Fifty Grand

2 BLOODY FORK, NEW MEXICO

The future paid a shivery visit to the back of the car. I woke, half opened my left eye. A yellow desert. Morning. I let the eyelid fall. Blackness. But not the blackness of negation. Nothing so fortunate. Merely the absence of light. Too hot to sleep. Too uncomfortable, too much background noise: radio in the front cab, annoying chitchat, stones churning against the bottom of the vehicle like lotto balls.

I felt weak, my bones ached, my jeans and sneakers were drenched with sweat.

The Land Rover rattled over a bump on the coyote road, the engine grumbling like an old horse.

No, no point trying to sleep now. I removed the cheap plastic sunglasses, wiped the perspiration from my forehead, rubbed at the dirt on the rear window.

Vapor trails. Red sun. Hot air seething over the vast expanse of the Sonora. No cacti, no shrubs. Not even a big rock.

Where were we? Was this a double cross? Easiest thing in the world, drive half a dozen desperate wetbacks to the middle of nowhere, kill ’em, rob ’em. Happens all the time.

I turned to look at Pedro, our driver. He caught my eye in the rearview, nodded, and gave me a tombstone grin. I nodded back.

“Yes, we’re across,” he said.

We crunched into a pothole. Pedro grabbed the wheel and cursed under his breath.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” someone said.

“What road?” Pedro replied.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

“We’re across the border? We’re in the United States?” I asked.

“For the last kilometer,” Pedro confirmed. Both of us waited for any kind of emotion from the others. Nothing. No one applauded, cheered, reacted in any way.

Most of them had probably done this journey dozens of times. Pedro, however, was disappointed. “We made it,” he said again.

I peered through the window and wondered how he could be so sure. It looked like fucking Mars out there. A thin brown sand worrying itself over a bleached yellow ground. Nothing alive, all the rocks weathered into dust.

“The land of Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Lopez, Jorge Bush,” Pedro was saying to himself.

“Thanks for getting us over,” I said.

Pedro tilted the mirror down to look at me. He gave me an ironic half smile. My friend, I don’t do this dangerous job for praise, but I certainly appreciate it.

I’d made my first mistake. Now Pedro had singled me out in his mind as a classy sort of person, different somehow from the others. Someone with enough old-fashioned manners to say thank you. That, my demeanor, and my odd accent-all of it more than enough to burn my way into his consciousness.

Keep your mouth shut in future. Don’t do anything different. Don’t say a goddamn word.

I stole a look at him, and of course all this was in my head, not his-he was far too busy. The windshield wipers were on, he was smoking, he was steering with one hand, shifting gears with the other, while repeatedly scanning the radio, tapping the ash from his cigarette, and touching a Virgin of Guadalupe on the dashboard every time we survived a pothole.

He was about fifty, dyed black hair, white shirt with frills on the collar. The M19 spiderweb tattoo on his left hand meant that he’d probably feel bad about leaving us for the vultures but he’d do it if it came to that.

The kid looked at me. “United States?” he asked, pointing out the window.

“What’s the matter with you, don’t you speak Spanish?” I was going to say but didn’t. He was an Indian kid from some jungle town in Guatemala. His Spanish probably wasn’t so great.

“Yeah, we’re across the border.”

“So easy?” he asked, his eyes widening. He, at least, was impressed.

“Yeah.”

He craned his neck through the glass I’d cleaned.

“United States?” he asked again.

“Yes,” I insisted.

“How?”

From what I’d been led to believe we were somewhere on a sovereign Indian nation that didn’t allow fences, or the border patrol, or even the local cops. Law enforcement was done by the FBI and they had to come in specially from Austin or Washington, D.C. It had been a coyote road for years.

“We just drove over,” I said with a smile.

The kid nodded happily. He was the youngest of us. Sixteen, fifteen, something like that. Sweet little nonentity.

He and I and three others jammed into the back of the ancient Land Rover. Seats opposite one another. No way to stretch your legs out. Empty chair next to Pedro but he wouldn’t let anyone sit up.

I drifted for a bit and felt drool on my arm. The old man from Nogales was napping against my shoulder. I wiped the spittle with my T-shirt sleeve.

Yeah. Five of us. The Indian boy, me, the old man, a deaf woman from Veracruz, and a punk kid from Managua who was sitting directly across from me, pretending to sleep.

Didn’t know any of their names. Didn’t want to know.

I stared through the window at the sameness.

