A few months of on-again, off-again shared coffee and conversation didn’t equal anything that should lift her pulse.The reporter was talking again, his tone impatient.“I’m sorry,” she said to the reporter, “what was the question?”“The Santa Muerte shrines and the offerings of food and bullets and—some say—blood? How do they tie into the Maya and the end of time in three days?”“You’re assuming that they do.”“Are you saying they don’t?” the reporter shot back.“You’ll have to ask the people who visit the shrines.”Hunter quietly took a seat at one side of the room, close to the front. He put a heavy manila envelope on the seat next to him.“But the shrines began appearing along with talk of the Maya millennium,” the reporter said.“There have been shrines as long as there have been indigenous people,” Lina said. “It’s simply their way of communicating with their gods. As for the Maya in particular, when they move away from their homelands, their need for shrines goes with them.”“What of three days from now—December twenty-first, 2012?”
