He lays out his tools, gets to work, uses some rags to mop up some of the leaking water. It looks like a simple repair job, and Benito should be out of here in a few minutes. He accidentally looks toward the two beds. The Anglo male is sitting on a bed, his back against the wall, his face puffy and red, looking like a defeated man.

The blond girl is cute, and Benito feels a sharp pang, remembering his own little girl, Gabriela. Oh, such a black-haired beauty, and he has to pause for a moment, remembering the year after she graduated from high school, how she went to work for a cousin in Ciudad Juárez, across the river from El Paso, Texas. She worked as a restaurant manager, was young, beautiful, with her whole life ahead of her…

He wipes at his eyes. One night she went out with some friends, driving a car across the border as a “favor” for someone. The car was part of a mule effort, smuggling cocaine across to the United States, and the car passed through the border checkpoints without any problem. The real problem came when the car was to be delivered to some sort of dealer in El Paso but ended up being seized by his rivals. The drugs were taken, the car was driven into the desert, and young, sweet Gabriela and her three friends were shot in the car and burnt.

“Hey!” comes a little girl’s voice. “Hey, mister!”

He ignores the girl’s voice. The toilet seems to have shifted on its base, which has led to leaking and a backup, and with a soft shove from his shoulder, the toilet returns to the proper place.

“Mister, please! Look at me! C’mon, look at me!”

Benito doesn’t want to look, but the pleading tone of the girl’s voice makes him turn his head. The cute Anglo blonde is standing straight up on her tiptoes, arms stretched out, and then she does a perfect cartwheel on the cement floor.

She stands, smiling, arms back straight up.

“Did you see? Did you?”

Benito nods and turns away, eyes filling with tears. He doesn’t want to think of what will happen to this sweetie at some point. Her father, sitting on the edge of the bed now, a dead look on his face…well, Benito thinks he is here because of something he has done. He is the guilty one. The little girl?

She is an innocent.

“Look! Please! Look again!”

And damn it, he does look again, and even the hard man standing guard looks, glancing up from his cell phone where he’s been playing some game, and the girl spins out again in a cartwheel, and her foot slips and she falls in a tumble.

She screeches and her father comes down and checks her, and she cries out for a moment, and says, “It’s okay, Daddy, it’s okay. I’m fine.”

He picks her up and gives her a hard, squeezing hug, and Benito’s hands shake as he gathers up his tools and nods to the other man.