The Collection

There was silence on the line, but I knew he was nodding. 'Keep me informed,' he said.

'Of course.'

I was still furious, but I pretended I wasn't, and we ended on a false note of rapprochement. I wondered after I hung up what kind of man could treat human life so casually, could order deaths as other people ordered dinner, and I told my­self that the kind of man who could do that was the kind of man who would statutorily rape the daughter of his house­keeper.

The kind of man I would take on as a client.

I didn't want to think about that, and I walked into the kitchen to make my morning wake-up coffee.

Maria Torres's bodega was closed when I arrived, so I went to a nearby McDonald's to get some coffee. There were gang members signing near the blocked bathrooms and a host of hostile faces among the silently staring people at the tables, so I paid for my order, took the covered cup, and went out to wait in my car.

I didn't have to wait long. Before the coffee was even cool enough to drink, a dark, overweight woman in a white ruffled skirt walked down the street and stopped in front of the barred door of the bodega. She sorted through a massive keyring, used one of the keys to open the door, and flipped the Closed sign in the window to Open.

I went over to talk to her.

The woman was indeed Maria Torres, and when I told her that Hector had said she could put me in touch with a Guatemalan woman who might know Maya's mother, she nodded and started telling me in broken English a long involved story about her son and how he'd met and married this Guatemalan girl over the wishes of her and her family. It was clear that she hadn't heard what had happened to Hec­tor, and I didn't want to be the one to tell her, so I simply waited, listened, nodded, and when she finally got around to telling me her daughter-in-law's name and address, I wrote it down.

'Does she speak English?' I asked.

'Therese?' Maria smiled widely. 'More better than me.'

I thanked her, and to show my appreciation, I bought a trinket from her store, a little rainbow-colored 'friendship bracelet' that I could either give to my niece or toss away, depending on how the mood struck me.

The Guatemalans lived in a ghetto of a ghetto in the slums of south Phoenix. It was a bad area on a good day, and there hadn't been a lot of good days since the beginning of this long, hot summer.

I found the house with no problem—a crummy plywood shack on a barren lot with no vegetation—and I got out of my car and walked up to the section of plywood that I as­sumed to be the door.

I should've brought a tape recorder, I thought as I knocked. But it didn't really matter, because no one was home. I walked over to the neighbors on both sides, but one of the houses was empty and the tired skinny old man in the other spoke no English. My attempts at pidgin Spanish elicited from him only a blank look.

I decided to head home, get my tape recorder, then come back and see if Therese had returned, but when I reached the front door of my apartment, the phone was ringing, and it continued to ring as I unlocked and opened the door. Some­one was sure anxious to talk to me, and I hurried over, picked up the receiver.

It was the Big Man.

I recognized the voice but not the tone. Gone was the ar­rogant attitude, the sureness and confidence born of long-held power.

The Big Man sounded scared.

'She's hit me!' he said.

'Maya's mother?'

He was frantic. 'Get over here now!'

'What happened?'

'Now!'

I drove like a bat out of hell. I did not slow down even through Paradise Valley with its hidden radar cameras, and I sped up Scottsdale Road at nearly twice the speed limit, fig­uring I'd have the Big Man pay off any tickets that were sent to me through the mail.

One of Pressman's flunkies was waiting for me at the door of the house, and I was quickly ushered in and taken to the bedroom, where the Big Man was seated on a chair next to the gigantic waterbed, stripped to the waist. He looked at me with frightened eyes as I entered.

I felt a sudden coldness in my gut.

His right arm had withered to half its normal size and was blackening with rot. No less than three doctors, all of them obviously very highly paid specialists, were standing around him, one of them injecting something into the arm, the other two talking low amongst themselves.

'That bitch cursed me!' he shouted, and there was both anger and fear in his voice. 'I want her found! Do you un­derstand me?'

The flunkies and I all nodded. None of us were sure who he was talking to, and it was safer at this point not to ask.

The Big Man grimaced as the needle was pulled out of his arm. He looked at me, motioned me over, and one of the doctors stepped aside so I could get close.

'Is there any way to reverse this?' he asked through grit­ted teeth. 'Can I get this curse taken off me somehow?'

'I don't know,' I admitted.

'Well, find out!'

He screamed, and the arm shrunk another six inches be­fore our eyes. The doctors looked at each other, obviously at a loss. They seemed nervous, and it occurred to me for the first time that though they might be tops in their field, the best and the brightest the Mayo Clinic had to offer, they were just as afraid of the Big Man's wrath as anyone else. It was a sobering thought.

I started out of the bedroom, intending to find a phone, make a few calls, and see if anyone of my acquaintance knew anything about the lifting of Guatemalan arm-shrinking spells. I turned around in the doorway, wanting to ask the Big Man something else, but he screamed again and, with a sickeningly wet pop his arm disappeared, its tail-end nub sucked into his shoulder, the skin closing behind it as if it had never existed.

I hurried out of the room.

No one I knew had any info or any ideas, so I figured the best idea was to once again stake out Therese's shack. I told one of the Big Man's flunkies to let him know that I'd gone to find out about the spell and Maya's mother. The flunky looked about as thrilled as I felt to be telling the Big Man anything right now, and I quickly left before he could de­cline and insist that I do it myself.

Luckily for me, Therese was home. Alone. I put on my most official-looking expression in order to intimidate her into talking. I told her I was working for Vincent Pressman, hoping that the name carried weight even down here, and said that he wanted to know the current whereabouts of his former maid and her daughter Maya.

Word about the situation must have already spread through the Guatemalan community because Therese blanched at Pressman's name, and quickly crossed herself when I mentioned Maya.

'You know something about this,' I said.

She nodded, obviously frightened. I got the feeling she wasn't supposed to be talking to outsiders.

'What's going on?' I asked. 'What's happening to Mr. Pressman?'

The woman looked furtively about. 'He mess with the wrong woman. She a ... how you call it? ... Very power­ful, uh ...'

'Witch?' I offered helpfully

'Yes! Witch! She curse him. She will kill him but she want him to suffer first.' Therese crossed herself again.

'What about her daughter, Maya?'

'Daughter dead.'

'What?'

'Mother kill her. She have to. Cannot live with shame. Now she blame him for daughter's death, too. His fault she have to kill girl.' She shook her head. 'It bad. Very bad.'

I asked about removing the curse, asked if there was any­one else who could do it, another witch perhaps, but Therese said that only the one who applied the curse could lift it. She told me the other limited options for