The Tortilla Curtain

signal, this was it, the declaration of war, the knife thrown in the dirt. First the car, now this. Delaney thought of the cameras then, of the evidence, and he tugged the cord at his feet so the flash would locate him. Only one camera flashed--the near one. The other had been smashed. He couldn't see if any of the pictures had been exposed--the light was too dim--and so he tucked the functional camera under his jacket and worked his way along the wall to the gate.
    When he rapped on the glass of the guard's cubicle, the guard--a lugubrious long-nosed kid with a croaking voice and the faintest blond beginnings of a mustache--jumped as if he'd been goosed with a cattle prod, and then Delaney was in the booth with him and the kid was saying, “Jesus, Mr. Mossbacher, you really scared me--what's the matter, is anything wrong?”
    It was close. Steaming. Room for one and now there were two. A red-and-white-striped box of fried chicken sat beside a paperback on the control panel, the cover of the paperback decorated with the over- muscled figure of a sword-wielding barbarian and his two bare-breasted female companions. “Your car break down?” the kid croaked.
    Delaney pulled out the camera and saw that six pictures had been exposed, six indisputable pieces of incriminating evidence, and he felt as if he'd just hit a home run to win the game. The kid was watching him, his eyes like little glittering rivets supporting the weight of that nose, something sallow and liverish in his skin. They were six inches apart, their shoulders filling the booth. “No,” Delaney said, giving him a grin that in retrospect must have seemed about three-quarters deranged, “everything's okay, just fine, perfect,” and then he was ducking back out into the rain and jogging up the street toward his house, thinking of the photos, yes, thinking of the wrecked car and the slap in the face of the wall, but thinking above all of the gun in the garage, the Smith & Wesson stainless-steel.38 Special Jack had talked him into buying for “home protection.”
    He'd never wanted the thing. He hated guns. He'd never hunted, never killed anything in his life; nor did he ever want to. Rednecks had guns, criminals, vigilantes, the cretinous trigger-happy minions of the NRA who needed assault rifles to hunt deer and thought the natural world existed only as a vast and ever-shifting target. But he'd bought it. With Jack. They'd had a drink after tennis one afternoon at a sushi bar in Tarzana, it must have been six months ago now. Jack had just introduced Delaney to Onigaroshi on the rocks and the conversation had turned to the sad and parlous state of the world as represented in the newspaper, when Jack swung round in his seat and said, “Knowing you, I'll bet you're completely naked.”
    “Naked? What do you mean?”
    “Home protection.” Delaney watched Jack lift a sliver of _maguro__ to his lips. “I'll bet the best you can do is maybe a Louisville Slugger, am I right?”
    “You mean a gun?”
    “Absolutely,” Jack said, chewing, and then he reached for the glass of sake to wash it down. “It's an angry, fragmented society out there, Delaney, and I'm not only talking about your native haves and have- nots, but the torrents of humanity surging in from China and Bangladesh and Colombia with no shoes, no skills and nothing to eat. They want what you've got, my friend, and do you really think they're going to come knocking at the door and ask politely for it? Look, it boils down to this: no matter what you think about guns, would you rather be the killer or the killee?”
    Jack had picked up the check and from there they'd gone to Grantham's GunMart in Van Nuys, and it wasn't at all what Delaney had expected. There were no escaped convicts or Hell's Angels sifting through bins of hollow-point bullets, no swaggering bear hunters or palpitating accountants running up and down the aisles with their tails between their legs. The place was wide open, brightly lit, the wares laid out on display as if Grantham's was dealing in fine jewelry or perfume or Rolex watches. Nothing was furtive, nobody was embarrassed, and the clientele, so far as Delaney could see, consisted of average ordinary citizens in shorts and college sweatshirts, business suits and dresses, shopping for the tools of murder as casually as they might have shopped for rat traps or gopher pellets at the hardware store. The woman behind the counter--Samantha Grantham herself--looked like a