The ’74 Maverick was warming up when one of the De León family’s cooks ran toward them waving her arms. The gardener was with her.
“Mister,” he said. “Please help us find our daughter. They say you’re going to look for Cristina. Find my little girl, too.”
The detective looked at the couple. The cook handed him a photo of a dark-skinned girl who looked around twelve years old. She was wearing a public school uniform.
“She was playing in the park with her friends. They came and took them all. Put them in a white truck. María Pérez López is her name. She was about to turn fifteen. Two months we’ve been looking for her.”
“We can pay you with our car,” the gardener added, pointing to a broken-down Nissan flatbed next to the servants’ quarters.
Treviño looked compassionately at the girl’s parents and slipped the photo into his breast pocket.
“I’ll keep an eye out for her.”
“Let’s go,” said the Bus, who couldn’t stand those people.
Just as they were about to leave, the cook asked if she could grab a cassette of Juan Luis Guerra’s greatest hits from the Maverick’s glove compartment.
“Sorry. It’s just, who knows if you’ll be back,” she said and hurried back to the kitchen.
“Goddammit!” the Bus exploded.
Moreno and Rafita, leaning on the two Lobos with tinted windows, watched them until the Maverick’s engine turned over and the main gate opened.
When Treviño and the Bus reached the outskirts of La Eternidad, they stopped at a convenience store. A headline from the evening paper caught their attention: FIFTY CONSTRUCTION WORKERS DISAPPEARED NORTH OF LA ETERNIDAD: THEIR BELONGINGS WERE FOUND ON A TRAIN TO MATAMOROS. While the Bus picked up a few bottles of soda and a dozen or so bags of junk food, Treviño stepped out to smoke his first cigarette of the trip. Standing there, he noticed that the front yard of the house next door was being set up for a quinceañeara. Everything was there, even the cake. As he watched the preparations, Treviño thought back to a few months earlier, when an armed crew had killed seventeen kids at the same kind of gathering not far from La Eternidad. The killers got out of two huge trucks, took their time interrogating everyone there, then shot them all and left. Later it was revealed that they’d been released from federal prison by the warden for the express purpose of carrying out the crime.
He recalled how the hit men had opened fire on a group of kids (sure, maybe they were dealing drugs, but they were still a group of unarmed teenagers) and thought to himself, God help us. It was a party just like this one. The guys must have driven up a street just like this one, fanned out across a garden just like this one, terrorized a group of people like the ones right here. People dancing, chatting, enjoying life. And how do you bring them to justice when there are no witnesses, the facts of the case are beyond reckoning, and they’re backed by the prison’s warden, to say nothing of the politicians. From one day to the next, right before our eyes, everything changed. The law doesn’t decide who has the right to live anymore. It’s them. It’s the criminals who decide who lives and who dies. “Holy shit,” he said, tossing his cigarette. “What have I gotten myself into?”