Houston Noir

Happy Hunting by Icess Fernandez Rojas

North Shore

The dark-green Ford F-150 skids across the three lanes of Beltway 8’s feeder road, tires smoking like a dying fire. It roars past abandoned gas pumps and overflowing garbage cans, then rumbles to a stop at the convenience store. Its front door is only a few feet away, close enough for Marisol Gomez to see into the brightness inside.

She grunts as she steps out of the truck. Since the killings started, her muscles have forgotten how to relax. Glaring at the cashier through the thick, dirty store windows, she almost smells him — the foulness of what he is.

“Murderer,” she whispers.

This Stop & Shop is the only convenience store still open at night in the crumbling, frightened East Side. Inside, he perches on his stool like a fat toad behind the counter. Reading. Hardly paying attention. In plain sight. He’s taunting her, she knows. She wishes she’d figured it out sooner. Maybe then, Demetria and all the other women would still be alive. Children would have their mothers and boyfriends, their loves.

The oppressively hard rain has been beating on more than just pavement and buildings. Marisol is damp all over. Her clothes cling in an unbearable hug and her hair is wild with frizz. Her perfectly applied makeup is long gone. Everything she thought made her intimidating has washed away. Everything except the 9mm at the small of her back.

This is her moment. She’s done something the puto cops couldn’t do — or didn’t want to. Her hustler’s brain has figured out who the serial killer is, and she’s going to bring him to justice. North Shore justice.

This could go one of two ways: a long chain of devastation and sorrow ends, or she becomes a statistic — one more body for the cops to find and put in the unsolved file. Marisol stuffs that thought down inside herself as she walks to the door, opens it, and steps in from the rain.

This one is for her girls.

“You’re scary when you get like this.”

Yessenia, timid as a newborn cat, tried to cool her fear with frozen yogurt. It was more soup than yogurt, with chunks of mango floating like ice cubes. The more she heard about Marisol’s crazy plan, the more the soupy yogurt found its way into her mouth. Her best friend had conjured a plan that terrified Yessenia. Marisol wanted to capture the serial killer hunting brown and black women all over the East Side — North Shore, Channelview, and Sheldon — meaning every woman they knew. The plan would result in either jail time or death, and Yessenia didn’t think her friend would look good as a corpse.

“It’s gonna work, chica,” Marisol practically yelled, her voice ringing through the interior of Menchie’s frozen yogurt parlor. She used her siren-red manicured fingers to mimic shooting a gun. “Two pops to the head and it’s over!”

The two young women sat in the long, narrow establishment that screamed with hot pinks and lime greens. It echoed with bad pop music, meant to keep up customer spirits. Outside was a sweltering wet heat; inside was comfortable enough for a penguin and his family to enjoy. But the blinding colors and air-conditioning couldn’t keep customers’ minds from the news: there was a serial killer on the hunt.

So far, eight women had been found in nearby parks or wooded areas, each strangled with a piece of clothing they’d been wearing: shirts, bras, panties, even shoelaces. Not raped. Never touched below the neck. It wasn’t about sex. Yessenia said it was about control, winning, or maybe even ending something. She and Marisol knew all the victims — they were all friends, friends of cousins, or former classmates. That was the East Side: more connected than a politician and only half as shady.

“Aren’t you tired of this shit?” Marisol asked, hands gesturing to accentuate every word. “It’s like the freaking Hunger Games. It’s to the point that we’re not sure if our own friends are out to get us.”

“They aren’t. Probably aren’t.” Yessenia tucked a sliver of dirty-brown hair behind her ear, avoiding Marisol’s wildly gleaming eyes.

“Come on, Yessenia.” Marisol’s own hair — curly, wine-red, crunchy with hairspray and gel — shook with her words. “You haven’t left your house in three weeks. Every time I call you, you’re too scared to answer.”

“We have to let the police do their thing, Mari. Just chill.”

“Those bunch of good ol’ boys? They love brown and black extermination. Since Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, we’re being hunted. And with that dude as president, it’s open season. You heard the latest, right? No? Amber in Channelview. Check this out.”

Marisol whipped out her cell phone in its glittery pink case and tapped the screen, bringing up a video of two deputies aiming guns at two men in a bright-blue mustang. Yessenia recognized the car. She looked away. The gunshots sounded like firecrackers on the phone’s small speakers, reverberating throughout the shop. Marisol identified the wounded, and those names sounded familiar too. Everything was too familiar.

“That went down after finding out about Marissa. Them boys are mad as hell. And after Dejah, the streets are lit. How many more have to die before this fool gets caught?”

“Why us, though? Like, why can’t the homies... ” Yessenia trailed off and wrapped herself tighter in her brown cardigan.

“The homies ain’t about handling any business but their own. Amber had kids, man. I met them. She brought them to the house to pick up a registration sticker. Now they’re orphans — part of the system. It ain’t right.”

The stickers were an old argument between them. For Marisol, selling fake car registration and inspection stickers was a means to an end. Either you hustled, or you got hustled. Sometimes Marisol thought Yessenia considered herself too good for the East Side, with its taco trucks and discount grocery stores. Too good for the oil refineries and the upwind from Pasadena. She couldn’t bear to walk on a street with no sidewalks. Didn’t she know, sometimes folks need to make their own way in the world? That’s what Marisol was doing.

Yessenia stirred her orange yogurt soup in disappointment. Marisol’s fake car stickers were bad enough. She also charged little old ladies to fill out their Lone Star card applications for food stamps. Twenty-five dollars a pop and no guarantees. But they kept coming, because they needed someone who knew how to read and write English. Grandmothers, the disabled, single mothers — Marisol took advantage of everyone equally. She even seemed proud of it.

“I wish you’d stop doing that stuff.”

Marisol rolled her eyes at her best friend. “Ain’t no one worrying about no damn stickers right now, Yessi. We’re being killed, pendeja!”

Nearby, an old woman sitting with her young granddaughter glared at Marisol, who responded with an ugly look of her own, daring her to say something, before continuing her train of thought: “I bet you he’s a cop. They know about killing us and getting away with it.”

“Mari, that’s not fair.”

Yessenia’s phone buzzed. She glanced at its screen, then placed it facedown on the table. “Can we take a break from talking about this?” She pushed away her yogurt and stared out the window, her face flushed as snow.

Marisol leaned over to hug her. “I’m not letting anything happen to you, I promise,” she whispered. “Ain’t no one messing with my girl. Nobody.”

The promise hit Yessenia’s ear in a boom. This was how it was with them: the whispers were never quiet, and the secrets never stayed secret. Usually, there wasn’t anything Yessenia could keep from Marisol. So it surprised her that Marisol hadn’t noticed the new gold bracelet on her wrist or her dangling earrings. She was too caught up in her anger.

“Wet out there, ain’t it?” she says.

Behind the counter and the thick glass, the cashier flips through a magazine and doesn’t acknowledge Marisol. His name is Roscoe, Yessenia found out. It’s obvious he wants nothing to do with his customers. He’s almost forgettable in his bright-blue cotton polo and khakis. Roscoe wears his role like camouflage, Marisol thinks, sizing up his prey without her knowing. She’s just a woman alone, stopping into the store for a drink. Not paying attention to the cabrón about to crush her windpipe. He’s one of those East Side country white boys, cowboy boots and hat like an unwritten uniform. If not the cowboy uniform, then an old trucker hat like every man in his family wore after they went bald. That was years away for Roscoe. He kept his blond hair short on the sides and longer on the top. He wasn’t Marisol’s type, not by a long shot. She preferred her country boys like white noise, in the background and hardly noticeable. But this one, this one looked like he had something to prove.

Even the hunting ground is incognito — just an average convenience store. This one is about the size of a thumb, with bright fluorescent lights flooding every corner. Not one place to hide. A strong smell of bleach punches Marisol’s gut. It’s like a hospital, but filled with snacks. She has to admit, it’s a logical setup. If she were a killer, she might’ve thought of it herself.

“Bathroom?”

Roscoe points to the back of the store where a gray door stands open.

Marisol walks slowly past the rows of candy bars and motor oil, casing the area. No one but her and the guy behind the bulletproof glass.

Fuck! How am I gonna get this fool to come out from behind the counter?

If she can’t do that, the piece at the small of her back is useless. The restroom door scrapes against the floor with a loud noise as she closes it behind her.

“Where are you going to get a gun?”

“I got a cousin,” Marisol said.

“Of course,” Yessenia muttered under her breath. She wrapped herself tighter in her favorite brown cardigan — the one that made her feel safe. She’d put her hair in a messy ponytail, ready for whatever Marisol had planned for the night. Her jeans, however, were new, and had cost enough to fill the truck’s gas tank three times over. They were a gift, and she wanted to show them off, even if only to her best friend. But Marisol was once again distracted.

The Hartz Chicken Buffet parking lot was empty as last call at a funeral home. Marisol watched the employees through the stained windows. They buzzed around in dark aprons, cleaning and serving the final customers of the night.

A slow, steady rain made the streets as slick as glass. Cars slithered down Uvalde Road, careful and saint-like. No speeding. No running lights. North Shore had never been this obedient. The most recent murder had been discovered the night before. Bethany Ife, former cheerleader at C.E. King High School in Sheldon. They found her in the wooded area behind a neighborhood off Beltway 8.

The parking lot lights hummed a dull yellow on cars for sale, cracked pavement, and a long-abandoned ATM decorated with weeds. There was once life here, where a haircut, polished nails, and a good meal were possible. Now those options were gone and an uneasy silence filled every crevice in these neighborhoods. There was a collective holding of breath, a closed eye, the frozen-contortion-before-the-doctor’s-needle type of pause. The East Side sat motionless in thought, waiting, wondering who was next.

Inside the truck, it had been an hour of off-tune humming and air-conditioned chill. Marisol watched Hartz customers get their fill of the all-you-can-eat chicken and roll themselves into their cars. A scrawny discount rent-a-cop escorted each woman from the restaurant to her car. He looked fresh out of high school and still in puberty. What’s he going to do if real stuff goes down? Marisol wondered.

“We should add security services,” she said, then mentally added that to her business plan for Marisol & Company Investigations. That meant adding extra people. Yessi, with her scared ass, could stay in the office doing spreadsheets or whatever assistants do. This new hustle would be better than the selling all those stickers or filling out those forms. She could be a legit business owner, calling some shots around here. She’d be important. Everyone would know her.

“What are you talking about?” said Yessenia.

“We’re gonna start, like, a detective agency. A chick detective agency. In North Shore. Dope, right?”

Yessenia wasn’t surprised. Marisol loved money more than herself and she loved attention more than that. Surely she’d name the thing after herself and make Yessenia file papers. It was my idea! she’d say, making herself the hero and Yessenia the lame sidekick.

Yessenia flicked the air-conditioning vent closed and changed the subject: “Why are we meeting him here?”

“He likes symbolism, the big pendejo.” Marisol flicked the vent back open. When Yessenia didn’t respond, she sucked her teeth loudly. “Ay, I have to tell you everything? You don’t know about the Channelview cheerleading mom? That white woman who wanted to get her hija on the team, so she sent someone to kill that other girl’s mom? They planned that shit right here.”

“Mari, you need to reconsider this stupid plan of yours. It’s going to get you killed.”

“It’s not stupid,” Marisol snapped. “Look — if you want to go back to your house and the little scraps of life you’ve made for yourself, dale. But me? I’m gonna catch this son of a bitch, then ride this gravy train to the end.”

Yesenia rolled her eyes. “Why does it have to be you?”

“Because no one else is doing it. No one else is gonna be out here making this cheddar. Can you imagine if I off this guy? Word spreads on the street, and folks come running to the door.”

“You’re not Batman, you know.”

“Nah, I’m better. I’m his half sister they don’t talk about, from the barrio.” Marisol winked.

A female vigilante — why the heck did Marisol think she could be such a thing? Yessenia peered at her friend’s face in the pink light from a flickering neon sign and thought she looked more like the Joker. Which, when she really thought about it... why was he a villain, anyway? Maybe he was misunderstood and only trying to make the world a better place. Maybe the Joker was the true hero.

Suddenly, Yessenia’s phone buzzed in her back pocket, making her jump.

Marisol laughed, a couple of seconds longer than necessary. “Who is it? Your boyfriend?” Her schoolyard tone rubbed Yessenia like sandpaper.

“Stop laughing at me.”

“You’re scared. Like, little-girl scared. When are you gonna put your big-girl panties on? Damn, no wonder... ”

“No wonder what?” Yessenia tried to make her words rumble into a growl, but couldn’t quite manage it.

“He’s here.”

