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We brought the duct tape—do you prefer gray or tan? No matter, get

your ass in.

We have the plastic bag, the loaded guns.

You have been waiting?

Everyone is waiting, but our list is so long.

Everyone pretends we will never come.

But everyone is on somebody’s list.

Well, for you, the wait is over.

Let me tell you about a killing season.

What?

You don’t like violence?

I understand.

But get in the car.

You say it hard to see because of the darkly tinted windows?

You will learn darkness.

Miss Sinaloa is a detail. She was special, so fine.

Of course, she took the ride, my God, what a ride.

Okay, yes, there is the matter of cocaine and whiskey and sanity that might undercut her standing in the community.

See those people on the street pretending you don’t exist and this big machine with tinted windows doesn’t exist, pretending that none of this is happening to you?

That was you until just a few minutes ago.

The killings?

Murder itself is simply a little piece of life and so it can be dismissed as exceptional or irrational or extreme.

Though it is curious how, if you kill with style, it does get everyone’s attention.

Surely, we know that even at our best we can only know little pieces of life.

What, you are uncomfortable? The tape binding your hands behind your back is too tight?

Shut your fucking mouth.

You want this pistol cracked over your ugly face?

No?

That’s better.

Now shut up before I have to tape your mouth.

What was I saying?

Oh, yes.

We can still believe that destroying another human life is an extreme act.

Unless of course, the slaughter is done by governments. Or the killing is done to some vague group variously dubbed as terrorists or gangsters or drug dealers or people—and this varies with location—of other color or religious notions.

Still, you can see, there is really nothing to worry about since people know how to ignore whatever interferes with the way people want to think about the world.

Yes. I mean this. People can have murders all around them and have people vanish in broad daylight and still go on just fine and say, well, those people were bad, or it doesn’t happen that often.

What?

Stop shaking your head. You say nothing and do nothing.

You understand?

You are simply along for the ride. And all those things you said didn’t matter, well, now maybe you will change your mind, just a little bit.

The trick is to leave, fade away and stop thinking about the killings.

In the first eleven days of August, seventy-five go down. On Monday, August 11, fifteen are murdered.

Let it go, fade away, turn the page, change the music.

Let me tell you of an incident.

I come back from the shadows against my will.

What?

You don’t believe me?

Believe me.

This incident, yes, this incident. There is this woman, and she is very nice-looking, and a friend invites her to a party being hosted by men who apparently work in the drug industry. The woman, the one I am talking about, and damn you, listen as if your fucking life depended on it, well, this woman lives in southern Chihuahua and so she has little to do with Juárez just as Juárez has little to do with the real world, you know, the United States, Europe, all those kind of places where the real world exists.

When the car comes and she gets in it, her friend takes money from the men but does not come along for the ride.

For the next few days, she is gang-raped.

When she returns to the workaday world, she gives a deposition to the authorities, and suddenly she is on the front page of the newspaper. She goes into hiding, though she is still bleeding from her vagina and rectum. She remembers that at the hospital, she was shunted aside because her case was not considered an emergency.

And so she becomes a detail. That is the way of life. Everything becomes a detail if it interferes with the big picture.

She has never met Miss Sinaloa, but now, they truly know each other and they talk