Edson says, “I need to ask you something.”

Emerson has learned to be wary of questions with preludes, but he says, “Go on.”

“Was there a video?”

“What do you mean? Like…”

“ Take Out the Trash. Did you see one?”

“I don’t watch that kind of thing.”

“I know, but — ”

“I haven’t heard.”

“Me neither.”

“What are you thinking?”

Again, he hears the shudder in Edson’s breath.

“It was a Q-blade, so everyone automatically thinks, Take Out the Trash. But what if it wasn’t?”

“Go on.”

Edson twists his bottle in its plastic sleeve on Emerson’s desk.

“The last time I saw her, at Todos os Santos, when the gay guy tried to scare me off, she was talking to some people. One of them was a priest — a white priest. Well, he dressed like a priest, but a lot of white guys have this priest thing. And the night of the gafieira she got called over to some people who were not on the guest list.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“I just want to go down and have a look.”

“What for?”

“A trash can.”

“And if you find it?”

“Then that’s the end of it.”

“And if you don’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let it lie.”

“I know, I should. But I don’t think I can.”

“Then brother, you be very fucking careful.”

The old fit people thud and creak.

Edson makes his first pass on the wrong side of the road, then turns through the Ipiranga alco station on the central strip and pulls over onto the verge. He can re-create every slo-mo frame of the massacre scene, but now, here, he cannot find it in all the empty blacktop. No flowers, no Mass cards, no edible blessings. He leaves the Yam and walks up and down the margin, grit-stung by fast trucks. An off-cur of tire here, like a snake’s shed skin. A coil of sheared-off steel: street jewelry. He stands where the killer waited, hand out, hitching a lift. Edson extends his arm, draws an imaginary line of division across the blur of vehicles, houses, towers, sky. He feels nothing. This edgeplace is too dislocated for anything like memory or grief to attach.

A moto-taxi stops on the opposite verge. A long-haired woman dissmounts. The flowing cars frame her like the shutter of a movie camera. The woman walks up and down the verge. She leans forward, hands braced on hips, staring across the highway. Edson jerks upright. The image is branded onto his visual centers. The fall of the hair; the tilt of the cheekbones; the false-innocence of the doe-eyes, the anime eyes. Her.

Their eyes meet across car roofs. Heart stopped, time frozen, space conngealed, Edson steps toward her. The blare of horns sends him sprawling across the grit. She is running for the moto-taxi, gesturing the driver to Go go.

“Fia!” The highway swallows it. He saw her on this same margin, this spot where he stands. He saw her dead. Face covered. Logos on the soles of her shoes. He saw them take her away from this margin.

The moto-taxi weaves into the traffic. The thrall is broken. Edson snaps off a tracking shot on his Chillibeans. He jumps onto his bike, kicks up the engine. She wears a green leather jacket. Green leather jacket and long long hair streaming. He can find those. He takes a scary scary cut across the central strip and into the fast lane. She’s twelve cars ahead of him, shifting lanes. Edson’s Yamaha can outrun anything on this highway; dodging between biodiesel trucks on the Santos convoy, he closes the gap. She glances over her shoulder; her hair whips across her face. It’s me, me! Edson screams into the slipstream. She punches the rider on the back, jerks her thumb forward, then right. The rider bends over the throttles; the bike takes off like a fighter. Edson’s right behind it. She told him she never rode pillion. The sudden slowdown almost sends him into the back of a school minibus. One of São Paulo’s endemic roadlocks. He’s lost her. Edson cruises up the line of stationary traffic. She’s not in this line. He walks the scrambler between two cars, so close to the big RAV that the driver yells at him, Mind the chrome, favelado. Not in the center lane. Not in the inside lane. Where? He sees green leather accelerating up the offramp from the opposite side of the highway. Caught him with his own trick. But he knows where that road leads: Mother of Trash, Todos os Santos.

“Take it.” Mr. Peach offers the gun handle first to Sextinho. It’s a handsome, cocky piece he keeps in his bedside cabinet, for the night when the indentured biofarm workers above and the housing projects below meet and the world breaks over Fazenda Alvaranga.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“It’s easy, I’ve shown you; this, this, and you’re ready. Just take the fucking thing.”

He never swears. Mr. Peach never swears. “I’m sorry…” He presses hand to head. “It’s just you don’t know what you’re doing. So take the fucking gun.”

Edson lifts the bone handle in limp fingers. It’s much heavier than he imagined. He understands now what the boys see in these pieces, the sexy metal, the potency. He stashes it away quickly in his bag. Dona Hortense must never find it. It would be a nail in her heart to see her littlest and second-favorite son gone to the gun. Quickly, he says, “You’ve seen the video, what do you think that was?”

“A ghost,” says Mr. Peach.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Edson says.

“I do,” says Mr. Peach. “The most real things there are, ghosts. Take the gun, Sextinho, and please, please, querida, look after yourself.”

That evening in his hammock Edson takes a fistful of pills and invents a new self: Bisbilhotinho, Little Snoop the private dick. He is polite and quite slow spoken. He plans everything carefully and moves slowly and deliberrately so that people will make no mistake about his seriousness. He always leaves himself a clear way out. He deals with killers. Little Snoop is a young personality and has yet to spread wide his wings and flash the colors hidden there, but Edson likes him, can see where Little Snoop might surprise him.

“You’re going where?” Petty Cash says as Bisbilhotinho trades identities with him. “Hey, I’m not so sure about this; if you get killed, I’m dead.”

“Then you get to inherit my clients,” Little Snoop says. “What clients?” Petty Cash calls after him.

It’s a risk, leaving the bike with all its engine parts in place, but he may need to get away fast. He’s paid two different kids well to mind it, with more on his return. They’ll keep an eye on each other. Todos os Santos at night is a blazing city. Truck headlights dip and veer as they plow the rutted road into the heart of Out Lady of Trash. Garbage fires smolder; kids gather around burning oil drums stirring the flames with broken planks. Churrassceiros tend their small braziers, charcoals red under white, flyaway ash. Boys shoot pool under clip-on neons in tattered lanchonetes. Edson can see the guns tucked in the backs of their baggies, like his own. But it doesn’t make him feel safe at all. Heads turn as he works his way up the spiral road. Atom Shop is closed.

The bar is jammed with customers watching soccer on a big screen. Little Snoop orders a Coke and shows the video grab to the barman. Edson has watched the clip so many times it has become a visual prayer: her face turning away from him as the moto-taxi accelerates into the traffic.

“Her parents are worried,” he says to the barman.

“I’d be too, if you’re looking here,” says the bartender, a handsome twenty-something. “No, I don’t recall her.”

“Do you mind if I pass it around?”

The fans pass the I-shades hand to hand, a cursory look, a purse of the lips, a shake of the head, a small sigh. Some comment that that is a goodlooking girl. Goooooooooooool! roars the commentator as Little Snoop steps down onto the road. Half the bar leaps to its feet.

Patiently, politely, Little Snoop works up the spiral. As the trasherers and collectors never rest, neither do the workshops and the disassemblers. The kids running handcarts of parts to the grill plates and ovens barely glance at the video. Have you seen her, have you seen her? The chippers and smelters bent over in the hissing light of bottled gas shake their heads, irriitated at the distraction.