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Camaro wouldn’t hold much so he’d rented a trailer. He would soon receive an ATFE take-home vehicle. Hood was thirty and never married and he had few things. As he wrestled another box from the trailer, he was thinking it would be nice to have a dog.
    The house was a 1920s adobe, one of ten tucked amidst the hills on the northwest side of town, a development that never quite caught on. The place came furnished and had a new swamp cooler. The road in was graded dirt with ruts for gutters, but the hillside views were good: south to old town in which the bell tower of the church was still the highest point, east to infinite desert, and west to more desert and black-orange sunsets that covered miles.
    Hood had arrived in Buenavista forty-eight hours ago, just enough time to meet the local chief of police, shake hands with the three members of the ATFE task force he was assigned to, then participate in the gun buy that had resulted in the killing of two men. One of the dead was a teenaged boy named Gustavo Armenta, who was on a date that night, and as Hood carried another box into the house, he pictured the way Gustavo had led his girlfriend by the hand from the restaurant patio and how a few moments later an errant bullet had found his heart in the darkness fifty yards away, stopping eighteen years of past and sixty years of future dead and forever. The other dead man was a gun dealer with a revoked license.
    Hood heard a distant noise and through a window saw a vehicle coming slowly up the road. The headlights raked and bounced, and a while later the police cruiser came to a stop just outside the carport light.
    Gabriel Reyes got out and let the door close quietly, bumping it shut with his hip.
    “I’m glad I didn’t have to wake you up,” he said.
    “Coffee?”
    “Please.”
    In the kitchen Hood poured a cup and Reyes looked around the old home. His uniform was clean and pressed. His expression was that of a man expecting the worst.
    “I guess you don’t come out this early with good news,” said Hood.
    “Benjamin Armenta ring a bell?”
    “Gulf Cartel.”
    “The boy who was killed last night is Gustavo, his son. He lived in Buenavista, on the Mexican side. Engaged to the girl. It’s a shame and a mess.”
    “Was he mixed up in his dad’s business?”
    “Who knows? He was on his way to UCLA.”
    Hood sighed and looked out at the lightening day.
    “So be extra careful, deputy. Benjamin Armenta will demand vengeance for Gustavo. It’s a point of honor. It’s my job to say that, even though I probably don’t have to. You know the Zetas, don’t you?”
    Hood knew they were the latest pestilence in the drug wars raging in Mexico, paramilitary killers leaving corpses, sometimes piles of them, across the nation. “The Gulf Cartel’s beheaders.”
    “They’ve been busy. Thirty-four headless men, women, and children in eight days. All of the victims tied to Carlos Herredia’s Baja Cartel. Of course, Benjamin Armenta has lost ninety-seven of his own. That’s one hundred and thirty-seven killings in a week and a day.”
    “Have you talked to my task force people?”
    “I called them.”
    “Thanks for coming out.”
    “Gustavo and the Zetas aren’t why I came out.”
    “So there’s even more good news.”
    “Let’s sit outside and watch the sun rise.”
    They sat on the low courtyard wall because there were no chairs. Hood saw that Reyes walked with a slight limp. The chief looked sixty, gray-haired, thick.
    “Be careful at dusk and dawn this time of year,” said Reyes. “If you step on a western diamondback, it can ruin your whole day. I still limp.”
    Hood nodded and looked down at Buenavista.
    “I got an anonymous call two mornings ago,” said Reyes. “It was the same day you got here. It was a woman, and she told me there was an injured man in the desert outside of town. She told me to drive east on 98 until I saw a pickup off to the side. I did that. Big skid marks at the truck. A rear