A Dodge Ram, so black it nearly disappeared, rolled into the parking space next to them. The driver’s-side window opened enough for a pair of glaring eyes to survey the scene. Then a man — a beast — emerged from the truck. Marisol’s cousin was six-foot-plus and built like a bull. Short buzzcut. Eyes like the bottoms of bullets. He marched toward the back cab of the truck.

“Stay here.” Marisol hopped out of the truck and sauntered over to her cousin. He gave her a knowing nod and she nodded back. The exchange was swift. Marisol pointed, the cousin leaned into the darkness of the back cab. She yelled at her cousin and he yelled back. In the end, he handed over a covered bundle and she kissed him on the cheek.

Yessenia read a text on her phone. She responded, I’ll see you soon, and stuffed the phone into her pocket as Mari opened the door.

Smiling as if she’d just walked away from an explosion in an action movie, Marisol brandished a gun from the bundle. “Now we ride! And we’re gonna get ’em — soon!”

Marisol’s heart drums like a death march. Inside the bathroom, she feels claustrophobic, the sand-colored walls closing in on her. She grabs the gun, places it on the sink, and punches the hand drier button. She turns the nozzle up to dry her hair. She leans into the heat and closes her eyes, letting the air play with her long curly locks. This is going to be tougher than she thought.

She can hear Roscoe talking to someone. She cracks the door open, not far enough to repeat its loud squeak, and peeks through. The round-bellied cashier is on his cell phone. Marisol catches shards of conversation.

“Are... sure... yourself... let you know... going to be fine... smile... chula... right.”

The day after Marisol got the gun, Yessenia hoped the downpour would deter her search for the killer. But Marisol showed up at her door dressed in all black: jeans as tight as yoga pants, and black boots with heels so high they could be considered weapons. She looked like a Latina superhero, but without a cape.

“This is stupid,” Yesenia said as Marisol barged through her doorway. “I can’t believe you’re serious about this.”

Marisol looked her up and down. “You look like a librarian with the flu. Go get ready. And hurry — we need to pick up something on the way.”

“What if I don’t want to go?” Yessenia swatted at a loose strand from her messy ponytail and adjusted her dark-rimmed glasses.

Marisol rolled her eyes and tossed her curls. Hands on her hips, she stared down on Yessenia. “Look, stop being a punk, huh? You act like you didn’t even grow up here. What else you got to do tonight? It’s not like you have a boyfriend. What are you gonna do — play with your cat and watch Netflix?”

“I was in the middle of—”

“When did you turn like this?” Marisol waved her hand dismissively. The words were gasoline, and Yessenia knew the match would soon follow. “You’re so weak.”

Yessenia shuffled toward her room, her house shoes scraping the dusty clay of the Saltillo tile with each reluctant step. Marisol flung herself on the couch, a leg over the armrest and her cell phone between her long fingers. She pounded out social media statuses as she waited for Yessenia. She didn’t notice the new-furniture smell in the living room or the pair of men’s tennis shoes under the couch.

The drive was filled with Marisol’s off-key singing to the radio’s latest Tejano song and Yessenia’s tense silence.

“You know I love you, right?” Marisol always started the apologies with a question. “I’m sorry if you thought I was mean. It’s just that, sometimes... ”

“Sometimes?”

“You need a push toward what’s good for you. If it were up to you, you’d live in that house and never leave. Just work and home. You even get your groceries delivered.”

“I don’t get my groceries—”

“There’s a whole world out there, Yessi. I know North Shore and the East Side ain’t much, but damn, girl. Get with it. Get a hobby. Get laid! Something!”

“Actually, I just—”

“This world that you created for yourself ain’t right. You’re like one of those mole people who never comes out the house.”

“But I was out all day today. In fact—”

“You gotta interact, girl. There’s a whole world out there for us. Give me a smile? Come on, smile.”

The station had started its commercial break with one about a new weight-loss tactic to improve your love life. Marisol watched as a slow smile spread across her friend’s face and nodded her approval.

She closes the restroom door again. She can hear her heartbeat in her ears, trying to escape through her throat. Her hands are shaking and she can’t stop them, no matter how tight she balls her fists. Closing her eyes, Marisol thinks, Breathe in, breathe out, on repeat until she’s somewhat still. Still enough. “You got this, Mari,” she whispers to herself.

She grabs the 9mm from the edge of the sink, the sound of the metal on porcelain louder than she intended. Returning it to the small of her back, the piece is like a reassuring hand. With a final shake to take out the last nerves, she opens the squeaky gray door into the store.

She steps into darkness. The bright hospital lights are off, as are the lights outside. Shit. It will take a minute for her eyes to adjust so she keeps her back on the wall. Don’t call out. He knows I’m not in the bathroom anymore.

The frosty refrigerators are cold on her back. She remembers there were six coolers along the rear of the store. They end at the coffee machines. In front, the chip aisle is closest to the Cokes. She remembers that from last time.

Marisol steps deliberately to the right, her heel making a loud click. Quickly, she slips off her boots and leaves them on the floor. Steps left. Then right. Her toes feel the polished, unyielding floor. She reaches back and grips the piece like her cousin showed her.

“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” His voice rings through the dark and drips with playfulness.

Marisol’s stomach flips. She doesn’t speak. She’ll let the gunshots be her response.

“Cat got your tongue? This is the first time you’ve shut up in years.”

Marisol sees outlines in the shadows. She’s now in front of the chip aisle. To her right is the coffee pot, still hot and full. Next to the pot is a doorway to the back. She aims at that space. Readying herself.

“You should have noticed something by now. But you only see what you think is important, don’t you?”

The voice is close, almost close enough to touch. She keeps the gun trained on that space, ready to move fast, to follow his voice.

“Oh, no? She didn’t notice? Not at all? This will be delicious.”

The first night of patrolling was about as exciting as a trip to the dentist. The duo drove all night, looking for anything suspicious. Yet they didn’t know what, exactly. Old cars? Random men walking down the street? A deranged guy running with scissors? They drove past refineries and grazing fields peppered with horses. They drove past darkened strip malls and abandoned easements sheltering the sleeping homeless. Using the freeways as their personal Grand Prix and the Beltway like a drag race course, they drove past Waffle Houses and libraries, into neighborhoods that had seen better days when better days were more plentiful. Even North Shore’s Walmart, with its normally towering parking lights, was dim and abandoned. Channelview was worse, and Sheldon looked like no one lived there anymore. That was the worst part of searching for the killer: seeing their neighborhood looking like a ghost town and feeling like a slow death.

On the seventh night of patrolling, with nothing to show for their efforts but sleepless nights and empty gas tanks, Marisol wanted hot Cheetos and a Big Red. The Stop & Shop convenience store called to her like a beacon in a sea of darkness.

“Maybe we should just go home,” said Yessenia.

“Don’t be a baby,” Marisol scoffed.

Inside, the store was bright with whitewashed walls and stung with the strong smell of Clorox.

“It stinks in here, man!” Marisol yelled to the cashier behind the thick plexiglass as she pushed open the door, Yessenia shuffling behind her and smiling apologetically.

“That’s the smell of clean,” the attendant replied, looking up from his book, Programming for Dummies, and winking at Yessenia. The fluorescent light bounced off the plastic badge on his chest, illuminating the name Roscoe.

Marisol rolled her eyes, walked to a refrigerator full of sodas, and saw a familiar face: Demetria Jenkins.

“Girl, how you be?” Demetria swooped Marisol in a bear hug, her boxer braids falling into her face.

Yessenia smiled as she watched this scene and prepared for Demetria’s crushing embrace. But Demetria kept talking with Marisol, so Yessenia shuffled to the chip aisle. She peeked at them through the bags of discount Doritos. They giggled and gossiped like they were back in high school, falling into the type of easy banter Yessenia didn’t have with anyone — not even her own best friend. She wondered if Roscoe saw what was happening and guessed how embarrassed she felt. Eventually, she got tired of eavesdropping and walked back to the pair.

“Oh, where are my manners?” Marisol said when she finally noticed Yessenia had reappeared. “Demetria, you remember Yessenia Perez, right? She went to school with us.”

Demetria cocked her head to the side and made her eyes into slits for a moment before shaking her head. “Sorry, I don’t remember.”

Marisol and Demetria continued catching up, so Yessenia carried their items to the cash register. Roscoe smiled at her warmly. His grin tickled his earlobes and it made her blush for a second. His too-tight work shirt covered his belly over his belt buckle. As he rang up her purchase, Yessenia noticed the callouses and scrapes on his hands, worker’s hands. They knew what it was like to get at life the hard way.

“Is there anything else you need?” he asked in a low voice.

“Let’s hope not.” She gave him a small smile.

“You know where to come if you do.”

Yessenia responded with a shy laugh and left the store. It was another fifteen minutes before Marisol joined her in truck.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve seen Demetria. Isn’t she great? We’re gonna get together soon, after all this murder stuff dies down.”

“She didn’t even remember me,” Yessenia said. “And she used to cheat off my homework.”

“She’s getting married next month. Invited me to the wedding.” Marisol slid the truck into reverse and then drove into the night.

Yessenia nibbled on a chip. Her phone buzzed. She occupied herself with its screen as they rode home, with Marisol talking about Demetria all the way.

Two days later, when a pair of runners found Demetria’s body in Gene Greene Park, Marisol sank into the type of sadness that made her snap at everyone around her. Yessenia received the brunt of it, as she was used to.

“We should have been able to find this asshole. Pero no — you had plans. If we’d been out searching that night, Demetria would still be alive!”

“Are you blaming me?”

“I have to blame someone!”

“Maybe Demetria said or did something she shouldn’t have.”

“Demetria was amazing. No one who knew her would want her dead!”

“No one’s a saint, Marisol.”

Yessenia made a hard right and skidded the Ford F-150 across three lands of the Beltway 8 feeder road. She’d always wanted to drive like that — like she owned the road. In her car, she’d been much closer to the street. In this truck, she could see everything. That was why she’d bought it several months before. It’d proven very useful.

Marisol was extremely proud of herself for figuring out who the murderer was. She yelled at Yessenia to drive faster, worried that another woman would be attacked before the night’s end. Yessenia did as commanded, as usual.

The truck rumbled into the parking lot. Marisol glared at Roscoe through the window.

Yessenia watched her watching him. “What if it isn’t him? I mean, what makes you so sure?” Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, but she ignored it. She wanted to hear Marisol’s answer.

“It’s totally him. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Plus, look at him. He just looks like a crazy loser. God, why does it have to be raining tonight?”

“You don’t know anything about him.”

“He just looks like he hates black and brown women. Plus, he’s, like, forty years old and doesn’t even have a car. Look — there’s no cars in this parking lot except us.”

Yessenia wanted to argue, but there was no point. Marisol saw what she wanted, never what was in front of her. She handed Marisol the gun. “Here — it’s a full clip,” she said.

“I mean, we’ll find out for sure. At the very least, I’ll scare the shit out of him and make his ass confess.”

Yessenia nodded solemnly.

“Hey, but... if this doesn’t work... ”

“You know what? You’ve got this. I believe it now.”

Marisol tried to hide her proud smile and assume a tough look. “After this is done... we should take a break. You know, before we start our business?”

“Sure. Anything you want.”

Marisol reached over and squeezed her friend’s arm. She’d been too hard on Yessenia — too mean. She’d taken her for granted. After this was all done, she’d tell her so. Buy her something nice, like a dinner or something. Marisol smiled again, to let Yessenia know she wasn’t scared, and slipped out of the truck.

Yessenia waited until she saw Marisol walk through the store, into the bathroom. She picked up her phone.

“Hey, baby.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to do this one yourself?” said the voice at the other end.

“No, amor. I’m still tired from Demetria and Bethany.”

“All right. I’ll call you know when it’s done.”

Yessenia hung up and put the truck into gear, pulling out of the parking lot, toward the freeway home. Behind her, Roscoe flicked off the store lights.

The Falls of Westpark by Pia Pico

Westpark Corridor

There must have been an accident. Traffic on Westpark seemed unnaturally thick, even for four thirty p.m. Jules sat idling in her Malibu, studying the view of the Falls of Westpark apartment complex, the Presidium office building, and the brackish ditch that ran between. Today, a Home Depot cart enriched the vista, the telltale orange basket jutting toward the scrubbed aluminum sky. An afternoon breeze kicked up by a hurricane brewing in the gulf whipped a few plastic bags from their sticking places in the weeds. Empty soda bottles littered the tamped-earth trails on either side of the water, which resembled the aguas negras Jules had seen in Mexico as a child. She watched three or four day laborers head toward Windswept Lane, just parallel to Westpark and rife with low-rent apartment buildings, liquor stores, small markets, and casas de belleza that served the Hispanic population in the vicinity around the Houston Flea Market.

A text popped up on her phone: Glad you wouldn’t give me a ride bitch! Nice traffic. Looks like you’re fuked. This was followed by a smiley-face emoji.

