Ostensibly, I run a pawn shop marked by a simple red and white sign that reads CASA DE EMPEÑO, but anyone who lives in Los Remedios along the road to Atizapán will tell you it’s more. They’ll also offer you a fuchsia candy tortilla at the stoplight just before you come to my store; it’s the intersection where a man with a mime’s face juggles fire and a monkeyless organ-grinder plies his trade dispiritedly (how he lost the monkey is another story). Don’t eat the tortilla, don’t tip more than twenty pesos, and make a left turn. You’ll find me, if you really need to.

I’m an expert at staying hidden. More than once, it’s been the difference between life and death, so I live lean and keep my head down. So far as I know, I’m doing well here. Nobody knows what I’m running from.

And I’d like to keep it that way.

Unfortunately, our pasts have a way of coming back, time and again, just like our shadows. Oh, there are ways to sever your shadow, and I know a guy who did, but it was a really bad idea. He took sick afterward, died the slow death of a consumptive, and last I heard, his shadow was making a killing in Atlantic City. Literally.

These are dark times, and I just want a quiet place to ride them out.

Unfortunately, things never seem to work out the way I want them to.

My first inkling that I hadn’t covered my tracks completely came on a sunny Monday afternoon. I was sitting behind the glass case in my shop, eyeballing a pair of hand-painted porcelain miniatures I’d bought for two hundred pesos maybe twenty minutes before. Nice, they looked Dutch, and some tourist would buy them by next Friday.

Foretelling isn’t really my thing—well, only as an adjunct to my real gift and only as relates to the object I’m handling.