Free Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden Page A

the predator. He knows how they will do him. He knows almost certainly it will not be a clean and easy death.
    He often has nightmares. Always he is killing someone and they are begging for mercy, for a quick and easy death, and in his dreams, he always hears laughter, his laughter. He calls this “gangster laughter.”
    He knows fear, and that is why the duct tape is so important. First, you quickly tape their mouths, then put the plastic bag over their heads and bind it tight around the neck. But attention must be paid to the hands and feet. The hands are taped behind the back, the feet cinched together. Because always, once they realize what is happening, they start “jumping around like chickens that have had their heads cut off.”
    I ask him something: Why is the duct tape sometimes gray and then other times beige? Is this simply a happenstance, or a deliberate decision, a kind of homage to the importance of color in life?
    He ignores the question.
    There is a thumbnail of his life and I have no idea if it is true. He begins as a gofer for the state police, the little guy who scurries when someone wants coffee or some tacos. He is good at serving people, he seems born to such a role. He comes from poverty but he is quite bright. For example, he knows accounting.
    In the state police, he makes a friend among the cops he serves, a man who goes on to be the bodyguard of the governor and then rises and joins the cartel. They drift apart, but this relationship will prove important to him.
    For himself, he finds he can kill—I don’t yet know the details of how he comes into this knowledge. He joins a crew and operates the uniforms, the cars, the ambulances, the trips. The easy money.
    He winds up as the bodyguard for the adolescent son of the boss, and this job is taxing because the boy, seventeen or eighteen, is an asshole. Still, it is a good job—saving the boy from brawls in discos, killing people the boy does not favor, simple chores like that. Also, at times he collects money for the boss, and kills for him. It is a life.
    Then he has a problem. He is sent to collect five thousand dollars and he does this. But he spends all the money in one night on a party for himself. This is bad, but he can make up the money. However, the boy he guards has some kind of grudge against him now.
    One day, the son tells him to go to the store and get shovels and picks.
    He knows what this means.
    The other bodyguards take him down to a dry wash and beat him long and hard. But they let him get away—this is simply part of the legend that follows him.
    So he gets away. He pays a coyote a thousand dollars to get him into the United States in 2007. He is cheated, of course—the coyote dumps him on the levee. But he crosses, gets works, moves his family north, joins a church. Watches his back.
    That is why I wait here in the sun by the levee with a great blue heron wandering the river at my back. He is watching me, I am all but certain of this. I sip ice water out of a clear glass. I am outside in a plastic chair so he can study me. A cat rubs against my leg. I do not blink.
    I am fevered and about to pass out. It came to me late yesterday, this fever, but I ignored it and now I sit here wondering if he will show up and wondering if I will be conscious when he shows up. I think he will not show. This is a test, an audition. I sip the ice water, lean down and caress the cat, look out into the glare and feel him watching me.
    I must have him. Others question this appetite in me. They say he must be a psychopath. And maybe he is, but how can you know unless you meet him? Or they say he is evil, and then I ask them what evil means and they mutter but never clearly answer me. I think he is essential to understanding. He is my Marco Polo of slaughter.
    I have been with mountain lions, twice less than ten feet away, once with the lion standing in the night screaming in my face. I consider them fellow citizens, not predators. The basic