Certain Dark Things(29)

Atl frowned. Her disappointment was easy to read and Domingo found himself wincing, quickly trying to make things better.

“I can go back,” he offered.

“No, it should do. It should lead somewhere,” she muttered.

“Do you want tea? I made some for myself. I can make you a cup.”

“No.”

Her dog padded into the room and Atl bent down to scratch its ear, the Doberman staring at Domingo with its small black eyes.

“Atl, who are you running away from?”

The way she looked at him, the way she lifted her chin and her eyes narrowed, told him real quick that he shouldn’t have asked.

“Why do you think I’m running?”

“I just know. It’s a— I dunno.”

He thought he ought to mention the dream, but he kept quiet for now. It might only make it worse. She already looked half-spooked.

“I’m not going to tell no one,” he said quietly.

Atl stood up and pushed her hair back behind her ears with both hands. She shook her head. She seemed … kinda offended. He thought she wasn’t going to tell him anything and then she leaned back against the wall, arms crossed.

“I’m trying to get away from some drug dealers.”

“Can’t you call the police?” he asked, sliding his hands in his pockets. He had a pack of bubble gum somewhere.

She laughed. For all her talk of being his elder and apparently so much more mature, it was girlish laughter.

“What do you think they’ll do first? Throw me in a cage because I’m a vampire or because I’m a narco?”

“Like, what, you sell those synthetic pills and shit?”

He thought of the parties he’d attended and the stuff that was up for grabs there. Not much, to be honest. Street kids were more likely to be sniffing glue, paint thinner, and rubber cement than doing blow. But once in a while, he would go to a rave in a rugged warehouse. There, the upper-middle-class kids who spray-painted themselves with glow-in-the-dark paint mixed with the street kids and the poor from the lost cities—the poorest of the poor neighborhoods, where people lived in shacks made of tin and whatever they could find. There, too, sometimes you’d find a rich kid from high up the slopes of Santa Fe. And there Domingo had met guys and girls passing pills with funky names. Crimson Dreams. The Snail. Four Times Three. He’d tried one and didn’t like it. It had dulled him too much and had made his head spongy. Domingo didn’t have much more than his wits, so in his view, he couldn’t be messing with them. Even if he thought he could, he didn’t have the cash for it.

Try as he might, though, he just couldn’t picture Atl at a rave, carrying a plastic baggie full of pills, selling them and counting the money before putting it in the change purse at her waist. It seemed way too … ordinary for her.

“I don’t sell anything.”

“I don’t get it.”

“My family is in the drug trade. They run—well, they ran—a tidy operation for years and years up North, supplying drugs for the vampire and human markets. Very lucrative. Then a few years back other groups started moving into our area. It’s gotten … rough.”

He remembered the headlines flashing in the newspapers, the ticker going round the screens in the subway. Narco vampires were always killing each other up North. That’s all you heard about them. Rough. Sure.

“Anyway, we’ve been having problems with this one guy. Godoy. One of those new vampire lords who have been messing with our operations and stirring the pot. My mother thought she had it under control … and then they killed her.”

“Jesus. So you ran off?”

“My sister said I should be ready. I looked through the window.…”

Atl’s voice trailed off. She looked down at her hands, as if she were concentrating, inspecting them very carefully. Suddenly she snapped her head back up and stared at him.

“They killed my sister, my family. That’s when I ran. Now they’re going to make an example out of me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Won’t the cops arrest them, anyway?”

“You don’t get it.”

Atl unzipped her jacket and tossed it on the floor. Then she turned her back toward him and lifted her shirt. She had a tattoo between her shoulder blades. It looked like a bird with a long beak, stylized and kind of odd. Sort of like the pictures he’d seen in his history book when they talked about the Aztecs. Like the picture from one of them codices.

“What is it?” he asked.

“My family’s crest. The hummingbird. We’re not a small-time gang. I’m not a small-time thug. The police won’t do shit. Well, except maybe kill me or jail me. Or jail me, then kill me.”

Domingo extended his left hand, reaching toward, but not touching, the intricate drawing. Atl tugged her T-shirt down and threw him an irritated look. He pulled his hand back.

“I need to find a place with an Internet connection,” she said.

“I know a café where they don’t ask for ID,” he said. “That’s … umm … that’s what you want, right?”

Atl scooped up her jacket from the floor and nodded.

*

He took her to the café near the basilica. The person at the door waved them in, taking their money without bothering to check their papers. Even if someone had said something, Domingo knew it would take no more than a few words to convince the employees to let them use a computer.