"Because I can. I'm strong, I'm fast, I get stupid when I'm angry, then I do brave things. I don't think about death except in the middle of the night. That's why." His explanation had come after a long pause.

"You have a wife? Children?" Luis asked.

"She divorced me. Couldn't take going to other policemen's funerals and waiting for mine. Couldn't take me twitching at night when I couldn't forget what I'd seen. Isn't easy for a woman to be married to a policeman."

"Why do you fight here?"

"Unomundo killed Federal agents in the United States. I wish my government had not waited for them to die. If we had come years ago, maybe they'd still be alive. Maybe your family would still be alive. There's a hundred places I wish I'd gone to fight when I had the chance. North America. South America. Here. Some nights I think of what I could have done and didn't and I'm ashamed."

Luis laughed. "You talk like a missionary."

"Yeah, yeah," Lyons agreed, laughing with the Guatemalan. "But they bring the Word. I bring the Wrath."

They came to a crossroads and took another highway. The hours passed. Cornfields and gardens became vertical hillsides. Winding upward through ravines, switching back every few hundred yards, the narrow road cut through a forest.

At many of the curves, their headlights revealed clusters of small crosses. Names marked the crosses. Rotting flowers indicated frequent visits by mourners. Beyond the guardrails, the wooded mountainside dropped away to darkness.

"Why the graves there?" Lyons asked.

"Not graves. Shrines. That is where they died, so their families believe that is where their spirits wander."

"EGP? The Nazis?"

"No. Buses. Cars."

The switchbacks and curves continued, the highway zigzagging ever higher. Mist swirled in the headlight beams.