Following Chico’s lead again, Fernando and his friends crossed over to the buckling garage. For all that it was open at both ends, the garage was a big, dim, musty space, cluttered up wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with almost as much junk as the yard outside.

Rap music pounded from huge speakers at the far end, rattling the scrap metal and glass. The air reeked of rust and old grease. So too did Chico’s thug of an older brother, who emerged scowling from underneath the low red truck, which

The city of Saguero wasn’t much of one. Only in comparison to a place like Cortez. It was simply more crowded, somewhat less crumbling and sad. It was dingy and shabby. A mean-looking town. Dogs and derelicts scuttled about the streets, weaving among the working-class folk who trudged on by foot or sullenly biked, or puttered past in their varicolored jalopies, which belched black smoke against the advancing dark.

It was about nine in the evening when Fernando and the others arrived in what appeared

Fernando could hear the din of the dance music before they stepped one foot inside El Mar.

Blue strobe lights streamed through the smoky interior. Their watery beams cast a deathly pallor over the club goers who milled about in straggling bands. Staggering, jostling and shambling, they swayed to the music or from drunkenness or both. Zombielike in their bearing. Glassy-eyed in their looks. Grotesque in their idleness and inane thronging.

Garish flashes of bared flesh and flung limbs seared through

It was quieter and less crowded up on this second floor, if only by a little. Taking a quick look around, Fernando gestured to Tito and Pepe.

“Go find us a table. I’ll get us some drinks.”

Nodding to him, the two took off. Shed of them for the moment, Fernando made his way over to the bar. As he did, he scoped out the scene.

There was a small group of girl friends dancing together. It was the usual type of such a grouping—one very good-looking girl who was the center of attention of the cluster,

Fernando turned to see who’d tapped him, though he’d half-guessed already. It was the beautiful girl from the dance floor. Up close, she looked every bit as lovely as she smelled. Her eyes were blue and electric, her rosy lips framed in the most luscious pout. She was slender yet shapely. Cream-complected.

She wore a shimmering blue sheath of a dress that looked like one good tug would do it. Over her bare shoulder, she tossed back her long dark shining sheet of hair. Hands on her hips, she

Alejandra giggled, as if Fernando were joking. “What do you like then? Tell me.”

“Order,” he said. “Reason. I like for things to be in their rightful place. For people to behave like rational beings, not dumb blundering animals. When they don’t, it irritates me. It should irritate everyone. But it doesn’t. And that irritates me all the more. On the whole, I find the human race to be a gross disappointment.”

Alejandra frowned, not knowing what to say to this. Fernando didn’t blame

Outside on the streets of Saguero, Fernando ambled past closed shops, deserted cafés. After asking around, he knew the general direction of his destination. But the path there he took at random, letting his intuition guide him as much as his senses. His night vision had always been good. Even in the darkness of this unfamiliar place he felt at home and in his element.

He meandered through dismal alleyways choked with trash. He doubled-back at dead-ends, or at some prickle of primal warning that

“I don’t have any money for you,” Fernando said.

This wasn’t exactly true, but as Chico had so sagely put it: Why pay for what you could get for free? The whore shut the door behind them, plunging them both into shadow.

“I don’t care,” she growled back at him, driving him up against the closed door.

Her mouth was on his then, lush and musky and wild. Her hair crinkled in his hands, a bristly tangle of half-fallen curls. She scored her nails over him through his thin shirt, scratched

* * *

By the next week, Fernando had seen the choking ferns and vines routed from beneath his grandmother’s house and a plot of the rich dark earth plowed under for a garden.

Fibrous weed roots of all kinds riddled the loam. They snapped in sullen protest at their demise. Under the killing blade they became fodder for the crops to come, the good and rightful seed which would inherit.

Apart from his handy friends, Fernando consulted with the greater purview of Cortez. He recruited from among them,