The man had been spotted an hour earlier, at about five P.M., slogging up the steep, cobbled street toward the resort, and his looks had set off alarm bells: a jail bird’s face, heavy-jawed and sleepy-eyed, with a drooping Emiliano Zapata mustache and a dirty, graying ponytail hanging down in back from under a tattered campesino ’s hat, and with leathery, pockmarked skin as creased and pouched as an old valise that’s sat out on top of the bus too many times. Blue-green tattoos-lizards? snakes?-twisted up the sides of his neck from the grimy collar of his denim jacket. Pompeo, the senior of Sandoval’s two policemen, had stopped him to talk to him. When he found that the man had no identification, had a total of six pesos on him, and had a story that didn’t add up, he’d brought him in to see the jefe.

That had spoiled the jefe ’s day right there. Pompeo was a good sergeant. Unlike Sandoval, he’d been born to be a cop. He loved the work and he was big and fierce-looking enough to be intimidating in a way that Sandoval never could. (If truth be told, Sandoval was a little afraid of him himself.) Pompeo had been there for a decade, so he knew the ropes and he’d been the main reason that Sandoval had thought he could cope with the chief’s position at all. If Pompeo took care of the street situations-the traffic run-ins, the occasional quarrelsome drunk-Sandoval, who had taken a month-long correspondence course in public administration, after all, could surely handle the administrative matters. Also, Sandoval had given himself a reasonable command of English, of great use to a local police chief on summer weekends, when the place was lousy with tourists.

The one fly in the ointment was that Pompeo sometimes-now, for instance-took his job too seriously. Why had he stopped the man in the first place? Had he been hurting anyone, threatening anyone? No, he was just walking peaceably up the hill, and what was the law against that? Probably he was heading up past the Hacienda Encantada and out of town entirely. The dirt road wound through the dry hills all the way to San Lucas Tepitipac. That was probably where he was going. If Pompeo had just let him continue on his way, he would not be a problem. Or at least he’d be somebody else’s problem, which was just as good.