Bound

Tiggy Malvern

Fic number six of the 'Wires' series. Huge thanks for beta duties to Julia K, Lady Ganesh and Solo.

The bleep of his watch was muted and short beneath the low-buzzing rattle from the kitchen, marking off the fifteen.

Sands tipped his head back to the wall behind his chair, long-settled with his fingers linked on the table in front of him, all out in plain sight. Resisted the urge to reach over and drain the last pleasingly bitter drops from his near-empty coffee.

If this was a first meet, he would have walked by now - wouldn't want to set a precedent for bad habits. But he'd already invested enough time and 'favours' in this one to want paying, and it was evolving nicely towards a bit more entertainment potential than anything else he had running right now. So many of even the most intelligent people had such small minds, a pitiful lack of imagination and flair when it came to their business dealings. It might be worth a few minor inconveniences here and there for a chance to shake out the boredom.

When it came, the rustle from the bar, the soft dull tap of sole on metal, he didn't move.

Five count, steady, slow.

Showtime.

He waved the girl over for a refill on his coffee maybe a second before the door opened and the footsteps came his way, quick and heavy. Lomas flopped into the seat opposite, quick strained creak of it under him, and he stayed silent while she poured. No question Sands had the right guy here - he breathed like a pig rooting through dirt, and he oozed sweat even with the air-con pinning the temperature somewhere in the sixties.

Sands thanked the waitress with a flashed smile, and made a point of asking for the check. Lomas never ordered anyway, but it left him shuffling with a thousand restless small twitches through the minutes while Sands stirred sugar into his coffee and counted out the notes for the payment and tip.

Her feet tapped off back to the kitchen, light, fast, efficient, flash of heavy heat and chatter as the door opened and resealed with a click behind her.

Lomas was leaning in across the table, words low and urgent. "So what have you got for me?"

So very eager, so very easy to bait.

Sands set his cup back down on its saucer, his fingers still wrapped around it, and curled his lip just a hint at one edge. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

Sands tipped his head slightly and angled his eyebrows. "I almost hate to say it, because there aren't too many out there, but he's actually clean. You set me to digging dirt on the one government official in Bolivia who isn't taking backhanders or picking out the sugar jobs for his nephews and brothers-in-law. The guy doesn't even screw around on his wife." He let the curl stretch till it was something like a smile. "I'm assuming that very incorruptibility is why you need something on him."

"It's taken you over a month to find nothing?" Lomas was turning predictably edgy, voice taut with an anger lashed down only out of respect for his current carefully public situation.

Sands shrugged and took another sip at too-hot coffee, aiming sunglasses over the rim. "Finding something's the easy part. It's convincing yourself there really isn't anything well hidden if you dig just a little deeper that takes the time."

"I'm paying by results here, not by the hour. You got nothing, you get nothing from me."

Getting pissed actually did something for the guy - he quit all the irritating shifting and snorting while he made his point at least. Still not exactly intimidating, but as close as he was ever likely to get.

Sands smiled quick and wide, lips pressed together all the way. "Oh, you'll pay me what we agreed, and then some extra. After all, the job didn't go away - it just got a little more complicated." It was always amusing to play them along the tracks, poke them into response, knowing all the while they'd stick around and take it, everything running precisely to his cues.

And then something was going wrong, motion from over by the bar where there shouldn't be. Shifting with rustles and a faint metallic chink, and El was on his feet and moving, footsteps slipping away. Away towards the door in fast, even strides.

There was never any deviation from the script.

Lomas was talking again, more like ranting, nothing that fell outside the parameters of the predicted conversation pattern, and Sands' focus was locked on El and what was beyond El, head frozen against the burning urge to turn and track; couple of low mundane conversations from the near-empty bar, everything normal but for those footsteps direct and purposeful and the rattle-click of the door, the rush of traffic and chatter street-bright in the moments before it sealed shut, slicing El from his senses.

What the fuck was going on?

Coffee cup hot under his gloves, beautifully baited mark fuming and desperate right there for the skewering, and a void in the part of his head tuned to track and monitor the mariachi. Not unprecedented, El wasn't glued to him permanent and pathetic, but he should be expecting it, he should have warning.

Sands didn't need a babysitter for jobs like this, but it made some of his clients happier to think he did. Otherwise they got nervous, started to wonder what they were missing and look a little deeper, when Sands didn't want them thinking that way. And some of his more reluctant informants weren't so inclined to cause him annoyance if El came along. Sands could handle the annoyance, but it was less hassle to be able to skip straight to the civilised exchange. All El had to do on these trips out was hang back and glare, which Sands seemed to recall he was reasonably good at, and whatever he did, Sands figured it worked.

The bodyguard schtick doubled up well with his living arrangements too. Sands didn't give a mile high fuck what anybody thought of him or his choices in bed on a personal level, but working in these superstition-steeped Catholic countries, those kinds of rumours would cost him paying clients and inspire his sources to turn pissy on him. He was never inclined to make his life hard when it could be easy, and nobody would question him keeping the hired gun close by at nights.

Sands didn't need a babysitter, but when back-up was built into the scenario, the play didn't work so well without it. Sands non-threatening was part of the deal, hands on the table and with no trick in place to get around it, because it wasn't needed.

El was a guy driven by habit, a few basic wants and desires; he didn't split from a settled routine without a specific kind of trigger. There had to be something going on, something Sands was missing outside of this self-inflated prick across the table, something he needed to know and -

If there was something out there, El wasn't sure enough to tip him off.

Lomas hadn't shown any obvious reaction to El's leaving, or to anything that could have sparked it, but the stupid cunt-brain just might be oblivious to anything subtle. Once El was out the door, Sands couldn't know anything, no way to tell if he'd stuck around or if he was off half a mile down the street already and Sands was on his own.

But that wasn't how it was - if El had to bail, he wouldn't do it without letting Sands know, some signal, the warning. So El was right there by the windows, lounging back against the frame and lighting up a smoke, relaxed and casual while he checked out something that was most likely turning out nothing but a minor glitch on the norm.

Well, if that was how it was gonna be played, Sands might as well take advantage. These conversations always ran a little smoother and more direct with El out of earshot, and he wanted this over so's he could be sitting by the radio with a coffee before the afternoon rain shower came due and drowned out half his surroundings in pounding rattle and swish. Lomas had had his break to let the steam out long enough.

Elbow on the table, Sands leaned in towards the monotonous flow of words, waving a hand in front of him to swat them away like a fly. "You know, there are more pro-active ways of dealing with your problem," he said, gliding his speech confident and smooth over the torrent. "You need him out of the way so someone a little more... amenable to your interests can take his place. Just because the guy's clean, doesn't mean the plan's got to be written off. You only need to make it look as if he's got some mud trailing around the edges." Sands shrugged, quick and dismissive. "Or depending how fast you need things to happen, you could always arrange to remove him less indirectly."

Silence, the almost audible tick-tick-tick of a brain straining top speed and still laughably slow, and Sands reached careful and obvious for his pocket, stripped the plastic from a pack of cigarettes and lit one through the gap. He didn't particularly need one right now, but it always made a useful stage prop. He sucked the smoke back deep through his lungs, the flow of it smooth and alive in his throat, good even when he wasn't strung out tight for it.

Lomas scraped his chair in an inch or so closer to the table, and this was when the real game hit the starter. "Suppose I like your suggestion." Voice quick and quiet, not secretive and attention-attracting, just low enough to be practical. Business mode on, the one place Lomas actually carried some steel and scored some points. "I don't see a reason I'd need you for it."

Sands matched his tone and the speed of his words, speaking round the filter rather than delay by lifting it away. "You don't know the right people to approach for this kind of work. If something goes wrong, the burn follows the trail of spilled gasoline and ends up right back at your door. Employing the services of a middle-man adds a layer of fire-proofing - you never even meet the contractors."

"So now you think it won't work."

Sands stuck out his lower lip and blew smoke up towards the ceiling, the heated tang of it vivid and rough at his nose as he half-smiled. "Let's just say I've learned from experience that even the best plans can use a get-out, just in case."

Lomas snorted - it would have been more effective if it wasn't just a dramatisation of his natural breathing pattern. "And what about you if something goes wrong? Why would you take on the risk?"

Sands shrugged. "I disappear. Not quite so easy for the man with the four kids and the sweetly-padded job he's so attached to." He flicked his fingers towards the ashtray alongside his saucer and arched his eyebrows to the limit. "And don't forget, you'll be paying me well for it."

"If I decide to pay you at all."

Sands just let the corners of his lips slide upwards and rolled the cigarette slow between his thumb and fingertips. Lomas was all set to bite, whether he'd admit it yet or not.

Not that it was going to make any difference, since Cuevas would be out of his job in a few months at most either way. Morales was going to take the election and drop-kick the old firm into a lengthy exile - the polls weren't telling it that way yet, but they'd come around. And that result would be adding yet another layer of insulation between Sands and any official representatives of his dear old Uncle Sam and the rest of the family back home. If Sands could make a little cash and find a little fun along the way, well, that just sprinkled the sugar layer over the top.

Lomas pushed his chair out from the table - well back in a drawn-out grating squeak, meeting apparently over - hauling himself upright with his usual level of grace, table quivering hard beneath Sands' elbow, and the door pushed open from outside, footsteps over the street noise, El; El sliding back through the room and into place at the bar, smooth, light, unhurried, everything good. Scrape of Lomas' sole as he turned to watch before his attention and his head came back to Sands. "I might be in touch," he said as his goodbye gesture. He'd offered Sands a hand to shake at one of the early meetings, obvious from the swinging movement-pause, but a table apart was quite close enough for Sands. There were one or two places being blind really did give a guy an easy ticket.

Sands drew a final long kick of smoke back into his lungs as Lomas walked away, then screwed the rest of the cigarette into the ashtray. "I'll be expecting you," he said to nobody in particular, though El would be listening.

He swallowed the last of his coffee - too sweet, but he'd been having too much fun stringing Lomas out with the sugar to stop - and slid to his feet, steady and confident through the bar, El drifting into place beside and slightly behind.

Sands stopped in the open doorway, let the noise of the street settle into his head, the heat and humidity wrapping close and clinging round his body. Sound filtered to find the gap in the passing feet, the cane snapped out before him as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

It irritated him, having to use it, every fucking time, the click-click-click of it on stone, the swinging rhythm in his wrist that had eased unnoticed into something natural when it was the most viciously artificial thing a person could ever have to fucking do, but they'd left the car too far down the street for him to gamble on an unobstructed stroll. The movements of his legs felt dragging, cautious, scaled down from the mariachi's pace, but the cane only took a category three storm to his personality construct. Continually trotting after El like an eager and hyper-obedient puppy would wreak devastation on his image more like a level five.

Sands picked up on the rumours that did the rounds; half the people who mattered weren't entirely sure he wasn't faking at least some of the vision loss. Sands would have enjoyed shooting for more than half, but there were some genuine practical limitations to what he could achieve.

El tripped the locks when he was a few feet from the car - Sands carried keys as spares in case of problems, but why go fishing through his pockets when he was never gonna get to really use them? He didn't touch the bodywork, reached right for the handle, found metallic expanse smooth and barely curved beneath the glove anyway, fuck, swept his fingers down, curling to grip. An inch high this time. A bitch to judge allowing for some variable amount of kerb depth, but it would have looked smooth enough to anyone who didn't score an El in observation skills.

He swung himself into his seat, cane slipped down underneath, and El was inside seconds after him, firing up the engine and pulling away. They were moving down the street, city-speed, smooth with the steady flowing traffic, and El wasn't saying anything, no light words to explain away his little disappearing moment back there.

Not something that was going to be tossed out and buried in a sentence then.

If four minutes in the car wouldn't be enough to cover it, Sands wasn't going to kick that conversation off either. He never liked having a discussion interrupted at an unpredictable point; everything flowed so much smoother when it was his choice whether or not the other guy got time to think.

He was starting to want that damned smoke now, but he'd killed the habit of lighting up in succession a while back, and it wasn't one he'd be inviting back home. He buzzed his window down a few inches, let the breeze in - hot and thick with the stench of engine fumes, but the air-con stank of stale plastic and he liked the rush of real air, whistling past his ear and over his throat, tugging through his hair.

Sands already had a man in mind for the Lomas job - he'd put the feelers out this afternoon, get past the tedious theoretical aspect of the negotiations. Then when Lomas had kept him waiting long enough to satisfy his ego and took the offer, it would all be in place and ready to run. It was going to be an interesting race to get both commission and payment completed before the polls tipped Morales' way and Lomas backed out. And even more interesting to see if Lomas could contain his temper when he realised he'd taken an entirely pointless risk and been screwed out of the round thirty thousand.

Life was working pretty well for Sands right now. And given where he'd found himself a couple of years back, that was actually quite a statement.

He had a sharp and reliable back-up, a good lay and a still-interesting-to-play-with challenge all wrapped up in one Mariachi-shaped package, which was a jetstream high improvement over having to deal with three separate people for his range of kicks. He had cash building up fast in a variety of places, mostly because El refused to spend anything more than basic living expenses. Sands suspected it wasn't doing much for the mariachi's pride, the experience of living off of someone else's earnings, which was amusing when Sands had existed mostly through El's largesse for some nine months after the Day of the Dead and never cared a rat's prick about it.

El knew when to shut the hell up and keep out of the way, and was more than happy to spend an entire day in one room with the guitar and a pencil. Sands had never come across a woman who didn't resent being told to piss off and go entertain herself when he was busy. He tired fast of making meaningless apologies and he wasn't a flowers and chocolates kind of guy, and thankfully El didn't want either. The guitar was a pain in the ass for confusing his dictation software, but a few closed doors between them solved that inconvenience well enough. And sometimes through the deals, El would catch something Sands just couldn't, a quick detail relayed back in the car that tipped him to a potential problem ahead of time.

His current arrangements suited him just fine. He didn't like them being changed around without notice.

He closed the window as El pulled into the garage, engine throbbing loud off the concrete through his head before it stuttered and died in a rattle of keys.

El was out of the car before Sands had retrieved the cane, echoes from the sharp clunk of the door and the fading strides. Sands flicked his cane out right to find the wall, landmark for his position in the world, again as a double check on the first stair, then tucked it under his arm as he walked up confident to where El was jingling at the lock.

El was inside by the time Sands got there, moving fast over to one of the closets and hauling open the door to smack back against the wall. Sands lounged himself over the chair near the doorway, stretched out his feet to cross at the ankles, and slung an arm along the wooden back. Tipped his head into the sounds as El rooted around deep in the shelves.

"So what was with the sudden urge to take a leak?"

Pause before the answer, an in-breath, briefest halt in the rustling. "I always had you covered." El was half inside the cupboard, hollow-bouncing words reflected back, but he shaped the tones evenly, gave it some low sincerity instead of snapping it out the way this mood of his usually talked.

"I know." If he didn't, he would've been considerably more pissed about it.

El was dragging something from the closet, weight scraping big over the chipboard of a high shelf, dropping it to the floor with a soft whumph.

Travel bag.

Sands hadn't planned on going anywhere for a while yet.

"I got a call."

That was new - El's cell ran more along the lines of a security precaution than a phone. "Must've been something interesting."

"From Lorenzo." Oh, and there was a name dredged up from the ocean floor with the limpets. Sands hadn't wasted brain-space on either of the sidekicks since they'd parted ways that last trip to Mexico. "Somebody's looking into them," El said. "Somebody who's also been asking questions about me."

So finally someone had strung all the beads together in a row and made a necklace. It had taken longer than it should have.

Sands swung his feet round further, more of his weight on the chair back, head turned direct the Mariachi's way.

"There's a couple of things you should take into consideration before you go rushing off."

"Like what?"

"You do realise Lorenzo's perfectly capable of dealing with his own issues."

"So am I. He still helps when I ask. What's next on this list?"

Sands had never felt the need to get all in-someone's-face and overdramatic to get a point across. He'd always found threats worked just as well quiet and from a distance. "You're not going wandering off on any world tours without inviting me along."

The scraping and rustling from the closet stopped, El's feet turning to cross the floor towards him. "I know." Touch of a thumb dry at his jaw, still, and then gone. "I've known that for a long time now."

Right. And he'd waited for Sands to offer instead of asking because Sands had already told him he hated that fucking camel shit country and wasn't going back. Jesus, El could be tiresome when he tried to play noble. "Good. I've got a meeting at four I really shouldn't skip out on if we want to find life quite as pleasant when we get back, and I'll need to make a few calls. We can be on a plane early evening."

"I'll be packed when you're done."

"Clean up too, just in case. How long will we be gone?"

"I don't know."

Only what he'd expected, but it did fuck all for his planning. Looked like Lomas was wriggling off the line this time, though he'd sweat rainforests through a few shirts till he got it figured out. "I'll clear the rent for three months. Which airport?"

"Acapulco."

"Tasteful. At least I'll fit right in." If the sidekicks were holed up in tourist central, maybe they'd drunk their way through the lottery win already.

"We only need the tickets. Lorenzo can see to the rest."

Sands wasn't sure he liked the implied delay on the guns, but it would be simpler to avoid any direct dealings in Mexico where there were alternatives. "Fine. Just make sure he puts the emphasis on good old-fashioned bullets instead of flame-throwers. I don't plan on sharing in his fetishes."

"I think he knows what I like." Layer of buried humour back in El's voice, and they'd been grabbing weaponry from one another long enough now that whatever worked for El would be familiar and functional to Sands, if not his first choice.

Sands thought about some of the other things El liked, and raised eyebrows high in his direction in case he turned. "Oh, I doubt he's got the full picture," he said lightly. "At least, not yet."

Another flashed break in the rustles as El threw him some kind of Look, but he didn't have anything verbal to add to it. Sands grabbed his laptop from the nightstand, took it through to the main living area away from El's packing, and fired it up.

He had a couple of files close to ready - not as tidy as he normally liked things at that simple level, but the basics were all in there. He'd print those out and slip someone the cash to get them delivered - Lariño worked out well, he knew just enough about Sands not to get too interested in the contents of packages. His recipients probably wouldn't pay the full account for incomplete info, but what he had would keep his reputation from skidding off full speed down the avalanche slope with this sudden cut-and-run.

He opened up a text file, skimmed fingertips over the edges of the key rows as he worked out a brief cover note to go with the files. He didn't like reliance on the dictation software, the unpleasant aspect of having to speak his plans aloud grating in the edges of his brain. He was gaining efficiency at basic typing, sliding and jabbing faster at keys, the words machine-read back at him through the earphone to check for errors while his fingers formed the few vague sentences - business delayed, he'd be available to collect more detail when he returned if they were still interested. His mind steered his hands across the layout, tracked the stumbling, badly pitched digi-speech for his mistakes, and still more than enough left over to think.

Mexico.

Fucking Christ. It wasn't someplace he'd ever wanted to see on his list of vacation hotspots, and he'd thought he'd bleached it out of existence entirely back when the Mariachi had baulked at the idea of a trip home. Not that any one of these Jesus-sucking Latin piss-holes rose cliff-like above the others in standards, but outside of Mexico there were fewer people looking for him who didn't have paid employment in mind.

He could think of places he'd like to visit less, even now, though it wasn't the lengthiest list - mostly the kind of countries where they still hacked off people's fucking hands, because he wasn't ever putting himself in line for losing any more body parts.

He could've sat this one out easy enough, no obligations; could've stayed at this table with its plasticised wood veneer smooth beneath his sleeves, surrounded by known entities and limitless knowledge that only needed him to pinpoint the right apple and reach out to pluck it. But no part of his ideas on entertainment included waiting around for weeks or months, trying to figure out if El was just keeping busy or if he'd finally gotten himself killed. From what Sands figured of the sidekicks, they suffered from the bullet-induced gun-happies just as much as El did. Somebody really ought to stick around to slam the brakes on any truly ass-cracked plans those three were likely to be laying down. Sure, El talked a big line about not wanting to keep on shooting people as the main course of his day, but it was amusing just how fast that could be turned around once he got to doing it, and –

His fingers froze, locked onto the keys, long, confused 'o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o' stuttering from the voice synth till he jerked them away.

It hadn't figured into his thinking, not even a sidelong glimpse of it.

It hadn't occurred to him, not till right now, that El might have chosen to stick around with his old friends and not come back.

The thought pissed him off, but he was more pissed that he hadn't considered it, that he'd just assumed, when he didn't assume anything.

Christ.

It wasn't fear at the thought of being without El - he'd been there, checked out the scenery and gotten the stamps in his passport to prove it, and he wasn't planning any revisits. He'd do just fine on his own if he had to. But he had a head full of good reasons for not wanting to.

Every aspect of his business dealings included calculations of risk, assessments of betrayal and double-cross, the ways out of the potential trap. El factored into most of the decisions he made, right from whether to take on a job for a particular client, and he was pivotal to his plans extending months ahead. Without the mariachi, every meeting had to be in specific locations, known interiors with paid eyes to tip him off to aberrations and familiar surroundings if he had to get out, a limitation that cost him both sources and paid requests. El gave him flexibility and scope, knowledge and speed, the ability to learn faster and more reliably, and Sands hadn't stopped to consider for the longest time what El might be taking home from his end of the deal.

It had been easy at first, and entirely deliberate. He'd given El revenge, a focus, a reason, the undeniable lure of everything El had been pretending wasn't missing from his pitiful excuse for an existence.

And then he'd taken it away again, sliced the man from both his home and his fight.

There was unquestionably some aspect of loyalty keeping El close, a factor that went a long way with a man like that once it was triggered - its threads wove all around him, so dense they were almost visible, binding him, obligation biting deep and spreading through like a cancer. Once on board the Mariachi's protection list, it took a lot of effort for someone to get himself kicked back off again, though it wasn't entirely impossible - the notorious dead brother had proved that. But El's mariachi tag-team had that same loyalty too, and he didn't stay with them.

Not yet.

The quick, rising whine of a zipper buzzed through from the other room. El was done with one of the bags.

Sands had lost the keys, the layout before him when he dragged his hand away, and he traced it into his world with fingers; following edges to set the back key into place, tapping with an index through the count of o's he'd notched up. Set the voice reading through from the start again to check, catching the two stray letters he'd skipped, and worked on to the end of the message. The keys dipped solid and smooth beneath his fingertips, damp from his skin, click-click-click under the digi-speech running in his head.

He queued the jobs up to print, two copies of the cover note, one each of the files, the inkjet kicking off its first rattle-whirr behind him as his hands found the envelopes in his desk. He called up Lariño and got the mailbox, left a message to stop by before five. El would be around if he showed while Sands was at the meet.

He lit himself a cigarette, fingers automatically drifting to check for the ashtray on the corner of the desk. He sat loose in the chair, head tipped back against the rest, the invasive, erratic clatter of the printer flooding his ears, occasional clicks and soft scrapes of El's packing from the bedroom low beneath it.

