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Cassie June walked into the restaurant. She must have been about one meter seventy tall. She shivered from the cold while speaking to someone out of sight. She took off her coat, letting snowflakes slip from her shoulders. Cassie’s husband came in with their two daughters—a bright-eyed twenty-one-year-old and a lanky thirteen-year-old—crowding together in the narrow entry. The twenty-one-year-old unzipped her jacket and removed it, revealing a University of Minnesota sweatshirt. The thirteen-year-old’s eye shadow ringed her eyes dramatically like she’d colored them in with charcoal. A waiter approached the family and guided them to a free table in the opposite corner of the restaurant.

While they ate, I kept glancing away from my plates on the sly. Anyone who glanced my way might have caught me studying Cassie’s face—those wide, lively eyes, that distinctive mouth set a little higher than most. As Cassie listened to her husband and daughters, she nodded and smiled, and when she laughed, her silver earrings swung gently.

When they finished eating, the family rose and drifted apart. Her husband and the twenty-one-year-old waited by the entrance. Glancing around for Cassie, I spotted her weaving between the tables in the middle of the restaurant toward the exit, followed by her thirteen-year-old. I lowered my head like a schoolboy caught staring at the pretty girl.

In my mind, an image lingered of the woman noticing me, but that vision dissolved. It was replaced by a picture of her as a child, seated in the back seat of a rental car that would have been scrapped or crushed into a cube years ago. Cassie was crying. The face that had glanced in my direction at the restaurant looked like a caricature time had drawn in mockery.

The family regrouped in the foyer. They retrieved their coats and jackets. Cassie spoke while pointing at the street, and she laughed at some joke.

I wanted to say something. Anything.

They went out into the night then walked away along the sidewalk, huddled in their coats with their hands thrust in their pockets. They passed under arcs of light flickering yellow, red, and white—bulbs glowing in the darkness like milky vapor.

At eleven, I took my laptop down to the hotel bar and searched online for albums to download. Modest Mouse had never released Good News. They put out an album in 2003 and then retired. The first album by The Restless was a hit, and the band stayed together, including their original keyboardist. Eddie Ingram’s girlfriend had avoided the accident, so he never composed his masterpiece. Thom Yorke’s Facebook profile suggested he was working as an orderly in a mental institution. The present adored a band called Beasts of Downtown, which burst onto the scene in 2002 and redefined rock. On the album Reckoning, released in 1984, R.E.M. included a track called “Girl on Skates,” alluding to how for years Cassie June had claimed that a stranger—the one appearing beside her in the famous photo—had saved her from being killed by the Southern California Prowler. A stranger whose DNA belonged to no one. Joanna Newsom’s albums were missing. I searched for an hour and a half, but any proof that she had ever been born had vanished.

At three in the morning, I went to the hotel gym. The echo of my footsteps spread as though I were entering an abandoned building where the lights had been left on. I worked my back and chest; the pain of my tearing fibers anchored me. I ran for half an hour in front of the glass wall, where my doubled reflection overlapped a sea of ink lit only by a streetlamp at the end of the road.

The next afternoon, the snow had stopped, and I strolled beneath a leaden sky. I browsed the shop windows. I bought whatever I fancied and piled the shopping bags in my hotel room.

I had dinner at the restaurant. Every five minutes, I looked toward the foyer, imagining Cassie would walk in. Why would she come?

That night, I sat on the edge of the bathtub with my laptop and read the news. In Sweden, a jihadist had boarded a train with an AK-47 and mowed down eleven people. My body froze; my numb fingers lost feeling on the keys. I closed the laptop.

I swallowed four sleeping pills and got into bed. The black tide rose. I grabbed my portable music player, played Roy Harper’s “The Same Old Rock,” and jammed the earbuds into my ears. I pulled the covers up to my forehead and curled into a ball. As my consciousness faded to the sound of the guitars, images appeared in the darkness of my mind as if carved from obsidian. Scenes trapped inside. The family who visited me every night when loneliness overwhelmed me, and who would always be there.

