Mean Streets

Spanish.

Iko jumped to his feet again and began trotting around the little ghosts, sniffing them, but he returned disgruntled and disappointed to my side and sat down with a huff of breath. Apparently none of the skeletal kids was familiar.

I felt small hands on my knees and plucking at my sleeves. I looked down and found two small skeletons dressed in cloudy white dresses looking back up at me with empty eye sockets.

I'm not much of a kid person, so I never know what to say or do when faced with children. I had no idea if the ghosts of children knew any more than they had when alive, but even children have information. I squatted down, feeling my bad knee pop. “No hablo espanol muy bien,' I said, probably mangling what little I remembered from years living in Los Angeles. With my luck they didn't speak anything else, but sometimes ideas came through with ghosts, even when the language was foreign, as they had with the ghost of Ernesto Santara. 'Ustedes habla ingles?'

They turned their skulls on their slender spines in unison: no. They didn't bother to talk at all, but, with a shiver, I knew they were twins then, and they wanted to know why I was in their graveyard. No one had come for them in a long time and they were lonely-was I a relative of theirs? How I knew these thoughts I couldn't begin to tell you.

I shook my head and pointed to Purecete's memorial stone. 'I'm looking for him. And for Maria-Luz Carmen Arbildo. Maria-Lucy Hector.'

Two skulls tilted in curiosity as if to say, 'Why those two?' while a toy truck pushed its way across the dirt nearby guided by a misty skeletal boy.

'Umm…,' I started, not sure how to explain. 'Como Maria-Luz… umm… knows?' I stumbled through the language, tapping the side of my head and hoping the sign translated somehow.

'Hector?'

The skulls consulted each other with a glance of unseen eyes. They turned back to me and spoke as one. The words pushed the concept into my head, naked and complete, but not in English.

'El es su padre.'

Her father. Whose burial place she did not seem to know, whose name she did not have. 'Oh,' I breathed, the situation both more clear and less. Why the black-magic present, then? What was the nature of that paternity that she sent such a dubious gift?

The twin ghosts beckoned me to follow and they drifted toward the Arbildo plot. Leaving the chocolate and the ofrenda behind, I followed them and Iko followed me.

The graves of the Arbildos were crowded with tiny skeletons and strange, half-formed shapes of silvery energy thick as clay moving in some somber dance. The two skeletal girls floated through the weird party and stopped before a grave with an unusual double cross of gilded iron from which the gold had flaked until only shreds remained. 'Nuestra madre nosotros.'

This was the grave of Dulcia Maria-Carmen Ochoa Arbildo, wife of Antonio, and her two daughters, Carmen and Lucia, who had all died in April of 1936. The girls had been four years old. Dulcia had been twenty-five.

'Por que-' I started, but the ghosts of Carmen and Lucia pointed their bony fingers at the crowd of small spirits.

^uVea: nuestros hermanos y hermanas.'

I looked. Beside the grave huddled a knot of unformed shapes, the features of lives they never lived flickered and changed, fluid as water, over half faces the size of my fist. I'd seen this before; they were transient souls, in flux between one life and the next. Grave upon grave across the plot was littered with the reminders of children who had never been born, or died while still infants and toddlers. They were everywhere, generation after generation of the family's bad genetic luck and horrific accident. It seemed as if the Arbildos of San Felipe had been cursed.

Maybe, against all tradition, this was something the family preferred to forget. Hardly a wonder, then, if Antonio Arbildo had removed his family from this place as soon as he had the money to do so. Not too surprising if he had named a boat for his ill-fated wife, or that the boat had been lost with everyone aboard, except a single man and a dog.

A dark shape started to push the grid into some new form, struggling against the strength of the Grey's energy lines. Iko barked suddenly and the deep humming of the Grey hit a sour note. The ghosts flickered out with a collective gasp. The shape collapsed back into darkness and I was alone again in the graveyard.

I still didn't have all the pieces, but an idea was forming in my head. Dead children and a daughter by the wrong father… I returned to my camp stool and sat again beside Purecete's grave, pouring out the last of the chocolate and wondering if the ghosts would return. They didn't.

Dawn came up slowly in cold shades of blue, while I huddled, expectant and ultimately disappointed, in the empty panteon. It was still lit only by candles and drifted with copal smoke when Mickey arrived.

He avoided my glance and packed up the food and chocolate, the toys and gewgaws, in glowering silence. I let him. My body was too tired and my brain too full of strange threads weaving slowly and incompletely into a tapestry I didn't yet understand to want to add the frustration of cross-examining my volatile escort to the mix. I followed him back to the Chevy, hardly noticing that Iko had disappeared with the dawn and didn't follow us to the car this time.

