1

Nobody asked us to look. Every day, ever since, I still wish we hadn’t.

‘Just a second,’ Carlos said from behind me, crouched above the body we’d found. His camera clicked so fast it could have been the crickets shirring in the humid pre-dawn gloom.

‘C’mon, man, your seconds last about ten minutes,’ I said through a yawn, wiping my glasses on my shirt, my voice a rasp because four days of jeep and hotel-room air-conditioning had given me a throat like a sock full of broken glass.

Carlos laughed and said, ‘Yup.’

Until we found the body, I didn’t expect to remember a thing about Poza Rica. Just another story, we’d thought. ‘Waiting for the Black Gold Rush’ was the provisional headline – a profile of Poza Rica, the crumbling oil city in Veracruz, eastern Mexico, ‘a place caught,’ I’d written, ‘as though in suspended animation, waiting for foreign investment to capitalise on the region’s fifteen billion barrels of oil – and raise the city to its former height.’

Just four days’ worth of interviews, we’d figured, and we’d be back home to file text and photos for the kind of dull, well-paid gig all freelancers dream of until they actually have to do one.

Yeah, well, you know. After eight years of living in Mexico, I should have known there’s no such thing as just another story.

Call it Iguala or Reynosa, call it Manzanillo or Apatzingán, it’s the same poor-town generica of pulled-down shutters and bad-luck motor shops, the same blue Alcoholics Anonymous triangles, the lurid blood cursive of gang tags.

It’s the same taxi-rank shrines to Saint Jude and the Virgin of Guadalupe, the same faded Revolution murals, plaza, bandstand, and busts of the illustrious dead.

It’s the same ‘missing’ posters on every lamppost and shop front, the same blood-and-sulphur odour of wrecked drains.

After we found the body, though, nothing would ever look the same again.

Ten minutes into our drive home to Mexico City, the AM radio playing bolero songs, we would stop now and again for photos of wellheads for the story: at the centre circle of a balding football field, in the yard of a pay-by-the-hour parking lot, at the bottom of an alley between the Best Western Hotel and the Banco Azteca.

So there we were, coasting down the main boulevard, closing in on five a.m., nobody heading out to work, nobody coming home from the late shift, the shadows under the big overpass holding only trash from the previous day’s market, when we passed a small oil-derrick swinging back and forth at the bottom of an alley between a shuttered bar and a gleaming Oxxo convenience store, and Carlos said, ‘Oh, shit. Stop the jeep, vato.’

‘What?’ I’d said, parking at the top of the alley, but Carlos was already legging it towards someone lying on the ground.

For a second I wanted to tell him it was just a drunk, but then I got out of the jeep and saw the guy, his limbs splayed at angles no drunk sleeper would ever choose, and I stood there, winded, at the top of the alley, my heartbeat shaking my throat, my knuckles white where I gripped the jeep’s doorframe, as a light, clammy rain petered down over me.

Bodies, I was OK around. They tell you the same amount of nothing, whether they sit calcified in a burned-out car, lie hog-tied and dumped on beaches, or rise greenish and soapy-looking from mass graves. But the poor guy lying by the oil derrick under the streetlight, his wasn’t like any body I’d ever seen before. His counterfeit Levi’s and white briefs had been pulled down to show a nest of pubic hair around a bloody hole, his cock and balls, peeled like grapes, left resting on his broken hands. His cheap pleather jacket was open over a polo shirt whose red wasn’t dye, a red whose sugary butcher’s-shop cloy drew the 7/11 coffee I’d been drinking in the jeep almost all the way back into my mouth.

‘Don’t get sick, vato,’ said Carlos, laughing when he heard me spit. ‘You’ll wreck my shot.’

‘Yes, because it’s just gorgeous right now,’ I said, lighting a cigarette to kill that dead kid’s smell while the oil derrick just kept right on clanking.

People who tell you death has a smell, they’re wrong: it’s got dozens, and I only know some. After the Acapulco jet-ski drive-by me and Carlos had covered a couple years before, you couldn’t tell the blood-smell from the bladderwrack parching on the shore. After the big warehouse massacre we’d reported on in Tlatlaya, in mid-2014, the main stink had come from the wheaten note of bullet-holed guts. At the mass graves uncovered in Taxco, the stench had been deep, fungal, butanoic, enough to put me off Roquefort forever.

