“Because it turns churros into molten dough,” I said. “Or charcoal briquettes. I don’t know why I have the damned thing in the first place.”

“Can I have it if you die?” Tomás said. “And the 442?”

“Yeah, sure, why not?” I said. “Just so you know, Carlos and Jimmy secured a sawed-off shotgun under the back seat. I haven’t figured how to get it out without blowing off the right-rear quarter panel. So what do I get if you die?”

“Monthly note on my regular truck,” he said. “Plus the awesome responsibility of taking care of Elena, my daughter and grandbaby.”

“Sounds fair. What are you thinking?” I said, donning one of my mother’s old oven mitts and pulling the churros from the oven.

“What I’m thinking is you ain’t gonna like what I’m thinking,” Tomás said. He grabbed a hot churro and devoured half of it. Chewing, he said, “I don’t half like it myself.”

“So, surprise me.”

He did.

I admitted to having serious doubts.

“You think you can pull that off?” I said.

“You mean can I swallow my pride long enough to keep your butt topside?” Tomás said, licking his fingers clean of sugar. “You and me been way enough for each other in tight spots. This time’s different. We both got our asses handed to us on this one. Both of us done seen the faces of people we love from hospital beds—and that’s a view I don’t never want again.”

“How’s the coffee?” I said.

“Like suckin’ a buffalo’s wet balls, jefe.”

“How would you even know that?”

36

36

“You won’t.”

“But you have to admit—I could.”

“But you won’t.”

“How do you know that?”

“My Somali great-grandfather Bashiir Cilmi told me in a dream.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Your great-grandfather? Isn’t he, like, dead?”

“August.” Tatina laughed dismissively. “If he were truly dead, how could he speak to me?”

Every once in a while—both in families and in politics—you are confronted by such glorious lunacy that it’s simultaneously indefensible and unimpeachable.

Tatina and I had been going round-robin for ten minutes on the subject of my possible death at the hands of Bojing and his crew. It was a cold early evening in Mexicantown, a cold late night in Oslo. I was loading the remaining arsenal of Tomás’s expansive cache of weapons into the back of my GMC Yukon. Tomás had already cleared out more than half of his gun locker and was in the process of distribution. I’d never seen his gun locker empty before; it was a strangely unsettling feeling staring at the now-vacant insulated steel walls, shelves and open and empty lockboxes.

The last thing to go from Tomás’s gun locker was a box of flash-bang grenades. God only knows where he got them.