Traps

People saw the old man only at night. He would sometimes be seen returning home in the early hours of the morning before daybreak, stooped shouldered, wearing a dusty Fedora and heavy tweed overcoat with its frayed collar turned up. You knew he was old the second you laid eyes on him. Even from a distance, you could see his large dark hands and rough swollen fingers looking like crook cigars; and then there was the unmistakable pace of his steps, stiff, steady and ancient, taking him forward into the night, or bringing him back in the dawn. Not many people knew where he went, or what his name was.

Nothing much happened in the town that people openly spoke about. It was a little known place in the Sonoran desert, familiar to the locals as La Boca del Diablo. Most outsiders didn't even know it existed. The activities were routine. There were the illegal immigrant crossings at night. The drug transports. A few ramshackle whorehouses. Very little else happened there. Like all border towns, it was covered in a layer of fine dust. It made no difference if the streets were paved or not. The rural zephyrs swept the dust in from the barren hills and flat deserts, leaving layers of dust everywhere. Some enterprising individuals went about the town with oiled rags offering to wipe the cars free of dust for a fee. The price was not set. A quarter, a dollar, it made no difference. Anything to buy a taco, or a morning fix, anything to keep going.

The old man hobbled into the night as Jim Hebert watched him from a second story window of the Medina Medical Clinic. The stooped figure walked past dust-covered cars, and beneath street lamps hanging precariously like round piñatas from thin wires. Hebert watched the solitary figure walk up Avenida Francisco Villa as he had watched him every night for the last two weeks. A few times, he had caught him coming back in the early morning, his hands thrust into his pocket to shield them from the bitter cold, backlit by the sun peeking from the straight horizon, giving the old man an eerie radiance as he moved down the rutted street.

As Hebert absently watched the old man walking away, he thought how much he had begun to feel like a trapped cockroach. Medina's Roach Motel, he thought. He was a sick roach, plagued with a virus that no longer responded to mainstream drug treatment.

The disease had begun to undermine all of his organs. He had scampered here, over the border, like a frightened bug, running headlong for what he hoped would be a reprieve, some kind of momentary salvation. Tumors had been growing on him like tomatoes on a vine. In L.A. his doctors had given him less than six months to live. The virus was mutating, they said, it was no longer responding to treatment. It had won the battle and was now preparing to end the war. He had lived with the virus for fifteen years and had formed a healthy respect for it. It was smart, cunning, and extremely patient. Dr. Medina had managed to shrink some of the tumors, but he was still losing weight at an incredible rate. He was vanishing. Hebert realized a lot of the treatment he was taking was of the mumbo jumbo variety. No real substance, just wishful thinking. This was a last ditch effort. He knew he was going to die. These current efforts would prolong it for a few weeks, a month or two at the most. He wasn't afraid to die. Not anymore. Everybody dies, he thought. Why fear the inevitable?

The night would pass slowly. Even though he did not fear death, he dreaded falling asleep. He considered sleep a thief, shoplifting what little time he had left. He would soon find all the sleep he needed. In the interim, he was determined to stay awake, pushing sleep aside as long as possible, napping only briefly during the day. He felt better at night because of the stillness. Although for the past few days, in the early morning hours, he had heard strange screams coming from the streets. It must be an animal, he thought. No human ever walked the earth that sounded so forlorn or lost as the creature that emitted such bone chilling sounds.

"Chupacabra," an attendant had told him. "It comes through here now and then to hunt livestock."

Hebert had never heard of this nocturnal creature. The attendant had said it was some sort of supernatural predator. Hebert, being the realistic down-to-earth man that he was, dismissed this explanation as nothing more than ignorant ramblings. It was probably nothing more than a wounded animal.

Supernatural predator indeed. There were certainly predators out there but they were of the two-legged variety, laying in wait for some poor drunken fool to stagger by. While he stared out the window, he recalled the day he met the women who had infected him, a well to do Beverly Hills bitch that spent her husband's money on able-bodied men like Jim Hebert. He had thought of her often over the past fifteen years. She had been a supernatural predator, a real vampire. No mistake about it. He would never have dreamed that a woman in a white Bentley would hand him a prolonged death sentence.

He was only thirty-eight years old, certainly too young to check out, and educated enough to make a living with as little effort as possible. If only he had done things differently, he thought, he would not have found himself in this mud hole town waiting to die. How many others had she infected, he wondered, how many were already resting quietly under the earth?