Even from there, I could see what they’d done to the kid. The blood on his shirt wasn’t from a bullet-wound: his neck was a collar of bruises where he’d had the life choked out of him, and there were no punctures in his chest or face. Matter of fact, he had no face. That’s where all the blood had come from: his face had been taken, his eyes thumbed out, leaving a wet red mask specked with dust and grit, his teeth climbed black. A Stanley knife, I figured: criss-crossed incisions edged the wound above his right jaw, and, from the ragged edge of skin under his left, I could tell they’d stopped cutting once they’d worked up enough of a loose end to tear the rest of his face off with their hands.

An ant picked over the ridge of bone and cartilage where his nose had been. My stomach gurgled like a volcano. Carlos stooped to blow away the ant, then unlidded his camera.

‘Watch the street,’ said Carlos gently, his back turned to me.

What I wanted to say was, If you don’t hurry, I’ll be sick everywhere.

What I said was, ‘Ugh, fine,’ and swallowed back the sour taste in my mouth.

‘You’re OK, vato,’ Carlos said to the body as he knelt with his hand above the kid’s mussed and bloody hair, murmuring so quietly he could have been praying. ‘It’s over now.’

Carlos used to say ghosts lingered at murder scenes for a little while after the victim died. Used to say it was something the Jesuits taught him at the high school back in Juárez. Used to say that because of how furiously the soul was expelled from its body, the soul was too scared, too shocked to fray out into nowhere.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he said to the faceless kid, taking a long drag of cigarette smoke to breathe over the body like funeral incense. ‘Don’t let us keep you.’ He raised the camera lens to start taking his photos. The flash was the white of candlelight. ‘We won’t take a minute.’

‘It was “I won’t take a second” a minute ago,’ I said.

‘Take it easy,’ said Carlos, and I couldn’t tell if it was me or the kid he was talking to.

‘We were headed home,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe you.’

‘Relax,’ said Carlos. ‘We’re having fun, aren’t we?’

The street beyond the alleyway was dead as a moon. There weren’t even the usual sharp-faced teenagers in brand-new baseball caps and space-boot-looking trainers guarding corners, their smartphones and pistols hidden in their kangaroo-pouch bags. They’d been everywhere the whole four days we’d been in Poza Rica: hanging around alleys, lingering by market stalls, even tipping off cops outside houses in poor neighbourhoods.

But now? Nobody. Just the boulevard’s matte and tarnished buildings, just streetlamps mottled with old petrol fumes.

‘C’mon, man,’ I said, watching a wounded dog clitter past on its three good legs. ‘How many pictures do you need?’

‘Just keep an eye out, yeah?’ His boots gritted as he shifted for the right angle.

You can spend a lifetime watching over people. All through secondary school, back in Ireland, I’d been the guy who’d keep an eye out for teachers during lunchtime scuffles, or hidden the booze nicked from the drinks cabinets of other lads’ parents, or stowed my mates’ weed and ecstasy stashes in my flat, and now here I was keeping sketch while someone else took a picture he really shouldn’t.

‘Is your back turned?’ said Carlos behind me. ‘I’m almost done.’

From the red hills of Michoacán to the flicker-lit Zeta nightclubs in Coatzacoalcos; from the mass graves in the stiff-grassed hills of Cocula to the Huejutla warehouses where rats and damp gnawed the Gulf cartel’s unlaundered bales of money; from the Kodachrome skies and parched dirt roads of the Tarahumara Mountains – to here, to now, to this alley of broken glass and drying blood in Poza Rica, Veracruz – in every one of those places, I’d watched over Carlos while he got his photos, and I hadn’t fucked up, not even once.

‘Bro,’ I said, turning over my shoulder to see Carlos’ face lowered to a face that wasn’t a face any more.

Carlos’ hand was inside the dead kid’s jacket, reaching for the inside pocket.

‘You’ll get your prints everywhere,’ I said.

‘Oh, yeah, because forensics are, like, super-diligent round here,’ Carlos said, the kid’s wallet already flipped open in his hand.

‘I can’t believe this,’ I said, even though I could.

Carlos opened the kid’s wallet and slid a Universidad Veracruzana student card out from behind the Cinepolis and KFC discount cards, then took a photo of the ID. Name: Julián Gallardo. Date of Birth: October 1996.

‘Mire, güey,’ said Carlos, sliding the card back into the wallet and the wallet back into Julián’s pocket. ‘No harm, no foul.’

Tyres squalled beyond where I’d seen the dog jogging out of sight.

‘You weren’t keeping an eye out.’ Carlos laid his camera on the ground.

Gravel crunched. A siren cut through my skull. Then police-car lights washed over us, red and blue and halogen white, and doors slammed as two shadows climbed from the big white Guardia Civil pickup, while a third aimed a mounted AR-15 assault rifle down at us.

