I dig through the messenger bag past bullets, cans of spray paint, locks of hair from convicted murderers, grave dust and ground up bone, salt for barring doorways and drawing circles, extra Sharpies and “Hi My Name Is” stickers. You know, the usual.
For about a year all this stuff was stuck in the Caddy’s trunk where I couldn’t get it. Restocking took forever and there are some things that I just couldn’t find. One of a kind items, reagents that would take me a couple of years to get more of. I’m lucky the trunk is warded as well as it is, or most of it would be useless by now.
The dead side sucks, sure, but if you do it right it’s a great place to stash your stuff.
After a minute I find what I’m looking for. A pair of handcuff bracelets with the chain connecting them removed. I check the cuffs. One of them has a large M engraved on the side, the other an S. It won’t do to mix them up.
I bought the cuffs about eight years ago off a dominatrix who works sex magic in Brooklyn. Goes by the name of Mistress Morgana. Has the phrase “a touch of the exotic” on her cards for her normal clientele. Real name’s Eunice. She’s a peach.
I put the cuff marked M around my left wrist and close it. I can feel a small pop of magic as the spells in the cuff activate. I slip the other into a pocket.
I’ve modified these heavily over the last six months from their original purpose as a bondage toy. Each cuff has spells engraved into the surface. I blurred out a bunch of them and added new ones with a Dremel.
I just hope they work.
I secure the Benelli in the trunk, check to make sure the Browning’s loaded, and sling the messenger bag over my shoulder. I’m jittery and worn out, adrenaline replacing the Adderall.
I cross a couple of boulevards, dodge traffic and then I’m in Tepito. Here the streets are clogged with people shopping at makeshift stalls covered in blue and yellow tarps, folks selling their wares on blankets in the street. It’s a massive twenty-five block swap meet of vibrant color and noise, thick smells of food and sweat, gasoline and rancid garbage.
Clothing, bootleg DVDs, computers, luggage, TVs, boomboxes, guns, drugs, second-hand odds and ends, people. If you’re looking for it, chances are somebody in Tepito has it.
And throughout it all is Santa Muerte. There are shrines to the Bony Lady in half the stalls. You can buy small resin statues of her, candles, incense burners. Every botánica has prayers to her printed on fake parchment, rolled up and tied with a bow. Spells for love, vengeance, money, happiness. She is death and sex and magic and salvation. A dark reflection of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her only promise being that one day she will come for you. Even if there were no shrines to Santa Muerte in Tepito she’d be in the very fabric of the place.
I get stares as I wander through the streets. The out of place gringo. Some are curious, some sizing me up. To the ones who look like they might be trouble, I lower my sunglasses and give them a good, long look at my eyes. They scurry along like rats after that.
I don’t know where Tabitha might be in this chaos. I gravitate toward the shrines, the stalls with life-size statues dressed in hot pink wedding dresses, gold and black fabric, dollar bills pasted to their plaster robes.
I ask about a Korean woman and get pointed in half a dozen directions. To the locals anyone Asian is Chinese. A while back a slew of Chinese immigrants showed and started buying up stalls and storefronts. Now they own most of the place. None of them are Tabitha.
A couple hours of wandering and my body tells me it’s either time for food or more Adderall. I opt for the food. I hit a cart and pick up a Coke and a bowl of migas, garlic soup with pork bones and day old bolillos. I’m leaning against a light post, staying clear of the wires and cables snaking up from the stalls into the lamp to pirate power, finishing my second bowl when I see it. A small, unobtrusive carving in the post of one of the permanent stalls across from me. A tiny pentagram with two wavy lines beneath it. If you didn’t know what it was, you probably wouldn’t notice it.
The stall is a botánica selling folk remedies, prayer candles. But the carving tells me it sells other things, too. A woman, old, with skin cracked and brown like gnarled teak, sits behind the table watching me run my finger over the carving. I toss the paper bowl and plastic spoon in a trash can, or at least I hope it’s a trash can, it’s a little hard to tell out here, and walk over to her.