Savages

triple?” Lado says. “Tell me the truth. Tell me
enough
truth I might let you live.”
    Jesus breaks down. “It was me, I did it.”
    Lado, a little winded, leans on the bat. “Not alone, you didn’t. Who are you with?”
    “The Nine-Four.”
    “Never heard of them. What’s that?”
    “My gang.”
    “Your ‘gang,’” Lado says. “You little balls of shit couldn’t pull off a
tombe
like this. Who do you answer to?”
    “The Baja Cartel.”
    “
Pendejo, I’m
the Baja Cartel.”
    “The other one.”
    “What one?”
    “El Azul.”
    Lado nods. “And who with El Azul told you where to be and when?”
    Jesus doesn’t have an answer.
    He really doesn’t.
    Not even when Lado hits a triple.
    Not even when he hits a grand slam.
    Jesus just spits out a lot of incoherent shit. This guy came to see him, he doesn’t know the guy’s name, the mystery man gave him the info about the dope run, suggested he should hit it, they’d split the profits …
    “Do you know a man named Ben?” Lado asks. “Was it him?”
    Jesus is happy for any suggestions. “Yes, that was it, Ben.”
    “What did Ben look like?”
    Wrong answers, wrong answers. Jesus can’t describe Ben, he can’t describe Chon.
    Fregado
—useless.
    “Would these know?” Lado asks, pointing to Sal and Jumpy.
    Yes, Jesus tells him, they’d know.

190
     
    Sal whimpers.
    He can smell his own fear, his own filth.
    Can’t stop his legs from shaking or the tears pouring out his eyes or the snot running out his nose.
    Jesus’s moans have stopped.
    He lies like a pile of dirty clothes.
    Lado puts his pistol to Jumpy’s forehead and shoots, splattering pieces of Sal’s friend all over him. Then he turns to Sal and asks, “Do you really expect me to believe that you just found a van full of
yerba
parked in your barrio and you took it? Is that what you expect me to believe?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Lado puts the gun to his head.

191
     
    The photo comes across Ben’s screen.
    Three dead kids
    With the legend—
    “taking care of business.”

192
     
    O sits on her bed and watches an episode of
The Bachelorette
on Hulu.
    “I’m telling you,” Esteban says, “she’s going for the wrong guy. That boy there is a
player.
”
    O disagrees. “I think he’s sweet, and vulnerable.”
    Esteban don’t know what “vulnerable” means but he knows what a player is, and that boy in the hot tub there is a
player.
    Maybe maybe, O thinks.
    Men know men.
    She and Esteban have formed a nice little relationship. He’s her new BFF. Sure, probably a case of Stockholm syndrome (O saw this thing on TV once about Patty Hearst), and he’s no Ashley, but he seems like a nice kid. So in
love
with his fiancée, OMG is the boy whipped. He tells O all about Lourdes and the baby, and she gives him sage, sisterly advice on how to treat a woman.
    “Jewelry is very important,” she tells him. “Jewelry and lotion. I’d pull back on the chocolates, though, because she’s probably feeling all fat and stuff.”
    “She is.” Esteban sighs.
    “Yeah, well,
you
didn’t bag the groceries,
amigo
,” O says. “And are you doing the deed regularly?”
    “Que?”
    “Drilling for oil, digging for gold, performing your husbandly duties?” O forms a “V” with two fingers of her left hand and shoves her right index finger back and forth between them.
    Esteban is shocked. “She’s pregnant!”
    “Not dead,” O says. “And during her second trimester her hormones are hopping around like bunnies in a field of clover. She’s hornier than a convent. You have to take care of business, boyfriend, or she’ll think
you
don’t think she’s beautiful anymore, and then look out.”
    “She is beautiful.” Esteban sighs.
    Whipped, whipped, whipped.
    “Show her.”
    Actually, one of the things O likes about Esteban is that he’s sexually unthreatening.
    Which O appreciates these days.
    She doesn’t really like the idea of being touched, never mind being entered, being
violated
, which she used to like a lot. Her once voracious sexual appetite has dwindled to a sensual bulimia. Her little bud that used to pop out and welcome any new sensation now hides in the closet in the fetal position.
    Thank you so much, my clit-sis, Elena.
    And Chain Saw Guy.
    Summoning that image is a mistake because it turns on the vid-clip. She squeezes her eyes shut and when she opens them again the bachelor’s head is floating in water and it’s a second before she realizes that