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They decided not to decide. Soak in a good bath, remove their watches, leave things to fate, with the brightness of North Star shining. They just were. There. Keeping each other company, trying to pass the time, this time, what was left of it, as best they could.

“The next day, I rose at dawn, still dark, to take the dogs out,” Rose tells me.

They had been trapped like sardines in the car for days. The three dogs endured the journey bravely, and it was time to give them the reward they deserved. Whatever happened, Rose was not going to deprive them of their walk in the woods. María Paz, Violeta, and Ming were still asleep in the North Star, and Rose figured he would return in time to have breakfast with them and make some decisions. Although who knew what kind of decisions — that was not so clear. Just then he decided it was best not to overthink the situation, and he took off toward the same uninhabited area he had gone to weeks earlier when he had emptied the Glock on the tree trunks. The temperature had risen a few degrees and the air was tolerable. Some of the snow had melted and an otherworldly blue glow surrounded the mountain. He could smell the fresh pine from the dripping stalactites on the branches, and Rose felt at home in the silence of his newly recovered solitude — that is, until he heard the faraway wail of a siren, reminding him that things were not so idyllic. Quite the contrary, there was an intense police presence all around and this time all hell would break loose if Rose were to shoot the Glock. Which reminded him, he had the gun with him in his backpack, a big mistake under these circumstances, and he thought about returning to the motel to put it away. But the dogs were already way uphill, happy and liberated, and Rose decided to follow them. In the end, all the bustle was down below and no one was going to wander up here.

They took about an hour climbing a little quiet road, their lungs heaving, their breaths steam, the four old friends, the clan, and Rose estimated that it was high time to start back when he came upon it: the Gift from God.

“Or gift from the devil, maybe,” he tells me. “I swear, all I thought was, oh, no, please, no!”

It was a yellow truck, old model, parked on the right shoulder, with no one inside. Nothing striking, and it would have gone completely unnoticed by anyone but Rose, who recently had seen a photo of an old prostitute hugging her pimp, as they leaned against the trunk of a yellow truck exactly like this one with the same sticker in iridescent letters on the windshield: Gift from God.

“It had to be the same one,” Rose tells me. “When I saw it, I accepted the fact that fate comes to meet you wherever you are.”

There were footprints in the snow, large boot prints through the barren undergrowth. It didn’t take a basset hound to track down the owner of the truck, and Otto, Dix, Skunko tore off quickly, zigzagging, noses to the ground, in a pattern tight as violin strings.

“I did not want to follow,” Rose tells me. “Didn’t want any part of it. My failure as an avenger had already been confirmed, and at that moment, my legs grew wobbly at the mere possibility of a face-to-face encounter with this man. At the same time, a spark of anger against this vermin suddenly flared again, and I followed the dogs. Revenge is like a hormone, which irritates you and emboldens you and makes you believe that you have cojones as big as a house. That’s what I discovered that day.”

The footprints went along the hillside, vanished for a bit, reappeared on the other side of a stream, meandered, deeper and deeper into a thicket of branches, reaching a peak that crowned the surrounding area, and then descended into a ravine, where the forest came to a clearing. The dogs had stopped at the top of the peak, and they remained alert beside Rose. From this vantage point, Rose had a clear view of the man below. It had to be him. The man was nearly naked amidst all that snow, wearing only underwear and a pair of yellow boots. His back was to Rose and he knelt on some rags or cloths, likely the clothing he had taken off.

“A humongous guy, actually,” Rose tells me.

A grifter, as they called them. And very white too. More so a slight shade of blue, like the snow that day. Rose immediately recognized him. He knew it was Sleepy Joe, although he could not see his face. Who else could it be, with that truck and in that trance? And it wasn’t really as if Rose knew the face. He had only seen pictures of him as a child, or hidden behind sunglasses. It seemed that Sleepy Joe had been there for some time, in the clearing, preparing his mise-en-scène. He had carved a notch high in the trunk of a large tree, and on that notch had placed a thinner trunk, binding it tightly with rope. He had painted the whole thing white, giving it a grotesque air. Rose remembered María Paz’s story about the Slovakian child and the insomniac nights because of a picture of another child, the Nazarene, who bore a white cross, sized especially for him. Shit, thought Rose, who is this animal going to crucify now? The cross was white, as if for a boy, or a girl. For Violeta? That would be the logical conclusion. He had constructed the whole set away from it all, camouflaged among the thickets, though right behind her school. But other than the fact that it was pristine white, like the cross of the child in the portrait, this cross was sturdy and big, and could easily bear the weight and height of an adult. Even Jaromil’s huge frame.

Sleepy Joe remained with his back to them, submitting himself to a rocking back and forth that slowly grew more intense, as if on the verge of a revelation. Something like the aura that precedes an epileptic fit with the spine bent backward at an impossible angle, the eyes raised to the heavens, body trembling with love for God, or perhaps from the cold. Rose tries to explain to me that it was worse, a more impressive scene than he had imagined from María Paz’s descriptions, because it was so unapologetically grotesque, more grotesque than frightening, actually, or in any case a good mix of both.

So finally, this was Sleepy Joe. Jaromil. The Passion Killer. The man who tortured and killed Cleve. And Pro Bono, and many more. A lone and naked giant, with yellow boots, blue with cold, shaken by hysterical mimicry in the middle of the forest. Rose did not know whether to laugh or weep. Cleve, my lovely son, think how much damage this clown has done to us.

Sleepy Joe prayed. Or at least he muttered things, repeated phrases, perhaps in Latin, or in an invented gibberish. To Rose’s ears it sounded like a litany of the names of demons: Canthon, Canthon, Sisyphus, Sisyphus, Scarabaeus, Scarabaeus — muttering names like that in pairs, the first time very serious and the second more shrill, all very theatrical.

Astonishing, really, but as Rose heard other names, he realized they were not the names of demons but of species of beetles.

“What followed all happened very fast,” Rose tells me. “Don’t expect some grand choreographed finale, because in fact the whole thing was very chaotic and arbitrary. Chaotic, no doubt. Although arbitrary, who knows, maybe not. Don’t think I was unmoved by this spectacle Sleepy Joe was putting on. There was a force behind it that made it almost impossible for me to bear. Remember that this makeshift priest, this motherfucker, had killed my son, in a ritual probably very similar to the one I was watching. And I was not immune. My mourning, my attachment to my own flesh, forced me to connect with that. I’m saying that I was very much aware that this dark ceremony involved me. Ultimately, it was me that man was waiting for, me who had been summoned, and perhaps I had only just beckoned his call.”

Once Rose was able to accept that, he was there of his own will and with a definite purpose. He opened his backpack and pulled out the Glock. Not before that, only then. “Sacrifice is sacrifice,” he said half aloud. “If the thing is killing you, then you have to kill it.” The gun was loaded and the target a gift, yes, there was his Gift from God, distracted, his back to him, practically naked, as if begging for a clean shot in the back of the head. But Rose’s hand began to tremble, and his conviction faltered. Not because he feared the consequences of such an act in the sense of electric chair or such.