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I drove along a grassy track worn bare by years of footsteps, until a stand of fir and maple trees blocked the way. I switched off the radio and the engine. Figures showed up in the windows of the neighboring houses. A woman hunched over a kitchen sink was scrubbing a plate.

I got out of the Chevy Caprice. My soles flattened the grass. The breeze carried dog barks and the murmuring of televisions. Birds fluttered and chirped. The air, growing cooler as the sun slipped behind the horizon, felt worlds apart from the polluted coastal atmosphere, as if I had crossed into another country.

In the nearby houses, behind walls and drawn curtains, a baby would be nursing at its mother’s breast, with her warm smile in return. A couple would be making love. A girl, lying on her stomach in bed, would be reading a novel. A teenager holed up in the attic would be learning a guitar solo, all the while dreaming that someday another teenager might imitate his riffs. They were sustained by dreams unlike those that drive someone to lock a serial killer in a car trunk. I disparaged those people because I had never belonged among them. A searing anger coursed through my veins, burning them, tainting everything I experienced, rotting me like a heroin addict. And for whatever years remained, fueled by this boiling rage inside, I would hunt down those who deserved punishment. I would find my rewards in the crunch of my knuckles meeting another jaw, in the shot that punched through another terrorist’s skull. I would save someone today, and tomorrow I’d save the next. Even if my anger melted my organs and cracked my skin until it vented scorching steam. No one would take my place, but I would bear it.

I took out the scissors and gripped them in my left hand. With my other hand, I slid the key into the trunk’s lock. When I opened the lid, I was hit by a reek of hot brass and urine. I stepped back on guard against what was inside.

Richard Alcala’s scalp had gone as white as plaster. A gash glimmered across his right eyebrow. The lower half of his face, including the duct tape covering his mouth, was stained with dried blood. The killer’s cheeks were swollen, and as he breathed, little blood-bubbles popped in one nostril. He gawked at me in terror.

I cut through his duct-tape handcuffs with the scissors. Richard Alcala wobbled his trembling arms, trying to find something to hold onto. When I tugged his forearms to haul him out of the trunk, he dropped onto the grass like a sack. As the gag stifled his cough, the killer’s cheeks quivered, and his nose blew blood as if he had just sneezed.

I slipped one tip of the scissors under the duct tape stuck to his cheek and cut carelessly, slicing the skin. Richard Alcala’s whimper died in his throat. I pinned his shoulder to the grass and peeled away the layers of tape until they came off his face, leaving a purplish stripe.

He rolled onto his side and vomited blood, scraping his throat as he coughed. The lower half of his face had become so mangled that, between all the blood, you could barely make out a mouth—like a tiny cannonball had burst out of his throat destroying everything in its path. In the puddle of blood soaking the grass, the white fragments of molars, incisors, and canines glinted.

Richard Alcala stood up, but his legs wavered. He lurched unsteadily, coughing and whimpering. When I shoved him toward the grove, he toppled forward. Crawling away on all fours until he reached the first maple, he pulled himself upright, clutching the bent trunk, which quivered under his weight. The killer mumbled some sort of litany. Letting go of the maple, he edged from tree to tree as if trying to lose me in a maze.

Shifting shadows from the canopy glided over us. A breeze rustled the leaves, an unseen bird flapped its wings.

Richard Alcala veered to the right. I drew my Smith & Wesson and took off the safety. I aimed at the trunk of a maple two meters ahead of the killer, who was stretching out his arms to stay upright. I fired. The blast sent birds clattering from the branches where they’d been perched, and their silhouettes streaked across the grass, tracing shadow puppets on the trunks. Richard Alcala staggered back and fell onto his backside. Once he got up, he bolted deeper among the maples and firs toward the edge of the grove. Ten meters on, he turned left. I fired at the trunk inches from him, spraying splinters into his face. While muttering, he shook his features as if he’d disturbed a beehive. He changed direction. He shoved one leg in front of the other postponing his collapse, and leaned against each trunk as he passed.

When the echo of the shot faded, I called out to the killer.

“Do you think someone’s going to save you?”

Richard Alcala peeled himself off the trunk he was clutching, lurched forward, and laughed like he’d been holding it in for years.

“Nobody gets saved.”

He stumbled out of the grove into a blaze of sunlight. He lowered his head, dazzled. Ahead lay a broad yard dotted with a trampoline, a swing set, and a few raised garden beds. Beyond that rose the back wall of a single-story house. At one of its windows, a hand pulled the curtain shut.

Richard Alcala ran across the yard on a diagonal, heading for the path between the side of the house and the hedgerow marking the property line. I aimed just shy of the corner of the house. While the killer wavered and stumbled in a drunken arc, I pulled the trigger. With the shot’s crack, Richard Alcala screamed and fell on his backside, clutching his calf.

He pushed himself upright. Dragging his left leg, he made his way along the side of the house toward the back door. He kept muttering like a radio jammed between two stations. He hurled himself at the door, and on his third shove, it gave way. As he slammed it shut, he glanced over his shoulder—a clown with bulging eyes in that stark white upper half of his face, the lower half smeared in red.