A girl was skating toward her home when a serial killer convinced her to get into his car and took her to a dark place, where he raped and sodomized her, then strangled her and crushed her skull with hammer blows. A group of unkempt, bearded men, armed with hammers and machetes, ambushed a tennis player and dragged her toward a van, which minutes later, out of control, ran over one of the men, whose chest imploded. Two men broke into a villa in the early hours of the morning, went up to the bedroom of the elderly couple sleeping, and beat them to death. A naked woman climbed onto the railing of her balcony on the tenth floor, and while humming a tune, she opened her arms in a cross and let herself fall forward. A girl with a bruised face lay half on a filthy floor and a mattress dotted with stains, and her arms were covered with the black marks of needle marks. A woman was walking down a busy street when the man who was stalking her grabbed the woman’s hair and plunged the blade of a dagger into her chest and side again and again, while the rips in the woman’s blouse soaked with blood and her screams escaped along with the air through the slits in her lungs. A drunken woman drove her car across the median line of the road and crashed into another car, whose occupant, a twenty-something girl, was thrown through the windshield, which tore her face apart, and when she hit the asphalt, her head exploded. A woman lay among some rocks, half-buried under rotten leaves, genitals exposed, her legs twisted as if her bones had been broken. A group of teenagers dragged a child into a forest, where they beat him and raped him while recording it on their cell phones. A woman crouched by a bathtub was holding a child’s head under the foam, while the child’s arms flailed and his hands groped the woman’s rolled-up forearm, until the last of the bubbles that clustered on the surface of the water burst. Inside the charred shell of a car, the driver’s seat had melted and fused with the legs of a man whose torso had been charred to a crusty black shell, torn open in breaches that revealed flesh red as a coal, and from the open guts the intestines had spilled like charred sausages. A woman was distracted browsing the frozen foods in a supermarket while a man dragged the woman’s daughter to a car; the man locked the girl in the trunk, drove her to a vacant lot, raped her, and smashed her head with a rock. A five-year-old girl was playing in front of her apartment building when the leader of a group of prepubescent children pressed a knife to the girl’s throat and dragged her to a laundry room, where they stripped her, groped her, and urinated in her mouth while laughing. A woman was hugging her decapitated daughter. A teenager hunched under the crumpled hood of a car was feeling the ruin of her face, which when it had hit the front seat had torn apart like a half-peeled rubber mask, and the globe of her left eye hung loose from its socket. In a forest at the foot of a volcano hung the desiccated corpses of hundreds of suicides. Some men lured a teenager by offering her alcohol to pass her around among themselves and their friends as a prostitute, kept her quiet with threats, and when they got tired, they killed her, dismembered her, and served her flesh as kebabs. On a plastic sheet lay the naked bodies of half a dozen boys and girls, and on their torsos, from the junction of the collarbones to the navel, tortuous sutures closed with staples showed that they had been gutted to sell their organs. A man disguised as a police officer gathered dozens of teenagers and climbed onto a platform to pretend he needed to inform them of some news, but he sprayed them with an assault rifle. Some men burst into a concert hall and machine-gunned the crowd while praising an imaginary character, and the wounded, and those who pretended to be dead, they disfigured, stabbed their eyes, castrated them and stuffed their genitals into their mouths, and ripped the fetuses from the pregnant women. A lion ripped open the belly of a gazelle, tore the fetus from the womb, and devoured it. A cat crossing a highway was sprinting, stopping, and jumping to the side against the hulks of cars, vans, and trucks that charged. In row after row of metal crates two meters by ninety centimeters, hundreds of pigs grew so one day they would be taken to the slaughterhouse. A parrot forgotten in the sun suffered a heat stroke and dehydrated to death. A hamster locked in a forgotten cage ate the plastic from the walls to escape, and the plastic tore the walls of its stomach. A fish caught lay on the grass gasping. A mouse chewed in half dragged its entrails. A fly got tangled in a spider’s web, and the spider injected it with a paralyzing agent and sucked it into a husk. A spider was weaving its web in the corner of a ceiling when a hand crushed it with a napkin. An army of ants scurried around a caterpillar, which wriggled as if dreaming while the ants dragged it toward their colony, pinching it with their tiny jaws. In a drop of water, thousands of microscopic organisms hunted each other or escaped, suffering an endless war.

