But he couldn’t help it. His mind took him back to his seventeenth year … She was an innocent bystander. Just thirteen then. But we were all innocent bystanders then.

The fighting had started in Mexico City. It hadn’t stayed. By the winter downtown San Diego had descended into violence. Their mother told them to stay inside, she didn’t want them in this kind of fight. The only thing they left for was school … of course, that turned out to be what got her, in the end. They’d heard the gunfire every day, but it had become little more than background noise.

Only, that day, it wasn’t. One of them, he’d come running out of a back alley directly across the street, yelling and shouting and firing. The ones in the alley fired back. One of them, one of their bullets, came straight across the street …

Their mother didn’t stop crying for days. Their father, well, he just sort of withdrew. And Seth? He made his vow. The street gangs would not continue. And he’d hit them right where they lived.