Extra Kill by Dell Shannon

Extra Kill by Dell Shannon

Author:Dell Shannon [Shannon, Dell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-09T18:41:11+00:00


TEN

Once, they'd been going to destroy the narrow alley with its uneven old brick paving and the gutter down its middle, the leaning ramshackle old buildings flanking it. Nothing to do, that was, with a progressive and fast-growing city proud of its modernity. Then a few civic-minded organizations got up indignant petitions and committees, and in the end it stayed, to become a landmark, one of the places tourists came to see: the first, the oldest street of that little village whose name was nearly as long as the street—the town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, of the little portion.

At ten-thirty on a gray February morning it wasn't much to see: shabby refaced buildings, haphazard stalls cheek-by-jowl in a row down the middle, over the old gutter, and most of the shops shut, boards up in the stall windows. Night was its time, when the lights softened down the shabbiness and the tourists came, the buyers (tourists or not), and the famous old restaurant was open midway down the street, and the women who'd marketed and cooked and chatted all day in their ready-made cotton housedresses got out their shawls and combs. There'd be a couple of men with guitars stationed somewhere, and the man at the mouth of the street with his little bags of hot roasted piñon nuts, and the music and laughter drifting out of La Golondrina, the restaurant, and the buyers drifting along looking at everything (the women stumbling on the uneven bricks, in their high heels)—at the gimcrack cheap jewelry and the beautiful handcrafted real stud from the little silversmithies here and south of the border, at the handmade baskets, and braided-leather and to0led—leather shoes, at the hand-blown glass and the hand—woven cotton (also at the boxed cheap linens from Belgium, and the good stud and the bad from Japan, from the Philippines, from everywhere in Europe)—and maybe stopping to have their fortunes told by the old woman at the far end of the street.

And even at ten-thirty in the morning, over the whole street there hung the faint scent of glamour—and that was the combined scents from the little cavelike shop, three breakneck steps down from street level, where the candles were made, the incredible rainbow candles scented with pine, with orange, with jasmine and gardenia, and nameless musky saccharine odors.

Most of the shops were shut, but he knew that behind many of them were living quarters. This was a minor little errand, he needn't have come himself, but—he also knew—he might have a better chance of getting whatever there was to get than the most fluent of his Spanish-speaking sergeants.

He could have wished that the article in question had been something other than a serape. That inimitable object of Mexicana, the long strip of rough cactus cloth or cotton, garishly striped and fringed, was to be had at all but a few specialty shops: but maybe that fact was balanced by another, that it had been raining that night.

He started at the mouth of the street and took one side at a time.



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