The Transmigration of Bodies Read Online Free PDF

to go on, he persisted, I’m not going to do anything, but I need to get an angle on this.
    The Unruly pressed her face up to the half-open door. She smelled of brandy.
    Real close. In that big white house. Cross from the elementary school.
    Odd. The Redeemer prided himself on knowing about all the palmgreasing, hornswoggling, and machinating in the city, but this house had him stumped. Who owned Las Pericas? And why would Dolphin hide Baby Girl there?
    Okay, he said, I’ll be around, tell your pops to call me.
    The Unruly slammed the door, and he listened to her walk away.
    He got a text from the government assuring him that everything would be back to normal any minute now, that it was essential to exercise extreme caution but not to panic: a reassuring little pat on the head to say Any silence is purely coincidental, okay? Like when people are talking and everyone goes quiet, like when an angel passes, like that. But it came off more like Better to play down than stir up.
    Baby Girl. The Redeemer recalled the first time he’d met Baby Girl on a job he did for her dad: itty-bitty thing, quiet, long hair always carefully brushed, pretty face but eyes so sad. The kind of girl you wanted to love, really truly, but then the urge passed kind of fast. Even for her family. The Redeemer had seen it, at a big blowout after that job, seen the way they treated her like a piece of furniture from another era, one you hold onto even tho it’s uncomfortable. The Castros had been putting on airs for years and Baby Girl cramped their style. Now the Fonsecas, too, had struck it rich, but about style they couldn’t care less. So different and so the same, the Castros and the Fonsecas. Poor as dirt a couple decades ago, now too big for their boots, and neither had moved out of the barrio: they just added locks and doors and stories and a shit-ton of cement to their houses, one with more tile than the other. So different and so the same. If he thought about it, in all these years he’d never once seen them cross each other. Until now. Odd for them to butt heads right when there was finally enough room.
    But he’d seen this before, the way old grudges resurface. Even in this city, where people didn’t nose around, no matter what was done or who was doing it, sometimes it could almost seem like We’re all one. Don’t matter if your thing’s a burning bush, some lusty dove, a buried book, big bank, talk or cock, there’s room for us all. But no sir, he knew better, the real deal was: Don’t give a shit what you’re doing but you better not look at me, fucker. Every once in a while people did look; every once in a while they remembered what they’d seen. But man, for this all to go down now—just when everyone and their mother was cowering under the bed?
    He passed by the local park once more. The grass on the median looked overgrown tho it had only been ignored a couple of days. Inside the park, in a little fountain where a colony of frogs used to live, he saw none; the water was dead, bereft of ripples; for a second he considered bending down to drink from it because he’d only bought one bottle and finished it, but opted instead to walk another block to the pharmacy.
    The pharmacy was closed. On the metal shutter a piece of paper: Out of Masks .
    He’d been told, that time, to go get Baby Girl from some corner store in a barrio stuck on the side of the hill. A boyfriend had tried to abduct her, but at a traffic light she got out of the car and ran into the shop. The boyfriend followed but when he tried to drag her out, the owners chased him off and someone called one of Baby Girl’s brothers—yes, everyone knows fucking everyone. Before the brothers could head out to butcher the boyfriend, tho, their father stopped them, calling in the Redeemer to keep it from escalating into a major shitstorm. The boyfriend wasn’t on juice, or blow, or smack, he just couldn’t stand Baby Girl getting feisty and refusing to go with him when