He sucked the smoke back long, shaped his mouth and exhaled quick, short to huff out smoke rings that would float across the desk. He'd spent hours one lazy afternoon too hot even for bugs perfecting the art on Steve Holden's back porch. Steve always had the best weed.

He couldn't see them now, but Sands didn't believe in letting a skill fade away once it was acquired.

In his head, the thoughts were already starting to run, sniff, scatter and reform.

Flying was a bitch.

It hadn't ever been on his list of fun things to do, not since he was a kid and leeching his kicks out of take-off, the rising whine of engines and the push back into his seat, and it wasn't getting any better when he couldn't watch the movies or read a book. Worse when the turbulence fucked with his stomach, made him spend most of the flight wanting to heave, and choking it down 'cos he wasn't gonna puke in a sick bag and he wasn't gonna go stumbling down the aisle tripping over feet while he groped for the bathroom either. Music only filled so many of the holes in his head, and the headphones gripped him in a reverberating pound that swelled through his skull if he wore them right through the flight.

He fucking hated explaining to the dicktards at security that no, he wouldn't be taking off his shades so they could check his face against the one in his passport, not unless they wanted to be held responsible for the nightmares of half the snot-sniffing, whining brats in line.

The taxi ride round the tourist pisshole that was Acapulco in the mid-fall heat was no improvement over the planes. The driver they'd gotten was the real chatty type, wanting to know who they were, how long they were staying, pushing a card at them for if they needed another ride. El fenced off most of his conversation in terse replies - they were staying with friends and no, they wouldn't need another cab - leaving Sands silent, his head pressed to the vinyl by its own weight. Vibrations through the metal from road and suspension prickled at his temple, the heat and noise of a city afternoon notching up the tightness settled behind his non-existent eyes. Advil held back the pain, the reaction to loss of sleep, but it couldn't switch off the racing feet tap-tap-tapping in his head, scampering like rats.

Once he caught a thought, set a trail, his mind tracked it down to the end, through every permutation, every split in the road, setting weight and chance to each possible route till he got it figured.

There'd been a while there after the Day of the Dead when Sands' own brain had done a kick-ass job of trying to fuck him over. He'd hear sounds, vague uncertain shuffles, and his mind would trip off in a fit of the crazies, invent all kinds of shit behind them - the quick snick outside that was the flick of a safety, the soft scraping in the quiet of the early hours that was someone picking at the window catches, Guevara coming for him with drugs, coming for him with drills to smile while he screamed and screamed, and he lay and shivered, trapped when he could barely stand and he couldn't see, the grip of an M-11 branded into his palm.

It had eased up some once he'd heard the beetle-licking bastard-fucker was well and truly dead. But the last of it hadn't faded for a long time after.

There were afternoons in summer when the rain hammered around the apartment for hours, the low sounds beneath lost entirely and the frequencies that came through all distorted like running paint. It was worse when he first moved to some new place, always the local oddities he needed to pin down and file. He counted himself fucking Olympic medal standard on the auditory perception scale - he'd heard the line about how the other senses heightened to compensate, and it was all so much cracked out camel shit. It was nothing but practice and concentration, and he figured he'd scored a little higher on the motivation front there than most people who found themselves suddenly blind one day. But it didn't matter how good he was, he was never gonna be able to catch and filter everything. And there was still that small place tucked up in the back of his brain at lizard-level, way out of reach of his logic, that insisted strange sounds in the dark had to be monsters, even if they were the human kind.

Nothing was ever gonna come even close to those moments of not being able to trust himself, to not knowing what he thought he knew. But he wasn't all cosied up with spending big chunks of his time second and third-guessing El by this stage of the play either.

He didn't need El - he'd proved that once, and he didn't feel inspired to do it again. Wanting - well, that was an entirely different proposition. Sands had made it a lifelong principle to get what he wanted, and keep it if he wanted, too.

The unfortunate downside to that was when the dice didn't roll with the plan, it went wrong in spectacularly bad ways.

Soft rustle from El, the creak of the seat under shifting weight, a quick brush of fingers at his sleeve, and Sands straightened, angled his head to the window for the sounds. Only a few cars passing now, low-murmuring engines buried in the rush of wind; nobody to hear on the streets, occasional high, excited squeals of kids that carried, a short series of barks before the mutt was quieted, fast. Residential neighbourhood, one of the better ones.

The cab pulled up, presumably at the address El had given in La Sabana, a suburb sprawling in the hills above the main squeeze of the city. Sands' hand went straight to the door, which he'd had plenty of time to surreptitiously explore, finding the handle and stretching out a leg slow, like it was stiff after the journey, till he touched sidewalk. The cane was packed away in his bag - he was stuck with being an American, but Mexico wasn't the place to go around advertising anything else about himself that might bring in added interest.

Sun slanted warm across one side of his face, the drone of the cab's engine fading back from his head in the wash of breeze. Only a slight salt hint beneath the hydrocarbon fumes, most of it stripped bare by the miles travelled over land, but fresh, unconfined, missing the stink of too many bodies cramped up in too small a space. He took a few steps along the sidewalk, his head tilting into the air, his mind running background checks on the voices further along the street, chattering about the mundanities of groceries, while El hung back to pay the driver. Sands felt he'd already been paid well enough with his turgid little life - if Sands had been left to deal with that irritating chatter alone, he would've shot him ten blocks back and walked.

Controlled thwumps as heavy bags met the sidewalk, the click-tap of the inflexible guitar case, and then the trunk slammed behind him, taxi pulling away seconds later in an elderly rattle.

El's steps moved his way, heavier, weighted, and Sands reached out to take the bag that brushed against his leg. The address they'd given was a few blocks over from the place they were headed for, and Sands' feet were drawn automatically after El's, the sidewalk smooth under his sole every time, unblemished by cracks or weeds. The breeze pushed through his nose as they walked, veering over his skin with every side street, bringing the sharp scents of greenery and flowers, the occasional heavier aromas of cooking. Low voices and music drifted from open windows as they passed, the rare too-loud screech of a TV, the heat pricking over his whole body in a way that lifted the wire from round his skull, no longer trapped in a metallic box with strangers and staring eyes.

"We're here." Fifty-four paces from the last intersection, and El turned right, Sands following up... nine steps and along a path that curved, pointless and annoying. He stopped when El did, waiting behind as he tapped on the door. The pattern was barely forced, not enough that anyone passing would recognise it as a signal.

The feet from inside came fast, close to running, the door flung back to smack and rattle against the inner wall. "El! Jesus, you're here!" It was Lorenzo who'd shown up, and he stepped out right in El's face, all cloth sounds, some kind of arm-clasping or hugging going on. "Shit, it's been too fucking long."

"I know," El said simply, but the words smiled wide. "How have you been?"

"Hey, you know me." The laughter was bubbling up behind his voice, Lorenzo the big eager Labrador, missing only the sound of his tail thumping the floor twice a second. "Quite the set-up we got here now, huh?"

"Well, it's an improvement on the last place, I suppose." El's dry humour bounced in his exaggerated inflection. "Where's Fideo?"

"Asleep right now, I guess." Some of the enthusiasm had dipped out of Lorenzo's voice.

Sands had never taken well to being ignored, especially when he was having a shitty day. "Why don't you just go right ahead and say he's drunk?" he drawled, pointedly sounding as bored by all this as he felt.

"What's he doing here?" Even when Lorenzo was forced to acknowledge Sands, he was still talking to El.

"He offered to come," El said evenly.

"El, you didn't tell your hosts I was tagging along for the ride? Surely that wife of yours must have taught you something about manners." Sands smiled through the following silence to show close on his full set of teeth over El's shoulder. "So good to see you again. Any friend of El's, isn't that how it goes?"

"Don't expect that to cut both ways, not when this shit we've got going on is all down to you."

"No." That was El pushing in through the pause before Sands could launch his offensive. "It wasn't his choice. The fault there is mine."

"Whatever. Looks to me like when he shows up, it all goes to hell, every time."

"Oh, I'm only ever the messenger." Sands held his smile wide open through the words. "What the people around me do, well, that's entirely their own choice."

"And somebody fishes the guys who made the choices you didn't like outta the river."

Sands dipped his head a little and lifted his eyebrows over the shades - his evening was shaping up to be considerably more entertaining than the rest of his day. "So what exactly happens to the people who do things that aren't to your personal taste?"

"Can we come in and talk about this with some food?" El had that quirky humour tinge back in his tones - Sands wondered how long it would hold out. "They didn't have much on the plane."

"Sure, just dump that crap of yours behind the door for now."

Sands decided the invite extended to him, even if reluctantly, and followed El up another small step through the doorway, the cool of shadow dropping over his skin as the foot-echoes closed in around him. Just ahead, the ringing tap as El set the guitar case down on tile, followed by the softer thud of the bag.

"You got much in that case?" Lorenzo asked.

"A very bad, cheap guitar," El said, and Sands could imagine the expression that went with the words. "They get suspicious about people who ship empty ones."

"You're clean?" Lorenzo sounded as appalled as Sands was by the situation. He wasn't exactly unarmed right now in a technical sense, since there were plenty of things he could pass through the scanners that had dual functionality and would dispose of people quite well with the right application, but none of them gave him the sense of security that went with several well-maintained guns and rounds in the chambers.

"Had to be," El said with a quick shrug. "We came straight from the airport."

"Fuck, well the food can wait, come on through and get kitted out. I've got some shit back here I know you'll like."

"We both need weapons," El pointed out.

The pause was there, but only brief, the rustle as the kid glanced Sands' way. "Yeah, we got enough for two," he said. He moved off deeper into the house, feet tapping light and even, El behind him. Sands left his bag by the door with El's, keeping the laptop case with him as he followed. Tile all through the length of the hallway, smooth and ringing under his heels; no change in footing as the walls and echoes fell back into the sensation of space around him, a stronger smell of cleaning fluid and something that lingered, spicy. Lorenzo jingled keys and rattled a door, heavy with silent hinges.

"You keep your weapons in the kitchen?" El asked, trademark desert-dry.

"Why not? Nobody's gonna look for them there." The kid got his sense of humour back fast, didn't stay pissed for long. Maybe he was just that happy to have El show up to help him out. "Handguns, take whatever sparks your burner, there's ammo and clips for the lot on the top two shelves."

Two more El-steps before the low metallic clicks started - he never could keep his fingers off of anything his eyes liked. "Thirty-eights - Glock G28, Walther PPK/S, Smith and Wesson 67." His voice was muffled by the enclosing doors as he ran through the list for Sands' benefit, altered more by the thickening of accent with the shift of his brain into unthinking assessment, the pure speed of thought encumbered by the necessity for words. "Nine millimetre - Sig P239, Tac-Five, Beretta 92FS, G17C, G34 -"

"Somebody likes their Glocks," Sands observed, resting the laptop on the floor against his leg and noting the dips as El slipped further into the shorthand.

"Many people do," El said evenly, and Sands wondered just which of the list was rattling through its action under his fingers, distinctive series of slide-snicks as he worked it. Smooth, efficient sounds under the faint oily tang of weapons, under El's continued listing of the nines moving into the .45s., and Sands' own hands were starting to quiver with the possibility of touch. Several nice weapons on the supermarket shelf, make a choice and he'd have them loaded and with him, everything right back in its place. "Desert Eagle .50 AS..."

His mind jumped and caught on the glitch in El's recital.

"What the hell would these idiots want with the Eagle?" Sands drawled the words out long to carry across the room, giving the derision that little extra kick. "Thirty rounds and your arms are shaking too hard to shoot straight, if the fucker hasn't already jammed when you can't hold the recoil."

"Christ, we don't use that piece of shit. That one we keep around more as a souvenir." Sands let his head glide Lorenzo's way, following the words, the something there in the kid's voice that was actually interesting, something dark and viciously satisfied that warranted some future poking to test just how deep and wide it ran.

But that could stay stored away for later fun. "How many G17s?"

"Just one," El said. "There's a pair of the 34s."

Fuck. It was so much easier to keep track of one style of weapon, one size of magazine and calibre of round, instead of reaching to remember what the hell he had in his hand in the middle of a firefight. "Too big." Pity, he would have liked the higher mag capacity. "How about the Sigs?"

"We've got a full set of the 239s," Lorenzo offered. It was gone already, that licentious pleasure behind his words, a tendency Sands had grown very familiar with, spending the last couple of years around El. "Picked up four as a lot, new pieces."

"Here." Sands swung back, instant to El's voice, the quick movement, the something in the air, his hands moving out rib level to catch. Touch of solidity out of nothing, and his fingers closed down with only a barest fumble to drag it into his body, the ridged smoothness against his gloves hitting his brain with the flash of grease scent. He stripped off the gloves and tucked them deep into his pocket, metal cold and unbalanced within his palm as his fingers slid over to find safety and action and empty grip. He checked the chamber with a pinkie tip and cycled the action through a couple of times, fast and easy with no slickness or stickiness at the mechanism - somebody kept it ready to go. El threw him the clip, and it slapped into place with a satisfying double click, all awkwardness dropping away from the weapon as it slid into equilibrium and purpose. The weight of it curled perfect within his palm, the guard settled against his index, fluid and natural wrapped into his skin.

He stretched his other arm out behind him, closed fist to find a countertop - no prints, not here, not anywhere - and it was almost an effort to reach out and let go, to set the pistol away from him, back into the void.

And he was letting himself slip into complete fucking idiocy, because the gun wasn't going anywhere, it would still be right there when he wanted it. He snagged the second Sig from El and ran through the routine, checking and loading against the background of rattles and snicks as El did the same for his own choice of weapons.

"Holsters?" El asked.

"Hey, did you think this was an amateur set up you were walking into?" Lorenzo grinned as he rattled keys at another door and poked around, tossing something to El, caught with a slap and a low metallic ring. "Catch." That last was spoken in Sands' direction, and the kid didn't throw right, didn't have the quick, distinct tell in his motion, but the leather whistled and flapped across the gap, and Sands snapped his hand out right to feel it wrap onto his wrist. He traced the arrangements of straps and buckles - double shoulder holster for underarm carry - and stripped off his jacket to wriggle in and adjust, circling his shoulders to check the feel of it after he slid the Sigs into place along his ribs.

Now he felt in a marginally more reasonable position to be taking on the stinking open drain El called home.

"So what else are you hiding back there?" Sands’ fingers worked the buckles, adjusting the straps into the right fit for the weight of the guns, his mind running ahead to other possibilities. "Compact autos?"

"We picked a few up along the way," Lorenzo said, light steps tapping across the room. "Couple of MAC-10s, Micro Uzis, an OTS-33 –"

"Any with silencers?"

The keys stopped, abrupt, the door still sealed. "What the fuck d'you want with a silencer? It screws the accuracy, and only cuts it back to loud three rooms away instead of three blocks."

Sands raised his head slow, angled to let the lenses stare straight on. He could almost feel the shiver-flash across the room, the instant when the kid actually thought instead of letting his mouth run.

The jingle returned, and the swish of air forced aside. "A couple came with silencers as part of the deal. Best of the lot's probably the Beretta."

"The 93R?" Only three round bursts, and he'd never used one, but the reputation said reliable and easy to strip. It was another nine mil too, which kept the ammo simple. He spread his lips, curved thin. "Pass it along."

Familiar boots his way across the tile, and the gun came from El, the dimpled touch of a grip to his fingertips; no tossing an unfamiliar weapon whose weight and configuration were only theory, with the option or not of a stock poking out six inches from the back. Not, it turned out, as he outlined the length of barrel into silencer, under to the folding fore-grip and guard, and back around to the gaping emptiness that waited for a magazine. He found safety and clip release in the obvious places as he explored, and the chamber was usefully designed to be checked for a round by touch without having to pull back the slide - the convenience of a weapon built for special forces and designed with night work in mind. He also found what had to be the selection lever for single shot to burst fire, but he didn't have a fucking clue which setting was which. He'd check that with El later when the kid wasn't around. The middle of a fight would be a bad time to be experimenting, with no idea how much of a kick to expect.

El passed him the clip, the size and weight of it consistent with the twenty capacity his head dredged up from the vaults, and he smacked it home but didn't chamber the round. Unfolded the fore-grip, turned and swung the gun up towards the door behind him - inevitably nose-heavy with the silencer, probably a nicely balanced weapon without. One of the smallest auto-burst pistols around, easy to conceal even with the little something extra screwed on the front. He smiled along its length, feeling the call of it through his finger, the burn to find a reason and test it out.

"Nice, huh?"

He kept the smile in place as he turned Lorenzo's way. "I think it might do."

"There's another if you want the pair."

"Even better." He clicked the round through to the chamber and laid it aside on the counter, taking and setting up the second Beretta.

"You said you had something I might like?" El prompted.

"Hell, yeah." There was a grin in Lorenzo's voice, and a slap as El caught something heavy. "Remington twelve gauge over/under, all shaved down ready to go."

It always came back to the shotguns with El Mariachi - Sands could never get why he fetishised the damn things so much. If he had to use one, he should at least go pump-action. "That's an expensive piece of kit, El. Better pick one of the pistols next time you want something to whack a guy over the head with."

"I think prices are higher for the ones that still have the shoulder stock and most of the barrel," El said, over the distinctive click-snap of a break-open action.

"It's shorter than a side-by-side, easier to hide," Lorenzo said. "Just the one sighting plane, so it's more accurate."

"Only the lateral accuracy," El pointed out. "It pays for it in the elevation."

"El, the last time I checked, you didn't point those things at too many ducks." Sands slapped the Beretta's mag to check it was fully seated. "Elevation's not your issue."

"It is when I'm aiming at a man on a roof."

"The difference doesn't exactly come into the calculation when you're waving it around in your hand instead of using the sights. I think you're still going to hit him."

"If you can miss with that, it's way past time to take the pension," Lorenzo agreed. "Quit being stubborn, El, you only do it for the hell of it."

"Set in his ways," Sands agreed. "It's a symptom of age."

"I'm not so much older than you," El said. "And it is a good gun."

"Just not the one you're used to, right, we got it." Lorenzo sounded about sixteen when he laughed and teased that way. It was going to be interesting, unravelling the triggers, the differences between this version of the kid and the one who kept weapons as tasteful mementos.

"Shells?" El's attempt to divert the chit-chat away from his idiosyncracies was obvious, but it worked on Lorenzo well enough.

"We've got a few hundred rounds of tactical buckshot laid in."

"Ah, yes, tight patterning and low recoil - the optimal choice for home defence," Sands drawled.

"I don't remember you objecting too much to my choice of protection when they were needed," El said.

"I objected all the goddamn time, you just didn't listen."

"What is it you Americans say about fixing things that aren't broken?"

"Just because you mostly get away with that crap you pull doesn't stop it being stupid."

"You would have done so much better, I suppose."

Sands tipped his head and grinned. "Most of the time, I wouldn't have been there at all. I'd have found someone else to do the job for me."

"That only works when there are people like me around." El was running the shotgun through its action beneath the words. "If everyone was like you, nobody would do anything."

"But everyone isn't like me, and I adapt to the circumstances. You inherited a guitar case full of guns, I found myself with some small skill in persuasion - we both learned to make good use of what we got." Sands swivelled on the ball of one foot to face the last he’d heard of Lorenzo - the kid had stayed quiet all through the exchange, there only in the light movement through the room before El snicked the cartridges into place and snapped the Remington closed. Sands had never been all that fond of a silent observer, and he liked them even less now, with nothing in the spaces for him to read. "I’m sure Lorenzo here will agree that you tend to become a little over-enthusiastic at times."

Lorenzo rustled briefly, and he spoke fast and relaxed. "El, Fideo – they’re both nuts. I gave up on saying it years back."

It would have been entirely sensible if it had been true, but Sands didn’t believe the kid had given up on anything at all. All the detail Sands had gathered when El had hooked up with Lorenzo in Culiacán, everything he’d heard when he met him at Honaker’s warehouse - it all said there wasn’t much of an idealist left in the kid, but those last, lingering remnants of optimism were tied to his friends.

"If I'm so crazy, what does that make you for coming along?" El smiled. Leather creaked and brushed as he pulled it tight around him and slid the shotgun away.

"A sucker, yeah, you think I don't know? Somebody's got to look after the idiots." The grin was back, oozing through Lorenzo's words. "Now that's got the personal protection angle covered, we can start on that case of yours. You wanna take a guess where we keep the real offensive stash?"

El shook his head, the irregular brush of hair along his shoulders. "Later. We won't need more till we've got a plan, and I still want to eat."

Quick rustle and squeak of shoe on tile from Lorenzo. "Sure thing." He moved past Sands to the door, El following behind; Sands grabbed the laptop from the floor and trailed after. "I'll order in, it's easier. You can drag all that crap of yours out of my hallway and up to your room. Get the basics unpacked, take a shower if you want, and the food'll be here when you're done." Twelve steps from the kitchen doorway, and Sands swung his foot out right to brush against his bag as a double check before he bent to pick it up.

"You can take the room first right, top of the stairs," Lorenzo said in El's direction. "I'll get more sheets for him." Heavy emphasis giving the last word a kick, and it was interesting how fast the open hostility had come right back. The whole conversation held an amusing echo of El's slips early on, forgetting just how much he was supposed to hate Sands for the duration of any chat about the weapons. The kid suffered the same enthusiast's weakness for his subject, for someone else with the knowledge to share the love. "We only keep the one room ready, don't wanna encourage too many visitors."

"We only need one." El spoke up fast, before Sands could count in his own slow-drawled response to the kid's bitching, but he kept it neutral and light.

Sands wasn't surprised that El would push the point. It could be read the platonic way easy enough by two guys who knew what it was to fight and run, and Lorenzo's voice held no stresses when he answered. "Fine by me - less cleaning to fight with. I got rid of the maid when we heard we were being checked out."

"You didn't trust her?" El's voice instantly harder, built solid by layers of suspicion and threat.

"I'm pretty sure she was straight, but she could have been threatened. Pity - she was nice to have around, not just good at the cleaning." Sands amended his earlier speculations - obviously the sidekicks weren't running low on cash yet if the pretty boy was levelling his talents at the help.

"Didn't that maid of yours ever get just a little bit curious about all the locked cupboards full of guns?" he asked.

"We told her they were stuffed with paperwork, old records for the taxes. She was easy on the eye, not Einstein."

Sands smiled in the kid's direction, thin and tight. "You know, there's a wide body of evidence that people tend to aim for those at their own intellectual level when it comes to sex. How nice to see it holding true."

A single footstep, fast and heavy Sands' way before the movement froze. "You're in my house, you'd better watch what the fuck you say."