‘Get down,’ said one cop, in a frightened whisper.

‘Can’t believe you fucked this up,’ Carlos said.

‘All right, man, whatever you say,’ I said to Carlos, and got to my knees, hands behind my head, my press laminate held high and its lanyard around my wrist.

The first cop moved forward, the second one covering him from behind, light gleaming along the telephone-wire coils of his gun’s security cord.

So we knelt there in the white glare, hands behind our heads, broken glass pricking through the knees of our jeans, the cops’ shadows looming bigger, their footsteps closing in.

2

The two cops stepped out of the light and into our faces. The first to reach us took the laminate from my hand, while the cop standing in the back of the pickup swivelled his mounted rifle back and forth along the avenue. You could still hear the clunk of the derrick and my jeep radio petering sad melodies into the dark.

‘This is a crime scene,’ said the first cop.

My skin wasn’t skin any more: just a hot prickling shiver all over.

‘We thought he was alive,’ I said.

The cop looked over at Julián, then back at me.

A wad of shit pressed hot against my asshole.

‘Until we got close,’ I said.

The cop didn’t say anything, just gave Carlos a chin-jut.

‘You took pictures?’ he said.

‘Was about to,’ said Carlos. ‘Sorry.’

The first cop smashed Carlos across the jaw with the stock of his pistol and said, ‘You stupid bastard. You’ll get us all killed.’

The word Help hit the roof of my mouth and bounced back into silence, but Carlos didn’t even cry out, just went down, docile as a felled cow. The second cop kept the muzzle of his gun trained on him.

‘Get his ID,’ the first cop told the second one.

Moments like that, nothing matters to you. Your head’s got the clean emptiness of a spilled-out goldfish bowl. Nothing you thought mattered means a thing, not your coffee-breath or your headache, not the shit-wad about to hit your thighs, not even your memories of the people you won’t see again. All you are is the tarmac smell in your nose and the grit and broken glass under your hands.

The cop loomed over me, and said: ‘You want to end up like this kid?’

‘No,’ I said. My breath skittered loose grit.

‘Me neither,’ said Carlos.

The cop crouched beside me. ‘You know who this town belongs to?’

‘We’re doing a story about oil,’ I said. ‘Just numbers. Nothing about crime. Heading home, we saw a body, stopped to see what was up.’ I sucked in air that tasted of road. ‘That’s all.’

The first cop pressed his fingers to his forehead. ‘Look, I’ll repeat myself. Do you know who this town belongs to?’

‘I don’t think they know,’ said the second cop. This guy, his voice was high, nasal, a newbie’s. ‘They wouldn’t be here if they did.’

The first cop looked at me, then at Carlos, then at the newbie cop.

‘Let’s get out of here, seriously,’ said the newbie cop, a plea in his voice now.

The first cop dropped his eyes to the ground, nodded, then holstered his gun.

‘You’ve been lucky tonight,’ he said, his hands on his hips. He shook his head.

Carlos slipped me a wink from further along the alley floor. His jaw was red, darkening to cinnamon, and his lip trailed a string of dark blood. The salt taste welling up under his tongue; I tasted that under mine as well.

The second cop said, ‘I’m sorry about your jaw.’

The first cop jerked his head towards our jeep and said, ‘What are you waiting for? Go, go.’

Carlos dusted off the knees of his jeans, patted my shoulder. ‘Come on, yeah?’

The second cop coughed and the air was instantly the smell of puke.

‘Where are they getting these new guys?’ said Carlos, his arm around me.

‘Ten years of this drug-war shite.’ I held my press laminate up at the third cop in the back of the pickup. ‘Not many tough lads left.’

‘Must be that,’ said Carlos, and looked back over his shoulder at the body in the white-lit alley. ‘Poor guy, though. Wonder where they’re taking him.’

The cop who’d hit Carlos dragged Julián Gallardo by his shoulders towards the pickup. The one who’d talked to me was muttering into a radio now. With one hand he held one of Julián’s feet. The other foot dragged.

‘Same place they all go,’ I said, and turned the key in the ignition.

The cops slung Julián into the back of the pickup, and he thunked against the metal, his limbs awry, and the cop on the radio kicked away the lines his heels had dragged through the dirt and grit.

‘Yeah,’ said Carlos. ‘Nowhere.’

3

Driving out of town, Carlos smoked a cigarette in literally four five-second drags without even coughing, while my fingers drummed a non-rhythm on the steering wheel. Even though the sky was fading from ink to cobalt, every shadow that passed over the jeep – the buildings, the streetlights, the big mall with its Cinépolis and KFC – seemed darker than the one before it.

