The Tortilla Curtain

to his wife, when he was in the wrong and anybody could see it. And Kenny Grissom. The hordes of the poor and downtrodden. Jack. The theft.
    It was then that he stood back and looked at the car for the first time, really looked at it. Brand new. Not a scratch on it. Not a dent or ding. He thought: Maybe I should go down into Tarzana to the car wash and have it waxed, to protect it, just in case. And then he thought: No, I'm here, I'll hike. He smeared his face with sunblock, tucked the bottle of mineral water down his shirt and started off up the trail.
    He didn't get far. He kept thinking about that new car--forty miles on it and four and a half thousand dollars on top of the insurance--and how vulnerable it was sitting there beside the road. Sure, this wasn't as busy as the canyon road, but if they'd got the first car, what was to stop them from getting this one too? The fact that it was quieter out here just played into their hands, didn't it? Fewer people to see the crime, as if anybody would do anything about it anyway. And any car parked here guaranteed that the owner would be away from it for hours.
    Suddenly, without thinking, he sank into the brush no more than a hundred yards from the road. He could see the car glittering in the sunlight through the stalks and branches of the vegetation that lined the trail. He was being paranoiac, that was all--you couldn't hold on to everything, could you? He knew that, but for the moment he didn't care. He was just going to sit here, sit here through the afternoon, hidden in the bushes, sit here and watch.
    The waves washed over her, back and forth through the speakers, wearing the corners smooth, buffing her like a shell, mother-of-pearl, and by the time the seagulls chimed in with their eerie faraway cries, she'd forgotten all about the green Jeep, the jerk with the ponytail and his poor pathetic dog. She was going to have to stop in at the office for a minute, and then it was up the hill to Arroyo Blanco to congratulate the Kaufmans on their new home and hand-deliver her little housewarming present--a fifty-dollar gift certificate for two at Emilio's and a pair of tickets to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Most realtors wouldn't have bothered, but that was what set Kyra apart, and she knew it. The little things, the courtesies and reminders, the birthday cards and the inexpensive but tasteful gifts meant more than a hundred open houses. Goodwill, that's what counted. She'd tried to explain it time and again to Delaney, but he had no head for business, and that was just as well--no reason to have two marketing geniuses in the house. But she knew that people in her area changed their place of residence once every 3.7 years, and that they had cousins, children, parents and old college roommates who needed housing too. And when the time came to list their property, they would go to Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, the empress of goodwill.
    She was in and out of the office, and then she realized she was going to need gas to get up the canyon and then cross back over the hill to the place she was showing at four in Monte Nido. The station she liked, where they still had old-fashioned service and only charged you thirty-five cents a gallon more for it, was at the corner of Ventura and Fallbrook, so she'd have to backtrack past the restaurant--but she still had plenty of time. The Kaufmans weren't expecting her till two-forty-five, and that would still leave her fifteen minutes or so to stop home and check up on the fence people.
    She was right on schedule, but she was destined to be late, though she didn't yet realize it, as she pulled out of the gas station, heading east. For Kyra, this stretch of Ventura Boulevard was among the most familiar stretches of road in the world, and because it was her business she kept a sharp eye out for change--restaurants closing, stores opening, condos going up--but it was still capable of surprising her. As it did now. Two blocks up, at Shoup, she noticed a group of men gathered round the 7-Eleven parking lot. They were Mexicans, looking for work. They'd started appearing along here about two years back, but there'd never been more than a handful of them. Now there must have been fifty or more, clustered in groups just off the parking lot and stretched in a ragged line all the way back to where the road snaked under the freeway overpass. This was a new development, which warranted checking up on, and she swung impulsively into the parking lot, nearly