So hot now the air itself was a gigantic lens distorting the landscape, bringing distant mountains dizzyingly close, warping the flatland into curves.

I pressed my face against the glass. Time marched. The heat haze conjuring ever more intense illusions from the view. The yellow desert: a lake of egest. The cacti: dead men crucified. The birds: monstrous reptiles from another age.

I watched until nausea and vertigo began to zap my head.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and for the hundredth time since that last interview with Ricky I wondered what exactly I was doing here. Revenge is a game for pendejos. Hector says that tit for tat is a base emotion, from the lizard brain, from way, way down. He says we’ve evolved beyond revenge. Witnesses at executions always leave dissatisfied, and he would know, he’s seen dozens. But it’s not about feeling good, Hector. It’s about something else. It’s about tribal law, it’s about the restoration of order. Entropy increases, the universe winds down, and one day all the suns go out and the last living entity ceases to be. It’s about accepting that, accepting that there’s no happy place, no afterlife, no justice, just a brief flowering of consciousness in an infinity of nothing-it’s about seeing all that and then defying the inevitable and imposing a discipline on the chaos, even as the boilers burst and the ship goes down.

Do you see? No, I’m not sure I do either.

I wasn’t the only one suffering. “It’s like being born under glass,” the woman from Veracruz was saying. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

The Land Rover rattled through a huge sand-filled pothole on the coyote road.

“As long as we don’t break an axle we’ll be ok,” Pedro muttered, and as if in response, the engine grumbled, stuttered, stalled, caught again. Jesus, that’s all we need. Outside of Delicias, Pedro had to start it with a hand crank. He boasted that the old Land Rovers were better than the new ones, but none of us was reassured.

I affected an unconcerned yawn and reached in the bag for my bottle, but when I took it out I saw that it was empty. The tortillas were gone, the tequila was gone, the water was gone.

The kid from Managua nodded at me. He’d been twitching in his seat for twenty minutes. Jumpy little torta. Could be a sign of anything from schoolboy nerves to an ice habit.

“Güey, what’s the matter?” he asked in slangy chingla Spanish. He had a sly, pinched face with big green handsome eyes and a throwback Elvis haircut.

My type. A dozen years ago.

“I’m out of water,” I said.

The kid nodded, reached into his own grubby backpack, and produced a bottle of tap water.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching for it.

“Five dollars,” the kid said.

I smiled and shook my head.

“Four,” the kid persisted.

“You’re kidding.”

“Three.”

But I was done talking to this Nicaraguan street punk, this half-chingla trash. Clearly he was a mother of the first order. Give him a taste of this and a year from now he’d be coyoteing grandmas in meat lockers, leaving them to fry on a salt pan at the first sign of the INS.

I leaned back against the side of the vehicle and continued staring out the window.

A cerulean sky.

Cloud wisps.

Tardy moon.

I wondered where we were. The brief hint of mountains was over. The desert was becoming white.

“One dollar,” the kid said, tapping me on the leg. I looked at the long-fingered, grubby-nailed paw resting on my knee. I removed it with my left hand and replaced it on the kid’s lap. I stared at him for another sec. High cheekbones, coffin-shaped face, and a kind of faux menace in his sarcastic grin. I could tell that he thought of himself as a heartbreaker. Shit, he probably was back in Managua. Girls under sixteen or widows over fifty would be susceptible but everyone else would see right through him.

He was wearing an oversize black T-shirt and blue Wrangler jeans that had been hemmed by a tailor. His shoes were interesting. White Nike Air Jordans that seemed to have two different soles. He was dressing up, but he was dirt poor-in his brother’s pants and someone else’s used sneakers.

Still, that was no excuse.

“One dollar for a refreshing drink,” he insisted.

I decided to work him a little.

“Where I’m from, güey, we have a saying: ‘Refuse a man a drink and he’ll refuse to speak for you at the Gates of Heaven.’ But maybe you don’t believe in Heaven. That’s ok. Most people don’t, these days,” I said icily.

The deaf old woman genuflected.

The Indian kid looked uneasy. “And what do you know about it, señora?” he asked.

Señora, not señorita. That was ok. It was better than güey.

“It’s just a saying, forget it,” I assured him.

His eyes frosted over and he looked at me with disdain, and I knew the hook was in. Too damn easy. Poor kid, I thought, and returned to the view of the flatland. A few scrabble trees, a dried-up creek.

