Bound - Part 2

Tiggy Malvern

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

The trip to Mexico was tedious and unremarkable. They swapped out one car with doubtful paperwork for another fast enough, and lost that one in turn on the city's outskirts. They left Lorenzo in charge of the apartment search and signing the paperwork – El and Sands were obviously out, and only the desperate would sign their property over to Fideo. The kid had the right face and the right charm from years of spinning the con on women, and he'd come across almost respectable if he didn't paste up the billboard notice that he had way too much cash for a guy his age. By the time a would-be landlord made it past the glow and worry and the endless chatter of the new father whose wife was in hospital with the preemie twins, and thought to ask for ID and paperwork, Sands had it on hand already.

After several prolonged, pointless and often circular discussions, they finally bought an '02 Chevrolet Chevy that none of them liked, except Fideo, because he liked anywhere he could pass out in reasonable comfort with a bottle. It wasn't up to the preferences of Lorenzo and Sands, and newer than El's choices, but it was common and cheap enough to be unremarkable, while still hanging onto some level of power and mechanical reliability. They picked up an older model to switch it with too, to keep tailing and surveillance a little less sun-on-wet-road glaring.

With the basics in place, Sands was left feeling for ways to get the dirt on a paranoid killer, without sending vibrations down any of the long, invisible cobweb strands the man would have splayed out all across the city.

He'd done some of the background already, when he was working through Lorenzo's list of names, so he wasn't trying to fire up from empty. But he couldn't tap any of the usual sources - anyone Sands could pay, Salinas could pay more, and you could bet your bitch he'd be keeping check. The guy's main house and his not-so-secret stash pad for his mistress were off limits like a Compton ghetto. Sands couldn't access even the basic plans, not any way that wouldn't let Salinas put a tab on him, and details on staff and security were locked up tighter than a virgin's cunt.

He'd worked on guys more dangerous, more loaded and more jumpy, and more than once. But with a background team to cover the angles, with access to satellite images and phone taps and every bit of tech he could half-way justify to a budgeting committee. And never when the target of interest had a line on him personally.

After a few days, he was starting to feel he was completely fucked.

Oh, there were things he could have tried, people he could have risked approaching, but only if he wanted the equivalent risk of something suddenly blowing up in his face, and not in a tidy metaphorical way.

This time, somebody else was gonna have to do the approaching.

When there were possibilities in place El might need a little time to get used to, it was always best to start him early.

"I'm saying we could stay buried alive in this econobox for six months and he still wouldn't be a man we can easily get close to."

"You're saying we're fucked," Lorenzo said in disgust.

"Hardly." Sands gave him a flashed smile. "I've got a few ideas."

"Like what?" Fideo asked.

"Well, he has a daughter in university," Sands said, lifting his tone to casual conversation. "We can get to her any time."

"No." The word came flat and quiet from Sands' right, just where he expected.

"She doesn't even need to know she's in play." Sands turned his head meaningfully Lorenzo's way and smiled. "I can think of a dozen entirely non-violent ways we can access her right now."

"We don't go near her."

It was the tripwire voice glittering quietly in his head, and Sands had no intention of tugging.

El's kid would still have been in elementary if she hadn't so untimely and literally chewed on her mouthful of dust, so no direct empathy link there; but El could get funny over anything involving kids, including, apparently, the grown up versions.

Sands hadn't thought it would fly, but it would have been stupid not to toss it up there and take a look.

"You said you had a few ideas." Fideo's prompting cut the silence before it could stretch. "So what are the others?"

Sands flipped the top on his carton of cigarettes and put one to his lips. "Well, if you don't like the easy option, things get a bit more complex." Flick of the lighter wheel and sharp sting of smoke, and he exhaled through smiling teeth. "It leaves us tailing him and snatching at an opportunity in that same undisciplined ambush plan we disliked so much with Ayala. Or it leaves us sending him an invitation."

"You want us to play bait," Lorenzo said, edged, resentful. A shuffle as he sat upright from his sprawl on the floor.

"Not precisely, since the bait won't actually have to be there."

"Bait as ourselves, or someone else?" El again, shifting close, interested, and he'd worked with Sands long enough now to see the possibilities tunnelling through his mind.

"Oh, someone else, it's less risky that way." Sands tipped his head towards El, the slow flow of breath moving light and warm over his cheek. "However itchy he may be feeling about a bullet in the back, he's still a man with a lot of businesses and a lot of investment to keep watch over. We approach one of his contacts, let them know the kind of person we're interested in dealing with. He'll put us in touch and arrange a meet."

"He'll never buy it, he'll guess it's a set-up." The kid talked fast and certain, the street smarts that almost explained why El kept him on hand as backup.

"That's the drawback to the plan, yes," Sands said, his smile quick and wide. He let smoke drift thick and bitter through his nose, reached to flick his cigarette over the ashtray. "The good part is we get to control the place and time and lay everything out in advance. We can make it a hotel room – it's common procedure, neutral ground, anonymous for everyone concerned. We've got as long as we like to check out hotels, pick one that's accessible by some means other than the front door."

"Then we throw out a line, and hook in that contact," Lorenzo finished. "That's my job."

Sands quirked his lips, the cigarette angling between them. "Unfortunately not."

"Why not?" The anger was always there, simmering under the kid's skin, flashing outwards at any whiff of provocation on the breeze. "I spin a line like a pro, I'd be perfect."

"Yes, you would, and that's the problem." Sands propped his elbow on the arm of the sofa, rolling the cigarette between thumb and fingers beside his cheek. "The surveillance they ran on you was casual, indirect, asking a few of the locals to keep tabs on any activity. It's likely he doesn't have photos, but I don't doubt he'll have descriptions, and if a pretty kid dripping charm and a dentist's wall grin starts asking after him, I can guarantee he won't be coming out to play." He crushed the rest of his smoke into the ashtray – it tasted stale, from a pack bought new yesterday. Fucking Mexico. "Fideo's a little more non-descript, and he was safely holed up drunk most of the time you were being checked on."

"See, Lori?" Fideo said, bright in a rustle of cloth. "You don't get to complain any more, it comes in useful sometimes." Sands could imagine him waving his bottle in victory at the validation.

"His descriptions of me will be even poorer than Fideo's," El said, steady and thoughtful. "We can't be sure how Fideo would work out, and I've done it before, lied to these earth-crawlers."

It really wasn't what Sands had in mind, sending El out alone to play verbal tag with a target already primed and suspecting; that was what sidekicks were designed for.

Unfortunately, it also made sense.

He reached over to pluck the pack of smokes from El's left pocket, peeling back the foil. "Just remember you're not allowed to kill this one. At least not yet," he added with a smile. "We'll need him around a while longer."

"No, no goddamn way, you're not fucking doing this." Lorenzo was up on his feet in a single smooth movement and padding Sands' way, all the effortless reaction and speed that made him such an efficient killer. "You're doing it again, pushing El out up front to take the shit if things get hot, and it's not gonna happen." He stopped just inches from Sands' steel-tipped shoes, and the point he really shouldn't cross - so much of El's innate skill in there, and barely any of the control.

