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these men have, Luz thinks. Never a bit of truth in them.
    The gun goes back into the bag, and Freddy flips through the money again. The racket of a passing truck drowns out most of what he says next. All Luz hears is “…lady, right?”
    She shrugs.
    “So I think you want to go first class,” he continues.
    What she wants right now is to get so high that the world falls away and leaves her floating in that place where nothing hurts and nobody can touch her. What she wants is to be done with all this walking and talking and trying, to lie still in a dark room, her only sensation the crisp coolness of clean sheets against her skin.
    “Don’t fuck around,” she snaps. “Say what you mean.”
    “I mean I can stick you in the trunk of a car and send you out like some Indian from Oaxaca, but that’s always a gamble,” Freddy says. “You might make it, you might not. Or, for more money, I can pull some strings and guarantee you get across.”
    Luz pictures Rolando drawing nearer every minute, creeping up on her.
    “Look, I know you’re fucking me over,” she says, “but I’ll pay whatever it takes to be sure I get to the U.S. The only condition is, I need to go today.”
    Freddy frowns and fingers his mustache. “That I don’t know about,” he says. “A guaranteed crossing takes time to arrange.”
    “Today or nothing,” Luz says.
    Freddy taps his palm with the stack of cash she gave him, considering this demand. After a few seconds, he shrugs and says, “I’ll do my best. Maybe this evening.”
    “So get to work,” Luz says.
    Freddy motions her to a filthy couch sitting in the shade, tells her she’ll be more comfortable there. She says she’s fine where she is. He offers her cookies, a soda, and she refuses both. She tries to listen in when he gets on his phone, but he ducks inside the shop and keeps his voice low.
    A fly buzzes round, sent by the devil to drive her crazy. She swats at it once, twice, then gives up and watches it land and skitter over her sweaty forearm. It pauses and taps at a freckle of dried blood on her wrist, Maria’s or El Toro’s. She scrapes the spot off with her fingernail, and a bigger one on the back of her hand.

4
    T HE WAVES ROLL IN PALE GREEN, VEINED WITH WHITE FOAM LIKE liquid marble, bellies full of sunlight. They rise only waist-high before flopping with barely enough energy left to make their runs up the sand. Malone sits cross-legged above the high-tide line south of the Imperial Beach pier and watches a flock of plovers work the swash zone. The skittish little birds chase the retreating waves, pausing now and then to peck the wet sand in search of mole crabs.
    No alcohol is allowed on the beach, but the cops and lifeguards recognize Malone as a local, another sunstruck idler who’s dead-ended in this last-stop surf town, so they ignore the Tecate in his hand. He hides the can anyway, leaving it wrapped in the paper bag the clerk at the liquor store slid it into when he bought it. He has a thing about keeping up appearances, a conceit his parents beat into him, and one that he likes to think sets him apart from other drunks. Deep down he knows it’s a ridiculous distinction, but so what, a man needs his signifiers.
    Not many people are out on this warm Thursday afternoon. A family of what might be Germans, pale going quickly to pink; a couple of Mexican kids giggling under a blanket; two jarheads tossing a football. Malone finishes his beer and could use another. It’s been an exciting day, with the crossing and the drop-off, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and his nerves have taken a pounding. He stands and brushes the sand off his ass, wonders if Pablo Honey is drinking.
      
    The pier is a rickety mess of planks and pilings. Malone can see the ocean below, through the gaps between the boards, and feel the entire structure rise and settle with the swell as he walks out on it. To the north, the view is all the way up the coast to downtown San Diego, to the south,