Chapter 13

The taxista insisted that he knew where he was going when they started. And after stopping at three dirty little buildings where the main source of income was the selling of women flesh, he was still muttering, "Calma, senor! Calma, por favor! I find pretty quick."

Alex settled back in the cab and let him try. That was all he could do.

The next building was a squat, dirty green two-story with grimy windows and a smell half-way between second-hand semen and a spilled bottle of cheap perfume, the sort someone might use to disguise a cesspool.

Two or three Mexican women with furtive eyes were stringing fresh-washed sheets on a line.

The taxista went up to one of them and asked if this was La Casa de Los Angeles.

"Si." The woman, swarthy with the high cheekbones that revealed much Indian blood, walked away and began to hang laundry on the next line.

The taxista followed her, spewing a voluble stream of Spanish apparently designed to get her talking again. She spat on the ground and turned her back.

Saying something clearly obscene, the cab driver grabbed the woman and turned her, raising his hand to strike her across the face.

"Hit me," she said, "pig! Then I tell Manuel Ramos and he will fix one pig of a taxista!"

The cab driver's olive complexion paled visibly. "Perdoname," he said, backing off.

The Indian woman laughed at him. "Come back tonight, pig! When we are open. We do not work day and night like some animals!"

"No!" the taxista snapped back. "Just at night, like all animals!" Hastily he dodged a clod of dirt one of the women threw at him, and then he was pushing Alex back into the cab as the women screeched insults after him to the effect that he was the result of a coupling between his mother and a scabby dog.

The prostitutes were still in the dusty dirt road making obscene gestures when they were more than a block away.

"Whores!" the driver said in disgust, hawked and spat out his window.

Alex dodged back in time to escape the backlash. "Yes," he said.

"It's no good talking to them. What can a man say to a woman who makes a living on her back. They are only good for one thing." The driver took both hands off the wheel to punctuate his words with a short, vicious gesture. "Putas! They say they are too busy to take you now. That they are too good to wipe their shoes with you. Come back tonight, they say." The driver unleashed another stream of disgusted spittle out the open car window.

"It's all right."

"Bueno. We go someplace else. I know a nice girl in the hills. No casa de putas. Clean. Better for you than those whores. Si?"