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disingenuous, I know you still believe in all that shit. All o’ you are still children inside, livín your real life back then. Still waitín for that magic payoff. But no prob, I can live with that . . . and it ain’t like you’re lazy or afraid to work, either . . . impossible to tell with you, Zoyd. Never could figure out how innocent you thought you were. Sometimes you looked just like a hippie bum musician, for months at a shot, as if you never turned a buck any other way. Rill puzzlín.”
    â€œHector! Bite yer tongue! You tellin’ me I—I
wasn’t
innocent, me behavin’ like a saint through it all?”
    â€œYou behaved about like everybody else, pardner, sorry.”
    â€œThat bad.”
    â€œI won’t aks you to grow up, but just sometime, please, aks yourself, OK, ‘Who was saved?’ That’s all, rill easy, ‘Who was saved?’ “
    â€œBeg pardon?”
    â€œOne OD’d on the line at Tommy’s waitín for a burger, one got into some words in a parkín lot with the wrong gentleman, one took a tumble in a faraway land, so on, more ’n half of ’em currently on the run, and you so far around the bend you don’t even see it, that’s what became of your happy household, you’d’ve done better up against the SWAT team. Just in the privacy of your thotz, Zoyd. As a exercise, li’l kinda Zen meditation. ‘Who was saved?’ “
    â€œYou, Hector.”
    â€œ
Ay se va
, go on, break your old
compinche
’s heart. Here I thought you knew everything, it turns out you don’t know shit.” Grinning—a stretched and terrible face. It was the closest Hector got to feeling sorry for himself, this suggestion he liked to put out that among the fallen, he had fallen further than most, not in distance alone but also in the quality of descent, having begun long ago concentrated and graceful as a sky diver but—the tostada procedure was minor evidence—he growing less professional the longer he fell, while his skills as a field man depreciated. He had come, with these falling years, simply to rely on going in, trying to neutralize whoever was there with a repertoire of assault that still ran from stupefy to obliterate, and if they were waiting for him one time and got in the first move,
ay muere
, too bad. Hector sadly knew this wasn’t anywhere near the samurai condition of always being on that perfect edge prepared to die, a feeling he’d known only a few times in his life, long ago. Nowadays, with his old fighting talents lapsed, what looked like simple impulse or will might as easily have been advanced self-hatred. Zoyd, the big idealist, liked to believe that Hector remembered everybody he’d ever shot at, hit, missed, booked, questioned, rousted, double-crossed—that each face was filed in his conscience, and the only way he could live with such a history was to take these chances with his own bad ass, upping the ante as he moved into his late midcareer. This theory at least had kept Zoyd from lying around hatching plots to assassinate Hector, as others had been known to waste hours of potentially productive lives doing. Hector was the kind of desperado whose ideal assassin was himself—he could choose the best method, time, and place and would always have the best motives for it of anyone.
    â€œSo, let me guess, I’m spoze to be some early-warning alarm, some invisible beam she can walk through and break, so you get a few minutes’ edge but meanwhile I’m the one gets interrupted, or come to think of it, broken, somethin’ like that?”
    â€œNot at all. You can go on with your life, such as it is. Nobody runnín you, you don’t call in, we don’t call unless we need you. All’s you got to do’s be there, in place—be yourself, as your music teacher probably used to tell you.”
    Late hit, Zoyd thought,