He straightened and walked toward the big machine Leah had uncovered to smother the fire. The machine had a cable running to a computer on the nearby workbench. He pulled a stool from under the workbench and sat at the computer. He turned on the computer, and when the opening screen appeared, he typed a few commands and began to scroll down a list of names and data. The list began to scroll faster, but he was still moving his fingers as though he were typing commands to find something.

Leah was watching him. “You’re not doing it. You’re erasing the file.”

She grabbed his wrist, trying to pull his hand away, but he elbowed her aside and launched himself toward the two remaining cans of kerosene. He snatched one up and began swinging it around, throwing the fuel on the card printers, the floor, the benches, and computers.

Leah shot him once in the chest and he fell to the floor.

She sat on the stool he had just vacated and stared at him. The whole thing was a disaster. She was here in the place where everything she needed to know was stored. Tonight, she had shot all three of the men who could have given it to her.

Leah’s eyes strayed along the computer’s cable to the big machine. That was the one that made the licenses and cards. Beneath its stand was a tub about the size of a bathtub made of galvanized steel. It caught her eye partly because all of the machines were high tech, but there was this humble object, like something from a barnyard. She noticed that it was full of pieces of the plastic material of credit cards and licenses. Some pieces she could see were just trimmings, but others had mag-stripes or chips. Some bore parts of photographs, and some had whole pictures. She recognized a couple of logos from banks.

Leah moved closer. The tub seemed to be the scrap bin for the rejects and the experiments. She knelt beside it and began to reach in and pull out pieces of plastic. Leah began to look at cards and pieces of cards, taking them out of the bin, shuffling through them and dropping them in piles on the floor.

The Vargas had apparently not thrown their mistakes away and burned or shredded them to keep from being arrested for counterfeiting credit cards and licenses. They had simply dropped them into the tub.