Sands ran his fingers to the tip of his cigarette and lit it carefully, slipping the lighter back inside his jacket. "You think I want it this way? This job's wearing my trademark, it's what I do, but as you informed us all, these nice Mexican friends of yours have my photo."

"You've got some cute excuse lined up for everything, don't you?"

Sands dropped his head to the back of the sofa, lenses staring up at the kid, and added a hint of smile. "I suppose you'd prefer it if I simply reacted without reason, like you?" He wondered if El would choose to make an entrance any time now, but sometimes El seemed to grow bored with that role and left the kid to bait his own trap.

"I've got reasons, right out up front for everybody to see. For every one of yours we get a look at, there's four more boxed away, so I wanna know what your angle is. What are you getting out of making El the front man for all this shit?"

"I don't make El do anything," Sands said evenly. "Unless you have some severe aural hygiene issues, you must have heard him volunteer. I really don't see what your problem is."

"My problem is that El's my friend, and you're some kind of twisted fucking monster who doesn't have a fucking clue what that means." The kid hadn't taken that last, dangerous step, but he was leaning in, pushing closer, loud and intrusive in a wave of forcefully expelled breath.

Sands exhaled smoke in a slow, steady stream, crossed his feet at the ankles and tipped his head a little to the left. "Did you know that your oh-so-good friend here had plans to ditch you, never to be seen again?"

The silence from Lorenzo was immensely satisfying, a silence that lasted more than long enough for the kid to look to El and get the confirmation he wouldn't hide.

"You know why," El said quietly, after the stares had dragged out more than long enough.

"I know we don't need your goddamn twisted take on protection. Sometimes we might want your help, mostly we just want you, don't you get that?"

"He gets it," Fideo said. "It just doesn't change anything."

El hooked a foot up onto his knee, weight shifting forwards as his hands dropped to rest on his ankle. "Does it matter so much what I thought before? I'm here now."

"It matters when the idea's still stuck in that fucking thick skull of yours." Lorenzo had subsided from yelling to what could only be described as sullen, sounding more like a kid than ever. But he backed off from Sands to fling himself over the sofa arm alongside El, and presumably glare at him. "What the fuck we gotta do to kick it outta there, huh?"

Sands uncrossed his ankles and got up to make his exit, leaving what remained of El's smoke to burn out in the ashtray. If anything, it tasted worse than his own, and he had no interest in listening to the mariachis poke through a years-old issue with no chance of a resolution. He was only bored of being the convenient target for all the brat's frustrations and ill-temper - El could fence some of that shit for a while.

The voices were still there with the bedroom door between them, but Sands didn't bother to tease out the words from the drone. He fired up the laptop and ran another search on Salinas, just in case anything novel dropped out, but it was all old news. He pulled the files on Salinas' feeders for review, the guys who'd point them up the chain if someone approached them with an order they couldn't fill. They got one shot, and they needed to pick the right guy – big enough it was reasonable they'd go to him in the first place, but nobody too sharp who might just tag the vibes coming off of El. Salinas didn't promote idiots, so it had to be a delicately balanced choice.

The background voices dropped off as the files read back to him, Little Lori's inputs quieter and the gaps stretching longer between. Shortly afterwards El's boots tapped towards the bedroom, as expected.

El closed the door behind him, quiet, and didn't step away, resting his body against the frame.

So it was going to be a 'discussion'. Tedious, but unsurprising.

"You didn't have to tell him that," El said.

Sands swung the chair round from the laptop to offer El a small, quirked smile. "You don't think your 'friend' should know the truth, if it's not convenient for you?"

"He knows it anyway," El said with a shrug. "He just doesn't like to look at it."

Sands curled the smile a few degrees higher. "Well, everybody gets stuck with shit they don't like sometimes, El, I don't see why the brat should be an exception. Not when you and me are all set to throw ourselves into the firing line on behalf of those idiots, because they were too stupid to make themselves inconspicuous when it counted."

"No." El's voice hardened and flattened on the single word. "You don't get to blame them."

"Why the fuck not? They're the ones who summoned you back to this stinking slurry pit."

"You can't blame them because I did this." El took three strides into the room, then stopped still, a couple of feet away; Sands could almost feel the air quiver against his skin under the fast-rising words. "I did this when I brought in my friends to get you back. And now we're paying for it – you, me, Lorenzo, Fideo, we're all paying for it, and I don't regret it."

"Well, I fucking do," Sands snapped. "It wasn't the brightest choice you ever made, El. That warehouse was just temporary storage, you didn't need them."

"I could have gone there alone, yes, and I could have killed everybody there, killed that man." El was almost spitting the last two words, the hatred curled behind them flashing through in the moments before he dragged the control back into place, words falling quieter. "But not with any real chance of reaching you before they shot you. For that I needed help."

"Except you didn't, because I'd already taken care of that angle perfectly well myself."

"I wasn't willing to risk that," El said, flat.

"And meanwhile, I was in there hanging every plan I put together round the assumption that you were coming back. Something of a pity you couldn't bring yourself to trust me, because there'd have been no reason to have dragged ourselves away from a perfectly reasonable lifestyle and back to this miserable pisshole if you'd had the same kind of faith."

"Faith?" El half-turned away on the balls of his feet, his breath almost laughter, and bitter as ninety percent cocoa. "I've had faith in the past, in other people, in God, and none of it ever stopped them from dying."

Sands curled a smile wide and cold. "You know, El, for a guy who lights candles and mutters in corners before he kills people, you talk a lot like an atheist."

Quick rustle of distinctive denial. "God is here. He has to be. I'm just not so sure He involves Himself the way I used to believe." El's words had slowed, calmed, the frustration eased from his voice. "I think maybe He gives us our own lives to live, and the ways to deal with the consequences of what we choose."

It was interesting sometimes to poke at El on the god thing, and see what dropped out. In most ways, El was a deeply practical guy – if someone pissed him off, he killed them, if someone tried to shoot him, he killed them. If he was lonely, and the only person around making the offer was a man, he fucked a man. But there was still that last knot of superstitious bullshit he wouldn't untangle himself from; no matter how fucked up his life got, he just picked up the whole baseball diamond and moved it to fit the play.

Religion really was the most appallingly sticky form of brainwashing. The CIA could have learned a lot from its techniques.

"Screw god," Sands said, huffing a breath down his nose. "He's no fucking help and I'm happy to hear you admit it, but it would be nice to think you had some confidence in me."

Scuff of boot on tile as El shifted back his way, words low and shaped by curiosity. "Everything you're talking about happened almost a year ago. Why argue over it now?"

"Are you going to tell me anything's changed?"

"I know you better now than I did," El said, no pause, no gap for his thoughts. "I've seen how you do things."

"And what the fuck does that mean in more practical terms?"

"I trust you the same way I trust Fideo, or Lorenzo."

Well, that wasn't so goddamn flattering, being held equivalent in competence to a drunk and a kid. But El probably thought of it as a fucking compliment, and it was the best he was likely to get.

El padded over to the bed, footsteps quiet and even, sat himself on its edge. "You know who I am," he said. "You always did."

Yeah, and that freeway length protective streak that fixated and clung unwavering was a big chunk of why Sands had trusted El enough early enough to keep him around, but it could also be goddamn inconvenient, as the brat was getting thoroughly clued in on. "I know your issues are gonna turn some easy play into a serious fuck up if you don't get a lock on them."