When he first arrived, he saw a strange word scrawled in red ink on the wall of the clinic---jotolandia. In the course of the week, he learned that the word translated into "queerland." He felt a deep indignation. He had never gone to bed with a man. It was a repulsive thought. No, the vampire who had brought him to this end had been a beautiful blonde haired woman who had no regard for anything under the sun but her own selfish desires. A true predator. He peered out the window and looked for the old man. He had passed from view. He was another mystery, Hebert thought, seemingly coming from nowhere and going to nowhere.

The scream swam through the darkness sounding like the lamentations of a grieving demon. One of the women in the group covered her mouth to keep from yelling out loud. They sat in the skimpy shadows on the outskirts of town, waiting for the coyote to guide them across the border.

Four heads searched the night for whatever might have made the shuddering cry. In the distance, a lone figure made its way toward them. It was a large, lumbering individual wearing a hat and a long bulky overcoat.

"Is it him?"

"Be quiet!"

Rita Saldano lay shivering while her husband held a reassuring arm over her. There wasn't enough brush to hide so they lay prone on the ground. The approaching figure changed direction abruptly and went off away from them, shoulders stooped, head bowed.

"It's not him," her husband said.

The woman who had stifled her scream was Maria Alejandro. "I think I peed in my pants," she said.

"Keep it to yourself." Raul Maldonado, a carpenter with hopeful dreams of a better life, had very little patience with hysterical women.

"I don't think he's coming," Rita said.

"He'll come, if he wants to get paid," her husband said.

Somewhere in the distance, they heard something approaching through the brush. A half moon was snuggly tucked into a clear sky. Four heads rose in unison and searched the desert floor. Something was there, moving slowly. In the silvery-blue light, it looked like an animal of some sort, but nothing like any of them had ever seen before. It had the posture of a hyena with an irregular saw-tooth fin on its back, some spikes sprouting out to better than eight inches, looking like long quills stuck to a crusty hide. Something was also shooting out of its mouth like a round probing tongue.

"What in God's name is that?" Rita whispered.

"It's the devil," Maria Alejandro said anxiously.

"Shut up!" Maldonado hissed. "We don't need that kind of talk right now."

The creature stopped suddenly and looked in their direction with eyes that glowed like rubies. In the moonlight, they could see thick fangs protruding from its jaws. Its head had a curious resemblance to a short snouted lizard. They had absolutely no idea what they were looking at. The red eyes were large and round and seemed to bulge out of its oddly shaped head. The tongue lashed forward like a long tube and waved at them like an airborne snake. The four of them stared spellbound, unable to move or speak.

The thing began walking toward them and then rose on its hunches and stood looking and sniffing in their direction. It made strange noises and took several more steps toward them, cautiously.

"It's going to kill us," Maria Alejandro said, and began to weep.

No one spoke. They were all frozen to the ground. The creature looked four to five feet tall, lean and well muscled. Its arms were short like a kangaroo's with large three pronged claws that looked powerful enough to take a dog's head off with a snap. It came closer and was bringing a sulfuric stench with it. The bulging bloodstones that were its eyes flared and looked intently at them as it came toward them on its hunches, walking swiftly and with courage. The hellish odor about it was mesmerizing, the fumes seemed to be numbing their brains to obey and stay still, to not move, to freeze.

"Hijo de su puta madre!" Maldonado said.

As if the words had been a command, Maria Alejandro stood up and began to run toward the town, its streetlights dim in the distance.

Rita Saldano's husband had gathered some stones and was waiting for the creature to get close enough to pitch them.

"Be careful, Ernesto," his wife said.

Maldonado swept the sand for stones or a club, found nothing, picked up handfuls of sand and stood up to confront the thing as it came closer. Ernesto Saldano got to his feet and stood next to him.

"Come and get it, you ugly bastard!"

Maldonado screamed loud enough for Maria Alejandro to hear him clearly as her legs carried her rapidly toward the town.

Dr. Medina glanced out of his living room window just as Maria Alejandro ran by at a fast trot. The man in the room with Medina turned just in time to see the fleeing woman's backside as she continued running down the middle of the street.

"Is she one of yours?" Medina said.

Hector Corvasco squinted his eyes to focus as he watched the running woman. "Looks like it," he said. There were four pollos he had agreed to cross into the U.S., and he thought she looked like the jittery one, Maria Something-Or-Other. "She's going in the wrong direction."