In the symphony of organic life, each member of every species contributed its note of pain.

I stopped feeling like I was lying in bed, or even inhabiting a body. I shrank to a grain of lead plunging into a swarm of nightmares.

The following afternoon, I wandered through the city in a snowstorm that turned my hair white and covered half my coat. My atoms interacted with dark matter, weighing me down as though I were wading through a swamp. Pedestrians passed by, hunched under their umbrellas. If they weren’t careful, they would walk right through me. A few passersby peered at me from the hollow sockets of their rubber masks.

That night, I went back to the restaurant. They served me my lamb stew. Three spoonfuls into the broth, potatoes, and meat, a hand with rings on two fingers and veins standing out slid a newspaper clipping under my face.

In the center of the yellowed paper was a black-and-white photo. Two paramedics carried a stretcher beneath a plastic cover that outlined a human figure. Behind them, ten-year-old Cassie June watched, eyes wide, her fists pressed to her thighs. Next to her, I had placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder, staring at the stretcher with a calm I had never actually felt. It reminded me of certain Victorian photographs in which families posed with relaxed faces alongside their dead children.

I lifted my eyes to Cassie’s face—her lined forehead, the creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

Time had infected every human cell to break them down into dust, and I couldn’t stop it.

Five meters away, her daughters and husband looked on, astonished. Cassie’s irises and her hand trembled like a schoolgirl handing over a poem.

I wanted to burst into tears.

“Come over for a while,” Cassie said. “We live nearby. We’ll have tea, we’ll talk.”

I swallowed hard.

“Tea sounds good.”

THE END

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in my collection titled Los reinos de brea, about ten years ago.

Today’s songs are “The Same Old Rock” by Roy Harper, and “Esme” by Joanna Newsom.

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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.”

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

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After four blocks, the adrenaline rush wore off, and I realized the car’s body was rattling in time to metallic thuds. Richard Alcala was thrashing around, trying to pop open the trunk lid. He moaned and cursed but didn’t quite beg for help—whoever freed him would discover his identity. On one side, death row was waiting for him. On the other side, I was.

As my stolen Chevrolet Caprice passed by, some pedestrians shot sidelong glances. Drivers in the cars ahead eyed me through their rearview mirrors. With my nerves frayed, I couldn’t tell if I was just imagining those stares, or if it was obvious I had someone locked in the trunk.

The car’s body lurched with each jolt, like the parked van where I’d kept my cargo from killing the would-be model. Richard Alcala shouted for help with a tinny voice.

I switched on the radio and turned up the volume. The news anchor was talking about the Prowler again, repeating a tip line number. I spun the dial. Stations flickered in and out between bursts of static, snatches of sound. I landed on a classical music station but found the silences between notes too hollow. The next station played Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a few lines after it began, about four minutes before the guitars would crash in and blow the song apart.

I listened, leaning back against the upholstery like I’d wrapped up a day’s work, but within seconds, a fresh round of thrashing, pounding on metal, and shouting ruined it. I squeezed the steering wheel, cursed, and cranked the volume to drown him out. I was drawing attention like a circus promotion vehicle blasting ads through a megaphone. A group of young men and women in bell-bottoms recognized the song and hollered. One woman in the group bobbed her head in time. Another one looped an arm around her friend’s elbow and started hopping, the hand holding her cigarette high, sketching a sinuous trail of smoke.

Traffic slowed me down and kept me from taking shortcuts. I was mapping out a clear route in my head, but the pounding reverberating through the car body shattered my concentration. Was Richard Alcala still screaming for help, or was I just hearing echoes in my mind?