"If you want your life to be easy, you stayed with the wrong man." No humour in El's line, it was just planted out there as flat statement.

"Sorry, El, no sacrificial martyrs required this time." The smile Sands gave him still wasn't headed towards friendly. "After all, I get bored with 'easy' even quicker than you do. But it might be pleasant if you could find the middle path a little more often, less of the lurching between ridiculous extremes."

El shook his head, slow, distinct. "I can't change."

Sands raised his eyebrows and laughed out a couple of short breaths. "Fuck, El, you change faster than just about anybody I ever knew. From dust town guitar-maker to mass assassin could seem quite a leap, but you cover it in seconds."

"The guitar-maker was never really me. He was what I wanted once, but it was too late for that."

"Yeah, and it was way too fucking long before you'd look at it and see it." At home, Sands would have walked now, left El to simmer on it for a while, but the only place to go was back out there with the sidekicks. Hardly his preferred option, and definitely not with the brat sprawled smirking over the sofa, getting his jollies from the caustic voices. "But as you're feeling too stubborn to listen, I have these files still waiting for me, the ones that are going to salvage your 'friends' for you." He twisted the chair back around to the laptop, pushed his earphone in and hit resume. Then a second time because the fucking thing had dropped into sleep mode.

El rose from the bed and moved to stand behind him, hands falling light on his shoulders. Sands shrugged at them, but they didn't go away, and he was too busy to make an issue of it. The synthesised words halted and stumbled uneven into his ear, the patterns and complications forming slow in his head.

"Do you have an answer?" El asked eventually.

"To you being an idiot? Hardly."

"To how we run this."

"I'm working on it," Sands said, his tone even and entirely discouraging.

It was El who left, the hands sliding from Sands' shoulders, feet tapping quietly to the door, and then the murmur of subdued voices melting inwards through the wall.

Sands stayed right where he was until El called him through for lunch, thankfully peaceful for once, without the kid joking and sniping to keep the chatter rolling. Sands was pretty sure Lorenzo was dealing out more than his quota of glares and mournful stares, and entertained himself by being neutrally bland and oblivious to any hang-overs from the morning's little chats.

They started the hotel search that afternoon, ruling out any place with CCTV cameras strung out beyond the lobby and concentrating on the middle range joints. Sands and El pulled up a list of possibilities from the internet, based on size, location and what details El could figure from the photos, and then it was a two-day grind around the city, running the personal checks on every one.

Sands went along on these excursions, pissing off the kid because El took ten minutes back in the car each time to explain to Sands what the mariachis learned in seconds. But Sands didn't give a pig's turd about Lorenzo's moods – he knew Salinas, what he was likely to do, how he'd react, and he wanted all the fine print scanned in, just in case there was anything his blunt instruments might have overlooked.

Balconies and adjacent taller buildings were a plus for external access, busy streets and overlooked grounds wiped at least that particular side of the hotel from the list. The options narrowed fast, and they paid a return visit to the last few possibles, double-checking distances and El's estimated access times until they had a winner – the lucky Ground Zero for an update in blood and bullet chic.

It was a smallish place tucked down a side street; not suspiciously out of the way, just a few blocks from the arterial, but the alleys narrowed fast around it, with barely more than a service road at the rear. A family-run independent instead of a chain joint, which kept the security angle down nicely - anything to trim the costs. Fideo baulked at that last part, till Lorenzo pointed out they could always make an anonymous donation to cover the refit if the mess got out of hand. Apparently the dipso had the lingering remnants of a desire to stick up for the 'little people', when he emerged far enough from his liquid coma.

Sands took a couple more days to finalise his choice of go-between to lead them to Salinas. El really wasn't going to like it, but El didn't like anything about this whole gig, any more than Sands did. It was a question of practical options. And maybe next time El wouldn't be so fast to volunteer when he didn't know for sure what he was standing in line for.

There weren't any more angles to cover, no more reasonable delays while he checked through the threads for flaws. The fabric would either hold or it wouldn't.

It was time to send El in.

El didn't like it.

"No."

"You already volunteered, El, remember?"

"Not for this. Make a different plan."

"And that's why it's perfect," Sands said, smiling wide. "El Mariachi would never sit down with a drug dealer, much less pose as one, everyone knows that. We'll reel in Salinas as close to off his guard as he's ever going to be."

The pause in the snapping flow, the break with steady breath, and once El got to thinking, instead of reacting, that was the time to put the final pressure on.

"We're going to need every inch of advantage we can knot into this one." Sands reached out past his left hip, tapping the new pack of smokes on the edge of the table to loosen them. "The guy's jumpy as a sack full of cats poked with a fire iron, and if the tie unravels too soon, it'll be your friends who are left to deal with the cats." He stuck one between his lips, held out another to El, who took it without comment. "You and me, well, we'll slide out of this goat's intestine of a country, and be just fine," he added with a quick smile.

It had always been a sealed win; it had only been a question of how much talking he'd have to do to fix the game.

The rest of the plan, those were the parts that needed a little more latitude built in. And they didn't have it.

"I'm sure we can come to an arrangement." El's voice crackled and dropped briefly now across the link. "People say you're a useful man to do business with."

"Which is why I'm careful. I only deal with people who aren't a risk of tainting my good name." The reception bristled with more static, metallic when Torres spoke, the penalty of extra distance to source, but the smile still carried right through with the words.

It wasn't exactly the transmission quality Sands had paid for, and a certain supplier was going to learn the error of that choice when Sands found himself with half a day left empty, but it was giving him enough.

It wasn't the two-way comm he would've liked either, but no way would this camel-sucker have missed El wearing an earpiece.

"We both know you've already run your checks, and we wouldn't be meeting if you'd found anything you didn't like," El said easily. "So why don't we talk numbers?"

The background had always been the weakest part of the web, the part most likely to stretch and tear, and collapse their own sticky threads binding around them.

Ideally an operation like this would have used a fake identity, a trail seeded carefully through the right people and places to ensure anyone asking found the right answers, but that would have taken time Sands didn't want to spend sitting around in Mexico, and resources he didn't have easy access to any more. The limitations had obliged them to hijack somebody else's name and background - carefully selected so there was minimal risk of him having had dealings with Torres before, but negligible still wasn't zero.

With Torres satisfied and El inside, the least controlled gamble of this first phase had already dropped in their favour. Sands still didn't consider it fully sewn up though, sitting two blocks back in a beat up Chevy, listening to El trade edged lines with a long-term player. As he'd pointed out to El when he hooked it into his shirt, the transmitter meant they'd know when and why any fuck-ups happened. It didn't mean they'd be close enough to fix it, if El happened to find himself with more of a lapful than he could handle.

In the driver's seat, Lorenzo was restless and twitching, fingers tapping light and fast and hollow on the cheap plastic dash. Sands curled his lips in tight, exhaling a long stream of smoke forward between the seats, and the kid swore.

Sands had offered up the choice – windows sealed so they could both follow the chit-chat, or windows down and Sands wore an earpiece so they didn't broadcast to the passing world. The kid had bitched predictably enough, but he'd picked El over his lungs.

