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Brian Henry

Murder at the Taco Stand

“I’ll have two cabezas, with extra cabbage,” said Guadalupe.


The swarthy taco stand worker took her order without a smile. “Onions?”
Guadalupe nodded her assent.
She surveyed the smattering of customers going about their taco-ingesting
business at the small cluster of tables.
The tall postman had obviously just finished his shift. He was
methodically eating his carne asada with the measured bites of a satisfied letter
carrier, rewarding himself for a long day of sliding small rectangular pieces of
communication into larger rectangular boxes. Two small tubs of hot sauce sat on
the table in front of him, along with an unwrapped taco and a large, blunt, object
wrapped in plain brown paper. Perhaps the recipient of the object had not been
at home and the thoughtful mailman had brought the parcel to the taco stand with
him, to ensure its security.
At another table was a figure Guadalupe recognized all too easily. It was
Hector ‘One Thumb’ Espinosa, a small-time gang banger gone straight whose
sullen face was familiar from its many appearances in the Pavedale Daily
Breeze. Espinosa concentrated silently on the tortilla in front of him which he
was slowly slicing into strips with a long, glinting butcher knife. Beside the tortilla
was a tub of ‘macho salsa’, a specialty of the house – heavy on onions,
jalapenos and fatty, blackened cubes of pork. Hector was evidently making his
own tortilla strips to scoop up the chunky mixture.
Sitting on the low concrete wall by the telephone pole, holding her soggy,
dripping taco at a distance and looking at it as though it were an inscrutable
wooden treasure chest carved with Maori insignia, was Elsie McCutcheon, the
escaped mental patient from the asylum ten miles down the road. She wore an
out-of-fashion dress with a pattern of small, red, grim flowers and buzzing,
streamlined bees. Her sleepless eyes gazed at the taco with a mean bee
ferocity, fixing it with mindless insect determination. Her history of poorly
considered strangulations was partially evident in the involuntary jerking of her
arms and the occasional, near-instinctive, clutching of her own neck by her left
hand.
Finally, Guadalupe took note of the Hoover brothers, the rotund artisanal
potato farmers from the edge of town, each of them packing a sleek Smith &
Wesson. The Hoovers were known for their possessive patrols of their extensive
acreage and had more than once injured an alleged trespasser they claimed
they’d caught digging up one of their fine Arcadia Golds or Purple Velvets. Their
identical beady blue eyes and carefully combed heads of blonde hair were as
cool and emotionless as their trigger fingers when they spied a suspected
vegetable thief within their carefully planted domain. The Hoovers lifted their
burritos to their respective mouths in a synchronized, masculine curve, taking
decisive bites and chewing in large, clockwise motions.
It was then that Guadalupe’s order was ready.
Brian Henry

She laughed a nervous, inexplicable laugh, and reached out her hand for
the tacos. Then there was a murder.

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