a dress, go to a restaurant, walk the neighborhood, soak up the ambience.'
'I been in jails got better ambience,' Chollo said. 'And if she is under duress-man I love the way you gringos talk-she won't come out.'
'Right.'
Chollo drank some coffee and rummaged in the bag for another donut.
'And if she's not in there at all, she won't come out.'
'Right.'
'So we see her, we'll know something.'
'And if we don't, after a while, we'll have narrowed the possibilities from three to two.'
'So how long you figure we'll sit here?'
I shrugged. Chollo found his donut and took a bite.
'How come it takes you all that time to find the right donut?' I said. 'They're all the same.'
'No two donuts are alike,' Chollo said. 'You had Indio blood you'd understand.'
We looked at the house. A tall guy with a Pancho Villa moustache wearing a faded tan windbreaker and a San Antonio Spurs cap on backward leaned in the doorway. Chollo put his empty coffee cup on the floor and opened his door.
'I'm going to reconnoiter,' he said.
'Yeah,' I said. 'Use that Indio blood, look for a sign.'
Chollo got out of the car, closed the door, put his hands in his pockets, and strolled toward the tenement compound. I sat and worked on the coffee. Decaffeinated, with cream and sugar. If you drank some and then took a bite of donut, it wasn't so bad. In a while someone came to the door of the house and replaced the guy with the Pancho Villa moustache. The new guard was a fat young guy with a shaved head and an earring I could see from across the street. He was wearing unlaced high top black basketball shoes and a hooded red sweatshirt with the hood casually hanging to highlight the earring, and baggy pants with an extreme peg and the crotch at about knee low. The sweatshirt gapped over his belly and I could see the handle of an automatic pistol showing above his belt. As they changed places both guards looked over at my car. I didn't mind. If I stirred up interest maybe something would happen. Anything would be progress. Nothing happened.
I ate another donut. Susan had explained to me that they were not healthful, and while I was in favor of healthful, rice cakes and coffee didn't do it on a stakeout. Susan had explained to me that it didn't have to be rice cakes or donuts. Why not bring along a nice lettuce, tomato, and bean sprout sandwich? I told her if Chollo reached into the bag for a donut and found a bean sprout he would shoot me, and she'd have only herself to blame for her sexual deprivation. She smiled at me sadly and began to talk to Pearl.
The door opened and Chollo got back in. He reached into the backseat for the big thermos and poured himself some coffee.
'This is the real stuff, right,' he said. 'In the tan thermos?'
'Yeah,' I said.
I tried not to sound sullen. The decaf in the blue thermos was very satisfying.
'Place is a quadrangle, four tenements, all of them three stories, all of them connected by walkways from the third-floor back porches. The alleys between are walled up with plywood, and there's sandbags behind the plywood. There's some sort of wire fencing around the roof. It looks like they're growing plants up there. The windows are boarded up, with gun ports in them. There's a guard on one of the back porches, can see the whole interior of the quadrangle. There's at least one guy on the roof.'
He sipped some coffee and made too much of how good it tasted.
Then he said, 'I can hear kids in the yard in the center of the quadrangle. I could smell cooking.'
'So it's not just pistoleros,' I said.
'No.'
'Doesn't make it easier,' I said.
Chollo shrugged. We sat and looked at the tenement complex. Every hour, the guard at the front door changed. Each time, the new guard and the old one stared at the car for a time.
'Sooner or later,' I said, 'they are going to have to come over and ask us what we're doing.'
'Sure,' Chollo said.
We looked at the tenements some more. We were out of donuts and the coffee was gone. In the front seat beside me Chollo was quiet, his eyes half closed, his hands folded in his lap. I imagined myself from some distant perspective sitting in the car in the spring in a destitute city with a Mexican shooter whose full name I didn't even know. I also didn't know if I was looking for a runaway wife, or a woman who'd been kidnapped. Of course it could be neither. She could have been murdered, or died accidentally, or suffered a sudden stroke of amnesia. She could be in the tenement in front of me wearing black lace and serving champagne in her slipper, or chained in the cellar. Or she could be on a slab in some small town morgue. Or she could be in Paris, or performing with the circus in Gillette, Wyoming. All I knew for sure was that she wasn't sitting in my car with me and Chollo eating donuts.
Across the street a tall, thick-bodied man with a ponytail and a dark moustache came out onto the porch and talked with the guard. They both looked at my car. Then the thick-bodied man started down the stairs with the guard.
'Here they come,' I said. 'Sooner.'
Chollo didn't stir, though his eyes opened slightly. 'Want me to shoot them?' he said.
'Not today.'
