is different. This is like what you see all over the Valley--it's like their own code.”
    Jack turned to Delaney. A light misting rain had begun to fall, barely a breath of moisture, but it was a start. “What do you think?”
    There it was again, the hate. It came up on him so fast it choked him. There was no escape, no refuge--they were everywhere. All he could do was shrug.
    “I just don't understand it,” Jack said, his voice soft and pensive. “It's like an animal reflex, isn't it?--marking their territory?”
    “Only this is our territory,” Kyra said.
    And now the thing in Delaney's throat let go and the taste it left was bitter, bitter. “I wouldn't be so sure,” he said.
    November passed into December, Dame Edith and Dom Flood were given up for lost, the first major storm of the season soaked the hillsides with two inches of rain over a three-day period, and Delaney Mossbacher discovered his mission. He was a man of patience and resource. He'd spent half his life observing animals in the field, diving among manatees in Florida, crouching outside fox dens in upstate New York, once even roaming the Belizean jungles with the world's foremost jaguar expert, watching over kills and waiting through endless mosquito-infested nights for the magical photo of the big