“Yeah.”

He craned his neck through the glass I’d cleaned.

“United States?” he asked again.

“Yes,” I insisted.

“How?”

From what I’d been led to believe we were somewhere on a sovereign Indian nation that didn’t allow fences, or the border patrol, or even the local cops. Law enforcement was done by the FBI and they had to come in specially from Austin or Washington, D.C. It had been a coyote road for years.

“We just drove over,” I said with a smile.

The kid nodded happily. He was the youngest of us. Sixteen, fifteen, something like that. Sweet little nonentity.

He and I and three others jammed into the back of the ancient Land Rover. Seats opposite one another. No way to stretch your legs out. Empty chair next to Pedro but he wouldn’t let anyone sit up.

I drifted for a bit and felt drool on my arm. The old man from Nogales was napping against my shoulder. I wiped the spittle with my T-shirt sleeve.

Yeah. Five of us. The Indian boy, me, the old man, a deaf woman from Veracruz, and a punk kid from Managua who was sitting directly across from me, pretending to sleep.

Didn’t know any of their names. Didn’t want to know.

I stared through the window at the sameness.

So hot now the air itself was a gigantic lens distorting the landscape, bringing distant mountains dizzyingly close, warping the flatland into curves.

I pressed my face against the glass. Time marched. The heat haze conjuring ever more intense illusions from the view. The yellow desert: a lake of egest. The cacti: dead men crucified. The birds: monstrous reptiles from another age.

I watched until nausea and vertigo began to zap my head.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and for the hundredth time since that last interview with Ricky I wondered what exactly I was doing here. Revenge is a game for pendejos. Hector says that tit for tat is a base emotion, from the lizard brain, from way, way down.