I checked into a motel before driving to Pavel’s house through what must’ve been the least green city in America. The air had the texture of exhaust. On the west side, where Pavel lived, the roads were like endless stretches of bone-white desert sand. Only by cowering under highways could you find any shade, which is where I saw the tents, sheets of cardboard, and shopping carts filled with rags that told me I was in a Rubicon trial area. The houses were all boarded up and bleached by sun, convenient backgrounds for campaign signs, cardinal red with white letters: REELECT MAYOR JOCK FISH.

Pavel’s house was in an especially bizarre location, among a row of homes perched high on a slope above a four-lane arterial thoroughfare. Turning off that road was frightening—it felt like slowing down would cause a fifty-car pileup—but I maneuvered the Highlander over to the gravel at the base of the slope and parked. Then it was a matter of climbing the switchback path to the house on foot. Halfway up, I paused and squinted across the street, the oils of my skin beginning to cook. A guardrail ran along the other side of the road, beyond which everything plunged into a canyon.

Of these houses on the slope, Pavel’s looked like the only one currently occupied. The others had plywood sheets on the windows and doors, but Pavel’s house reminded me of Tori’s grandma’s place in Retreat, everything welded and caged.

He answered the door in a smudged tank top and cutoff jeans. Balding on top, he was hairy all over, coarse black sheathing his legs and shooting from his shoulders. All the features of his face were clustered in the middle: a small, broken-looking nose and crumpled lips, purple like liver.

“Do you think my car will be safe?” I asked, looking down to where I’d parked.

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” he said with that accent, maybe eastern European, “but no promises, okay?”

I couldn’t believe the heat inside. Pavel didn’t have any AC and he inexplicably kept the windows closed. The air burned my throat. It didn’t help that he chain-smoked.

“This is my good time of day,” he said, sort of joking. “After my first pills wear off, before the next ones kick in.”

With a pronounced limp, he led me to the kitchen. I took out the recorder and he leaned in to it when he spoke. The first thing he wanted to tell me about was the shooting.