You must come to Ensenada immediately.

“Ensenada,” Grace said through clenched teeth.

She handed him her passport. Inside the front cover was a laminated Mexican Department of Justice identification card. The Mexican government issued the cards as a courtesy to American judges and other officials.

The customs inspector’s thick black eyebrows rose behind the cover of his sunglasses. He handed over her passport and waved her through. “Excuse the inconvenience, licenciada,” he said quickly. “Bienvenido.”

Grace hit the window’s up button and left the border behind. Sometimes she didn’t know which annoyed her more: Mexico, where men assumed superiority over women and weren’t afraid to show it, or the U.S., where men assumed the same thing but the smart ones left it in the locker room.

She wasn’t a stranger to the problems of Latin machismo. She had a Mexican grandmother on her mother’s side-thanks to the failed 1911 Magonista rebellion in Baja California-and a Mexican great-grandfather and grandfather on her father’s side. She had Native American mixed with the pure Mexican, as well as several Scots and a roving Norwegian dangling from the family tree. She also had an Irish-Mexican father and a Kazakh-Mexican mother, plus a pure Kazakh grandmother, refugee from some failed tribal revolt after Communism hit the Asian steppes.

Although bureaucratic types labeled her Hispanic, Grace considered herself the perfect all-American mongrel.

Despite being raised from age thirteen in a Santa Ana barrio by her Kazakh grandmother, Grace was always uneasy in Tijuana. Or maybe it was because of her teen years in the barrio that she disliked Tijuana. It didn’t matter. She never thought about it and never looked back.

That was another thing Marta had taught her.

La Revo, the traditional entry into Tijuana, seethed with open-air sex shops, girlie bars, and hotels that doubled as whorehouses or holding pens for illegal aliens heading north to the Promised Land. A single woman alone in La Revo was fair game, which was why Grace avoided the whole area by using the new port of entry at Otay Mesa.