An angry Rottweiler raced out of the house, barking and snarling. Rivas shot OC into the dog’s face. Then he scrambled to Frames, who was lying on his back, holding on to the Doberman’s collar with both hands. The dog lunged again and again, digging its paws into Frames’s torso. Rivas shoved the OC canister in front of the animal’s head and sprayed. The Doberman pranced wildly, whining in agony and rubbing its nose in the grass.

Rivas pulled slowly to his feet. He felt his body’s early morning stiffness and the accumulated weariness of a hundred suspects wrestled to the ground. He looked behind him at the garage. The man who had knocked him over was gone.

Frames jumped up and watched the two dogs paw frantically at their faces. “Man, I hate dogs.”

Rivas pointed for Frames to take the right side of the garage while he ran left. He followed a concrete sidewalk as wide as his shoulders between the garage and a broken fence. Overhead, a grape arbor supported a tangle of thick vines and yellow and brown leaves and cut visibility to a few feet.

Holding his Sig, Rivas moved slowly in the dim light, stopping every few steps to listen. Behind the garage sat a low wooden shed and, between them, a passage covered with a panel of sheet metal.

At the back of the shed, the walkway dead-ended at a seven-foot-high concrete block wall. The smooth face of the wall was impossible to mount. The alley offered no way out. Rivas’s mind went back over the path. Where’d this asshole go? He turned around to see Peña pushing aside the sheet metal to stand twenty feet away in the center of the sidewalk, leveling his gun at Rivas’s head.

Tall and thickly built, Peña wore a ragged tank top and boxer shorts. His shaved head stood on a neck and shoulders covered in prison tattoos—black spirals curling up to the base of his cheeks like swollen angry snakes climbing out of his shirt.

The two men looked at each other across the dim corridor. Rivas’s gun was in his right hand, beside his hip. Peña’s was at head level, pointed straight ahead.

“There’s a shitload more cops back in the house,” Rivas said.

“Bésame el culo,” Peña said. His voice was low and toneless. The hand with the gun stayed dead still.

Rivas stared at the large figure before him, at the blank face and the empty gaze of his eyes. He weighed the odds of moving out of the line of fire and raising his own gun. What part of a second would it take Peña to squeeze the trigger? The Sig Sauer in his hand suddenly felt heavy.

Is this my story?