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murders took a surprising amount of work.
    Unless the Zetas wanted the murder solved, of course. It happened occasionally. Maybe this was one of those.
    Chief Ramos had not looked closely at the bodies. That was what management was all about. These things you delegated.
    “Where are the heads?” Chief Ramos said.
    Another shrug. “Not present.”
    “Do we know who any of these people are? The corpses?”
    Delgado fired up a Marlboro and surveyed the plaza again before he finally spoke. “Sometimes I think about quitting and just walking across the river, you know? I got a cousin lives up in Texas. Manages the sporting goods department at a Walmart up in New Braunfels. You remember Helio Diaz? He was a couple classes ahead of us in high school?”
    The chief of police shook his head. The name rang a bell, but it was hard to say.
    “Well, anyway, nicest guy in the world. Helio went over the Rio Grande back in the eighties, got his citizenship, makes about the same money as you and me. Forty-hour week, health and dental. This with very few decapitations. Never has to worry about this lunacy, this . . . sickness.”
    Delgado waved his cigarette at the plaza. The sun was still low in the sky, the blue lights of the police trucks bouncing manically into the shadows at the corners of the square. The corpses lay in their row, unmoved. Flies clouded the air above them. Cops stood near their vehicles, shaking more hot sauce onto their Subway sandwiches, waiting for orders.
    Chief Ramos knew that they didn’t have enough space at the morgue for all these bodies, so once again he was going to have to figure out some kind of temporary solution. Maybe he could rent a refrigerator truck. He’d read that they did that in New Orleans during the hurricane, when their morgue was inundated with water. Perhaps he could draw on the discretionary fund, which still had forty-one thousand pesos left over after paying for the Police Athletic League expenses, night soccer to keep troubled youth off the streets.
    These were the kinds of details that Chief Ramos enjoyed working with. Thinking outside the box.
    But unfortunately, right now refrigerator trucks weren’t his main problem. His main problem was this survivor. Any way he looked at it, this didn’t make sense. Survivors talked, and the Zetas were notoriously reliable in never leaving any loose ends. The Zetas had been formed by a group of twenty or thirty Mexican Special Forces soldiers hired as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel twenty years ago. Eventually they’d gotten too big for their britches and split from the Gulf Cartel, forming their own sect. Their hallmarks were that they were disciplined, well trained, heavily armed, and ruthless well past the point of sadism.
    In other words, their decision trees were to be admired as pitiless models of efficiency.
    If the survivor talked, it would create problems for them; more important than that, it would create problems for Chief Ramos. The chief considered the matter from several angles, but the truth was there was only one rational solution. And he did not need a decision tree or a statistical analysis to be able to see it.
    “Bring the survivor over there to that truck,” the chief said. “Take great care. I will interrogate him personally.”
    Delgado looked at the chief for a minute, then sighed and tossed his cigarette butt on the ground. He seemed very sad. “I’ll have one of my guys take care of him if you want. You shouldn’t have to do this yourself.”
    “Just bring him to the damn truck!”
    Chief Ramos wheeled around and walked over to the pickup truck. It was the curse of responsibility. Delegation was all good and well, but sometimes you had to sink your own hands into the dirty soil. That was the challenge of leadership: when to do . . . and when to tell. Now it was time to do. Time to lead by example.
    After a minute a couple of uniforms arrived at the truck where the chief stood. The bloody, naked young man