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

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

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 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