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Richard Alcala smiled with quivering lips. He wagged the index finger of his intact hand like a TV show host embarrassed by someone’s answer, but then he curled that hand into a fist and threw it at my face. I dodged. The killer used that momentum to pivot and run diagonally toward the bike path.

I sighed. I chased after him.

Richard Alcala was sprinting as if he’d taken advantage of the stroll to get his energy back, like he were grabbing the baton in a relay race. He had pulled his left hand out of his pocket, and with every stride the bloody smear flicked drops around.

His shoes kicked sand into the faces of beachgoers lying on their towels, and of children playing with their plastic buckets and shovels. They shouted at him as he pulled away. A surfer crossed his path, and the killer rammed him shoulder-first. The people in that area looked at us the way they’d stare at a howling ambulance.

Richard Alcala reached a group of vagrants sitting on bulging backpacks—gaunt women and men with tangled hair and dirty beards.

The killer shouted between gasps, “That maniac’s after me!”

He took off running while placing the vagrants between us, and they turned to watch me approach. A figure peeled away from the group. As I tried to sidestep her, she shoved me in the chest.

I found myself facing a gum-chewing girl around nineteen or twenty. The raven-black fringe of her hair covered her eyebrows. She wore a gray T-shirt with one sleeve rolled all the way up to her shoulder. Lacking a bra, the outline of her small breasts was visible through the fabric. One of her cheekbones was smeared with grime, like she’d rubbed it with a greasy finger and no one had told her.

“You think you can harass a vet?” she asked with a voice like a cartoon fairy’s.

My vision vibrated, partly because of my exertion and partly because the sun had baked my brain. I had to wet my mouth before I could speak.

“You don’t want to know what he’s a veteran of.”

I pushed her aside with one hand. As I passed the girl, she drew a standard-issue army knife and pressed the tip against my neck.

“Show some respect.”

I held my breath. The metal poked like a needle drawing blood.

She chewed gum with her mouth open, her front teeth sticking out. She smelled stale, like she’d been stuck on a bus for ten hours and slept on the beach. Her gray eyes stared calmly back at me.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed her companions: scruffy, bearded men, both white and Hispanic. Off in the distance, looking small as a toy, Richard Alcala was showing signs of fatigue, glancing over his shoulder.

I slid my left hand inside my jacket toward the right pocket, but the girl nudged the knife’s tip a few millimeters deeper and broke my skin. The nerves around the cut lit up with a jolt.

I could have snapped her wrist, but did she really deserve that? I recognized in her gaze the conviction that she was in the right, that she could dispense justice.

I pulled out the folded wanted poster. When I unfolded it, the movement jostled my shirt, and the girl’s eyes dropped to the butt of my pistol, which stuck out behind my belt. She looked back at me, suspicious, her brow creasing.

I showed her the wanted poster.

“You’re letting the Prowler get away. That’s how you’re helping.”

Her body jerked around in a swift half-circule, her shoulders shrugged as if she’d just waded into icy water. She slid the blade back into the sheath on her belt.

“Shit.”

She tore off after the killer. I followed, weaving through the scruffy men. Two of the vagrants tried to keep up, but they gave up after about ten meters.

Richard Alcala was getting away down the bike path. I was risking losing him in the crowd. As the girl ran in front of me, the way her T-shirt clung to the tendons in her arms and narrow back suggested she was long overdue for a decent meal.

When I rubbed the puncture next to my carotid, blood stained my fingertips. The heat of my neck kept me from really feeling the bleed.

We closed the distance on the killer, who was glancing sideways at people passing him on skates or skateboards. I blinked to stop the row of palm trees and Richard Alcala’s figure from shimmering like a desert highway. My lungs were on fire, each breath filling them with hot air.

A cyclist was coming up the path—a teenager with blond dreadlocks, wearing a psychedelic T-shirt. The killer blocked him. As the teenager swerved, Richard Alcala grabbed the handlebars. The teenager spoke up, frowning. The killer clutched his dreads and yanked him toward the sand like he wanted to tear off the kid’s entire scalp. The teenager screamed. A dozen beachgoers raised their heads like gulls. The teenager lay halfway on the path halfway in the sand, clutching his head with both hands. Richard Alcala shook out his hand to release the torn strands, then mounted the bike.

The vagrant girl shouted. The killer looked at us with eyes rolled white, his features twisted with anxiety. He wobbled the bike, forcing two women in bikinis and rollerblades to move aside, then straightened and shrank into the distance along the path. He was about twenty meters ahead.

When I sprinted, a stitch stabbed my sides. The girl ran like she’d just realized she needed muscles. She waved an arm while her other hand pointed at the figure disappearing on the bicycle.

“Stop that man!” she yelled between gulps of air, though her voice sounded like she was teaching kids to play a game. “The bald guy with the mustache!”

