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I tracked the Ford Thunderbird to a parking lot bordering Venice Beach. I parked six spaces away, past three empty slots, two cars, and a delivery van. In case the man was roaming nearby, I took in the view through the windshield and side windows. Next to the half-buried asphalt of the bike path, clumps of palm trees had sprouted from the sand, some as tall as, or taller than, the shops along the boardwalk. The sun, sinking into the Pacific, bleached white the fronds of one palm, while the rest stood out like green torches. Silhouettes bustled across the wide beach, and at intervals lifeguard towers rose in the distance.

The beeps from the tracker echoed through the car like pinball ricochets. I switched the machine off. I could hear the surf rumbling, waves breaking their stride from the sand; the squawking of gulls; the din of shrieks and laughter from the bathers. The sun beating down on the windshield was browning me like a roasting chicken.

I had to find that man and stop him. I was following the plan like a musical score, but my back stayed pressed against the leather seat, and anxiety was growing in my chest. My subconscious lacked the vocabulary to describe the cataclysm it had foreseen.

I had saved Cassie, who had cried, yet tomorrow she would skate under the sun while her brain boiled and steam blew from her ears. If some grinning long-haired guy asked her to ride in another car, she would hop in before waking up to reality. And these folks ambling around Venice Beach like buffalo in a zoo enclosure, this pink-and-orange horizon—would it matter to them if one day Cassie ended up in the dark, panties gone, while the man on top of her strangled her?

The girl was alive and had learned nothing. Her mother, after rushing home, might have taken out her revolver and imagined forcing me to face the black maw of its barrel. I closed my eyes and saw her face as though draped in dusty cobwebs. Cassie’s mother, hating me. Hate upon hate, from people who refused to understand.

If I spirited the victims away from the shadows, they remained ignorant; if I saved them and they found out, they despised me.

I got out of the car and slammed the door. I wandered the parking lot to stretch my legs while the burning asphalt sucked at my soles. A car honked. I realized I was in the way of someone trying to maneuver into a space.

How long until the owner of that Ford Thunderbird got hungry? Or was he circling around to satisfy the hunger left over from when I saved Cassie?

What if I refused to hunt him? I could hit the nearby theaters in case they were showing Jaws or Star Wars again. I would make a pilgrimage to the record stores and buy first-edition vinyls of Nick Drake, Roy Harper, Karen Dalton. I could dine into the dusk until I emerged into the odd world I’d find.

If that starving coyote went hunting and left another corpse behind, would I even find out? Would I care? Another anonymous woman would vanish. Her face printed on milk cartons. With luck, in several years or decades, some hiker would discover that the femur his dog was slobbering over had belonged to a woman—or a child.

Dozens of miniature black holes roamed the United States, swallowing pretty hitchhikers, teenage runaways, prostitutes. Black holes wandering immortally: when one disappeared, another took its place. The rest of the population kept working, birthing, gathering to celebrate the Super Bowl, filling baseball stadiums, balancing on surfboards, or doing whatever else they fancied in this period of time that blended with all the others like spilled paint in a swimming pool. News of a woman’s disappearance would spoil someone’s snack in between bites of bacon and sips of beer. Most people believed (though they wouldn’t say it) that some sin had condemned that photographed woman to deserve it, or the universe would had chosen someone else to punish. The sacrifice was part of an obscure plan that someday would drain into some blend of justice and harmony. But if I stepped in, the masses would go on smiling in ignorance.

The tension in my neck hurt. How many times had I told myself that every life I saved was worth it, even if it stuffed my mind with skeletons and cadavers, a mounting heap at the bottom of a bloody pit?

Music drifted out from the turntables and radios in the boardwalk shops and apartments. Graham Nash protesting war and the military. Dolly Parton. Hendrix. As if at a concert, different acts played on neighboring stages. A warm breeze carried the scent of incense from the apartments. Dozens of people strolled around. A girl in shorts too tight to crease and a crop top that showed her belly button skated while holding the hand of another skater—a man in his early twenties with long hair and a mustache. On the sand, groups lying on their towels cackled like flocks of birds. They had been born in a cell where some invisible hand projected pictures of puppies, babies, cakes, and tropical beaches onto the walls.

All this laughter and enjoyment while somewhere in this city—not to mention the rest of the world—someone was getting beaten, raped, or murdered. Thousands of crimes went unnoticed, and criminals moved on to their next victim. So many beatings where the battered victim avoided the police, or reported the assault only for no reporter to pick it up. So many rapes where, for whatever reason, the victim stayed silent. In any neighborhood where kids pedaled on tricycles, in the basement of some house with neatly trimmed grass, a man might be exploiting a woman’s body as a semen receptacle the same way he would use a toilet for urine, and when he killed her, he’d dispose of her corpse like flushing a used condom. Maybe that woman never made it onto the list of thousands of missing persons, or she was mentioned briefly in a newspaper, and I would never find out.

I skirted the beach, eyeing every passerby and every group member, just in case I recognized the individual. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I had come out here to hunt. I stopped to look back at those who had just passed by, though some were already shrinking in the distance on their roller skates, skateboards, or bikes.