“Ok, fifty cents, you can have it… Hell, you can have it for nothing.”

I yawned.

“Go on, take it,” the kid said finally, resting the bottle on my knee.

No point torturing him anymore. “For your sake,” I said.

He smiled with relief. A big easy grin. A kid’s grin. Life hadn’t ground that out of him. Hadn’t seen too much of the world.

Twenty-one, twenty-two. Half a decade separated us. Half a dec and a lot of experience.

I unscrewed the bottle top, took a drink of the tepid water, and passed it back.

“Muy amable,” I said.

He put his hand over his heart. “Please think nothing of it,” he replied formally.

Somewhere, at least for a while, he’d been raised right with a lot of sisters and aunts. It made me curious.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Francisco.”

“I heard Pedro say you were from Nicaragua.”

“Originally, but I lived in the DF for a few years.”

“The DF?”

“That’s the Distrito Federal, you know, Mexico City, and then after that I moved to Juárez.”

Shit, I’d been planning on saying that I was from Mexico City too. Have to change that idea. “I see,” I said hastily. “So what are your plans in America?”

“I want to make money,” he said flatly. The old man murmured, the little kid grinned. Of course. I was the odd fish here. That’s why everybody went to America.

“Why didn’t you cross in Juárez?”

He leaned forward. “Vientos Huracánados,” he said in a whisper.

I nodded. One of the newer, nastier drug gangs. They don’t kill you. They go to your house and kneecap your children. Then they go to your mother’s house and torch the place with her in it. And then they go to the cemetery and dig up your father’s corpse and behead it. Not to be fucked with.

“What did you do to them?” I asked.

Francisco shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“I was a mechanic in Belize, I can speak English,” the Guatemalan kid chimed in. I nodded and put my sunglasses on-see, that’s why you don’t make conversation; now here I was caring about two people.

I pretended to doze.

The two boys started to chat about soccer and the old man next to me began chanting some ancient Gypsy ballad.

After a while I really did sleep.

Hector says the mammalian brain is the most amazing thing in the world. Even when you’re asleep your brain is taking stock of things, measuring the temperature, processing auditory input, sniffing the air.

When I woke I knew immediately that something was wrong.

The bitter taste in my mouth was adrenaline.

The Land Rover had stopped.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s a car in front of us,” Francisco said.

I looked through the filthy windshield. Sure enough, about a quarter click ahead, a red Chevy pickup. New one. Big one.

“Pitufos,” Francisco speculated, but they didn’t look like cops to me.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We’re northwest of Palomas at a junction called Bloody Fork. Just south of the road. This is our way up,” Pedro said.

“Can we go round ’em?” Francisco asked.

Pedro shook his head. “Only way is back the way we came, and they’d catch us.”

“They won’t chase us over the border,” I said.

“Won’t they?” Pedro muttered.

“So what are you going to do? Just wait?” I wondered with impatience.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s the border patrol.”

“What’s happening?” the old man asked, suddenly becoming aware of the situation.

“Cops, or something,” I told him.

“We should get out and make a run for it,” Francisco said.

Ni madres. “Are you crazy? On foot? Across the desert?” I exclaimed.

“They can’t chase all six of us,” Francisco replied, attempting to open the rear door of the Land Rover.

Pedro turned around in his seat. “Everyone stay put!” he snapped.

“I can’t afford to get deported back to Mexico,” Francisco said, pushing at the door. He looked at me. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“If we run for it, they get us all sooner or later. Get the old-timers first and then us,” the kid from Guatemala said.

“They’re going to murder us,” the old man said, insanely grinning at this prospect.

“Look, they’re coming up,” Pedro muttered. “Everyone relax and stay put and let me do the talking.”

The big truck gunned the tires and came toward us in a cloud of dust. When the two vehicles were about six meters apart the cabin door opened and a man in a baseball hat produced a rifle and a bullhorn. He wasn’t pointing the weapon at us but he made sure everyone got a good look at it.

“Everyone out of the vehicle,” he said through the speaker.

“Everyone has to get out,” Pedro said in Spanish.

No one moved.

“Everyone out,” Pedro repeated.

I didn’t like the look of it. “He’s not wearing a uniform,” I said.

Pedro took the keys from the ignition and opened the driver’s-side door. He exited and walked toward the truck with his hands up.

“Lie down, with your arms and legs spreadeagled,” the American said.

Pedro lay down.