"She looked frightened." Medina said. "She might have seen it."

"The Chupacabra?"

"Yes."

"You actually believe in that thing?"

"If it isn't that, what is it?" Medina said. "What animal have you heard that makes those kinds of unnatural sounds?"

"Could be a wounded mountain lion, a coyote," Corvasco said. "An animal in pain makes strange noises."

"Not like that," Medina said. "No animal in these parts makes noises like that."

He watched Corvasco and knew he was looking at a near illiterate thug. A man who was blind to anything he could not explain to himself. Corvasco wore a burnished crucifix on a gold linked chain, but Medina knew it had been taken from someone he had robbed. Corvasco did not believe in God anymore than he believed in Santa Claus.

As far as Medina was concerned, the Chupacabra was back in the region. Ranchers were reporting slaughtered cattle, goats, sheep, and other livestock. All killed in the same manner, all drained of blood through half-inch fang bites found around the neck or chest area. The animals had no other wounds anywhere on their carcass. Guillermo Baize, a local rancher, had found his prize bull one morning, condensed to nothing more than dead beef. Medina knew the bull, had seen him many times before. It was a furious, powerful beast good only for grazing and fucking cows. It had been a large animal that was found with fright caught in its eyes like mosquitoes in amber, telling of the timid condition it had been reduced to before its death. The only marks found on it were the puncture wounds on its throat. No mountain lion could have done that, Medina thought, and no coyote would have even attempted to bring down such a large fuming beast.

The Chupacabra, or "Goatsucker," was a phenomenon that had fascinated Medina since it first appeared in Canovanas, Puerto Rico in late 1995. He had found himself in San Juan after moving there from the Dominican Republic where he had been practicing medicine. The first reports ignited his curiosity, but as reports mounted and news of the killings escalated, his curiosity turned to suspicion that this strange creature may have been the results of clandestine government research. Like the AIDS pandemic, this strange beast had seemingly come out of nowhere. Prior to the first reports in Puerto Rico, it did not have a historic precedent. Medina began to suspect that it was the product of genetic experimentation that had somehow escaped. The reports continued to mount; more sightings began to crop up all over the island, then Mexico, then Central and South America. All within the span of six years. This creature had not come to life in the fictional pages of some brooding Gothic novel. This new odd thing had come full-blown into the real world from the beginning, leaving a trail of blood-drained animals in its wake. What in the name of Darwin was it?

Whatever it was, it was a true vampire; of this, there was no argument. But where had it come from? Medina no longer thought it was a government experiment gone awry. There were too many of these creatures spread throughout a vast area. But if it wasn't a product of rogue research, then what was it? Some thought it was alien in nature, extraterrestrial, or maybe even inter-dimensional. Far reaching theories indeed, but what else could account for its existence? It seemed to be localized in Latin American countries, or in the southwestern areas of the U.S. This geographical weirdness only added to the mystery.

Strange anomalies captivated Medina. In medical school, they had christened him Dr. Frankenstein because he was always talking about unorthodox ways of treating patients. He never did graduate because he had been caught cheating on an exam and was promptly expelled. Nevertheless, this did not deter Rudolpho Medina from his lifelong dream of becoming a medical practitioner. He had some diplomas printed up, business cards made, invested in some used medical equipment and he was in business. Narrow-minded restrictions were not going to stop him. Not in the least. That's how he had ended up in Puerto Rico. It wasn't long, however, before legitimate medical doctors were complaining to the authorities in such a loud clamor that not even his generous bribes to local officials were enough to calm the waters.

Mexico was a good alternative. But he had wanted a real out of the way local. La Boca del Diablo was perfect for his needs. The Internet was his fishing hole. Disparate people will do disparate things if they have nothing more to lose. His prices were reasonable by all accounts. Undercut the competition, he would think. Always. What you lose in money, you make up in volume.

Every now and then, he had a success on his hands that served to fuel his reputation. These people were walking gold mines; they would go about telling of their miraculous recovery and how the wonderful Dr. Medina walked on water. He was a firm believer in word of mouth as the best form of advertising.

