The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

Ignacio was lying in the shade just outside the metal shed, smoking a cigarette, while Miguel labored away inside, cooking the chemicals down into methamphetamine crystals. Beakers the size of basketballs boiled over electric burners, the fumes routed through glass tubes to a vent in the wall.
    Miguel was short and wiry, just thirty years old, but the lines in his face and the grim expression he always wore made him look fifty. Ignacio was only twenty, fat and full of machismo, taken with his own success and toughness, and convinced that he was on his way to being the new godfather of the Mexican Mafia. They had crossed the border together six months ago, smuggled in by a coyote to do exactly what they were doing. And what a sweet deal it had turned out to be. Because the lab was protected by the big sheriff, they were never raided, they never had to move on a moment's notice like the other labs inCalifornia, or bolt across the border until things cooled off. Only six months, and Miguel had sent home enough money for his wife to buy a ranch in Michoacan, and Ignacio was driving a flashy Dodge four-wheel drive and wearing five-hundred-dollar alligator-skin Tony Lama boots. All of this for only eight hours of work a day, for they were only one of thee crews that kept the lab running twenty-four hours a day. And there was nodanger of being stopped on the road while transporting drugs, because the big sheriff had a gringo in a little van come every few days to drop off supplies and take the drugs away.
    "Put out that cigarette, cabrone!" Miguel shouted. "Do you want to blow us up?"
    Ignacio scoffed and flicked his cigarette into the pasture. "You worry too much, Miguel." Ignacio was tired of Miguel's whining. He missed his family, he worried about getting caught,he didn't know if the mix was right. When the older man wasn't working he was brooding and no amount of money or consoling seemed to satisfy him.
    Miguel appeared at the doorway and stood over Ignacio. "Do you feel that?"
    "What?" Ignacio reached for the AK-47 that was leaning against the shed. "What?"
    Miguel was staring across the pasture, but seemed to be seeing nothing. "I don't know."
    "It is nothing. You worry too much."
    Miguel started walking across the pasture toward the tree line. "I have to go over there. Watch my stove."
    Ignacio stood up and hitched his silver-studded belt up under his belly. "I don't know how to watch the stove. I'm the guard. You stay and watch the stove."
    Miguel strode over the hill without looking back. Ignacio sat back down and pulled another cigarette
    from the pocket of his leather vest. "Loco," he mumbled under his breath as he lit up. He smoked for several minutes, dreaming and scheming about a time when he would run the whole operation, but by the time he finished the cigarette he was starting to worry about his partner. He stood to get a better look, but couldn't see anything beyond the top of the hill over which Miguel had disappeared.
    "Miguel?" he called. But there was no answer.
    He glanced inside the shed to see that everything was in order, and as far as he could tell, it was. Then he picked up his assault rifle and started across the pasture. Before he got three steps, he saw a white woman coming over the hill. She had the face and body of a hot senorita, but the wild gray-blonde hair of an old woman, and he wondered for the thousandth time what in the hell was wrong with American women. Were they all crazy? He lowered the assault rifle, but smiled as he did it, hoping to warn the woman off without making her suspicious.
    "You stop," he said in English. "No trespass." He heard the cell phone ringing back in the shed and glanced back for a second.
    The woman kept coming. "We met your friend," Molly said.
    "Whois we?" Ignacio asked.
    His answer came over the hill behind the woman, first looking like two burned scrub oak trees, then the giant cat's eyes. "Holy Mary, Mother of God," Ignacio said as he wrestled with the bolt on the assault rifle.
    Theo Eight years of living at the edge of the ranch and never once had Theo so much as taken a walk down the dirt road. He had been under orders not to. But now what? He'd seen the trucks going in and out over the years, occasionally heard men shouting but somehow he'd managed to ignore it all, and there had never been gunfire. Going onto the ranch to investigate automatic weapons fire seemed an especially stupid way to exercise his newfound freedom, but not