Quarantined by Joe McKinney

got a time check for the birth of the baby. Dad was a veteran street cop at that point in his career and very little rattled him.
    He returned to the living room just as the woman, the curandera, he soon learned, was cracking the egg into a bowl.
    She looked up at my Dad and said, “For protection against the mal de ojo. The evil eye.”
    She emptied the egg into the bowl. The yolk was the burning copper yellow of the sunset, and it was streaked through with blood.
    “That rattled me,” Dad said. “It’s hard to explain, but looking at that egg, I
knew
something had happened, something strange. There was a sort of charge in the air.”
    I remember him shaking his head, unable to explain further.
    I asked Carmenita Jaramillo, “Do you do that thing with the egg?”
    She smiled.
    “The people who come to me are simple people. For them, I offer the pouches of barley and crushed sage. I roll the chicken egg over their skin and crack it open for them to see the mal puesto, the bad magic. But it is no magic that I do. It is peace of mind I give them. Nothing but that.”
    Her smile shifted to one corner of her mouth and I could tell she was studying me.
    When she spoke again, it was like her voice had joined her thoughts mid stream.
    “But not that for you,” she said. “You I can tell, you need something else.”
    I was fascinated with her, and even though I thought her folk cures were, well, silly, the woman herself still intrigued me.
    She put a gnarled finger up to her nose and said, “You are looking for the shiny people.”
    “The shiny people?”
    “Yes. A man and a woman. Dressed like you. Their clothes shine in the sun. And their troca too, yes?”
    “Troca?” I said. Unlike my dad, I was never able to pick up Spanish. At one point, I got good enough at it I could ask for somebody’s driver’s license and their insurance, but when I promoted to detective, I lost even that. But then I clicked. I remembered the word, and I got excited. “You mean a van? Yes. I am. Have you seen it?”
    “Yes, I see them. Yesterday morning. I hear the man yelling. The woman screaming. There was a fight in the street.”
    “You saw them fighting? The man and the woman?”
    “I hear them fighting. Voices. Like today, when they were chasing you.”
    “You mean it wasn’t the man and woman fighting with each other? They were fighting someone else?”
    “The man was fighting with another man, yes. There was much yelling. Four or maybe five gunshots.”
    “Could you see who the other man was?”
    “No.” She shook her head. “But after the shooting, I see their troca going into that garage over there.” She pointed out the window to a battered gray wooden garage across the alley from her backyard. “Inside there.”
    Beyond the garage was a two story house with a rickety, unpainted wooden staircase and balcony along the length of the second floor. It looked quiet. No one else around.
    “Carmenita, this is important. I have to go there. Are there any more of those men around here?”
    “They wander everywhere. You must be careful. Do not let them find a pretty young woman alone. I can not protect you from what they would do.”
    “Understood.”
    “Detective, may I—”
    “Call me Lily. Please.”
    She smiled. “Lily. You do not believe in the curandero, do you?”
    “They’re not really part of the culture I grew up in,” I said, conscious of the thin evasion.
    “The only magic we do is to know what the people who come to us need. We are listeners only.”
    “What is it that I need?”
    “You are sick.” She touched her chest. “Here.”
    At first I thought she meant with H2N2, and I said, “No, I’m fine. I get check ups every other day.”
    “No. In here.” She pointed to her chest again, the heart. “Susto.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Susto?”
    “Loss of spirit.”
    I could have laughed it off, I told myself. I could have smiled and said that’s nice and thank you and left.