Who the fuck am I kidding? It was freeing in a way—goddamn liberating—to know that no matter what choices he’d made, he was always going to end up truly fucked.

The others talked among themselves, and he quickly picked up their names: the old, grizzled dude was Chavez. The big motherfucker was Roman, big enough to unscrew your head with his bare hands. The quiet one with the fancy snakeskin boots was Ringo, and if Eddy had money to bet, he’d take the odds that Ringo had a knife slipped down in those pretty boots. He had dangerous eyes, like eyes you’d see on a shark or something. Not like the pussy, Ortiz, who looked like he wanted to cry.

After they all got done tearing through his shit and turning things over, they started to unpack their own bags.

Big-ass guns Eddy didn’t recognize. Bulletproof vests. Handheld radios and knives and helmets and all sorts of other police-looking stuff. He could make out the bare Velcro strips on their vests that once held the patches or badges of whatever unit or department they worked for. These sons of bitches were cops, every one of them, but they weren’t here for official business. Eddy figured it had to be about those weird messages Apache had sent him, and it probably ended with him dead and floating in the river behind his trailer like those damn wetbacks.

That’s why they didn’t give a shit if he saw their faces or knew their real names.

Eddy Rabbit was well and truly fucked.

—

APACHE WALKED HIM OUT BACK behind the trailer, while the others pulled the Suburban and the Charger near the salt cedar and giant cane, hiding them from the dirt road leading up to the front of the house. The rest of them sat around drinking beers they’d brought, while Apache nudged him on down toward the water itself, where Eddy had seen the bodies. The path was all trampled down and easy to follow, first from where all the mules with their backpacks had walked back and forth to the riverbank over the last few months, and then where he and Danny had chased each other. Eddy figured other people had walked there recently, too, when they’d finally pulled those dead wetbacks out of the water.

Apache offered him a beer, a warm Budweiser, and Eddy took it. He knew Apache’s real name now: Johnnie, or Johnnie Macho. He’d heard the others use both, and he was the real ringleader of this circus.

Charity used to wear a ratty old T-shirt all the time: This is my circus. These are my monkeys. Looking at Johnnie or Apache or whatever the hell he wanted to call himself over the top of the warm Bud, hearing the other men who were now lounging around his property loudly cracking jokes and laughing, that seemed about right.