He slaps the PW-Pro into my palm. Instantly, I know why I’m here.
“Eres más que tus pinchi libros,” Toro says. “Ya es tiempo que crezcas. Que dejas la niñez y te mantienes de pie con nosotros como hombre.”
He’s thrown everything noble about me back into my face. From this point, there’s only one way forward. At his side. As one of him. With this thought, the scar in my chest cracks open, becoming a drain that funnels every malignant thing in the world into my body.
The ATF agent shifts his gaze to me. His expression screams, pleading, begging for mercy.
But his fate is as sealed as mine.
The pistol, this instrument of death, feels heavy as though it were carved from a tombstone. I grip it with both hands, shaking. I try to rise above myself, to float in an altered state above this putrid catastrophe, but I can’t. Every detail remains in sharp focus, needles that etch this bleak moment into my conscience.
Toro snorts impatiently. His tattoos flare electric yellow. He cups the back of my neck and forces me to a knee beside the condemned man. Toro clutches my wrist and slews me forward until the pistol’s muzzle presses against the agent’s forehead.
The agent and I stare at each other — eyes misted with mutual fear and helplessness.
“¡Ya!” Toro barks.
I jerk the trigger, a loud bang cleaves my hearing, the gun bucks in my hand. Acrid smoke wisps, then vanishes. Ears ringing, trembling, I stagger to my feet.
Blood weeps from a puckered hole along the ridge of the man’s left eyebrow. The eyeball below is distended, clouded, and turning gray, black. I recoil, gagging, convinced the eyeball is about pop out. The other eye glistens like polished glass. More blood fans across the tarp, behind his left ear where the bullet exited. The agent quivers in a palsy of agony. Snot bubbles from his nostrils.
Toro clamps onto my upper arm, steadying me. “De este momento, estamos siempre empatados, tu y yo, el y tu. No hay salida.”
The dying gringo. Toro. Me. Our fates are locked together. Forever.
Toro takes the PW-Pro from my hands. Ysidro and Chuy bundle the agent in the tarp, then lift and upend him headfirst into the footing hole. He slides in and thuds against the bottom. I hear the rustling of fabric and a muted groan.
Toro picks up the spent cartridge shell and throws it in the hole. His fellow thugs grab nearby shovels and spend time tossing in dirt. Two minutes? Five? I don’t know. All I recognize is that my already broken life is now a pile of useless shards.
On Toro’s cue, we start back to the dirt ramp. A tractor rumbles from the adjacent construction area and parks close to the hole to angle a pneumatic rammer into the void. A percussive noise carries toward us as the tractor tamps the bottom of the hole. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa.
I imagine the ATF agent, limbs contorted painfully, blood squeezed from the pulp of his mangled face, suffocating as the earth packs around him. By midmorning, he’ll be buried under a pillar of cement and rebar. By the end of the week, the rest of the overpass will have been poured, entombing him beneath thousands of tons of concrete.
Is the agent forever disappeared? How long is the Mousetrap expected to last? A century? Longer? Perhaps it will outlive our government, our civilization, and our descendants will regard this structure as a historic relic, as inviolate as the aqueducts of Ancient Rome.
I struggle up the incline, so lost in my fugue that it isn’t until I’m confronted by the electronic babble from the Peace Memorial that I realize we’re back at street level.
On the sidewalk, we trek north. Toro lights a smoke. Chuy and Ysidro share a joint. Cars pass. No one sees nothin’. No one knows nothin’. Just another night in Globeville.
We arrive at the stop for the southbound number 12. The black SUV waits by the curb. Toro reaches into the rear seat and retrieves my backpack and tool bag. Up the street, a rectangular outline of yellow lamps heralds the approach of the bus.
Toro taps his phone. My backpack buzzes. It’s my phone. When I check it, the text reads: New deposit.
Toro says, “Lo que te debo, mil quinientos,” and then flashes a welfare debit card that he slides into my shirt pocket. “Un poco de propina. Loaded to the max, carnal. You and your mom are set for the month.”
With both hands, he cups my face. Our macho jefe leans close and kisses me gently on the lips. He pulls back but keeps his big taurine eyes on me.
I wait for him to say something, to reassure me that I mean something, that I’m more than a tool, more than his chew toy.
Wordlessly, Toro and crew hop into the SUV and motor away. The bus eases forward, sighs to a halt. I climb aboard, show my pass, and slide onto a vacant seat. Through the window, I read the message cycling on the Peace Memoriaclass="underline" Stop the shooting! Love one another!
About the Contributors
Mario Acevedo is the author of the national best-selling Felix Gomez detective-vampire series and coauthored the Western novel Luther, Wyoming. His work has won an International Latino Book Award, a Colorado Book Award, and has appeared in numerous anthologies including A Fistful of Dinosaurs, Straight Outta Deadwood, Psi-Wars, and It Came from the Multiplex. Acevedo serves on the faculty of Regis University’s MFA program and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
Francelia Belton’s love of short stories came from watching old Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents television shows in her youth. Her fiction has appeared in various publications and she was a finalist in the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Writing Competition. Now, she is on a quest to write 1,001 stories before she dies — an audacious goal for a slow writer; she is documenting her journey at Francel.Be/Writing-Stories.
R. Alan Brooks teaches writing for Regis University’s MFA program and is the author of the graphic novels The Burning Metronome and Anguish Garden, as well as his award-winning weekly comic for the Colorado Sun, “What’d I Miss?” His TED Talk on the importance of art reached one million views in two months. He hosts the MotherF**ker in a Cape comics podcast and has written comic books for Pop Culture Classroom, Zenescope Entertainment, and more.
D. L. Cordero is a sci-fi fantasy author, occasional poet, and horror dabbler working out of Denver. As a nonbinary, queer, Afro-Latinx and Taíno person, Cordero aims to write intriguing stories that center around characters from marginalized communities, without making identity the crux of the tale. Their work can be found on dlcordero.com and they can be followed on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (@dlcorderowrites).
Amy Drayer grew up a free-range kid on a charming island in the Pacific Northwest. A graduate of Scripps College and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project, she published her debut novel, Revelation, in 2020. She also pens short stories, is an enthusiastic member of Sisters in Crime, managing editor of the museum of americana, and editor of the 2022 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers anthology. Learn more about her work at makahislandmysteries.com.
Peter Heller is the author of the best-selling novels The Dog Stars, The Painter, Celine, The River, and The Guide. He holds an MFA in poetry and fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a former longtime contributor to NPR, and has been a contributing editor at Outside, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. Heller is also the author of four books of literary nonfiction.