Night Is the Hunter by Steven Gore

called?”
    â€œIt’s none of your business.” Junior pushed himself to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m gonna take care of him myself.”
    Donnally pointed at Junior, then at his chair. “Sit down.”
    Junior remained immobile. Donnally felt the eyes of the white patronsstaring at Junior. Talk continued around them, but Donnally had the sense that the words, mixing in the hollow space around them, had somehow become disconnected from the speakers.
    â€œYour grandmother told me you were confused that night and didn’t remember what happened and who called.”
    â€œShe’s wrong. I remember. It’s her that don’t want to remember.”
    â€œAnd twenty years later, you’re going to do something about it?”
    â€œI’ll do what I need to do.”
    â€œIf you’re doing outreach, that means you’ve come a long way. Why waste the trip?”
    Junior stared ahead, toward the front door. His body moved side to side like he was boxing, as if preparing to dodge a punch, or preparing to throw one.
    â€œI don’t know what you have in mind,” Donnally said, “but I know there’s a better way to do it.”
    Junior blew out a harsh breath, then sat down. He stared at his coffee cup, his thumbs working against his fingertips.
    Donnally expected him to get up again, and this time walk out.
    Instead, Junior said, “I haven’t come very far at all. I was ready, I’m still ready, to go blow that scumbag away.”
    â€œNot quite.”
    Junior shrugged.
    â€œWhat changed for you?” Donnally asked. It was too soon to press him on who it was that called and why the detectives had hidden that fact by leaving it out of their reports.
    Junior finally looked up. “You know why my father became a Norteño?”
    Donnally shook his head.
    â€œThe drug cartel down in Michoacán, where the family ranchito is, forced a deal on our relatives. My father got caught in the middle. They was gonna suffer down there unless he did what they wanted up here.”
    â€œAnd that was . . .”
    â€œBe on the receiving end of the cocaine they were shipping north.”
    Junior fell silent again. His eyes moved as though his mind was struggling over something, maybe weighing something, perhaps how much to say, or how much to admit.
    â€œBut it wasn’t just force and threats. I know that. My father got something out of it too. You know what I’m saying. He’d been in the trade for ten years. It was a chance to move up and have soldiers and guns to protect his operation in the neighborhood. And a way to buy stuff for my grandmother and send money to the family in Mexico.”
    â€œAnd make himself look big.”
    Junior paused, and then nodded. “Yeah, he wanted that, too.”
    Since Junior’s mother wasn’t mentioned in the police reports and she hadn’t testified against Dominguez in the penalty phase of the trial as Junior and his grandmother had done, she must have been out of their lives.
    â€œI take it your mother wasn’t around when all this happened.”
    â€œShe got pregnant with me in Mexico and drove a load across the border to pay her way into the States. Got caught. I was born in the women’s federal prison in Bryan, Texas.”
    â€œWhere is she now?”
    â€œNowhere.” He glanced away for a moment, then looked back at Donnally. “She never made it out.”
    Junior pulled out his wallet. He opened it and turned it toward Donnally, displaying a picture of a slim, long-haired woman dressed in prison blues, sitting at a picnic table next to a razor-wire fence.
    â€œThis is the only picture I have of her.”
    Donnally decided not to say anything about the woman’s beauty. That wasn’t something a son would want to hear from a stranger about his mother. Or to comment on her sadness. That was something Junior had lived with all his