Outside, in the adjacent building, on the second floor, he could see the night-light coming from Jim Hebert's room. Medina couldn't see the man, but he knew the American was staring out the window as he did every night, looking perhaps to see if death was coming for him. The man did not have long to live. Both men were reconciled to this. Hebert had been recommended to come to the clinic by a man who had gone into spontaneous remission for lymphoma. Overall, he was doing very well. He had no qualms about dying.

Medina did not think of himself as a quack, no more than a priest thought of himself as a fraud. He gave people hope. He gave them a life raft with a slow leak. He gave them comfort. And when your life was seeping through your fingers like sand, hope and comfort of any sort was welcomed.

Corvasco lit a cigarette and said he had better get going if he was going to guide his illegals across the border before daybreak.

"Don't you want your money?" Medina said.

"I trust you," Corvasco said, blowing the match out and tossing it into an ashtray. The product he had brought to the doctor was resting on the coffee table. It was an ounce of uncut Mexican heroin, looking like brown sugar in the plastic bag.

"My patients are going to appreciate this," Medina said.

Corvasco glanced at him. "Of course they are."

"One more thing," Medina went to a desk and took out a disposable camera from one of the drawers. "Take this," he said.

Hector Corvasco watched Medina as he handed him the small box. "What do I want with this?"

"I want you to take pictures of the Chupacabra if you see it."

"Are you serious?"

"Very serious. You're out there all the time. You have a better chance of capturing it on film than I do."

Corvasco took the camera reluctantly and rubbed the stubbles on his chin. "I'll be back in a few days to pick up my money," he said.

"If you manage to get pictures," Medina said, "I'll pay you very well for them."

"No guarantees," Corvasco said.

When he left, Medina went to his bathroom, took out a length of latex tubing, and secured it around his bicep. He then brought out a stainless steel syringe already filled with an adequate dose and flicked the bulging vain on his left forearm with his finger before inserting the needle. After this, he watched the brown liquid disappear from the chamber as his thumb pushed in the plunger.

The night air shimmered like a sheet of isolated rain and the thing went into it like something disappearing behind a curtain. Gone.

The three of them stared into the empty desert. "Where is it?" Maldonado said. He let the fistfuls of sand stream to the ground. Ernesto Saldano dropped the stones in his hands. His wife got to her feet.

The grotesque creature had been all bluff. As soon as the men made their stand and called it out it backed off and the air around it immediately began to ripple and wave like strange transparent netting. As it backed away, Rita noticed how remarkably agile it was, like a dancer.

"What time is it?" she said.

Maldonado looked at his watch. "A little past one."

"What time did he say to meet him?"

"Twelve."

Corvasco saw their silhouettes in the distance. The only one he wanted to lead anywhere was the young female, the married one. She had a nice body that was made in the Yucatan, firm and curvy with cupcake size breasts. The girl attracted him. Her brown hair was long and curly. He liked that. He liked her slim waist. Corvasco did not need the money to smuggle them. Medina's payment would carry him for a few months before he had to go out and mule again, or lead wets across the border. She had the look he liked in young women. There were pretty women around town, but he didn't want to have to pay for it. He wanted someone who whimpered when he made love to her. After he picked up his money, he'd get away for a while. Maybe Guadalajara. There were pretty women there too.

The husband didn't look like much of a problem. A sucker punch would do it. He was just a skinny boy with no muscle and less brains. Corvasco could take him out without breaking a sweat. If he had to, he could stick him. Either way, he wasn't worried about it. The only problem was getting away from the others. Besides the husband, there was only one other one, the big guy with the big gut. The other woman had run away for whatever reason. That was odd. No matter how scared they were, they never backed out. There was too much on the line. Then again, she may have gone back to the hotel to pick up something she forgot. Didn't matter, really. As it was, all he'd have to do was get rid of the fat guy.

As he walked toward them, he could see that he had been recognized. They were signaling, waving their arms in the air. He was on his way to satisfy an appetite, a craving he allowed to build in urgency before he indulged himself. Everything had to be just right, beginning with the attraction to the woman. He didn't care for sports, or any of the other bullshit men talked about and thought important. All he cared about was money and having sex with other men's wives. It was important to him that they be married, or at least in love with the man they were with. He didn't know why and cared less. That's how the hunger directed his lust.

Different men have different hungers, he thought. Everyone fed on each other. The country fed on its people and those that it couldn't use it spat to him so he could feed on them. Medina fed on his patients and his patients fed on hope. And in the end, everyone fed the big black belly of the universe that never stopped eating and made sure that it had enough food on hand, manufactured at the insistence of the sex urge. Corvasco was simply following his destiny, choosing entr‚es from the menu that his life had given him.

