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candle-wicks, but under it all was still the aroma of burning coffee. Angelica sniffed and shook her head doubtfully; she opened her mouth to say something, but a white-haired old grandmother bustled into the kitchen just then, reverently holding out a quarter and two dimes and four pennies in the palm of her hand.
    “Gracias, Señora Soollivan,” the old woman said, pushing the coins toward Angelica.
    Angelica couldn’t remember now what service this old woman was grateful for—some haunting ended, some bowel disorder relieved, some recurrent nightmare blessedly forgotten.
    “No,” said Angelica, “I haven’t—”
    But now a man in a mechanic’s uniform blundered into the kitchen behind the old woman. “Mrs. Sullivan,” he said breathlessly, “your amuletos finally worked—my daughter sees no devils in the house now. I got the cundida at work this week, so I can give you two hundred dollars—”
    Angelica was nodding and waving her hands defensively in front of herself. She knew about cundidas —a group of people at a workplace would contribute some amount of each paycheck to the “good quantity” fund, and each week a different one of them got the whole pool; among the new-immigrant Hispanic community, to whom bank accounts were an alien concept, the cundidas were the easiest way to save money.
    “I didn’t do anything,” she said loudly. “Don’t pay me for your blessings—somebody else has paid the price of it.”
    And who on earth can that have been? she wondered.
    “But I need to pay,” the man said quietly.
    Angelica let her shoulders droop. “Okay,” she said, exhaling. “If I run into your benefactor, I’ll pass it on. But you can only give me forty-nine cents.”
    During Christmas week in 1993, Angelica had—finally, at the age of thirty-five—flown alone to Mexico City and then driven a rented car more than a hundred miles southeast to a little town called Ciudad Mendoza. Members of her grandfather’s family were still living in the poor end of the town, known as Colonia Liberación, and after identifying herself to the oldest citizens and staying with some of her distant relatives until after Christmas, she had got directions to the house of an old man called Esteban Sandoval, whom she was assured was the most powerful mago south of Matamoros. In exchange for the rental car and the cut-out hologram bird from one of her credit cards, Sandoval had agreed to complete and formalize and sanction her qualifications for the career she had fallen into a year earlier.
    For three months Sandoval had instructed her in the practices of the ancient folk magics that are preserved as santería and brujería and curanderismo; and on the night before he put her on the bus that would take her on the first leg of her long journey back to her new American family, he had summoned several orishas, invisible entities somewhat more than ghosts and less than gods, and had relayed to her from them her ita, the rules that would henceforth circumscribe her personal conduct of magic. Among those dictates had been the distasteful name that she was to give to her business, and the requirement that she charge only forty-nine cents for each service.
    Pete Sullivan accepted the exact change from the two people and walked over to toss it too into the barrel of coins.
    Kootie was at the open kitchen door now, silhouetted against the spectacle of Angelica’s colorfully dressed clients dancing under the sun-dappled palm trunks outside, and his eyes were wide and the hand he was pressing to his side was spotted with fresh blood.
    “Mom—Dad—” he said. “They’re here, nearly—block or two away.”
    Pete pushed the old woman and the mechanic out of the kitchen, into the crowded office room, and when he turned back to Kootie and Angelica he lifted the front of his untucked shirt to show the black Pachmayr grip of the .45 automatic tucked into his belt.
    It was, Angelica knew, loaded with 230-grain hollow-point