His loyalty might have been touching, if it didn't paint him so vividly as the pathetic sad-eyed puppy.

"Call me curious," Torres was saying now. "You seem like a man who has his business running smoothly, and now you're looking for a change?" Christ, this guy should be the one trying to replace Honaker, he must have taken classes. He'd be an easy shoe-in for Salinas, when the boss met with his upcoming demise.

"My usual line of supply dried up suddenly about a month ago. I'd just taken a delivery, and I can fill some gaps with smaller businesses, but you'll understand I need a more reliable, long term arrangement in place."

That part of the story had been an easy fit to tailor for. Some government agency or other was always taking herbicide or machetes to somebody's coca fields somewhere.

It was enough to satisfy Torres, because business was officially on. "So what schedule did you have in mind?"

"In some ways I work like you do," El said carefully. "If I hadn't heard the right things about you, I wouldn't be here, but I'd still like to check quality for myself. Let's say twenty now, and assuming I'm satisfied, nine hundred on a regular four month timetable."

A pause and some distorted, unidentifiable scratching sounds. Sands gave a quick smile – selecting the right numbers to offer up had been another one of those delicate touches. "Why the long delays? More regular deliveries are easier on the line of supply, and there's less to lose if a transport should meet with misfortune."

"The President's watchdogs have been taking more of an interest in our industry lately, but they only sniff around where they have reason to suspect." El spoke slowly, as if he was choosing his words, even though this answer had been meticulously rehearsed. Sands shifted on the seat, the Coke can between his knees sliding chill against the layer of sweat over his skin. He might need to start assessing El a little more closely in future, if he was getting this good at faking his own habits and responses. "Less regular shipments are less likely to attract attention. Besides, if I ran my operations your way, I would have found myself with some problems when my last supplier went out of business."

"Nine hundred's a lot of stock to find at short notice." The words were neutral, all fact, but if it hadn't been a problem, Torres wouldn't have said anything at all.

"I heard you are a man who gets things done. I'm sure you can arrange it."

Careful, El. It was a useful move most times, flattering the middle ranks, but give the guy too much and he'd start to believe it. Try and close the deal without referring them up the line.

Christ, he wanted that two-way. Sands hadn't been able to coach El on every possible twist to the chat, and El was quick, but this wasn't the realm his experience was tuned for.

"I'm sure I can, but I wouldn't like to make a deal without being certain I can meet it. I'll double-check some shipping schedules and get back to you tomorrow."

It was a dismissal, but it was also El's cue to steer this meet up the driveway and park it neatly in the garage. "If you're thinking of importing to meet demand, I need to know who's supplying. I want to be sure it's somebody with a reputation for good product."

A pause while Torres considered his answer, the pause that would tell whether Sands and El had measured this guy up close enough, the suit pulled tight in all the right places. The pause while he decided whether to concede or to lie, and El didn't give off the vibes of a man it was wise to lie to. "That's something I'd need to discuss with them first, if it turns out to be necessary," Torres offered carefully.

"Obviously," El said, almost relaxed now, with something like a smile. Notching down the threat in reward for good behaviour, smooth choice. "I wouldn't want to work with anyone who didn't keep the basic precautions."

"I'll be in touch."

This time, El grabbed at the hint, the scrape of chair loud and buzzing with static through the car. "I'm looking forward to it."

It was only because Sands really listened, because he knew, that the sinister edge glinted along the words.

Long, even rush of breath from the kid in the front of the car, and El's feet tapping steady and unhurried across the link. Sands was still monitoring the final exchanges, the delicate mid-warm pleasantries as El ended the meet and got himself politely the hell out, but part of his mind was already sliding forwards, into the next stage, going over what they had of the plan, re-checking for flaws.

The final snap-click of a self-locking door, and El was back out on the street, headed for the other car, one that Fideo had been sitting in the whole time, because Sands wasn't being caught out by any more Honaker-style trackers slipped on board their transportation. El had made it work, and was on his way back to the apartment.

Which the puppy took as his cue to start fucking yapping again. "Well, that's a real nice job you've done there, teaching El to talk just like a goddamn psycho."

It was almost amusing how talking, for the brat, so often seemed to mean taking a jab at Sands.

Sands turned his face full to Lorenzo, blank beneath the lenses, and bored. "Why would I need to teach him? He's more than capable of learning by observation when he chooses to."

"I'm missing why the fuck exactly anybody would want to act like you."

Sands raised his eyebrows part way, just enough to draw a big bold line round the recital of the obvious. "Because however often his crazy decisions might seem to deny it, El isn't just a fighter, he's a tactician. And for a tactician, there's really no such thing as having too many options." He dropped his cigarette end into his Coke can, sputtering hiss as it rolled in the last of the liquid, and quirked his lip at one edge. "Generally, El chooses methods that are a little more direct than mine, but both of us find it useful to have some level of skill with the other's talents."

El's natural conversational style hadn't altered any the last couple of years - a little more fluid when he used English, more of the casual and the colloquialisms sliding in, but still just El. When he wanted to, though, he could really rack up the balls, vocabulary expanded way beyond the standard tourist chatter of a mariachi.

Sands had wondered initially just what Lorenzo's story was, that this historically poverty-soaked Mexican spoke English like a native. A perpetually cursing trailer trash native, to be sure, but there were enough of those in Uncle Sam's back yard that the kid would blend right in.

He'd stopped wondering so hard right around the time he'd decided the kid was too simple to be any kind of challenge. He didn't care if Little Lori had grown up with some ex-pat grandpa or uncle instead of his crack whore mom, or whatever sob story had turned him into a teenaged killer. Though there could still be some benefit to knowing where someone's mental kinks lay, to poke at just for fun.

"You say all that, say it cuts both ways, but I've never seen you do anything but talk, send other people out to do the dirty work." The words weren't exactly placatory, but they came later, slower than the brat's usual elastic snap-back, some hint of thought crawling behind them.

Sands tipped his head a little, smiling with closed lips. "You will." Salinas wasn't going to be alone and he wasn't going to be easy, and that part of the plan would call on all of them.

He plugged his earphone into the laptop on the seat beside him and tapped at a couple of keys. He didn't have anything useful he hadn't gone over twenty times already, didn't have a detail in the files that wasn't duplicated in his head. But if it looked like he was working on something, at least the kid would shut up for the duration.

The engine turned and stuttered into barely-even revolutions, the seat shivering and settling beneath him, rattle of tappets high over the whine. Lorenzo pulled out into the buzzing flow of traffic and made the left two blocks on to head back to the apartment, all in silence.

Sands pushed his hand through his damply clinging hair, wiped at the sweat gathering round the plastic at his ear, and wondered how much longer it would be before the kid figured the fake-out. With careful, sparing application, he could probably string it to last until he got the fuck back out of Mexico.

He had the impression the next few days were really going to stretch the 'sparing' part.

They made it back to the apartment without the brat feeling the need to offer any more commentary, and the heavy Mexico traffic kept Lorenzo's driving within the tolerances of Sands' stomach. When he let himself in the door, the air flowed past him thick and tequila-sweet, Fideo already established in one of the chairs and starting on the celebratories. El was the slow, steady chopping from the kitchen, the rhythmic thunk of blade on wood, and Sands wandered through to lounge against the cupboards alongside him.

