A neighbor, an old woman in a doorway, pointed down the wet avenue.

“They took the boy,” she said.

“An ambulance.

It went that way — but it wasn’t right, señor.

He was fighting them.” Aurelio’s heart turned over.

And in the same moment Cristóbal’s phone rang with a second call — a man named Ismael, an old friend of Gael’s from the years Aurelio had thrown away, who had heard through the neighborhood that someone powerful was finally asking about Araceli’s boy, and who had been carrying something for years that he had never known what to do with.

Chapter 13 — The Recording