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he said gloomily, “if it wasn’t my favorite goat.” He scowled as he looked for an ashtray. “They didn’t need to of kilt him.”
    “Killed him?” Bob has a habit of starting conversations in medias res. I always feel as if I’ve skipped the first paragraph or two.
    “Leroy,” he said. He leaned over and drowned his Camel in the half inch of lemonade in the bottom of my plastic glass. “Slit his throat. Hung him up by his heels and let him drip.”
    “Slit his throat?”
    Bob shoved both hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. “Ask me, it was them damn Mes’can witches. Built a altar in the shed, stuck a buncha white candles and white feathers around, left some quarters and a half dollar on a coupla white plates. Guess they picked Leroy because he was black.” He gave a short laugh. “Guess bein’ black is unlucky for goats, too.”
    “I guess,” I said. Bob lives about two miles out of town with a golden retriever named Budweiser and twelve goats. Eleven now, I supposed.
    “Ol’ Bud, he didn’t even bark. Guess he’s gettin’ kinda hard a hearin’. He’ll be lonesome. Leroy was his favorite goat. Mine too. Alius hung out at the fence to get his ears rubbed.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. I stop at Lillie’s Place a couple of times a week, mainly because I like Bob. He’s basically a bigot, but if you can get past that, he’s a nice enough guy, trying to make an honest buck. I wasn’t personally acquainted with Leroy, and his death probably wasn’t any more barbaric than the deaths of animals we kill for food. But living alone the way he does, Bob’s attached to his animals. His sadness made me sad, and angry.
    Constance came up. “Is it true what I hear about your goat, Bob?” She whipped out a small notebook, frowning. “Sounds like Santeria.”
    “Yeah,” Bob agreed morosely. “Damn Mes’can witches.”
    Constance took out a pencil. “Mrs. Peters found a dead pigeon in the alley behind her toolshed yesterday. It was missin’ a head, and there were dimes and quarters scattered around it.”
    The news about Leroy was disturbing, especially given all the suspicious gossip about witches, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that there were Santeros in town. The barrio is on the east side of town, squeezed along the Interstate. Quite a few of the families have been here as long as the town and, for better or worse, have been Anglicized. Tex-Mex. But in recent years, increasing numbers of illegal aliens have slipped across the Rio Grande, fleeing the grinding poverty and political oppression south of the border. A lot of the locals look down on the wet-backs, although they’re perfectly willing to exploit them as cheap labor whenever they can get by with it. This is a subject I have strong feelings about. A few years ago, Immigration set up certain conditions under which longtime illegals could apply for resident alien status. Until that amnesty expired, I worked as a volunteer in the program that Sarita Gonzales ran through the Guadalupe Methodist Church, helping longtime undocumenteds qualify for resident status. Santa’s husband Rogelio is the Methodist minister. He ministers to people’s souls. Sarita ministers to their lives. Sarita’s ministry seems to make a bigger difference.
    Sarita told me about Santeria, which in Spanish means “worship of the saints.” It’s a mixture of Catholic and native ritual involving occult practices that smack of witchcraft. One of these practices is animal sacrifice, so it was probably Santeros who slaughtered Leroy. A few years back, they had done something much worse than that. A pretty blond tourist in a Mexican border town was abducted and ritually murdered by the members of a cult called Palo Mayombe, the dark side of Santeria. They were narcotics smugglers who believed that their sacrifice would keep them from getting caught. It didn’t. But by that time, the pretty young blonde was horribly dead, and the