Adam Weiss was thinking: This is bullshit. This guy is lying. He’s telling me this story because he wants money.

The man was in the bathroom now: a couple of minutes earlier, he’d stood abruptly and stumbled quickly to the restroom, and now Adam could hear him puking.

The man was puking because he was drunk, very drunk. No, more than drunk: this guy was high—coke or speed, some stimulant. The man had to be coked out of his gourd to be telling him this story, snorting speed for days to get this fucked up, this fucking paranoid, this fucking out of his mind…

What was Adam supposed to do with that story?

He looked around the sorry excuse for an office—a desk, a desk chair, two battered armchairs salvaged from God knows where, all crammed into one end of a double-wide so shitty it made the chairs look fancy. Behind the desk, a stand fan feebly stirred a big wall poster showing farm workers striding bravely across the fields, arms linked in proud solidarity.

From the bathroom, the heaves and choking gasps reached a crescendo that rose over the roar of rain pounding the corrugated roof.

Christ. Why the hell did this have to happen when Ricky, his supervisor and the glorious founder of the glorious Workers’ Solidarity Movement, was gone?

He looked at the generic Commie worker poster again, and wondered if the socialist propaganda meant anything at all to the workers who attended meetings. When Adam addressed them, he felt completely ridiculous—a rich twenty-two-year-old summer intern from Barnard, standing in front of a few exhausted field hands, urging them on to unionization and freedom.

He fought a sudden urge to run out of the trailer, to get on his bike, and pedal. What the hell was he still doing here? Leave the drunk campesino to the toilet—it’d probably be less embarrassing for the guy! Adam would just cycle home to his little shack in Bel Arbre. It’d take him twenty minutes, tops; twenty minutes and he’d be home and dry. He’d play videogames on his laptop, then text with Tiff.

It was Tiffany Coen’s fault that Adam was even in that fucking dump. He’d thought he’d impress her by getting a hardcore fieldwork internship, but when he announced he was spending the summer in Florida organizing migrant farmers, she’d dismissed it as some romantic ego trip, and told him she and Andy Willet were going to help actually change immigration policy.

So now Andy and Tiff were working for a plush PAC in DC—swank cocktails in a different embassy every night—while Adam was stuck in the middle of a fucking South Florida monsoon, listening to some Mexican or Guatemalan or whatever spew his guts out in the shitty bathroom of the shitty trailer.

God, he was so fucking far out of his motherfucking depth. What could he do? Surely it was money, he just wanted some money…

But the man hadn’t asked for any money.

What do you do when an anonymous farm worker staggers into your aid office and tells you that at one of the estates, if you screw up, the foremen take you out into the Glades and kill you? That they videotape your execution to show new workers what happens if you screw up?

It was insane, it was insane! What the hell can you screw up so badly they kill you?

Drugs. Oh, Christ, he thought. It’s drugs. It has to be drugs.

Adam suddenly realized the vomiting had stopped.

He listened.

Silence.

He looked toward the bathroom and called out, “Señor? Que tal?”

No answer.

Oh, shit.

Adam pushed himself slowly to his feet, the creak of the floor suddenly loud in his head.

What if the guy had died, just keeled over from the coke and the drink?

But he would’ve heard something.

Adam didn’t want to have to deal with this.

Then he started thinking: if this was drugs, if there really are men willing to kill workers just as a warning, these men would be vigilant. They would watch their employees like vultures, waiting for them to slip up. And this guy had just slipped up big-time.

Adam pushed the door to the hallway open gently. Light in the bathroom peeked through the crack in the frame. Something behind the bathroom door was clattering and banging, the sound loud and arrhythmic.

He took a step closer, then tapped on the door.

“Señor?”

Silence.

He rapped harder; maybe the man hadn’t heard his knocking above the sound of the rain, the hollow banging.

“Señor?”

There was no sound other than the rain and the clattering. Adam had no choice: he grasped the doorknob and pushed.

The door swung open into an empty bathroom, rain pouring through the open window, the wind smacking the window and storm shade against the frame. Adam saw the boot mark that the man had left on the toilet seat when he’d clambered out through the window and into the night.

The rain soaked him briefly as he pulled the window shut. As he went back to his office, Adam realized he was trembling.

If the man was so scared he’d climb out a window, he probably thought he’d been followed. The man thought these men—these killers—were watching him and waiting for him.

And he’d led them straight to Adam.