It was Kelly, whom she’d left at the Triangle Club, after the 2:30 open-discussion meeting. He’d asked her for a ride home, but she’d begged off. She needed to shower and eat before her eight p.m. shift at Kroger, so he’d hoofed it to the Shell station, where his sister would pick him up to drive him back to his halfway house.

WTF! Jules texted back. I’ve been sitting here for 10 mins. Find out what’s going on and text me back. She eyed the engine temperature gauge on the control panel of her Malibu — the needle edging toward red.

She rolled about .3 miles over the next fifteen minutes before she saw the text from Kelly drop down over the top of her Instagram feed: Holy shit. Lady’s body found in dumpster outside of Westpark recycling center. K9 having a field day.

??!!!

Turn around and go the other way if I was you, he wrote.

Good idea. Jules did just that.

As she got ready for work that evening, Jules listened to an anchorwoman on the local news: “Deputies are unable to identify a woman’s body that was found in a dumpster at the Westpark Consumer Recycling Center in the 5900 block of Westpark. Crime Stoppers is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information that leads to an arrest.”

The next day, before the 2:30 meeting, Jules and Kelly sat at the green plastic picnic table on the Triangle Club’s cobblestone patio, smoking. The Triangle Club occupied a dingy office flex space in the Westpark Business & Ed Center, an industrial park built in the 1970s. The club served as a space dedicated to the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Kelly had almost six years of sobriety; Jules, six months. Kelly’s style of dress rarely varied: he wore extra-large T-shirts, khaki or camouflage cargo shorts, Teva sandals. A Houston Astros cap often topped his graying pageboy. Despite his yellow-brown teeth and pocked face, Jules liked fellowshipping with him before the meetings, hearing his stories of what it was like before he got sober. He used to be able to drink three beers, he said, no problem, but somewhere between three beers and eleven, he’d find himself at the dope house. He’d gone nine years without drinking or doing drugs, he said — a dry drunk — before prison. Before prison, he’d had a wife, a full-time job at one of them big oil companies — all the things. When he lost his job during the Houston oil bust, when his wife left him, when one night he ran into his old drug dealer in the corner liquor store, then it was back on.

“I told my old dealer I ain’t got no money,” Kelly said. “That’s all right, said the dealer, I can cover you. He knew that once I started doing that shit again, I’d be selling for him in no time. It got so bad: I was doing meth, cocaine, heroween. I went home to my dad’s house and asked him to lock me up in my old bedroom. He did. He cooked my meals and brought them to me. I was selling drugs through my bedroom window, but he found out and had them deep bars put up over them. But I figured I could get the customers to meet me a few houses away, so I would sneak out. I did that about two times, and when I got back to the house he was standing there on the porch, arms folded. You don’t even want to get well! he said, and kicked me out. Soon after that, I ended up in prison. That’s what it took for me to get sober, and not one or two years. It took four or five years for me to get it.”

Whenever Kelly acted like he was making some sort of pass at Jules, she reminded him: “Practice the principles. No thirteenth-stepping.” Her sponsor said that to her often. Even still, Kelly didn’t stop staring at her boobs. She figured it was an honest enough exchange: he’d share his stories; she’d let him stare. As long as his advances stayed visual, she could handle them. She was trusting her higher power to keep her safe.

“I think the killer is Jake,” Jules said. Jake was a guy who recently stopped coming to the 2:30. The word was that he’d relapsed. “Remember he works at Home Depot? He probably carted her body to the recycling center in that Home Depot cart I saw dumped in the ditch yesterday. I pass by that ditch every day and always look at it. That cart wasn’t there before the body was in the dumpster.”

Kelly laughed hard at her theory, accidentally blowing smoke in her face. “Girl, there’s Home Depot carts in every ditch and bayou in this city! First off, no perp is gonna take that kinda time. Trust me. I know perps. What you got against Jake, anyway? And Christ on a bike! Why you always looking down a ditch?”

“How do you know he didn’t do it?” Jules asked. “You always tell me to watch out for people with clay feet.”

“First of all, Jake ain’t got no clay feet, because them’s that do gotta be uppity types — you know, people that looks high but aims low — and Jake ain’t uppity. Second of all, I know Jake; he’s good people.”

“Well, I don’t know. I just have a feeling about him.”

“What — he stare at your titties more than the rest of us?”

Dan, the leader of the 2:30 meeting on Wednesdays, arrived in his suit and tie, looking every bit the lawyer. He never said what he did for a living, and neither Jules nor Kelly ever asked. People in AA didn’t ask each other that kind of stuff. Everyone was happy to just show up at the club for another day sober. “Keep coming back,” they said at the end of each meeting, holding hands. “It works if you work it.”

When Jules wondered aloud why Dan always led the 2:30 in a suit, Kelly answered, “He’s faking it — faking it to make it.”

Dan stopped by the picnic table on his way into the meeting. He smelled good. Jules recognized the Comme des Garçon Wood-something-or-other her ex used to wear.

“What are y’all yakking about?” Dan asked.

Kelly took a drag off his Camel and turned his head to blow the smoke to the side, away from Dan, but he kept his eyes on Jules.

Jules said, “About the girl’s body they found in the Westpark Recycling dumpster yesterday.”

“God,” Dan drawled, “that’s a grisly thing, isn’t it? I heard about it on the news last night.”

“I think the body was dumped outta this Home Depot cart I saw in the ditch yesterday,” Jules said. Kelly kicked her under the table.

“What does that cart tell you?” Dan asked. He had a knowing tone in his voice.

“That some homeless dude or some Mexican did it,” Kelly cut in. “Those are the sorts always stealing shopping carts.”

“Hey,” Jules said, “I know you don’t know this, cabrón, but I’m Mexican.”

“Ho!” Dan laughed. “Don’t step on the toes of your fellows; they’ll retaliate!”

“You’re not Mexican,” Kelly said. “What kind of Mexican are you?!”

“The Mexican kind,” Jules answered. It wasn’t worth going into it with him. Like everyone else, he wasn’t going to believe her — because of her strawberry-blond hair, her blue eyes, her pale skin. Only Mexicans seemed to know that not all Mexicans looked alike; not all of them had brown or black hair, brown or black eyes, and brown skin.

“Anyways,” Jules continued, “those guys walking back and forth along that ditch? They’re Salvadorans.”

“Now how would you know that?” Kelly said.

“Ricas pupusas,” Jules said, referring to the handwritten neon poster she passed every Sunday on her way to the Triangle Club. Families from Windswept ambled along the ditch’s dirt trails to the parking lot of St. Michael’s Academy, where they lined up to buy these homemade savory stuffed-corn tortillas. Jules stubbed out her cigarette and stood. “Salvadoran comfort food,” she said, blowing smoke straight into Kelly’s face.

She left him sitting by himself and entered the door held by Dan, who’d pulled it open for another woman. Jules had never seen her before, this girl of maybe twenty-two, wearing a spaghetti-strap camisole, jeans ripped at the knees and studded with rhinestone butterflies.

For the past four months, Dan had been leading the Wednesday 2:30 open-discussion meetings. Daily attendance at 2:30 meetings ranged from four to fifteen people. The hotter it was outside, the more people in the small, windowless room. While other meeting leaders read from Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book, or from the daily meditations in Twenty-Four Hours a Day, on Wednesdays with Dan, the topic was always the same: alcoholism.

Halfway through the meeting, when Dan passed the basket, Jules dropped in her two dollars, then handed it to Kelly, who looked at her, shook his head and grumbled, “You’re not Mexican.”

“Kelly?” Dan called on him. “You wanna share?”

“Um, uh,” he passed the basket without putting money in it, “I’m Kelly, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Kelly,” the group chorused.

“I, uh, I think I’m just gonna listen today.” He folded his hands on top of his belly and grimaced at Jules.

After the meeting, while Kelly was in the restroom, Dan approached Jules.

“Grab a coffee with me.”

Shocked, Jules hesitated. She and Dan had never exchanged any type of back-and-forth before. “I’m waiting for Kelly,” she said.

Dan smirked, laughed. “Oh.” She could tell he had the wrong idea.

“We’re not together, me and Kelly. I was just gonna say goodbye.”

“Okay. Meet me at Starbucks on Hillcroft and 59,” he said and walked out the door.

“Come on, come on.” Jules banged on her steering wheel as she waited to turn left onto Westpark. Not far north, Hillcroft turned into Voss, and the dilapidated apartment complexes of Woodlake and Briar Meadow gave way to the seventies single-story mansions of Piney Point. But here, amid the thicket of electrical transmission towers and the sooty skein of overpasses and underpasses, a single-family dwelling would likely incinerate under the scalding sky. The only habitable enclaves in the immediate vicinity were one hundred — to three hundred — unit apartment complexes, one of which was the Falls of Westpark, a phlegmy stucco building that Jules passed each day on her way to the club. The Falls’ walkways faced the road, open to the air but shrouded in shadows. One whole flank of the building rubbed against the cindery bulk of State Highway 59. Jules suspected most of its inhabitants were the day laborers who loitered in the shade of the 59 underpass, waiting for jobs. Every time she drove past the Falls, she stared at its dim walkways and wondered what the people who lived there felt, what they hoped for, how they dealt with all the noise and exhaust from the freeway. She noted a few children’s plastic toys through the grills bordering the walkways. Maybe some of the day laborers had families with them, wives or mothers or sisters who worked as nannies and/or housekeepers for families in Piney Point, Uptown, Hunter’s Creek, River Oaks.

Since she’d broken up with her ex, Jules was all alone in Texas, family-wise. She’d moved to Houston seven years prior from Seal Beach, California, to attend Rice University on a diversity scholarship. Her plan had been to graduate with an English degree and return to the West Coast for law school, but she’d ended up getting serious with Larry. They’d met when she started working weekends at the Signature Kroger for extra cash; he was her manager. With only six hours left until graduation, she took a break from school and moved in with him. During this time, her drinking progressed to the point of her blacking out nightly and throwing up each morning. Within the year, Kroger had fired Larry, he had kicked Jules out of their shared apartment, and she had become a full-time cashier to pay her own rent. Going back to college, even though she was nearly finished, seemed beyond her physical and emotional capacities.

While her mom urged her to return to Seal Beach, something about Houston’s hardscrabble, unsentimental landscape appealed to her. Despite the superficial prettiness of Southern California (paradise, some people called it), she’d grown up in an infernal household, her alcoholic father constantly yelling at her and putting her down, her mother enabling all of it, her younger brother addicted to surfing and speedballs to cope with the consequent racket in his brain. After this brother died from a heroin overdose, Jules could no longer bear the sight of the Pacific Ocean. The difference between the external beauty of her homeland and the internal bleakness of her heart was too much for her. Houston fit her; she fit Houston.

Traffic would not ease up. Four minutes passed as Jules waited for a break in the oncoming cars, although she probably missed a couple opportunities, so flustered she was by Dan’s invitation. Why would he invite her to coffee? Or command her, more like it. He had (he said) twenty-plus years sober; he wouldn’t flirt with a woman in recovery, would he? Especially one as new as Jules? She checked her face in the rearview mirror; the Rum Raisin lipstick feathered out from the smoking lines over her upper lip. She needed to stop smoking, but goddamnit, one thing at a time. She’d given up almost everything.

When she looked back at the traffic, she saw just enough of a break to swing out left, then turn immediately right onto the road which ran between the Hillcroft Transit Station and a wooden complex that housed businesses such as Jaycee’s Exotic Dancewear, Relief Ambulance Services, Video and Surveillance Equipment Outlet; a church, Iglesia Pentecostes: Camino Al Rey de Gloria; and a Hindu temple, the Sanatan Shiv Shakti Mandir. At the intersection of Harwin and Hillcroft, Jules’s pussy started pulsating and thumping against the seam in the crotch of her jeans. Her heart sped up; her breath grew thin and shallow. “Uh, uh-h-h,” she groaned, shocked by the sudden flush of lust. Waiting for the light to change, she shook her head no, feeling betrayed by her body. Dan must have something of the governor in him — a personality that, like alcohol and drugs, she was powerless against. Although she hadn’t picked up this energy consciously, her body had absorbed it and was making it known now to her mind. But dear god! She was living by the principles now; she needed to place principles above pussy.

When she arrived at Starbucks, her underwear was so wet she could barely catch her breath. She feared that if she went into the Starbucks, then, true to previous form, she’d be back in the parking lot in less than thirty minutes, straddling Dan in the passenger seat of his S-Class, sliding up and down his lawyer cock while he sucked her tits.

She found an empty parking spot next to his Benz. She checked his windows: they were duly tinted. As she headed to the entrance, she said a prayer to her higher power that she’d learned from one of the old guys in the meeting: Help me, help me, help me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was her favorite.

