The Tortilla Curtain

pocket and stepped back out into the rain.
    It was coming down hard. Piñon was like a streambed, nothing moving but the water, and he could hear boulders slamming around in the culverts high up on the hill that were meant to deflect runoff and debris from the development. Delaney wondered about that, and he stood there in the rain a long moment, listening for the roar of the mountain giving way--what with erosion in the burn area and all this rain anything could happen. They were vulnerable--these were the classic mudslide conditions, nothing to hold the soil in thanks to the match-happy Mexican up there--but then there really wasn't much he could do about it. If the culverts overflowed, the wall would repel whatever came down--it wasn't as if he and his neighbors would have to be out there sandbagging or anything. He was concerned, of course he was concerned--he was concerned about everything--and if the weather gods would grant him a wish he'd cut this back to a nice safe gently soaking drizzle, but at least the way it was coming down now that bastard up there would be pinned down in whatever kind of hovel he'd been able to throw together, and that would make him all the easier to find.
    At the Cherrystones, Delaney found the key under the pot with no problem, and he hung his poncho on the inside of the doorknob in the kitchen so as not to dribble water all over the tile. He fumbled for the light switch, the gun pressing at his groin like a hard hot hand, like something that had come alive, and his heart slammed at his ribs and thudded in his ears. The light suddenly exploded in the room, and Selda's cat--a huge manx that was all but indistinguishable from a bobcat--sprang from the chair and shot down the hallway. Delaney felt like a thief. But then he was in the darkroom, the film in the tank, and that calmed him, that was all right--Anytime, Jack had said, anytime you want. Delaney was so sure of what he was going to get this time he barely registered the reversed images on the negatives--there was something there, shadowy figures, a blur of criminal activity--and he cut the curling strip of film and let it drop to the floor, printing up the first six frames on a contact sheet. When it was ready, he slid the paper into the developer and received his second photographic jolt of the week: this was no Mexican blinking scared and open-faced into the lens on a pair of towering legs anchored by glistening leather hi-tops, no Mexican with the spray can plainly visible in his big white fist, no Mexican with hair that shade or cut...
    It was Jack Jr.
    Jack Jr. and an accomplice Delaney didn't recognize, and there they were, replicated six times on a sheet of contact paper, brought to life, caught in the act. It was as complete a surprise as Delaney had ever had, and it almost stopped him. Almost. He pushed himself up from the counter and in a slow methodical way he cleaned up, draining the trays, rinsing them and setting them back on the shelf where Jack kept them. Then he dropped the negatives on the contact sheet and balled the whole thing up in a wad and buried it deep in the trash. That Mexican was guilty, sure he was, guilty of so much more than this. He was camping up there, wasn't he? He'd wrecked Delaney's car. Stolen kibble and plastic sheeting. And who knew but that he hadn't set that fire himself?
    The night was black, utterly, impenetrably black, but Delaney didn't want to use his flashlight--there was too much risk of giving himself away. As soon as he dropped down on the far side of the wall, the faint light of the development's porch lights and Christmas displays was snuffed out and the night and the rain were all. The smell was raw and rich at the same time, an amalgam of smells, a whole mountainside risen from the dead. The boulders echoed in the steel-lined culverts, groaning like thunder, and everywhere the sound of running water. Every least crack in the soil was a fissure and every fissure a channel and every channel a stream. Delaney felt it washing round his ankles. His eyes, ever so gradually, began to adjust to the light.
    He started straight up, along the backbone of the slope the coyote had ascended with Sacheverell in its jaws, and there was nothing under his feet. Where the white dust and the red grains of the anthills had lain thick on the dehydrated earth, there was now an invisible, infinitely elastic net of mud. Delaney's feet slipped out from under him despite the money-back guarantee of