Sands angled his head, stayed with the smile. "And where is she now, this obliging maid of yours?"

"How the hell should I know? Home, most likely, with her two hot sisters and her hag of a mother."

El was rustling just behind Sands, bending, picking up his bag and the guitar case from the floor. "So there's a woman out there who knows everything there is to know about the inside of this place, gossiping her way through the local markets with no idea she could be a target." Sands dragged his lips back in shrunken and small, just a hint of twist at one edge. "She could have spilled her guts and be chilling on ice already, and you fuckmooks wouldn't know it because you're not keeping tabs."

"Yeah, and if we watched, we'd be dragging somebody's attention her way for sure."

"Which is why you were an idiot for having her here in the first place. Your foresight was even shorter than her skirts."

Lorenzo’s voice dropped and hardened. "You don’t know a fucking thing about her, or me."

Sands let the smile grow, slowly. "You just keep right on thinking that."

"Screw you, I think what I know."

El's feet were already on the first couple of stairs, so Sands lifted his eyebrows and turned to follow instead of answering, to count, to learn. How many stairs to the bend, how many above it, distance to the door of that first room on the right, all filed away and ordered almost unthinking now, the details of stair width and height and composition taking a little more concentration. It was always good to know in advance if stairs were solid, or if someone could shoot through from underneath.

El gave him the fast run-down of the room - enough furniture to be useful, not so much it was fucking annoying to avoid it all, just the way he liked it. They rearranged some to make it a closer fit to Sands' usual patterns, shifting a small table to the bedside as a nightstand. Sands unpacked his laptop and wound out the charger cord, soft drawn-out creak beside him as El sat on the edge of the nearest bed.

"Don't push too far," El said. "He's young, he will snap."

Sands smiled slightly as he re-zipped the case. "If he wants to kill me, he might find it trickier than he thought."

"It's not you I'm worried about."

This time he turned El's way as his smile stretched wider. "Nice to know you have faith in me."

"He wouldn't be trying to kill you," El said. "I'd have to beat you down before you got to him."

El wasn't wrong about that angle of it. If somebody came for Sands, he wasn't going to be swatting them off, or defending himself, he was going to be killing that bastard motherfucker before they got anywhere goddamn near. He wasn't ever going to find himself strapped to any fucking tables ever again.

Not that his reaction would have been any different two years ago; he just wasn't inclined to put the brakes on that way. If the kid was stupid enough to use violence without genuine intent, well, one day it really was going to be his funeral.

"And you'd do that," Sands said, flat.

"I'd hit you both and tie you up and sit on you if I had to." Another soft creak from the mattress under the shift of weight. "I'd prefer not to."

"Well, I hope you plan to have this same conversation with him, because I won't be taking any of your shit over something he starts." Sands held his face El's way for another second, before he crouched with outstretched hand, walls textured beneath his gloves as he felt for the socket.

"He knows how things stand," El said, and that deliberately wasn't answering what Sands had asked. "Three right."

Sands' fingers swerved, hard edge of plastic instantly there, flawless smooth contrast to the dry roughness of the wall that caught at the leather. He plugged in the cable, quick low bleep from the computer as the charge fired up. "Good. Then he won't be starting anything, and you don't need to lecture me."

"No lecture," El said. "Just the truth."

A truth that already had El threatening him when they'd been here maybe an hour. Sands twisted back to level El with the non-stare, expressionless and set. "Well, while we've got Honesty and Bluntly Forthright standing here in the middle of the room, let me tell you just how much you don't want to take that line of truth any further."

"I just don't want any of my friends to get hurt." El's fingers touched light at his cheek, and Sands pulled back and up onto his feet.

"Then you can tell your 'friends' that if anyone does, it won't be me." He turned, orienting himself for the doorway, and walked easily from the room.

So much for the shower option, but after his explorations of the room and the furniture-dragging session, they'd lost close on half an hour and the food would be showing up soon anyway. He counted his way down the stairs, and leaned against a wall in the hallway at the bottom. The only room he knew from here was the kitchen, and that would be a pointless trip, since nobody was cooking.

It was only a minute before boots tapped on the stairs behind him. El passed him, unspeaking, and Sands fell in a few steps behind, shadowing the uneven motion as El paused to check doorways.

"Hey, El." Lorenzo's voice came from along a ways, and muffled by wall. The kid had good ears, then; nice to know if he was gonna have to work with him. "Get your ass in here, I'm just gonna go grab us some plates, food should be right up." It was notable, that singular ass, but Sands decided to consider himself invited along too.

He let El take the lead, moving towards the words – Sands could have tracked it himself, but El would avoid any crap that got in the way of the direct route.

El turned into the obvious doorway and slowed, a smooth stop so Sands didn't run into him. "You should have warned me your tastes had changed, I'd have dressed for dinner," he said.

"You think I like this shit?" Sands supposed there'd be a face to go with the distaste in Lorenzo's voice. "I mostly eat in the kitchen, this is just a place to bring somebody I'd want to impress."

"You don't want to impress me?" El laid on the mock-hurt with the kid a bit thicker than his usual style.

"If I did, I wouldn't try it with furniture," Lorenzo grinned. "You said you were hungry so I ordered half the menu and figured we could use the table space."

"That sounds good, as long as the menu wasn't pizza."

"Nah, there's a restaurant down the hill - great place, they don't normally deliver, but the owner likes me."

"This owner, she would be female and forty?" El asked.

"Closer to fifty," Lorenzo said, the missing wink bright in his tone, "but damn, she can cook." His feet came for the doorway, pushing past Sands like he wasn't there to head off down the corridor, presumably hunting down the plates.

El pulled back a chair with an unmistakeable scrape, and Sands moved over to his left, reaching for the chair that would be there and finding the back at hip height. El was just as useful with a pistol with either hand, but he had better control of the shotgun kick with his right, and he liked that side clear.

Sands lifted his fingers to the table in front of him, finding its edges, its depth and weight, a solid carved wood that slid polished beneath his gloves. The cutlery and a glass were set out unevenly, tossed into an approximate place setting in a hurry, and he straightened them into his two hands' width square.

Footsteps from the hallway behind, tapping different, not the kid, and El was already moving, pushing back and up from the chair - but he was loose and easy, and the kid's steps were there too now, casual rhythm unbroken over the tiles.

"Fideo!" El laughed as the feet met the doorway. "I was starting to think you might be avoiding me."

A shuffle of shoe from Fideo, and he called back towards Lorenzo in the hallway, "Is he here or is that me?" Still not exactly sober then, and it wasn't just the half-joked words that said it; something too subtle to be called a slur, but there.

El-motion, fast, the two strides to cover the ground then the slap of body barrelling into body. "So does that prove to you I'm here?" El's grin was thousand-watt bright even to a blind man.

"Okay, okay, I believe you! Now get off of me." More sounds of cloth and feet as the two men untangled, then "Him too, huh?" It wasn't said with malice, or any kind of interest at all either way, just an observation made and filed. So the sidekicks hadn't reached a consensus of feeling on the subject of Sands after their last little meeting – that might be something fun to work with.

"El says he offered to come." Lorenzo's quote held enough hostility for the both of them, but Fideo didn't bother with an answer, just grabbed a chair across the table.

Oh, yes, definitely fun for the future.

"El also says you didn't go into a whole lot of detail when you put out the call." Sands was growing rapidly bored with the whole male bonding chit-chat deal. "So in the absence of food, how about you fill us in on what exactly we're walking into here?"

Silence of a few seconds, a couple of low rustles, enough for an exchange of looks and some agreement. Seemed like Lorenzo was elected spokesman, and as ever he aimed his voice at El. "That guy you offed the end of last year, he had fingers poking into just about every pie baking in Mexico, and some of his business friends weren't happy to find their arrangements fucked over. They've got prints from you that tell them El Mariachi, but that part they'd already figured. And they've got prints from him that go right along with a face and a name."

It wasn't any kind of surprise. Sands had briefly considered torching Honaker's storage before they left, but they'd still have lifted his prints from the plane or the dump they’d dragged him to in Chiapas, and even that much was only the back-up confirmation for the chit-chat of Honaker's surviving thugs who'd run out early on the party.

Christ, he was starting to feel like El. Kill one guy to get them sliced out of your hair like so much sticky bubblegum, and it only made ten more show up gunning for you. "Would you tell me again just why the fuck we should be back in this cesspit you call a country, El?"

Nobody answered him, not that he'd expected one.

"Far as we can figure, they've still got shit on you, El," Lorenzo said. "Too many rumours to get close to the truth. But some of the questions they asked got answers, and those answers brought them here, on to us. We're just a sideline interest right now, one of a half a dozen tracks they're headed down, but that's gonna change."

"Which makes it first order idiocy for us to walk in the front door," Sands pointed out. "So why exactly are we here?"

There was a pause then, quick, not enough to be a blip on the radar with most people, but there was something in it Sands knew he'd missed. El had interactions with these dicktards that weren't in his repertoire with Sands, a completely different code of wordless signals that didn't involve any kind of sound.

"We can't get to the fuckers," Lorenzo said, the words too fast, a pathetic attempt to cover the gap. "None of us can." He threw in the emphasis hard on that second part when Sands smiled. "We could take a few of them with the right plan, but not all of them, not fast enough before the others could move on us."

Sands was still smiling; he didn't see a reason to stop. "You're making it all a lot more complicated than it needs to be. There'll be an instigator, one behind the group of sheep, whipping up the enthusiasm and prodding the others along with his inspired-sounding plans. Take out the activist with enough of a dramatic flourish, and the rest will get the idea and go home."

"And how do we know who it is?"

"I'll find him for you," Sands said simply. "I take it you already know who some of these people are?"

"We've got a list of names, yeah," Lorenzo said.

"Then it's easy. You just need to know the right people to ask."

"He can do it," El said when Lorenzo didn't answer. "If they're there, he will find them."

"You've got a lot of confidence there, El. Hope you've got something to back it up."

"He found me," El said.

"Yeah." Sands could hear in the bitterness just how far that fact crawled down the kid's throat to get stuck. "Back when he had the whole fucking CIA behind him. Right now he's been in this country maybe two weeks outta the last year and a half."

High, two-toned jangle of a doorbell, classic noir movie style, and that had to be another pretension, like the furniture. No way this house would be older than thirty years or so, built some while after Acapulco had sprawled into the hip place to be.

"That'll be the food." Footsteps as Lorenzo was gone back down the hall, Fideo scraping to his feet and wandering after him. Sands wouldn't be offering to do any fetching and carrying, and El was more than smart enough to stay clear of visitors.

"I get the feeling your friends don't like me much, El," Sands said with a quirked smile.

"That would only matter if you wanted them to." Instant clipped answer, all the tension in the flat speed of the words. So El was already starting to tire of playing mediator for this little game – well, he should have thought about that part before he decided they were coming to stay. Sands lounged into the back of his chair, into the high solidity of the wood along his spine, let his gloved fingers slide slow along the carved contours of the table, a curve still at the edges of his lips.

Lorenzo didn't have anything more to add when he came back to the table, losing himself in the rattle of bags and aluminum scrapes. The hot scents flash-flowed across the table, drowning out wood and furniture polish and El in a wave of tomatoes and garlic with lower undertones of herbs and chilli. At least the smell of it lived up to the kid's advertising.

A slight glitch in the pattern of El's breath, air flowing out a little longer before he drew it back in. Not enough to be real tension, just... a moment.

Sands swung his neck around slow, but he didn't hear anything that broke the mould of the last couple of hours, not from the door and not from where the windows had to be in the external walls. Nothing from the sidekicks, either, not that he'd know their subtle tells, but Lorenzo was scratching at a container casually enough, and the drunk was breathing low and slouched like the bum he was.

Sands uncrossed his ankles, feet flat to the floor, slid his ass nearer the edge of the chair.

"Here, grab this." The kid passed plates down the table via El, and Sands set his dead centre of his square of cutlery, checking with a quick outward sweep of his pinkies. Motion from El's right hand, his left arm unmoving alongside Sands, then the quick, high screech of tines on a plate, so different from the ringing clatter of knife or spoon.

Sands reached for his own fork, sliding it in from the edge of his plate till he hit food; push against the pressure half a fork length, lift against the weight, but the sense of resistance, of something dragging was out of place, the tug on his fork oozing away slow and uneven like something –

Something that fell into place with the mix of smells.

Fucking fideos. The bastard-fucking, beetle-licking Mexican had given him a plate full of fucking noodle 'soup'.

He lifted and angled his head to give Lorenzo the full effect of the glasses and hinted smile for just a second, challenge accepted, donkey-sucker, before he shifted his interest obviously back to his food.

Noodles, right. Some food types were trickier than others, but it wasn't so tough. There was a consistent pattern to it, same as there was to everything - lift the fork against the drag, wait for it to come loose as some of the strands fell away. Twist the fork, three, four times was usually good, tilt and shake a little if it still felt too heavy; he didn't want to be opening wide like a goddamn whale every mouthful, but he didn't want to smear tomato gloop all round his face either. Small amounts worked best.

So much concentration and effort just to goddamn eat without looking like a six year old.

Every fork was assessed slow and careful, measured and balanced against the last. No way was he gonna screw up in front of an interested audience, and the spectators were obvious enough – El would be watching, sure, because El watched everything and Sands liked him that way, but the real giveaway was the absence of any bland hilarity. The kid hadn't managed to keep quiet longer than a minute around El since they'd walked in the door, and now the dinner table was all scratching forks and clinking glasses and eyes.

Sands would have liked an update on some of those eyes. El to Lorenzo, vaguely reproachful probably, nothing too sharp, all too predictable. The real interesting one would be the dipsomariachi – clued up enough to pick up on the issues, obviously, since he was keeping it shut too, but was he taking a side in the table rounds of eyeballing or was he still playing the neutral observer?

Sands lifted and twirled his fork, listening for Fideo, for the liquid slosh that came from that seat more often than the others between the scrapes of metal on plate; feeling for the slide and tug through his fingers, raising the fork higher as the weight dropped back, and El's hand was at his thigh below the table, the quick, deep pressure of two fingertips through his jeans. The signal that said, 'Wait, not yet' when they were close to ambush, and the meaning hadn't changed, only the context.

He wondered if there was anything at all left wrapped round his fork, or just a single lonely strand hanging on by a twisted quirk of gravity.

He tipped and angled the fork back down to the plate to be sure before he pushed back into the pile and this time El's fingers eased away as he rolled it.

The noodles oozed soft over his teeth when he chewed, sliding down his throat in thick, soggy balls at each swallow. He supposed it was good, spices combining into a slow-heated kick at the back of his tongue, but it was a little tough to be fully appreciative of quality when the mechanics of eating sucked all his concentration and he'd been designated the meal's main entertainment.

It didn't matter whether it was good or not - that camel-cunted kid could've laced it with gunpowder and Sands would’ve been sure to gag down every last greasy strand. Or at least as much of it as was practical, because even people who had eyes looked like idiots chasing the last stunted pasta strands round in circles.

The strained silence with himself as the central attraction was more than irksome; it wasn't going to tell him anything he needed to know. He set his fork down on his finally empty plate and turned to Lorenzo with a faint smile. "Well, that was a truly unexpected treat. So what's next?"

He'd figured for more sniping from Lorenzo, but he got Fideo's input instead, too loud, laced with the supply of spirits. "Yeah, Lori, what else has your sugar mommy cooked up for us this time?"

"Hey, you got that one all fucked up." Lorenzo was just a bit too quick to jump in and defend his reputation for a guy with his back-story. "I figure I pretty much keep her in tips, right along with half her staff."

"The young and pretty half?" El was smiling again, his words rising and falling exaggerated. "Or do their services include cooking too?"

And that was the mariachis off into what seemed to be their usual rhythm, pointed banter fired back and forth like the studied silence of the fideos had never been there. Somewhere through it, Lorenzo unpacked the next course, which turned out to be a perfectly simple, though something above average, chalupa. None of the rest of the food came deliberately booby-trapped, and either eating or El seemed to improve Lorenzo's mood, as the chatter and the joking ran constant and circular around.

Sands stayed back from it while he ate, tracking the back-and-forth conversation of the mariachis - lots of reminiscing, old stories he didn't give a shit about, but he needed to find the nuances, the patterns in the interactions, the way the influences ran between the three. It mattered on a tactical level, who would question plans and who would sign right on the line without eyeing all the small print, but it was also about the threat, the pressure from all the angles, and what might give.

Sands finished eating while the others were still scraping irregularly with forks between all the chatter, and pushed his plate aside to clear the space in front of him. He peeled off his gloves, unholstered one of the Sigs and ejected the mag, pulling back the slide to kick the round from the chamber before he eased it forward off the frame. None of these guns needed cleaning, but it had been a while since he'd handled a Sig, and he wanted to remind his fingers of the habit of the basic strip. Plus, he'd like to demonstrate some degree of competence to these bozos before he started fumbling with the unfamiliar Beretta and made himself look an idiot.

"How d'you know you're not sitting there in full view of the neighbours?" Lorenzo demanded.

Sands tipped the glasses a little his way, and smiled. "I didn't, but you weren't too concerned in the kitchen earlier. I figured you guys might have paid the extra for a little privacy when it was needed, and if not, well, you'd be up on your feet right now and grabbing for the blinds."

"Why should I do shit like that for you? I'm not your fucking servant."

Sands shrugged and turned back to the pistol. "They're not my neighbours." He ran his fingertip over the mechanism and along the barrel, every metal surface flawlessly smooth with the lightest hint of oil. Only what he would have expected when El respected these people's dealings with weapons, but he reassembled it and then checked the second Sig anyway, because it was just good practice.

The oil left a faint grease over his fingertips and the hint of old gunpowder to go with it. Okay, he knew where the kitchen was and there'd be a sink to wash his hands in there somewhere. He was fine with groping just as long as the sidekicks stayed out of his way.

He tucked the gloves under his arm and lifted his chair back to stand in a practiced single motion.

"Bathroom's second right back along the hall." The kid's voice coiled as grudging as ever even when he was being helpful, and Sands smiled tight.

"That will be nice to know, when I decide I need it."

He went to the kitchen, picking up the count of steps from where he'd left off at the dining room door. Knuckles light against the doorframe setting a measure to start from, he walked across the tiles to find the countertop he'd set the pistols on earlier, trailing the back of his hand along it as he walked the room until he hit metal. Easy.

Finding the soap was a little harder, but he tracked it down in a dispensing bottle, something with a lavender scent that lingered on his hands and washed out everything else from his nose. It figured the maid had done the shopping too.

He didn't bother trying to hunt down a towel, just shook his hands off and left them to drip.

Counting back to the dining room was faster, more accurate this time, aided by the conversation and laughter, and he shifted his weight off-centre to lounge against the doorway, deliberately casual and confident. He reached into his jacket for a new pack of smokes, stripping the plastic free and peeling back the foil.

"Don't smoke in my house," Lorenzo snapped. "Go outside."

Sands tapped the end of a cigarette lightly on the carton, then threw the pack over to El, quick rustle and slap as it was caught. "What about El? Can he smoke in your house?"

"He gets kicked out too."

El slipped the pack away in a pocket, and Sands smiled slow. "What's this we've got here? Another reformed addict living in fear of corruption?"

Lorenzo sniffed out air sharp down his nose. "Never touched the fucking things. And neither should he." That last was spoken pointedly in El's direction.

"I'm not going to be earning a living with my voice anymore," El said. His tones could almost have passed as neutral, just a little too much care behind the choice of words.

"Well, I still do."

"I didn't think you earned a living by anything now." Sands waved a hand slow across his body to take in the expanse of the room, the house.

"It's what I do," the kid said. "I like it. So piss off if you're gonna light that thing."

Don't push too far. El hadn't had the opportunity to have that particular chat with his sidekicks yet.

He'd let it slide, for tonight.

Sands could retrace his steps to the front door by the route he came in, even if it wasn't the most direct, but what was outside the door beyond the path they'd walked up was all a wonderful shiny mystery. He hadn't used his cane since he got here, and he wasn't starting now, not for standing outside in a Mexican street in full view of fuck knew who. He stuck the smoke between his lips but didn't reach for the lighter, let his smile shape round the filter. "And here I forgot to pack the bug spray. I find mosquitoes strip all the fun out of nicotine." Familiar changing pressure as he spoke, the length of the cigarette wriggling and angling from his mouth almost as good as the drug.

He pushed away from the doorframe, point made. "Well, much as I'd just love to spend an evening kicking back for a pleasant chat with you guys, I believe I have a job to do." He pressed his lips together and curled them towards Lorenzo. "I'll need some basic information to work from. Please tell me this place has some form of internet access."

There was a pause, just long enough for Lorenzo to look to El and get the okay, which was severely fucking irritating. Sands wouldn't get anything done if these people were gonna be double-checking every basic demand before they granted their 'permission'. "Wireless networked, secure, the whole place," Lorenzo told him. "Set yourself up and I'll give you the password."

"I'm already set up."

"Fine." Lorenzo's tone was distinctly piqued, but he coughed up the relevant info, and Sands shifted his attention to direction and distance, to the appearance of effortless as he counted through the doorway and to the stairs. He didn't let himself reach fingers for the banister, for the double-check, till he was damn sure he was out of everybody's line of sight.

At the top, he angled and headed for that first room on the right, slowing as he approached the door, a little wary. He hadn't closed it, and El knew better, but who the fuck knew what those other two morons wandered round their house doing?

His hand found only air and frame, and he circled his arm out wide as he stepped through to make sure the door was still pushed right back against the wall.

The laptop was on the table where he'd set it, the chair undisturbed from its position a hand's breadth out, the checks fast and automatic. He started the machine, background thoughts tracking as it bleeped through its initial routines.

He hoped Lorenzo knew what he was talking about when he said the connection was secure. These guys were shooters, not techs, but they'd got the cash to pay the right man to set them up. Which meant at least one person out there had a way into the system. Hopefully their porn-viewing habits had bored him enough that he'd given up on taking a peek. Sands couldn't imagine Fideo and his tequila-brain finding anyone willing to fuck him the conventional way too often.

He settled in and lit himself that cigarette - he was in his own room, and he'd opened the window a few inches for the cooler evening air. The kid had no excuse to bitch.

He entered the log-in details Lorenzo had given him, dragging in smoke through the seconds of the connection.

The lilting, exaggerated tones rose up from the floor below, carrying easily through the open door; enthusiastic chatter, rushing sentences cutting in over the end of the last, breaking down into massed laughter.

The computer announced itself logged in, and Sands let the smoke slide from between his lips as he considered the subtleties he'd gained on El.

