Page 26 of A Long Con

Another photo depicted the handsome, dark-haired adventurer running from a charging water buffalo with a lasso of rope in his hand. Shirtless again.

Well, of course I already loathed the guy because he had my painting. After all, I had painted it, successfully copying an excellent artist’s style. But now that I saw how athletic and maybe skilled he was, I just wanted him to die.

“What a toolbag,” I said with disgust. “I don’t agree with killing animals.”

“I know,” said Royal. “I like that about you.”

Did he? He wanted me to slap him but not hunt animals? There must be some fundamental difference in the types of cruelty. Was it because one was consensual?

“Hey,” I said, just as we were about to leave, “maybe you should keep this bearer bond. You’re the one with the gun.”

Royal considered it and nodded.

Now our job was to drive around potholed streets, past the cell tower on a scrubby hill, past a blazing sand-white cathedral. We were looking for a late model burgundy Honda Accord, which looked like every other car in the world to me, but I found that most other cars were older, beaters. I pulled over at two newer red cars that didn’t turn out to be Hondas.

There were no hotels in our search radius, so O’Bell must be staying—or hunting rats—at an Airbnb, I reckoned. It didn’t seem to be a particularly fancy area. We rode through whole blocks of trash, men pouring uneven cement, clouds of spicy charred meat occasionally floating our way. I rode past a gorgeous mural where primary colors of paint seemed to have been poured at random from the top of a wall. I saw it was intentional because a painting of a cholo stood in front of the drips, arms folded, squinting at us from under his brim.

There were a few murals, in fact. Two masked wrestlers floated in a spacy sky. Geometric Aztec designs were a backdrop for gesturing gods, one of them a woman with bare tits. Giant toucans and parrots decorated a pet shop. It took us about half an hour to find O’Bell’s rented Honda, and we parked right behind it.

Royal said, “This doesn’t look very fancy for a guy who just bought a painting for two mil.”

“I’m gonna knock on his door. You cover me. I’ll tell him I have his bearer bond and I’ll buy the painting back from him, no questions asked.”

“Rajah dat,” said Royal, going through the gate behind me. It occurred to me that Royal literally had my back. I even smiled.

No one answered the door, so we went around the side of the house, thinking maybe he was on the back porch. I was point man, so I saw O’Bell first. He was leaning over the railing where a long-barreled rifle was positioned on a tripod. He looked through an attached scope at a shallow valley covered with houses, squiggles of cooking or trash fires rising straight up in the windless desert. I didn’t realize till much later the irony that he was, once again, shirtless.

Of course I didn’t disturb him in his sighting in, and I held a hand against Royal’s chest as a warning to stay. Squeezing the trigger, O’Bell shot his squirrel or pigeon, but wasn’t happy about it.

“Fuck!” he shouted. He pounded the scope with the palm of his hand—an action that couldn’t have improved his shooting—and once more took aim.

“Excellent! Chest shot!” He folded up the tripod, put the gun in the case and started heading our way. Glancing at us, he said, “Oh hey there, Antonio, Santos,” before whipping out his phone and furiously texting.

“One star,” he snarled as he viciously thumbed the screen. “Did you see that, you guys? This fucking thing is not fogproof, the EZ-tap system utterly sucks, and these target turrets aren’t exactly resettable.”

I asked, “Are you posting a bad review on Amazon about your scope?” Then it occurred to me that he’d said, “chest shot,” an odd thing to say about a pigeon or squirrel, so I meandered back to the deck.

The last thing I heard was Royal advising, “Don’t use terms like ‘sucks.’ Be more specific, like how did this sucking keep you from hitting your target?”

“You’re right,” said O’Bell. He read aloud as he typed the one-star review. “Although my target was standing still smoking a cigarette, this alleged fogproof lens coating prevented me from focusing correctly on his forehead.”

Holy mother. If I squinted, I could make out the collapsed, fallen body of a man in front of a house about two hundred yards off. Maybe at this distance, with all the traffic, mariachi music, and people shouting at each other, nobody had heard the gunshot, because only two or three people stood around the guy, like what the fuck.

A slowly dripping realization into my damaged brain told me that I had just witnessed someone killing another human. I’d only seen a dead body twice—my uncle on the hospital gurney, with the endotracheal tube still down his throat, and some random homeless guy in January in New York. Both times I’d gotten so dizzy I had to sit, and both times I’d vomited.

I hadn’t eaten anything in over a day, so I couldn’t vomit. And maybe it was the distance of the dead guy or that it was hard to know anything about him, but I only got mildly dizzy now. I remembered seeing my uncle, who’d been hit by an Uber in Phoenix. I believe that life is meant to be instructive, that we learn from our mistakes. Then why does the terror of holy retribution hang over our heads? Even if we confess that we alone are to blame for bad choices, why would God oppress us for errors made as we walked the righteous path to morality and prosperity?

What had my uncle done to be visited by such godly vengeance? Now, what had this guy done to deserve being picked off like a rabid rat by an eternally shirtless guy who wrote bad gun scope reviews on Amazon?

When I staggered back to the men, I had to cling to Royal’s arm. “That guy . . . “I managed to whisper lamely.

He nodded, fearless and in control as always. “I know,” he told me.

O’Bell was finishing up with a flourish. “There!” he declared, lifting the phone on high like the Lion King as he thumbed the “submit” button.

Cheerful now, he regarded us, his associates. “Did you hear how that moron from Louisiana did?” Royal shook his head. “He was supposed to pick off a child molester from a hundred yards. Last I heard, he was sitting waiting for the guy to leave his house. Whoo hoo! I’m so far ahead, why don’t you say we go for some sushi? There’s this awesome place over by the Hotel La Finca. What do you say, Antonio? You look like a brave guy.”

“Sure,” said Antonio. “We’ll follow you on our bikes.”

I added, “He is brave.”

Maybe I wanted to suck it up to Royal, or maybe I needed his protection for the pain I was in store for. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and all that. But as we followed Dennis O’Bell back to the street, I gave Royal a little squeeze on the ass.

And he smiled at me.