“You know what I don’t like about you Company Cowboys?” Taylor asked.

“No, what?”

“You aren’t cops,” Taylor said. “You’re killers.”

And fuck you, too, Art thought. But he kept his mouth shut. Kept it firmly clamped while Taylor launched into a lecture about how he didn’t want any cowboy shit from Art. How they’re a “team” here and Art better be a “team player” and “play by the rules.”

Art would have been happy to be a team player if they would have let him on the team. Not that Art cared one hell of a lot. You grow up in the barrio as the son of an Anglo father and a Mexican mother, you’re not on anybody’s team.

Art’s father was a San Diego businessman who seduced a Mexican girl while on vacation in Mazatlan. (Art often thought it was funny that he was conceived, albeit not born, in Sinaloa.) Art Senior decided to do the right thing and marry the girl-not too painful an option, as she was a raving beauty; Art gets his good looks from his mother’s side. His father brings her back to the States, only to decide that she’s like a lot of things you get in Mexico on vacation-she looked a lot better on a moonlit beach in Mazatlan than in the cold, Anglo light of the American day-to-day.

Art Senior dumped her when Art was about a year old. She didn’t want to throw away the one advantage her son had in life-U.S. citizenship-so she moved in with some distant relations in Barrio Logan. Art knew who his father was-sometimes he’d sit in the little park on Crosby Street and look at the tall glass buildings downtown and imagine going into one of them to see his father.

But he didn’t.

Art Senior sent checks-faithfully at first and then sporadically-and he’d get occasional bouts of paternal urges or guilt and show up to take Art to dinner or maybe a Padres game. But their father-son time was awkward and forced, and by the time Art was in junior high the visits had stopped altogether.