“Things are not good in Copal,” the Marine said. “Then again, things are not top-notch here. Look at these losers—” He nodded at the guards who stood, slung their rifles over their shoulders, and headed away into the night. “—they’re worthless. Children have been disappearing from the villages. Does anyone do anything? Does anyone investigate? Fuck no. They blame it on the Duende. That’s right, you can’t take a piss without showing some imbecile your papers, but children start going missing and they point their fingers at a freaking goblin.”

He paused and shrugged and began to scratch his head again.

“My thoughts? My personal opinion? It’s a load off. Who here can afford children? But people take it hard. My girl is upset. Her twenty-third cousin or some shit is missing.”

Like all the gringo expats Ethan had ever met, the Marine wanted to wax poetic about the poor sixteen-year-old he was defiling.

“She cries all the time now, but she’s a sweetheart. You have to understand that women down here respect something basic in you. They allow your manhood. They remain gracious to your nature.”

Outside, a distant noise echoed down out of the mountains or shanties. Ethan closed his eyes and rested his head against the window, hoping that the glass, bordered as it was with the night, would be cool. An instinct from his previous life in the north. Of course the glass was warm.

Another flurry of noise, louder now, and closer, in the hills behind the bar. The shrill yapping of coyotes on the hunt. The Indians stood and crossed themselves.

“It’s just coyotes,” Ethan said. “Don’t they know it’s coyotes?”

The Marine looked bored or trashed, the bottom falling out on his drunk. He waved and knocked over Ethan’s empty bottle. “Coyotes stick to the uplands. The scrub. They don’t have them down here.”

Ethan knew coyotes from his grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. They broke into the rabbit hutches the night he found his mother. No one went out to stop them.

“I’m listening to coyotes right now,” he said.

The yapping came closer, hysterical, modulating, high-pitched as parrots. They were on the move and closing in and the Indians pressed themselves up against the back wall and began to pray. Ethan heard some other commotion in the street, a screaming woman, and then a new sound over the rest—the clear, high wail of a child.

The Indians crossed themselves again and sat. Ethan listened harder. The shrieking coyotes, the child, a crying woman and praying Indians, and the moment dropped into sudden focus: the child was screaming in pain. She was not just frightened audience to the coyote hunt; she was there with them. She was the prey.