The singer sang the last verse, and the guitars went wild. In the rearview mirror, two cars back, a police cruiser appeared. The officer behind the wheel leaned over to look at me through his sunglasses.

I pressed my fingertips against the radio volume knob like it was a membrane of glass, and eased the sound down until the song barely overlaid the cries for help. But the car was still rocking, as if Richard Alcala were kicking at the trunk lid with both legs.

We stopped at a red light. The police cruiser lit up its overheads, and the street woke to the howl of the siren.

I gritted my teeth. My blood turned to hot coals. I floored the accelerator and jerked the wheel. The cruiser followed. I barreled down a side street, slaloming between cars. I smashed the headlight of a car coming straight at me.

The cruiser wobbled in and out of my rearview with its lights flaring off the windshield. The cops inside were moving their lips, shouting something. As I drifted around a curve, tires screeching, the smell of burning rubber filled the car through the open window. I noticed that at the sound of the siren, Richard Alcala had stopped pounding and gone quiet.

My neck was stiff and aching. My grip on the steering wheel was so tight it felt like my palms and fingers would fuse to it. I shifted gears like a madman while ducking my head between my shoulders in case one of the cops decided to shoot through my back window.

I searched for narrow passages, shortcuts, but kept finding fenced-off lanes or dead ends where the car would get stuck. I refused to turn down any alleys; I might trap myself with nowhere to go.

The cruiser’s wail faded a bit amid the traffic noise. I got distracted scanning vacant lots along the sidewalk, and a pedestrian at a crosswalk had to leap aside to avoid me mowing him down.

I spotted a gate, its door ajar, leading to a paved path flanked by garages. I jerked the wheel, careened across the oncoming lane, and crashed through the gate. The door whipped inward, screeching. I followed the asphalt between the garages, and after passing half a dozen I spotted one open and empty. I spun the car around and skidded inside at an angle. Part of the trunk stuck out, but I didn’t have time to straighten the car fully.

I turned the radio down until it would only bother the neighboring garages. Richard Alcala was hammering on the trunk door. The guitars on the radio shrieked like harpies. My heart was pumping so hard it felt close to bursting, and the rush of blood in my ears blotted out the cruiser’s siren.

Red rings throbbed around my vision. A familiar fury was boiling in my gut. I shoved my way out of the Chevy Caprice and rounded the side to the trunk, where the lid bulged from all the pounding.

Shelves packed to overflowing lined one garage wall, with junk scattered across the floor. I blinked to clear my sight. Bleach bottles, two toolboxes, a shovel, a vacuum cleaner, a pair of scissors, even a surfboard. A roll of duct tape.

I rolled it between my fingers, searching for the tape’s edge. Tried to pry it free with my ragged nails, but no luck. I bit a corner, warping several layers of the tape. I snatched up the scissors, accidentally knocking over a metal box that crashed to the floor and spilled a couple dozen tools. I wedged one scissor tip under the tape edge, but it slipped and sliced open my left palm, the sting like ice water. Even as blood trickled from the cut, I worked the blade until I could peel up the middle of the tape. Then I tugged, and the duct tape came loose with a squeal.

I held the roll in my mouth. Its dangling flap swayed as I slid the key into the trunk lock. The flurry of high guitar notes clawed at my veins.

I threw the trunk open. Richard Alcala lunged sideways, reaching his arm toward my face. I smashed a punch into his eye, sending the side of his head crashing into the trunk rim. I grabbed his neck with my left hand and hammered punches into his mouth with my right until static buzzed through my arm and my fist went numb.

When I let go, Richard Alcala collapsed inside the trunk with a string of groans. The lower half of his face was disfigured in a bright burst of blood, as if he’d vomited straight up.

I relaxed my jaw, letting the roll of duct tape drop into my hand, then stuck the tape’s end to his cheek. I wound it around his head a few times, covering his mouth. I tore the strip off with my teeth. Next, I seized his wrists, pressed them together, and cuffed them with more duct tape.

