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Eldorado Starfire rounds that she had dipped in an omiero of mint and oleander tea; and Pete had carefully etched L.A. CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL in tiny letters onto the muzzle ring of the stainless-steel slide.
    “Take it, Angelica,” he said tensely. “I could hardly even pick it up this morning. My Houdini hands are on extra solid today.”
    Angelica stepped forward and pulled the gun out of Pete’s pants, making sure the safety catch was up and engaged. She tucked it into her own jeans and pulled her blouse out to cover it.
    Kootie nodded. “We’ll receive them courteously but carefully,” he said.
    Through the open kitchen door, from the street, Angelica could now hear an approaching discordant rumble, like bad counterpoint tempo beaten out on a set of bata drums that the orishas would surely reject for being perilously tuned; and when she stepped outside, striding resolutely across the sunlit walk and onto the driveway, she saw a big, boxy red truck turn in from the street and then slowly, boomingly, labor up the gentle slope toward where she stood. Peripherally she noticed that Kootie was now standing at her left and Pete at her right, and she reached out and clasped their hands.
    The red truck rocked and clattered to a halt a couple of yards in front of them. It was streaked and powdered with dust, but its red color shone through lividly; and she noticed that an aura like heat waves shimmered around it for a distance of about a foot, and that the leaves of the carob trees on the far side of the driveway looked gray where she viewed them through the aura.
    The truck’s driver’s-side door clanked and squeaked open, and a rangy man of about Pete’s age stepped down to the pavement; his worn boots and jeans seemed only deceptively mundane to Angelica, and his lean, tanned face, behind a ragged mustache the color of tobacco and ashes, was tense with care.
    “What seeems to be the problem?” he drawled, and there was at least some exhausted humor in his voice and his squinting brown eyes.
    The passenger-side door was levered open now, and a pregnant woman in a wrinkled white linen sundress stepped down onto the driveway-side grass. She too looked exhausted, and her blond hair was pulled back, like Angelica’s black hair, into a hasty, utilitarian ponytail—but Angelica thought she was nevertheless the most radiantly beautiful woman she had ever seen.
    “Any problem here,” said Pete levelly, “is one you’ve brought with you. Who are you?”
    “Good point,” said the man with the mustache, nodding judiciously. “About us bringing it with us. Sorry—my name’s Archimedes Mavranos, and this lady is Diana Crane.” He looked past Angelica’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “And we sure do apologize to be interrupting your party.”
    Angelica glanced behind her, and realized how odd the crowd in the parking lot must look—the kneeling old women giving thanks, the men and women appearing to pantomime swimming and goose-stepping and traffic-directing as they flexed various freshly pain-free limbs, and the six apparently naked men crowded into the Little Mermaid inflatable pool.
    “We’re humbly looking,” Mavranos went on seriously, “for a man with a wound in his side that won’t quit bleeding.”
    After a moment, Kootie let go of Angelica’s hand; he held up his blood-reddened palm, and then, as slowly as a surrendering man showing a gun to a policeman, lifted his shirttail to show the bloody bandage.
    “A kid!” said Mavranos with an accusing glance toward Pete. He peered more closely at Kootie, then stepped forward. Angelica let her right hand brush the hem of her blouse over the .45, but the man had only knelt before Kootie and taken the boy’s left wrist in his gnarled brown hand. “You’ve Möbiused your watchband?” he said gently. “That won’t work anymore, son. Now when you do that you’re just insulating yourself from your own self. ” He had been unbuckling the watch strap as he