Angel Baby: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

opens the backpack and slides a hundred-dollar bill off one of the stacks of money inside. She shows it to the driver and says, “This is yours if we leave right now.”
    The driver hesitates, ducking his head to see if Luz is being followed. After weighing the risks, he starts the car and pulls away from the curb with a loud screech. They’re soon lost in traffic, one taxi among hundreds.
    “And so?” the driver says, sizing up Luz in the rearview mirror.
    Luz drops the bill onto the passenger seat.
    “Take me to Lomas Taurinas,” she says.
      
    The colonia looks the same as it did when Luz left it. A maze of tin-roofed shacks clogging a dry, dusty canyon next to the airport. A slum cobbled together out of plywood, old garage doors scavenged from the U.S., cinderblocks, and blue plastic tarps. A barrio where fear rules, and anger flares quickly into violence.
    When Luz was three, Luis Colosio was shot in the plaza down the street from the hovel she shared with her mother and two brothers. The presidential candidate had come to campaign in the neighborhood, and it was like a party, with music and cheering and vendors selling tacos and raspados. Luz thought he was a movie star, the way everyone called out his name and pushed in to listen when he climbed onto a truck to give a speech. She whined and whined until her Uncle Serafin lifted her onto his shoulders so she could see.
    Colosio waded into the crowd after he spoke, shaking hands and hugging supporters. That’s when a man sidled up to him, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. Luz didn’t understand what was happening but was frightened by the screams of those who did. The gunman was apprehended on the spot, a deranged factory worker. There were rumors, however, that others were involved, policemen and rival politicians.
    Luz directs the driver through the maze of narrow streets, past the little store where she used to buy chips and sodas with quarters begged from tourists down on Revolución, past the school with its broken windows and cracked basketball court, past the corner where the neighborhood girls taunted her because of her ratty clothes and bare feet. She shivers to see it all again, everything she ran away from. Stupid, ugly, filthy Taurinas. Her hatred for the place hasn’t cooled.
    They finally reach her mother’s house, a two-room concrete bunker with tattered lace curtains hanging in the barred windows and gang graffiti sprayed across the front door. Luz tells the driver that if he waits for her, there’s another hundred in it for him.
    “Only if you hurry,” he says. “This place is a den of thieves.”
    The welter of electrical lines overhead casts a spider-web shadow onto the house. Two men up to their elbows in the engine of a pickup watch suspiciously from across the street as Luz climbs the crumbling steps to the porch. She smells sewage and burning trash, and her whole childhood returns to her at once. She wants to vomit, to leave immediately, but it’s finally come to this: Her mother is the only person who can help her.
    She knocks once, and the door, unlatched, swings open with a creak. It looks as if someone has emptied a Dumpster in the front room. Beer cans and wine bottles everywhere, dirty clothes, boxes of greasy car parts, a giant stuffed pink elephant, four or five TVs. The only furniture is a worn-out couch. Luz recognizes it as the same one her brothers took turns sleeping on when they were kids. Flies buzz around plastic bags filled with empty cans of beans and fast food wrappers, and someone is snoring in the bedroom.
    “Mamá,” Luz calls from the doorway.
    The snoring turns to coughs.
    “Wake up,” a man grunts. “Someone’s here.”
    “Who?” Luz’s mother asks.
    “How the fuck should I know?”
    “Who is it?” Luz’s mother yells into the front room.
    “It’s me, Mamá, Luz,” Luz says.
    “Luz?”
    “I need to talk to you.”
    Silence, then urgent whispers. A few seconds later her