There are people who read my fiction and immediately identify themselves, or a moment, or a place or a person. My stories are fiction, but they are often placed in real locations, down to specific moments in time.  These moments aren’t borrowed from newspaper accounts, but they could very well be.
Last week, I read about the 72 Mexican migrants gunned the death at a ranch near the border, allegedly because they refused to pay extortion money to get into the U.S. A couple of days later, a partying gangbanger swiveled through a bar in Puerto Vallarta with some beers in hand when one of his grenades accidentally went off, injuring 16 people and maiming four.
Who parties with grenades handy, inside a bar? In my neck of the words, guns were common. Apparently in Puerto Vallarta grenades are the accessory de jour (authorities said club owners needed to conduct searches of patrons), but if I were to fictionalize this incident, reviewers would clobber me for being a drama queen with an over-active imagination.
But of course, as every journalist knows, reality is always far more exciting than fiction.
Take the big shoot-out scene in “Tell Me Something True,” where armed “sicarios,” or killers for hire, enter a restaurant intent on killing the son a famous drug lord. The real tale was narrated to me by an eye-witness, a good friend who happened to be in the restaurant having lunch that day.
Over drinks one night, he described the surprise, the horror, the unbelievable panic of being inside an enclosed room with bullets literally whizzing over his head. My friend and his lunch companions dove to the floor and cowered underneath the dining tables as the relentless shooting went on and on, seemingly forever.
When it was over, he was the person who began to frantically search for his cellphone, only to see it lying an arm’s distance away, underneath a dead man’s cheek. Like Gabriella, he reached for it, oh so carefully, than jerked his hand away in panic when he thought he saw the man blink!
What my friend knows for certain is, when someone shouted that the shooters were coming back, he ran toward a closet in the back and locked himself up for what seemed hours, until the police opened the door and found him, like they found Gabriella, cowering under a tablecloth on the floor.  
My own personal shoot-out story was less harrowing, but its finale equally dramatic. I was enjoying myself at a dinner party in my sister’s apartment, when, late in the evening, something shook the building. We saw smoke filter from an upstairs floor and called the lobby, to no avail. The sound of footsteps marching up and down the stairs kept us from going outside to explore. Hours later, when we could no longer hear a thing, we ventured downstairs, to find the police surrounding the doorman and the building guard—both shot dead.

The shooters wanted no witnesses (and thank God we didn’t venture outside). Turns out the apartment of an upstairs tenant had been blown up in an attempt to kill the relative of a drug lord. He survived—in vain. A few weeks later, he was gunned down on the highway.