He laughed a little more, the smile in his voice flowing easier than the dry, fire-blackened humour he most often showed to Sands; but he still walked with his feet sliding the barest hint of air above the floor for low impact on singing tile, still reacted and tracked every new hint of sound from outside for that half second before experience wrote it off as harmless. Sands had figured it that way, but it was always nice to have it confirmed. Even here, relaxed with people he entirely trusted, people he read as both safe and competent, El was a killer. He was too much the Mariachi to ever be able to dial it back to plain old peasant Pedro or whoever the fuck it was he'd started out as.

Sands didn't give a shit about the name. El had been aware of Sands' full range of options for a while now, but he stuck with 'Sands' for all uses and occasions, when he bothered to use a name at all, and Sands didn't see any other tag displacing 'El' in his own repertoire. El was El, and anything else was just so much gold plated curlicue drawn across the grenade.

He fired up a search engine, slid in an earphone and started working his way through the list of names Lorenzo had given him. The information he had available through public channels was never going to be interesting enough, but it gave him a place to start. Let him put together a picture of people, left hints of where the dirt was likely to be and what kind suited their palate - the neat, tidy, white-collar financial discrepancies, quick to slide down the throat without gagging, or something a little more hands in the potting clay. Clues on who he should be looking at for the impetus, the power-seeking climber behind it all. The guy who was snapping to take Honaker's place at the top of the pile wouldn't be a shy and retiring type.

It was slow, tedious, and fucking frustrating work. He'd long since learned the internet wasn't quite the friend it had been before (because 'before' never needed qualifying, oh no, even without a capital B, it was the alternative befores that were in need of a tagline), but he still got seriously pissed about the number of sites that weren't even close to compatible with his software - links based in images not words, totally fucked up layouts with overlapping text the voice synth couldn't read when he cut the images out. Local rags in the Spanish-speaking world weren't all on board with the latest disability access guidelines.

Christ, he could use El around for this.

His nose itched where the sweat gathered under the frame, the dampness lying sticky and trapped all along his cheekbones. It had always been like that, from the minute he got off the United jet in Mexico City four years ago, but it had never irritated him like this when he wore the shades by choice, as part of the game. He reached up to rub beneath, pressing with fingertips through the damp, then snatched the glasses away and set them on the table by the laptop.

He could have stripped them off the second he walked through the fucking front door - he'd got no investment hanging on what El's mariachi band thought of him. It was just so much habit now that they lived clinging to his skin like a goddamn Alien face-hugger everywhere outside of the shower and bed.

He pulled up the pages that gave him hits on the next name down the list, settling back while the synth read haltingly through the articles. Boring shit mostly about charity donations, business mergers and share prices, and the pattern of underlying voices from the floor below him was changing - Fideo's deeper foreign tones had died out a while back, probably passed out slumped in his chair, and what was left ran softer, delays between words instead of all scrambled together overlapping. Nobody had laughed during the last couple of minutes.

He’d left it long enough now for the conversation to have turned interesting, and he needed to piss anyway. Nobody had gotten around to telling him where the bathroom was on this floor, so he'd open every door he came across and tap on the walls till he found the small space with the tiles.

The bathroom turned out to be just a couple of doors down the hall, and he left the door open so the voices stayed with him. No words from here, just the sounds and patterns, the broken rhythm of exchanges between El and the kid.

He flushed and washed his hands, walked obviously back along the hallway to his room, then altered his steps to creep onto the stairs as the sounds came into focus, Lorenzo's voice rising with more than just proximity. "Sure, you got bored of wearing the scorpions so now you drag one about with you instead."

"He guards my back."

"That's the best you got?" The bitterness almost burned through the kid's words. "Fuck, El, you don't need a pet psycho for that, we'd do it any time you asked."

"I know." El's voice was low, serious, only Sands' familiarity with the man letting him catch the words.

"But you're trusting your life to a snake, one that strikes blind."

One of those long pauses, the ones that meant El might get around to an answer or he might not. Sometimes the mariachi took a while to make up his own mind which, and when he did talk now it was slow and careful, still figuring out the words. "When Sands dies, it will be because of the choices he made for himself, not because of mine."

"That's it? You'll hand yourself over to a vicious, self-absorbed crazy instead of your friends because you don't want to feel guilty?"

"Don't you think I've done that enough?" Hard note creeping through into El's voice, defensive in most people, more like a warning in him.

"Screw that, I'm starting to think you like it." Lorenzo didn't seem to take warnings too well, from anybody. "This is just another line on the guilt thing you're eating yourself up with right now. If the guy had his eyes, you'd have ditched him the second you took out those fuckers who knew where you lived."

"Maybe." Maybe? Nice to know El was right on deck with lying to his friends - he'd tried kicking Sands out goddamn hard enough the morning after, not giving a shit he was blind. "That might have been part of it once. Not so much now."

Little Lori was definitely pissing on the wrong tree with that angle. When Sands had been at his most pathetic, El had treated him with a determined loathing suitable for a particularly large and iridescent beetle wriggling in the soup, and that didn't leave room for a whole lot else. El's attitude had actually been kind of refreshing after the bubblegum kid's constant, irritating attempts to be helpful, though Sands might have enjoyed provoking him more if he hadn't been spending so much of his time wondering just when the mariachi was finally gonna snap and kill him. By the time El had worked his way around to respecting him, Sands had damn well earned it - there was no space for pity at the Sands-El party.

No, El was keeping him around as the companion without consequence, so he could pass on the whole sackcloth and ashes deal that had headlined so often in his life. But the sidekicks had skipped a lot further down that particular road than any of them probably realised, and it wouldn't take El's actual presence now to have the Mariachi curse swinging the Death-scythe at them.

"So if you don't feel sorry for him, what the hell is it?" Lorenzo demanded. "He's too much of a shit to like and he makes a lousy choice of back-up."

"He's better than you'd think." Something of a smile in El's voice, that almost-buried humour seeping through. "You can't know without seeing him. He's... inventive. And he's fast."

"Fast, huh?" The kid sounded genuinely curious.

"Fast enough." El switched out to steel tones and unshakeable fact. "He's fast, and he's also blind. Don't ever forget that. He acts like he isn't, but you should not."

That quick huff of air from the kid's nose again. "Yeah, the more you talk, the more it just keeps on getting so much fucking better."

"You should be grateful his reactions are good. It's only because of them I was able to stop him from shooting you when you ran into that warehouse."

Oh, yes, the moment when it would all have been so easy. Sands had stilled his finger at El's shout instinctively, before his brain had reconsidered, but El would have felt that extra half second gap and known what it meant.

Right now, the decision was looking like it might have been worth the risk.

Lorenzo sighed. "Fuck it, like it matters, he's here now." His voice dropped and softened, losing the edge. "Just do me one favour, okay?"

"Apart from being here?" El teased.

The kid ignored the baited switch to humour. "Watch your back. Don't trust him."

"You're a bit too late for that," El said, simple fact.

Short pause, and Sands could imagine the kid giving El the Stare. "You're a fucking idiot, you know that?"

"I told myself that sometimes." El was smiling again, the quick humour that flashed twisted through his words. "It didn't seem to help."

"You really trust him? All the way, no doubts?"

"With me, yes." El's answer was immediate, and certain, all the amusement stripped back. Seemed like he flashed though the moods with everyone, not just because Sands pissed him off. "With anybody else...."

"Right, gotcha. That probably works out better when he's staying at your place, not mine."

"He won't harm you." El's degree of confidence on that point was actually kind of irksome, since it was a decision Sands hadn’t quite finalised yet.

"Not with a gun, no. He'll just yank on the strings in our heads like he did with yours." Nice to know the kid wasn't buying into it either.

"He couldn't have made me do what I didn't already want," El said.

"Wanted and decided not to, yeah," the kid pointed out.

"You don't ever change your mind?"

El changed his mind all the goddamn time, that was the problem. It was never easy, but he'd sway to the right pressure, and fucking Christ knew all his decisions were driven by some pretty chewed up thinking.

"It wasn't a mistake," El went on, softer now. "Marquez needed to die, in spite of my promise. Carolina would have understood, for our daughter's sake, if not for her own."

"Shit, yeah, she would've flipped and iced the fucker a year before you did," Lorenzo said, affection and humour a neon flash through his voice. "Fine, you had to take the bastard out, I get that. But the rest of it, later, you had to do all that too?"

Another of those El-pauses that stuttered with the careful thought. "Maybe not. But I had to do something."

That was it, right there, the chink, the flaw for the chisel, and now would be a really good time for the kid to ease off. Stop the pressure before El got genuinely pissed, leave him to tick along with that one admission that maybe not every choice he’d made around Sands had been the ideal.

"Okay, you win, I’ll take that for now." So the kid knew El more than well enough to catch on too. Sands would have had to admire the skill, if it wasn't set up to deliberately undermine everything he had in mind for himself. “But just... make sure you think around him, okay? Don’t let him go poking you into anything."

"That's advice you should probably be giving to yourself."

"I'll work on it if you will," Lorenzo said, the grin laser-bright through the words.

"Deal," El said instantly. "So why don't we prod Fideo awake and get back to the game?"

"Sounds good to me, he'll be an easy mark," Lorenzo smirked. "Hey, droopy, wake up and play the round before we finish off that bottle for you."

That seemed to be the interesting part of the conversation over, and Sands eased his way slow back up to the top of the stairs. It gave him a little something extra to work with, and he wondered how much useful detail he might have missed out on before he tuned in.

It was intriguing that El had opted not to include the tequila-head in the conversation.

He walked into the bedroom, and this time he wrapped leather-clad fingers round the edge of the door, swinging it back behind him to close with a soft click. He stripped off his jacket, letting the cooling air to his body through his shirt - this room had the same aspect as the dining room, so no curious neighbours peering in at the guy with all the holsters - and tossed it onto the nearest bed. Settled himself into the chair and lit another cigarette, trickling the smoke slow and burning through his throat and back into his lungs.

The laptop hummed its low existence from the table, the rush of the fan against the evening's warmth, and he set his earphone in and restarted the last article he'd abandoned. He rolled the cigarette back and forth between thumb and index finger, twirling regular with the run of his thoughts when it wasn't settled at his lips. Words and sentences stuttered heavy and slow into his brain, jagged contrast to the talk and laughter rising smooth from below. Muffled now by the extra door, but the voices still there, the mariachis relapsed into the base pattern of flashing speech that rose and fell with protest and counter-accusation. Fideo a little off-pace, a whole gravel trap of drag against the excitable over-dramatics of the kid, El pouring commentary flowing and even-paced over the both of them, and the computer was reading words into his head that he was tracking only as sounds, not as meaning.

He'd been awake too fucking long.

He wanted El around for this, wanted the words that would keep up with his mind, thoughts and opinions to bounce his own from and balance them. Wanted El leaning in behind with a rush of breath past Sands' ear as he peered at the screen, arms folded across the back of the chair and pressing along Sands' shoulder blades, the close brush of old smoke and fresh gun oil wrapped around the physical presence that flared in his head from across a room.

What he wanted was to fuck El's ass, and hard, hold El's body settled and heaving beneath him, beneath his hands, but he wasn't so sure how El would react to that suggestion right now. He'd run the confrontational route over the sleeping arrangements, but he might just turn head-shy at taking it that way with mariachis two and three on the other side of the walls.

If he had to, Sands would put in the effort to soften him up a little first. He could do a lot with El's cock in his mouth, and once he had his fingers in El's ass, the guy was sold. But it would be better without it, because he really wasn't feeling too patient right now.

His cock was shifting and stretching at the sensation-flashes in his head, and he reached down to rearrange because an erection trapped pointing south wasn't a comfortable thing.

They didn't fuck now as often as they used to. Oh, they still fucked enough, because hey, they were guys and they liked it, but it hadn't been the automatic ending to a day for a while now. Part of that would be the novelty wearing off, because everything got old in the end, even fucking a legend as the finale to a Sahara-style dry season. Some of it was the change of lifestyle that meant they weren't always in bed and awake at the same time, Sands' schedule fixing round the flow of information and ideas as much as the clock. And the rest of it was the change from the lifestyle, because there was just something about being shot at nearly every single goddamn day that made Sands want to fuck his own brains out.

The laptop beeped at him, querying the inactivity, a prelude to sinking into sleep mode, and he reached to tap a random key to keep it awake. So far, he only had one name that supported further investigation, an implausibly smooth character whose questionable business developments got the go-ahead rather too easily from the local planning departments, and whose acquaintances covered an expanded range of social respectability, but he still had a few more on the list to check. The faster he got this shit squeezed through the wringer, the sooner he and El could get the fuck out of this miserable camel spit country and back to a more comfortable lifestyle.

He set the search engine running on the next name down the list, discarding the first entries after half a summary and cursing everybody who'd give their son a name as stupifyingly uninspired as 'Jose Sanchez'. The tenth sounded more promising, and he settled back and let it run. The breeze rippled past him from the window, shifting and rising with the change in temperature, playing over the sweat gathered beneath his arms and along the holster straps.

El's voice carried through from below, and with it the instant jump-and-catch in Sands' head, the mind-shift as his brain adjusted priorities, his ears reaching to separate that one sound from everything beyond it, for words, for mood, for meaning.

The process was so automatic, he only registered it when he stopped to think, to consider how things worked, and right now El was taking up a lot of his thought-time that should be sticking with the business at hand. He wondered if he'd even be able to change it now, if he wanted to. He'd trained himself so deliberately into that awareness of El, where he was, what he thought, what he sensed, and he had no idea if the process was reversible.

He killed the synth voice that droned through the 'phone into his head. He always worked better fixing on one angle at a time; anything else just got in the way of those all-important fine details, and his brain was inclined to centre on a different one for tonight.

He tugged the plastic from his ear, dropping it to the desk with a clatter, and pushed with his feet, rocking his chair onto two legs, his head hanging back over the rest.

The wood caught at the leather of his shoulder holsters as he slouched against it, and he pulled at the straps till the Sigs’ weight settled telling and comfortable against his ribs.

Another break in the chatter from below, the soft low noises of town, of distant people and traffic forming his background from the open window. The breeze ruffled beneath his hanging hair to touch cooling at his neck.

Footsteps, base of the stairs, moving his way - El.

The fingers of his left hand were on his shades, gone there instant and unthinking in the half-moment between sound and recognition. He started to lift away, then stopped, the curve of the plastic warm, still damp against his palm.

He curled his fingers round the frame and pushed them in place across his nose, spun the chair to face the door as it opened.

"I was wondering when you'd finally be through with the reunion chit-chat," he said. "You know, you could have been making yourself useful in here instead." Technically it was true, though if El had come earlier it would only have meant Sands getting laid that much sooner.

El hadn't moved from the doorway, even before Sands drawled out the first word - the Mariachi's instincts that had kept him alive over ten years didn't dial down to 'off', not even with a long term lay, just a low simmer setting that kicked into full flame at the first whisper-lick of tension.

El took those extra couple of steps into the room now, neutral and even with his voice. "If you want my help, you only have to say."

Sands didn’t ever say. He didn't have to. El just did.

He propped his elbow on the arm of the chair, circled his hand and fingers slow from the wrist. "They’re your friends. I don’t care what happens to them either way, I’m not going to be begging on their behalf if you don’t volunteer."

"I’m not asking you to beg," El said, the words clipped sharper this time, distinct with the gaps between.

Sands gave a twitched half-smile. "Well, that’s good. Because you really wouldn’t like the results." He uncurled himself onto his feet, took the two strides between them to plant his hands on El’s chest, leaning in with weight and momentum. His palms met steel, tension through muscle and body, the moment of instinctive resistance to force before El's brain kicked in and allowed it, his body flowing with the pressure to slam back against that section of wall Sands had found right by the door with no furniture and no annoying pictures hanging in the way. Low grunt of air lost from El’s lungs with the impact, and Sands used the sound to steer his lips in, because there were a whole lot of things in Sands' world that got a whole lot better when he had his tongue in El's mouth and El's body pushed up against his own.

El stretched out an arm, hooking the door closed in a swish of air and a harsh slam.

El was the lingering spice of onion and tequila with the heat around Sands’ tongue, and the pressure of skin rough and scratching because neither of them had shaved since before they'd left the apartment two flights and twenty hours ago, and that was just fine because Sands was giving it as good as he was taking it, and he wasn't looking for soft or delicate. El’s hands were on him, firm through his shirt, pressing him back, the lips under his own moving slower, looser to force a change of pace, and that was predictable, El's attempt to strip the edge off him, ease this down a level, and it wasn't gonna happen, not this time. Sands hooked his fingers deep into muscle, sucked that pouting lip in between his teeth and bit down - not hard enough for blood, because that just tasted lousy, hard enough to pinch and bruise. Hard enough that El's grip on Sands' arms tightened into a burn as he dragged his flesh away, that he sucked in breath fast over Sands' cheek.

There was a moment of only the breathing, heavy, loud from both of them through open mouths. Panting silence, close, and then El’s mouth was back on his and entirely with the game-plan, a fast, slick pressure and his fingers still ringing flame above Sands’ elbows. Sands leaned in with more of his weight, El trapped against the wall behind, the lines of El’s teeth and his own running against his lips under the kiss. Pushed his knee into the gap between El’s, rubbing thighs and dicks together through their clothes, and El let the wall hold him, hooked an ankle round Sands’ to drag his leg forward and out till Sands was forced to shift his weight or fall.

El wouldn't back off. He knew how it was, the kick of it, unleashing all the bitter anger and tension through the sex. El had fucked Sands that way often enough, and Sands had taken it because it was El, who was as efficient and casual a killer as Sands, and because even through the drive and the bruising fingers, El could be relied on to hold back enough not to cross a line. And mostly because it felt pretty fucking fantastic, and somebody who could push him far and hard enough to make him want it that way was an unusual find.

El lived in the flicker-flash of violence exactly where Sands did, and Sands was willing to let that work for him whichever way. Not the actuality of it aimed in his direction - he knew more than enough about real pain not to go eroticising that shit. But the dark, vicious potential twisting right there on the surface, all reined in check because of the control Sands held tight in his own hands, the control over that other person, that worked his buttons just fine.

El knew it all, knew exactly how this was ending, and he wouldn't back off yet because he knew too how much more satisfying it was to have that someone else push back. All that knowledge and possibility spread against Sands, the stretch of muscle over heaving ribs beneath the shirt, the drive of teeth and tongue under his lips, under his cock as the press of hips returned against him, near-flawless violence and chaos wound through the body of a man who wanted him every way he could take him, and Sands wanted in.

His hand curled at El’s neck, holding him while he drew back to leave space between their bodies, the edge of teeth against him, the brush of skin over his nose, fabric crumpling into his palm as he dragged at El's layers keeping him out. Never casually physical any more, not the feeling good and getting off that sex had always been before; the world was sucked into his head through his skin now, flashing through his brain starved and desperate for every scrap of detail, no off-switch outside the dampener of cloth, of gloves. Round, warm, metallic imprint of studs sharp and heavy under his thumb now as he fought open El's jeans, denim rough over the cock stretching and changing for him, moving into his hand as he pressed in and down past snagging, coiling hair and belt-line ring of sweat, damp, warm, sliding.

El’s hands pulled at his own clothes in turn, stripping guns and shirt from him with the easy, relentless efficiency El applied to everything, and naked would prove useful later so Sands moved with him while his own fingers hooked and fumbled at the buckle of the holster for that goddamn shotgun. El's touch met his on the leather, reaching to help, and Sands slapped him away, dragging his other hand from El's cock to get the fucking straps off and the clothes with it, pressing his body back to El's, to hair and sweat and heat. El was movement under his hands where everything else was static and safe and dull, once-touched-always-known while the world shifted through its thousand changes around him, and Sands claimed its movement through El, dragged the world's physicality into his own with the rise and stretch of ribs at his palm, the bunch and slide of muscle against his thigh.

One hand at El's jeans pushing down, the other back on his cock, on skin gliding smooth within the curve of his grip, jerking him all the way hard and then some, fast. El's fingers wrapped around Sands', dry and rough over his knuckles, slowing the movement to draw it out, and Sands flicked off the restraint and grabbed El's arm to turn him, pushing him face flat against the wall, hand between his shoulder blades.

El stilled beneath his palm, all easy tension against the wall, and Sands leaned in to scrape teeth down the length of his neck, because El was just a bit too comfortable with this.

The reaction was flawlessly fast, El twisting down, out from under his grip; Sands grabbed low, finding shoulder instead of biceps, pushed his knee to the wall to stop El's predictable sideways slide and hooked his arm around, hauling El upwards by the armpit. El back against the wall but facing outwards again, hands gripping Sands above the elbows to drag him close, breath harsher, its warmth driving heavy on the curve of Sands' cheek below the lens before El pulled him the rest of the way. Lips on his, dry, pushing, scratch of stubble over his skin, and Sands had his hand free to wrap round El's dick again, picking up right where he left off, and his tongue pressed into El's mouth as a bonus to the deal. Flash of tequila snapping across his tastebuds, and fuck, he'd missed that, the rush of it burned into his nose with El's breath, El's body fluid along the length of his own as both of them manoeuvred and slid for the angles, a shifting coil of strength and instinct. Pressure met with its counter, teeth met with teeth, every application of force drawing the equal response before El ultimately tired of the game, of pushing back against this thing he wanted, let his body flow loose and compliant beneath Sands.

El Mariachi stretched bare against the wall, all slack, restless muscle and hard, even breaths, willing for anything Sands chose to do to him.

It was an illusion that would fragment into violence if Sands persisted in anything El didn't want. But Sands knew how to make him want.

He drew El from the wall, guiding him round and back till El's legs met solidity, pushed steady against his chest so El took the hint and dropped onto the bed, thud and creak of mattress under the weight. Sands stepped forward to find that edge and slid himself up the bed alongside, fingers stroking the length of El's body as he moved, hair and skin and scars uneven beneath his calluses from guns and cane.

Sometimes Sands wanted to press El down onto the sheets and fuck him till he stopped ever fighting him. But El wouldn't ever submit completely, and if he would, he'd be boring.

He reached out to sweep the hair back from El's ear, scratch of stubble at his palm as El turned into it. Ran a hand slow along El's ribs and down, leaned over him close, the press of the shades shifting lighter from his nose with the angle. "Not this time," he said, slow, quiet, and curled his fingers into a grip at El's waist and pulled.

El rolled fast with the pressure, easing much of his own weight, curling his legs up as he twisted. His body lifted beneath Sands' hand to settle on all fours, and Sands arched across him, pressed against the length of bone and tight flesh and sweat. "Better," he smiled, stretching to shape the sound of it to El's ear as breath, warmth, felt the bare shiver along the spine beneath him.

He reached for the tube placed earlier on the nightstand between the beds, squeezing gel out cool onto his fingers and smearing it down. One hand settled itself at El's cock again, working him steady and deliberate as other fingers pressed in to lube El's ass ready for him. Not stretching, not loosening, only the basic practical matter of pushing past resistance to get the slick in, because a dry fuck just wasn't any fun.

