“My name is Antoine Walker,” the big man says, blocking my path. “Ring a bell?”
I take a half-step back. The bullet with which Jack Paris had surprised me had shattered most of my right hip. The small stumble is not lost on the predator in front of me.
“The world is full of Walkers,” I say.
“Not anymore,” Antoine says, inching closer. “One less now.”
“Is that right?”
Movement behind me.
“Man by the name of Willis Walker. My daddy. Got his motherfuckin’ dick cut off.”
“I might have heard about it.”
“Me too,” Antoine says. “We all heard about it. Heard about that voodoo shit, too. They say you’re some kinda witch. That true?”
“No.”
Antoine steps closer, towering over me. Hawk and rodent.
“The pain is coming,” Antoine says. “You know that, right?”
I remain silent. I sense a presence behind me. I feel hot breath on my neck.
“The man ax you a question,” the presence says. “He ax you a question.”
“Yes,” I say, without turning around. “I know the pain is coming.”
“But you don’t know when, do you?”
“No. I do not.”
“I’m doin’ life plus twenty,” Antoine says. “You?”
This time, my silence suffices.
“See? We got much time,” Antoine says as he unbuttons the fly on his prison scrubs. He does not take his eyes off me. “Much time indeed.”
I feel a crowding of men behind me. The damp, ripe assemblage of a dozen or so bodies. When Antoine Walker places a heavy hand on my shoulder, I sink slowly to my knees, my mind and body and soul returning to another time, to a stifling room above a Tijuana bodega, thinking:
I am nkisi. I am brujo.
I will survive.
