Even now he loved to drive his shiny Cadillac back to his native Tijuana and park in front of the old haunts.  Pay some street tonto to guard the car while he went inside and watched their eyes go wide and round as he flashed his money and rings and bought a round for the house.

In the span of a few heartbeats the word would get around: Emilio’s back!  Emilio’s back!  So that when he strolled the narrow streets the children would follow and call his name like a deity and beg for his attention.  And not far behind them would be their mothers and older sisters, doing the same.

He loved to drive by the St. Ignatio School where the priests and sisters had tried to beat some religion into him and make him like all the other sheep they imprisoned in their classrooms.  He loved to stop in front of the adobe chapel and blow the horn until one of those black-robed fools came out, then give them the dirty-digit salute and screech away.

He knew where his mother was living--still in the same old shack down in the Camino Verde settlement where he’d been born--but he never visited her.  They’d be ice-skating in Hell before he gave that puta the time of day.  Always putting him down, always saying he was a good-for-nothing puerco just like his father.  Emilio had never known his father, and he’d spent years hating him for deserting his family.  But after Emilio’s last blow-up with his mother, he no longer blamed his old man for leaving.

That blow-up had come when Emilio turned twenty and took the bouncer job at The Cockscomb, the toughest, meanest, low-rent whorehouse in Tijuana.  His mother had kicked him out of the trailer, telling him he was going to hell, that he was going to die before he was twenty-one.  Emilio had sauntered off and never looked back.

He proved himself at The Cockscomb.  He’d been fighting since he was a kid and he’d learned every cheap, dirty, back-alley brawling trick there ever was, usually the hard way.  He had the scars to prove it.  He was good with a knife--very good.  He’d stabbed his share and had been stabbed a few times in return.  One of his opponents had died, writhing on the floor at his feet.  Emilio had felt nothing.

He started working out, popping steroids and bulking up until his shoulders were too wide for most doorways.  He had a short fuse to begin with, and the juice trimmed it down to the nub.

But not to where he was out of control.  Never out of control.  He always eased the belligerent drunken Americanos out to the street, but Heaven help the locals who got out of line.  Emilio would beat them to a pulp and love every bloody minute of it.  Another man died from one of those beatings, but he’d deserved it.  Over the succeeding years he caused the death of three more men--two with a blade, and one with a bullet.

He moved up quickly through the Tijuana sex world, from whorehouses, to brothels, to chief enforcer at the renowned Blue Senorita, a high-ticket bordello and tavern that catered almost exclusively to Americanos.  Orosco, the owner, liked to brag that the Blue Senorita was a “full service whorehouse,” catering to all tastes--strip shows, live sex shows, donkey sex shows; where a man could have a woman, or another man, or a young girl, or a young boy, or--if he had the energy and a fat enough wallet--all four.

For his first few years at the Blue Senorita Emilio had been proud of his position--inordinately so, he now thought--but the sameness of its nightly routine, along with the realization that he had risen as far as he could go and that somewhere along the corridor of his years, when he’d aged and softened and slowed, he’d be replaced by someone younger and stronger and hungrier.  Then he’d find himself out on the street with no income, no savings, no pension.  And he’d wind up one of those useless old men who hung around the square in their cigarette-burned shirts and their pee-stained pants, sipping from bottles of cheap wine and yammering to anybody who’d listen about their younger days when they’d had all the money they could spend, and any women they wanted.  When they’d been somebody instead of nobody.

He could see no future for him in Tijuana.  Nowhere in all of Mexico.  Perhaps America was the place.  But maybe it was too late for him in America.  He would be turning thirty soon.  And how would he get in?  Damned if he’d be a wetback.  Not after practically managing The Blue Senorita.

The featureless corridor of his future seemed to stretch on ahead, with no exits or side passages.  Just a single door at the far end.  Emilio promised himself to keep an eye peeled for a way out of that corridor.

Charlie Crenshaw turned out to be that way.

Emilio hadn’t realized that at first.  The pudgy, brown-haired, blue-eyed boy had looked terribly young when he stumbled into The Blue Senorita that night ten years ago.  He’d been roaring drunk and obviously under age, but he’d flashed his money and spread it generously, and everyone had nudged each other when he bought doe-eyed José for an hour.

When the maricon’s time was up, Emilio had let him out a side door and stood watching to make sure he got good and far away from The Blue Senorita before he forgot about him.  But at the mouth of the alley the kid was jumped by three young malos.  Emilio hesitated.  Served the little maricon right to be beat up and robbed, but not on The Blue Senorita’s doorstep.  The local policia wouldn’t care—Orosco paid them plenty not to—but if the brat got killed there could be a shitstorm from the States and that might lead to trouble from the capital.

Cursing under his breath, Emilio had pulled on his weighted leather gloves and charged up the alley.  By the time he waded into the fight, the kid was already down and being used as a soccer ball.  Emilio let loose on the malos.  He crushed noses, crunched ribs, cracked jaws, shattered teeth, and broke at least one arm.  He smashed them up and left them in a bleeding, crying, gagging, choking pile because it was his job to look out for The Blue Senorita’s interests, because he wanted to make sure these malos never prowled The Blue Senorita’s neighborhood again.

Because he liked it.

He dragged the unconscious kid back to the side door and checked out his wallet.  He learned his name was Charles Crenshaw and that he was only fifteen.  Fifteen!  Hell to pay if he’d been kicked to death out here.  He shuffled through pictures of the boy with his parents, posed at different ages before different homes.  As the boy grew, so did the houses.  The most recent was a palace.

The little maricon was rich.

And then Emilio came to a photo of the boy and his father standing before a building with a shiny CRENSOFT sign over the reflecting pool set in the front lawn.  CrenSoft...Crenshaw...the rich boy’s father owned a company.

As he stared at the wallet, thoughts of blackmail, and even ransom tickled Emilio’s mind.  But those were just quick fixes.  They would change nothing.  Perhaps there was another way...

And somewhere down the long, featureless corridor of his future , he saw a red EXIT sign begin to glow.

Emilio threw Charlie over his shoulder and carried him back to his apartment.  He placed a call to the family, told the father where Charlie was, and said to come get him.  Then he sat back and waited.

The father arrived at dawn.  He was taller than Emilio, and about ten years older.  Every move, every glance was wary and full of suspicion.  He had another man with him; Emilio later learned he was the father’s pilot.  When Emilio showed him Charlie’s battered, unconscious form, the father’s face went white.  He rushed to the bed and shook the boy’s shoulder.  When Charlie groaned and turned over, the father seemed satisfied that he was only sleeping it off.  Emilio noticed him checking to make sure his son’s watch and ring were still where they belonged.