The Martini Shot by George Pelecanos

decay. Occasionally, an old white mare, unaccompanied by cart or harness, would clomp down the street, stopping to graze on the patches of grass that sprouted along the edges of the sidewalk. And directly below his balcony, through the leaves of the black curaçao tree that grew in front of his building, Moreno saw children crawl into the great canvas Dumpster that sat by the curb and root through the garbage in search of something to eat.
    Moreno watched these children with a curious but detached eye. He had known poverty himself, but he had no sympathy for those who chose to remain within its grasp. If one was hungry, one worked. To be sure, there were different degrees of dignity in what one did to get by. But there was always work.
    As the son of migrant workers raised in various Tex-Mex border towns, Juan Moreno had vowed early on to escape the shackles of his lowly, inherited status. He left his parents at sixteen to work for a man in Austin so that he could attend the region’s best high school. By sticking to his schedule of classes during the day and studying and working diligently at night, he was able, with the help of government loans, to gain entrance to a moderately prestigious university in New England, where he quickly learned the value of lineage and presentation. He changed his name to John.
    Already fluent in Spanish, John Moreno got degrees in both French and criminology. After graduation, he moved south, briefly joining the Dade County sheriff’s office. Never one for violence and not particularly interested in carrying or using a firearm, Moreno took a job for a relatively well-known firm specializing in international retrievals. Two years later, having made the necessary connections and something of a reputation for himself, he struck out on his own.
    John Moreno liked his work. Most of all, whenever his plane left the runway and he settled into his first-class seat, he felt a kind of elusion, as if he were leaving the dust and squalor of his early years a thousand miles behind. Each new destination was another permanent move, one step farther away.
    The Brazilians are a touching people. Often men will hug for minutes on end, and women will walk arm in arm in the street.
    Moreno put down his guidebook on the morning of the fourth day, did his four sets of fifty push-ups, showered, and changed into a swimsuit. He packed his knapsack with some American dollars, ten dollars’ worth of Brazilian cruzeiros, his long-lensed Canon AE-1, and the Guzman photographs, and left the apartamento.
    Moreno was a lean man, a shade under six feet, with wavy black hair and a thick black mustache. His vaguely Latin appearance passed for both South American and southern Mediterranean, and with his newly enriched tan, he attracted no attention as he moved along the Avenida Boa Viagem toward the center of the resort, the area where Guzman had been spotted. The beach crowd grew denser: women in thong bathing suits and men in their Speedos, vendors, hustlers, and shills.
    Moreno claimed a striped folding chair near the beach wall, signaled a man behind a cooler, who brought him a tall Antarctica beer served in a Styrofoam thermos. He finished that one and had two more, drinking very slowly to pass away the afternoon. He was not watching for Guzman. Instead he watched the crowd and the few men who sat alone and unmoving on its periphery. By the end of the day, he had chosen two of those men: a brown Rasta with sun-bleached dreadlocks who sat by the vendors but did not appear to have goods to sell, and an old man with the leathery, angular face of an Indian who had not moved from his seat at the edge of the market across the street.
    As the sun dropped behind the condominiums and the beach draped into shadow, Moreno walked over to the Rasta on the wall and handed him a photograph of Guzman. The Rasta smiled a mouthful of stained teeth and rubbed two fingers together. Moreno gave him ten American dollars, holding out