Mean Streets

He was probably a slim man in life, judging by the narrow-cut clothes his skeletal form wore in death. He had a jaunty hat on his skull and a scarf tied around the absent circumference of his neck. A shadow of flesh clung over the skeleton, giving it a blurry, out-of-focus look. Iko whined and wriggled at the ghost's feet, rolling in the dirt and showing his belly.

"Oh… Iko," the shade breathed, the words coming clear into my head. "Where is your mistress?" He scratched the dog as it quivered in delight.

"Not here yet," I offered. "But I think she'll show up soon."

Mickey glanced around and I followed his lead, but no one was paying us any particular attention. They were all busy and the sounds of the fiesta ramping up to last the whole night through drowned the oddness of any conversation we might have.

I held out the bottle and the ghost took it. "Gracias, Senora. It is a long time since I had a drink with a lovely lady." A spectral twin of the mezcal bottle rose to his mouth and he poured a long shot down his transparent throat.

"Ernesto said you were a lady's man," I said.

The ghost of Hector Perecete belched and lowered the bottle. "Ernesto? From the Dulcia? Poor fellow. Good-hearted, not so good-headed. I'm sorry about the crew. It was only me Arbildo wanted drowned."

"So it wasn't an accident that the boat sank when you were on it. Jimenez found a way to sink it for Arbildo. The insurance company wasn't sure, but they suspected it. You know they paid off, eventually, right?"

"Oh, si. It was an old boat. Kill two birds with one stone-heh. Or two problems with one hole in the hull. He didn't want her to know, or he'd have just had me cut to pieces in an alley in the Distrito."

"Leon Arbildo, you mean."

"Si," Hector replied, taking another gulp of ghostly mezcal. " Leon had a head for business." "What was her name?" "Who?"

"Leon Arbildo's wife. You met her at the mezcal distillery, didn't you?"

"Ohhhh… Consuela. No, we met at a party. She was very bored. So was I. But of different things." Hector drew closer to the table and looked it over, pausing to scratch Iko behind the ears and pat his sides roughly. "I imagined I was so very suave she fell at my feet, but I suppose it was truly that I was new and not like Leon." He laughed and his yellow teeth snapped together with a sound like castanets. "Youth is arrogant and full of folly." He put out a skeleton claw for the towel and water. Mickey and I watched him in silence as the ghost washed his nonexistent face and combed his memory of hair. Then the specter straightened his scarf and resettled the hat on his head before surveying the spread of food.

Mickey's eyes couldn't stretch any wider without the orbs falling out, I thought. "They never speak," he whispered. "I never hear them speak…"

"Get used to it," I muttered back. "Once they know you can hear them, they don't shut up."

The boy jerked his head toward me, drawing a breath that shook in his throat. He was more excited than the dog.

Hector-I couldn't think of him as Estancio after all this time-had torn off a hunk of phantom bread and sat on the edge of his grave, munching it. His teeth clicked and ground together. "I thought I would never taste pan de muerto again. It's very good."

"Mi-mi tin lo huzo," Mickey stammered, replying in Spanish, since he heard Hector in that language, just as I heard him in

English.

Hector looked at him for the first time and the boy flinched back at the uncanny gaze from the ghost's empty eye sockets.

"Your aunt? You must thank her for me. My Carmencita-my little girl Leon called Maria-Luz-could not bring me food and drink for these many years. She was afraid the lawyers would discover her knowledge of me and of what they would do if she came here. I left my home to be with Consuela-her mother- and I hid myself as a long-dead man, Hector Purecete, who would not mind. At first I did it to be near Consuela and later, when they thought they'd killed me, to watch over my daughter."

Bones and wings rustled in the darkness and a sigh of unearthly wind brought another ghost to the party.

"Papa."

We all turned to look at the smaller spirit that had walked up to Hector Purecete's grave. She wouldn't have been very tall in life, but she had probably had her father's build. A gleaming, oil-black nimbus surrounded her, shivering off the white surface of her dress. The memory of her face was still strong, creating a translucent veil of phantom flesh and expression over the visible bones of her skull. So this was Maria-Luz Carmen Arbildo.

The dog jumped into the air and barked in joy, running to tangle under her feet.

The ghost woman laughed and patted the dog. Then she looked sharply at me. "You brought him. But what happened? He should not be loose already."

"The statue was broken at customs," I answered. "I think Guillermo Banda paid someone to do it."

"That bastard… I hate him. More than I ever hated Jimenez for what he did."