“The rest of you. Come out slowly with your hands in the air,” the man said, still hiding behind the door.

Nothing else we could do. “Pedro took the keys,” I said.

Logic worked us; we got out of the Land Rover and lay down next to Pedro on the desert floor. When they were sure that everyone had exited, the two American men cut the Chevy’s engine and walked over, one carrying a hunting rifle, the other a double-barreled shotgun. They were both tall, wearing boots, jeans, plaid shirts. The one with the rifle had a John Deere hat pulled low over his face. The other was sporting a baseball cap of some description. Both seemed to be in their early thirties.

“Well, looks like we got ourselves something better than javelinas here, Bob,” the John Deere man said.

“Fuck it, Ray, they’s sorry-lookin’ wetbacks, maybe we should just leave ’em,” Bob said.

Ray shook his head and dropped the bullhorn.

“Please, sir, we got lost, we were driving-” Pedro began, but Ray kicked him in the ribs before he could finish.

“Listen up, dinks, nobody speaks till they gets asked a question. Is that understood?”

I didn’t know if all of us could follow English but the message was clear enough.

“Everyone’s gonna have a stash, Bob, keep ’em covered and I’ll shake down their gear,” Ray said.

“Why do I have to keep ’em covered?” Bob asked a little nervously.

I stole a look at him. He was the younger of the two-might be persuadable if things got hairy.

“Cuz you have the shotgun. Anyone gives you any trouble, plug ’em. Hear that, dinks? Anyone moves and Bob here will blow your fucking head off, comprende?”

We nodded dutifully, mushing our faces up and down in the dust.

Ray went to the Land Rover and began violently opening our stuff.

“Hurry up, man,” Bob said.

“Shut the fuck up, Bob,” Ray told him.

Ray rummaged in our backpacks for a couple of minutes. What he didn’t find there made him angry.

“Well?” Bob asked.

“Search the dink driver.”

“What you get so far?”

“Squat, a couple of hundred, few bags of c, some grass. Nothing.”

“Let’s go, man, let’s get out of here.”

“Somebody’s holding. Search the driver… hell, we’ll search all of them. Two hundred bucks won’t cover our expenses.”

One by one he turned us over and began patting us down.

Pedro had about a hundred dollars in a billfold but apparently none of the rest had much of anything. If they looked in my ratty sneakers they’d have themselves a handy little score but I knew they wouldn’t think to do that.

When they flipped the Guatemalan kid they found that he had wet himself.

Both men laughed. Bob’s mood lightened.

“Probably shitted himself,” Bob said.

“Yeah, well, I ain’t checking. He can keep that coke he jammed up there too,” Ray replied and they both laughed some more.

Ray flipped me with his boot.

“Look at this little piece of fucking ass,” Ray said. I could see him now. ID him pretty easily. Flinty brown eyes, light tan, hard gray stubbled chin, hog nose.

“Little spitfire, you can tell,” Bob agreed.

“Not your type.”

“How do you know?”

“Seen your ex-wife. This one, nothing to hold on to. One-twenty, one-twenty-five. Can’t be five-five. Pretty little thing, though. Let’s see what she’s holding. Turn out your pockets.”

I came up with about fifty bucks in assorted bills. Ray patted me down and didn’t find anything else.

He stood up, looked into the sun.

“This is one sorry bunch of dinks,” he said.

“What about the Land Rover?” Bob asked.

“Land Rover’s a piece of shit.”

“So what now?” Bob asked.

Ray signaled his friend to come over. They leaned against the hood of the Chevy and looked at their plunder. Ray opened Pedro’s bag of junk cocaine, cut with God knows what-meth, rat poison, whatever. Kind of shit that made you want to shoot at people from freeway bridges. He took a pinch on the back of his hand, snorted it, and shook his head. It was practically worthless.

Bob obviously wanted to go now but Ray was working himself up. Had they been tipped off about us, or did they just sit here and watch the coyote road? Either way, this wasn’t the big one they’d been hoping for.

Ray came back over and looked at us all lying on the ground.

He kicked Pedro in the gut.

Pedro curled into the fetal position, expecting more blows, but Ray couldn’t be bothered.

“If anybody’s holding out I’ll fucking kill yaz, every one,” Ray said. “Come on, what else you got?”

But nobody had anything.

Heat on our necks.

Still morning but the ground was burning.

The old man from Nogales took off his watch and held it out.

Ray looked at it. “The fuck is this?”