A woman screamed. I heard blows, glass shattering. Someone growled. A shot whipped through a curtain and punched a hole in the window, cracks spidering around the bullet’s entry point like tiny veins.

I sprinted over to the path running alongside the house toward the front door, crouching as I went, keeping the wall between myself and the inside. I hurried under a window in a single stride.

Two more shots. A woman’s screams, then running footsteps.

In front of the house’s facade, I stood up next to a rhododendron bush that reached my neck. I thumbed the safety on my Smith & Wesson and tucked the gun behind my belt. Approaching the front door, I drew a deep breath and glanced at myself. My jacket was spattered with blood droplets. I wet my thumb with saliva and scrubbed at the stains, but they barely lightened.

I rang the doorbell. I realized that a woman’s panicked voice had been filling the silence only when she suddenly fell quiet. On the other side of the door, footsteps approached, then stopped about five feet away. She held her breath, trying to make it seem like I had rung the bell of an empty house.

I rang again.

“Neighborhood watch. I heard gunshots. Are you okay?”

The door opened a crack. Through it peered Cassie’s mother, her face flecked with blood. Her lips trembled. For a few seconds, her turquoise irises wavered while her tight throat suppressed any words.

“You.”

“They told us a fugitive had been spotted in the area. I can help you.”

Cassie’s mother opened the door. As I stepped through, she shoved it shut with a bang. A bullet hole had scarred the doorframe. Several gleaming bloodstains marred the pattern of the woman’s apple-green cashmere dress. In her right hand she clutched a Colt Python double-action revolver. She had lowered the hammer. Light slid along the eight-inch chrome barrel.

Cassie’s mother lifted the revolver as though to aim at me, but gave up halfway. She spoke in a strained voice.

“I shot someone. He broke in through the back door. I’d heard gunshots in the yard, so I grabbed the gun. This man ran in here, and I have my daughter… so I fired. The radio said something about a serial killer. He was hurt, but I don’t know… I don’t…”

She shook her head and looked toward the living room.

I had worried that when the front door opened, I’d find Richard Alcala holding the revolver he’d wrested from her, ready to blow my head apart as I rightly deserved. I stifled a smile. Relief flooded me, the kind you feel after emptying your bladder when you’ve been holding it for hours.

I placed a hand on Cassie’s mother’s shoulder, and for a moment her gaze pleaded.

“You did what you had to,” I said. “Let’s see what’s left.”

I guided her into the living room, where a wet gurgling sound arose. I caught the scent of gunpowder. Richard Alcala lay on his back, sprawled on a shaggy rug whose ash-gray fibers were darkening with blood. In the lower half of his face, a gaping hole bubbled with tarry phlegm between ragged breaths. His eyes roamed void of humanity, like a fish gasping in a fisherman’s hand. Two bullet wounds—one between his fifth and sixth ribs on the right side, the other in his throat—were leaking ribbons of blood.

Cassie’s mother covered her mouth, shook her head, and wept.

“You got him,” I said.

She slid the hand lower, stretching her bottom lip.

When I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket to pull out a folded paper, she noticed the bloodstained bandage wrapped around my palm, then she lifted her gaze to study my expression. I spread out the wanted poster.

“You stopped the Southern California Prowler—killer of at least twenty-six women and girls.”

Cassie’s mother snatched the paper from me and skimmed it. She examined Richard Alcala’s pale face; his pupils had shifted toward her, his chest shaking in time with the blood gargling in his throat. She let her muscles loosen, her brow lowered, and her features hardened.

“Oh.”

She wiped her tears with her forearm. Reaching out blindly with her right hand, she set the revolver on the hallway table, nudging aside two picture frames. She gave the dying man a look you’d offer a spider swirling down a drain. Then she moved to the phone mounted on the wall, lifted the receiver, and turned the dial for a nine. I thumbed the Colt Python’s hammer back with a soft click.

I found Cassie huddled by the sofa, facing the egg-yellow wallpaper. She wore a T-shirt printed with a whip-poor-will. Her index fingers were jammed in her ears, her eyelids clenched so tightly that the skin at their corners wrinkled. She was trembling like a tower on the verge of collapse.

I placed a hand on her hair.

“Cassie.”

She stopped trembling and lifted her face to me, her eyes shining with tears.

I helped her to her feet. I pointed at her mother, who was in profile, murmuring into the phone receiver. I guided Cassie to the shag rug in the middle of the living room, beside Richard Alcala, whose wounds kept spreading bloodstains like overflowing lakes. Cassie shuddered and let out a whimper. She turned away and covered her eyes.

I stepped behind the girl and turned her toward the killer.

“Cassie.”

She lowered her hands and opened her eyes. She looked down at the dying man the way someone would stare into an abyss.

Richard Alcala’s pupils flicked across the ceiling. With every convulsion, his mouth spewed bloody gobs like a broken faucet. Lying on the rug was a tar-molded mannequin foaming and steaming as its human features—face, torso, arms, and legs—melted into a puddle of black muck.

I pressed a hand on Cassie’s shoulder.

“Don’t look away.”

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Author’s note: this story was originally published in Spanish about a decade ago, in a collection titled Los reinos de brea.