“Do you know who I am?”

The bus driver shook his head, squeezing his eyes tight.

“Yes, yes, you do. Pretending otherwise will not change this. It cannot. Open your eyes and say my name. I cannot yet take your tongue, but I can make you use it. And I will.”

Gualterio stirred next to him, ready to step forward and force the man to comply. He’d seen all this before as well, but many of the others in the barn had not. They knew El Patrón only as an old man, confined often to his chair; prone to falling asleep in the late-afternoon shadows of the hottest days. A man who enjoyed telenovelas and his Zita’s dancing. Perhaps they mocked him behind his back. Maybe one of them thought to betray him.

This display was as much for those men as the one tied to the chair. Juan Abrego was now the teacher he’d once dreamed of being, and this was his lesson.

The bus driver finally opened his eyes, took a deep, deep breath. “You are Fox Uno.”

Juan Abrego shook his head, although the man was not wrong. It was a silly name, given to him long ago, the way they now called Martino Tiburón; the way Gualterio had always been known as Oso Ocho. Such things stayed alive mainly in the press, in the narcocorridos. Many people believed “Fox Uno” had no true meaning now and that such a person no longer existed. Only the name itself lived on, carrying an immense weight . . . an impossible burden.

Fox Uno was little more than a horrible dream, un espantajo—a terror. Something to frighten children.

And when Juan Abrego remembered the boy he had once been, the boy he had left in his father’s fields decades ago, he could almost believe that, too.

“No, I am Death, my friend . . .”

After the bus driver finally answered all his questions—after he was broken and all his secrets poured out—Juan Abrego would strangle him to death with his bare hands. Fox Uno’s hands. Those same hands he was afraid would dirty Zita’s dress and that he dreamed were permanently stained in blood. He would then have Gualterio help him with the guiso, putting the body in the burning barrel, where it would fold in on itself and melt and stink so bad that the barn itself would never be rid of it. He might later decide to give his horses away, or cut them loose to run free, and burn all the buildings here, never to return to Cuchillo Negro. But before all that, he wanted every man in this barn to watch him kill this bus driver and stare into the barrel until the body was only embers and ash and grease. No matter how long it took. He wanted them to learn this lesson well, and never, ever forget it.