The two men stared down at the boy, he looking back at them, watching as their expressions shifted from disgust to confusion to plain old horror.
As ever, it was left to Dabney to speak the obvious. “That ain’t Pedro.” 12-year-old Kuger Rawlinson, cradling his own intestines in his hands, licked at his lips with his bone-dry tongue and tried to speak. “Help me,” he breathed. “He…hurt me. He hurt me…real bad.”
“No shit,” Tony said, his tone humorless. He lowered himself to his haunches and drew as close to the kid as he dared. “Who did this to you?”
Kuger blinked, failed to focus. “P-Pedro,” he whimpered. “I came back. I came back and I found him and he was still alive… Still…still alive… So… so I cut him down and he…he hurt me.”
“How could he do that?” Dabney said. “How was he even alive?”
Tony waved for his partner to shut up. “Where is he now, Kuger?”
The boy’s watery eyes darted to the left. “That…he ran…that way… He… he hurt me…”
Tony followed the boy’s glance to the narrow alleyway that ran behind the stores, towards the trailer park. “All right, son,” he said. “That’s all right. Try not to talk.”
“I think…” Kuger rasped. “I think I’m gonna die.”
Tony looked the ravaged kid up and down and nodded. “Yeah. Well, that’s all right too.”
“I’m…gonna die…”
Tony nodded. “That’s okay, son. You go right ahead.” He stood, turned, and led Dabney a few paces away, leaving Kuger to the darkness.
“Mom!” he cried. “Mom! Mom! Mom!”
He didn’t say anything else after that.
It was Tony who finally broke the painful silence. “Do me a favor, Dabs,” he said. “Go grab the 12 gauge from the car.”
THEY MOVED QUICKLY, FOLLOWING dappled blood spots along the alley, Dabney with his Glock pistol out in front of him, Tony carrying the shotgun. Elmer View wasn’t a long way, but it was too damn far for someone with no feet, so they were surprised—again—to find the trail led them all the way out the alley, down the street, and through the side gate to the trailer park.
Most of the homes were dark and there were no people around. It was a fair assumption that they’d all gone to join the parade. Tony could hear the distant clatter of a rhythm section and Rick Soto’s incomprehensible chatter blasting out of the loudspeakers in the square.
“Look there,” Dabney said, flicking his head at the trailer up ahead, lit up inside and out—and the screen door hanging off its hinges.
Tony nodded. The two approached in silence and entered unannounced.
Inside, they found Blake Rawlinson, older brother of the recently departed Kuger Rawlinson. They found some of him in the hall, some of him in the bathroom, a few pieces scattered about the living room, and the rest in the kitchen.
On cursory examination of the property, the officers also discovered an upturned bloodstained cardboard box—marked ‘Kuger’s stash’—from which spilled several hundred dollars’ worth of no-doubt illegally obtained Mexican fireworks. These too were scattered around the trailer, and always in the vicinity of smeared bloody hand-prints, which Tony would wager were not made by Blake. These prints trailed from the cardboard box in Blake’s room, across the carpet, through the trailer, into the kitchen, and up onto the countertop. The window over the sink was smashed and, peering through and shining his flashlight onto the ground below, Dabney could make out further tracks leading out the main gate—back towards town.
“ALL RIGHT,” DABNEY SAID when they were back in the patrol car and speeding down 14th Avenue. “Fine. I’ll say it. I’m not afraid to say it…”
“Say what?” Tony growled from the driver’s seat.
“What the fuck is going? What the Jesus fucking fuck is going on?”
“You asking me?”
“How is it,” Dabney said, near hysteria, “that a little kid, blown in half, no guts, no balls, no legs, nothing left of him but two arms and a head, manages to survive and—more than that—rip two other healthy kids to pieces and take off into the night?”
“You asking me?”
“How the fuck is that possible, Tony? How does that even happen?”
“I don’t know, Dabs. I’ll be sure to ask him.”
GARY TIBBS SAT ON a bench by the Victoria Square bus stop. Behind him people were shouting, laughing, singing. White men in cheap sombreros danced with drunken women in brightly-colored dresses with skirts that swirled about them as Thurman’s Hermanos blasted out the hits of Herb Alpert. Some kids he knew from school were at the banquet table but they’d finally stopped trying to get his attention after the seventeenth attempt and once the tacos had arrived.
Gary wasn’t in the mood. After what he’d seen, he’d never eat tacos again.
He was thinking about the kid he’d helped murder and wondering why, no matter what Blake Rawlinson said, no matter how retarded it truly was, it always sounded like a great idea at the time.
He was thinking about the expression on Pedro’s face—the fear in those eyes. And he was thinking about that last, truly awful, stupid moment when he lit the fuse. The one fact he neglected to mention to Tony and Dabney. “That’s right, fellas. Kuger’s fireworks, Blake’s idea, and my matches.” Those fuckin’ Rawlinson brothers. He swore to himself that if he ever saw those two again, he’d kill ‘em.
And then he saw something that distracted him from such noble thoughts. He was staring across the street, not focusing on anything in particular, but settling into the middle distance between two parked cars on either side of D-Lo’s Bail Bonds and just a little to the left of Albert Ramirez, who sat on the curb with his head in his hands, trying not to puke fourteen frozen margaritas into the gutter. Into that middle distance came something, or someone, loping dangerously along the sidewalk. Gary focused his gaze then, and saw something that, he knew, simply could not be.
NO ONE SEEMED TO notice Tony was carrying a shotgun as he walked down Vista. Or if they did, they didn’t care. They were all too drunk, too involved in their own good times.
When did Cinco de Mayo become such a big deal? he wondered to himself. When he was a kid, there wasn’t a thing about being Latino in a white town that seemed worth celebrating. Not to him and sure as shit not to the town elders, but look at it now. Walking down the street he had to navigate all the spent beer bottles and streamers that littered the sidewalk. He said to himself: This is the kind of shit that happens when no one’s got any jobs to go to in the morning. They focus all their energies on the next big event that offers them the chance to get fed, get loaded, and get laid, while halfway across town their children are committing murder.
“Hey, Tony,” his radio crackled. “Tony, come in!”
“What is it?”
“I’m in Victoria Square.” Dabney’s voice. “I just saw Blake Rawlinson’s mother. She looks pretty drunk. You want me to…?”
“I don’t want you to do anything except find Gary,” Tony said. “And don’t use this frequency.”
He let go of the radio and saw Albert Ramirez approaching. A stumbling kind of gait, but there was purpose in it. Over his shoulder Tony could see the crowds at Victoria, now counting down to the big fireworks display. “DIEZ!” they cheered.
“Hey!” Albert called, above the din. “Hey, Tony!”
“NUEVE!”
“How’re you doing, Mr. Ramirez?”
“OCHO!”
“What? Oh, I’m… I’m fine, I guess, it’s just… Well…”
“SIETE!”
Tony did his best to smile. “Maybe one too many, huh?”