"You could've lost him at the end there."

"But I didn't." El talked down at the countertop, onion smell-sting rising thick over the even fall of the blade. Marriage to the hellion with the knife rep hadn't passed along many of her skills to El – he was no flash chef of the veggies, every slice measured and cautious.

Sands tipped his head and let his lips twitch at one corner. "Don't build him up so much in his own head next time, then you won't have to glare so hard."

"I've had more practice at glaring." Light, gentle humour lurking in the words, the simple, repetitive motions already draining El of any tension left from the meet. Sands wouldn't have to drag him to the bedroom and fuck him back down to ground level this time.

Pity – he could have used the de-stress workout himself.

The door rattled again with pressure and keys, slamming behind feet as the kid breezed in. "Nice job, El! You nailed that sucker right to the fucking wall."

El spared the onions for a second as he turned to smile at Sands. "See? Some people appreciate my efforts."

Sands flashed his eyebrows quick and high over the lenses. "But a reasoned critique is far more constructive."

The kid bounced to a stop in the kitchen doorway, all rustling shirt and squeaky shoes. "So what's next up?"

Sands shrugged. "We wait. Salinas bites or he doesn't, we can't change it now."

Sands hated waiting.

It had always been a big part of the job, but over the years he'd never gotten any better at it. It was there the whole time, nibbling along the edges of him, the urge, the temptation to nudge things along a little, that extra bit of fine tuning, because nothing could ever be perfect, right? There always had to be something more he could tweak, put that extra bit of pressure on to ease things his way. Why settle for ninety-three percent odds when he could notch it up to ninety-four?

But sometimes there really was nothing more to be done, sometimes all you could get from leaning was risk somebody noticing the extra weight and blasting the entire deal sixty feet high in a cloud of dust. And sometimes knowing that wasn't enough to keep Sands from leaning, because if everything came too easy, it just wasn't enough to keep him entertained.

This time, leaning wouldn't be a risk, it would be group suicide. This time he didn't dare stick his nose outside the goddamn door of the apartment without a reason that outweighed the disaster of his fucking photo plastered on the mark's walls.

This time he had to wait.

The waiting hadn't been much of an issue the last year or so. Mostly he was dancing around two or three deals at any one time, and waiting for the detail to drop on one just meant switching his attention to another. And then there was El, conveniently making the offer to distract for an hour or two, always there with hands reaching to run along his arm, his neck, at just the right time.

The timing of it was predictable, deliberate - El grew a little nervous when Sands got twitchy, and Sands liked it that way, the proof that El was still so fully aware of him, that trained concentration focussed tight over his skin the same way it had been those first few months.

Now El spent too much time lounging round the table with the sidekicks, and lazy afternoon fucks sprawled along the sofa weren't on the agenda.

Sands went over the files on Salinas, the details on the hotel, the room, the planned access and the timing. When the files weren't repeating slow and uneven in his ear, they ran through his thoughts, circling, tilting, every angle checked and rechecked, the patterns of it seared into his brain unrelenting, until he just wanted to scrub his head clean of every word and sleep.

Music couldn't empty his mind, the long, sweeping flow of classical unable to relax him, possibilities and probabilities forcing through the heavy, driving beat of dance and every variation between. Inactivity strung out the hours, days measured in the stretching gaps between meals, boredom the creeping threat that had stalked behind him his entire life - closer than ever now, bound in a world without light or colour or flashing movement, one less sense to process and distract.

The dipso didn't change, laughing along with the others or passed out in a corner as the moods and the booze hit him, and either way he wasn't hassling Sands. Even the kid had eased off, skipping past the gaping opportunities for cheap shots, aiming his chatter at the mariachis and leaving Sands' existence in the apartment unremarked.

Sands thought maybe El had warned him to sit and stay, or risk getting bit.

He slept a while at nights, after the sex, fast and intense to take the edge off, then slower and drawn-out. He woke in the early hours with the claws scratching endless in his head, wanting out, wanting loose to act, and he reached again for El, for the urge that burned all the others from his brain.

El didn't show any sign of tension through the waiting, not on the outside; he never had, his body innately restless and seeking of distraction and touch, with little room for change. But there was something ticking there inside him, something regular and even and ready, and he responded each time, alert and awake, never turning Sands away in sleep.

They waited three days before it rang, the new phone kept close in El's pocket, the one only Torres had the number for.

Chatter sliced short round the mariachi table at the distinctive ringtone, the flap of cards falling onto cheap wood, and Sands swung away from the laptop, head tilted to the open door between.

The bleeps cut off mid-note when El hit talk.

The Spanish was rapid at first, confident as El gave the hotel for the meet, let Salinas' guy offer a time. It was less than a minute before El's end of the chat turned stilted, lots of 'yes' and 'no' and 'I don't think –' with lengthening gaps between, and Sands started to get that slow crawl over his skin that he'd felt in Culiacán, and again in Saltillo with Honaker on their asses.

Sands was on his feet, idling in the doorway against the jamb when El finally agreed on eleven the next morning and flipped the cell closed. "You wanna tell us just how badly that went wrong?"

El laid the phone down on the table, muted click of plastic. "He won't use the hotel. He said it was his choice or no meet. I said yes."

"Christ, El, what d'you do a goddamn fucked-up thing like that for? We know shit about the place."

"If we backed out now, he'd know for certain. This is our only chance to get to him."

"Yeah, and now we've got less than twenty-four hours to make it work."

El's feet crossed the floor towards him, fingers resting light on his wrist. "Sometimes we only had seconds, and we made it work."

"Except it didn't work out too well that time I got shot," Sands snapped. Christ, he'd thought that incident was the end of the mass gun-slinging, he'd made goddamn sure to arrange it that way. At least until Honaker had crashed his party.

El's hand curled and tightened over his skin, a grip instead of a touch.

Fuck. It was already done, and the time they had was running. "So where's the new meet?"

"A place of his in Polanco. He didn't give me a description."

"Well, if you've got the cash, Polanco's the place to own property." Sands gave El a tight smile. "Did he at least give you an address, or is that to follow at a half hour's notice?"

"No, I've got the address." El was smiling soft in return, but the words lay muted over it.

"Get over there. Get a scope on that house, figure out everything you can from outside, but don't get close." Access to CIA databases and satellite images would have come in seriously useful about now, but El would pick out a couple of good rooftop vantage points.

"I'll go too. We can take different spots, get the info from different angles and work it faster." The kid's eagerness to finally be doing something after the wait waved like a goddamn flag.

"And twice the risk of being seen," Sands decided. "We don't chance it, El goes alone. But you can wait with the car, get him out quicker if there's a problem." And as a side benefit, it kept a tense, questioning brat out of Sands' space for the next couple of hours.

He turned back to El, still standing close, still a physical ring of pressure light on his arm. "Get what you can fast, then get out. If you stick around there too long, he'll know about it, and I need you back here early." The thoughts scrambled and split in his head, the rats freed and racing through the corridors, the maze of possibilities to be shaped and funnelled by whatever El found in Polanco.

He smiled wide with the scope of the choices, the people to find and tap in a single day. "We've got some shopping to do."

