The Black Minutes

5

Chief Taboada took the brand-new highway and passed by the lagoon. A sign marked the turnoff he was looking for: GRUPO ENLACE. BUILDERS. As he approached a barbed-wire fence, he saw a building emerging out of the dunes. He parked his car and continued on foot. A small bonfire was burning a hundred feet ahead of him, in the sand in front of the building, a bonfire like the ones that construction workers make to heat up their food. Next to it, they had tied up a German shepherd that still hadn’t sniffed him out: finally, good luck, the wind’s blowing in my favor.
A mountain of bricks and cement blocks was piled on the dunes. Taboada ducked down behind them to watch a man walking toward the bonfire; he was stooped over and wrapped in a dirty serape. At first, he thought it was a boy leading him by the hand, but soon he realized that what he had thought was a boy was actually a dwarf. The stooped man raised his eyes and his front teeth showed. I know that guy, he said to himself. It couldn’t be . . . Jorge Romero! What is he doing here? Could he be the building’s night watchman?
In front of the bonfire, there was a carpet of trampled beer cans. The dwarf helped Romero sit down on a stump, and they talked as the dwarf warmed tortillas. A little bit later, a girl arrived with a container of food and started to serve it on four plastic plates. Romero shouted something unintelligible to his right and another dwarf came out of the building. When they saw what was on the plate, the little men jumped for joy. The girl finished serving and the dwarfs attacked the food as if they hadn’t eaten for a long time.
Right then, the wind must have changed direction, because the German shepherd started barking. One of the dwarves scaled the mountain of blocks with difficulty, and when he got to the top, he saw the policeman and jumped up and down and pointed at him. The other dwarf was jumping, too, and Romero immediately lifted the rifle the girl passed to him. As a reflex, Taboada reached for his belt, looking for his .357, which agitated the dwarves even more. He’d just seen the Blind Man lifting the barrel of the gun when the rifle blast tore through a bag of cement. Holy shit, he thought. There was no reason to fire back if he had no way to cover himself, and if he wanted to get to the car, he’d have to run at least thirty feet in the open. F*ck, he said to himself, there’s nowhere to hide. From his spot in the dunes, Taboada saw the dwarves motioning in his direction, they were running toward him. A second rifle blast, even closer, forced him to jump to the ground. Shit, he said to himself, how can he be such a good shot? His eyes, cabrón. The dwarves are his eyes. When he tried to run away, he fell flat on his face right into a puddle full of mud. As soon as he could, he started to run down the slope and he kept on running until he couldn’t hear the barking anymore.