The sun wasn’t thinking about rising yet. Neither was Lincoln, the guy I had come to Cancun with.
I’d really like to take you to Cancun, baby, he’d said two weeks earlier, on our third date.
I laughed.
“What’s funny about that?”
I pictured high-rise resort buildings choking coastline. Portly Americans choking resort buildings. Me choking Lincoln.
“Nothing,” I said.
They were at the Gulfport Shaggy’s, about to celebrate a decent haul on a pot deal with a late-morning bloody and there stood The Treat, looking less Dutch than usual, a little more redneck, talking to some senior stoner with ass-length white hair in a sectioned-off ponytail . . .
You will probably bleed out in the next ten minutes. The totality of every bad decision that brought you here has become a laser, cauterizing the hole in your chest. You can tell that nothing inside you will work properly anymore. You’re just an engine now, pumping fluid through a ruptured hose . . .