When El gave them the run-down on what he'd seen, they didn't really have a whole lot more.

Salinas had invited them along to one of the few big old private residences still standing in a district swallowed whole by corporate and condos. It was as isolated as a central neighbourhood got, which worked their way for making the hit and getting out with minimal fuss, but didn't exactly facilitate their entrance.

Sands twisted the last of his cigarette into the ashtray, the heavy, fresh stench of burning crushed away with the pressure. "We'll need to play this one on the subtle side. If we try and shoot our way in, Salinas won't stick around for us to kill."

"Whatever we try, it could still go wrong." El spoke quiet and level, flat fact in the face of a plan with too many unknowns. "We need somebody waiting at the front, with a car to chase down anyone who runs."

Sands twitched his lips, half-curled. "In particular the second car out, he's the type to send a sucker decoy first."

"Yeah, but he knows that too, he could bluff us out," the kid said. "If I thought El Mariachi was after me, I'd be in the 'decoy' car."

Sands tipped his head and considered. They could play 'if he knows that we know' all night and never get a solid answer. "If we attack the first car at the gate, the second gets a warning and battens down. So we cover the bases – two guns waiting at the front, one takes the first car out and rams it a quarter mile along the street. Whoever's left at the gate mops up anyone else trying to follow." That would neatly account for both the sidekicks, and keep the dipso well clear of any situations where he might get a bit too excited.

"Is there a way in to do this quietly?" Fideo asked, pulling neatly back to the idea of the hit as planned instead of the hit as it all went to hell.

"The road on the west side is tree-lined, that gives cover going over the wall." No hesitation, no decision to be made; most of El's surveillance time would have been concerned with getting himself inside. "It won't be easy, but it can be done."

"Then I guess the choices are pretty much made for us." More rustles from Lorenzo, wriggling around again, sprawled across the floor. Until he met the kid, Sands had always thought El was the pinnacle of constant motion. "The two of us outside while El goes in to make the hit."

"And me," Sands added. He wasn't gonna sit in a fucking room and smoke waiting for everything to happen without him, not this time. Setting the pieces up and sitting back while the game played itself out didn't have quite the same appeal when he had a personal investment in there.

"It won't work." El turned to face Sands, voice soft and unwavering. "We don't know anything about the layout."

"That's fine, I'll just follow you."

El shook his head. "One man is less noticeable than two, easier to find a place to hide if I need to."

Sands' face smoothed out blank, the stiffness drawling through in his words. "That's been true all along, El. It never bothered you before."

"It didn't matter before. This plan depends too much on secrecy, we all agreed on how to get it done." El lightened his voice, the familiar hint of humour creeping in. "Besides, I need you to cover the one gate at the back. Unless he tries climbing his own walls, that's the only other way out."

Give El a little warning, and too often he'd track down some unshakeable logic why things should happen his way. Not one of Sands' favourite things about the man, but it was better than the alternative of working with an idiot. "He's fat and fifty," Sands pointed out. "I think we can discount the walls."

"I'll take the back entrance." Lorenzo turned to aim his words direct to El, the standard Sands-avoidance pattern of the last few days. "He can wait out front with Fideo."

"I can't drive," Sands said, flat. "And if a car gets through that gate and into traffic, I won't know which one to shoot."

"You can't leave him back there on his own, El, he'll shoot the fucking gardener."

Sands uncrossed his feet, tipped his head towards the brat's patch of floor. "Salinas is jumpy about this already, he's hardly likely to have his family stashed in there." He drawled the words slow and deliberate, and unlike the brat, he wasn't going to route his criticisms through a third party. "Everybody in that place is going to be a shooter, and everybody's a target. Nail that to your skull before we go near it."

"The footpath meets the gate on the west side, where the trees are," El said. "You and Fideo will be less obvious at the front where it's open, Sands needs to stay out of clear sight." Sands let his lips curl faint at the edges - El was getting real smart at finding ways to agree with Sands without directly taking sides against the kid.

And unlike the brat, Sands was sharp enough to spot it when it ran the other way.

"What if nobody goes to the cars?" Fideo asked. "If you hold them in the house, how long before we come in?"

Sands reached down to tap lightly at the bag on the floor, tucked up tight alongside the sofa. "One of the reasons I went shopping today was to pick up some better comms – a little more visible to wear, but we'll have clear signals for well over a mile, even allowing for a few walls in the way." He might be stuck hanging around outside for this one, but he wasn't going to be waiting and wondering. It really wasn't his natural role.

"When Salinas is dead, or you tell me he's outside, I'll take the back way out, pick up Sands and the car there." El's hand slid to the sofa between them, the edge of a finger brushing over the denim at Sands' thigh. "Fideo and Lorenzo leave in the car that wasn't a battering ram."

"Hey, but what if the guy isn't even in there? We're working this whole thing round the idea that we're hunting a sitting target, when he could be waiting for El to get all cozy on the sofa with the guns inside before he even shows up."

The kid did at least get there, in the end, even if he tended to be a little late – Sands had dismissed that possibility early in the afternoon. "That leaves the opportunity for someone to set up an outside ambush, exactly the circumstances in which Ayala was taken down. Salinas will be keen to avoid that. This meet's scheduled for late morning to give him plenty of time to get safely holed away inside – maybe earlier in the day, or maybe he'll have spent the night in there. Nobody's going to plan an assault with a twelve hour window." Not even El, not if it involved sitting outside a guy's property with no clue which direction he was headed from and no hope of staying inconspicuous.

"I guess that covers most of the options," Lorenzo said eventually. "Just as long as nobody pulls any funny shit."

Sands had no doubt the last part was aimed exclusively at him, but he smiled down towards Lorenzo, benign. "We're leaving you to take charge of your inebriate friend on that front."

Quick, shifting movement from the floor, but El leaned forward in his seat, dropping his elbows to his knees, and the brat offered no further commentary.

The conversation dragged on a while longer after that, details poked at, possibilities tossed back and forth, but there were just too many gaping holes in what they knew to pin down anything outside of the basics. The inside of the house was pure 'here be dragons' territory, and there were a whole lot of cracks in the plan that relied on El's ability to improvise to pour the concrete filler in.

When Sands grew bored of talking in circles and headed for the bedroom, El followed him with reaching hands and eager lips, though he wasn't hard.

Well, not at first.

The blow job was enjoyable enough, a whole spiral staircase up from the rest of the evening. It never really lost its edge, having El crouch before him, hot mouth and taut tongue working over his cock, swirling and licking to get Sands off.

It wasn't hard to make someone suck him off. Man or woman, it was all the same, anybody would do it, with the judicious application of pressure from just the right angle. But to make El Mariachi want to suck him off - to have the man drop to his knees with a smile and soft words, fingers tugging fast and light at Sands' fly - well, that was an achievement Sands counted as a personal special.

Orgasm was good, coming pretty much right when he would've finished it himself, and it was pleasant enough to reciprocate the favour with his hand, but it didn't dope Sands out of existence the way he'd come to expect. The sheets lay sticky over the sweat on his skin, and damp with come at his hip, unless he curled to avoid it.

Alongside him, El wriggled and twisted even more than he usually did, and Sands figured neither of them was pinning down too much sleep.