Coming the other way on the path was a black man riding a mountain bike. His afro made him look like a toasted mushroom. Judging by how built he was, when he walked, all those lumps of muscle must have gotten in his way.

The girl shouted her order again. The bodybuilder spotted Richard Alcala, who was pedaling like a speeded-up film clip. The man jumped off his bike, grabbed the frame, hoisted it onto his shoulders, and hurled it at the killer. It clobbered Alcala in the face and knocked him flat on his back, his head cracking on the asphalt.

We reached Richard Alcala, who lay sprawled across one lane of the bike path. I was breathing fire. Beads of sweat trickled down my face, chest, back, and limbs. I blinked until my vision cleared.

The vagrant girl bent over, rested her palms on her thighs, and breathed through her mouth while chewing her gum. The killer’s lips were parted, his eyes fixed on the sky. His arms were curled as though gripping invisible handlebars.

The bodybuilder picked up his bike and straightened it. Though the top of his hairline reached my chin, his torso was twice as wide as mine. The veins in his arms bulged like plastic tubes forgotten inside during surgery.

“Did I crack his head open?”

“He’s breathing,” I said.

“Thinking might be another matter,” said the girl.

On both sides of the bike lane, cyclists and skaters had gathered. Some beachgoers watched as they stood on their towels or sat in their chairs.

I needed to get Richard Alcala off the streets. I doubted I could have stopped him alone, but I had to get rid of my companions.

“Let’s get him out of sight. Behind that row of parked cars.”

The bodybuilder hurried to chain his bike to a signpost. He came back and lifted Richard Alcala by the armpits like a child. I took hold of the killer’s legs. Spit dribbled from the corners of his mouth.

We dodged skaters, staggered around tourists and passersby in tank tops and shorts. A child in a cap with the Eiffel Tower on it snapped our picture with a Polaroid. A couple noticed Richard Alcala’s vacant stare and the drool at his lips, and asked about it, their voices colored by concern.

“Booze and heat, bad combo,” the bodybuilder said.

Dozens of people hurried past, barely giving a glance at the unconscious man we carried. Maybe they assumed we had a valid reason.

We ducked behind the line of parked cars and laid the killer on the dirt shoulder. The girl was smiling, baring her yellowed teeth. Between chews, her tongue rolled the gum into a ball. The bodybuilder lifted one of Richard Alcala’s eyelids, finding his gaze had slipped downward.

“Who did I knock out?”

The girl laughed. She knelt and tugged one end of the killer’s fake mustache, pulling up his upper lip and revealing his gums. Flakes of adhesive clung to his skin like dead, sunburned tissue.

“Why was he wearing a fake mustache?” the bodybuilder asked.

I unfolded the wanted notice and handed it over. The man read the poster, then glanced at Richard Alcala.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I scanned the boardwalk to see if any cops were around. If they took the killer in, maybe the problem would be over—unless he escaped. I’d return to my present and discover that for decades they’d put on this farce of trial after trial. What was there to discuss, when I knew this man had killed more than two dozen people? Maybe I’d find out that instead of executing him years earlier, they’d let him out of prison—gray-haired, a withered parody—so he could enjoy the California sunshine, thanks to judges who talked a big game about morality but at the end of the day went back to their gated communities with guards at every entrance.

My fists shook. I wanted to grab the killer by the shirt and drag him into an alley. How could I ditch these two?

“Now I can say I brought down a serial killer,” said the bodybuilder.

I sighed.

“It gets old fast.”

The girl laughed in a sudden burst, like someone tickling her. She leaned over Richard Alcala’s face. A peace sign pendant in silver slipped out from under her gray T-shirt, swinging back and forth.

“We got you, bastard. You enjoy raping women and girls, huh?”

She rested her hand on my shoulder for balance and pressed the grimy sole of her sneaker against the killer’s cheek. The skin around the shoe compressed, the eyelid on that side twitching. Then she lifted her foot away, leaving a print of sand and dust on his cheekbone.

Beyond the row of cars, a family passed. The mother and father peered over a hood, but after they got a look at Richard Alcala, they hurried their kids along toward the beach.

I placed a hand on the bodybuilder’s shoulder and the other on the girl’s.

“Keep him here while I call the cops.”

As I circled around the row of cars toward the opposite sidewalk, the bodybuilder called after me, “Cops show up here every few minutes.”

I turned back to face him with the kind of urgency I usually handled by breaking bones—but in his case, all that muscle would get in the way.

“No. Keep him hidden. Play it cool. I’ll be right back.”

The girl looked at me tilting her head, her thumbs tucked behind her belt.

---

Author’s note: this is a translation of my novella titled “Sonríe,” contained in a collection I self-published a decade ago. Barely anyone read it, so I figured I may as well post it on my site.

I had completely forgotten about the punkish vagrant girl and the mushroom bodybuilder. This was likely the goofiest part of the tale.