Chapter 12: The Silver Car

"Someone was outside," I said. "Last night. Someone was watching my door."

Mateo was already up, pulling on his damp running shorts.

"She hired somebody."

"She hired somebody to sit outside my house."

"I'll go." He laced his shoes fast. "I'll run back the way I came. She wants me home, I'll go home. I'll handle her."

"You can't handle her. Nobody handles her."

He crouched by the mattress and kissed me once, hard.

"Then I'll stand there while she yells," he said. "I'm good at that. I've had thirty-one years of practice."

He went out my back door and over the chain-link fence into the alley.

I stood in my kitchen in my robe and drank a whole glass of water without breathing.

Then I went to the front window.

Halfway down Iturbide Street, under the neighbor's pecan tree, there was a silver sedan.

A man sat in the driver's seat with a coffee.

He'd been there all night.

I didn't get dressed.

I walked out my front door in my robe and my unlaced steel-toe boots.

I crossed my yard, passed my lemon tree, and went down the middle of the street.

The old man next door was watering his roses. He stopped watering.

A woman across the street was walking her baby in a stroller. She stopped walking.

I knocked on the silver sedan's driver's window with one knuckle.

The man inside was about forty, with a gray cap and a belly and a camera with a long lens on the passenger seat.

He rolled the window down two inches.

"Can I help you, ma'am?"

"Good morning," I said, loud enough for the roses and the stroller. "You've been parked outside my house since last night. I'd like your name."

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