He took the watch and threw it into the desert.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

He unslung the rifle and fired it twice into the side of the Land Rover. The bullets whizzed through the metal plates and continued in a dying parabola for a thousand meters.

“What are you looking at?” Ray said, staring at me.

I shook my head.

“I said what are you looking at, bitch?” Ray demanded.

“Nothing,” I told him.

“Yeah? I think you’re looking at me. I think you can’t keep your eyes off me. Is that right?”

Ahh, so this was how it was going to be in America.

Hoping for a little time to get my bearings but that wasn’t going to happen. Gonna be ugly from the very start. Straight from the get-go. Mother of God, how does it feel, Hector, to be right about everything?

“Cover me,” Ray said to Bob, and he took a hunting knife from his belt. He safetied the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, tightened the strap.

“What are you doing, man?” Bob asked, his voice quivering. He knew what was going to happen.

Ray didn’t reply. Ray was gone. Ray was a character from an old story of his uncle or his paw, propelled by forces he didn’t understand.

He kneeled down on top of me. His groin over my groin. I tried to push him off but he put my hands under his knees. He was about a hundred kilos, mostly muscle. I was pinned.

He leaned forward and placed the knife against my throat. It was cold. Very sharp.

My head hurt from the fear. I couldn’t breathe.

The desert burned off the sweat pouring from my back.

“Get off her!” Francisco said, sitting up.

“Shut the fuck up, dink, or I’ll fucking kill all a yaz,” Ray said.

“Get off her!” Francisco repeated.

“Bob, if this one doesn’t lie down in five seconds, blow his fucking dink head off. One… two… three… four…”

Francisco hesitated for only a moment before lying down.

You did the right thing, kid. You can’t argue with a shotgun. Proud of you, güey.

“What are you doing, man? We better go. We have to go. The BP has drones and choppers. This is taking way too long,” Bob said, trying to talk some sense into his partner. But that moment had passed. Ray couldn’t back down now.

His eyes narrowed and he mumbled something I couldn’t catch.

He let the edge of the knife rest against my chin and then he dragged it slowly down my neck, bumping it over the carotid artery before bringing it to a halt above my clavicle.

“You understand English?” he said in a whisper.

I nodded.

“You wanna live?”

I nodded again.

“Don’t do nothing stupid.”

Holding the knife against my throat with his right hand, he began ripping open my shirt buttons with his left.

“Rest of you turn over, face into the dirt, I don’t need no audience, goes for you too, Bob, think I can handle this little lady. Seems eager to please.”

One by one they rolled over. All except for Francisco. His eyes were blazing. Boy was going to get himself killed. He’d clenched his fists and was thinking about a rush.

I couldn’t help. I was deep in the pit. I could barely see. Paralyzed by fear. Fear a blanket smothering me. Fear in my throat.

Ray’s mouth. Desert. The pit.

But now I had to climb out.

I caught Francisco’s eye and gave him a minute shake of the head.

It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right.

But he was still going to come.

Jesus.

It’s all right, little Francisco. Don’t do anything. It’s all right.

Eyes narrowed, fixed, he was gonna rush Ray. No. No. Bob will kill you.

I stared him down and, seething, he finally turned over and forced his face into the dust.

“You want it, baby, don’t ya?” Ray said in a whisper.

The knife was on my thorax.

I owned it. I felt it there. I let it be there.

I would let it be there for a while and then I would move it away.

“What’s your name?” Ray asked.

I tried to think whether I’d used a name with any of the passengers on the bus. But I hadn’t. I’d been careful.

“María,” I said.

Half the girls in my elementary school had been called María. That would do just as well as any other name.

“Ok, María, you look like you got a nice pair, let me see them tits,” Ray said.

“We don’t have fucking time for this, man,” Bob grumbled, scanning the horizon, nervously. The gun not pointing at anyone now.

“Ain’t gonna take but a moment. Ok, María, let me see ’em,” Ray repeated.

He had ripped two of the buttons off my shirt.

“Let me do it,” I said in English.

Carefully, I wriggled my hands free from under his knees. He didn’t stop me. I undid a third button and a fourth. I smiled at him and gently pushed him upright. He resisted at first but then moved back. He was still straddling my pelvis and he still had the knife.

The knife.

A four-inch serrated hunting weapon. Lovingly honed. You could skin a bear with that thing.

