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Miss Sinaloa moves closer, and I feel the warmth of her body.

Murder Artist

He always has time for a little prayer. He was raised Catholic and he believes in God. So he makes it a rule to give them two minutes for a prayer. They are handcuffed, blindfolded, half-starved, and badly beaten. They are ready. And so they pray. And then, he strangles them, feels their bodies fight for air, struggle to retain some hold on life, and there is this ebbing, he can feel this in his hands, as they slide away into eternity.

He wants me to know this as we sit in the room, drapes pulled shut to keep out prying eyes, black coffee steaming in his hand, his voice level, and the sentences direct and with a simple eloquence. He is speaking for a trade, the sicarios, the professional killers, and he wants the world to know the work, and he wants the other sicarios out there to know that it is possible to leave the work. And come to God.

He has a green pen, a notebook. He has printouts from the Internet, mainly things about myself. He has spent ten hours researching me. Like so many pilgrims, he is in the market for a witness who can understand his life. He has decided I will suffice. He is at ease now. Before, his body language was hunched over, shoulders looming, hands ready, those trained and talented hands. He wore a skullcap that hid his hair, and he seldom smiled.

Now he is a different person, a man who laughs, his body almost fluid, his eyes no longer dead, black coals but beaming and dancing as he speaks.

“We are not monsters,” he explains. “We have education, we have feelings. I would leave torturing someone, go home, and have dinner with my family, and then return. You shut off parts of your mind. It is a kind of work, you follow orders.”

For some time, his past life has been dead to him, something he shut off. But now it is back. He thinks God has sent me to convey his lessons to others. Like all of us, he wants his life to have meaning, and I am to write it down and send it out into the world. Of course, he must be careful. When he left the life two years ago, the organization put a contract on his life of $250,000. He does not know what the contract currently is, but it is unlikely to be lower. At the moment, God is protecting him and his, he knows this, but still, he must be careful.

Just the other day, a man and a woman from El Paso went to Juárez for the funeral of the woman’s sister who had been murdered the previous week. They both worked in the El Paso hospital where gunshot patients from Juárez are often brought for their own security. At about noon, two cars cut the couple off from the procession. Twenty rounds were pumped into the front seat, killing the man and the woman. Two people riding in the backseat were left unharmed. As so often happens, no one really saw anything, and so the killers in their two cars rode away as if they were invisible.

Such incidents can never be far from his mind. He is almost a scholar of such actions, since for about twenty years he performed them.

“I don’t do bad things anymore,” he says, “but I can’t stop being careful. It is a habit I have. That’s how I ensure security for myself. They killed me twice, you know.”

And he lifts his shirt to show me two groupings of bullet holes in his belly from when he took blasts from an AK-47.

“I was in a coma for a while,” he continues. “I weighed two hundred ninety pounds when I went into the hospital, a narco-hospital, and I shrunk to a hundred twenty pounds.”

It was all a mistake. The organization believed he had leaked information on the killing of a newspaper columnist, but it turned out the actual informant had been the guy paid to tap phones. So they killed that guy and “apologized to me and paid for a month’s vacation in Mazatlán with women, drugs, and liquor. I was about twenty-four then.”

He sips his coffee. He is ready to begin.

He notes that when I asked him earlier about his first killing, he said he couldn’t really remember because he used so much cocaine and drank so much