One of the very first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing. He doesn’t immediately understand that it’s a bullet at all, and it’s only luck that it doesn’t strike him between the eyes.
The story dives right into the thick of things with its opening line. The narrative literally kicks off with a bang as the hired guns of a Mexican drug cartel arrive to take care of a journalist who has been writing articles bringing unwanted attention onto the newest kid on the block. Of course, one can never be entirely sure who else a journalist might have shared important information with so everyone inside the house is fair game. It’s just common sense within the uncommonly nonsensical world of drug cartels so powerful they can actually become more powerful than the government. And so everyone must go, even if that mean an eight year old boy. Fortunately, young Luca escapes, along with his mother, but they are the only two of the nearly twenty inhabitants of the house who are so lucky.
She pulled a stool around to the far side of the counter so he could drink it in comfort. He was careful not to get foam on his mustache. They talked about literature and poetry and economics and politics and the music they both adored, and he stayed for nearly two hours, until she began to worry that he’d be missed somewhere, but he waved his hand dismissively.
A flashback to a period not all that long before the arrival of weapon-toting cartel soldiers tells the story of how bookstore owner Lydia—Luca’s mother—developed a friendship with a new customer one day. His name is Javier and though Lydia is to all apparent eyes happily married, there is nevertheless an electricity between them. In fact, it’s almost weird: he just so happens to like the exact same off-the-beaten-path books she does. Even weirder: he suffers from the same non-existent condition described in one of those books as Lydia: the inexplicable urge to hurl one’s body from a fatal height. Just goes to show that one can never be entirely sure they are quite as idiosyncratic and unique as they think. Or, perhaps, there is another rationale at work in this unlikely sharing of really quite amazing statistical improbabilities. Good thing he’s not a scuba-diving geologist with an urge to become a big brother or the whole plot would collapse.
Unlike his contemporaries and predecessors, La Lechuza was not flashy, gregarious, or even particularly charismatic. He seemed enlightened. But like every drug lord who’s ever risen to such a rank, he was also shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional. He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman. A thug who fancied himself a poet. The article ended with the inclusion of a poem written by Javier himself, and Lydia’s mouth dropped clean open when she saw it there in print. She knew this poem. The first one he’d ever shared with her.
The entire narrative turns on the fact that the customer with whom Lydia becomes overly intimately familiar also happens to be the ruthless head of the new cartel in town. Simple math at this point begins to make some sense. One plus one equals a guerrilla assault on the family of the journalist writing about La Lechuza. Two plus two equals Lydia and Luca teaming up with beautiful sisters Soledad and Rebeca in hiring a coyote to transport them across the border into America as undocumented immigrants. And therein lies the fruit of this unwise relationship between the very married bookstore owner and the shockingly compatible stranger. Too bad for Luca’s dad—and the other fifteen victims of the cartel’s onslaught—that the stranger wasn’t a scuba-diving geologist simply looking for a book on how to become a big brother.
