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fields, where would he go? Slink back to Miami and explain to his employer that there had been an error, he had lost their prey in a cane thicket? He would prefer the bullet of
el jefe
’s pistol to what would happen to him then.
    Coco’s eyes were fixed on a dense clump of cane and stray pepperbush a few feet ahead. He stared hard at it, willing his eyes to disregard the green patchwork of leaves, to penetrate the tiny lattice-work of shadows. A mosquito whined through the silence near his ear. Was that a fleck of white behind a fluttering leaf? The heat seemed to urge itself up a notch and Coco felt sweat rolling down his brow. He didn’t try to wipe it away.
    A vision overlaid itself on Coco’s sight, a boy standing on a crate, peering through the shutters of a shack into a tiny bedroom, a sheet ripping away inside like a sail shorn in a windstorm. Coco watches a man’s glistening buttocks rising and falling, his mother’s bare legs waving skyward. Her sounds sharp, shrill, as if she was being hurt, as if this strange man was hurting her. “
Mami
,” the boy calls, and the woman lunges up on her elbow, outraged.
    “Get away,” she shrieks, though the man is pumping still. “I am working. Get away.” And Coco does.
    Coco felt a mosquito pierce the flesh of his cheek, felt another settle on the sweaty nape of his neck—fat, healthy mosquitoes, nourished on the dark blood of cane workers—but he had not moved his gaze from the tangle of brush in front of him. He saw another fluttering movement there, thought he caught a glimpse of dull steel. But it might have been a trick of his eyes. If he could see the past in a tangle of brush, he might see anything.
    He turned to Manrique, who was standing nearer the spot, and motioned the big man forward with the slightest motion of his chin. Manrique hesitated, then started forward.
    Manrique reached out to part the brush, his machete raised. Coco tightened his grip on his own blade. Manrique took another step…
    …and staggered backward as a gunshot blew away the silence. Manrique tottered, gave a spinning little half-step, a black dot sprung up on one of his doughy cheeks, a patch of bone and scarlet red opened up by his opposite ear. His eyes were aimed at Coco, but they were seeing something far away.
    Coco was already running forward. He saw the brush moving, glimpsed a hand, then the same flash of dull steel, pointing at him now. He lunged forward and lashed out with his machete, swinging blindly into the labyrinth of green and shadow. His feet tangled in the pepperbush’s roots as he swung and he went down, his ears ringing with the sound of another blast.
    He lay with his cheek in the cool muck, his head still ringing from the explosion, which must have gone off at his ear. He was vaguely aware of movements through the cane, sensing only that they were moving away from him as he blinked his eyes into focus.
    He was trying to push himself up when he realized what was lying on the ground before him. He hesitated, his face inches above the musty-smelling earth. He closed his eyes, thinking that perhaps he was dying and this was another vision. When he opened his eyes, it was still there.
    A hand. Or a part of one, its forefinger still curled in the ring of a pistol. A thin trail of smoke rose from the barrel of the weapon. On another finger, a gold ring, twisted in some shape like vines. A thumb, still twitching. And where the rest should be—wrist, arm, elbow—there was nothing, nothing but a spray of red pepper berries and a splash of blood.
    Coco pushed himself to his knees, shook his head groggily, listening to the sounds of
el jefe
crashing through the brush, of Edgar chasing after. He hauled himself up, felt his tender ear, but found no signs of blood. He found the big blade where it had fallen in the crook of a pepper root, took it up, and followed the sounds of the chase.
    Coco found
el jefe
’s spoor soon enough, a fist-sized smear of blood in a sandy