particularly wise. On the street, the chupacabra float was turning slowly, the great idiot mouth champing at the air. Patricio didn't leave. Ramon shielded his eyes from the sun and looked up at him.
"What?" Ramon said.
"You hear about the ambassador from Europa?" Patricio said. "He got in a fight last night at the El Rey. Some crazy pendejo stabbed him with a bottle neck or something."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. He died before they could get him to the hospital. The governor's real pissed off about it."
"So what are you telling me for?" Ramon asked. "I'm not the governor."
Elena was still as stone beside him, her eyes narrow in an expression of low cunning. Ramon quietly willed Patricio to go away, or at least to shut up. But the man didn't pick up on it.
"The governor's all busy with the Enye ships coming in. Now he has to track down the guy that killed the ambassador, and show how the colony is able to keep the law and all. I've got a cousin who works for the chief constable. It's ugly over there."
"Okay," Ramon said.
"I was just thinking, you know. You hang out at the El Rey sometimes."
"Not last night," Ramon said, glowering. "You can ask Mikel if you want. I wasn't there all night."
Patricio smiled and took an awkward step back. The chupacabra made a weak, synthesized roar and the crowd around it shrilled with laughter and applause.
"Yeah, okay," Patricio said. "I was just thinking. You know ..."
And with the conversation trailing away, Patricio smiled, nodded, and limped back down the hill.
"It wasn't you, was it?" Elena half whispered, half hissed. "You didn't kill the fucking ambassador?"
"I didn't kill anyone, and sure as hell not a European. I'm not stupid," Ramon said. "Why don't you watch your fucking parade, eh?"
Night came on as the parade wound down. At the bottom of the hill, in a field near the palace, they were putting a torch to the pile of wood surrounding Old Man Gloom - Mr. Harding, some of the colonists from Barbados called him - a hastily cobbled-together effigy, almost twenty feet tall, with a face like a grotesque caricature of a European or a norteamericano, green-painted cheeks, and an enormous Pinocchio nose. The bonfire blazed, and, wreathed in flames, the giant effigy began to swing its arms and groan in seeming agony, a somehow eerie sight that sent a chill up Ramon's spine, as if he had been given the dubious privilege of watching a soul being tormented in the fires of Hell.
All the bad luck that dogged people throughout the year was supposed to be burning up with Old Man Gloom, but watching the giant twist and writhe in slow motion in the flames, its deep, electronically amplified moans echoing off the walls of the Palace of the Governors, Ramon had a glum presentiment that it was his good luck that was burning instead, that from here on in he was headed for nothing but misery and misfortune.
And one glance at Elena - who had been sitting silently with her jaw set tight and white lines of anger etched around her mouth ever since he had snapped at her - was enough to tell him that it wasn't going to be very long before that prophecy started to come true.
Chapter Two
He hadn't intended to go back out for another month. Even though they'd fucked passionately the night before, after one of their most vicious arguments ever, tearing at each other's bodies like crazed things, he'd decided to leave before she could wake up. If he'd waited, they'd only have had another fight, and she probably would have kicked him out anyway; he'd taken a swing at her with a bottle the night before, and she would be outraged at that once she'd sobered up. Still, if it wasn't for the killing at the El Rey, he might have tried staying in town. Elena'd probably calm down in a day or two, at least enough that they could speak to each other without shouting, but the news of the European's death and the governor's wrath made Diegotown feel close and claustrophobic. When he went to the outfitter's station to buy rations and water filters, he felt like he was being watched. How many people had been in that crowd? How many of those would know him by sight - or name? The outfitter didn't have everything on Ramon's list, but he had bought what was immediately available, and then had flown