Chapter 11: Where

I found Yosi early on Thursday morning, behind the Gate Watch table at the park, eating a croqueta I had delivered.

He had slept in his truck.

There were six camp chairs around him and a whiteboard that said ROUND TWO.

A stack of ammunition cases sat beside it with a sponsor's logo on the lid.

The plan on the whiteboard was a hundred shooters, two hundred rounds apiece, and the word VOLUME underlined twice.

I stood in front of him with my hands in my apron pockets, and I did the thing I had practiced in the van.

"I want a bet," I said.

Yosi looked at the croqueta.

"You want a bet," he said.

"You take three people in with a signed magazine each, and I tell you where to shoot. The Anchor dies on fourteen rounds."

"Signed by who?"

"By me," I said.

He started laughing and stopped when he saw I was not.

"Okay, Lalo," Yosi said. "And if it doesn't work?"

"Then I stand in front of your camera and say I was wrong, for as long as you want."

"And if it does?" he said.

"Then you ask me one question on your stream," I said. "Out loud, so your forty thousand can hear."

"What's the question?" Yosi said.

"You'll know."

He thought about it for the length of the croqueta.

Yosi had never turned down a crowd in his life, and a bet with an audience was a crowd with a plot.

"Done," he said. "Three. My gym guys, and the captain."

He meant the two men who lifted with him at the gym and the retired electrician with the whistle.

I took them aside by the batting cages and told them what a Deputy was.

They did not believe me.

I did not blame them, because I was asking three men and a retired electrician to put their trigger fingers under my name.

If one of those sixteen rounds killed a person, the Registry would print it on my record, and I would have asked for it.

I thought the word Deputize four times anyway, looking each man in the eye.

[Deputized: four. Magazines: four rounds each, signed. Authority 24 of 60.]

[Deputies: 4 of 4.]

A thin gold line ran down the side of each magazine.

The electrician held his up to the light and said, "That's not paint."

By midmorning the Gate Watch put its tripod in front of the oval, with a hand radio patched into the stream.

You cannot get a signal inside a gate.

A handheld radio does not need one, and neither does a camera that looks through a door.

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