The Tortilla Curtain

was gone, all right. It was incontrovertible. He'd parked here half an hour ago, right on this spot, and now there was nothing here, no steel, no chrome, no radial tires or personalized license plates. No registration. No _Introduction to Southern California Birds or Trail Guide to the Santa Monica Mountains.__
    The first thing that came into his head was the police. They'd towed it. Of course. That was it. There was probably some obscure regulation about parking within two hundred feet of a road crew or something--or they'd posted a sign he'd missed. He rose slowly to his feet, ignoring the faces in the cars across from him, and approached a group of men lounging in the shade of the nearest bulldozer. “Did anybody see what happened to my car?” he asked, conscious of the barely restrained note of hysteria in his voice. “Did they tow it or what?”
    They looked up at him blankly. Six Hispanic men, in khaki shirts and baseball caps, arrested in the act of eating, sandwiches poised at their lips, thermoses tipped, the cans of soft drink sweating between their fingers. No one said a word.
    “I parked right there.” Delaney was pointing now and the six heads dutifully swiveled to regard the vacant shoulder and the scalloped rim of the guardrail set against the treetops and the greater vacancy of the canyon beyond it. “A half hour ago? It was an Acura--white, with aluminum wheels?”
    The men seemed to stir. They looked uneasily from one to the other. Finally, the man on the end, who seemed by virtue of his white mustache to be the senior member of the group, set his sandwich carefully down on a scrap of waxed paper and rose to his feet. He regarded Delaney for a moment out of a pair of inexpressibly sad eyes. “No espick Ingliss,” he said.
    Fifteen minutes later Delaney was having his hike after all, though it wasn't exactly what he'd envisioned. After questioning the boss of the road crew--_We haven't towed nothin' here, not to my knowledge__--he started back up the canyon road on foot. It was three miles or so to the near grocery and the telephones out front, but it was all uphill and the road wasn't designed for pedestrians. Horns blared, tires screeched, some jerk threw a beer can at him. For fear of his life he had to hop the guardrail and plow through the brush, but it was slow going and the burrs and seedheads caught in his socks and tore at his naked legs, and all the while his head was pounding and his throat gone dry over the essential question of the day: what had happened to the car?
    He called the police from the pay phone and they gave him the number of the towing service and he called the towing service and they told him they didn't have his car--and no, there was no mistake: they didn't have it. Then he called Kyra. He got her secretary and had to sit on the curb in front of the pay phone in a litter of Doritos bags and candy wrappers for ten agonizing minutes till she rang him back. “Hello?” she demanded. “Delaney?”
    He was bewildered, immobilized. People pulled into the lot and climbed casually out of their cars. Doors slammed. Engines revved. “Yes, it's me.”
    “What is it? What's the matter? Where are you?” She was wound tight already.
    “I'm at Li's Market.”
    He could hear her breathing into the receiver, and he counted the beats it took her to absorb this information, puzzle over its significance and throw it back at him. “Listen, Delaney, I'm in the middle of--”
    “They stole my car.”
    “What? What are you talking about? Who stole it?”
    He tried to dredge up all he'd heard and read about car thieves, about chop shops, counterfeit serial numbers and theft to order, and he tried to picture the perpetrators out there in broad daylight with hundreds of people driving obliviously by, but all he could see was the bruised face and blunted eyes of his Mexican, the wheel clutched between his hands and the bumper gobbling up the fragments of the broken yellow line as if the whole thing were one of those pulse-thumping games in the arcade. “You better call Jack,” he said.
    8
    IT WAS LIKE BEING HAUNTED BY DEVILS, RED-HAIRED devils and _rubios__ in eighty-dollar running shoes and sunglasses that cost more than a laboring man could make in a week. What had he done to deserve such a fate? Cándido was a sinner like any other man, sure, but no worse. And here he was, half-starved and crippled by their infernal machines, bounced from one to another of them like a pinball,