The dude pretended he didn’t exist.

Faroe kept staring.

Finally the cop looked over casually and nodded. He was an old hand. He knew he’d been burned.

“Have a nice day,” Faroe called across the street.

The cop shrugged and turned away to light a cigarette.

Faroe strolled along the buckled, treacherous sidewalk toward La Revo. He’d parked in Chula Vista and walked across La Linea-the border. Now he needed a cab back to the U.S. port of entry. There were always cabs next to the zebra-striped burro on the corner of La Revo and Calle Cinco.

The cop stopped smoking long enough to talk into a cell phone or a radio. Faroe couldn’t tell which and didn’t care. For the first time in decades he had a squeaky-clean conscience.

Around him the air smelled of broken septic lines and tacos with claws in them. The sidewalks were dirty and cracked, cluttered with hunched indio beggars, sidewalk souvenir sellers, and a timeless collection of hustlers, thieves, and ordinary people just trying to get by. They peddled leather boxes, brightly painted wooden toys, and T-shirts celebrating the joys of everything from drugs to anal sex. The shops were ramshackle and poorly stocked. The bars advertised lap dancers. Next door, phony pharmacists in white coats peddled cut-rate Viagra and knockoff cancer drugs.

The tourist district of Avenida Constitucion tried to be respectable, but it reeked of shadowy bargains, furtive pleasures, and easy vice. Cheap smokes, cheap liquor, cheap sex; everything the bluenoses had squeezed out of San Diego had migrated a few miles south to Tijuana.

Faroe walked the block that had once held the infamous Blue Fox. Sidewalk bar barkers hailed him every few steps.

“Hey, mister, you want some pussy? How about a little fun? Preeeety girls, right here, come in.”

A thin man with a thinner black mustache had incorporated sound effects into his sales routine, pinching one side of his face between thumb and forefinger and jerking the flesh of his cheek juicily to suggest sex.