I slammed the trunk shut, staggered back. The song was fading out to silence. My right hand throbbed as if several knuckles had cracked. The skin was peeled raw, and a broken tooth dangled from one of them. I shook my hand until it fell away.

On the radio, a DJ was cheerfully chatting about the bright sun and the weeklong stretch of fair weather.

I propped myself against the trunk to catch my breath, and listened for sirens.

In a far corner of the garage, three young Hispanic men sat on the floor. One, with obsidian-colored hair and a cat-like mustache, had an acoustic guitar across his thighs. He held a G chord in his left hand, his right hand—holding the pick—resting on his knee. Another guy, his hair clipped short with shaved sides, raised both palms in a peace gesture.

I dropped the roll of duct tape. It bounced and rolled out of the garage. I slipped the scissors into my jacket pocket, and from that same pocket pulled out a few bills. I counted four fifties and folded them. I tossed the money in front of the three young men.

“Buy yourselves some better duct tape.”

Author’s note: today’s song, for no reason, is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” Wish I could have returned back in time and prevented you folks from getting on that plane.

As one commenter of the video put it succinctly: all crimes committed during the “Free Bird” solo are hereby forgiven.

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I ran to the opposite sidewalk. Slipping among the tourists, I searched the alleys and parking lots for an out-of-the-way car. I collided with someone rooted to the spot. When I pushed that person aside with one hand, my palm sank into the supple flesh of a breast, hot under my touch. I mumbled an apology.

I came upon a parking lot wedged between two buildings, that stretched into an L-shape. Four cars and a van. I stopped by the nearest car, a cherry-red Mercury Bobcat, and tried the driver’s door handle. It held fast. I moved on to the next one, a chalk-colored Ford Pinto.

Time was speeding toward zero. I pictured the bodybuilder and the girl talking to a cop while another officer handcuffed Richard Alcala, and it felt like I was the one getting arrested. If cops were waiting for me when I got back, there’d be questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

I closed my fingers around the Pinto’s door handle. Another shadow joined mine, spilling across the Pinto’s bodywork. I turned around as if expecting someone to bury a knife in my back.

It was the aspiring model. The flare of her dress had lost its grace beneath wrinkles. Strands of blonde hair stuck out in all directions. Her eyes had grown glassy. A bruise shaped like a hand clung to her throat.

I refocused on the car. When I pulled the handle, the driver’s door opened. I bent inside and sat down.

The woman approached the gap of the open door, darkening the interior.

“Why did you call me an idiot?”

I flipped down the hinged flap of the sun visor in case the owner had stashed a key.

“That man hurt me,” the woman said, “and you insulted me. You could’ve given me a hand.”

I bent over to slide a forearm under the seat, rooting among candy wrappers and clumps of dirt. I barely diverted my gaze toward the midsection of her dress.

“Why the fuck are you still here?”

“Where should I go?” she asked, sounding dazed. “Home, like you said? To hide in terror? No. I’m supposed to get my pictures taken, and I will. That nasty man won’t ruin my day.”

I slumped against the seat as if my muscles had fallen asleep. I leaned over to frame her face in the door’s opening.

“The photographer assaulted you.”

“Excuse me?”

“The photographer assaulted you after shaving his head and sticking on a fake mustache.”

“The same photographer we talked to yesterday?”

“The only one that connects us.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You ran into the Southern California Prowler.” I shook my head. “A serial killer. Besides, do you really want them photographing that hand-shaped bruise on your neck?”

When the woman traced the bruise’s outline, pain twisted her features. She let her gaze wander over the other parked cars and the sky, as if cementing the information to the slow rise of the mountains.

While I felt around the gearshift, someone rapped on the passenger-side window. A middle-aged man, hair combed like some bank employee. He eyed me, eyebrows raised. I stretched across the passenger seat and turned the crank to lower the window.

“Yes?”

The man creased his brow and tried to smile.

“You’ve mistaken this car for yours.”

“I need it. It’s vital. Can you give me the keys?”