Inside, Dan stood near the front of the line. Jules stopped behind the last person, hoping to calm herself down, but he saw her and waved her toward him.

“What’ll you have? My treat.” He placed a hand on her back and moved her in front of him.

Behind her, Dan was a force, a magnet attracting her hips toward his. She stopped herself from leaning into the almonds, madeleines, and gift cards, afraid she would just succumb and press her ass against his package. “Dark roast, please,” she practically gasped to the barista.

“After two p.m. we only have Pike’s Place,” the barista replied.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I need to use the restroom,” she murmured to Dan, and sped off before answering the barista’s question: “Room for cream?”

When she emerged from the bathroom, Dan was sitting at a counter near the front window.

“Can we sit outside?” Jules asked. She trusted that the gaggle of Bangladeshi men at one of the tables, the roar of the freeway two hundred feet away, and her own hypochondria about breathing in car exhaust would dampen her lust significantly.

“Just to be clear,” Dan said, when they’d situated themselves at a free table on the patio, “I’m not trying to thirteenth-step you.”

“You’re not?” Jules replied, both embarrassed and relieved. “I mean, good! I hope you’re not.” She tuned her ears for a moment to the sound of semis trucking north on 59 while Dan removed his suit jacket and tie. Outside, in the afternoon glare, she could see that his eyes were sort of topaz-y, and his cheeks had more color than they did under the fluorescent lights of the Triangle’s windowless rooms.

“No. I’m not. I wanted to talk to you about Kelly.”

Jules took a sip of her Pike’s Place through the slit in the plastic top. She adjusted herself in her chair. Her pussy-pounding had ebbed almost completely.

“I see the two of you together a lot,” he said.

“We only see each other at the meetings. My sponsor told me to show up twenty minutes early and stay twenty minutes late, for the fellowship. Kelly’s the only one there, usually, until right before the meeting. Sometimes I give him a ride back to his halfway house, but it’s so far away that most of the time I don’t.”

“Definitely don’t give him any rides. Frankly, it worries me seeing you two together so much.”

“Why?!” Jules set her cup, which was scalding her fingers, onto the table.

“What do you know about him?” Dan asked.

“I know he went to prison for selling drugs. That’s where he got sober. He was sober in prison for six years, and he’s been sober since he got out around two years ago.”

“Selling drugs isn’t the only reason he was there,” Dan said.

“Why else was he there?”

“Voluntary manslaughter.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he killed someone in the heat of passion.”

“Like his girlfriend?”

“Like that.”

“Did he kill a girlfriend?”

“I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you that you should beware of getting too close to him.”

“Does it seem like we’re close?”

“Don’t underestimate the power of the program to bring people from completely different walks of life together in the back of a van.”

“What? You mean, like, in the back of a van — having sex?”

“If it’s rocking,” Dan shrugged. He handed her a business card. “Feel free to give me a call if he starts to freak you out.”

Jules looked at the card. It was heavy white card stock with the name Dan P. printed on it. The only other information was his phone number centered underneath.

“Is this your AA card?”

“That’s right. Put my number in your phone now,” he instructed her, “and call me right here. That way, I’ll have your number and I’ll know it’s you when you call, and I’ll pick up. You can call for other reasons too, but I want you to have it in case of emergencies. Neither I nor my wife mind me getting calls at all hours of the day, and believe me, I’ve been called at ALL hours of the day.”

Jules finished plugging his digits into her phone. She paused before pressing the red button. “Your wife?” she said.

“Thirty years. That woman has been with me through it all, as they say. She’s a champ. We have six kids.”

“Six kids?” She pressed the button, sending her number. “How is that even possible?”

“Surely you know,” Dan said.

Before work that evening, she plugged Kelly’s first name — that’s all she knew — into the Google search bar on her desktop, along with the years 2007 to 2014, which she figured allowed for a margin of error in the amount of time he served, and the words voluntary manslaughter.

Nada. No surprise. Maybe his name wasn’t Kelly.

The next day, in the corner of the Half-Measures room of the Triangle Club, Jules sat at a table with a black rotary phone and a fake plant. Because of her young sobriety, her sponsor constantly texted her with opportunities for service work, and today she was answering Intergroup phones for three hours. Being present to answer the central AA number on a phone that may or may not ring, that may or may not have a desperate person on the other end — a person hoping at that moment to get sober, or just someone without a computer looking for the closest meeting — seemed like low-hanging-enough service work for her to manage. It was a step above emptying ashtrays and making coffee. “Service is the third estate of recovery,” her sponsor kept telling her. “You do it or you’ll drink.” Jules didn’t want to drink or drug anymore. Her bottom had been when she almost said yes to heroin — heroween — after her brother’s overdose, knowing full well it wouldn’t make anything any better. Now she sat next to the rotary phone, holding her own cell phone in her hand, scrolling through Instagram and Facebook and Twitter to pass the time. A noon meeting of around fifty people — a more professional crowd — was taking place in one of the club’s larger rooms. The folks at the noon meeting intimidated her.

The phone rang. She picked it up. “Intergroup Houston,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Jules!” It was Kelly.

“How did you know it was me?”

“I know your voice,” he said. “Nah! I’m just shitting you. I saw you were gonna be answering phones ’cause your name was on the board, so I thought I’d give you a call.”

Before Dan warned her about Kelly, she might have found this phone call funny, but now it seemed sort of strange. “Wait, did you call because you need to talk to someone at Intergroup?” she asked him.

“Nah, girl. I just wanted to talk to you over an actual phone instead of over text.”

“I gotta go,” she said. “What if someone who really needs to talk is trying to call?” She hung up.

Her volunteer shift ended at two. Even though she attended the 2:30 every day, today she wanted to leave as soon as possible because she didn’t want to see Kelly. She needed to find a new meeting to attend. He must not be outside at the picnic table yet, she thought. Otherwise he’d have come in and found me by now. But then, in he walked with his Astros cap, camo shorts, Ride or Die T-shirt, Tevas.

“There she is!” he sang, and it suddenly seemed to Jules from the warmth in his voice that he had been living for these afternoons. “Wanna go into the meeting, or wanna go out and have a smoke first?”

She smiled at him wanly. “You go smoke. I’ll meet you in the room.”

“K, save me a seat,” Kelly said.

The leader of the Thursday 2:30 meeting was a guy named TJ. He called on her to share. The topic was about the fellowship, about unity, about how being in the program allowed things buried inside to start to come out. She liked that line, things buried inside coming out, and she shared how that was truer and truer for her in sobriety. Before, she had tried to reach that buried mystery with drugs and alcohol. And at first, these had worked: she’d had a mystical experience. But then, they stopped working, the drugs and the alcohol. She felt every head in the room nodding at this. Now, when she practiced the principles — even when no one was looking — she felt... How did she feel? She felt like that church song “Nearer My God to Thee.” TJ nodded and smiled. “I’m grateful,” she said. “It’s like every day I’m closer to understanding that heaven is on earth.”

After the meeting, she told Kelly she needed to feed a friend’s dog — a lie that came to her when he scootched over to make room for her at the picnic table. She stayed standing.

“Well, be careful,” Kelly said. “They found another body last night — this time in the ditch. You hear about it?”

“They did?” She hadn’t heard.

“Young girl. Butterfly jeans, rhinestones.” He looked at her, waiting.

“That girl who was at the meeting yesterday?”

“The same. Hey, Johnny,” he said, turning to the big black dude sitting across from him at the table, “you see Jake here yesterday?”

“Nah,” Johnny said. “I ain’t seen Jake in a couple weeks.”

“I want to ask you about some other good meetings,” she said, leaving a message on Dan’s voice mail. “Call me back when you get a chance, please.” She sat in her Malibu, the afternoon sun beating through her windshield, the heat rising vigorously from the concrete parking lot where the group members parked. Large summer thunderheads rose into fantastical castles in the sky. Staring at the bumper sticker on the truck parked in front of her car (Legalize Freedom, with a marijuana motif), she felt her iPhone vibrate in her hand. The text on the screen said Dan P. She hit Accept.

“Hey,” she said.

“Is this an emergency?” Dan asked, sounding genuinely worried.

“No. Well, it sorta is. I just found out that girl who was at the meeting yesterday, the one you held the door open for, was pulled out of the ditch last night. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“I’m sorta freaking out. I think that you telling me about Kelly has me freaked out.”

“Good,” Dan said. “I meant it to freak you out. Hey, you know what? I’m waiting on a delivery and need my phone free. Why don’t you meet me at my office, and you can look on the computer at Intergroup, and I’ll direct you to some good alternatives.”

“Um, okay? Where’s your office?”

“The Falls of Westpark.”

“The Falls of Westpark?”

“I own the building.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Surprise.”

When she entered the grimy three-story complex, she pulled out her phone to text Dan that she was downstairs. Tejano music wavered from behind a closed door somewhere to her left. The sharp smell of something — lardy tortillas being cooked on a hot comal, maybe — caught her nose.

Just as she was typing her message, she heard her name called and looked up to see Dan in his dress shirt and suit pants, leaning over the railing of the third-story walkway. “There’s a staircase to your right. Come on up.”

Inside Dan’s “office,” there was a desktop computer sitting on a white folding table cluttered with papers and receipts and a couple of Styrofoam cups. Several legal-looking books stacked upright on a few shelves occupied the lone bookcase against the wall. A framed law certificate hung next to the bookcase, cockeyed. There was a nubby couch under the window near the door, and there were two leather desk chairs on either side of the folding table. The kitchen looked bare. Through a doorway into a back room, she could see a bed, neatly made, and through the bedroom window, the large red-and-white sign for Pare de Sufrir, a mini — mega church on the 59 freeway feeder.

“Did you know that girl?” Jules asked him. She sat in the leather chair in front of the desk. He sat in the other desk chair, across from her.

“Did you?” He flipped through a couple receipts, avoided meeting her eyes.

“I’d never seen her before yesterday,” Jules answered. She could feel her body getting nervous. What in the world made her think it was okay to be here? With Dan P., who before this afternoon she would not have imagined in this place, not in a million years. “So you own this building?”

“Actually, my wife does. Her family.”

“Ah.” He’d lied to her. Must have been easy to do. Here she was, and who would ever find her here? She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She thought about texting Kelly now, but what would he do? Because, suddenly, she felt doomed, and not the kind of doom she’d felt yesterday in the parking lot of Starbucks. This was darker, heavier... fatal.

“I think I’m gonna go,” she said, standing up.

Dan leaped up and cut her off from the door to the apartment. “You haven’t found another meeting. I’m gonna help you. Let me get you some water.”

“It’s okay, I really need to go. I forgot that I have to feed a friend’s cat. I actually haven’t been there in days. Could you text me about the meeting?”

She knew she wouldn’t be getting out. The front window’s blinds were drawn. She thought of screaming, but her voice was suddenly gone. It really was like in her nightmares, when she tried to scream and nothing came out.

“Sit down,” Dan said.

“Please let me out,” she croaked.

“Sit down.”

“I’ll scream.”

“Lots of screaming here all the time. It’s a perfect place for screamers to scream all they want. Nobody’s going to do anything. They’re all afraid of the law here.”

He approached her slowly, and she felt like she would faint. Just then, she heard a raucous banging against the apartment door.

“Open up!” a voice yelled. “Police! We’ve got you surrounded!”

Dan bolted toward the back of the apartment, and the door busted open. It seemed like twenty cops stormed into room, but it was probably only five. They had Dan down on the bed, a knee grinding into his back, before Jules could find her legs and turn toward the door.

One of the cops had her in cuffs within moments. “Don’t think you’re going anywhere,” he barked. “Some help!” she heard him call before the room turned to static, and she passed out.

“I never liked that guy,” Kelly said. “What’d I tell you? A total faker.”

Jules had stayed away from the club for two weeks, but now she was back. She hadn’t drank or used, but she hadn’t been able to stomach a meeting, nor could she go back to work. Her sponsor stayed with her for the first week, until her seventy-three-year-old mom could fly in from California to help her for an undetermined amount of time — until Jules could manage being alone again, whenever that may be. Her mom had driven her to the meeting in the Malibu, and she would be back twenty minutes after it was over to pick her up and drive her home, then cook enchiladas for her and sit next to her on the couch watching Netflix for hours. Knowing that the rooms of AA were filled with sociopaths and criminals made it hard for Jules to return, but she was aware that staying away for too long meant she would probably drink, and to drink again meant she would probably die. The meetings had helped her stop suffering — pare de sufrir, indeed. She knew she needed to continue to make them. Meeting makers make it, one of the sayings went.

Plus, Kelly was here.