El hunched slightly beneath him, muscles bunching along spine and thighs where Sands leaned into them, quick, clenching spasm onto his fingers, but he didn't pull away.

Sands supplied El's cock with a little extra flick, rolling fingers damp with lube across the head at the tip of each stroke to keep him hard before he pulled back to add more. One last wet press of nails and knuckles into barely-accepting flesh, then slicking up his own cock, his breath shifting deeper at the quick taste of contact.

El was still and waiting, no twitch through the mattress beneath Sands' knees while he smeared the oily film along himself.

Tube back capped and neat on the nightstand, and he shifted closer into El, more pressure against the inside of hair-curled thighs till El obligingly spread himself wider. Reached out fingertips to rest light between El's shoulder blades. "Lower," he said, tones flat and empty, his hand following the ridge of spine as El flexed down onto his elbows.

He eased forward, resting his weight slow along El's body, one hand dropping to the bed to steady him. "More." Almost a whisper this time, breathed cool onto El's neck between the parted strands of hair, fabric slippery under his palm, the lining of his jacket he'd thrown there earlier, crushed now beneath El as he pushed him down.

El slid his arms up beneath his head, flattened his chest to the sheets and stilled again.

Sands' lips curved soft at the edges as he dropped back onto his knees, freeing his hands to spread El and position his cock. Holding himself against the tightness of it, easing hips forwards, pressing in slow through the long outward rush of El's breath.

They didn't do this often enough for El to find it easy, and Sands liked it that way. His deals were a whole lot more entertaining when the guys on the other end hated him, feared him, and swallowed the baited hooks he offered anyway, the conflict bitter in their voice, stiff in every twitch of muscle. And here, now, El wanted Sands, had wanted it from the second he'd opened that door and known it was going to happen, but the biggest kick was feeling El fight his body to take it. The tension through the shoulders beneath his hands, along the spine arched up against the length of him, the resistance he pushed against, Sands' pressure held steady, not sharp, but uneasing till El forced his flesh to submit, to relax and accept him.

The grip around his cock, the barrier he pushed against, impenetrable and then abruptly gone, his body dropping forward the last inch.

It hit him again, every time, never quite remembering just how fucking amazing this was, hard-on full length into moist and willing flesh.

He trailed a hand up the inside of El's thigh to double-check, his nose not good enough to tell El's horniness from his own, running his fingers over skin still stretched tight around his balls and onto his cock. There were definite advantages to fucking a guy with near-flawless control over his body, used to ignoring and working with pain at a level that made anything Sands gave him a gnat bite.

He slid his hand along El's cock, curling it into his grip when it pressed at his palm, working El as he began to move, jerking him light and fast, because Sands wasn't gonna hold back any and drag this out, but if he was investing his efforts in making El want to stick around, he was at least gonna make sure he got off.

His other hand strayed over El's body while he fucked him, tracing the lines of muscle across his belly, the shifting tensions at his neck with Sands' rhythm on his cock, following the altered planes as El eased and settled slow and moved into him, Sands leaning in to breathe heat across the path of his fingers. El always seemed to be hot for that kind of thing, but more to the point, Sands liked it too – liked the quick shiver of flesh over El's ribs, liked the sweat in his nose and beneath the slide of his fingers, the proof wherever he touched of El's response to him, his influence over each inch of this body.

And goddamn whore-loving Christ, he really liked fucking him, the natural-rising rhythm in his hips with the flare of nerves through his balls, and finally, Jesus, finally, El shuddered and lost it, heaving with broken breaths beneath him, and Sands could let go. Distilled sensation, pure input, no analysis or question, pushing himself into the heat and pressure of another body that moved with him and for him, reaching with him, this one instant when there wasn't anything fucked up in his world, every sense natural and unforced in the driving rush of the need to come.

It lasted till the shakes quit his body and his balls hung soft, and once he would have opened his eyes.

It wasn't the shock it used to be, his mind falling back into a body that was blind. He was long past forgetting; hell, he was past even dreaming it. It was only good to have something left unchanged, the fractional pinpoints of time uncorrupted by the desire to see.

He was sprawled along the sticky arch of El's back, his fingers still clamped round El’s left shoulder. He loosened his grip, the curved indent of a nail in El’s skin sweeping beneath his fingertip as he straightened, and he wondered if he’d left other marks too, curling red and bruised down to El’s collarbone.

He still had his socks on, his feet sliding without resistance over the sheets.

When he pulled out, there was a faint sour smell clinging beneath the lube and come, and Sands wrinkled his nose. "You might have said you weren’t clean."

"It wouldn’t have stopped you," El said, "and I didn’t want you to think I was saying no."

Anything that looked like El was backing out on him would only have pissed him off more.

Sands stripped off his socks, hung a towel from his waist and went to the bathroom to wash his cock.

El followed behind him to clean up too, and Sands brushed his teeth and left him there. He picked out the Sig holsters from the pile on the floor and dropped into the other bed, the one that didn’t have sheets smeared with lube and come. And thinking about it, his jacket too – fuck, he’d need to get that cleaned.

El didn't seem so keen on the soiled bed either when he returned, snatching up the other pillow and squeezing in alongside him, though Sands wasn't exactly making an effort to move over and make room. El's head pushed in beside his ear, stray hair draping forwards onto his shoulder.

El had too much hair for sleeping with, or for fucking - it hung limp round his neck and slid forward over his face, and Sands never knew exactly where till it was catching on his fingernails or getting between his lips and the particular piece of skin he was aiming to suck or bite on. But its length added detail to his world-picture too, the low-rustling brush of it over collar as El turned, the swish of an automatic denial he chose not to speak, and Sands would easily trade a minor inconvenience for information, for the knowledge he craved, needed to make his choices.

El wriggled closer into him, pushing a little for more of the bed, light itch of chest hair rubbing against Sands’ arm, the angle of a hip pressing into his skin.

There were times when he missed curves and softness. Not that there was anything much wrong with El's general physique, but women were different, and Sands liked them too.

He didn't plan on doing anything about it - even if thinking it didn't give him the creeping twitches all down his spine, a casual fuck wasn't worth risking his life on, no matter how tight the ass or well curved the tits filling his palm, and it probably wasn't worth annoying El over either. Sands wouldn't expect El to pitch him a jealous fit - the arrangement they had going here wasn't exactly steeped in romance - but it would be a potentially literal pain in the ass to kick off the Latin macho trip. He could live without the pissing contest of proving who could outclass who for horniness.

He liked it well enough, the way El's body worked against his, the changing textures of planes and muscles and scars under his fingers, the scratch of hair brushing with the sweat over his skin. He could unleash the sex when it was El in a way he was pretty sure wouldn't work now with a stray fuck, when he'd be just a bit too distracted wondering if he was gonna get stiffed by a knife or a needle instead of fingers or a cock.

It had been a good screw tonight, one of the more inspiring sessions, and Sands had snatched only a few raw hours of sleep hanging around airports over the last day and a half, and he really could be out of it by now. Unfortunately, his day wasn't done with yet, not for either of them, because El should have been right on the edge of sleep, curling into him with slowed breath, arm draping over Sands' stomach. Sands had long since given up on pushing it away. Instead, El lay pressed along him with the hint of tension through his body, the regular, controlled rise and fall of his chest that went with thought.

The air stirred slow over Sands’ arms, the sultry remnants of breeze from the still-open window.

El rolled up onto an elbow, one broad finger drifting slow along Sands' shoulder, following the waving path of a strand of hair across his skin. Silent and watching.

So now it was time for all the tedious probing as El tried to figure what had triggered this little session. Sands didn't get off that way so often himself - all that sealed in anger and frustration was more of an El specialty. The Mariachi had obviously never gotten much training in the exercise of patience.

Easier to deflect before El actually made it around to talking.

"You told me he asked." Sands drew the words out slow and flat, and nothing like post-coital. It made a little too much sense when looked at from a certain angle; the lack of a pick-up at the airport, Lorenzo's reaction at the door, the precise phrasing of his words, the silent something that had gone between when Sands asked Lorenzo why they were here.

The finger stopped its trace, sitting still and heavy over his collarbone. "I said he would come and help me if I asked. He would still come even if I didn't."

Well, that was interesting. And pretty much all Sands needed to fuck this fuck-up even more was El deciding to start making clever with words.

"I seem to recall you getting pretty pissy with me one time over the things I wasn't saying. Something about me getting kicked out on my ass on the nearest street corner."

A twitch through the hand at his shoulder and the touch curled a little deeper. "I'm sorry."

"For then or for now? Either way, you're really not."

"I.... This is important. I got them involved in this. Now I have to fix it."

"So the little lies of omission are just fine when you think it's important. Well, I'm glad we got that all cleared up."

"You couldn't have talked me out of coming," El said, the words low and almost reluctant.

Sands knew that. And he would have come anyway, which was the only reason he wasn't considerably more pissed about it, because El's choice of conversational shortcut hadn't changed a thing. But it was useful to steal some of the moral high ground out from under El every now and then; it was a good time to go poking for information. "Well, now that we're in this cosy shithole together, why don't you tell me, El, just how close are you to friend Lori?"

"What do you mean?"

El always could be a little slow to catch a shift in direction. "Well, I don't mean did you fuck him in the ass, because I know you didn't do that kind of thing before you got your hands on mine, so what I mean is exactly what I asked."

"Like you said, he's a friend." El's voice was coloured by puzzlement still, and the inevitable tint of curiosity. "He knows how to handle a gun and how to handle himself, and he can be trusted completely." A pause, before his words softened and dropped. "I don't have so many of those left now."

Every word of it truth on the nail, and none of it telling what Sands was asking. "Such a good friend, yeah, and one you only bother to keep in touch with when there's trouble. Whatever happened to all those calls just to say 'Hi'?"

El shrugged the shoulder he wasn't leaning on, weight shifting beside Sands. "We're busy men, we have our lives." Faint brush of sound and altered angle of the words as El tipped his head. "He sends messages sometimes."

Sands smiled, deliberate. "That's telling phrasing, El - he does, you don't."

"What are you trying to say?"

"I'm thinking maybe there's a reason you don't stick around with your friends, and maybe it's more than you not wanting to take turns playing babysitter for the alco-drain."

The mattress creaked and shivered under him as El settled back onto it, his arm matching up alongside Sands' in layers of muscle and bone.

When he spoke, his voice was pitched to the ceiling, not at Sands. "I promised myself once that I'd keep them out of my life, and then I broke that promise."

Flash of El whispering as he waited in a church confessional, thinking no-one was there to listen, and Sands smiled. "You seem to do that a lot."

"Not a lot, but... it always seems to be the important ones."

"So, our hosts here are good enough friends for you to want to protect them from the curse of El Mariachi," Sands summarised. "Not so good that you actually put what's best for them before what's best for yourself in the end, but good enough that you're still half-trying to keep that promise." He turned his head on the pillow for El's benefit, let the edges of his lips curl upwards, tight. "Sounds to me like you've got some confusion going on in there, El."

"No confusion," El said. "Things change, and sometimes none of the choices are good ones."

"So it's a basic policy of steer clear that alters with the whim of the moment? You run too much of your life that way, El, you're supposed to get past it as you age."

Soft pillow sounds, and El was talking to Sands again, the humour back. "I change my mind too much, I've been told that once already tonight."

Sands gave him a wide, lazy grin. "I didn't think you'd miss me. Clearly Lorenzo did, or he'd have yelled the roof off."

"You weren't so obvious," El said, light. "I don't know how long you were there – I only knew at all because I know you."

"And you didn't stop to tip off your little friend? I'm proud of you, El, that almost counts as deceitful and underhand."

"Like you say, he would have yelled the roof off, and I wasn't in the mood." The humour was still there, but something darker, more like warning, beneath it. "Neither of us had anything to say that you didn't already know."

Well, that was debatable. Oh, most of it he'd guessed or assumed, but sometimes the phrasing of the confirmation added quite a lot. "The brat got the same crap from you I did, that's all I'm interested in," he said, flat. "If he doesn't hold back in his little games after tonight, I certainly won't."

Dip-creak of mattress, transmitted shiver of movement and El's hand touching light at his elbow. "I know you didn't want to come here," he said, words sober and low. "Thank you."

That kind of statement of the obvious didn't need a response, and Sands rolled over onto his side, a more comfortable position squashed into a small space with someone else.

El's hand moved with him, resting still on his arm, but he didn't push closer.

Sands kicked the sheets loose from the corner of the bed. He hated feeling pinned down, enclosed.

The neighbourhood was quiet; no cars, no voices through the drifting minutes, just the air and the cicadas. Always the freaking goddamn cicadas. The town felt un-lived in, but for the bugs. And his pillow was too thin. He pushed at the edges, so it fluffed into more of a hump in the middle.

The way his schedule had been all screwed up the last twenty-four hours, his brain didn't have a fucking clue whether it was night or day out there. He needed to train his melatonin levels to cue into cicadas.

The sleep-anywhere mariachi, of course, was already lapsing into the slower, even breaths of sleep, and Sands resisted the urge to kick him awake. El would only want to talk more, poke through the shit that was bugging at him.

If he had to be awake, his brain ran better without fending off El's curiosities and concerns along the way. Especially when it was El he needed to get the full detail topographic chart on; El and just exactly how the links between him and the sidekicks ran.

Sands had picked up real early in life that he wasn't the same as the people around him, that everyone else he saw was interacting on a level he didn't even have a concept of. He'd watched and studied, and he'd learned that certain behaviours consistently got certain reactions, and that giving the expected responses to the cues allowed him to fit in, to pass as their defined 'normal'. He knew there was a starter path required by society to get what he wanted out of life, so he went through school and snagged his degree with no more than a couple of minor glitches in his record, the kind any smart, bored teenager could rack up.

By then, the act had started to wear kind of frayed-to-threadbare on him - he'd long ago figured out most everyone was a hypocritical jerk when he dug deep enough. If people would be so quick to turn on him if they knew, why the fuck should he even bother with them?

He was the way he was, and if the world didn't like it, well, screw them all.

Through the years of watching, of insinuating himself, of deliberately tuning his own reactions to get the right ones from others, he'd learned exactly how to hook people in, which was enough to keep them around for the couple of weeks or months he might need them. He'd never bothered to learn how to keep someone's attention for longer.

He'd never imagined wanting to.

That was okay, he'd always been a quick study, and like any problem it would be resolved by the application of logic. He only had to work out what it was El wanted, and then give it to him.

Starting from the top of the pile, El wanted his wife and daughter back, but that was somewhat outside Sands' scope and likely to be counterproductive anyway - he didn't see himself fitting in too well with the family reunion. Even if he discovered the secret to godly miracles, he'd probably skip that one. Not that it was relevant either way, because godly miracles would give him back his fucking eyes and then it'd be sayonara Mariachi - though El had turned out to be useful in a number of ways, beyond having eyes, and it might be better to keep him around, just in case.

El had wanted revenge, but the mariachi had scratched that one from the list himself. He could be enticed back into it, as effortlessly as Sands had done before, but El would know exactly what he was doing, and that wasn't the kind of interaction Sands was looking for. And nor was the lifestyle.

El wanted music and books, but he had those perfectly well without Sands. Sands talked with him about them sometimes when the conversations ran that way. Attempts at anything more would look as instantly artificial as they were.

El wanted contact. He'd pushed that all along, right from the time they first screwed, slowly, constantly demanding that extra boot tip beyond where Sands had drawn the line. And Sands had let it keep on sliding because there was no particular downside to it, and he'd found that, blind, he slept better that way. Because touch gave him knowledge from El and about El that he couldn't get any other way, and it was better if all that shit looked like El's plan. But Sands already touched El, in bed and out - it wasn't something that needed thought, it was there, a result of living and interacting so closely and the sensory requirements of Sands' shrunken, restricted world, bounded now by the limits of his hearing instead of the distance given by sight.

He could take those everyday touches and change them, make them less casual, leave them lingering to speak more about El and the physical association between them. But Sands had already discounted sex as a plausible hook to keep the mariachi in the longer term. Sex was something the guy could get anywhere, after all, and with someone who had a nice rack of tits up front and looked just as good without shades. If El was feeling out of practice, Lorenzo could easily give him the run-down on the latest pick-up lines.

Sands couldn't imagine it now; or actually he could, and it made his flesh want to crawl away and tuck itself deep inside his bones. The idea of some stranger's hands moving disconnected and anonymous on his skin, people now the disembodied impressions of words and breath, footsteps and the reaching movements of their arms. Fingers sliding over him with the rest no more than shifting rustles, and no cues to read on where those hands would stray next, without their eyes to tell him what they were thinking and planning....

Not that he'd been able to tell when he could see, that had been proven in a definitively pointed way, and it only made the thought of walking into a bar and choosing someone blind kick-start his gag reflex like a ten inch cock shoved up against his palate.

Of course, paying for sex got you anything you wanted, including no touching, but no point in paying if he could keep better for free.

If.

Sands didn't know what El wanted.

Sands hadn't been a whole lot older when he'd figured out the things he considered exceptional about himself weren't often the qualities other people found appealing, though on balance it was likely El would appreciate one or two of them more than most. El was with him now because fighting back with Sands was better than a miserable existence moping around a pile of dust and graves, and because the slow business tour of foreign climes with Sands, where people actively trying to kill them were an intermittent inconvenience instead of a constant hazard, was a big improvement on both.

El had to be worked on slow, took his time coming round to a change of plan, and that had been an irritation that occasionally made Sands just want to shoot the bastard back when he'd been wasting months of his life sitting around all day in the grit and the sun, but now the inertia was playing entirely in his favour. So long as nothing disturbed the status quo and Sands deflected any better offers that might look like coming El's way, he had some time to work on figuring out the 'want' part.

It had been easy enough to hook El when Sands decided he wanted him around, to draw the man to him in the absence of anyone else. He hadn't even needed to engineer the isolation; El had already done all the hard part for him. But it wasn't enough to hold him indefinitely, not when El had other friends who'd keep in touch, the little sidekicks who hadn't even needed to click their fingers; one cryptic warning call and El had dropped his life and come running. Christ, El's scope was wider even than that, if he ever considered it - he could fit himself in with people anywhere. Clear of Mexico, and anonymous in the life Sands had handed him, he didn't need a killer for a companion.

With most of the women Sands had screwed, it would have been easy. Keep buying them flowers, dinner, jewellery, and they'd stick around to keep taking. But El was no closer to the average sap-mook than Sands was himself, and he didn't have much in the way of reference points from which to interpret a guy who sailed so far out of the shipping lanes. The man he'd first met had been laughably simple, all that rage glittering through so many tight layers of repression, just ready and waiting to be peeled. But El reinvented himself time after time, shifting his whole life right along whenever the currents changed, and it wasn't always easy to follow the flux and know which facet of the man he was dealing with.

Mostly, he liked the fact that El could still sometimes puzzle and intrigue him. Right now, it was proving to be something of a bitch.

The whir of the laptop fan had disappeared a while back as it dropped into sleep mode, and Sands reached out to push the lid closed, tidy and no risk of accidents. Alongside El, that machine was the most vital link he had to his own survival.

The layers of sweat had cooled with the touch of the air, and he was sticky and cramped, his head starting to ache with tiredness while his brain circled restless, his body trapped by the conflicting urges.

He wriggled himself out from El to sit on the edge of the bed, finding the towel he'd folded alongside. Breeze shifted and tickled soft over his reaching fingers, bringing little sound from the night, only the insects in the trees or bushes rustling too close to the house; no people, no activity, no innocent activity that wasn't deliberately trying to lose itself in the background.

He pulled the window shut, locked it with a definitive click, and went to take that shower.

Interactions in the house slid into a pattern over the next couple of days, and with somewhat lower friction levels than Sands might have predicted, given the range of less-than-flexible personalities involved.

Sands spent most of his hours with the laptop, reversing the daily arc of the sun from bedroom to kitchen to dining room, taking over any useful surface that kept the crawling heat from his skin. El sat hunched by his shoulder much of the time, running through pages of text far smoother than any mechanical speech, skipping and summarising, Sands pushing for more detail when the words nipped and dragged at his brain. El wandered off sometimes, his disappearances followed by rattles and slicing thuds from along the hallway, later by the sharp scents of onion and achiote merging into the heat of food. Cooking had been part of El's routine for years now, for himself alone and then for the two of them; Sands supposed it was almost automatic, and Lorenzo made no effort to stop him.

The kid had tried hanging around Sands' choice of shared space on the first day, lurching into the fast back-and-forth dissection of information with idiotic questions about what exactly they were looking for and how the details pieced together. El had answered him the first few times, explaining with ridiculous patience that they wouldn't know a goddamn thing till they found it, before Sands lazily suggested the kid should fuck off and find a gobstopper to suck on, a sentiment El had backed in more placating terms.

Sands had no idea what the kid did with himself to pass the days after that, but he didn't much care. That willingness to keep El happy and stay out of their way was a big influence on the overall absence of tension. It was mildly entertaining to bait the brat with a few pointed comments over food, but generally Sands had too many things taking shape in the corners of his head to waste the time.

They didn't see a whole lot of the dipso. While Sands found Lorenzo's enforced presence irritating, he would have liked to have Fideo around bugging his ass considerably more than he was. It was tough to run an accurate profile on a guy who was never there to hook a line into.

The kid wasn't so hard to figure out - he ran on money and sex, like most people his age, even if he did have that pleasantly useful little vicious streak threaded right down the centre. Fideo - right now Fideo ran on booze, but Sands wondered what else was squirming stifled under the liquid coating. There had to have been more to his motives once, and that was still there, if somewhat dehydrated. The drink obscured it, made it a little harder to find, but the answer to that particular mystery might tip the scales one way or the other, an influence in his favour or against, and it was one of the big things on Sands' extensive 'need to know' list.

The dipso drank till he passed out, then woke when he got half-way sober. He showed up for meals if 'sober' happened to coincide, but he had the alcohol-seeker's casual disregard for calories that didn't come in liquid form, eating on average once a day, unless maybe he got the munchies in the night. Fideo's nocturnal wanderings drove Sands nuts the first couple of nights, the slow tap of surreptitious footsteps over tile creeping through the house, setting every nerve in his body dancing on the high tide of adrenaline, till he picked out the faint slur and scrape of sole in the tread and learned to ignore it.

Fideo's sleep patterns were even more fucked up than Sands' own, and Sands was at least making the attempt to keep a routine.

Lorenzo tried to talk Fideo out of his room now and then, mostly around meal-times - concern for his friends was the last lingering virtue to pollute his otherwise suitably dissolute character, exactly as Sands had predicted. Sands' curiosity had teased him away from the frustrations of an El-less keyboard on the second evening to tag along. Sometimes information came in unexpected little packages.

