He took another step toward us, the knife extended. “You won’t use that gun. You’re no different than Cathy. She was afraid at the end, too. Yeah, I gave her money. Fifteen hundred dollars. She begged for it. Told me she wanted to go to Mexico to have her tits done.”

“Her tits!” Lupe and I exclaimed at the same time. Laughing, Lupe sauntered majestically over and stood next to me.

“So that’s why you went down to Mexicali. You really did love her,” Lupe said.

“She was a beautiful young girl.” Armando Diaz looked away sadly for an instant, then his face grew twisted and angry as he remembered. “I thought I’d surprise her, bring her some flowers, but when I got there she was with a red-haired man and she laughed at me. She said she’d sent the money I gave her to Guatemala to make a revolution. Like Castro.”

I remembered the story Rudy Sancerre had told me about how Armando Diaz had escaped from Cuba. That his wife and child had been swept away and died in the ocean between Cuba and Florida. Although it happened nearly fifteen years ago, it was clear that Armando Diaz did not spend a day during which he did not think of this. His daughter would have been Cathy Vega’s age by now. Or Lupe’s. Or mine.

“How’d you do it?” Lupe asked.

He turned his attention to her again, taking his eyes off the gun. He had already made his judgment about me. He didn’t seem particularly afraid of me anymore. “I’ll tell you. You’re not going to be leaving here alive. Film developer. I gave her a shot. She got sick, but I cleaned it up and left things to look like she overdose.”

“Except for the bruise on the back of her neck,” I reminded him.

“She fought against me.” He took another step. We were only a few yards apart now.

“Before or after you fucked her?” I asked.

“It’s so sad. I suppose you wanted to love her just one more time,” Lupe interrupted in a small quiet voice.

In the shade his face was a mask. “Before.”

Lupe looked sick. “She was already dead, wasn’t she?”

Armando Diaz shrugged. “Dead or alive, she was a whore.”

The willows groaned in the breeze.

Lupe grabbed the gun from me, clasped both of her hands around it, and threw herself into a shooter’s stance with her hands out in front of her chest. “Get over there!” she yelled at him, jerking the gun in the direction of the greasy artificial pond and toward a tombstone a few feet away.

He stood looking blankly back at her.

“Move it. Over to that marker. Look at it. Say that name out loud.”

I heard the click of the safety being released, then I saw him move slowly to the tombstone Lupe was pointing at.