“Now you know what feet of clay are,” he said. “You really know, and like the Promises promise, No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others! You’re facing your fears, girl. Not fucking everything and running.”

She and Kelly were sitting on one of the picnic benches after the noon meeting. A whole gang of fellows surrounded them, some leaning against the wall of the courtyard, some spilling out into the parking lot under the blinding, relentless sunshine. Most of them chatting, laughing. They knew what had happened to her. She’d shared it in the meeting. She’d had to do it. “We’re only as sick as our secrets,” her sponsor had said. She was seeing a counselor now, too, who agreed that going back to the meetings was a good idea — just not to the 2:30.

“You gotta stay in the middle, girl,” Kelly was saying. “Don’t let the fuckers out on the edges get you. You survived. Your experience is gonna help some other person. Now you got one fucking hell of a story! Believe me.” He smiled at her through his yellow-brown teeth.

By some act of grace, he’d been at the Shell station, waiting for his sister to pick him up, and had looked up to see Jules on the third-floor walkway at the Falls of Westpark. He’d seen Dan lead her through the apartment door, the blinds drawn.

“You’re sorta hard to miss,” he said. “Even though that place is full of Mexicans, just like you, you stood out like a sore thumb.” He smiled broader. “I just knew that some seriously bad shit was going down. I called that 1-800-TIPS number — you know, that Crime Stoppers number? Told them I had information on the perp who dumped those gals in the bin and ditch, and that I was pretty sure another dumping was about to take place pronto. I’m amazed how fast they showed up.”

“You gonna get the $5,000?” Johnny asked.

“I’m not telling you if I do!” Kelly laughed.

Jules looked at her watch: 1:20 p.m. A few seconds later, she heard her mom honk the horn of the Malibu. She stubbed out her cigarette and stood. “I gotta go.”

“You gonna be here tomorrow?” Kelly asked.

“Probably.” She was taking it one day at a time, for reals.

“Keep coming back,” Johnny said.

Jules smiled at him.

“You gonna be all right?” Kelly asked.

When she turned to look at him, he was staring at her boobs. She slung her purse over her shoulder, reached her hands behind her waist, and thrust out her chest, as if to crack her back. “I think so,” she said. She waited for Kelly to look her in her eyes again before she dropped her arms. Then she turned and headed into the merciless glare of the parking lot.

Railway Track by Sehba Sarwar

Lawndale

Holding my ping-pong paddle — or table tennis, as I referred to the game — I served the ball and tossed a question to Sanjay: “Want to help me track the Raincoat Hombre?”

Sanjay missed the serve. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s follow the hombre!”

I slammed another serve that Sanjay missed. Our fingertips touched as we stooped to pick up the orange ball. Electricity rippled through my body. Leaning forward, I placed my lips on his. Sanjay responded by thrusting his tongue into my mouth. Two men playing a few tables away stopped their game to watch us. We broke apart.

Collecting our belongings, we drove away from the university rec center. Sanjay followed me to my house, where I uncorked a bottle of wine. After a few moments of watching the news, which showed protests against the upcoming presidential inauguration, I turned off the TV and used my phone to play Bollywood music from a wireless speaker. Sitting close to each other, we hummed tunes until the freight train’s whistle cut through the music. I turned off the sound.

On cue, the man I had dubbed Raincoat Hombre appeared in my window, walking down Jefferson Street. Once he dropped out of sight, Sanjay and I slipped out of the back door and into my car.

I drove half a block to the stop sign, where we glimpsed the man below another streetlight. He disappeared into the dark, and I rolled my car forward.

The road curved, and the Raincoat Hombre turned and looked directly toward us, his face a flash of white. Sanjay gasped.

I swung my car onto Hackney Street. Three minutes later, we were back in my living room. I poured more wine.

“It’s hard to hide in a neighborhood where no one walks,” I commented.

We clinked our glasses and found ourselves six inches apart. Sex on my handwoven carpet from Karachi was more satisfying than on my luxury king mattress.

Sanjay and I had met through mutual friends at the University of Houston and bonded over weekly table tennis games, which were followed by drinks, and often more. With my braids and jeans, I could pass as a college undergrad. Sanjay looked older, even though he wore track pants and a baseball cap. His narrow frame stretched a few inches taller than mine, but arm muscles bulged beneath his shirt. He was as zealous about working out as I was about reposing on my sofa.

Though Sanjay’s background was different from mine — he had been five when his family moved from New Delhi to Houston, and he considered the Bayou City his home — we spoke the same language. I was not yet familiar with the city and its enclaves. My family was in Karachi, and I had landed in Houston to pursue a doctorate in social work. Sanjay helped me find my two-bedroom rental down the street from campus, in a quiet East End neighborhood called Houston Country Club Place. Sanjay deemed the house safe for a single woman, but drawled, “You’ll be the only Pakistani around here!”

For the most part, when I worked on my papers at night, I was accompanied by croaking frogs, chirping crickets, and the passing cargo trains. No neighbors ever appeared, until one winter Thursday night, the Raincoat Hombre — as I later referred to him because the Spanish spoken in my new neighborhood had begun to seep into my system — appeared as if he had been teleported to the spot beneath the streetlight closest to my house. His khaki coat swung around him as he strode past Mr. Rodriguez’s crepe myrtle tree, and his hoodie cast a shadow on his face. The first time I saw him, I nearly fell out of my chair. But over the course of the month, I adopted a Thursday-night ritual: the freight train’s eleven p.m. whistle became my cue to set aside my seminar report, watch for the hombre, and ponder over where he was headed.

The murder was reported on the morning after Sanjay and I had attempted to track the Raincoat Hombre. That afternoon, after a day of listening to stories — a woman having an affair, a teenage boy struggling to inform his parents he liked boys, an older man trying to cope with his wife’s death — I took a moment to check my phone. An alert from my neighborhood association popped up on my screen:

Registering that Alicia Hernandez’s body had been discovered just a few blocks from my house, I forwarded the e-mail to Sanjay. I also shot off a description of Raincoat Hombre to Mrs. Alfaro, the neighborhood association secretary, who I had briefly met.

Within minutes, she called me. “Would you like to come over for coffee tomorrow? You can tell me more about this mysterious man.” Curious to learn more about the murder, I agreed.

The following morning, Saturday, I walked to her house, one block from mine. Along the way, cars and trucks basked in the sun and oak branches fluttered in the breeze. Doves cooed. A police siren wailed on the other side of the railway track.

Clad in my adopted uniform — jeans and hoodie — I knocked on Mrs. Alfaro’s door. I had stopped wearing shalwar-kameezes and saris after the election.

Mrs. Alfaro served me iced tea, then settled in her rocking chair. “Tell me — you’ve seen someone mysterious wander our streets at night?” Her voice was squeaky. “No point talking to the police — yet. But I’ll alert the association. They can follow this man, to ask some questions.”

“I’d like to talk to him as well.” I sucked on a piece of ice.

Mrs. Alfaro pressed a hairpin into her gray hair and used her little finger to push up her glasses. “I don’t see why not. According to your story, though, we have till Thursday, yes?” She refilled my glass. “You know that the Hernandezes just moved here. Alicia was from Guatemala, and Luis is from South Texas. He’s a security officer in the medical center.”

I nodded. “I met them last month, at the Christmas concert at the convent. She seemed like a gentle woman.”

“That night, she was going downtown to meet a girlfriend, but she never left the East End.” Mrs. Alfaro’s words spilled like a soup pot bubbling over. “We didn’t want to frighten anyone, so we didn’t say more in the newsletter. They found Alicia in the backseat, wearing just her shirt and... panties. The murderer used her skirt to strangle her. She had bruises on her face — it was blue with punches. They say Luis was crying so much, he could hardly identify her.”

At ten thirty the following Thursday night, two men knocked on my front door, introducing themselves as part of the neighborhood watch team. I invited them to the backyard, where my landlord had left sagging chairs and a wooden table on the cement patio.

The older neighbor, David, said, “Our community is small, so we take responsibility to patrol blocks.” A stout man with a twirling mustache, he looked as if he was visiting from the eighteenth century. “We’ve caught burglars. But this is the first murder since I moved here thirty years ago.”

Juan, a tall man with wrinkles ironed into his forehead, nodded. He leaned against the wall. In the dim light, I glimpsed a flash of steel — a pistol tucked beneath his jean jacket.

“Where are you from?” asked David.

I tried not to flinch. “Pakistan.”

Neither man responded, but I knew the questions they didn’t ask: Isn’t that where terrorists come from? Followed by: Are you Muslim?

The cargo train sounded its whistle, drowning out the cicadas’ whirs. We peered around the wall. The streetlights cast shadows, but no one was in sight. David and Juan waited another hour, but the street remained empty.

Luis Hernandez’s front door opened onto Lawndale Street, overlooking the steel gates of the Villa de Mittal convent. Hands shaking, Luis offered me iced tea. Several weeks had passed since his wife’s murder, and the police were no closer to solving the crime than they had been when it occurred. I had seen Luis at the nearby Fiesta Mart. When I greeted him, he responded with teary eyes and asked if I could help him. Without hesitation, I had agreed.

Now, leaning forward on his sofa, Luis tried to smile, but his lips trembled. “Perhaps you can look through her things and see if you want anything? Or you could give things away?”

I sorted through boxes of clothes in their bedroom while he watched from the doorway.

“I’m sure you’re tired of questions,” I commented.

“I’ve told the police everything I know. After she drove away to meet her friend, I went to my buddy’s house to watch a basketball game. The police called me around ten thirty that night.” Tears trickled from his eyes.

I replayed the time line in my mind. Luis had seen Alicia around six p.m., after the winter sun had dipped into the horizon. There was a four-hour window during which the murder occurred.

“I still have nightmares about how she must have suffered,” said Luis. “I want to go back to the Valley to be with my family, but it’s not so easy to get a job.”

Being a mental health counselor is like being a detective: both professions require listening skills. Growing up in Karachi, I heard our housekeeper share stories about her abusive husband. When my mother helped our housekeeper file for divorce, I served as babysitter for her daughter and listened to the little girl’s stories about hiding in the closet while her father struck her mother.

My mother and her friends had infused women’s rights into my blood. “I lived through General Zia’s times,” my mother told me. “We marched when I was sixteen. And we saw women’s rights being wiped like grease from a table. No one could produce enough witnesses to a rape or win a case contesting an honor killing.”

Religious extremism had fomented over the decades, especially as war escalated in Pakistan’s northern regions. Though my personal life remained unaffected — I was raised in a progressive home, attended a coed school, and experimented with drinking and sex in Karachi as well as in the United States — I saw many of my Karachi classmates embrace an extremist version of Islam.

In California, at the women’s college I attended, my listening skills attracted new friends who told me about dates and sometimes date rapes. Wanting to help, I decided to study human behavior. That was what had led me to Houston and its university’s doctoral program. All the stories.

Assuring Luis I would return with more boxes to finish packing his wife’s clothes, I left his house and walked to my own. A police car sailed past me on Lawndale and parked under a crepe myrtle. One officer leaned against the car while the other remained in the driver’s seat, his face shadowed.

“Any progress on the murder?” I called out.

The officer shook his head and introduced himself as Javier Garcia. “We hear you’ve seen strange activity.”

“Just a man wearing a raincoat,” I responded. “He walks at night. But I haven’t seen him since the murder.”

“Aren’t you from the Middle East?” Cop Garcia asked.

“Pakistan. It’s part of South Asia.”

His face remained blank. “There aren’t many immigrants from your country in this neighborhood. If you feel any threat, or if you see anything suspicious, just call us.” He handed me his card before they drove away.

The second murder was reported on a Friday afternoon. My friend Sylvia called with the news: “A girl was killed last night.”

I jotted down notes: A twenty-two-year-old Filipina, Maria Lee, who lived a few streets from Sylvia’s house, had been murdered. If a neighbor walking his dog had not seen her body on the train track, Maria Lee would’ve been crushed by the eleven p.m. freight train.

Within an hour, I was at Sylvia’s house. She lived in her family home, across the tracks from mine, and had once told me the railway line was a border dividing the prosperous and the working class. “You’ve moved into a war zone,” she had said.

Squeezing a lemon wedge into the Corona Sylvia offered, I listened to her fill in the story. “Maria and her mother are from the Philippines. Her mom’s been in Houston for several years, but Maria arrived last month. She worked at a nearby taquería.”

I asked, “Was Maria in a relationship?”

Sylvia shook her head. She walked to her front door to double-check that it was locked. “Maria had an evening shift — her mother expected her after nine that night.” Sylvia shivered. “Her face was bruised and blue when they found her. And she was wearing a tank top and jeans. The murderer used her sweatshirt to strangle her.”

I sucked a lemon wedge. “Sounds familiar.”

“Makes me scared about living alone. But I don’t have a choice.”

