This time, I was an agent of sorts, possibly with the DEA. We were one of those rogue units that doesn’t play by the rules, gets results, and skims some off the top because the money gets burned anyway. I even wore the aviator glasses so that fuckers could see themselves in my eyes when I shot them dead.
We were driving up the highway to a cantina on top of a deserted hill in a town in Texas. It was dry, like the hairy skin on my sun baked arm was dry, like my lips were dry, like the bones of a long dead man are dry. When we arrived it was silent, but we could see the back of a lifted pick-up truck poking out from behind a stucco facade.
“Arms up,” I told them. I may have been the leader of these bad ass motherfuckers.
We strolled to the entrance and called out, “Afuera, cabrones!” When we looked inside, it was empty.
But we didn’t see that they had set up on the roof and were pinned against the walls by a hail of gunfire. As hardened and solitary sons of bitches, we didn’t give a fuck. We strutted out, nines in each hand, perhaps a shotty up front, and took them all out. A shower of blood, bits of skin, the occasional spilling of intestines.
When we were done, we walked away.
As I opened the door to the Bronco I noticed that one man in a federale uniform with a single briefcase and an uzi ran out and sprinted for the truck. I brought out my nine and unloaded in his direction, but oddly, he didn’t fall dead. He in fact managed to raise his weapon and aim, and more surprisingly, he got off a few shots, and against all odds hit me square in the chest, twice. Two holes, two sharp hits, right around the heart. I stumbled back and said nothing. I could no longer speak. I wanted to tell them, after they killed that bastard, to tell someone something. I wanted to tell them to relay a message, but they could not hear me and I could not hear them. Eventually, they disappeared.
I could not speak. Darkness was coming in from all sides, like the edges of a worn film reel. I was coming to a close.
I dipped my left index and middle fingers in the pool of blood forming beneath my waist. As I began to fade I wrote this in the dusty concrete:
L O V E
Y O J
And then I died.