The Tortilla Curtain

mahogany parlor table in a long white entrance hall. “You must be here to see the house?” the man said.
    Kyra never hesitated. She was thinking two mil, easy, maybe more, depending on the acreage, and even as she was totting up her commission on that--sixty thousand--and wondering why she should have to share it with Mike Bender, she was thinking about the adjoining properties and who owned them and whether this place couldn't be the anchor for a very select private community of high-end houses, and that's where the money was, in developing--not selling--developing. “Yes,” she said, giving them the full benefit of her face and figure and her nonpareil-closer's smile, “yes, I am.”
    There were places where the spoor was interrupted, the footprints erased by the force of the downpour that had swept over the hills while Delaney was sitting in the police cruiser wasting his breath. That was all right. He knew which direction his quarry had taken and all he had to do was keep moving up the shoulder till the prints became discernible again--and he didn't need much, the scuff of a toe in the gravel or the cup of a heel slowly filling with dirty yellow water. If he could track a fox that had slipped its radio collar and doubled back through a running stream for three hundred yards before climbing up into the lower branches of a sycamore, then he was more than capable of tracking this clumsy Mexican all the way to Hell and back--and that was exactly what he was going to do, track him down if it took all night.
    It was getting dark, black dark, by the time he reached Arroyo Blanco Drive, and when he saw by the lights of a passing car that the prints turned left into the road he wasn't surprised, not really. It explained a lot of things--the graffiti, the photo, all the little incidentals that had turned up missing throughout the community, the plastic sheeting, the dog dishes, the kibble. The fire had flushed him out and now the drunken moron was camped out up here, spraying his graffiti, stealing kibble, shitting in a ditch. And then it came to him: What if he was the one who'd started the fire? What if the wetback with the hat was innocent all along and that's why the police couldn't hold him? This one had been camped down there somewhere, hadn't he? Delaney saw the glint of the shopping cart all over again and the trail plunging down into the canyon and the Mexican there in the weeds, broken and bleeding, and he couldn't help thinking it would have been better for everyone concerned if he'd just crawled off into the bushes and died.
    But now it was dark and he was going to have to get a flashlight if he was going to go on with this--and he was, he was determined to go on with it, no matter what, right to the end. He was almost at the gate when a car pulled over and the rain-bleared image of Jim Shirley's face appeared in the window on the driver's side. It was raining again, white pinpricks that jumped off the blacktop in the wash of the car's headlights. The window cranked halfway down and Jim Shirley's skin glowed green and red under the blinking Christmas lights. “What in hell you doing out in the rain, Delaney? Looking for horned toads? Come on, I'll give you a lift.”
    Delaney crossed to the car and stood hunched by the window, but he didn't say Hi, Jim, hell of a night and how are you doing or thanks or no thanks. “You wouldn't have a flashlight I could borrow, would you?” he asked, the rain terracing his cheeks and dripping steadily from the tip of his nose.
    Green and red. The colors settled into the big bloated face above the black band of the beard. “Afraid hot,” Jim Shirley said. “Used to keep one in the car but the batteries went dead and then my wife was going to replace them and that's the last I saw of it. Why? You lose something?”
    “No, that's all right,” Delaney murmured, backing away now. “Thanks.”
    He watched Jim Shirley drive through the gate and on up into the development and then he turned and in the haunted light of the red and green blinking bulbs discovered the fresh outrage of the wall, the mocking black hieroglyphs staring back at him, right there, as raw as the paint that was already smearing in the rain, right there under the nose of the guard and the blinking lights and everything else. His car was wrecked, his dogs were gone. He went right up to the wall and pressed a finger to the paint and the finger came back wet. And black. Stained black.
    This was the