“Ise, man,” Jimmy said, his voice breaking. “Think about this. Think about what you’re doing.”
“Mi hermano,” he said, the affection in his voice genuine. “You don’t know how long I’ve thought about this.” He shook Jimmy’s head, almost playfully. “Remember our days in Hermosillo, when we first met.” He drew Jimmy close then, whispering in his ear, “When we were young, all the money and good food and dope, all the women we wanted until we got sick of having them. Remember when we would drive for days, no destination, no worries. There are things we lose in youth that we can’t call back. Do you ever think about things like that, Jimmy?”
“Oh, Ise,” Jimmy said, his frantic thoughts broken mid-sentence by his sobbing. He gave way to weeping, loud inconsolable moans with no more dignity than a ten-year-old. Finally, he recovered himself enough to speak. “It’s in the house, Ise. All of it. My grandmother sleeps on it under her mattress. But please, man, it was like a savings account. I was going to split it even with you.” Jimmy was breathing hard now, though hopeful he’d at least scratched the surface of empathy. “Man, I made some trades, some investments. There’s ten times more than I ever took.”
“Oh, my sweet Jimmy,” Isedro said in his ear, then kissed him on the cheek. “Adios.”
The report of the pistol, pressed as it was into Jimmy’s belly, was so muffled as to be perverse. Jimmy yelped, took a step backward, and fell into the hole where he lay moaning. He had dropped the flashlight beside the hole and Isedro picked it up and shined it down on him.
“Don’t feel bad, Jimmy,” Isedro said. “I would have shot you whether you lied or told the truth.”
Isedro looked over at Juan Carlos. “Bury him,” he told the big man.
“Fuck, man,” Juan Carlos said. “Finish him.”
“No,” Leon said. “He needs time to think about this.”
Juan Carlos handed him the shovel. “You’ll have to do it, man. I can’t.”
Ise gave him the light, but Juan Carlos snapped it off. “We don’t need to see this.”
Isedro had tossed in several shovelfuls of dirt which, in between the moans, he heard strike Jimmy’s clothing, when the sound of footsteps caused both men to wheel around. Juan Carlos caught the girl’s face and blue-tinted eyes in the flashlight.
“¿Qué pasó?” she said.
Jimmy screamed, something the way a calf bawls, then fell off into an eerie whimpering.
“¿Quién es?” she asked, who is it.
“Vete al carro,” Isedro told her, go back to the car.
It was perhaps the tone of her new lover’s voice or the nagging portent that had burned at her gut since the men had left the Suburban, but Dora suddenly arrived at her better senses. Without ceremony or hesitation, she chucked off both her pumps, turned on her bare heel, and bolted toward the thicket at the edge of the pasture. She had only covered about twenty yards before Isedro closed the distance and caught her by the hair. He dragged her back to the hole.
“I told you to stay in the car, mija.” His tone was fatherly, almost gentle.
The girl shrieked and clawed and tried to bite whatever of his flesh she could find. In her purse, she carried a medium-sized locking knife, but when she tried to get at it, Isedro yanked the purse from her shoulder, breaking the chain, and flung it into the darkness.
By the time he got her back to the hole she was begging for her life.
“Damn, Isedro,” Juan Carlos said. “I told you.”
Isedro reached under his jacket and drew out the nine millimeter.
“Shit Ise, don’t kill her.”
“What do you suggest?”
Juan Carlos had no answer.
The girl was on the ground just shy of the hole now, sitting with her legs folded under her, eyes down and rocking back and forth. “Por favor, Ise. No me mates. Por favor.” She sounded like a child pleading with her father not to be punished. Under the beam of the flashlight she looked up a flickering moment at her attackers, all the joy and love and sorrow and regrets of her young life seeming to pass from her eyes to theirs.
Isedro put the gun to the top of her head and fired. She dropped straight forward. Her arms at her sides, she looked like a subject prostrate before a king.
Isedro lifted her by the shoulders backward and tumbled her into the hole on top of Jimmy who groaned more loudly than he had the last few minutes.
“She should have stayed in the car,” Isedro said.
“Would you please finish Jimmy,” Juan Carlos pleaded. “Man, I can’t do this. I gotta get some sleep at night.”
“Shine the light,” Isedro instructed. Jimmy’s head and shoulders were still exposed and visible under the light beam. His eyes were tightly closed, and he seemed to have shut out everything but the pain. Isedro took careful aim at the base of Jimmy’s skull and pulled the trigger.
It took the two men only a few minutes to bury the bodies. They found the back door leading into the kitchen unlocked and lit a kerosene lantern. The first room they came to seemed to be that of a child, the bed no longer than five feet, and the floor strewn with toys and rag dolls. Isedro walked up to the bed, which appeared to have someone in it, and pulled back the covers only to discover a large stuffed bear.
When they walked out of the child’s bedroom, the old woman, dressed in a cotton night gown, was standing in the doorway of her own.
“Dios mío,” she said, her hands on her chest. “¿Quiénes son?”
“Amigos de Jimmy,” Isedro answered back.
“¿Qué quieren?” What do you want? She was shaking, her lower lip trembling.
Ise gestured at the big chair in the living room. “Siéntese usted, señora.” He took the woman by the elbow and politely helped her to the chair. As soon as she was seated, he reached under his jacket and pulled out the pistol, drawing a startled shriek from the old woman. She had her hands to her face and her eyes had gone wet. In the kitchen, a few paces away, was a cooking timer and a rosary, both of which Isedro took from the counter and set on the coffee table in front of the woman.
Isedro picked up the timer, set it for five minutes, and handed the rosary beads to the woman. He looked over at Rascon, who still held the lantern, and spoke to him in English. “Wait outside a few minutes, Juan Carlos.”
“This is fucked up, man.”
“Go ahead,” Leon said gently. “I’ll be five minutes. We have a lot of work to do tonight.”
Rascon, incredulous, shook his head. “It’s gone bad, man. I don’t know.”
For a moment, Isedro did not acknowledge the statement or even look at him. He stepped over and stood before the woman quietly crying in the chair. Staring down at her, he addressed Rascon. “Do you think we can turn it around now? You can’t call it back halfway through, man.”
Leon looked at the woman as he might his own grandmother, then went to one knee before her and addressed her politely in Spanish: “Madam, I will allow you five minutes at prayer. I will put the kitchen timer behind you so you are unable to see it. And I assure you, you will feel no pain. I admire you for succumbing so gracefully to your fate.”
He looked up at Juan Carlos. “Please,” he said. “Five minutes.”
Rascon waited outside for what felt like an hour when the kitchen timer sounded and the shot immediately after. When he stepped back inside, the old woman and the chair she sat in had been covered with a large flannel quilt decorated with the red silhouettes of