"We thought you'd forgotten about us," Maldonado said.

"Sorry about that," Corvasco said. "I was running late."

After this all three of them wanted to tell him about a weird and ugly beast they had seen.

"Where is it now?"

"It disappeared," Rita said. "It walked into the air and vanished."

Corvasco looked around the quiet desert and saw brush, cactus and shadows. Nothing else. "Looks safe to me," he said.

"What was it?" Maldonado asked. "I never saw anything like it before."

"Neither have we," Rita said, hugging her husband's arm.

"It makes no difference what it was. It's not here now." Corvasco looked around again, pretending to look for the other woman. "Weren't there four of you?"

"She ran away," Rita said. "She was terrified."

"Where is she now?"

"She's probably back at the hotel," Maldonado said.

"You're going to have to go get her," Corvasco said. "We'll wait here."

"What if she's not there?" Maldonado said.

"Where else would she be?" Corvasco glanced at his watch. "You better hurry."

Maldonado wanted to protest but kept silent. Corvasco was the leader whether he liked it or not. As he walked away, silently grumbling, the others watched him diminish as he headed toward the cluster of buildings in the distance.

" Now," Corvasco said, looking at Ernesto Saldano. "You come with me." Then, to Rita, he said, "You stay here."

"Where are you going?" she said.

"No questions," Corvasco said with authority. "We'll call you when we're ready."

She wanted to say something, but kept quiet as she watched her husband and the coyote walk toward the rocky hills to the north. The desert warmth was vanishing quickly as the night crept slowly toward sunrise. She shivered, more out of uneasiness than discomfort. She didn't trust Corvasco, didn't like the way he looked at her. She saw deceit in his eyes and very little else.

Soon the men were gone. It was just her and the surrounding desert. The only consoling objects were the lights of the town in the sapphire hue of the early morning. Even Maldonado had disappeared from view. She waited for what seemed a long time before she heard the coyote calling to her.

"Where are you?" she said.

"Follow my voice."

She could see his figure outlined against the dark hills. Ernesto was not with him. When she came up to him, she said, "Where's my husband?"

"He's sitting over there by some rocks."

She followed him as he led the way.

"There he is," Corvasco said.

She could see nothing but a dark rolling landscape. "Where?"

"There, on the ground."

A lump that looked like an oblong rock was ahead of her. It was motionless, and she suddenly realized it was her husband. She ran up to him and knelt at his side.

"Ernesto, are you all right?"

The man's eyes were shut and she noticed that his arms were locked behind his back. When she looked to see what was holding them, she saw the handcuffs secured to his wrists. A cold fear shot through her. Corvasco stood behind her with a faint grin on his face, looking down at her. She turned to look at him and saw the shiny blade of the knife in his hand.

"It's just you and me,chula" His grin expanded into a lazy smile as he grabbed her hair to pull her to her feet, forcing his rough lips over her mouth. Rita fought to push him away. The man smelled strongly of rancid sweat. Corvasco was not a big man but he was powerful enough to wrestle her to the ground with little effort. He hoisted her skirt to her stomach, his fist holding her hair in a tight grip. With a swift movement, he inserted the blade of the knife between her panties and thigh, cut them loose, then quickly unfastened his belt, and spread her legs apart.

She struggled beneath him. Everything was happening much too quickly. The man was going to do what he wanted, and all she could think of was that she did not want to get pregnant. After he slapped her face hard with an open hand, she tried clearing her mind in an effort to ease her fear and went limp, stretching her arms out, her hands feeling the sand until she touched what she was looking for. Corvasco forced himself into her, the dry penetration sending sheets of pain through her groin.

"You're going to have my baby," he whispered thickly.

The blackness that invaded his mind as she struck the rock against his skull was complete. The sudden weight of his body pushed the air out of her lungs as she labored to get out from beneath him. Corvasco was not moving. She hastily went through his pockets and found a ring with an assortment of keys, then ran to her husband's side, poked the smallest key in the cuffs, and released him. He was breathing but still unconscious. She patted his cheek until he began to moan.

His fingers went to his head to feel the bump. Dry blood was caked over his hair. "What happened?"

"Never mind," she said. "We have to go."