We pulled in at a petrol station on a fog-drenched curve of highway above the valley, the tyres’ drone across the forecourt numbing my adrenaline-crash headache, and then bought breakfast: doughnuts and over-sugared coffee for me, cigarettes and pre-mixed tequila-and-soda in a can for Carlos. He lingered inside, having struck up a conversation with some hefty biker guys who were heading for the El Tajín pyramid.

‘How are you not terrified right now?’ I asked when he got back.

Carlos looked at me, lifted my hand to his throat. ‘Feel that?’

‘Fuck. Like a cartoon mouse.’

‘That’s it slowed down, vato,’ said Carlos. ‘Thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest back there.’ He spun his Fidel Castro key ring around and around on his finger. ‘Full John Hurt style.’ The USB stick clipped to his keys whipped in circles. ‘So glad they didn’t get my camera,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but they got your face,’ I said. ‘Your name.’

Carlos waved a hand. ‘Oh, whatever, so I shave before I go back there. Buy some fake glasses.’

‘You already wear glasses.’

‘Oh. Oh yeah.’

‘Those scratched?’ I leaned in to check his lenses for dings, but they were too smeared for me to tell.

He put up his hands, patted my shoulders away. ‘Nah, vato, chill, yeah?’ He stretched out along the mosquito-flecked bonnet, his hands behind his head, and uttered a long ragged groan that turned into a cackle. ‘That was amazing. We totally have to come back.’

The valley was a slow ocean of fog. All you could see beyond the highway siding was a sheet of pure white, wet air that pearled on my boots and darkened a hanging strand of my hair.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Even those cops looked scared.’

‘Cops are people too.’ Carlos gave a one-shoulder shrug. ‘Kind of.’

‘At best.’ I scratched under my chin, looking into the road at lights shaped like dark number ‘7’s against the fog, at road-lines broken like dashes along the slick asphalt. ‘But why would they be getting rid of a body someone else left? And why would that scare them?’

Carlos slung an arm around my shoulder and wagged a finger under my chin, then said, ‘Well, that’s why we’re turning around, right?’ He let me go and sat back again, tapping the top of his can of tequila and whatever. ‘You don’t mind?’ he said, the ring pull raised.

‘You don’t have to ask every time.’

The can clicked open. ‘Stressful times, though, vato.’

‘Aren’t they all.’

Even so, when Carlos popped the can and swigged the whole thing I had to turn my back on him and light up again.

Carlos took out his phone, started texting.

‘You telling your mother?’ I said.

‘Nah. Just chit-chat,’ said Carlos. ‘You OK?’ He didn’t look up from his phone.

‘I’m fine. You’re the one who got hit.’ I lifted his chin. The bruise on his jaw had now darkened from cinnamon to aubergine.

He jerked his head away. ‘It’s cool, honestly.’

‘All right.’ The doughnut I bit into was so stale that it powdered in my mouth. ‘It’s weird, though,’ I said. ‘Leaving that body out there.’

‘Yeah,’ said Carlos, and I shut up, dunking the other half of my doughnut until it didn’t taste like chipboard.

At some of the graves we’d been to in Cocula, all that the locals had found were nubs of bone and yellowish gelatine traces in the dirt, because the bodies had gone into vats of caustic soda. At the burial pits in Taxco, we’d seen mould eating tattoos of saints, of kids’ names, of gang affiliation.

‘If it’s so easy to make a body vanish,’ I said out loud, ‘why dump one in public?’ I kicked the dirt.

Carlos puffed out a long breath, his eyes shut. ‘You know, you could keep asking questions.’ He opened another can. ‘Or, you know, we could just – drive back and ask. Like reporters, or something.’

I ignored him. ‘You see a single lookout on the street back there?’

Carlos shrugged.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘So, whoever dumped that body, they wanted it found.’ The second chunk of doughnut went down about as smoothly as a bite of highway. ‘Why?’

Carlos clicked his tongue. ‘Ni puta idea, güey.’ He pointed at the jeep. ‘This magic thing, we should get in it, and go ask people who the kid was.’

‘No mention of Julián Gallardo on the missing persons site.’ I flipped through the tabs on my iPad. ‘Nothing in local news. Nothing on Twitter.’

‘Check his Facebook.’

I scrolled down. ‘Couple pictures of him at a protest. Some hashtags about pollution.’

Carlos tapped one of the hashtags, which read ‘AJENJO ASESINO’ – ‘Ajenjo are murderers’ – and said, ‘That’s a lead.’

