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I have waited many years for this meeting. Before, I have had glancing blows with contract killers, brief words over beers, they would make vague references to their toils. These were always accidental collisions as we hunted the same ground for our varied prey. They never seemed strange enough. They simply seemed like everyone else, a fact I could not abide.

I am certain he and I agree on some facts. One, if he meets me he is taking a risk because this can only work if he trusts me, and trusting another human being is dangerous. Two, he will be killed, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, no matter, he will be killed. I have come to this place I cannot name to meet a man who will never have a name. We are on the line, but the line is over eighteen hundred miles long.

It must be intriguing for him to be prey after so many years of being the predator. He knows how they will do him. He knows almost certainly it will not be a clean and easy death.

He often has nightmares. Always he is killing someone and they are begging for mercy, for a quick and easy death, and in his dreams, he always hears laughter, his laughter. He calls this “gangster laughter.”

He knows fear, and that is why the duct tape is so important. First, you quickly tape their mouths, then put the plastic bag over their heads and bind it tight around the neck. But attention must be paid to the hands and feet. The hands are taped behind the back, the feet cinched together. Because always, once they realize what is happening, they start “jumping around like chickens that have had their heads cut off.”

I ask him something: Why is the duct tape sometimes gray and then other times beige? Is this simply a happenstance, or a deliberate decision, a kind of homage to the importance of color in life?

He ignores the question.

There is a thumbnail of his life and I have no idea if it is true. He begins as a gofer for the state police, the little guy who scurries when someone wants coffee or some tacos. He is good at serving people, he seems born to such a role. He comes from poverty but he is quite bright. For example, he knows accounting.

In the state police, he makes a friend among the cops he serves, a man who goes on to be the bodyguard of the governor and then rises and joins the cartel. They drift apart, but this relationship will prove important to him.

For himself, he finds he can kill—I don’t yet know the details of how he comes into this knowledge. He joins a crew and operates the uniforms, the cars, the ambulances, the trips. The easy money.

He winds up as the bodyguard for the adolescent son of the boss, and this job is taxing because the boy, seventeen or eighteen, is an asshole. Still, it is a good job—saving the boy from brawls in discos, killing people the boy does not favor, simple chores like that. Also, at times he collects money for the boss, and kills for him. It is a life.

Then he has a problem. He is sent to collect five thousand dollars and he does this. But he spends all the money in one night on a party for himself. This is bad, but he can make up the money. However, the boy he guards has some kind of grudge against him now.

One day, the son tells him to go to the store and get shovels and picks.

He knows what this means.

The other bodyguards take him down to a dry wash and beat him long and hard. But they let him get away—this is simply part of the legend that follows him.

So he gets away. He pays a coyote a thousand dollars to get him into the United States in 2007. He is cheated, of course—the coyote dumps him on the levee. But he crosses, gets works, moves his family north, joins a church. Watches his back.

That is why I wait here in the sun by the levee with a great blue heron wandering the river at my back. He is watching me, I am all but certain of this. I sip ice water out of a clear glass. I am outside in a plastic chair so he can study me. A cat rubs against my leg. I do not blink.

I am fevered and about to pass out.