They say he wasn’t afraid of anyone, un macho de verdad, they say, driven to ridding the city of the criminal elements who dominated the streets, even if he had to break the law to do so. Angel met Pedro in a nursing home in Miami, thirty years after Angel’s grandmother threw him out of the house for his philandering ways. Pedro took up with a woman with whom he had a daughter, and after she, too, broke with him, he fake-married a simple twenty-year-old girl from the country. They say his cousin, Gustavo, a lawyer and notary public, arranged the whole thing but never submitted the papers to the marriage bureau, so as far as the law was concerned, the marriage never took place. Pedro was merely interested in getting the guajira into bed. He wound up falling in love and stayed with her for fifteen years until he left for the United States. By then he had retired from the police force but his reputation preceded him everywhere he went. He was, after all, the man who had tracked, found, and killed Manolito Rivas, one of the most notorious murderers ever to roam the streets of the capital.
