The Execution Read Online Free PDF

this man, his uncle would never respect him.
    Or worse.
    Let the weight of the thing do the work . That’s what his uncle said. Whether he was referring to the weight of the object or the psychological measure of the act, it was all the same. If Ramon could just let the weight of the thing do the work, he would not have to get involved at all.
    His hands would be clean. And it would be done with.
    “You don’t have to,” came the voice.
    Not Ramon’s own voice. The young man’s beneath him.
    “No one will care if you don’t.”
    “Shut up!” said Ramon, kicking his bare shoulder.
    The sirens grew closer. Ramon felt eyes on him, real or imagined. The eyes of his uncle, the eyes of the dead, the eyes of the fat, taunting Carlito . . . and the eyes of the young man at his feet.
    In that single moment, Ramon could see his entire life ahead of him. Why had he ever wanted this? He had not been forced into it. He had sought it. His older brother was a simple farmer like their father. His younger brother was going to the military school in Mexico City.
    There was no need for this, he realized. There never had been.
    “This is insane,” said the young man on the ground. “You see that, can’t you?”
    Yes. Maybe it was. But perhaps it came to this: Who would Ramon rather be in this insane situation, the man at his feet, or the man wielding the blade?
    It was too late to stop this. Ramon moved toward the young man. The man tried to roll away, but Ramon got his feet down on either side of his chest, straddling him. He did not want to look at the man’s face, but there was no doing the job without it.
    The young man was looking up at him. Not at the blade: at Ramon.
    Ramon raised the blade all at once. He lifted the spadelike tool high into the air—and smashed it downward. But as the tool plunged toward the ground, Ramon realized he’d done exactly what his uncle had warned him not to: he had tried to muscle the blade into the man, instead of simply letting the tool do the work.
    His hands and arms attempted to do what his heart could not.
    And so he missed—the blade twisting slightly in its descent, whacking the man in the upper shoulder. It opened up a gaping, smile-shaped gash just above his clavicle.
    But it was no killing blow. Ramon saw white flashes of bone in the moments before the wound filled with blood.
    The young man grunted like he’d been punched. His eyes went white and teary, his eyelids fluttering, his mouth grimacing.
    Ramon looked around. He thought he saw his uncle on the running board of the Escalade, a ball cap shading his face, obscuring his expression. But it was another man. This man gave Ramon a simple wave. A summons. A hurry-up gesture.
    From that distance, it must have looked like a killing blow. The young man lay still.
    Ramon checked for the fat man, Carlito, but he was loading his own bulk into the driver’s seat of the truck.
    But he could not step away without being sure that his uncle . . .
    There he was. His uncle was up at the front door of the Palacio Municipal, kneeling over one of the beheaded corpses. He was writing something on the body’s bare back.
    No—a writing gesture, but not with a pen. A knife. Cutting swiftly yet delicately.
    For a moment Ramon wondered vaguely what he was doing. But the sirens were loud now, and almost upon them. Ramon knew that, whatever he was going to do, it had to be done now .
    On the ground beneath him, the young man gritted his teeth as though biting down on his pain.
    Ramon quickly leaned down. “Don’t scream,” he said.
    Then he began to run toward the knot of Humvees.

CHAPTER 5
    J uan de Jesus Ramos Diaz, the chief of police of Nuevo Laredo, considered himself to be uno hombre moderno— a modern man. He had graduated from the Instituto Tecnologico with a licenciado in business administration, where he had written his honors thesis on “The Use of Decision Trees in Managerial Problem Solving.”
    There were a great many