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June 10, 1971

He didn’t like beating people.

El Elvis realized this was ironic considering his line of work. Imagine that: a thug who wanted to hold his punches. Then again, life is full of such ironies. Consider Ritchie Valens, who was afraid of flying and died the first time he set foot on an airplane. Damn shame that, and the other dudes who died, Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper” Richardson; they weren’t half bad either. Or there was that playwright Aeschylus. He was afraid of being killed inside his house, and then he steps outside and wham, an eagle tosses a tortoise at him, cracking his head open. Murdered, right there in the most stupid way possible.

Often life doesn’t make sense, and if Elvis had a motto it was that: life’s a mess. That’s probably why he loved music and factoids. They helped him construct a more organized world. When he wasn’t listening to his records, he was poring over the dictionary, trying to memorize a new word, or plowing through one of those almanacs full of stats.

No, sir. Elvis wasn’t like some of the perverts he worked with, who got excited smashing a dude’s kidneys. He would have been happy solving crosswords and sipping coffee like their boss, El Mago, and maybe one day he would be an accomplished man of that sort, but for now there was work to be done, and this time Elvis was actually eager to beat a few motherf***ers up.

He hadn’t developed a sudden taste for blood and cracking bones, no, but El Güero had been at him again.

El Güero was a policeman before he joined up with Elvis’s group, and that made him cocky, made him want to throw his weight around. In practice being a poli meant shit because El Mago was the egalitarian sort who didn’t care where his recruits came from—­ex-­cops, ex-­military, porros, and juvenile delinquents were welcome as long as they worked right. But the thing was El Güero was twenty-­five, getting long in the tooth, and that was making him anxious. Soon enough he’d have to move on.

The chief requirement of a Hawk was he needed to look like a student so he could inform on the activities of the annoying reds infesting the universities—­Trotskos, Maoists, Espartacos; there were so many flavors of dissidents Elvis could barely keep track of all their organizations—­and also, if necessary, f*** up a few of them. Sure, there were important fossils, like El Fish, who was twenty­seven. But El Fish had been in one political shenanigan or another since he was a wee first-­year chemistry student; he was as professional as porros got. El Güero hadn’t achieved nearly as much. Elvis had just turned twenty-­one, and El Güero felt the weight of his age and eyed the younger man with distrust, suspecting El Mago was going to pick El Elvis for a plum position.

Lately El Güero had been making snide remarks about how Elvis was a marshmallow, how he never went on any of the heavy assignments and instead he was picking locks and taking pictures. Elvis did what El Mago asked, and if El Mago wanted him to pick the locks and snap photos, who was Elvis to protest? But that didn’t sway El Güero, who had taken to impugning Elvis’s masculinity in veiled and irritating ways.

“A man who spends so much time running a comb through his hair isn’t a man at all,” El Güero would say. “The real Elvis Presley is a hip-­shaking girlie-­man.”

“What you getting at?” Elvis asked, and El Güero smiled. “What you...