“I can’t see much,” he muttered.
She turned on the light. There was not much to see. Atl did have a mattress in the center of the room, but no sheets. She slid a closet door open and rummaged inside, tossing him a blanket. Domingo placed it on the bed and lay down.
Atl flicked off the light. He was at the edge of the bed, waiting for her to join him. Instead, he heard the closet door slide shut and then nothing but a deep silence. He counted up to ten in his head before wetting his lips and gathering the courage to speak.
“Atl, you are not coming to bed?” he asked.
“No,” came the muffled reply.
“You don’t have to sleep on the floor. It’s not like I’d try anything,” he said. “If it makes you feel better, I can take the floor, no worries.”
She chuckled. “I like small spaces. Just as the animals in the desert have their burrows, I have mine.”
“Oh,” he said.
He shifted his position and wrapped himself in the blanket. He hoped he hadn’t sounded like a creep asking if she’d come to bed. He didn’t want to give no wrong impression.
“Do you want to hear something interesting? Tarantulas line their burrows with silk to stabilize the burrow wall. They also use silk trap lines to alert them of potential prey.”
“That is neat. How’d you learn that?” he asked.
“My sister told me that,” she said, and her voice was faint.
He waited for Atl to say more, but she did not. Domingo wrapped the blanket around himself and slept. When he woke faint traces of light had begun to slip underneath the curtains. The room was still dark, but he could make out the outline of the closet and the shape of Atl’s dog resting by it.
There was his answer. Mexican vampires slept in closets. Who would have thought?
Domingo tiptoed outside the bedroom, quietly closing the door behind him. His stomach was rumbling. It was time for breakfast. He could use a good bowl of birria. He grabbed the apartment keys that were dangling by a hook next to the door and stepped outside. When he reached the first landing, he slipped on his headphones and pushed play.
CHAPTER
8
People had to get themselves murdered on Saturday. Never Tuesday or Wednesday, when Ana Aguirre was off duty. Always Saturday. She shouldn’t be on duty on the weekends. As a matter of fact, Ana should have been working a pleasant desk job supervising junior officers. But Castillo had blocked that move yet again. The twat. If Ana Aguirre had ever held dreams of a real career in law enforcement, they had long been dashed under the persistent hammer of the outdated Mexican police system.
Worst of all, when she arrived at the crime scene, knelt down, and lifted the blanket, she saw it was a kid. A young girl in a tight miniskirt, her top drenched in blood.
Ana looked at the girl and couldn’t help thinking of her own daughter, Marisol, who was seventeen. Ana kept working this shit job for her daughter. But she worried. She wasn’t home nearly enough and the city had a hungry maw, one ready to swallow the young and the innocent.
Ana aimed her flashlight at the girl’s face. The neck had been torn, savaged.
“Hey, you’ve got anything for me?” she asked, turning toward a policeman who was lounging against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“What you see’s what you’ve got. It looks strange as fuck. Vampire, no?”
Ana tilted her head. Great. She’d left Zacatecas to avoid the vampire gangs. It seemed they were all over the country. All over except for Mexico City. Not because it was a city-state, autonomous in many respects. That was just a geographical demarcation. No. Mexico City had held tight because it was territory of the human gangs, and the gangs, usually unwilling to cooperate, had managed to come together against the single enemy that mattered to them: the bloodsuckers.
But violence lurked at the edges of the city, in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and other areas. There, in the slums, the vampires sometimes made their incursions, trying to expand their fiefdoms. They failed. For now.
“I phoned and they told me you’d know what to do,” the policeman said.
Like hell, Ana thought, but she knew why they’d placed her on this case. Because none of the others wanted to touch it. Because she was from Zacatecas and it didn’t matter if you’d lived in Mexico City for six years, you were still an outsider. Because she came from the gang lands. Because Castillo hated her. Because the shit jobs always wound up dripping her way. Because she had put forth a sexual harassment complaint against another officer one time, and everyone had laughed it off, saying no one would want to smack the ass of such an ugly woman.
“When did you find her?”
“I called it in half an hour ago. Took you long enough to get here.”
Ana wanted to backhand the punk. He looked shy of twenty. Probably thought he was God’s gift to the Secretariat of Public Safety simply because they’d issued him a baton.
“Well, anyone see anything?”
“Nobody saw nothing,” he said.