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the photographer’s idea. They made me look like a turd. But my Pinocchio clock was on the wall behind me, smiling at everyone who enters my office. Its eyes roll from side to side as it tocks. The photographer thought it was colorful.
    Nita took something from the purse, but I could not see what she held.
    “My uncle had a clock like yours. He told us about Pinocchio, the puppet who dreamed an impossible dream.”
    “To be a flesh-and-blood boy.”
    “To dream of a better life. It was why we were here.”
    “Your uncle sounds like a good man.”
    “The tocking rocked me to sleep. You know how people talk about the surf? The tocking was my surf in Boyle Heights when I was seven years old. I loved that clock. Every day and all night, Pinocchio reminded us to work for our dreams. Do you see?”
    She opened her hand.
    “He gave this to me when I was seven years old.”
    A faded plastic figure of Jiminy Cricket was in her palm, the blue paint of his top hat chipped and worn. Pinocchio’s conscience.
    “When I saw his clock in the picture, I thought we were not so different.”
    She put the figure in my hand.
    “I can’t take this.”
    “Give it back when you find my baby.”
    I put the cricket in my pocket, and got out of her car.

Joe Pike:
    eleven days after they were taken

3.
    Dennis Orlato
    Their job was to get rid of the bodies.
    Twenty-two miles west of the Salton Sea, one hundred sixty-two miles east of Los Angeles, yellow dust rooster-tailed behind them as the Escalade raced across the twilight desert. The sound system boomed so they could hear bad music over the eighty-mile-per-hour wind, what with the windows down to blow out the stink.
    Dennis Orlato, who was driving, punched off the music as he checked the GPS.
    Pedro Ruiz, the man in the passenger seat, shifted the 12-gauge shotgun, fingering the barrel like a second dick.
    “What you doin’? Give it back.”
    Ruiz, who was a Colombian with a badly fixed cleft lip, liked
narcocorridos
—songs that romanticized the lives of drug dealers and Latin-American guerrillas. Orlato was a sixth-generation Mexican-American from Bakersfield, and thought the songs were stupid.
    Orlato said, “I’m looking for the turn. We miss it, we’ll be here all night.”
    In the back seat, Khalil Haddad leaned forward. Haddad was a thin, dark Yemeni drug runner who had been hauling khat into Mexico before the cartels shut him down. Now, he worked for the Syrian like Orlato and Ruiz. Orlato was certain Haddad talked shit about him to the Syrian, Arab to Arab, so Orlato hated the little bastard.
    Haddad said, “A kilometer, less than two. You can’t miss it.”
    When they reached the turn, Orlato zeroed the odometer, and drove another two-point-six miles to the head of a narrow sandy road, then stopped again to search the land ahead. Three crumbling rock walls sprouted from the brush less than a mile in the distance, and were all that remained of an abandoned supply shed built for bauxite miners before the turn of the century. Orlato and Ruiz opened their doors, and climbed onto their seats to scan the coppery gloom with binoculars.
    The surrounding desert was flat for miles, broken only by rocks and scrub too low to conceal a vehicle. The sandy road before them showed only their tire tracks, made three days earlier, and no footprints. Seeing this, Orlato dropped back behind the wheel. No other cars, trucks, motorcycles, people, or ATVs had passed on this road.
    “It’s good. We go.”
    Two minutes later, they pulled up beside the walls, and went to work. It was a nasty and dangerous job, there at the edge of the evening hour, best done quickly before the light was lost. They stripped off their shirts and guns, then pulled on gloves as Haddad threw open the back door. The two women and man were the last of a group from India,
pollos
who had been on their way to the Pacific Northwest, brought up through Mexico from Brazil and Central America, only to be kidnapped and held