Lorenzo didn't bother to knock before he opened the door, which was interesting. It got Sands to wondering just how easy the kid was in his choice of fuck. Two guys living alone in the one house - maybe the sidekicks wouldn't be so surprised when they discovered his sleeping arrangements with El didn’t involve separate beds.

The air from the room was thick with drink, and stale, the heavy fumes of tequila and a cleaner, purer spirit Sands couldn't quite catch, but there was no movement or words at the intrusion. Sands made a quick choice to stay outside and settled himself against the wall across the hallway, feet crossed at the ankles, head tipped back to the plaster.

"Hey, Fideo," the kid called from inside the doorway. "Time to get that big ass of yours downstairs for dinner, El's cooking his red mole chicken thing."

"I'm good here." Fideo's words came slow and deliberately shaped. Rustling followed, and the distinctive chinks of glass on glass. "Not hungry, I'll eat later."

"So skip the food, we're gonna run through what we know about these guys," Lorenzo tried. "Bring the bottle, you can drink it just as easy while we talk."

"You got somebody for us to shoot?" Hint of curiosity, roused interest there under the slur.

"We've got it narrowed down some, we're still working on the last few," Lorenzo admitted.

"So let me know when you do." Fideo's words slumped back into bored stupor, low beneath the clinks and the liquid slosh. "Just say the word, an' I'll be right along."

The kid turned with a scrape of sole, the long experience that labelled this particular visit a lost cause. Sands aimed thinly-curled lips at Lorenzo as he pulled the door to a soft-clicking close behind him. "Why not just smash the bottle and drag him out by the hair?"

He expected the kid to snap at him to mind his own fucking business, but he only shrugged an indifference that had to be faked. "Why bother? He won't eat if he doesn't want to, and he won't be taking in too much detail right now either. We can fill him in on the names when he's sober."

Sands lengthened his smile a half inch. "He'll never be sober."

"Close enough," Lorenzo said. "He's talking more now, so he's cutting back. Another couple of days, he'll be good to fight."

So the witless blob across the room had been the improving version - score another check in the column for El sticking with Sands. "I can't believe you trust a guy who resents putting down a bottle long enough to load his gun."

"I can't believe El trusts a guy who's in it for himself, all the way," the kid bit back, much more the predictable Lorenzo, and Sands smiled at him slow.

"Obviously I've got hidden charm." He hadn't teased anything useful about Fideo from his little visit, but he knew now when to get to Lorenzo with his defences briefly on the glitch.

"Yeah, that I'd like to see," the kid muttered, already walking away towards the stairs. "You can quit hiding it any time."

"Oh, I only do that for people who can make it worth my while," Sands said softly, and straightened away from the wall to follow the rising, warm tint of chili back to its source.

El was in the dining room, already dishing up food – clearly these Fideo-interactions never lasted long, whatever the outcome. "How is he?" he asked when Lorenzo reached the door.

"He talked some," the kid said as he dropped into his chair, which was the truth, if the edited highlights version.

"Talking, but not eating. He's getting worse." El didn't bother making it a question.

"Maybe he wouldn't if you were around more." Sharper edge to Lorenzo's words this time. "He's got some respect for you."

El shook his head, slow. "If anybody could stop him, it would be you. He makes his own choices. We all do."

"That's it? He's drinking himself to death while we watch, and all you can say is it's his choice?"

"What should I do?" El asked quietly. "Do you want me to pray? Get angry and shout and swear? If it would change anything, I would."

"You'd have done it anyway when I first met you."

"I did a lot of things once that I thought would help," El said, flat. "I learned that nothing ever does."

"You won't even try."

"He's an addict," Sands pointed out, quick, dismissive wave of his hand from the elbow. "It's a brain disease. You might as well try and cure him of Alzheimer's."

Smooth rustle of cloth from El, quick movement, and Sands reached for the light weight that slapped and slid on the table beside him, finding a pack of cigarettes. "That would make Lorenzo the only one here whose brain isn't sick," El said.

Sands took a cigarette from the carton, twirling it between his fingers. "You and me, we choose our addictions, stick to the ones that don't fuck with our heads. Him?" He turned his head half Lorenzo's way and smiled. "I think he just hides them better."

"I know you're saying that 'cos you expect me to demand just what the fuck you mean by it, so I won't," Lorenzo snapped.

Sands just stretched his smile a little wider. El didn't pick them too badly; at least the kid caught on fast. "As for the alco-brain up there, well, he likes his addiction a little too much to want to stop, and since good judgement and logic are rarely features of the condition, that's not going to change." He flipped the cigarette around between his first two fingers and slid it back into the pack. "Frankly, I don't know how you've lived with him all this time."

Half-amused huff of breath from Lorenzo. "I don't, when I can help it. Fideo's got his own place, he moved in here when we heard somebody was taking an interest."

"Nicely confirming that you're the kind of people who know and react when you're being watched," Sands drawled. Still, scratch one possible theory on the mariachi sidekicks – it looked like they were going to be scandalised after all. Or at least the kid was; the dipso was probably too far gone to notice, or to rouse himself enough to care if he did.

Lorenzo hadn't risen to chew on that last piece of bait either.

After just a few days, the kid was rapidly losing the only positive aspect to his existence. The basic research was as brain-shreddingly dull as ever, and playing with the kid had been the only passable form of entertainment for Sands' off hours that didn't involve El's dick.

The ongoing tedium of too many days trapped in one space with his world centred on a computer had the inevitable effect on Sands, his nicotine consumption shooting back up close to the levels of eighteen months ago. Sometimes it seemed unfortunate that his last drug of choice had been selected specifically for its inability to numb his mind. He smoked in the bedroom, and in the kitchen, another room Lorenzo never bothered to go near since El had taken charge of the catering. When they actually got around to launching the offensive, El could stock up the brat’s ammo for him if he couldn't stand to spend five minutes in the armoury. El predictably stuck with the kid's edict and smoked his few daily cigarettes somewhere outside in the yard.

Sands had nothing in the way of local contacts, and he liked to keep it that way, but there was a whole ocean of revealing information available as a matter of public record. Newspaper archives were wonderful things for finding out which local businessmen or their hirelings had been arrested, and on what charges, and the names of the lawyers they hired to get those pendings dismissed dug tunnels into so many other interesting details.

With El's help tracking the words through the maze of websites, a few days was enough to scratch most of the names from Lorenzo's list - pathetic worms, vindictive enough on their own solid ground, but liable to wriggle into hiding when there was trouble offing, not go looking to poke sticks at El Mariachi.

When he was down to three names, he'd burned through all the indirect options, and the investigation needed to get a little more personal. Not something he'd been looking forward to, when the names on that list knew exactly who Sands was and how he operated. This mission was going to require a particular degree of subtlety.

Subtlety did not include the brat.

"No," he said, flat. It was pointless to elaborate; the kid wasn't coming, and discussing it only ate into time he had several better uses for.

Inevitably, Lorenzo wouldn't get on board with that plan either. "Why not?"

"I don't want you getting in my way." Simple and honest, not that the kid would appreciate that, any more than he appreciated Sands’ words when they were carefully chosen for effect.

"Screw that. If they mark you, you'll want the extra gun along."

"You're insulting my professionalism. And El's," Sands added, since that was more likely to make an impact. "We've managed just fine without you all this time."

"And now you're going sniffing round people who know you're alive and are looking out for you, it's not the same."

Sands flashed Lorenzo a quick, suggestive smile. "How lovely to know you care."

"He has a point," El said from the sofa. "It can't be the same."

Oh, that was just perfect. El finally decided to participate in this little bout instead of judging from the sidelines, and he was weighing in on the kid's side. "So the solution is to have two of us there who might be recognised instead of one?" Sands snapped. "If he drops out of sight, they're going to wonder why, and they're going to look around that much harder. He has to stay here, and he has to be seen."

"You saying you can't deal?" Lorenzo challenged. "You’re such a pro, if you can work your shit out, I can be a lot more an asset than liability."

"He's saying we need you as a distraction, a decoy." El spoke fast and certain. "We need you to keep them looking here, at you, instead of at us."

Not exactly how Sands would have phrased it - he was fairly sure he didn't need Lorenzo for anything - but it was good enough to shut the kid up on that particular subject. And as a bonus, he'd managed to switch it around and have El take his part, something Lorenzo needed to take note of and get in line with, because Sands wasn't going to let it change.

They rented cars for the various research trips. Sometimes it meant a couple of days just driving through huge tracts of baking Mexican wasteland, but Sands had no intention of laying an airline trail linking their current identities to each of the people they were checking on, and he wasn't willing to stand out from the crowd in Lorenzo's choice of Bling-mobile either. El assured him the truck wasn't actually so thick on the chrome, but Sands expected him to say that whatever.

He left a layer of insulation between himself and the targets for his opening inquiries, approaching people at one extra remove from normal practice until he could be sure he had the right name to cherry-pick with the irresistible offer. The personality types on Sands’ list weren’t too compatible with quiet rural past-times, and his inquiries were greased by the mass of large cities where a tourist could pass unremarked, just as long as that tourist wasn’t too obviously blind. Sands got to stretch and amuse himself a little through the elegant and energising play of carefully-orchestrated scenes with El, much more tailored to his preferences than the stifling boredom of the days between, the wait back in Acapulco for the lines to twitch into place before the next target could be set. They kept their patterns unpredictable, holing up each night away in a different anonymous, low-middle rate hotel.

Sex was back on the daily agenda, the precedent of that first night running right on down the hallway. It was usually more El's idea, the hands and lips on Sands’ skin between bland hotel sheets or in the insect-tinged quiet of their room at the kid's place, and Sands was perfectly happy to leave him to take charge. El got his fix of the slower, softer sex he sometimes craved, and Sands got the scampering thoughts screwed from his head, the claws scratching their tunnels and passageways through his brain silenced by the sensations of his body and the drift into sleep.

If she was good for nothing else, this vicious, camel-cud-chewing bitch of a country was at least useful for getting him laid. There really was nothing like the over-arching threat of sudden, murderous assault with automatic weapons to add a little cardamom and freshen up a relationship.

The kid had obviously called Fideo right in the liquid department. Each time they rolled back into Acapulco, the dipso was spending more time conscious and sipping from the bottle in his hand, and less in an inebriated coma. Sands would have appreciated the chance to do a little more fishing if he could have gotten the guy alone, but the brat stayed practically glued to him, and was only too happy to drag any conversation into an irrelevant argument.

With no research needed to keep him working alongside Sands now, El wasted a lot of his time immersed in banal indulgences with the sidekicks. He dropped into the habit of lingering at the table after dinner, the three of them swapping teasing insults and endless chatter. Sometimes they'd break out the guitars instead, which was almost bearable, given the alternative.

Sands passed those evenings in their room, checking news channels for any hint of a comment that might mean movement, or reaction. That never ate through more than an hour of his time, and he’d leave the earphone in to listen to a book or his music, the rhythm of the words or the beat in his head still leaving him with El’s smiling voice and the rise of his laughter in the noise from below.

He lay still, unreacting, when El's boots tapped on the stairs late in the night, ignored the soft click of the door and the dip of the mattress, kept his breathing light and even beneath the hand that slid onto his ribs. He didn't try to convince himself it was enough to fool El, too many details impossible to fake, but there was nothing like holding back a little of what a man wanted to make him want it more.

El didn’t call him on the bullshit. He flexed his body around Sands, shaping lengths of muscle and angles along him, breathing tequila and smoke heavy through his hair while Sands dropped into true sleep.

Not all their trips out of town ran entirely smoothly; some minor glitches were inevitable. Predictions were only as reliable as the information they were based on, and not everyone was as discerning as Sands in squeezing the truth from the gossip. Working at one extra remove from the target had its drawbacks in the quality of the available sources, and the occasional over-adventurous idiot.

When the plans first wavered a little off course, Sands made a point of being out of the car and into the house while El was still locking up the garage. He followed the raised voices and forced, soundtracked laughter to the TV room, waited inside the doorway for the prickle and the half-breath that told him he had an audience. "There's a little something extra in the car you'll want to get rid of after dark." Sands spoke towards his fingernails, held as if inspecting them; much less likely to embarrass than talking at where he thought a person might be. "I'm assuming you know the best sites for local disposal, I'm afraid I haven't had the chance to get fully acquainted with the neighbourhood."

Lorenzo's voice came from low, stretched-across-the-sofa level. "You better be jerking my chain, or I'm gonna get seriously pissed."

Sands lifted his head briefly his way and shrugged. "One of the people I was chatting with got ideas about following us home. It seemed best that she didn't."

Swift rustle of movement and shifting weight, Lorenzo up on his feet and talking at Sands' level. "You parked a car with a fucking body in it in my garage, in my house."

Sands stretched his lips outwards, curled into a thin smile. "Technically El did, since I don't park anywhere these days, and I wasn't going to phrase it quite that way just in case someone might be listening, but it's more my body than his, yes."

"You're completely fucking sick, you know that."

Sands raised his eyebrows a little, his expression mild. "You're acting like I wanted to kill her. Really, that kind of thing's too inconvenient to wantonly indulge in. If the people I talk to start disappearing, business can get very slow."

"The CIA must be fucked in the goddamn head." Lorenzo's tone hadn't altered, no appreciation of the logic. "I can't believe even those bastards would let you run off the leash."

The kid’s reaction was nothing unexpected. He was a killer himself, and a natural at it, but he killed with the fuel of hatred, the adrenaline of the fight. He would never appreciate the purely practical approach, the 'Well, I suppose I'll have to shoot you now,' four quick, grouped rounds, and walk away. To someone like Lorenzo, the tidy, sensible simplicities of Sands' existence were a mark of 'other', and Sands had become well versed in the responses to 'other' before he'd learned to wear normal.

Sands only smiled in Lorenzo’s direction, polite, but not suspiciously friendly. "Oh, I can be very convincing when I want to be," he said, letting the inflections fall even and natural.

He wasn't naïve enough to believe his normal act had completely slid past those probing bastards in psych, but he'd never needed it to. A basic level of ruthlessness, of disconnection, was practically part of the job description for a certain kind of field agent, the ability to follow an order without stopping to quibble too much over the ethical and moral implications. What psych picked up on between the smiles and the chit-chat was enough to make sure he'd always been given the more delicately interesting assignments he preferred. And if he exceeded the actual job requirements by a certain amount, well, psych might wonder, but that kind of thing was a lot harder to prove.

El's feet sounded steady and regular from the hallway, heading closer – he might not have caught the specifics at that range, but he couldn't have missed the kid's tone bouncing off of the stonework. "I brought him here to do this," El said, stopped just inside the door. "I know how he works. I'm responsible for anything he does."

Sands turned the stare of the lenses flat onto El, stretched his voice into a slow drawl. "That's real sweet of you, El, but nobody's responsible for me except, well, me."

"I didn't mean it that way," El said, the same neutral voice.

"No? You don't get to mollify Little Lori with what he wants to hear and then feed me a different angle, at least not when we're both in the same room."

El took the two strides between them, speaking close. "You're doing what I asked of you. What we all asked of you," he said, flicking his head the kid's way. Rub of cloth over cloth and a low pressure of fingers along Sands' arm. "If it doesn't always go smoothly, should we put all the blame on you?"

El always kept business locked within its bounds well enough, but outside of that particular game park, Sands had been aware for a long time now of the brush light across his sleeve, the touch of fabric he wasn’t wearing at his wrist.

With El, it was an impossible call whether those fleeting gestures were deliberate, or if the guy had no clue about the hangovers from his earlier touchy-feely life. Sands' suspicions curved towards the unconscious view, which made it mostly pointless to go to all the trouble of avoiding them.

He tucked his elbow tighter to his body, took a deliberate step back and away. "Since you put it that way," he said with a quick smile in Lorenzo's direction. "If you feel the need to offer yourselves up as the sacrificial scapegoats, I'm always willing to pick one out. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I might need to go scrub my fingernails. They feel a little sticky."

The air flowed cool and empty around Sands as he walked from the room, through the house, its weight feathering his hair across his cheekbones, pressing cotton to his skin with phantom fingers in place of real ones.

Sands had never had any interest in the touchy-feelies outside of sex, though there were times they provided a useful tool for a specific effect. Now, though - touching El was communication and connection, a depth of information about the world he couldn't reach with just his ears.

His years of anthropological study of the people around him had never sidelined into the lifestyles of the blind, how much touch was normal and what could be considered pathetically insecure clutching and groping.

Sands wasn't shooting for looking normal for a blind man, only for being normal for Sands.

When the after-dinner chat kicked off that evening, Sands took his usual opt-out, and the tap of boots on the stairs followed a minute later, solid and regular.

El shut the door behind him, leaning back against it in a soft rustle of cloth. "If it matters, most likely they already know."

Sands tipped his face up from the laptop, keeping track of the bleeps as it ran through its start-up checks. "They've got a working set of ears, and you tell me they're not entirely stupid, so I imagine they do." He raised his eyebrows to arch high over the line of the lenses. "I'm more surprised Little Lori hasn't bothered to mention it, one more charge on his long list of all the ways I'm corrupting you."

"He worries because his friend chooses to live with a man who has no morals, no guilt - no compassion," El finished, soft. "Whether or not we also have sex doesn't matter so much."

"Not even to a good Catholic boy?" Sands prompted.

El laughed, short and harsh, the dulled tap of his head falling back to the wood beneath it. "Your 'good Catholic boy' is a killer, as I am, and just as good a Catholic."

"I've found that people tend to pick and choose among their religious edicts," Sands said, letting his amusement bleed through the words. "You'd be surprised just how many killers claim to be devout to God's ways."

El shrugged, the familiar sound emphasised by the rub of fabric along the door. "Few people know more about how meaningless sex can be than Lorenzo."

"Oh, I wouldn't say it's meaningless." Sands smiled, wide and lazy. "It isn't necessary, but it serves a useful purpose, if only as temporary entertainment. Would you call your guitar meaningless?"

El moved from the door, his fingers closing on Sands' elbow to pull him round in the chair, El’s legs pressed to his knees, his lips meeting Sands' fast and harsh. "I didn't say it was that way for me," he said as he stepped to the side. He didn't let go of Sands' arm, and Sands didn't shake him off. "You don't care if they know."

Sands laughed. "I don't care if they think I'm fucking next door's poodle. Hell, Lorenzo would probably believe it, maybe I should drop him some hints over breakfast."

"Better say it’s a spaniel, you’ll be more convincing," El smiled.

El didn’t ask any more about Sands’ avoidance behaviour. He’d know Sands wouldn’t tell him if he couldn’t work it out.

Sands was aware when El slipped from the bed later, dressing swift and simple without the click of the light. He tracked the footfalls to the door and beyond it, dulled, the quiet exchange of voices and the soft rumble of a car driven slow beneath the rhythmic patter of rain.

Sands said nothing when he returned either, only let El's cool skin wrap around him.

Sands had to kill a couple more of his informants who asked too many of the wrong kind of questions, and then get a check on their info before he moved on it. He'd never considered himself the kind of person who repeated his mistakes, and Mexico had taught him more than well enough the Microsoft shares value of getting his own double-cross in first.

El disagreed with at least one of Sands’ risk assessments, but he helped dispose of the body just the same. Sands had always found it easier to appeal to the baser instincts when he worked, and even El’s moral superiority had to admit that the kind of person who would sell out another for money or personal gain was no particular loss to society.

After three weeks of listening and following and delicately phrased negotiations, Sands had his name.

"How can you know?" was the kid's first, and entirely predictable, response.

"He fits the profile." Sands said easily. "He's ambitious and greedy, with quite a creative vicious streak if anybody happens to step on his toes. He's got big plans unfolding to expand his legitimate interests with no suggestion of where the money's coming from."

"That fits pretty much all of those bastards," Lorenzo bitched. "So why pick this one?"

Sands smiled at him, bright and confident. "He's also been making a lot of calls to every name on that list of yours, plus a few extras I've tied into Honaker's 'businesses.'"

"You hacked his phone records?" The kid actually sounded impressed for once, which proved just how stupid he really was.

"I paid off the guy who shreds his papers. He cost a lot less than a good hacker."

Shifting movement from the chair on the right – this little chat had been deliberately timed around Fideo having one of his less tequila-soaked sessions. "You say if we kill this man, the others will be frightened and give up?"

"Well, nobody's casting any microalloyed steel round it, but there's a good chance it'll play that way, yes."

"Then we kill him," Fideo said, the agreement instant and almost too easy.

"And just how do you plan on doing it?" Sands still had some curiosity prickling through his head when it came to the dipso – when he wasn't so drunk to be a complete waste of respiration, there were occasional flashes of insight to his remarks that suggested there might be an interesting, practical intellect drowning under the pickle juice.

"Shoot him, what else?" That was Lorenzo opting for his usual up-front solution to any problem.

Sands tipped his head towards him with a hint of smile. "Details?"

"Who cares? Three of us are enough to put a rotating tail on him, whoever gets the chance takes the shot."

"No. It needs to be a done a certain way," El said, the careful words that shaped his thoughts. It was the first contribution he'd bothered to make, leaving Sands to do the talking, even though Lorenzo would take it easier from El. "It has to be dramatic – a message. It has to be obvious to everyone who did it, and why."

"Obvious to everyone but the local branches of law enforcement," Sands added, "since I don't suppose the two of you are keen on adopting El's lifestyle." He swung his head slow around the full range of his audience. "El Mariachi's going to jump out of retirement again and remind people just how unhealthy it can be to ask the wrong kind of questions." He turned to El with slightly raised eyebrows and a twist to the edge of his lips. "Looks like that shotgun's going to earn its keep. I hope you packed the outfit."

"I brought it," El said, flat and clipped.

"So we're going on a trip to Morelia." Sands smiled wide over the room. "Ayala prefers his inland house during hurricane season. I think you'll like it."

"I'll start packing our shit," Lorenzo said. "How long are we gone for?"

"It's just me and El at first." Sands snipped the kid’s thoughts back fast. "We still want you two here looking wholesome and boring for the informants. Once we've checked out the choices and come up with some possible plans, we bring you in for the fine-tuning and the, how should I say it, execution."

One of those quick, charged silences as the mariachis confirmed agreement with each other, before El rose to his feet. "Then it's time for me to fill my guitar case," he said. "Lorenzo, what do you have?"

"All the good toys." The kid bounced up from the sofa with that insta-grin. "Come on, I'll show ya."

"If there are any flash-bangs, make sure to being a few along," Sands said as they passed him. "Might be useful to add to the show."

El's feet paused by the door. "Any more special orders?"