He was holding it lightly in his palm, face open. It might be susceptible to a blow to the wrist. He might drop it. But then again, he was big and strong and wary.

Knife fights are bad news. In self-defense class they tell you that you have to be prepared to lose a hand. You have to commit.

To save your life, grab the blade and twist and know that it’s going to hurt and it’s going to cost you fingers.

I undid another button. The shirt was open to my navel.

“That’s it, that’s my girl,” he said. Slobber at the corner of his mouth. His eyes filming over.

And me light, floating.

The knife.

The grinning face.

The partner turning away.

Commit. Lose fingers. The hand. And more. Never killed anyone. Nothing bigger than a wasp.

Commit. Lose fingers.

“Yeah, that’s it, let me see,” he said.

And then, just when I was ready to grab the knife with my left and punch him with my right, he rolled back onto his heels and stood.

I was puzzled for a second, but then I saw. He was undoing his belt and pulling down his jeans.

“You, too,” he said excitedly.

“Ok,” I said.

I pulled my jeans and underwear to my ankles. I slid them off.

Half naked.

The fear a river.

My arms shaking.

“Come on then,” I told him and offered another smile.

He leered back.

Yeah. He liked this better. He wasn’t getting off on the terror. He wanted a fantasy in his head. The willing victim. The fiery Latina. The sex-starved maid. Just like in his DVDs.

His jeans came off.

“Come on, honey,” I said in a voice that was half willing accomplice, half frightened victim. Evidently the right mix.

“Yes, ma’am,” he muttered. He spread my legs with his feet.

“Hurry up, Ray,” Bob said.

“Don’t worry, man, you’ll get your turn,” Ray said.

“Just fuck the bitch,” Bob grunted.

I opened my shirt.

“You’re gagging for it,” he said. “It’s going to be like making guac, María, we’re gonna scoop all the love right out of ya. Show you a trick or two. I’ve had compliments from pros.”

I nodded.

He kneeled between my legs and put down the knife to take off his boxers.

There would be one play.

I knew that he had the capacity to kill me. I knew that as a wetback my life wasn’t worth anything and more than likely if he did kill me, he’d have to kill all of us. Six deaths for what?

No two ways about it. A commitment. A trade. Your lives for ours. In advance I ask forgiveness.

His tossed his cartoon-covered boxers and when they were gone he grinned and reached for the knife.

The knife that wasn’t there.

“Huh?” he said.

Watching his brain tick over was like watching a dinosaur step on volcanic glass. Confusion showed between his eyes and before he could say or do anything his own treasonous hunting knife slashed him across the belly.

Maroon venous blood, stomach fluids, coffee.

A deep laceration, nothing punctured, but enough to sear his nerve endings and get his attention. He reacted faster than I was expecting. His fist hammered into the ground a few centimeters from my swerving head. I slashed at his face and the serrated blade opened his cheek like a sushi knife into yellowtail.

“Christ,” he screamed, lurched back, and fell.

With his weight off me, I got to my feet, and before his head had hit the ground I slashed him again. Gut shot. The blade cutting vertically from his belly down through his urethra and into his scrotum-gravity helped and this one was deeper, piercing his bladder, cutting a chunk from the head of his penis and opening his epididymis. Blood, piss, one of his testicles rolling onto the ground.

I scooted away from him, kicking up a tornado of dust with my hands and feet.

“Fuck! Fuck! She cut my balls off,” he managed between screams.

Bob was horrified. It had happened in about four seconds. He couldn’t compute it. I kicked up more dust and he didn’t even see me running at him until I was three meters away. He tried to raise the shotgun but in his panic discharged both barrels into the ground in front of me. Pellets struck me in the legs, burning like fat flying from the pan. Didn’t stop me at all.

He looked at the gun. Had he really shot both barrels?

Yes, Robert, and on such things turn the world. We’ll live and you’ll die.

I jumped at him like a fucking puma. He didn’t even think to hit me with the seven-kilogram wood-and-metal shotgun. He just sort of crumpled, absorbing the blow and falling.

The dagger entered his throat, my momentum so great that the serrated edge tore through his larynx and embedded itself in the cerebellum at the bottom of his brain stem.

He was probably killed instantly, but when we crashed into the ground I removed the knife and stabbed him hard in the forehead just to be on the safe side.

A crunching sound as the blade wedged itself into his skull.

I left the knife between his eyes, broke open the shotgun, and took fresh shells from his gun belt. Everyone was up now and the deaf woman had started to scream.