‘Not when every oil company gets called “murderer” round here,’ I said, and locked the iPad screen.

Carlos’ hands were deep in his pockets. Another wave of fog rose and broke. He bit his lip, scuffing his heels against the concrete and said, ‘Bit of a waste to find a body and do nothing about it.’

‘Our day-rate’s not high enough to do something about it,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ said Carlos. His eyes moved from the screen of his camera, still showing the picture of Julián Gallardo’s ID card, over to the bikers unwrapping their breakfasts.

‘Let’s just see if his name shows up in the papers over the next few days,’ I said. ‘If it links to what we’re working on, I’ll ask Dominic if we can do a follow-up.’

Carlos didn’t say anything.

‘It’s a compromise,’ I said, cuffing him on the shoulder. ‘I feel for him too. But, well.’ It was my turn to shrug. ‘You know how it is here.’

‘I do,’ he said, peering at Julián Gallardo’s thin, serious face, then up at me through falling strands of his brown hair. ‘But you?’ He wavered his hand in the air.

‘I’m tired,’ I said, opening the door of the jeep. ‘Come on.’

From the jeep’s speakers rose another old bolero song, all lorn tenor harmonies and guitar notes the colour of almonds.

Carlos was looking at the bikers again. ‘You know what, you just keep going.’ His fingers drummed the roof. ‘I’m going back.’

Pure close tenor harmonies sang about the madness of trying to change a lover’s fate, and I could almost see the beaten smiles on the singers’ faces, see the lyrics printed on the air, feel each word sticking deep in my belly.

Carlos tapped a cigarette against the pack. ‘Unless you want to come too. Keep me warm.’ He winked at me. ‘You and me, cosy inside that foreign correspondent ring of fire.’

‘You know how much it costs to ship a body from Mexico to Ireland?’ I said.

Carlos exhaled a long coiling gust of smoke and flexed his tattooed fists: praying hands, a watching eye, an anchor marked NEC SPE NEC METU – no hope, no fear. ‘C’mon, man, you have some making up to do. Weren’t for you being so tired and wanting to get home, maybe the cops wouldn’t have caught us.’

‘So hard of heart,’ sang those voices on the radio.

‘No?’ Carlos doused his cigarette in one of the coffee cups littering his side of the jeep.

The radio voices sang about lying on the floor of a motel room, peering up at a lover who was seated on a crescent moon.

‘Stop,’ I said.

‘Ah, but where’s the lie, bro?’ Carlos’ fish-hook smile deepened to a leer.

My fingers pressed against my forehead. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to do your job,’ he said. ‘I want the story.’

‘These brown tiles under my cheek,’ sang the radio, ‘colder than the heart in your chest.’

‘This guy’s story.’ Carlos held up the iPad screen to show me Julián Gallardo’s mute eyeless scream. ‘Right here.’ He leaned into the car, his breath’s heat reaching me across the gearstick. ‘Be a real journalist, vato,’ he said. ‘For once.’

‘Drunken madness,’ sang the radio, ‘to think I had anything good to offer you.’

A truck roared out of the fog, threw fantails of rain over the windscreen, and shook the jeep on its suspension.

‘OK.’ I turned the key in the ignition so hard I thought it’d snap. ‘We’re done.’

‘Drunken madness,’ sang the radio, louder than the engine roar, ‘to think you might ever be mine.’

‘Pussy.’ Carlos jerked his camera bag from the foot well and it thunked against the door. ‘I’m off. I’ll text you.’

‘What, hitch-hiking?’ I snorted.

‘Eh, yeah?’ Carlos jutted his chin toward the bikers outside the Pemex, then slammed the door, and started walking back across the forecourt, face lowered against the thin rain, already waving hello to the bikers.

In my rear-view mirror Carlos shook hands with each of the bikers in turn, borrowed a helmet from one, and slung his skinny leg over the saddle of a BMW.

‘Ever the charmer,’ I told nobody, lighting another cigarette.

As the motorcycles blatted into life, Carlos raised one hand above his shoulders, the middle finger aimed backwards at me. The praying hands tattooed on the back of that hand looked like they were begging me not to be mad at him.

‘Good fucking luck, then.’ I took off the handbrake, put the jeep back into first gear. Gravel rasped under the tyres like a record needle jerked from its groove as I punched off the radio. Before merging onto the freeway I watched him disappear.

Carlos flipping the bird like that as he vanished in the rear view, I thought maybe that was him saying this was just another fight, that he wasn’t about to get himself killed in Poza Rica, that he’d be right back.

Yeah, well, you know – turns out I was almost right.