Sands tipped his head as if thinking and then smiled. "I think that should do it."

He waited till the paired steps were well down the hallway before he turned back to the chair, where a high, steady grate of unscrewing already followed the end of the chat. "You'll play along with it, just like that? You're not going to question me on the details, the information?"

Liquid sloshed before he got an answer. "El knows the reasons, he's not against it."

"And that's enough for you? El believes me, so you do too? You know nothing about me."

"I know more than I might want to." The words were a statement, no sharp indent of teeth behind the tone. "El knows what he's doing. It would be strange to start doubting him now."

"You'll actually trust him that far, base all your choices and risk your life on his judgement." Sands' contempt spiked through his words, but Fideo only took another drink, then answered with the same calm.

"Don't you?"

Sands didn't have to consider the truth of it; that was a decision he'd made long ago. He much preferred to have the details, the reasoning, the chance to check for flaws in El's thinking, but when the bullets and noise and the cordite stink enclosed them, he simply did. "Only in his specific area of expertise," he said, with a quick smile. "I certainly don't trust you just because he does."

Sweeping rustle of cloth from the chair, and Sands got the distinct feeling he'd been saluted with a bottle. "I'll keep it in mind."

Too many of his conversations with the dipso went that way – Fideo always refused to rise, and how much of that was the man and how much the doping drag of the booze, Sands hadn't entirely figured out.

Not that it was going to matter, because a few more days with the sidekicks was all it would take to finish this deal.

It still irritated him not to know. But not enough to make him want to stick around.

They took the drive to Morelia the next day. Sands booked them a vacation rental place, two bedrooms for when the hangers-on joined the game. It was less hassle than to keep switching hotels for the next few weeks, and more anonymous and private, no minimum wage staff watching their every move, ripe to be paid off.

They already knew the addresses of Ayala's house and the local offices of his legitimate business fronts, and El scoped those from a respectful distance, getting a feel for layout and style and people. They tracked the man where they could be discreet, through the crowds, while Sands arranged for the architectural plans to the main buildings. Ayala seemed to keep a reasonable degree of routine to his days, touring his offices during the usual business hours, with other, more interesting engagements sometimes taking up part of his evenings.

He never went anywhere alone; he always had a driver for his car, and an 'aide' alongside him, who scanned the surroundings and didn't look at too many papers. They tailed him to a number of restaurants, three of them quickly becoming obvious as his favourites. They ate lunch at those places on other days, checking layouts and exits and lighting and the routines of the staff. Not the flashiest of the city’s joints, but the man had excellent taste in food – Sands had always preferred running surveillance on people who were a little more discerning.

Between the watching, and Sands’ meetings with a few delicately selected people, they spent hours at the apartment dissecting the information, picking through the details, the options and the obstacles. This was El at his most Elemental – the man walked through a door and saw the room drawn as a series of exits, elevations and sight lines. He unrolled a building plan and shaped it into cover and pitfalls, a complex maze of climbs and leaps routed through. Sands sprawled across the bed, relaxed without jacket or shoes, lighting their cigarettes as he built his own mental maps from the flow of words; he fired off comments and criticism, and the replies were fast and sure, any trip the failure of speech to keep up with a mind that flashed with instinct and years of experience.

He'd missed this. Missed the strategising, the chaos and improvisation of the full-scale assault, missed the challenge of testing El at what the man did best. As a full-time occupation, it grew tedious and unpleasant, but as a sideline hobby it was distinctly entertaining.

There was still the fundamental, irritating drawback of their geographic location, but Sands was more relaxed than at any point since they'd boarded a plane to goddamn Mexico.

He might have enjoyed it more if somebody in a nearby apartment hadn't been keeping a big hairy mutt that barked half the night. Who the fuck rented out vacation lots to people with animals anyway?

El would wake up with the first deep blast resonating through the walls, then be asleep again by round four. Unless Sands metaphorically prodded at him, because insomnia was a little less onerous when it was shared, and he'd take the opportunity to do some extra tunnelling into the sidekicks by the indirect route.

"So just how far can we rely on these friends of yours?" he asked through the ringing silence after one canine outburst. "And yes, I do already know your first answer to that, I'm talking on a purely practical level." Better to kick these things off on a motive that couldn't be questioned, then lead the conversation 'naturally' to more interesting territory.

"Fideo's still a good shot, even with his problems." El wriggled round in the bed, turning back to face Sands after he'd rolled away in sleep. "Sometimes when the fighting's hard, he can be a little... rash."

Sands arched his eyebrows – the drapes weren't thick, and the light leaking from the street would be enough to see by. "If you call him rash, that translates to suicidal in any reasonable language."

"No, but we might want to keep him from coming up against large numbers at once," El conceded. "He can make choices based more on his emotions than on good tactical grounds."

So there was a man who'd react buried there under the booze – interesting to have that suspicion confirmed, more interesting to dig out some of those triggers the next time they met. "How about the kid? What's his weakness we need to work around?"

El didn't answer right away, and when he did, his words were shaped and heavy with thought. "As a fighter, I'm not sure he has one. He's fast, precise, methodical – he sees his chances and he takes them." His voice flashed into a quick smile. "He's been shot less often than me." Short pause among the rustle and ripple of sheets. "His true weakness would be that whatever crazy things I do, or Fideo does, he follows us in, no questions, no hesitation."

"So whichever plan we run with, we should keep him separate," Sands offered, a little bait for more. "Let him fight his own style without interference."

El shook his head, hair rubbing heavy over the pillow. "He won't go without Fideo. He lost that battle with me long ago, but he won't leave Fideo to fight alone."

Sands twisted to lie on his side, facing El, closer, pulling the bedclothes tighter over his skin. "You know, El," he said slowly, "you sound like you've gone to a lot of trouble to get rid of a guy who should be exactly what you want at your back."

No catch to the slow slide of breath, no twitch through the sheets. "I don't want to drag him into all my problems. He has a life of his own, a home."

"My stab at the donkey tail says Lorenzo had racked up quite a body count by an age when you'd shot nothing more than a few desert lizards." El didn't answer, which was more than Sands needed. He smiled, slow. "If you're looking for someone to save, you'd have better luck starting with Fideo."

"Not save," El said instantly. "I can't save him from what he wants. But there are mistakes he hasn't made yet."

"Mistakes like getting a bit too famous, maybe? You're really not helping him out with that one."

"That's why I had to come back to fix it."

Sands' lip twitched upwards at one corner. "Whether you wanted to or not?"

"My life hasn't been about what I want for a long time now." Still no reaction under El's tone, just the heavy, clinging drag of resignation.

"You really should look into changing that, El," Sands said, lifting his voice light and breezy. "Too many obligations aren't so good for the soul." Especially when those obligations sucked Sands in with him.

"I'll try." The smile was back with the words, and El rolled closer, fingers curling over Sands' ribs. "So if something I want is close by, I should just reach out and take it?"

Sands let himself relax under the hand, every joint and muscle loose, pliable. "It's never too soon to start building those good habits." It might have been interesting to tease the conversation along a little further, but sex was good too; better when El was reinforcing Sands as what he wanted.

And maybe when he'd come, he'd be able to sleep through that goddamn dog.

Sex and schemes, packaged with good food and cigarettes - it was ten days of pleasant, entirely cooperative accord, and it didn't survive an hour past the arrival of the sidekicks, the transition from theoretical discussion to an actual, detailed plan.

"It needs to be the house," El said.

"No, it doesn't. We know the layout, but we've got nothing on the security." Except that it was there, and a lot of it. There was only so much detail Sands could put his hands on when he couldn't get within sight of the subject or anyone close to him. "One of those restaurants of his would be less problematic."

"Nowhere public. Bystanders mix badly with guns."

"Coming from you, El, that should almost be funny," Sands drawled.

"I never chose it that way," El said simply. "It was chosen for me."

"So we set off the fire alarm and everybody gets the hell out," Lorenzo said.

"Including our target," Sands pointed out.

"Yeah, but he's jumpy, suspicious - he won't take the front door with the masses."

"Neither will all of the masses, they'll take the nearest door," Fideo said. "Where one person goes, more will follow."

"And then our target's somewhere in the middle of a panicking crowd on the street." El said, wrapping up the scenario rather accurately. "I don't see how that helps."

"Well, if they're not trapped in a small space, the incidentals can get out of the way faster when the shooting starts," Sands said, aiming him a quick, closed-lipped smile.

"Yeah, everybody but grandma," Lorenzo snapped. "But I guess you don't give a shit about her."

Sands turned his head the brat's way with a half-raised eyebrow. "I'd hoped you might just be good enough to miss her and shoot the actual target instead. I know El is."

"None of that matters, because we're not doing it." El's voice was gaining a bit of crackle around the edges. "So we're back to the house."

"Which I veto. Unless of course you all want to die."

"You wanna come up with a plan some time instead of just knocking everybody else's?"

"The three of you know the details of how you work together, I don't." Sands kept his tone perfectly mild and reasonable, finely tuned to annoy the ill-tempered. "Anything I suggest will obviously have flaws."

"So you’re gonna admit you're not perfect now? Never thought I'd get to hear that one."

"We're supposed to be thinking of a plan," El cut in, knife-blade voice that was pure, precise threat, "and you two are making thinking difficult."

"I'm just telling it how it is," Sands said easily, stretching his legs out to cross at the ankles and slouching deeper into the sofa.

Flicker of sound from the kid's direction, then stilled, and Sands smiled faintly. He had the option of oblivious immunity to those kind of El looks, but Little Lori had to oblige or really piss him off.

A soft, rhythmic grating fired up from his left as Fideo unscrewed a bottle cap. Or was it re-screwing now? Sands was losing track.

"Why's it need to be a building?" Lorenzo offered into the silence. "We can take him out between stops, ambush the car."

"That's not a plan, that's improvisation," Sands said. "The first mistake, he heads off in a cloud of stinking rubber, and we won't get another chance. He'll hole up where we can't get near him, and bring the wrath of Ayala down on the both of you from afar." He turned full on to the kid and smiled brightly. "On second thoughts, I like that one, let's roll with it."

"We could do it when he's already stopped," Fideo said. "Somewhere we know he goes. Outside one of those offices."

El shook his head. "The window's too small. The car stops right outside, then he's in the door. Less than five seconds on the street."

"And if he makes it inside, we're back in Scenario Sidekick Slaughter."

"So we need him on the sidewalk away from places he owns, somewhere without too many people." Fideo's words were slow, but considering now instead of drunk. "You say there's a coffee stop he makes in the mornings?"

"Lobby of the Alameda early, before he hits the offices," Sands filled in. "The corrupting mark of too many foreign business trips, a weakness for lattes."

"The car waits on the street. He goes inside with the bodyguard, but they have to cross the forecourt to the door." El's voice was rising a little, quickening, definitely interested. "That takes it to around twelve seconds."

"Car running or off?" Lorenzo asked.

"Running. It's supposed to be a no parking zone."

"Still not enough. We'd need to hit him fast out of the car, so he can't make a sprint for the hotel, but if he's too close he could dive back in the car."

"We box it in," El said. "Then the car won't help him."

Sands uncrossed his ankles, let his fingers tap over his thigh. "We'll need one car in place outside, early – two showing up at once will trip his paranoia, he'll be gone before he's trapped."

"It won't work - his driver never pulls up close to another car."

"So there's somebody in the first car to back up once number two's in place behind," Lorenzo said. "And they can roll it round the block if anybody bitches about the parking."

"It might be easier just to ram the fucker, we're assuming the driver sidelines as a bodyguard on top of the obvious gun." Sands threw a quick smile out around the room. "We don't need to worry about tipping Ayala off, he's going to know by then anyway."

"Hell, if the driver's one of the bad guys, we can just shoot him through the windshield. It takes time to push a corpse out of the driver's seat and kick out the glass."

Sometimes the kid's direct approach actually came in useful. "Fine with me, but we still box him to be sure, and add that extra dramatic flair. So that's Lorenzo and Fideo in the two cars – we put Fideo in the sitting spot, that way it doesn't matter if he's drunk."

"Hey, if I can shoot, I can drive," Fideo protested.

"Any cop who pulls you over on a DUI won't be impressed by the logic," Sands said, dropping into his slow drawl for the mentally deficient. "It's really not worth fucking over the entire plan because you need to prove yourself."

"I never said I should, only that I could." Fideo didn't sound truly offended, but there was something a little spikier than usual in the words – maybe it really was the booze that doped him into indifference most of the time.

Maybe that was the point.

Sands dropped his head back to rest on the top of the sofa. "One of you takes out the driver, the other can have the bodyguard." He twisted and smiled brightly sideways at El. "El, of course, will be waiting out on the street to make the main shot, since publicity's part of the deal with this one."

"And what about you?" Lorenzo asked.

Sands sprawled unmoving, not bothering to turn his way. "What about me?"

"That's all of us mapped out, so where are you?" Less of a question this time, more of a demand.

Sands steepled his hands together over his lap, fingers tapping loosely at his knuckles. "It needs to be quick, noisy, and in particular it needs to be messy - just what the three of you specialise in. I think I'll sit this one out."

A short rustle-shift from El alongside him, and he could feel the look that went with it.

"Lori here mentioned they've got the photos to go with my name, if you recall. It really wouldn't be wise for me to try and blend in before an ambush."

He still had all El's attention on him, that momentary absence of movement as El studied, considered, but he didn't question it. At least not yet – that might change when they were alone.

Backing El through a fight, tracking El, that was easy, running in Sands' head on a level that was almost instinct. Keeping tabs on both the sidekicks too, on those less familiar feet and movements and unfamiliar fighting styles through a gun-battle of quick take-downs and passing pedestrians - he didn't know if he could do it. Didn't know if he could hold back on the 'shoot-anything-but-El' that was more reaction than thought, not when his ears were blasted by gunfire and impacts, cordite and blood burning into his nose with every breath.

And if he could, if he stopped to double-check exactly who he was about to shoot, well, that was just too likely to end up with dead Sands.

"So while you’re keeping your own face conveniently out of the frame, how about El? You’re putting him right out on stage under the spotlight." It was the kid who broke the silence again, provided the distraction. Sands might have appreciated it more if it hadn't been the kid who'd hauled the issue to the fore in the first place.

"Nobody will see El. Nobody ever sees El, they only see the suit – it’s like Superman." He flashed a wide smile across his shoulder to the Mariachi. "Of course the guns help as a bit of a distraction there too."

"I don't know how it works, but something does," El said, the humour creeping back through his voice. "I've seen some of those pictures the police make from witnesses, and they don't look like me."

Fideo shifted in his chair, creaking wood and rustling cloth from Sands' left. "Even with three of us, it won't be easy," he said. "It's two cars to get in place, one of them after our guy's out on the street, but before he gets close to the lobby. The timing's going to be tight."

Christ, they really had to be slacking if they were relying on the drunk to drag the conversation back on track now. "I've got short range comm sets laid on. Lorenzo in the tail car can fill you in when he's close, so you and El don't need to wait on alert the whole time." Sands ran the stare of his lenses over the arc of room."It's the best chance we're going to get. Unless anyone has another suggestion they've been nesting down with all this time?"

Nobody was confessing, only what he expected after the first few appalling suggestions, so he fixed his attention on the kid. "Did you get hold of those flash-bangs?"

"Not the trademarked type, but Fideo's rigged up something close."

"How lovely, especially since I won't be the one handling them." Sands aimed a wry smile into the corner, but this time the dipso ignored the edge slicing his way. "Toss a couple onto the sidewalk before you leave. It adds to the newsworthiness, and it covers your exit while everybody watches the show." He twisted back El's way to pre-empt the protest. "There won't be anyone on the street by then, they'll all have found something solid to hide behind."

"There won't be so many to begin with," El said, "unless we get unlucky and meet an airport coach arriving." And then El was speaking directly to Sands, words lowered and air brushing warm at his cheek. "If that happens, I'm calling it off and we wait a day."

Sands shrugged, his voice entirely neutral. "I don't see how a day will matter. Your hit, your choice."

"Well, I'm all for getting this bastard turned over sooner instead of later," Lorenzo said, twitching and vivid with that vicious snap escaping him once again. "Then I can get back home and start having some fun, my sex life's been for shit since these fuckers started giving us the eye."

It was tough to call if that last part was a crack at anyone else's choice of sex life without knowing if a look flashed alongside it, but if it was, El wasn't reacting.

"We should stick around a couple more days after the hit. They'll expect the guilty ones to run, and I've got a few people who'll fill me in on any activity in unanticipated directions. We can keep a check on what the police are putting together too." He showed the kid a faint smile under raised eyebrows. "I take it you do want to be certain you're free and clear before we end this."

El wouldn’t leave Mexico before he was sure, whatever Sands’ take on it.

"Two days, sure, what the hell. Who cares so long as it works?"

"It will work," El said quiet, confident. "It has to."

It didn't take a day to set it up. Trashed out autos for cash sale with no paperwork were easy enough to come by in Mexico, and the other equipment was all pre-order. They ran some tests with the comms for range and interference – not great on the range, but they worked inside the cars, and more importantly they were compact and unobtrusive, no more stand-out than somebody wearing an iPod. The mariachis talked some more over details, timing, and El's position for the wait, until Sands felt it was as fine-tuned as they were going to get it. If this turned into a total fuck up, it would be down to the sidekicks broiling their own asses.

When El left the bed to dress the next morning, it was the faint waxy scent of burning and the low, irregular chinks that plucked Sands from half-doze to full wakefulness. He lay sprawled, the warmth of the bedclothes folded around him, El's movements round the room enhanced by the metallic notes behind each step that had been missing for more than a year.

It was familiar in an oddly distanced way – the fundamental El as Sands had originally burned him into his brain, movements and suggestions and aural cues superimposed on that one visual image he was left with. The El woven through memories of adrenaline and exhaustion, bullets and the stink of blood and the constant, endless running; of that early, burrowing terror, clawing down through his soul to depths far more destructive than the pain.

But it was also the El of fervent, reaching sex, and bitter-dark humour as they fled, alive, and it was El, whatever sounds he wrapped himself in on a particular day; the memories stayed neatly detached, vivid in Sands' head, but his pulse slow and sleep-steady under sheet-warmed skin.

It was an interesting form of aural discontinuity.

At least until the repetitive chorus of barks echoed through the walls again.

Sands sat up, swiping stray strands of hair back from his face with his hand. "One day I'm gonna shoot that fucking dog. And whoever owns it for keeping the goddamn thing around."

"Dogs aren’t so bad." Steady swish with jangles, and no stress to tell in El's voice as he shrugged into the jacket. "I had a dog once."

Sands tipped his head, curious. It was surprising when new facts and thoughts slipped out of El now, little corners and angles of him still to find that Sands hadn't already explored. "I wouldn't have tagged you as the dog type."

"Neither would I, before I had one." El was smiling, but there was the hollow note beneath it Sands hadn't heard in a while. "He wasn't really mine, he was Domino's. She was the reason I made myself into this." Soft rustle and clink from the Mariachi clothes. "She died because of me, and left me with a dog and a motorbike."

Sands flexed his legs beneath the sheets, leaning forwards to rest his elbows over his knees. "That doesn't sound like a terribly practical combination."

"No, the dog rode the bike just fine." El's humour flashed warm, and gone. "For a while anyway. He didn't live so much longer than Domino."

"But you didn't like the dog enough to get another."

The bed dipped and shivered beneath Sands as El sat at its edge, slow, rubbing slide of a boot drawn over fabric. "I missed him when he was gone. He saved my life twice before he died, but that seemed a poor reason to replace him and lose that one too."

Banging, fast and heavy at the door, twitching ripple through the mattress as El jerked upright. "Hey, El, get your lazy ass outta bed, we're on a schedule here."

Another slide and a heavier, more definitive chink from the spur, El pulling on the second boot. "Let me hear Fideo out there with you, then I'll hurry," he called, loud, smiling.

"Yeah, yeah, he says the same shit about you." The kid's eyes rolled in his voice, hollowed by the door between.

El jingled once, low with the shift of weight; Sands felt the slow exhale of breath, the swish of hair alongside his cheek; the momentary touch of forehead and nose against his own, before El turned away towards the door.

"Have fun," Sands called after him.

"I hope not," El said, his tone entirely dark.

Sands didn't doubt it, but it would happen anyway. Once El got a target in sight and the hunt mode kicked in, the adrenaline would hook him and burn him through every bone.

El got off on the challenge, the risk, on pitting his skill against someone else's when it was winner takes all. There was a distinction between liking the fight and liking the kill, but it was a line El's conscience didn't see too well afterwards, when he remembered just how good it felt to bring a gun around and pull the trigger.

He should just admit he was a junkie and learn to like it.

Sands wriggled down again beneath the warm touch of the sheets, thumping at his pillow to beat it back into shape. It was only a little before seven, barely sunrise as far as Sands kept track of these things. While it wasn't exactly relevant to him now, the psychological impact of knowing it was dawn stuck around.

El wouldn't eat right before a planned hit, and Sands guessed the other mariachis would be the same. Food sat in the stomach like lead, a slow, sick feeling as adrenaline sucked all the blood from the gut and pumped it into muscle instead. Sands lay, tracking the soft sounds of feet and half-heard words from the rest of the apartment, ending with the slam of a door and the fading note of an engine.

There was still sound, still the low background hum of voices and traffic around the apartment complex, distant and rhythmic and real. He figured he'd have gotten past the part where silence gave him the creeping heebies by now, grating over him with metallic teeth that humped his whole skin into prickles of tension, but sticking around the cities where the fun was meant he never actually had to test it out.

It was early, and it was comfortable, the air brushing the tail of the night's cool across his cheek, the sheets folding their warmth to his body, and he was just too fucking awake to get back to sleep.

He tossed off the bedding and dropped to the floor, running through his morning set of push-ups, sit-ups and stretches. It was always easier to get that goddamn shit out of the way early.

He threw a load of washing in the laundry, because they'd be moving on again in a couple of days and the dirty stuff was annoying to pack. He hoped he'd hit the settings he wanted, and wasn't going to shrink or dye everything – it was one of those dick-biting ever-rotating dials, where following the instructions El had given him worked just fine, so long as it had been left in the right place. But he sure as fuck wasn't gonna wait around and ask every time, and with his colour choices now, the worst he could get was his T-shirts grey-washed.

He showered, shrugged into a robe, and made breakfast, one ear following the patchy, static-broken chatter of the radio set-up, tuned into the police band. He sipped at too-hot coffee while his granola softened to the perfect consistency in the milk. He used to eat a real breakfast, back when he used to take real exercise, but he lived by an image; an image that cracked dangerously if he got visibly sloppy, and his image didn't have a bulge oozing over the belt.