No matter which era I ended up in, I was surrounded by cheerful voices, smiling groups, couples holding hands. The same actors in different costumes, sporting whatever haircuts each era deemed acceptable. The plumage of exotic birds. In every decade, they believed everything would be fine, that a clear path lay ahead and they only had to look for it. I felt set apart from them, the last member of some other human species clinging to the edge of extinction. What could I tell these people? They would react as though I had blasphemed against their divine maxim that goodness always prevails. But goodness prevailed only because, before they even arrived, I had cleared their path. When I failed to worry about it, evil triumphed time and again.

I watched a volleyball game among a coed group where more than just the ball was bouncing. A figure nearby stood out. The man hovered near the bike path, scanning the beach. Sometimes he hid his face behind a camera and snapped a photo. His voluminous blond mane fell to his shoulders, and from behind one might mistake him for a woman.

When his name and surname flickered at the edges of my mind, I shooed them away. Names were for people unlike these rabid coyotes wandering around, ready to rip off a piece of someone unless the police—or I—put them down.

“I recognize that look. My friend Pete.”

It took me a second to realize the voice to my right was speaking to me. A man of about twenty-five. He was smoking a cigarette. The fringe of his long hair covered his forehead, and the wiry ends curled at his neck. His goatee protruded two inches from his chin. His gaze implied he enjoyed meeting strangers.

“He went from one party to another,” said the man, “loved to play guitar. Plenty of women would hang around for private songs. But he got drafted. When he returned, he threw away his medal. Every couple of months I spot him far off, just standing in the middle of nowhere, looking like you do.”

He drew closer as if to offer me a cigarette, but I wanted him gone.

“Do Pete a favor. Next time you see him, stab him through the heart.”

The man twitched his head like it was a nervous tic. He lowered his eyebrows and sucked on the cigarette filter. I walked away toward the bike path.

When the photographer’s features grew sharper, I stopped. By the look of him, his mannerisms, maybe he had a portfolio of pictures he’d posed in. As if his fishing line had gone taut, he fixed his gaze on a woman in her twenties wearing a black floral-print blouse with balloon sleeves and a triangular neckline. She had tied the blouse at her waist. Her jeans ended where her thighs began.

He held the camera at belt level and followed the woman’s rising and falling hips. That golden hair gleamed like satin. Any film studio would insure such breasts.

As she passed by, he blocked her path. His lips parted, curving along the gingival margin without showing the gums. A toothpaste-ad grin, with prominent canines. The muscles in his cheeks framed the smile like curtains revealing a show. Though I pictured those teeth pulverizing bones, splinters flying between his molars, she matched his smile in a fraction of a second.

“I had to stop you,” said the man. “Tell me, gorgeous. Which agency hired you?”

“What kind of agency would hire me?”

“A modeling one, of course.”

She cocked a hip to one side, and her laughter filled my mind with the urge to drop to my knees at her feet.

“Thanks, but no one’s ever noticed me for that.”

“They probably figured you were already taken by the best, under a million-dollar contract.” He lifted the camera to chest height. “Will you let me be the first to sign you?”

The woman swayed as if gripping an invisible pole, twirling a golden lock around her fingers.

“Do you just wander around the beach photographing girls?”

“I work for some magazines, making any man lust after mediocre girls and the world kneel before beauties like you. So tell me, want to get started? A few studio sessions and you’ll end up in Hollywood.”

Her nipples showed in the blouse like buttons. The man struck exaggerated poses and clicked away. She tilted her head, pursed her lips in a pout, and tumbled into a stream of laughter.

I closed my eyes and shoved my hands in my pockets. I would have preferred to buy a towel, lay it out on the sand, and bake until the sun dipped below the horizon. Tell me, beautiful: why should I bother, why should I sacrifice myself just to prolong your infinitesimal blink of existence, so your years can unfold—at best—for a handful of people who will also vanish? Cities buried under cities buried under cities. I’d save another person who had wandered blind and deaf into a trap, and if she found out I had intervened, she’d blame me for it. But I had to stop this coyote, or else he’d keep killing.

I didn’t know her name. I looked at another face and body I had to accept corresponded to a complex life. I had to assume this woman deserved salvation. But why add another nightmare to my crammed attic? Who would miss her? Whenever she set foot outside, hundreds of men—and some women—imagined the feel of her skin, how her breasts would fall when she took off her bra, how she would look lying in bed, eyes half-closed, face flushed, lips wet, thighs parted, displaying the earnings of her genetic lottery ticket—the product of a generation raised on the streets. But who actually loved her? A mother, a father? A little sister who yearned to see her? A boyfriend who believed she was irreplaceable? How many people would cry for her years from now, when barely any scraps of flesh were left clinging to her bones? Would this retinue of ghosts I was inventing convince me she was worth saving, instead of letting her get lost among the grains of sand formed by billions of forgotten humans?

I had to keep this man from killing her, or tomorrow I’d wake up in a sweat, haunted by the image of the woman talking to the photographer, stuck to my face like a gas mask. I would know I could have saved her but chose not to. I’d save her to spare myself the pain. Whoever she might be was irrelevant. I was just a pillar against the avalanche so that between me and the tongues of oncoming snow, someone might survive.

