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by gun killings. And I wanted to know what that could do to a man – to be a constant witness to the tortured secrets of this city, to have a career marked so powerfully by the gun’s ultimate legacy.
    It was late when we met outside the chipped and long-shut-down hairdresser on a darkened corner of a crossroads. We shook hands, and then, casually, Orlin pulled open his car door and showed me his guns: a 12mm shotgun and a 9mm Beretta pistol.
    ‘Have you used them?’ I asked him in the half-light.
    ‘Yes,’ Orlin said. I wasn’t used to journalists packing heat, less so firing them. One time, he said, he drove into a gunfight by accident. He had to put down his microphone and pull out his pistol and start shooting, because the gangs, in the confusion, had begun to shoot at him. Even so, he refuses to wear a bulletproof vest because the gangs might think he’s a cop and then they’d be sure to kill him.
    He had worked for the past eleven years for a national Honduran news channel, Canal 6, and had seen things on these eternal, yellow-lit night streets that you should not see. A six-month-old killed in the middle of a gunfight; whole families executed in their homes. He looked at me, his head tilted slightly, and flipped around the screen of his white Blackberry phone. On it was the decapitated body of a woman, her vagina on display. His thumb flicked, andanother image appeared. Three day-old dead men lay in cornfields, the heat causing their eyes to pop out of their heads. He laughed, his eyes twinkling, and he showed me another woman, semi-naked in death. His phone was filled with corpses. Young men from the 18 gang slumped in awkward positions, as if asleep. Before and after shots of the living and the dead, from smiling to something else.
    When he does not work, he gets bored, he said. There’s so much drama in what he does. The closer he gets to death, the more alive he feels. This, he told me, was real journalism. I began to fear this little man’s love for the tenebrous corners of this city.
    There’s much that he cannot report – if he did he’d be killed. Some murder scenes he just has to stay away from: he knows things would get too complicated with the gangs if he reported on certain killings. He feels he’s walking on an edge. ‘On the one side there is deep, dark water, on the other side there is fire. Here you don’t know who is who. In a war you take sides. You know who an army is – they are in green. But here . . . you have no idea,’ he said.
    A call came in. There had been a shooting in the Barrio Rivera Hernandez, and Orlin’s face changed. We jumped into his car and we were off, pushing through the down-lit streets to the murder scene. In this light the street took on the colour of jaundice, the plaster on the low-slung houses hanging like pockmarked skin, the grill-lined windows the shade of mustard gas.
    The body lay still under the ash-blond glare. The policemen were placing small fluorescent triangle markers out under the shadowed light, tracing where the spent rounds had fallen. The body lay awkwardly, his legs twisted, the shoulders tucked underneath. The dead man was wearing an orange polo shirt, which looked almost white now, and you could glimpse tartan boxer shorts poking above his stained blue jeans. When the cameraman turned on his light, you could see the blood still seeping gently from the man’s back.
    The police took out a tape measure and began to measure the ballistic range, but you felt they were doing this because the television crew was nearby. The police spoke to no one, and the street’s occupants stood back in the shadows. All the neighbours had come out to look and to talk in quiet voices. A fat baby sat on the sidewalk,gurgling; a girl, about three years old, in a pink frilly dress with small pierced ears, asked her mother for a hug; to her side a man laughed and swung his son between his legs. And in front of these children, the police flipped the body, and