Miguel Sanchez sat at the bar sipping his beer slowly, and contemplating his present life. He was nothing more than a slave to a wife who habitually disrespected him and her son who was allegedly also his. It was here where he had met Lisa, while she was working as the bartender, and he thought nothing of it. To him, at that time, a bartender was like a waitress, a perfectly legitimate service worker, so there was nothing disreputable about Lisa. While they had started to date, it seemed unusual that she was ready to go to bed with him so fast, more quickly than any other woman he had dated. In fact, she had initiated sex, while usually he did with the woman. Oh well, she was just fun, that's all, he had thought. And he had married her, when she announced that she was pregnant. He had just assumed the baby was his, but now the more he thought about it, the more he realized, he probably had been tricked.  Instead of staying home, and taking care of the infant, Lisa had spent every day out on the strip, hanging out with her stripper friend, Nona Flores, a former coworker. (Now, Miguel realized that bartending was a step up in the respectability scale for Lisa.) Together, Lisa and Nona spent the money Miguel nearly broke his back in the mine to earn on alcohol and other frivolity, leaving the infant totally neglected, unfed and unwashed, he would find out when he came home. And there was never any food or supplies such as diapers for the baby in the house. Miguel had to go out and get those items, himself. He finally had call a domestic help agency and hire a nanny to care for the baby while he worked, and started leaving less money on hand for Lisa. Then, Lisa accused him of having an affair with the nanny, a grey-haired greatgrandmother, who worked for the agency to supplement her Social Security check, and only spoke to Miguel in passing, when leaving, to report practical concerns, and then would hurry off, eager to spend time with the little ones in her own family. Miguel now utterly hated Lisa, realized what a fool she had made of him, and that baby--well that was only an extension of her and her evil. Naming him Miguel, Jr. was only a mockery, and a way she thought she could dupe him into stopping any suspicions that the baby was actually someone elses. And for all Miguel's attempt at care for the baby, when it proved to be necessary, the baby never was affectionate to him. On the contrary, he would squeal, and angrily bite, scratch, kick and dig his heels into him whenever he picked him up.  The nanny said such a reaction was normal for a child who was not used any kind of attention, but the baby seemed to be affectionate with her. The baby no longer seemed like an angel, an innocent, more like the Devil's spawn, another man in a miniature body, mocking Miguel. He stopped even thinking of that baby as even being human, more of a supernatural demon. Despite his harsh upbringing, Miguel had always kept calm, and been reasonable in dealing with others, often showing more kindness than he had ever been shown. But now, he was realizing how the world really worked.  Kill or be killed. Look out for Number One. He had been played for a fool and abused too many times. Now it was his time, to score. He fingered the ad for the life insurance policy which had come inside the morning paper. $250,000 for each insured, no physical necessary. Insure whom you wish. Miguel turned his head towards the other end of the bar. He even knew whom he could get to do the deed.  A jobless ex-con like Ignacio Torres would probably do plenty for just one grand, no questions asked.  He had seen Ignacio bumming for cigarettes. A thousand dollars would buy a lot of cigarettes. And 500 thousand dollars would buy, well you can only start to imagine...

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Ignacio Torres sat at the other end of the bar nursing his light beer. He could barely afford that, much less a brew which was not watered down. Released from prison for auto theft, he had no job prospects, and who would want to hire him? Besides, as the prison psychiatrist had now informed him, he was dyslexic, and as such, would never be legally licensed to drive, and that also explained why he had always read so slowly, leading him towards rebellion and expulsion from high school. Sharing an apartment with a former fellow gang member, who was receiving SSI for paranoid schizophrenia, who ranted and raved at imaginary demons all night, while Ignacio was trying to sleep, and collecting General Assistance was all he had to show for his thirty-one years. Drinking watered-down beer was his only comfort. Oh, and it also helped to manage his mood swings, also diagnosed in prison. He had been prescribed a medication for that, but it had made him perky, effeminately so, not a safe thing in prison, so he quit that. He had the bar, and he had church. In church, nobody would chase him away for being a nuisance when he bummed for cigarettes, at least, when we weeded the garden. And there was Phoebe, gorgeous Phoebe.