He stared at me like I was refusing to admit that this was all a joke.

“I don’t think so.”

I got out. The man came around the car and hurried to sit behind the wheel. He shut the door while throwing me a suspicious glance. He then started the engine and pulled out of the lot.

I was heading for the third car, a cinnamon-colored Chevy Caprice, when the woman grabbed my arm.

“People like the guy who attacked me show up when everyone forgets how to be kind.”

I shook loose.

“Jesus. Go home or to a hospital. But leave me alone.”

I tugged on the Chevy’s door handle, and it opened. I slid in, fitting my legs beneath the oversized steering wheel, and rifled through the glove compartment. Under a mess of papers, I found a key ring.

The woman bent over the doorway, holding onto the frame.

“I’ll stay happy. I owe it to the world.”

I wanted to scream until she fled. I made it clear with a scowl that I was sick of nonsense.

“You owe it to the world that let you get raped? That nearly strangled you to death?”

“I knew someone would save me. And you showed up.”

My back sank against the seat. I dipped my head, filled my lungs, and exhaled for three seconds. Then I stuck the key in the ignition.

“Thanks to you, I’m still alive,” the woman said.

When I turned the key, the engine purred, making my seat vibrate. The door handle shook as well.

She was smiling, leaning in so that her breasts all but spilled from her dress like upside-down bells framed by glossy, golden strands. A pang of hunger hit me.

“I don’t need your gratitude. I stopped expecting it a while back.”

She straightened, and backed away while fumbling with her left hand. She softened her voice.

“We should spread love, you know? In the end, that’s the one thing we’ll remember.”

I closed the door and gripped the steering wheel. I sighed. I let go with my left hand to open the door again.

“Sorry I called you an idiot, even though it’s true. Enjoy the rest of your life.”

I shut the door. I jiggled the gearshift into reverse and drove out to the street. On my way back, traffic slowed me down. I should have stolen an ambulance and blasted the siren.

I hopped the curb near my comrades-in-arms. The bodybuilder was driving a knee between Richard Alcala’s shoulder blades while the vagrant girl pressed the killer’s head into the dirt. As I climbed out of the car, Alcala’s eyes went wide. He whimpered like a frightened dog.

“Oh, you parked nearby,” said the bodybuilder.

“It’s not my car. Thanks for your help. I’ll take care of the Prowler.”

Richard Alcala flailed around like a fish on the boards of a pier, but the bodybuilder dug his weight into Alcala’s back. He growled, and the girl punched him in the crown of his head.

“Shut it, bastard.”

The bodybuilder freed a hand to calm the girl.

“We’ve got him. Don’t go overboard.”

She shot him a glare.

“Are you serious? You know he raped and killed like a dozen women, right?”

I popped the trunk. It was stuffed with camping gear. I cleared it out by dumping the bags next to a parked car until a body would fit.

“What are you doing?” asked the bodybuilder.

“Taking the Prowler somewhere else.”

“The police will come.”

“He hasn’t called them,” the girl said casually.

The bodybuilder looked at us, confused.

“Isn’t it enough if the police take him?”

I stepped closer. With half his face mashed against the dirt, Alcala strained his eyes toward me.

“The cops will hand him over to the legal system,” I said. “Trials. A media circus. Years spent arguing whether keeping him locked up or executing him is humane. His victims are rotting and their families suffer. I’m ending this for good.”

“Spending the rest of his life in prison seems like punishment enough.”

“I’ll keep him from ever getting out. Decades from now, someone may set him free.” I fixed my gaze on the vagrant girl’s. “Some idiot puffed up with pride over how compassionate he is, someone who’d be outraged to learn what I’m going to do. This killer deserves a classical treatment.”

“In a few decades, we’ll have forgotten all this,” the bodybuilder argued.

“I’ll remember it like it happened yesterday.”

“You can also let me go,” Richard Alcala said, spitting dirt. “I don’t hold grudges.”

“Need any help?” asked a woman over my shoulder.

