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

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

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

Fernando regarded this kindly matron as she regarded him in turn—Chico’s mother, his own mother’s cousin. Looking at Emmanuella, Fernando saw no resemblance whatsoever between her and Carmencita, except perhaps for an utter absence of pretension, which would have endeared her to him even were she no relation of his own.

Fernando curved a smile down at her. Her eyes went wide as he did so, as though she’d seen a ghost. A work-tumbled hand fluttered to her breast.

“My,” Emmanuella said

* * *

Fernando and the others followed Chico back to his home on the outskirts of town. The home was little more than a hovel, built from the rusted bones of what looked to be an old farmhouse slatted up with mismatched boards and sheeting, crippled under the weight of the years and its bizarre accouterments. Fernando’s stepmother María Luisa would not have deemed it fit to house dogs.

Haphazard additions had been tacked onto the barn house from all angles. A slope-roofed garage of sorts

Fernando had been chasing after women all his life. Long before he’d understood what compelled him, he had chased them. Stalking them, shadowing them. Studying them from afar. He’d sensed his natural affinity for the chase, and he’d enjoyed it.

But as he’d entered into his teenage years, this passion for the chase had gone from a passive exploitation of circumstance to an active pursuit. He would feel the anticipation building within him, a familiar restlessness that titillated

The salacious image of the bathing woman from the barrio persisted, taking on a life of its own. In a sense Fernando was forever striving to recreate this experience, to recast it in some form or fashion with every woman who strayed across his path.

He sought for it with fiendish single-mindedness, all while keeping his fiendishness tightly under wraps. It hadn’t taken him long to recognize that his inclinations were aberrant. Highly conscious of his own deviancy, he maintained an iron grip

Fernando’s neglectful mother may have planted the seed of his attraction. But it was another from his early youth who’d shaped his proclivities.

His first erotic experience had occurred to him in hindsight, when he was still living in the barrio. He had been eight years old, the same age he’d been when his mother had died. Perhaps because of this the encounter had been branded into him all the more deeply.

He’d been playing alone in his bedroom when he’d happened to glance

Fernando had never cared much for girls, it was true. Almost without exception, he’d found girls his own age silly and uninteresting. Shallow, predictable and dull. Too lacking in worldly experience to have any savor to them. Once you got them out of their clothes, you’d seen the extent of all they had to offer.

But he did like women. He had always liked them—mature, older women with depth and complexity to them. Ones who’d been around the block a time or two. Ones who’d been bitchslapped

III

Work conditions improved markedly in the days that followed. Both for Fernando personally and for the job site in general.

“Finally getting things in again,” Chico said, checking over the latest shipment of construction materials delivered. “I don’t know what lit a fire under the jefe’s ass all of a sudden, but now that he’s got his shit together, we might just get this job done after all.” His glance turned shrewd as he looked to Fernando. “Seems