He dozed in bizarre snatches of half-dream, of creeping, screaming memory and distorted predictions, so many twisted variations on the day's plan, all getting fucked over by the horror of past reality.

It was almost a relief to feel the morning, to find El kneeling across the room in a stream of fast, quiet Spanish, but Sands felt like a mangy mutt waking up to find its balls chopped off, and his brain needed a total hard drive purge and a restart without the worms.

El's presence around him was low sound and movement, a couple of quick touches, and Sands wasn't in a mood to make chit-chat either. The shower washed some of the sewage from his skull, along with the coffee El brought him, a thick tang sweet and rich in his throat when he stepped from the bathroom.

He sat cross-legged on the bed with El beside him, slide-and-click, slide-and-click, the easy, natural monotony of stacking rounds into clips – a hell of a lot more of El's than his own, since El never had adopted the habit of preserving ammo.

As the haze cleared from his head, the tension was right there to fill the spaces.

Slide-and-click, slide-and-click.

Whenever Sands needed a mental distraction, the easiest way was to find the brat.

"What the fuck are you doing? You look like the gringo from hell, and that moustache yells out fake half way down the goddamn street."

"Exactly." Sands hooked a spare clip onto his belt, hidden under the loose tails of what El assured him was the most hideous Hawaiian-style shirt on sale in Mexico City. He angled his face towards the kid and quirked his lip. "These people know who I am, and what I am. If I'm going to disguise myself, I wouldn't do it like this, would I?"

The kid didn't answer right away, and when he did, his words were aimed over Sands' shoulder, to El. "Does that shit actually work?"

"I don't know. He never tried to hide himself from me." El stepped around in front of Sands, studying. "It would work on people who don't really look."

Lorenzo sniffed in air, fast and high. "Everybody's gonna be staring at that get-up."

"Sure they look, an' then they all look right away again an' laugh," Sands drawled in heavy Texan. His southern accent was about as convincing as his Spanish, but he wasn't assuming too many Mexicans would be able to tell the difference. He reached for the big Olympus on the table and hung it round his neck. "Just another crazy tourist. Plenty of them in Polanco."

"Well, you got the crazy part nailed," Lorenzo not-quite-muttered as he turned away, and Sands smiled, dry. The kid was so much more entertaining when he took the bait.

Fideo was the last one to show in the living room, predictably, another fast round of weapon checks and ammo counts clicking a background to Sands' second coffee. The brat left first, taking the Metro a couple of districts over to select and appropriate the third car – another hangover talent from his charming teenage years. If they were going to be leaving a head-on wreck at the scene, it wouldn't be a wreck that could be tied to them.

Sands made it through another coffee and two smokes before it was time to go.

El turned down the smokes when Sands offered.

Sands settled himself into the car, El's seatbelt clicking into place alongside him – it wouldn't go too well if they were pulled over for a violation on the way. Bad enough they had to risk the dipso at the wheel for this one.

Sands hooked the radio into his ear and flipped on the mike. "This good?"

"Fine from here." Fideo's voice was clear and precise from the second car. "El?"

"I hear you."

"Okay."

El fired up the engine at Fideo's confirmation and pulled out.

The traffic was heavy, like it was ever anything else in Mexico City, but the worst of the morning crawl had cleared, and they'd timed the run well. Lorenzo hit the comms a couple of minutes from target, parked back along the street a ways in his acquired ride. The signal held some hiss for the kid's check, but they'd be pushing the range through the high rises.

El took a left from the arterial, swinging back north into Polanco's residential streets. The traffic load lifted as they weaved in on the address, leaving a hum settled low at the back of Sands' head.

Another turn, a slow, sharp right, and the hum was there, shattering into jagged frequencies, and it wasn't any part of him. The crackling at his ear was rising, fast, a mass of static hissed into his head, and Sands' muscles drew taut round his bones with the knowledge. "Stop."

El braked instantly, swinging the car over to the kerb.

The wait was only moments before the kid's voice echoed through, cracked and krazy-glued under the buzz, but still there. For now. "Hey, I'm getting all kinds of crap on this line - this earpiece I've got's a piece of shit."

Sands held himself entirely still, head pressed back to the seat, resisting the urge to shake it, pointless. "It's Salinas. He's figured out someone must've used comms to coordinate the move on Ayala. He's covering himself, blocking local transmissions."

It was back with him, and stronger, the crawling sensation hooked deep through his flesh, the knowledge that he'd lost his hold on the strings. The control all ripping away from him, another Culiacán, another Day of the Dead, and it was time to call this off, to bail and get out, now.

El breathed alongside him, waiting, fingers tapping light on the plastic of the wheel, otherwise still.

El wouldn't stop. There wouldn't be another chance, and El would take it on, with the odds slimming around him, walls closing to confine and trap; and Sands could walk away and shrink them tighter, and El still wouldn't back out.

Sands drew in breath deep and slow through his nose, stretching out the muscles between his ribs, prying apart the pressure inside that wanted to be small and tight and curled. "It'll get worse as we get closer. I guess we'll be making this deal without the chit-chat." He switched off his own transmitter, reached across and did the same to El's. "How long for you to check most of the house?"

El shrugged. "That depends how many people get in my way. Maybe twenty minutes from when I go in."

Sands ran his fingers over the face of the watch in his pocket, flicked the channel back open. "Nothing changes, you wait at the front just in case, like we said. We'll be in the area at 10.20, but that's a little early to be polite – we won't go in till 10.45." The sidekicks should catch on to the twenty-five minute deadline, and anyone who might be listening in wouldn't be expecting them any sooner.

"If I get out faster than we think, I'll bring the car round the front of the house before we head back," El added. "Watch for it."

"Hell, we — just use the phones. We've all got them." Lorenzo's voice hopped and broke through the static.

"If we use the cells while the operator's around, he'll just switch frequencies, jam those too." Sands twitched his lips, sent humour curling into the words for the benefit of potential third parties. "Salinas must've been pissing off some of the neighbours around that place."

"He's not gonna be — if he's been fucking with — phones for weeks."

"It won't be full time, only when the man himself is at the office. Which makes it fortunate he uses so many different ones." Sands flipped his tones into mildly irritated boredom. "This interference is just gonna piss us off. Switch off and lose them." He didn't want a hunk of dead plastic blocking his ear, and it would be one less chance of an untimely ID without them.

El clicked the car into drive, engine note rising smooth as they moved off.

Sands' fingers ran along his belt, over Sigs and clips checked and rechecked an hour before, and he forced them down to splay still across the denim at his thigh. "The back-up's on a timer now, so don't go crazy inside – none of that showy shit you like so much."

El only shrugged alongside him. "I did this without back-up for years."

Sands twisted in his seat, aiming the dark lens stare. "And if you find anything that looks like a jammer, take it out."

The car slowed fractionally, El's head swinging round to Sands. "How would I know it?"

"It'll be hooked to a computer to check sources, pick out the right frequency to spike."

"That might not help too much." El's inflection bounced exaggerated, and Sands smiled. Salinas wasn't gonna be running a low-tech set-up in there.

"Just shoot everything. You're good at it."

El's head flicked to Sands again, smiling light through his words. "I'm supposed to be quiet this time, remember?"