Back at my house, I scanned the neighborhood association’s latest update, but there was no mention of Maria Lee. My telephone buzzed. My brother Hasan was calling from Karachi.

I gave him a rundown of my news.

“Are you safe?” he asked. After I reassured him that I was fine, he shared Karachi updates. “There was a bombing — this time at Sehwan, at the Lal Shahbaz shrine. More than eighty people dead. Women and children also.”

Closing my eyes, I remembered the shrine of the Sufi saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. Throughout Pakistan, guards armed with machine guns stood outside shopping malls, cinemas, and even shrines. I wondered why this bombing by extremist forces had not been stopped. Violence was increasing in Pakistan.

When I met Sanjay for a drink at Bohemeos, an East End café/bar, and told him about Maria’s murder, he exclaimed. “You shouldn’t stay there alone! When does your lease expire?”

“Six months.” I sucked a lemon wedge. “Weren’t you the one who told me the neighborhood was safe?”

Sanjay’s brows pushed together, making him look like a vulture. “I didn’t know these murders would happen!”

The television above him streamed images of men and women protesting. One banner read, Collapse the Walls.

“I can’t sit back and watch these girls die. The police aren’t getting answers. One of my Karachi friends — he’s a detective in New York — has been giving me a crash course on finding clues and checking alibis.”

“So what’s he telling you? Don’t get into risky situations?”

I shrugged. “I’ve also talked to the police here.” I had been enjoying our open relationship, but Sanjay’s new protective comments made me flinch. Trying not to sound terse, I said, “I keep my doors locked and alarm on. I’m from a city filled with six times as many people as Houston — in Karachi, people are murdered every day. Their deaths don’t even make national news.”

“This isn’t Karachi!” Sanjay said. He flexed his muscles. “Want me to move in? You need protection. You’re the foreigner in this neighborhood.”

“We’re the foreigners in this country,” I responded. “And we always will be, even if we’re born here. Did you hear about the Indian man killed in Kansas?”

“I suppose they’ve always hated us,” Sanjay conceded. He sat in silence for a moment. “The murders here have one thing in common: both were women, and both were new to this country. And the killing style was the same. I’m surprised there was no... sexual assault.”

I leaned back, continued sucking on my lemon. “Good observations, Dr. Watson. People in my neighborhood haven’t connected the murders, because the second victim lived south of the railway track. If these are anti-immigrant hate crimes, I’ll surely be next.” I downed my beer and stood. “I have to go. I’m going to visit Maria’s mother.” I leaned over and kissed him. “Come over tomorrow and I’ll fill you in.”

I walked away, aware of Sanjay’s eyes pinned on my back.

In her apartment, among faded paisley sofas and framed photographs, Norma Gomez twisted her hands together. “As soon as they release Maria’s body, I’m returning to Manila.”

“This must be so difficult for you.”

Norma shook her head. “I didn’t tell the police, but one time someone sprayed on our door, Go back to where you came from. I wiped away the writing before Maria saw. I didn’t want her to be afraid. I’ve been in this country for five years. No one’s done that before. Things are scarier now that Trump is president.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said, aware I sounded more like a detective than a social worker. But Norma was so ready to talk, and I wanted to help her.

“After her shift, Maria called to say she was going to dinner. I didn’t ask questions. I just wanted her to be happy, so I was glad that she had met a boy.” I nodded, and she continued: “I’d made her favorite stew that night. I kept the food hot, in case she was hungry when she returned. She loved to talk and never ate when she was being social. But... ” Norma mopped her tears with a tissue.

I gave her a moment, then said, “Tell me more about Maria.”

“She was my daughter from my first marriage. I met my second husband in Manila — he served in the US Navy. We got married, and I flew to Houston, but Maria stayed with my mother. I sponsored her after I got my citizenship.”

I didn’t drive home until late that night, just as the freight train sounded its whistle. The gate was down once I reached the tracks. I stepped on my brakes, made sure my doors were locked, and turned off my engine, knowing that I would have to wait at least twenty minutes for the train to pass. The street was still, with no sign of Raincoat Hombre or anyone else.

The night’s excitement didn’t end when I got home. During the evening news, Mrs. Alfaro and the two neighborhood association men, David and Juan, knocked on my door.

Mrs. Alfaro spoke first, pushing up her glasses: “We heard you talked to Mr. Hernandez. And that you’re helping the mother of the other girl who was murdered. Have you talked to the cops?”

David interrupted before I could respond, his voice sharp: “Why’re you getting involved? We’re increasing neighborhood patrolling, so you’ll see more men walking around at night.”

“We go to Stephanie’s Ice House afterward,” Juan added. “Join us sometime. When you take time off from visiting families.” His voice was almost a snarl.

“We were, um, wondering,” Mrs. Alfaro pushed up her glasses again, “who’s the gentleman that visits you. One of your relatives?”

Before I could respond, my telephone vibrated. I stepped inside.

Luis Hernandez was on the line. “Can you meet me at a bar next week? I need to talk. I can’t live here anymore, without my wife... ”

When I got off the phone, Mrs. Alfaro and her team were still on the steps. Her voice pitched higher: “Stop trying to fix things, okay? The cops will solve these murders. Just keep your house locked and stop spreading stories — people will be afraid to come here!”

I ushered them to the street, slammed my door, and dropped onto my sofa. Unhooking my bra, I pulled it off through the sleeve of my shirt. Just then, another knock sounded, this time at the back door.

Sanjay stood outside, satchel flung over his shoulder. I invited him in and twisted open two beer bottles. Sanjay’s eyes strayed from the drinks to my unbuttoned shirt and bra-free breasts.

One eyebrow raised, I said, “Everything okay, Dr. Watson? Want to tell me on the rug?” Pressing close to him, I continued, “I’ve had many visitors today. And now Luis is creeping me out — he keeps calling me for help... ”

Sanjay tilted his head. “I want to hear more, but first, read this!” He held out his phone, which displayed a message from the university’s Indian student association.

I skimmed and absorbed that the body of an undergraduate Indian student, Nadia Masood, had been found in a freight train boxcar near the university. She had been strangled with her scarf, and her face was punched up. Nadia had been living in southwest Houston with extended family, and her parents were on their way from Ahmedabad, India, to collect her body.

Twisting away from Sanjay, I headed to my bedroom, reappearing in my uniform of form-fitting T-shirt, hoodie, and jeans.

“Wait! I thought we had other plans.” Sanjay followed me to his car.

As we approached campus, we saw six police cars with flashing lights parked alongside the railway line. Orange cones closed off one lane, and yellow emergency tape wound around the train. Sanjay dropped me off next to the railroad track and I walked toward the train, melding into the crowd of students.

Past the graffiti-covered railcars, I glimpsed an older female officer with silver hair shaved to her skull. I recognized her as HPD’s homicide supervisor, Henrietta Jones. Her photo had been shared in the neighborhood association newsletter as the officer in charge of the murders.

I attempted to approach her, but a police officer stepped in front of me.

“Could I talk to her?” I gestured toward Ms. Jones.

“Do you have information?” The officer’s voice was terse.

“Questions.”

“Call the station for an appointment.” The officer handed me a business card and turned to speak to a student who had tears trickling down her cheeks.

My night was haunted by dreams of an army of raincoat-clad men and women, marching along the railroad track, stepping in and out of boxcars. I woke up tired, no closer to answers than I had been when I fell asleep.

Two days later, Sanjay and I drove to southwest Houston. We knocked on a dark-brown door, and a tall woman named Aliya answered. She led us to her living room, dark with burgundy curtains drawn across the windows. Incense smoke made my eyes water. A couple, Rana and Ahmed Masood, sat on a cream-colored sofa, each clutching a mug of tea.

Their daughter Nadia had not lived at the university. Instead, she stayed with Aliya, her mother’s cousin. Each morning, Aliya dropped Nadia downtown, where she caught the Metro Rail to campus.

“She didn’t have many friends,” explained Aliya. “Being a Muslim from India, she didn’t fit in with the other Indians or Pakistanis. So she studied. She was doing well — she was searching for jobs and looking to change her visa status. She might even have met someone... Sometimes she came back late. She was a quiet girl and never told me who was giving her rides.”

Rana Masood adjusted her dupatta scarf and dabbed her tears. “We didn’t want her to go to America. Everyone warned us. But she wanted to study computer science. She got a scholarship from our community association, and she got a visa.”

Ahmed Masood hunched his shoulders. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his lips trembled. “Our community raised money for our tickets. We just want to bury our daughter and return home. But the police won’t release her body. The time to bury her in accordance with Muslim practice has slipped away. She remains in the morgue... ”

Rana Masood tugged my hand. Her palm was sweaty. “I don’t trust the police here. But I found Nadia’s diary.” Reaching into her purse, she drew out a notebook. “She didn’t write much.”

A few pages were filled with handwriting belonging to a person who spent more time on a machine than with a pen. I scanned the text, gleaning that Nadia had met a man who sometimes drove her home from campus. He takes me to dinner in a hotel — some neighborhood called the Galleria. We hold hands. He listens to me and understands.

I flicked to the last page: I promised him I wouldn’t write more, but one day I’ll share the story of the man I love.

Thirty minutes before I was to meet Luis at the bar, my phone rang.

“Can you meet me by the cemetery instead?” Luis stammered. “There’s graffiti on my wife’s grave.” He said the cemetery closed at sunset, and an iron bar blocked the entrance. “You can park across the street and enter from the side. I’ll wait for you.”

Making sure my phone was charged, I drove up Lawndale. Darkness had fallen, and there was no moon. As I pulled up across from the cemetery, I saw Luis waiting for me. I parked my car and crossed the street to join him.

Luis and I walked across wet grass to the curling cemetery road, a labyrinth with which he seemed familiar. I had been to Forest Park Cemetery just twice: once to attend Alicia’s funeral, and the second time for the smaller service for Maria Lee, who was buried in the mortuary since her mother could not afford a grave. Those burials were my first encounter with any US cemeteries. Forest Park’s grassy landscape stretched over hundreds of acres — the opposite of what I knew in Karachi, where bodies were buried on top of each other.

“Thanks for meeting me here,” Luis mumbled. “I don’t trust cops.” His eyes were teary and his hair disheveled.

I glanced around at the winding road, lined by pink and white azaleas. Far away, police sirens competed with the hum of the nearby freeway. Occasionally, a roar erupted from airplanes landing or taking off at Hobby Airport.

Finally, Luis stopped in front of a grave. The tombstone had been knocked flat.

I aimed my telephone’s flashlight at the flat stone. “This is not your wife’s grave! Who’s Joanna Martinez?” I turned to face him.

Luis’s face was shadowed. His eyebrows seemed thicker and his arms were long as he lunged for me. “Don’t move,” he whispered.

Though Luis’s frame was not much larger than mine, his arms felt like an iron belt. I clamped my teeth on his shoulder. He winced, loosening his hold. Squirming away, I folded one leg to knee his groin, but he thrust me onto the wet grass. I landed on my back, feeling scratchy stalks push against my shirt and jeans. The scent of jasmine from a nearby tomb clung to my nostrils, contrasting with the danger.

“What’re you doing?” My heart pounded so loudly, I could feel palpitations through my chest. “We’re not near your wife’s grave!”

“Shut up, bitch,” he muttered. He closed his fist and punched my right cheek.

My face tingled, but despite the pain, I registered that Luis’s hands were covered with latex gloves. I called out with as loud a voice as I could muster, “We’re close to the children’s grave site! Why’d you bring me here?”

He grabbed my shoulders and shook me, causing my teeth to chatter.

“You should’ve gone back to where you came from! Too late now, bitch.” His voice was a hiss. Pressing his knees into my stomach, he wrenched my body to pull off my sweatshirt.

I thrashed my legs and tried to call for help, but Luis pushed his knees harder into my gut and slapped my cheek. I fell back, and he returned to twisting my hoodie to make a rope.

Just as he leaned forward to wind the fabric around my throat, I saw Luis shiver. Cold metal touched the back of his neck. He turned to see six plainclothes police officers surrounding us, one pressing a .45 caliber pistol into his back.

“Why didn’t you tell me you suspected Luis, and that you were talking to the police? You could be dead!” Sanjay’s lower lip protruded, making him look ten years old.

I leaned back on my sofa and pressed an ice pack against my cheek, now padded with a bandage. “You were out of town. Remember I told you that Luis was being creepy? I had to do something.”

“I don’t understand why he went after you.” Sanjay removed his baseball hat and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Maybe Luis thought I was talking too much? I had a weird feeling when he asked me to meet at a bar. So I went to HPD’s homicide department and talked to Henrietta Jones. Remember, I saw her at the railway track? Even though I had no evidence — just a gut feeling — she listened to me. Maybe because she’s a woman too. Or maybe because we’re each working in terrains where we’re outsiders. Anyway, she said the story was going cold. No one wanted to talk to cops, especially not Asian immigrants. My fear made sense to her, so she agreed to have me shadowed.