A retired couple with bronze-tanned skin had come up behind us. They wore sleeveless shirts and shorts, carrying towels and toiletries.

“Move along,” said the girl, nodding toward the beach.

“He’s a thief,” the bodybuilder said. “We’ve got it under control.”

The woman looked down at the killer.

“Have you stolen something?”

Richard Alcala flared his nostrils and scowled.

“Fuck off, old toad.”

The retirees backed off, mouths agape. They scurried toward the Venice Beach boardwalk, whispering and eyeing us nervously, as if we were hooded thugs loitering outside a bank.

The bodybuilder forced Alcala’s chest into the dirt while pinning me with his stare.

“I see your point, but turning him in spares us a lot of trouble.”

I clenched my jaw. I longed to kill from a distance, offing murderers who suspected nothing, distracted by their own schemes. How would I convince two people I’d rather not harm?

Partly due to the unrelenting sunlight, a throbbing pain in my head demanded I barricade myself in a dark room, lie down, and hope that when I woke, this week’s nightmare had passed. The clamor of tourists, beachgoers, and traffic scraped my skin like sandpaper.

I lifted the hem of my T-shirt to show off the Smith & Wesson’s grip.

“You’ve noticed the guy’s missing a few fingers—courtesy of this gun. You two are the most decent people I’ve met in a while, but you’re letting me take the Prowler.”

The bodybuilder raised a hand.

“Listen, man, neither of us wants to get shot over this.”

The vagrant girl was eyeing the gun.

“Are you an undercover cop?”

“No.”

“You’re carrying a gun for no reason?”

“No. Let me put this killer in the trunk.”

“I knocked him out by throwing my bike,” the bodybuilder said.

“I remember. That was cool.”

The bodybuilder looked down at Richard Alcala, whose frantic thoughts escaped in mutters, but the giant mushroom of a man remained indecisive.

I rubbed my eyelids and took a deep breath.

“This killer raped and murdered someone I cared about. I’m not letting him rot in a cushy cell. Richard Alcala and I are going to have some fun. Whatever’s left, I’ll send to the police in boxes.”

I crouched down and seized the killer’s wrists. The bodybuilder eased off the weight of his knee.

“Help me if you feel like it,” I said to the girl.

“Absolutely.”

We hoisted Alcala by his arms and legs while he squirmed. We wedged him on his side inside the trunk, then I slammed it shut. Alcala let out a screech.

On the boardwalk, the retired couple, far enough that they could fit between my fingers, was talking to two cops who looked our way. Electricity shot down my spine.

“How do we know you’ll do what you say?” the bodybuilder asked as he rubbed his palms on his pant legs.

“Read the papers.”

The cops were weaving through the streams of people on the boardwalk, pink faces turned toward us.

When I opened the driver’s door, the girl slid a hand inside my unzipped jacket and grabbed my shirt. Her eagle eyes a couple of inches away. The smudge of dirt on her cheek suggested she’d started putting on war paint but got sidetracked. Her open mouth shifted the chewed gum like a washing machine’s agitator. She smelled foul.

“You need a Robin?”

“I work alone.”

She pressed her lips to mine and slid her tongue into my mouth. She tasted of strawberries and neglect.

I stepped back. I groped the air before remembering I had opened the door. Sweat coated me like I’d just climbed out of hot water.

“Thanks.”

I slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door. Once I sped off, in the rearview mirror, the bodybuilder was scratching his neck, and the girl crossed the road while eyeing my stolen car. She was slender—her body worn thin from life on the street—and her fixed smile rarely meant joy.

I kept watching her, a pressure swelling in my chest, until her figure vanished from the mirror. Was she still alive in my present? How had she filled those decades? Found a partner, had children? Died within a few years thanks to any of the disasters that loom over those who sleep on the streets?

As I turned a corner, I let go of another person that time will ruin.

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish in a collection titled Los reinos de brea, about ten years ago. I guess back then I considered romancing a vagrant girl who doesn’t brush her teeth. I can fix you, babe.