Her husband staggered to his feet as she went over to Corvasco and wrapped the cuffs around his wrists before flinging the key ring into the desert.

The old man bent over the wire trap to see if it held anything. Coiled inside was a young rattlesnake that had consumed whatever creature had been there, bloating its midsection, trapping it in the cage. The snake looked at him and hissed, rattling its castanet. The old man passed his hand over it and willed the snake to be still. The reptile closed its mouth and coiled itself into even tighter loops. It did not make a sound. After opening the trap door he reached inside and grabbed the snake by the throat, brought it out and snapped its neck like a twig. He took the lengthy creature and put it in the burlap sack along with an assortment of other animals he had found in his other traps.

He had one more snare to check before he went to deliver his game to the old Indian woman who would make tamales out of the catch. The old man did not want for anything and had no use for money. The Indian woman fed him well, gave him second hand clothes, and bought him chocolate candy bars now and then as an added treat. This partnership had extended all the way back to her great great grandmother. The old man had begun trapping for her and the partnership had been passed on to the succeeding generations.

The old woman he trapped for now did not have any children and the relationship would end with her death. He knew this and it did not worry him. He would simply eat what he caught. Although for the last hundred and fifteen years he had grown very fond of the tamales the women made. His current employer had taken it a step further and started selling the corn and game products to the people of La Boca del Diablo, stationing her rollaway cart at the dusty plaza in the center of town. It was a business partnership that had served them well.

Although he moved slowly, it was not because of his age. The gravity on this planet weighed on him and he lumbered about as if he were loaded down with rocks. Even though he was use to this, he could still recall the buoyancy of his own land and the ease with which he was able to move about. Now it was a memory that came to life only in his dreams.

When he came to his last trap, he heard the creature inside panic as he approached. In the corner of the cage he saw a brown jack rabbit cowing as he stooped to look at it. The old man made an unintelligible noise that sounded like a cooing dove. Again, he passed his hand over the cage before opening it. The rabbit relaxed and allowed him to take it out without making a fuss. He picked it up by the scruff of the neck and dropped it into his sack. It was not dangerous so he did not kill it.

His work for the night had ended and now it was time to deliver the game to the Indian woman who lived on the outskirts of town.

He took the same route he took each morning, and when he saw the prone body of a man ahead of him and a strange creature standing over it, the old man stopped. The thing standing over the body looked at him with blazing red eyes. A long tubular tongue waved at him. It did not show fear and neither did the old man. They stood there in the early dawn looking at each other. He knew the creature he was looking at did not belong here anymore than he did. It was never explained to him why he had been transported to this planet. The strangers who had abducted him were alien to his land, and he wondered now if the same strangers had brought the scarlet-eyed creature here as well.

As a gesture of good will, the old man took the rabbit out of the sack and tossed it at the beast. The saw-tooth quills on its back quivered as the thing swiftly caught the rabbit in one of its claws and looked at it momentarily before sinking its fangs into the furry neck. After this, it submerged its round tongue down one of the puncture wounds and began to suck the blood out of the warm body. When it was done, it let the carcass fall to its feet, turned quickly, and fled. The noise it made as it ran carried over the silent desert like a demon wind.

The old man went to the body on the ground and looked to see the fang marks on the man's neck. The cuffs on his hands shone in the breaking daylight. The side of the man's face was stained with dry blood, and the look of frozen death on the face showed surprise, the eyes wide with terror. The old man looked at the body and when he realized there was nothing there of any use to him, he turned and left.

After he put the night's catch into the small refrigerator at the rear of the Indian woman's house, he took the sack of tamales she had left for him near the back door and began to walk toward town. As he did every morning, he walked down Avenida Francisco Villa with the sun coming up behind him. In the distance, a man was watching him from a second story window of the Medina Medical Clinic. He would never meet this man, would never know his name.

Jim Hebert saw the carrion birds circling in the morning sky, and he watched the old man coming down the street while three weaving dust devils followed behind him, dancing like whirling ballerinas.

Bio: J. L. Navarro's most current writing credits are stories published in Cafe Irreal, BIGnews Magazine, 3A.M. Magazine, Gang Related, Angeleno Stories, and The Murder Hole, with other stories scheduled to appear in Shadowkeep, Steel Caves, Savage Night, and Suspect Thoughts. Additional work can be found on his website.

E-mail: cycocat3@juno.com

URL: http://tuvo_13.tripod.com

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