“Her team set up a wire on my phone so they could tap into my conversation with Luis, both live and on the phone, while also tracking our movement.” I sucked the lemon wedge in my glass of water. “We were supposed to meet at Stephanie’s Ice House, but he changed the plan at the last moment. When they heard him mention his wife’s grave, the cops went to her tomb. I kept talking, trying to give them clues. Still, it took them time to find us. If they’d arrived a few minutes later, I wouldn’t be here!”

There was a knock on my front door, and I paused. Sanjay answered, returning with Henrietta Jones.

“Thank you, Mona Naeem! You led us to a mass murderer,” she said, perching at the edge of an armchair. Henrietta frowned, which made her look older than her fifty years. “Luis wasn’t on our list because he had an alibi for each murder. But now we know his alibis were army veterans like him. They covered for him.”

Sanjay and I listened, keeping our eyes fixed on her.

Henrietta continued: “His real name is Charles Wilson, a veteran from upstate New York. He used stolen identities. If he’s who we suspect him to be, he might have killed more than six women in different cities. He’s a bragger. Hates immigrants, especially women. They shouldn’t procreate, he told us. He married Alicia so he could maintain a front, but he always intended to kill her and leave Houston. Maybe he killed her sooner than planned because she found out about a girlfriend... He had four flip phones on him. Different numbers. All messages deleted, and a different name for each phone.” She paused. “He’d studied Spanish. Liked to pretend to be an immigrant himself. Helped him gain trust with the women he victimized.”

I took a gulp of water while digesting her news.

“And you? Maybe he thought you were getting too close. We’ll find out.” Henrietta stood up, her shoulders sloping. “Thank you for leading us to Charles. This will be a long night.”

After letting Henrietta out, Sanjay crept close to me. We fell asleep curled against each other’s bodies.

I poured myself a glass of ice water and stepped into the steamy night to sit on my front steps. Inside, my belongings were packed in boxes. The semester had ended without me completing even one class. I was going to move into Sylvia’s house for a month, finish my papers, and then spend the rest of the summer in Karachi.

As always, Jefferson Street was quiet. Rivulets streamed from my walkway to the street, reminders of the afternoon rain, and the warm air felt like a clammy towel wrapped around my body. Grackles croaked from a nearby tree, and when Raincoat Hombre appeared below the silver streetlight, I nearly choked on the lemon in my mouth.

“Howdy,” he called.

“Howdy,” I responded, using a word I had never before dared.

He moved closer. I saw that he had a furrowed forehead, shaggy white eyebrows, and long silver hair.

“I’ve seen you before,” he said.

“I’ve seen you too.”

“You shouldn’t be out alone,” he said.

“The killer was caught.” My black eyes met his brown.

“I know — I saw your photo in the news.”

I blushed. Over the last month, I had been featured in more television interviews than I would be for the rest of my life.

“Why’d you stop walking?” I had more questions I didn’t ask: why Thursday nights, why after the train went by, why the raincoat even when temperatures soared? But I decided to swig water instead. After all, I had solved the bigger mystery.

Everyone in Houston now knew Luis’s — aka Charles’s — story. He had served two terms in Iraq and Afghanistan and been diagnosed with PTSD. Upon completing his Afghanistan assignment, he returned to New York, where he inherited family money. He was an only child. After his mother passed away, he moved across the country without leaving a trail. The Lawndale house — like previous homes in which he had lived — was owned by a fellow veteran who vouched for him whenever needed. When Charles applied for jobs, he used fake identities and never registered at veteran centers. Before Houston, he had lived in Miami, Mobile, and New Orleans, where he dated and killed at least eight women from countries including Mexico, India, Panama, Indonesia, and Guatemala.

“I don’t discriminate,” he had bragged in court, choosing to defend himself without a lawyer. “I hate all immigrants — especially women, ’cause they breed like rats. Sex I had to have, but I cut my juices off. Couldn’t mix with those women.”

Raincoat Hombre stood a few feet away from me. “I live in Montrose, but I explore at night. That’s what insomniacs do. I walk different neighborhoods: East End, Second Ward, Fifth Ward, Third Ward, Freedmen’s Town. I stopped coming here when I noticed a car following me.” He looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “And after the murders, I decided to give the East End a break.” He turned to glance at the curve of the new moon. “See you next week?”

I nodded, not bothering to tell him that the following week I would be in a different East End house, on the other side of the railroad track. If he walked as much as he said he did, I would encounter him again. Probably while sitting on Sylvia’s steps, brooding over whether to proceed with my doctorate, accept the job offer from the Houston police, or return to Pakistan for good.

Coat swirling around him, Raincoat Hombre navigated my walkway, turned right, and headed toward the railway track.

Jamie’s Mother by Stephanie Jaye Evans

Sunset Heights

She was walking through the streets at midnight because she had a man to meet, she was carrying a gun because she was going to kill him, and she was wearing high heels because she hadn’t thought it through.

For the first two hours, she sat by Jamie’s sleeping, dreaming body and ignored the pings his phone made. He lay on her couch, curled to fit his frame in its embrace.

She got a stack of clean white washcloths. Held them under the faucet and wrung them out, restacked and covered them with plastic wrap. Put them in the refrigerator. Then, one by one, she took them out and used them to bathe his face, as if he had the kind of fever that could be relieved with cool cloths. The kind that could be relieved by a mother.

He murmured in his sleep. Smiled, lifted his brows, sank more deeply in. She pushed his hair from his face. Her hand stopped at his temple, at the tiny dimple of a measles scar. Oh.

She remembered him in her arms. Solid and muscular even at four, bigger than the other children. The way his heavy head felt against her breast as she rocked him.

His phone pinged, facedown on the coffee table. A quick pool of light, then draining away.

In his jacket pocket, she found a pack of cigarettes. She went to the front door, disarmed the alarm, unlocked the door, and realized she didn’t have a lighter. She took a box of matches from the utility drawer and carried them with the cigarettes to the front porch.

They’d bought this town house, close to Downtown, in this still-iffy but gentrifying Heights neighborhood, when Jamie had graduated from high school and left for college. They didn’t need the big house anymore or the good schools and they didn’t want the commute. They were happy here for two years.

She struck the match against the side of the box, sniffed the sharp bite, watched the pure flame spring up. Lit the cigarette and drew on it hard. She hadn’t smoked since college, but you don’t forget how. She tilted her head back and let the smoke spiral from her mouth. She used to look sexy when she smoked — men told her so. She leaned on the railing and peered down into the flower boxes. The cyclamen she’d put out for Christmas had taken a beating and were spattered with mud from yesterday’s rain. She rubbed at them with her thumb; the petals were stained.

This new white town house was three blocks off 610. Closer than they’d wanted to be — you could hear the freeway traffic. That meant it cost less. Jamie was going to a private university. They were being careful.

She sat on the glider, moored to the front porch by a chain thick as her wrist — the sort you’d imagine holding the Queen Mary fast. Her husband bought it the morning they woke to find all the new townhomes on their block, a block dotted with crumbling shotgun houses and an auto-body store, had their porch furniture stolen. Only theirs was left, which was so funny. Kenneth went to C&D Hardware on 11th Street and came home with this absurd chain, and that made her laugh even more. First he’d been cross with her, then he laughed too, and they went upstairs and made love on the new bed they’d bought to match this new house and new way of living. They pretended the traffic noise was a river.

She got up and poked a hole in the soil of the flower box, dropped in the finished cigarette butt, covered it, and patted it down. She wiped her hand on her suit and went back in, locked the door, set the alarm.

Her son slept on. Happy. A faint smile on his face, the kind of smile a full and content baby makes when his mouth falls away from your nipple, eyes closed and lips wet with your milk.

He was still beautiful. Not the way he was when he played football. He’d been huge then — she and Kenneth could hardly believe they’d made this massive golden man. It had been so sweet to go to Jamie’s games and hear his name called, the crowd roaring for him. The golden muscled mass of him racing down the field.

He was beautiful. Not the way he was then. Not like a giant. A god.

He was beautiful like a tubercular. Like a Spanish martyr.

Like a heroin addict.

The first time, he’d gone into rehab straight from school. His coach put him on the plane, so they didn’t get to say goodbye. Only a phone call. When the phone call was over, Kenneth turned to her and said, “Was that him? I don’t think that was him. It didn’t sound like him.”

She remembered when they sent his clothes home. Boxes and boxes. This was, oh, a year ago. Her husband was gone by then. They blamed each other. They blamed themselves. She couldn’t bear his face — his eyebrows just like Jamie’s. Bird-wing eyebrows.

That day, the FedEx man piled the boxes on the front porch. She came out and dragged one into the dining room, and the FedEx man brought the rest into the house. She’d tried to give him money, fumbling in her purse, then upending it on the floor and scrabbling for dollars, holding out a fistful.

She’d locked the door, set the alarm, and gone into the kitchen for a glass of ice, a bottle of bourbon, and a paring knife. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, she filled the glass with bourbon, took a drink, and sliced open the first box. Jamie’s smell, faint, rose from the box. She put her face to the crack in the cardboard box and breathed in. Over and over. Great breaths of him. The way she’d put her face against his newborn skin and breathed in the sweet hay smell of this living, perfect child God had given her, after all the doctors told her it couldn’t happen.

That day, sitting among the boxes, she poured another drink, then fitted her hand into the slot and felt softness. She pulled out his shirts, one after the other, sky blue and pink and lilac and butter yellow — all the colors Lauren made polo shirts in. Sixteen of them. Made of really soft cotton, like baby clothes.

She pulled out his clothes and school books and the notebooks filled with his tiny, cramped handwriting and bordered with doodles — monster bodies with human faces and trees with cereal boxes hanging like fruit. The invitations and the dried-up boutonniere still pinned to the jacket lapel. Everything she pulled from the box, she laid on top of her heart. A business communication textbook that cost more than three hundred dollars: she put the six-pound book on her heart. Seven pairs of Levi’s 501s: seven pounds on her heart. A T-shirt: six ounces. That made an ounce too much. Her heart was crushed under the weight and she crumpled, resting her face on the smooth, cool wood. She held Jamie’s T-shirt to her face and smelled him. Then she lost herself, screaming, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie, baby, and she screamed at her God, who had not protected her son although, God knew, she was on her knees every night praying for his deliverance. Promising God anything, anything, anything, only please God, please. Please.

That was a long time ago. Now she looked down at her sleeping son, his cheekbones like a model’s. The skin under his eyes deep purple.

His phone pinged on the table again.

Months before she knew, really knew, what this was — what had him — she’d picked up his ringing phone once, while he was in the bathroom.

Before she could speak to the caller, Jamie flew from the bathroom, holding his pants closed with one hand. He snatched the phone, hurting her, crushing her fingers. He raged, screamed down at her. She edged around him, her hands held up, apologizing again and again. Fled upstairs to her room, shut the door and locked it.

Told herself she wasn’t afraid of him. She slid down and sat with her back pressed against the eight-foot solid-wood door and tried to stop the shaking. Because she wasn’t afraid of her boy.

Ping.

His blond lashes rested on his cheeks. His cheeks were covered in red-gold hair. His huge hands lay open on his thighs, his whole body loose and easy and at peace. He was happy. This was happiness.

The doctor told her, “He needs it like air. You’re trying to keep him from air. So be careful.”

Ping.

She picked up his phone.

Jamie had an appointment.

When Kenneth moved out, he gave her a gun. He said the neighborhood was rough; he wanted her to be okay. He showed her how to load it and sent her a link to a video about how to use it. She stuffed it in a Tampax box, but also watched the video.

Now, she went upstairs and got the gun. Put it in the zipper pocket of her purse. Then took it out of the pocket and put it in the loose bucket of the purse, with her loose change and loose bills and the lipstick she used every day and a package of Kleenex. She came downstairs with her purse and a quilt made of stitched-together biplanes. When Jamie was ten, she’d bought two of these quilts at the Neiman Marcus Last Call. For his bunk bed, back when he could fit into a bunk. Back when sleepovers happened every weekend. Now she laid the quilt over her son, drawing it up to his chin and tucking it around his feet.

Here’s something she remembered — something she’d pull out every now and then: Her boy at two years old. She would put on a CD and turn up the volume, and they’d dance. Holding him on her hip, her left hand clasping his right. They’d spin and dip and twirl across the family room floor. He would throw back his head and that bright splash of golden hair would flare as they spun and he would laugh and laugh and laugh.

