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By Root 1530 0

have always told us. The basic institutions falter—police, fire, government in general. Even the Red Cross recedes. First, when gunmen came and killed four at their emergency care center, they began shutting the facility at 10 P.M. Then, their ambulance drivers began getting radio warnings not to come the scene of shootings, or they would also be killed. Now they ride with cops. The next step, of course, is not to come at all, a response that is already advanced in the police and army.

I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts, and she will remain a mystery. Her perfect face will be blank. So will her beautiful eyes cocooned in makeup. By now her hair will have grown out, though I doubt it will cascade to her fine ass. The handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her fine time at the Casablanca when she was doing cocaine and whiskey and then was gang-raped for days. Perhaps she will share with me her memories of the crazy place.

The dead sit in rows and wait their turn to speak. They look more alive than the audience because they are totally committed to the play. It is the major performance of their lives, and I can tell they don’t want the curtain to come down. Also, they are confident of their lines.

My name is Ernesto Romero Adame, and I am thirty-three. I was driving my 2007 black Volkswagen Jetta and the bullets entered my neck and chest. It was New Year’s Day.

Then I hear another chair scrape, and a voice says softly,

Braulio Omar Casillas Arrendondo. And on the fourth of January, I was twenty-five. They wrapped my head and hands, as you can see, with duct tape. And then put some nine-millimeter rounds in my brain.

He sits, and slowly another form rises:

They never figured out my name, and so I’m not going to tell you. It was simple: January fifth, maybe two hundred feet from the Avenue of the National Army, a couple of nines right in the head.

This other guy stands up next to him and says,

Same day. Bunch of nines in the heart. Name—Luis Alberto Villarreal Vargas, twenty-five, and no longer counting.

A man cuts him off and says,

My hands are bound with wire. Took some forty-fives to the chest. Drove a Dodge Intrepid. Jesus Felix Laguna, every day of thirty-six.

Another guy says,

Let’s finish off the fifth of January. No name, doesn’t matter much now, anyway. Two in the head. Found me in a vacant lot.

I realize this show is going to take a while. But no one waiting to speak seems anxious or fidgeting. They all look relaxed, especially when you consider the large number of the cast with holes in their heads. Miss Sinaloa is harder to figure. She seems attentive, and yet I cannot read her lovely face at all. I can’t tell if she is merely being polite, or if she is caught up in the play.

Mario Antonio Martinez Hernandez, thirty-eight. Owned a junkyard. The wife came to pick me up, and I climbed in when suddenly two guys got out of a black Yukon and tried to open my door. I grabbed it and held it shut. This was January tenth. They stepped back and started firing.

I lean back and close my eyes. I simply listen and swim in the stories that fall from the pale lips.

Look, I went down the next day. They dumped me in a vacant lot after the torture. Some nines in the head. No name, please.

I took some rounds in the chest. I hobbled over to a security guard and asked for help. Then I died.

Enrique Enriquez Armendariz, fifty-one. A lot of torture, but I’ll skip over that. Hands and feet tied with duct tape. Dumped near a subdivision.

It’s a family thing. I’m a cop and so was my brother—he caught his back in May 2007. I took twenty-two rounds of 5.27x28 mm. I’m Police Captain Julián Cháirez Hernández, thirty-seven. I was on patrol at that moment.

I was coming out of my house to go to work when this van rolls up. Took thirty-five rounds from an AK-47. Never made it to the job. Francisco Ledesma Salazar, thirty-four, city police. Back then I drove a Ford Expedition.