Like a Shank to the Throat

“Yo, let’s get moving, man! We don’t have much time!” The Hispanic youth, around 14 years old, with a green-and-gray headband wrapped around his brow and wearing an unseasonably hot black sweatsuit, fumbles with the prybar in his thickly-gloved hands as ten more youths, all between 13 and 17 and in similar attire, follow suit, sneaking around the back of a large, drab green warehouse just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Hey, where’s Cabron, I don’t see him,” another, shorter and lankier boy asks the first youth, a tall figure for his age and filled out with the results of eating wet burritos from a take-out restaurant six nights a week.