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Sunday 4th June Nightfall The air was dusty. The kind of dust you could feel on your skin, and taste in your mouth. A taste like ash, like burning sickly sweet incense, like rotting flesh consigned to a pyre. The soup of odours was even more pungent to those beasts of the night who could sense such smells. Or those heroes of the night. This was Pueto Rico territory. Spanish was spoken more often than English, and could be heard on every street corner, or coming through open windows. Or from the Church. Singing - there was singing. Choir boys practicing, there voices melding together and floating through the evening. A few old folks, lighting candles, holding crusifix pendants, eyes upwards towards the carved ceiling or the stained window; or perhaps to God. Muttered prayers, some desperate, some afraid, some said with wet eyes. A tall thin preist, skin a honeyed brown, his head bald, his clothes black, his teeth white as he smiled, clutched a small bible. He was handsome, but his looks were only for the divine. His eyes observed all, both in and out of the Church. And he spied La Puma Negra. "Come to pray? Can I offer guidance?" he asked. Even his voice sounded handsome. Rich, deep, rumbling. A voice that could sing in a seedy jazz bar, or preach from a pure pulpit.