She was careful with that memory. That memory could kill her — crack her open so everything inside would slide out, and she would not ever be able to keep things together again.

Once she knew what she was up against, she did her research. She called in sick to work, which God knows was the truth because the night before she’d stood frozen in Kroger, in the canned vegetable aisle, dialing his number over and over, crying without shame. Her hands shaking, praying, Please, God. Please, God. Please, God. Barely aware of the small woman next to her, patting her arm and murmuring consolation in Spanish. She’d walked away from the kind woman, walked away from her full cart. Drove home and poured a bourbon. Put in her earbuds and played Adele’s heartbreak as loud as the iPhone would go. She’d danced by herself, bourbon in hand.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was a heroin addict. He overdosed, he died. His mom had twenty-three good years when he was sober. She would take that. Twenty-three years? Yes. She’d take that deal.

There were people who’d gone down that road and found their way back, she learned. But if the numbers told the truth, she would bury Jamie. Jamie wouldn’t bury her. This was the truth. She did numbers for a living and believed in them. They hadn’t given her false hopes and, God knows, God had.

Months ago, they pulled into a gas station to fuel up, and Jamie said, “Mom! What the fuck? You can’t stop here!”

She ignored him. She usually ignored what Jamie said by then because, like her husband, she wasn’t sure it was Jamie saying it.

She slid her card through the slot and turned, and three men glommed onto her, touching her, pressing in. One needed bus fare. His mom was sick. If she could only... Ten dollars, lady. Ten dollars.

Jamie’s face was turned away from her, stony. He’d told her. What the fuck.

She pulled out of the station, stopped at the red, and a zombie peered in her window and said something she was sure she had misunderstood. She drove through the red. “Jamie, did that woman proposition you?”

He smiled a smile that was a lot like Jamie’s. “She propositioned us, Mom.”

When her friends asked about Jamie, she lied. When they pressed, she dropped her friends. Ignored their calls. Stopped going to church. It was easier.

Here was a piece of good advice: she needed to go to Al-Anon. At least three meetings.

She went to one and sat there for an hour and a half, listening to the terror and desperation of strangers. She didn’t go back.

The text said he had what Jamie wanted. Gooood shit. Truth. Meet the same place as last time.

She scrolled through the text messages and found the last time.

A couple of months back, maybe three, she got a call from her bank. There was a young man. The signature — they weren’t sure.

She heard herself say, “That’s not my signature.” Then she walked into her boss’s office, said she was sick and had to go home. She looked sick. He walked her to her car; she didn’t want him to.

At home, she pulled up her account and did the math. Seven thousand dollars, give or take.

She went to her grandmother’s dresser, opened the top drawer, and took out the navy velvet box where she stored her wedding ring and the pearls her father gave her on her wedding day. The ring had been her husband’s grandmother’s. She was saving it for Jamie’s bride. For when he got better.

She didn’t shake the box. She carried it downstairs, poured a bourbon, and sat at the dining room table. Drank the bourbon. Waited until her heart was still. Opened the box.

The ring was there.

Covering her face with her hands, she wept with gratitude. It was such a gift, such generosity that Jamie hadn’t taken the ring. Oh, he did love her. He hadn’t taken the ring.

He had taken the pearls. Could have been both, but it was just the pearls. And seven thousand dollars. Give or take.

She used the phone’s map app to find where to meet the man. When she saw how close it was, she pressed the walking-man icon and got directions.

Here are some of the lies she told herself...

No. She was done telling herself lies.

She wiped Jamie’s face with a fresh cloth. Put a glass of ice water on the coffee table and pulled the table within his reach. Turned off the sound on his phone.

She blew out the spruce-scented candle. Dimmed the lights. Turned the television on to the Pandora channel and let Zoe Keating pour comfort and healing on her child.

She got on her knees and put her arms around his shoulders and held him close and breathed him in. He was still beautiful, you know? He was warm and bony and her Jamie, deep inside. She was sure.

She didn’t want to be late. She dropped Jamie’s cigarettes into her purse, filled a paper cup with ice and bourbon, set the alarm, and locked the door behind her.

Oh, that cool air. The breeze lifted her hair at her temples. It felt good. See, that was something else she’d learned: to take her pleasures where she could. It felt good to click the wrought-iron gate behind her. To be walking these happy streets by herself at night and not feel afraid. Because she wasn’t afraid. She was doing something for Jamie.

Her heels made a nice click click on the street. This block didn’t have sidewalks. She felt great. Healthy and strong, not too cold, not too warm, and the bourbon was good. She’d poured just the right amount: not too much, not too little.

Here was the house that had been on the market for three years — it went for seven hundred — plus and now there was a baby swing on the porch. Right next to it, Juan’s house. When she first moved to the Heights, she thought Juan was a slumlord. He had a four-unit garage apartment in back — she knew from the garbage cans out front on Thursday. He sat in a plastic chair in his front yard with a Chihuahua named Tiny on his lap. Neither Juan’s house nor his garage apartment had seen upkeep.

She and Juan were friends now. Long ago, Juan was a professional baseball player in St. Louis. He’d brought his whole family over from the Dominican Republic. He wasn’t a slumlord — he was a family man.

She passed under the massive oak tree some builder had the sense to save. The Heights had these lovely old oaks — more than a hundred years old and as big around as a rowboat. She walked up to the tree and pressed her cheek against the bark. See? She could enjoy this. This tree and the bark and the weather being good and her feet not hurting even though she hadn’t thought to change her shoes.

There was a jumble of flotsam on the lawn ahead. A closer look showed it to be a pair of red sneakers, a plaid flannel shirt with tag still attached, a pair of black pants. Two feet from the clothes was a blue loose-leaf notebook — GET AN EXPERT PERSPECTIVE ON AN HIV TREATMENT printed on the cover. As if the occupant of those clothes had been raptured away right before she walked by.

She loved neighborhood mysteries.

Her friends from the suburbs thought she and Kenneth had lost their minds, moving to this ghetto corner of the Heights.

The Rose Garden parking lot was full, and light and laughter streamed through the cracks in the blinds. Another night, she would go in and sit at the bar and nurse a Shiner Bock. Visit with Rose, who owned the Rose Garden but hadn’t named it or been named for it.

See, her friends couldn’t get this — how cool it was, this old beer garden in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

A block from the Rose Garden, the Tiki House was hosting a klatch of young men, some straddling bicycles, all with their heads shaved, all wearing white wifebeaters and baggy low-slung jeans. They were raucous as grackles, but went quiet when they saw her, leaving just the click click of her heels. She tapped one of Jamie’s cigarettes out of the package and walked over to them, smiling at the way they pulled themselves up and leaned back without giving way.

She held out her cigarette. The boys exchanged unspoken words and then one stepped forward, eyes on hers. Took the cigarette, put it in his mouth, lit it, took a puff, and handed it back to her. She didn’t look away. She put the cigarette between her own lips, drew on it, and slowly blew out a stream. Sucked in, gave a puff. A perfect O of smoke drifted away.

The boys exploded in laughter and applause. As she walked away, she added sway to her hips, listening to the catcalls her high school Spanish couldn’t translate.

See, she wasn’t afraid, walking into the night. This felt good, and the cigarette... She inhaled deeply. Why had she ever given this up? This was all kinds of good — the taste, the feel, the nicotine rush, the rising feathered plumes of smoke.

Okay, so now the shoes were hurting.

A pit mix pressed his ugly face against the nearest fence. This part of the Heights, there were those who wouldn’t dream of leaving their dogs out all night, and there were those who had bought dogs to be left out all night. The pit watched until she reached his property line, then sighed gustily and returned to his porch.

She should get a dog. A big one from the SPCA. A rescue dog, in case someone needed rescuing.

There was a rescue injection. NPR did a story on it. You had to be the police or an EMT to get one — she’d checked. She couldn’t get this magic EpiPen that could draw your child back to life when he slipped into his dreams, deeply, deeply, and loosed his hold on the tether that bound him to the world, where you waited for him, sending out your love and your longing and your terror and your fury like hounds that could sniff him out and find him, find him and drag him back to your arms before he was...

Jamie was very far away. She couldn’t find him anymore when she looked in his eyes.

Or maybe he was still there. She couldn’t see him, but maybe he was still inside.

She used to plan his funeral. Couldn’t stop her mind going there. All his friends would come. Walker and Taylor and Nick. They don’t come now, but they would come for the funeral and hug her, and the girls would cry and even some of the boys. They don’t come now, because he’s already dead, as good as.

She turned the corner onto Airline Drive and the roar of the nearby freeway rose to greet her. Airline was lined with Houston’s produce suppliers. Avocados and onions and bananas and pecans. The sidewalk was littered with peels and the golden tissue of onion skin floating like shed skin cells. This superfluity of a wealthy, vulgar, living, striving city that could give you life or give you death, and it was all yours, you choose — this road or that one?

Or maybe God chose. Maybe the city chose.

Probably it wasn’t that simple.

Oh, here’s something she loved: Before it got this bad, every Friday she would take off early and treat her boy to lunch at Liberty Kitchen. He would start with a dozen raw oysters. Gulf oysters, big as a baby’s fist. She taught him to pick up the shell and drink the sweet, salty brine. It was something she’d read about. She couldn’t eat raw oysters. She’d sit across from him and watch him eat, fill himself, anything he wanted. That was just... good.

After, they’d go to Mam’s House of Snowballs and he’d get two or three flavors of syrup with a ball of vanilla ice cream under the ice.

That was good.

Off Airline, the freeway was a roar of blare and flare and it bothered her not at all. She was part of this night. She belonged, and she belonged here.

The appointment was behind the Airline Service Station and Grocery. Where she’d stopped for gas that time they’d been propositioned. Tonight, she had a proposition.

It was late. Grizzled and gaunt, a man slept open-mouthed as a baby on the sidewalk in front of the store, bathed in the light of a Texas Lottery sign promising that you, too, could be a winner. His life was nested in shopping bags around and under him, spilling out. He stank.

She took a last draw on the cigarette and crushed it with the toe of her shoe. She didn’t pick it up.

Behind the station was the man who was killing her son.

No point in being mad at him. You don’t get mad at tornadoes or cancer or lightning strikes. It’s not personal — it’s business.

She closed her eyes for a moment, pulled up her chin, balancing the sea in her eyes. This was good. And this was right. She stepped into the dark.

Her heeled pumps with their black glove leather were no protection on the closely mown stubble and concrete rubble and shed condoms and Pepsi bottles and dog shit and fire ants. But she didn’t turn back. She made her way to Jamie’s appointment under the watery light of the twenty-foot neon sign.

The man had his back to her. He was small and his head moved rhythmically.

She said, “Hey.”

The man spun around, popping black earbuds out of his ears.

He was a boy. Black-haired, black-eyed in the dark. Not fifteen. Maybe fifteen, but not older.

He said, “Fuck.” He looked past her like he was expecting someone else.

His cheeks were smooth. That boy’s mother put her hand against that cheek when he was sick. If he had a mother. Probably he didn’t, if he was out here so late.

This wasn’t the man who was killing Jamie. This was a boy, and he looked hungry. He needed someone to sit across from him and put good food in front of him. Cold milk. Good bread with soft butter. Some soup.

She smiled at the boy like he was a shy woodland creature and she wanted to show him he didn’t need to be afraid. She reached into her purse for some money to give him for food and milk. She dropped her purse and fives and tens and twenties spilled out. Her gun spilled out. It was a mean thing, small and threatening. She looked up to reassure the boy.

He wasn’t looking for reassurance. Fear bloomed in his face.

His arm, loose and jointless, swung to the back of his oversized jeans. It snapped back, now rigid and straight, with a black-and-silver gun that was bigger than her own.

The air went dead — there wasn’t enough to breathe. She couldn’t hear the traffic. Couldn’t hear her own voice. She held up her hand, unfolded her fingers to say stop. Wait. I won’t hurt you. I was going to, but that was when I thought you were someone else. When I thought I was someone else. Before I knew you.

He didn’t hear any of those things her raised hand was trying to tell him. He did what his big brother taught him to do in such situations. He aimed at her chest and shot her.

He’d never shot anyone before. It was dark and he was scared, so the shot was low. His arm circled back and tucked the gun into the waistband of his jeans. He pivoted like a dancer and ran.

The blow knocked her against the back wall of the service station convenience store. She stepped back and out of one fine leather high heel, her foot landing on the gravel and the loam of garbage. She clasped her belly as the fiery pain and the warm rush spilled down her legs. The pain and the blood a surprise all over again. She sank down to the damp weeds and plastic bags and pooling blood, back against the brick wall, knees splayed.

I won’t bury Jamie, she thought. I won’t bury Jamie.

She cried this time too. This was so good. She was so grateful.

Thank you, she thought. To God, probably.