The Kings Of Cool

218

Lado has kept one of them alive.

To watch the dissection of his friends and learn.

The man is naked and chained to a wall, and now Lado takes the point of the bloody knife and presses it into the man’s stomach, just enough to draw blood.

“Tell me now,” Lado says.

“Anything,” the man sobs.

“Which guero?”

“What?”

Lado presses the knife a little harder. “Which American agreed to the assassination of Filipo Sanchez?”

The man gives it up.

Raised in the slums of Tijuana, Lado found many of his childhood meals in the garbage dumps that rose in his barrio like Mayan temples. When his father had work, it was as a carnicero, a butcher, and when the family got meat, it was usually a cabra, a goat.

So he knows the sound of a goat when you slash its belly, and that’s what the man sounds like as Lado lifts the knife through his guts.