"Hi," she said to Annja. "Please forgive me, and thanks so much for coming out and supporting us, but I have to steal our guest of honor. Byron, the Travel Channel video crew is here."

Byron gave Annja a helpless shrug. "I enjoyed meeting you, Ms. Creed. I'd better go."

"Can I have your card?" Annja asked. Suddenly her mind was crowding with questions. She feared losing the chance to ask them.

"Sure." He gave her one embossed with a thumb-size reproduction of the main Santo Niño image.

Out in the main space a middle-aged man with a knobby face and disheveled russet hair had commenced playing an acoustic guitar. He sang a song that seemed, implausibly, to have to do with hunting tigers. A large, mostly young crowd was clapping and singing along on the choruses.

"Billie here does some great stuff," Byron said, nodding to the rainbow-haired woman. "There's some of her paintings hung in the main room. You should check them out."

Billie patted his cheek. "He's sweet, as well as pretty," she said. She firmly grasped his elbow. "Now quit stalling and come with me." With a last, apologetic smile over her shoulder to Annja she hustled him off into the large space.

Regretfully, Annja watched him go. Some of the crowd in the next room began elbowing each other and pointing. Byron Mondragón was clearly the man of the hour.

Annja's amber-green eyes, scanning right across the crowd, slammed to a halt and tracked back. She focused on a suddenly familiar form.

Father Robert Godin was wearing his scuffed bombardier's jacket open over his black silk shirt and dog collar. The Jesuit was smiling and talking to someone. He didn't seem to notice her. He had the friendly, easy face of an old hound dog. But his eyes were the eyes of a cat.

"Son of a bitch," Annja said. Half under her breath. And half not. She didn't really care if he heard her. She smelled a rat.

She turned, pushed back into the front gallery, then out into the main room. A quick glance into the main room showed no sign of Godin. She didn't waste much time searching. She felt a sudden strong desire to be gone from there.

I knew I should never trust a Jesuit, she thought. Why is he following me?

Outside it had come down almost pure night, with only a bloody line along the horizon above the river, some purple streaks in the sky and magenta underbrushings on a few clumps of cloud overhead. She made her way upstream of a fresh crowd streaming into the compound and headed out the narrow half-concealed gate right onto Broadway.

She strode down the half block as fast as her long legs could carry her without appearing to hurry. She wondered now at her reaction. After all, Godin had expressed an interest in the Holy Child. Indeed, he had given her the impression he had a professional interest, as it were. He might have come to Chiaroscuro for the same purpose she had. Quite innocently.

Innocent, she thought. She snorted. A Jesuit. Right.

She turned right on the side street and walked quickly toward her parked Honda. Fishing in her jeans pocket for the key, she heard a car's tires squeal as it turned off Broadway. Its engine snarl crescendoed as it accelerated behind her.

Without knowing why, she launched herself in a long dive, just clearing the ornamental but still perilous spear tips topping a wrought-iron fence sprouting from a hip-high wall of whitewashed brick.

As she fell to the neat but dry lawn behind it the white front of the cinder-block house strobed yellow as an automatic weapon yammered at her back.

Chapter 12

Glass exploded from behind security bars on the house's big front window. The slats of the venetian blinds behind made musical twangs as bullets plucked them like strings.

The car roared by. Cautiously Annja raised her head. Her heart hammered in her chest, and her pulse was drumming in her ears. She hardly believed in drive-by shootings in the real world. She couldn't imagine gangbangers targeting her.

Unless the shooting was connected with the recent attacks on her in Mexico City and the none-too-distant campus of UNM. But that's conspiracy theory! she insisted.

And this was lethal and immediate reality. The vehicle was an American muscle car of some kind, low-slung and painted dark. She saw its brake lights go on just short of the next corner. Then it accelerated backward toward her.

For a moment she lay frozen, unsure what to do. The car screeched to a stop right in front of the house. The doors swung open. Young men in long plaid shirts piled out. They carried guns. Serious guns. Short, blocky MAC-10s with stub barrels, shotguns with barrels sawed back to the end of the pump action.

"Where'd she go?" the driver asked in Spanish.

"I think she went over the wall," the one getting out the passenger door replied.

A whistle came from the direction of Broadway. Annja looked that way to see a small knot of young men rounding the corner from the north. In the shine of the streetlight she saw they were similarly attired to the five who had emerged from the car. And similarly armed.

Gotta go, Annja thought as the thugs from the car approached the front fence with cocky assurance.

She leaped up and sprinted east, down the block away from the traffic on Broadway. The lights and the witnesses drew her like a siren song. But the second contingent of bangers had her thoroughly blockaded.

A dry rosebush clutched a low chain-link fence on the far side of the house's empty driveway. Annja was hurdling wall and bush before her hunters even reacted by shouting startled curses and raking the house front with random gunfire.

On the far side of the fence she immediately tripped over a hunched ceramic bunny. She went sprawling with a yelp of alarm. Then she jumped up and was off again. Her right ankle hurt ferociously but nothing seemed broken. The leg held, in any event.

Bullets cracked past her. She heard more glass breaking. A motion-sensor light came on from the porch to her right and was instantly shattered, most likely by a stray shot.

She vaulted another low fence. The block sloped slowly upward before her. With her long legs and natural speed she was quickly distancing her pursuers.

There was no question of charging this much firepower, sword or no. Her only hope was to make herself as poor a target as possible while pulling away from the cursing, puffing gangbangers. She continued running at top speed, dodging garden gnomes and plaster Virgin of Guadalupe shrines and jumping fences and hedges.

It finally occurred to somebody that she couldn't outrun a car any more than she could bullets. A second vehicle snarled around the corner and whipped past her, a pimped little Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution with a huge spoiler and pointy tribal-tattoo decals on the sides. It skidded to a stop a couple of houses ahead of her. Three more thugs leaped out.

The driver leveled another sawed-back pump gun at her from the hip. At that range the pellet spread gave him a chance to hit her even with lousy aim. She immediately launched herself in a long, low dive, past a front porch and between a garage door and the front of an old Ford Taurus.

Annja scraped elbows and knees on concrete. She was grateful for long pants and a jacket. Her left knee banged painfully on the pavement but didn't buckle when she came up to a crouch with a juniper hedge right in front of her, separating the drive from the next yard.

She called forth the sword. A banger appeared at the end of the driveway. He fired a MAC-10 at her. Bullets skipped off concrete and punched through the metal garage door as she ducked down in front of the Taurus. By chance she was in the safest location possible in the immediate circumstances. The little pointy 9 mm slugs would never make it through the big car's engine block.