He chewed on dull, tasteless food, while the machine spun up from a swish to a rumble through the wall, and voices came and went outside, distant, obvious, unthreatening.

He ran his spoon around the bowl, light and grating over the ceramic, and met nothing.

Everything should be in place by now; the crush cars collected, El and Fideo outside the Alameda, Lorenzo set a few blocks back to tail Ayala in.

He took out the laundry, wet and clinging round his hands, dumped it in the tumble drier and set it going. He cleared up his breakfast pots and emptied out the coffee maker.

The radio buzzed and crackled between routine messages of burglaries and muggings and pitiful, undisciplined assault.

He ran through the regular news reports on the laptop, the daily check on where they were, where they would be, and back in Bolivia. The polls were getting closer, Morales and Quiroga hovering around a tie, but the momentum was all behind Morales. By now, Lomas would have sniffed out the change in the wind, and he'd be sitting back tidy to wait it out.

Ah, well, he'd been fun to play with for a while, but there'd be others.

Sands set another batch of coffee steeping in the machine.

Maybe there'd been a hitch; El could've called it off, like he threatened.

He could call El's cell, find out for sure just what the fuck was going on.

Course, if he called at the wrong time, he could precipitate a fucking disaster. Then he'd be stuck in this charming vacation goat-hole for even longer, with the kid accusing him of sabotage as an added delight.

He brought the ashtray through from the bedroom and lit a cigarette, pulling the smoke in deep, holding it back in delayed breaths, feeling the heat of it slide past his lips, over his tongue.

The coffee-maker beeped across the room, sharp and intrusive and welcome against the background buzz of the drier, and he poured to meet his fingertip at the cup's edge, sucking off the bitter drops that clung. Fridge for cream, cupboard for sugar, the routine ingrained, mindless. He took his coffee over to the table by the radio, stirring in sugar, stirring, stirring, the rhythmic slide and ring of metal on porcelain loud in every sweeping circuit.

And then it was there, sliced through the fluctuating hiss of interference into his head – the call to the Alameda, to an incident involving gunshots.

So El had found his window for the show.

Sands left the spoon resting in his coffee and reached to turn up the volume, dragging hard on his smoke. Call acknowledged, location confirmed, multiple cars swinging around to head on over. Ambulances were on the way too, which was promising, though if the hit had gone right, nobody would be needing one.

He listened to the short bursts of reports for a few more minutes, confirming an auto accident right alongside the gunfire and victims down, everything in line with the pre-plan, then re-tuned to Radio 13, the news and sports band. The reception was easier on the ears, and he'd get the real info that way, once the reporters showed up with their enthusiastic eyewitness accounts, giving much more of the gory detail than all that terse, practical cop talk.

The first of the press were in place just minutes after the police, the signal vultures for the rest of the pack still descending. Morelia was hardly one of Mexico's 'active' cities, well away from the borders where all the more interesting events went down, so a shooting was a windfall that provided real juice for the week's blender. Something for a news guy to get a good bite into after all that hurricane bullshit that had been clogging the airwaves, a backed up drain of human interest refuse.

The reporters were almost amusing, their excitement trickling through the grave, serious tones required by protocol. Three people confirmed down at the scene, and with no gushing over the heroic efforts of the paramedics, they were long past saving. That boded remarkably well, assuming they were the right three guys.

Sands lit himself another cigarette, rolling it slowly with thumb and fingers between drags as he listened. One woman babbled high and fast and repeated about the big man in the mariachi suit with the big guns, who disappeared in a final flash of explosion and smoke, and Sands smiled. El never let him down, always added that extra flourish to the staging.

The Lesson was definitely on its way out to those who needed to hear it.

He hoped El had enjoyed his encore. With cameras starting to come built into more of the new cells as standard, that kind of street theatre was going to be a bit too much of an indiscretion for future use.

Sands crushed his smoke into the ashtray, and went to rescue the laundry before it turned into a big ball of creases. He could manage his own washing just fine, but he was never going to be real handy with an iron now; much easier to stay looking sharp if he bypassed that particular inconvenience.

He shed his robe in favour of jeans and T-shirt, warm and light from the drier settling over his skin, clinging with a hint of static. He kept one ear cocked towards the radio as he folded the clothes into neat piles, but there was nothing new coming now, just the same comments, the same audience-enticing witnesses on rolling repeat.

He was in the bedroom hanging shirts in the closet when the engine came, familiar, learned over the weeks, rumbling to a halt outside. Footsteps past the window, and all three sets were there, regular and even, El still chinking bright beneath his big disguising overcoat, hidden only from people who thought their eyes could tell them everything. The key turned in the lock as Sands picked up the shades from the nightstand and slid them over his face.

The door slammed back against the stopper, shuddering heavy, and the brat bounced fast across the main room to a sliding halt right under Sands' feet. "That was fucking fantastic!" And okay, Sands hadn't bothered to shut the door when he was carrying an armful of laundry, and alone, but the kid knew well enough where he stood with Sands, and it wasn't in his fucking bedroom.

The shorter, quicker steps of the dipso were next, then finally El, closing and chaining the door after him with quiet, methodical clicks, shrugging out of the coat and dropping it over the chair. Soft, slow feet with muted metal overtones padding over to the table and helping himself to Sands' cigarettes in the hissing flare of a match. And with the kid in the apartment too.

El had hit the down-slope already, and was sliding fast.

"The look on that skinny bastard's face when El leaped out from behind those prissy bushes and stuck the shotgun up his nose! You should have seen it! Tell him, El!" It was like having a face full of outsized, enthusiastically muddy Labrador.

El came through into the bedroom in a heavy cloud of smoke, weighted thunk of the glass ashtray placed on the nightstand. "The plan worked exactly as we said, every detail."

"Fideo smacked that car so hard it nearly bounced back into me. Stupid fuck of a driver had no seatbelt, mashed his face on the wheel, we took him out before he could even think what the fuck was going on." Ah, yes, that perfect, vicious icing, layered smooth all across the surface when it was needed. Putting Lorenzo in the tail car had been a nice touch on so many grounds.

Fideo was predictably reintroducing himself to the bottles lined up alongside the sofa, too busy replenishing his blood alcohol levels to offer a comment on his role, or anybody else's.

"Christ, El, you gotta do that inside? It's bad enough holed up with the psycho, not that I'd expect him to listen." The kid's voice was wearing a distinctly wrinkled nose, but still too excitable to show any real teeth.

"You're in my room," El pointed out, followed by the distinctive double breath as he drew in more smoke. "And I stink, and I'd like to take a shower."

"Yeah, yeah, I can take a goddamn hint," the kid said with an audio eye-roll. "I'll cut you some slack this once, with getting that asshole off of our backs and all, but don't think you're pulling that shit when we get back to my place or I'll kick you out the fucking door myself," he finished with a grin.

The door shut behind Lorenzo with too much of a bang, and Sands tipped his head El's way in amusement. "Shower, my ass. You wanna fuck."

"Can't I do both?" El's voice was heavy with the drag of tension.

Sands lifted his eyebrows, let his lips curl a hint at the edges. "Well, that depends. Which one are you prioritising?"

El screwed the smoke into the ashtray and closed the gap between them, his body pushing Sands back to the wall. "You." Blood and sweat and gunpowder clawed stronger through Sands' nose, and he smiled.

"That works for me."

El pressed forward, warmth of breath through Sands' hair, lips and hint of teeth along his neck. "You smell good."

"I smell like soap and laundry detergent, lightly smoked," Sands pointed out.

"I know."

Sands tilted his head as if considering, and El's heat pushed deeper into the gap, a rasping brush over the tingling sensitivity of his own freshly-shaved skin. "Well, I suppose anything's better than dead guy, and tequila gets a bit over-sweet confined to the inside of a car." He shifted his leg around El's, wound his fingers into one of the chains at El's thigh, tugging the fabric tighter at the crotch.

"Shower," El said, releasing the pressure against him to snatch his fingers away and pull him in the direction of the bathroom. Sands peeled off the glasses as he followed, and smiled.

Just three more days and they'd be out of this miserable piss-pot country forever; and for now there was a great screw on offer, the tiles of the stall pressed damp against his hands, the beat of the water over his back, the flow of it twining all round the skin down his legs to enhance the pull of El's hand on his cock.

Like El said, the plan was running exactly as intended, every detail.

He was going to be sick.

He wasn't, not literally, not while he held the last remnants of control over it anyway, because he was pretty sure the lingering taste of vomit wouldn't be any improvement over the rolling queasiness he was living with now, and because he wouldn't give Lorenzo the goddamn satisfaction.

"So she's got her ass up on the counter, jiggling her tits in my face, and she hitches up her skirt, and then she says, 'Hey, but what about the armadillo?'"

Fideo spluttered into his bottle, the stink of booze thickening through the car, and El was laughing alongside Sands, light, relaxed, comfortable.

And right there was another reason to hate the brat, as if he didn't have enough waiting in line already, being forced to share a day-long road trip with somebody who would not shut the fuck up.

The car shook to an abrupt halt, lurching him forward against his tensed seatbelt, then swerved right at the intersection to accelerate away again, hard.

Sands leaned closer into the door, into the stream of air through his cracked-open window, the flow over his skin letting at least two of his senses agree on the whole motion issue. The cross-country stretches weren't so bad - there was only so much even the kid could do to fuck up a straight line fifty-five - but every time they hit a town it was like riding a seedy mechanical bull in a cheap tourist bar that hadn't refurbished since the height of the eighties, the kind of place where he'd be peeling his shoes off of the floorboards with every step.

At least this was almost the end of it.

He was never goddamn car-sick.

Okay, he'd never gotten sea-sick before either, and he sure as fuck did now, but El never made him car-sick. At least not after that first week when he was all doped up on morphine-lite, and the drugs would screw with anybody's brain-stomach combo.

There was a soft rustle from Fideo that was all too obvious, and the top was grating back onto that bottle of his.

Sands straightened up on the seat and pushed his jacket open a little wider, because the kid hadn't opened his mouth to do more than breathe the last couple of blocks, the speed dropping from the car, and maybe this was one of those little mercies he wasn't gonna be so grateful for.

He buzzed down his window most of the way, tipped his head into the inflowing air, reaching for the sounds outside.

"What's wrong?" No surprise El had picked up on it too.

"Not sure." Lorenzo's fingers were restless on the wheel, a low plastic tapping. "Some of the neighbours are watching."

Sands lifted a hand from his lap, flexing his joints through the glove as if examining them. "Isn't that what neighbours do?"

"My neighbours like me, asshole. This is staring, and trying to make like they're not."

"Somebody they don't like has been here," El said. "Somebody who went to your house."

"You should probably pass on the trip home," Sands offered mildly. "I'm thinking another place to stay would be less problematic."

"Fuck that, it's my goddamn house. And it's probably just you they don't like."

"But they never got the chance to know me," Sands smiled towards the rear view mirror.

Lorenzo angled the car to a drifting halt and clicked on the parking brake, pulling over on the street instead of swinging it around into the driveway.

The car was silent, just the light, even sounds of breath, and the slow thrum of idling engine.

One of the dogs set off barking a few houses down the street, some small yappy bit Sands had learned to recognise, and it was shushed fast enough by the good neighbourly owner. The breeze brought green scents and the tentative tang of salt, the low buzz of cars rising from the main highway lower down the hill, a few distinct, well-bred engines rising and falling as they crawled between the intersections of nearby streets. Whistled rustle of leaves from some bush or low tree as the wind gusted through, the seconds of it enough to obliterate the voices that carried.

It hadn't ever been a noisy neighbourhood this time of the afternoon, but maybe there weren't so many kids playing in the yards, maybe less of the chat leaking from open windows.

At least Sands’ stomach had decided for sure it wasn't gonna show its insides to the world right now, even if it might be a while still before he'd try taking a coffee on board.

"I don't see anything," Fideo said, something close on fifteen minutes later. "If anybody's here, they're waiting us out."

"You might want to check with a couple of those drape-twitchers who seem to know what's going on," Sands suggested. "Seeing how they like you so much better than your visitors."

"Shit, no, they'll ask too many goddamn questions," Lorenzo said. "I've gotta live here when you've pissed off back where you came from, and I want it so I can make like nothing happened."

"Your choice," Sands shrugged. "It's never mine to go poking into holes without knowing exactly where the snake is."

"Yeah, and most people aren't like you." The kid's door clicked open, followed immediately by Fideo's. "El?"

Brief brush of knuckles at Sands' thigh, and then El was leaving too, with another rush of air through the car.

Footsteps tapping away, easy to follow them through the open window, separating on the path out front of the house to circle round; El going counter, brightly there, then lost as he left pavement.

Sands took a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, losing the flame to the breeze twice over before he finally had it lit.

He smoked slow, forearm slung over the sill between drags, letting the wind take the ash as his brain filtered automatically through the sounds. Kids, cars, bugs, same old shit.

He wasn't hearing gunfire, and if anything was going to happen in there, it wouldn't be quiet.

Something right on the edge of his hearing, hazed by distance or walls, something sharp and high and vivid like glass.

He tipped his head, reaching, but it didn't come again.

It was another few minutes before the footsteps were back, the kid first, then a second set that was pure El, fast and purposeful.

Sands turned El's way as he slid in. "So what did they leave as a calling card?"

"The doors are rigged." It was Lorenzo who answered him, voice tight. "Plastic on tripwires."

"Friendly. What do you plan on doing about it?"

"Fideo's dealing with it," El said. "We broke a window to get him in."

Sands steered the stare of his lenses toward the driver's seat. "You're going to trust him to de-bomb your house? He's got hands like an eighty-year-old grandma with Parkinson's."

A quick rustle-shrug was his reaction, the words unconcerned. "Explosives are his toys, not mine."

"But I notice the both of you are out here." Sands offered a quick, close-lipped smile to the mirror.

"Something can always go wrong," El said, soft.

"Just how wrong are we talking here? Since neither of you have bothered to warn any of those nice neighbours, I assume you're looking at losing a room, not the whole building."

"Oh, they didn't get excited," Lorenzo said, that vicious burn curling back up to the surface through his voice. "Definitely anti-personnel style, heavy on the shrapnel."

"Well, I suppose you could say that was thoughtful. The rest of the street will appreciate the gesture if one goes off."

"They're not going off."

"Is that blind faith talking, or is it actually justified? It makes no difference to me, you understand, so long as those special kitchen cupboards of yours have nice thick doors, but I do like to satisfy my idle curiosity."

Feet headed their way along the sidewalk gagged any retort the kid might have made, a woman's shoes, light and clicking. Short, fast steps, the three of them sitting in silence as she passed, and Lorenzo would be following her ass view, checking her out.

Sands wondered idly how she scored, if those quick little steps were forced on her by a skirt clinging close round her thighs, her calves stretched out by the heels, if her tits were high and neat under her shirt or if she'd already been sucked on by too many brats.

Lorenzo was probably more interested in checking out her clothes and her watch for retail value, old habits sticking tighter than that skirt.

Sands lit a cigarette and passed it across to El, then another for himself before buzzing his window closed. The kid still got to pay for that purgatorial road trip.

"No boom, then," Sands commented dryly when Fideo's quick, barely uneven feet tapped back towards the car. It was something of a pity – Lorenzo's reaction would have been extreme and revealing, and a useful weakness to work a little pressure at.

El would've gotten over it, he always did.

"They did a neat job, simple," Fideo said, dropping back into the passenger seat. "Simple means easy to fix too, but they weren't trying to change that. One way or another, if it's found, it won't work."

"So did they have us before or after we hit them?" El asked.

"After," Sands said, immediate, certain. "If they'd been sure before, they would've come for us in Morelia, not here. And besides, the reactions of the neighbours haven't started to wear off yet, so those visitors were recent."

"Yeah, and you're the one who said taking out Ayala would fix everything." Lorenzo's voice was icy with sharp-pointed accusation.

"Oh, I don't think I put it quite like that."

"Who gives a shit how you put it, you set us on the wrong fucking guy!"

Sands stretched out his legs, toes pushing beneath the seat in front of him, wriggled his shoulders back firmer to the support. "Actually, I think the miscalculation might have been in the assumption that there was a single instigator, when there could have been two working the others together. Removing one left the other exposed, and now he's getting desperate."

"So we're back in the same place we started at, 'cept now they've pinned us for sure and they're gonna keep on coming. While we do what the fuck, exactly? Hole up for weeks and wait for you to come up with another grand scheme?"

Sands curled his lips into a tight, closed smile. "Oh, I've got a pretty good idea who it is we need to look into - the name that came right up at the top of that list of phone calls."

"Why should we listen to you after you fucked up?"

Sands only stretched the smile wider. "Are you going to try and tell me Bozo here never screwed you over in a fight?"

"Hey, hey, who're you calling Bozo?"

"I could make it Booze-o if you want to be pedantic about it."

"I can still shoot straight, and I don't screw up."

"Right, you just make fucked up choices like you and me taking on an entire goddamn army," Lorenzo not-quite-muttered. So that was the specifics of El's idea of 'a little rash', Sands mused. Definitely one to keep in mind for future avoidance.

"They died and we got rich," Fideo said cheerfully. "Nothing to complain about that I see."

"Well, there sure as shit is this time, now I can't go home." Lorenzo twisted in his seat to aim the words straight at Sands.

Sands cracked open his door and tossed the last of his cigarette out onto the street. "Like I said, he's getting desperate. And rash, with moves like this one."

"Oh, rash, sure, like they wired my house on a fucking whim."

"It's indirect, too easy to circumvent, and too likely to take out the wrong target. It's uncontrolled and unprofessional, and it's tipped us off rather nicely." Sands flashed his eyebrows high and smiled wide. "We wanted to rattle some people, and I guess we did."

"Yeah, we pissed off a pit viper and you're laughing," the kid snapped. "Funny how I'm still waiting on your genius suggestion to fix it."

"We talk about it somewhere else," El said, lashed tight in his don't-piss-me-off-any-more tone. "We get what we need from the house and we leave."

"I can roll with that," Lorenzo said, and the three mariachis swung open their doors, smoke clearing from the car in the sweep of breeze. "What about him?"

"Everything of mine's already in the trunk," Sands pointed out. "El can stock us up on the rest." Picking through hundreds of boxes of ammo trying to find the nine mils wasn't his idea of a fun way to spend a couple of hours, especially when El could get the job done in under ten minutes. Though it might take a little longer this time, double-checking everything for any more traps, and there was another reason for Sands not to go roaming round the house prodding at things. He might as well be bored sitting out here as in there.

Besides, there was an added advantage to having somebody outside, an early warning in case any more visitors decided to show up. The neighbours might not all be as strongly pro-Lori as he thought they were, especially if they were sweetened up with a wad of extra cash for making just one quick call.

Sands’ watch was already set to bleep off the quarters. He liked it that way for the car trips, it gave him an idea of where the hell they'd be without him forever groping at the goddamn thing.

It was close on thirty minutes before the mariachis came back, but nobody else of interest had been around between, just a couple of chattering locals. The car shivered and readjusted beneath Sands as weighted bags thumped into the trunk, and again as the lid closed with a slam.

Keys rattled in the kid's hand, then stilled abruptly. "I'll drive," El said. "You need a break."

"Nah, I can go all day." The kid's grin was as obvious as the wink in the tone. "I'm fine."

"And I want you to stay that way," El said, smiling. "You should take a break when it's offered."

"Okay, okay, if it makes you happy, take 'em." The kid's eyes were rolling as the keys changed hands, and he slid into the back alongside Sands. Not Sands' preferred choice of travelling companion, but it had to be a level or two better than letting the fucker drive.

"Where to?" El closed the door in a controlled thunk, and he was talking to Sands, not the sidekicks.

"North would be a good start," Sands said, giving El a quick smile. "We're going to take a tour of Mexico City."

"What's in Mexico?" Lorenzo demanded.

"Among other things, your second man. I assume you'd prefer to remove him instead of running?"

There was quite a pause before the kid answered, and it wasn't the question he was evaluating. "Sure, why the fuck not?" he said eventually. "I just wanna get this shit done, then I can come home."

Sands angled himself into the corner of the seat against the door, vibrations rippling through him as the engine fired up, and tipped his head towards Lorenzo. "You still plan on coming back? You might do better to ditch the place."

"It's my fucking house. I bought it, with my money."

Sands twitched his eyebrows higher. "Well, that's debatable."

"The President gave us that cash for saving his life."

"And since all that dough was drug money used to pay for an assassination attempt, I'd say it technically belonged to the police evidence locker and was never El Presidente's to give away."

Lorenzo snorted. "Like your cash is so honestly come by."

Sands quirked his lips up into a smile. "Not often, no, but at least I admit it."

"You think I won't? I don't give a shit where it came from, it's better off ending up with me than oozing out bit by bit in the pockets of every bent bastard in the police." Lorenzo leaned forward to El's shoulder as the car slowed for the intersection. "Take a right, we better stop by Fideo's place and check that too."

"Why bother?" Sands said. "If it's already wired, you've got the hassle of removing explosives from a place we don't want to be, and if it isn't then we lead them right to it."

El stopped the car, with no tick from the turn signal. "Is there anything you need there?"

Fideo shrugged. "Nothing I need that badly."

"Would anybody else go in if you're not around?"

"Nobody comes to visit, 'cept for Lori."

"Then we stay away." The car pulled out, taking the straight route.

"So what happens when we get to Mexico?" At least the dipso stayed consistent - if it was good with El, it was good with him, no contradictions. Sands could be feeling a good deal more amenable towards Fideo by now, if the stench of booze in a confined space didn't start to fray with constant exposure.

"We get an apartment," Sands decided. "Not a tourist place, a real one. We don't know how long we'll need to be there, and our guy's going to be looking out for us, but it's a big city and he can't check everywhere." He rattled through the thoughts as the obvious pieces dropped into place, connecting up in his head. "In the suburbs, not central - it's easier to stay lost in there, and I can get us paperwork good enough to pass the few checks they make out in Locale Low-Cost." Slumming it wasn't top of his list of choices, but neither was catching any more bullets in dick-leech Mexico, especially not for the good cause of getting the sidekicks' shit sorted out. "That gives us the space to work out the details on the guy."

"We need to switch the car," El said. "People have seen us in this one."

"We do that in Chilpancingo." It was maybe thirty-five miles, they'd be there in an hour. "He won't know where we've gone from there, but I'm sure he'll guess," Sands added with a smile.

"No shit," Lorenzo said. "We didn't exactly run and hide with the last guy, he'll figure we're coming for him too."

And that was the part that was definitely going to put this assignment on the interesting side of routine. Sands didn't foresee quite so much boredom wrapped around the planning of this one as he'd suffered over the last month.

It could be quite a fine line right there between 'interesting' and 'messy'. He wondered which side this one was going to fall.

Bound Part 2