I pointed at Francisco.

“Calm her down,” I said.

He nodded, put his arms around her.

I found my underwear and jeans and pulled them on. My skin was crawling. It was ninety degrees but I was shivering. I gagged back vomit. No one had ever touched me like that. I wanted to lie down and cry. I wanted to shower for ten hours. I wanted Hector, Ricky. I wanted to swim in the current. I wanted moonshine or a fix. No time for any of that.

I pulled myself together, loaded the shotgun, and walked over to Ray, scrabbling like a redneck Uranus among the blood and sand for his missing testicle. His voice had taken on the high-pitched whining so familiar to those of us who have worked in abattoirs or the torture chambers of the police headquarters on Plaza de la Revolución.

He yelled when he saw me coming and threw an arm over his face.

“No, wait, no,” he said.

Despite the pain he scrambled to his knees and brought his hands together in a gesture of supplication.

“Please, I’m a family man,” he said.

I gave him both barrels from a foot away.

His head disintegrated.

His body quivered and fresh oxygen-rich blood spouted like a fountain from his neck. It flowed for half a minute before slowing to a trickle when the heart had no more of it left to pump. His torso kept kneeling there, spookily, until finally I kicked it over.

I looked at the crew. They were pretty junked.

I was pretty junked.

I walked to Francisco, who had calmed the deaf woman. I took the pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

“Lighter?”

His eyes glazed.

“Lighter?” I asked again and snapped my fingers in front of his face.

“Oh,” he said and reached into his pants.

I lit three cigarettes, put one in my mouth, gave one to the deaf woman, gave him the other.

“We’re gonna need to get these bodies in the pickup. I’ll bring it over,” I said.

He nodded. I passed out smokes to the others, walked to the red Chevy, got in the cab. Keys were in the ignition. I moved the seat closer, turned the key, hit the gas. I drove it next to the Land Rover, wiped my prints from the wheel, and got out.

Pedro was looking at me.

“Why did you move the car? Are we going to call the police? This was self-defense,” Pedro asked.

“What police?” I asked dismissively.

I left him to think things over and went to the Guatemalan kid. He was sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, crying hysterically. He was freaked. He’d never seen anything like this, not even in those jungle border towns.

“What’s your name, partner?” I asked him.

“F-f-f,” he tried, but he couldn’t get it out.

“Ok, Fredo, we need you to help us.”

He looked at me.

I was covered in blood and brains and bits of skull.

He shrank away.

I took him by the wrist. He disengaged my hand immediately.

“Are you ok?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“Speak to me. Are you ok?”

“Yes,” he managed. “You?”

“I’m fine. We gotta move fast. We’re going to need to get everyone back in the Land Rover. You gotta help us. Help the lady first, you and Francisco. Understand?”

He nodded. I left him, went to the old man and kneeled beside him. “Can you stand, abuelo?” I asked.

“Yes.”

He didn’t look too bad.

“We have to go,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. Somehow his cheek was bleeding. He was touching it, staring at the blood. Fixated.

“You’re ok. We’ll get you a Band-Aid in the car. Come on, Poppa,” I said and offered him my hand.

“You speak English good,” the old man said.

“I studied it in school,” I replied.

That fact helped him. Anyone who could speak English that well was practically a Yankee. And Yankees could do this kind of thing to other Yankees. He blinked slowly, rubbed the tears from his cheek. I got him to his feet.

“Pedro, you and Francisco get over here. Everyone else back in the Land Rover,” I said.

I rebuttoned my shirt and slid some of Ray’s face from my hair.

When the Guatemalan kid and the old-timers were in the Land Rover, I rifled the two corpses and took back our money and possessions. Both bodies were still warm.

“What the hell are you doing?” Pedro said.

I gave him his billfold and that shut him up for a second.

“Is there anywhere we can hide this truck?” I asked him.

“What?”

“Is there anywhere we can hide their vehicle?” I repeated with more urgency.

He thought for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he said finally. “I don’t remember any gullies or canyons around here. Nothing back on the reservation.”

“Gotta leave it then. We’ll put the bodies inside, buy us some more time,” I told him.

“You can’t move those bodies,” he said.

“Not without help.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Pedro, listen to me. They’re gonna bring birds and attention. Get the bodies in the truck and it might sit here unnoticed till nightfall. Might buy us a whole day. Maybe two.”

Pedro could see the sense in that. “What do you want us to do?” he asked.