I approached, focusing on the man, his runner’s physique. I called his name. He lowered the camera and gave me the look of a hyena that, chewing on a carcass with strips of flesh dangling from its fangs, growls at another predator trying to sink its teeth into the entrails. But he rebuilt his grin and nodded at me, like you’d greet a neighbor you share a beer with every couple of weeks.

“How’s it going?”

“You sold several sessions to Esquire and Black Tux.”

His smile slanted, showing that canine.

“My reputation precedes me. You recognize me by my face?”

“I work in the field.”

He looked me up and down, while the woman—arched, chest thrust forward—cast her eyes down his body, tracing an invisible mole with her fingertips just below her mouth.

“What did my previous work suggest about how this shoot with this lovely thing will turn out?” the man said.

I stopped myself from staring at the woman’s bubblegum-pink lips or the dip dividing her full lower lip.

“That you woke up lucky this morning.”

She laughed as if nothing in her life had ever troubled her. She swept her hands through her hair, which unfurled in the air, glimmering in the late-afternoon light. My groin tingled.

The flash from his camera pulled my attention away.

“Spontaneous smiles are priceless,” he said.

The woman bent forward, laughing as if drunk, bracing her fingers on his arm.

A deep rumble was building inside me, an underground quake. Let her enjoy herself, and she would, ignorant—until she found out.

“Surprised by your luck?” I asked.

She hardly looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

“My turn was coming.”

“In what sense?”

“I radiate that vibe. My reward had to arrive.”

“With vibes like yours,” the man said, “I’m shocked fate hasn’t caught up with you already. But most men wonder if they have any right to approach you. They delayed the karma you deserve.”

She nodded, giving him a conspiratorial look. “Anyone who comes near me knows I’ve got love to give and receive. That’s what we’re born for, to share love in every way.”

“You do that often?” I asked. “Share the love?”

She glanced at me as if gauging whether she’d accept a proposition. “Whenever I can.”

“Does it ever cause you any trouble?”

“Some of them get too attached, become possessive. But that whole ‘ownership’ thing ended a couple of decades ago.”

“I mean, have you ever met someone who wanted more than just making love—who wanted to kill you?”

She forced a shaky smile. She shifted from wanting to ignore an inappropriate comment to wondering what my intentions were. The man’s stare pricked my temple like a dagger point.

“You sound like my dad,” she said. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen. Nobody would want to hurt me—I’m nice to everyone.”

“And if it does happen? Are you going to hug your attacker till he stops?”

She offered me her profile and gathered her silky hair in one fist. “It’s a sunny afternoon at the beach. I don’t get why you’d think about that.”

“Bad vibes, man,” said the man, as though giving me advice.

“You get what you put out,” the woman added.

She looked at me like a child. If I were shorter, she would have bent down and rested her hands on her knees. “Is that how you think because they sent you to the army? You returned, though. Rejoice! You’re safe now. Nothing to fear, right?”

“Everyone assumes I fought in the war. Maybe I did, and I forgot.”

“Classic stress, so they say. Just take a deep breath, relax your face. That sort of thing has a solution. God invented marijuana. Get some strong weed and it’ll wash away your dark thoughts like a flood. If you want, I can introduce you to a couple of people.”

“Weed ramps up my paranoia.”

She slipped a hand under her hair to scratch the back of her neck. “I’m not sure if you’re messing with me.”

“Crowds would gather around you at parties,” the man said to me.

I avoided looking at him. “I don’t go to parties.”

He inhaled deeply and held his breath. “In any case, my friend, I’m afraid you interrupted us.”

He slipped an arm around the woman. She returned the gesture while shining that radiant smile.

“Sweetheart,” the man said, “back to the important stuff. Do you live near Venice?”

“Close enough.”

“Keep going the way you were headed, and in ten minutes you’ll reach my studio. 1313 Main Street, on the corner of Horizon Ave. Ring a bell?”

“Near the school.”

“Barely worth a taxi. 1313 Main Street. Sadly, I forgot my cards at home—slipped the mind of this pro. Will you remember?”

“I can handle that. 1313, corner with Horizon Ave.”

“Will you swing by tomorrow at five in the afternoon, looking at least as gorgeous as you do now?”

“Five, you say?”

“Or whenever you prefer.”

She laughed. “Tomorrow at five.”

“I’ll let you get back to it. Bet your friends are waiting for you to brighten their day.”

She lifted herself onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but it happened right as he shot me a blank look, so instead she swayed in a little dance back toward the sand. She turned to wave goodbye with a broad smile and a flutter of her hand. Her hair rippled like a dream.

I forced myself to tear my eyes away. The man studied me, expressionless. As he walked off, he flapped a hand at me as though shooing a stray dog.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea. Written during my Serious Period, when I was sure that if I wrote in such a way, I would eventually get published. Newsflash: tough luck. If you’ve read my stuff, you know that I’m a silly bastard, that my tales usually devolve into deranged nonsense, but there’s none of that in this story or the other five I’ll probably end up translating. This protagonist is one bitter hardass. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and if you don’t, well… I don’t know, go munch on rocks or something, will you?