Stolen Prey

continued the pain and he went back to denial, and all through the pain and the death, they got absolutely nothing useful.
    “If he knew nothing, and if the family knew nothing…” Dos began.
    “They knew nothing,” Tres said.
    “Then what happened to the money? Somebody knows something,” Dos concluded.
    “This is not really our problem,” Uno said. “We call Big Voice and report. We do what he tells us. Knowing where to send us, and what we ask, this is the Big Voice’s problem.”
    They were all wearing gloves, to avoid the slop of the butchery, rather than to prevent fingerprints. They wrapped Pruess’s body in the tarp and bound the tarp up with duct tape, and when they were done, the body looked like an enormous blue joint. After dark, they would throw the body in one of the garbage dumpsters that seemed to be everywhere. After finishing some minor cleanup with paper towels and Lysol, they carried the body up to the kitchen and washed their hands and started talking about dinner.
    “Pizza?” Tres asked.
    “If you go get it,” Uno said.
    They’d happened across a pizza place a few blocks away, on an avenue called Selby; a pizza place that had two Mexicans working behind the counter. They’d eaten there twice.
    “I will go,” Tres said. “Anchovies?”
    S O T RES went down to Zapp’s Pizza and ordered two extra-large pizzas, one anchovy with mushrooms and olives, and one pepperoni, sausage, and corn. The man behind the counter told him that because of the dinnertime backup, it would be thirty minutes, and would that be okay?
    “Is there a church where I can pray?” Tres asked.
    The man behind the counter, who wasn’t Mexican, but was extremely white and wide across the shoulders, gave him a smile and said, “Man, you are a five-minute walk from one of the phattest churches in the United States of America.”
    “Yes? Fat?”
    “Yes. St. Paul’s Cathedral. They’d be happy to have you come and pray.”
    T HAT THE church should be so close was like a sign, Tres thought, as he walked along the street. In five minutes, like the pizza man said, he came to a large but ugly church, sitting on the edge of a hill, like a frog ready to jump into a pond. There were thousands of churches in Mexico, and he was not intimidated either by the cathedral’s size or by its holiness, although the gray, stark walls were somewhat forbidding. He found the heavy fort-like doors open, and people walking out, trailing the scent of incense. A religious service had just ended, he thought.
    He stepped inside, intending to find a pew, to recite an Ave Maria or two, and perhaps a Gloria Patri, and to check the place out. And inside, he found the most glorious vision of his life:
    Three rose stained-glass windows glowed like fire, the Jesus and the saints and the martyrs reached down to him. He turned and turned and turned, in the church aisle, looking at first one and then another, then stopped, breathless, transfixed, as the saints began to move, like willow trees in the wind, gracefully, a dance even.
    And Jesus called, “Juan…”
    T RES GOT BACK to the pizza place an hour later, and the man behind the counter still smiled, but he was annoyed. Although the pizza was still warm, he said, “The crust may be a little crispy because you’re so late,” and Tres said, “I went to the church. Like you said. Jesus called my name.”
    “Hey, that’s really awesome,” the pizza man said. “That’ll be thirty-eight ninety.”
    Tres fumbled a couple of twenties out of his jeans pockets. He was still distracted, dazzled by the procession of Jesus and the saints. The pizza man handed him the boxes, and Tres went toward the door and turned to the pizza man and said, “Jesus said I will die soon.”
    The pizza man stepped back, and when Tres went out the door, thought,
Jeez. Is that a big goddamn gun in his pants?
    He watched Tres as he walked past the front window, and then turned to his pizza-maker and said, “Man, that kid had a big goddamned gun in his pants.”
    “All the better to shoot you Anglos with. Need a big gun to shoot a big fat man like you,” said the pizza-maker, whose name was Ochoa.
    “Fuck you,” the counter man said. “Tell you what: no fuckin’ Sweeney is any fuckin’ Anglo.”
    W HEN T RES GOT BACK , the others were unhappy with the delay—they were really hungry, and tired of watching
fútbol
reruns on the Spanish-language channels. He explained about the backup, and his trip to the