Back at the guesthouse, I fell into bed and slept six hard hours. I was still a bit groggy when I turtled out of my bedroom and down to the empty sala about noon. The visitors had all gone out, most of the family was at church or in the kitchen. Mercedes Villaflores glanced out of the kitchen window and waved to me to come inside.

'Buenos dias! Did you enjoy your evening?' she asked, immediately putting a cup of coffee and a plate of food on the counter for me.

'Yes,' I replied, not sure if 'enjoy' was the right word, but certain I'd learned something, if I could shake it into clarity. 'Where's Mickey-Miguel?' I sipped the coffee and felt it kick my system back up to speed. I looked for Iko, but didn't see him, and was just wondering about that when Mercedes replied.

'Oh, he's still asleep.' She shrugged and returned to her stove, chatting over her shoulder. 'Teenagers… You know.'

Thinking about the missing ghost dog and Mickey made me think of the cemetery. 'Mercedes… who's Tio Munoz?' 'Tio Munoz? Where did you hear of him?' 'Mickey mentioned him.'

'Ah! That boy… he's such a trouble. Munoz is… the family bogeyman. You know: the crazy uncle your mama tells you will take you away in the night if you don't finish your supper. Totalmente loco en la cabeza,' she added, knocking a knuckle against her temple, as if sounding a melon for ripeness. 'He was accused of working black magic long ago, but he run up into the hills and disappeared. I think, if he is alive, he is no trouble to anyone, just a crazy old man. If not… maybe he'll come to dinner tonight, eh?'

She laughed; clearly she didn't feel the same horror as her nephew, but then… she wasn't fascinated with black magic, as Mickey was.

'Do you know anything about the Arbildo family that used to live in San Felipe del Agua?' I asked. She just shook her head.

I poked at my food and thought. I was seeing a picture that was not at all pretty. I wished I was sure what had turned Maria-Luz from sweet on Jimenez to sour. Why hadn't Jimenez told her where Purecete was buried? Was that the key? Or had she discovered something else?

I fished the little baggie of statue shards from my jacket pocket and stared at the bundle of hairs, tied with red thread, wound counterclockwise. The magic goes backward… Like the writing on the paper. I could see the slip of notepaper clearly in my mind: the letters cramped on the left, expansive on the right, as if it had been written backward, running out of space… She'd scryed me out through the Grey, talking to ghosts through a blackmagic connection, as Mickey had described. Death magic, blood magic… Had Maria-Luz sacrificed the dog…? No, Iko was dead long before she knew about me-possibly before I was a Greywalker-back when Jimenez died in a plane crash. Just how long had she had the statue waiting for the right grave? Why had she wanted to put Iko's spirit, wound in black magic, on Jimenez's grave?

Tio Munoz seemed more interested in Mickey than in me. But if he was-or had been-a black sorcerer, maybe he was interested in the black magic I was carrying in my pocket as well as his great-nephew. You can't count on much about black magic or bogeymen, though he didn't seem to approve of Mickey's personal darkness.

I needed to talk to Maria-Luz or Hector Purecete. I hoped one or both would show up once darkness fell at San Felipe del

Agua.

Mickey scuffed into the kitchen looking morose and wan.

'We still on for tonight, Mickey?' I asked.

'Huh? Tonight?'

'Yeah. My little ghost party at the panteon, remember? You're going to help me with the setup, right?'

He looked relieved I hadn't said anything about Tio Munoz. 'Yeah, right. Setup. Sure.'

'What time do we need to head up the mountain? Four?'

'Dusk. Whatever. Tia Mercedes won't mind if I'm back late for the party here.'

She said something in Spanish that sounded like she'd be happier the later he was.

'OK,' he replied. 'We can leave at four with the food and stuff.'

'Cool. See you down here, then,' I agreed, carrying my empty coffee cup to the sink and allowing Mickey to escape.

I walked down to the zocalo and found a cafe table to occupy while I made a phone call. The layers of spirits and magic were thicker and brighter than ever, surging like an ocean in the plaza and spilling into the streets leading to it. I dialed Quinton's pager and waited for him to call me back. Quinton was still paranoid about the possibility of being rediscovered by his ex-boss, so the easily tracked technology of cell phones was one he chose to do without.

About half an hour later, as I was working on a sunburn, he returned my call.

'Hey.'

'Hey, yourself. Need a favor.'

'Shoot.'

'I don't have Internet access here, so can you run some searches for me and get back with information before four p.m. here?'

'That's… two here. Yeah, I can do that. What are the search terms?'

'I need everything you can find on the death and bio of a Mexico City lawyer named Jimenez. Sorry I don't know the first name, but he was the partner of a guy named Guillermo Banda. Jimenez died in a plane crash a few years ago. Also anything on the Arbildo family that owned a ship or boat called the