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went into the back room to boil water. The ritual of pain would begin again soon, but they would make me wait, and wonder, about when.

Chapter 9
    If you know you’re dead, you know you can do anything. The doctor’s voice wanted a little candle of hope burning inside of me. As long as it did, I’d be careful. But I knew I was a dead man. My faith in that fact was stronger than anything he could tell me. And I only had one idea about Heaven: I wanted to hold that shotgun in my hands and pull the trigger. Maybe there wasn’t another shell in it. Maybe that’s why they left it lying there on top of the fucking pistachios somewhere in the dark. Maybe it wasn’t there at all. Maybe they moved it when I was passed out. Maybe I couldn’t remember just where the hell it was. Who the fuck knew? Who cared? If I failed, I was already as fucked as I could be. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. And the doctor’s voice had made me as free as I was ever going to be.
    A moan came from the back room. The moan of a woman. I shivered. Whatever she was doing, I hoped she kept at it.
    My face and shoulder slid across the floor as I pushed with my right leg toward the gun I thought would be somewhere to my left. Too slow. I rolled over so the tire was in the small of my back. Flashes of light, pure pain, shot behind my eyeballs. But I was moving. In a wild flailing back-kick, I was moving faster. Faster! My head hit a burlap bag and suddenly I was breathing some kind of spice like powdery fire. Gagging. Coughing. But on my knees. Felt the front of another bag with my face. Another choking powder. Then the rocks of incense. My face felt the cool of blued steel.
    The main lights of the room went on. She was coming from the back. Let her. Let her get close, real close. Falling as I stood, I twisted on top of the bag. The tire around my gut sank into the loose contents of the sacks. I hadn’t expected that—but it was everything. Now I had some leverage. The gun was underneath me, pointing somewhere into the room. I angled over it, burying the tire deeper into the soft bags so I could get a better grip. There, the trigger. The gun jumped to life; the heat of the barrel touched my leg; the noise rang in my ears. I wrenched myself upright and turned, ready to be beaten to death, but, now, to stand and see it coming.
    She was on the ground. The blast, like the bite of some enormous shark, had taken a huge piece of her side and stripped most of the flesh from her right arm. Blood and pieces were sprayed across the white bags of couscous on the far wall. Her long white legs were bare beneath the shredded smock. Her back arched impossibly, inhumanly. She quivered and jerked for a couple of seconds, the circuits in her body out of control, and then she was dead as she could be. Her veil, still pinned beneath her throat, soaked up the blood seeping from her mouth and nose.
    I limped to the counter and used it slowly to pry the tire off me, my hands and arms shaking, my whole body shaking now beyond my power to control. In the back room near the neatly folded jeans she’d left on a chair, I found her purse and spilled out the contents. Her identity card, Maria Pilar Seco de Shami, showed a brunette, and gave her home address. Stumbling, I gathered up my own pants from the floor and took them into the back to wash them as best as I could, and as fast as I could, in the sink. I wore them wet into the heat of the Granada night.
    Â 
    The police who came to the hospital didn’t believe me when I told them I was just a backpacker who’d been mugged. But this was a tourist town. If the victim didn’t want to push it, the cops weren’t going to press the question. They didn’t ask me anything about Pilar. I don’t think they found her until days later, when the stink of the corpse overpowered the smell of the spices.
    I went to her apartment the afternoon after she died. I