“Tula isn’t a female. She’s an adolescent girl,” he replied. “There’s a big difference. Tula’s at that age-a magic age, man-when some girls seem to possess all the wisdom in the world. They’re not screwed up by crazed hormones and menstrual periods. They exist, for the briefest of times, in a rarefied capsule of purity. The window is very, very narrow, of course. It’s afterward that most women go a little nuts. Hell, let’s be honest. All of them.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Tomlinson pressed, “I’m trying to give you the background so you understand what we’re dealing with. This girl traveled three thousand miles on freight trains, riding in the backs of semis, to get to Florida. Hell, she even hiked across a chunk of Arizona desert. It’s because she hasn’t heard from her mother in almost three months. Her brother, two aunts and an uncle are somewhere in Florida, too, and she hasn’t heard from them, either. Something’s wrong. Tula came here to find out what.”

I said, “An entire family goes off and leaves a girl alone in the mountains of Guatemala? Maybe they’re not worth finding.”

“One by one,” Tomlinson replied, “whole villages migrate to the States. You know that. They watch television at some jungle tienda. They see the fancy cars, the nice clothes. Meantime, they don’t even have enough pesos to buy tortillas and beans. All the volcanic eruptions and mudslides the last few years in Guatemala, how do you deal with something like that? The coffee crop has gone to hell, too. Another revolution is brewing, and there’s no work. What would you do if you lived there, and had a family to feed? That’s what I meant when I said a person’s luck-good or bad-begins with where they’re born. Are you even listening to me?”

An instant later, the man’s attention wandered, and he said, “Holy cripes, another Walgreens. If they keep piling up the concrete, building more condos, this whole damn peninsula is gonna sink. Just like Atlantis. It could happen.”