“Let’s get ’em in the cab. Don’t touch them with your hands if you can help it, they can take prints off anything these days. Roll your sleeves down or make fists.”

I looked at Francisco. “You gotta help too, ok?”

He nodded.

“Good, let’s go.”

First we went to Ray. I took one leg, Pedro took another, Francisco an arm. We dragged his headless body to the truck. I opened the door and with some difficulty we heaved him into the cab.

“Good. Let’s get the other one.”

We dragged Bob to the truck and before we hoisted him up I pulled the knife from his forehead. It made a terrible sucking sound. I’d hit him so hard that I’d punched all the way to the back of his skull, and as we lifted him into the truck, his cranium cracked. Daylight streamed through the hole in his head, sky where his face had been. Sky and brains and blood. Pedro began to throw up but Francisco and I kept at it, heaving Bob into the cab and dumping him in the driver’s seat.

“Damn it,” Francisco said, wiping goo off his shirt.

Bob’s brown eyes were still looking at me. Half accusation, half amazement. I wasn’t going to take it. Fuck you. Is this what you wanted, Bob? Is this what you thought would happen when you got up today, when you had your coffee and met up with your good buddy Ray? Save your look, friend, save your accusations, you had a dozen chances to let this go.

I closed his eyes with my knuckles.

“Let’s give them something to think about. Gimme one of your bags of coke,” I said to Pedro.

“I’m not a dealer, it’s just to keep me awake,” Pedro said defensively.

Mother of God, what was his problem? Was he sniffing cop? Maybe I was being a bit too professional, a bit too cold. If only he knew how sick I felt inside, fighting back the waves, pushing them deep where no one could see.

“That’s ok, man, we just need to give the feds something to worry over,” I said. He gave me a dime bag of his stash and I opened it and poured a little on Bob’s pants.

“Make ’em think it was a double cross,” I said.

“Yeah,” Francisco said. “I can help with that.”

I wiped prints everywhere I thought they’d be and Francisco dipped the knife in the blood and drew a T on the windshield. We both knew what it meant. CSI would pin this on the Tijuana cartel. At the very least it would set them off on a tangent.

“Ok, now we can-” I began but was interrupted by Bob’s cell phone. The ring tone was one of those jazzy Vince Guaraldi numbers from Charlie Brown Navidad.

We stiffened.

“What do we do?” Francisco asked.

“Well, we don’t answer it,” I said.

We let it ring and ring and then we walked back to the Land Rover.

“Now what?” Pedro asked, his face ashen, his eyes exhausted.

“We continue on like nothing happened,” I said.

“How can we just go on?” Francisco muttered.

He was cold, trembling. I put my arm around him. Poor kid. He’d lost about seven years. Thirteen again. Now I wasn’t the next privileged chiquita in line for his attentions, now I was his way-too-young mother comforting him on the dirt floor of some Managuan shanty.

“It’s going to be ok,” I said.

He nodded and tried to believe it. And then he turned and looked at me. “What about you, are you ok?” he asked.

I hadn’t thought about it.

I wanted to fall down, I wanted to scald my body, turn it inside out. He had touched my hair, between my breasts, my legs.

“I don’t know… I think so.”

“Did, did they?”

“No.”

He nodded and stared at the yellow sand spiraling around his shoes. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s ok. We’re alive and in one piece,” I said.

It was one of Hector’s lines. We’re alive and in one piece and we’re not in a DGI dungeon.

Francisco frowned, said nothing. He was a bit fucked up, but really it didn’t matter if Francisco was fucked or not. Pedro was the one we needed. He knew the way.

I walked to him. He had stopped throwing up. He was trying to light another cigarette. I cupped the match and helped him.

He inhaled, coughed, inhaled again.

“Ok, Pedro, tell me the story, what were you supposed to do? What was the original plan?”

But he was too shaken and couldn’t yet manage an answer.

With the patience of Saint Che I gave him two minutes to drain the cigarette and then repeated the question.

“I-I’m supposed to drive you up through New Mexico. We meet the 25 and then we stop at a motel we use in Trinidad, Colorado.”

“How long will that take?”

“I don’t know, ten hours.”

Could I keep my breakdown away for ten hours? I’d have to. I took the keys from his hand, lit him another cigarette, opened the driver’s-side door of the Land Rover, reached across the seat, and turned the ignition.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Ten hours, hermano. We’d better get moving.”