Sands dipped his chin faintly, lifting his eyebrows high above his shades. "So shoot everybody first, and then start on the inanimate objects."

One of those quick, brushing touches at Sands' hip, and El's humour had fallen away. "When they're all dead, I just want to leave."

Yeah, and Sands shared the goddamn sentiment, and then some. Everything in Sands' head and his gut both was telling him to get the fuck out right now, while they could.

The ridged weave of denim pressed tight against his palms.

Two more turns, and El stopped, backed the car into a parking spot and killed the engine. "The house is the next block." El's door clicked open, tap of boots on pavement.

Sands shrugged out of the jacket that was masking the Hawaiian monstrosity, hooking it over onto the back seat. The camera looped across his shoulder, and he was all set to play.

El headed off along the street, Sands slotting into place behind him, sidewalk transitioning to the deadened tap of road surface and back to sidewalk beneath his feet. He hitched his camera strap higher on his shoulder a couple of times, arm swinging out to place the rough brush of stone over his knuckles.

"Here." El stopped, turned, and Sands leaned back on one elbow against the wall alongside him, surface coarse and cool through the thin cotton of his shirt, no morning sun here on the west side. Leaves rustled above and both ways along the street as the breeze swirled past the wall, the reason El had chosen this spot to go over. "The gate is another twenty metres along this wall."

Sands raised the big Olympus to his face, angling it along the street low, past where the trees' trunks would be. Polanco was Mexico's latest Hip Central, with a few architectural hangovers like Salinas' place, and wherever the hell he pointed a lens, there'd be something somebody would want to shoot. They were off of the arterials here, but the grid layout gave the streets some rat run potential, and cars went buzzing past maybe a couple a minute.

He slouched with fingers shoved into his pocket between photographic interludes, tracking the minutes over the face of his watch.

He didn't say anything when it closed on 10.19. El would know well enough for himself.

El took a step away from the wall, standing close against Sands. "This one."

The rumble of the passing car peaked and paled, heading away, and Sands bent to hook his hands together, boosting up at the press of El's boot to send him light over the wall. A soft rustle and slither from the far side, more leaves than heavy weight, and El faded out of his perception.

Flash of him forty seconds later in the three quick silenced rounds, a leafy brush instead of a thud as El grabbed the dead meat and lowered it slow.

Quiet was going to plan, so far.

Another couple of minutes brushed past Sands' fingers with no more sound from El, and by now he'd be far enough out that there wouldn't be.

Sands started to move in the direction of the gate, slow, very slow without a guide for his steps. Fingers lifted in a rectangle before him as he stopped, swung back around, a tourist casual and easily distracted while his feet found the ridges in the sidewalk, the broken lines where tree roots invaded. Holding the photographer image with the big Olympus still tucked tidily away behind his elbow, so much easier to reach for a Sig without a camera strap snagging at his arm. Quick brush of the wall, the position check as he turned back down the street, meandering forward, lazy, no real purpose.

It was obvious enough when he found the gate, hand stretching out further on the wall check, back into air and the twisting curves of metal. It was shut, which was nice to know. That would give Sands a useful extra couple of seconds while it was opened, and swinging metal hinges would tip him off that someone was leaving, no matter how stealthy they tried to be in the footsteps department.

No pause, no stop, just a guy wandering by, fingers squared ahead of him to point along the street. He sank against the wall again some thirty feet beyond the gate, his back to the house and too far to be sneaking even a slice angle view past the metal, nothing to drag suspecting eyes his way.

The cars hummed by in irregular patterns, waves of air forced over his skin and rippling the tail of his shirt. Sands turned his head to visibly follow one along the street now and then, his attention all strung back over his shoulder, beyond the wall.

Leaves rustled overhead and behind, shivering waves of sound rising with the wisps of hair teasing along his cheeks. He reached up to brush away a strand that tickled idly under his nose, catching on the outsized moustache. An insect darted in, close, dodging away at the last second, sharp flash-buzz past his ear.

Sweat gathered round the straps holding the Berettas high under his arms, undershirt clinging damp and goddamn itchy in wrinkles round the leather. He wasn't even going to want the fucking things, emergency use only, no way to hide the extra length of the silencers under the tourist shirt.

Quiet was good. Quiet meant everything was falling in line with the plan.

He still wished he knew just what the fuck was going on in there.

He lit himself a cigarette he didn't really need, but it made a nice stage prop for a visitor relaxed against a wall, taking in the atmosphere of a just-off-the-track Mexican street.

Quiet was drop-kicked hard in the long, slow shriek of abused tyres and an abrupt, very metallic smack and crunch. Distinct, but not ear-shattering, dulled by distance, everything happening a few blocks over the other side of the house.

Somebody had decided inside was a little too unsafe for them.

His fingers brushed over his watch – seven minutes since El left.

He hoped the kid hadn't wrecked too sweet a ride.

No audible gunfire from out front, which was a plus – the sidekicks had silencers, and maybe Salinas' people wouldn't be worrying about staying discreet for the neighbours right now.

Sands flicked the rest of his smoke out into the street, to be crushed by the cars. Edged back along the wall a ways, closer to the gate, because the people inside must be getting a pretty good idea of who was around by now. The crazy tourist was gonna get tagged soon, wherever he was standing.

He stopped maybe ten feet from the gate, propping himself relaxed against the stone. Still nothing from the other side of the wall but plants and bugs.

He was reaching so hard to hear the whispers, it felt like his fucking ears were being squeezed when it started, even dimmed by the passage through stone. No build-up, no slide in, just multiple weapons opened up, north end of the house – at least one auto in there, tight rippling bursts above the short groupings of the semis, too many, too overlapping, too broken up to count.

Distinctive blast of the shotgun, one barrel, the next a half a second later.

Sands' fingers had wrapped themselves around the grip of a Sig beneath his shirt tails, dimpled plastic pressed into the damp of his skin.

A drawn-out fucking gun battle with numbers had never been any part of the plan. If El had used a decent pump-action, the Remington or the Mossberg, he'd still have at least a couple of rounds in there.

The auto had fallen out of the symphony – empty, or dropped by a corpse. No other weapon jumped in to replace it, so Sands went with the corpse.

Two more shotgun shells, two more blasts from El, two more that said the corpse this time was a richly deserving motherfucker.

The gunfire was easing back, less from the semi-autos now, shorter bursts, breaks between – shots fired from cover, preserving ammo.

And then nothing – maybe a minute for the whole gig, max.

The quiet stretched out again, into insects and leaves and a passing car. No feet from inside, nobody in any particular hurry to leave, at least not by this door.

If Salinas was dead, El should be headed back here, all set to chauffeur Sands' taxi to the apartment.

If Salinas was still alive, as Mr Self-Preservation he should be getting the hell out, but nobody was shooting out front.

Unless Salinas was alive and he knew there wasn't a threat any more, in which case he'd stay safely tucked away inside.

Maybe, when whatever version of shit had sprayed off of the blades, El had gotten out the closest way he could find. And whatever door, window or rooftop ledge he'd used could've been nearer the front of the house, with no sane way through.

El could be circling back around the streets right now to come pick up Sands.

Sands liked that version, but he had to admit it wasn't very El – once the shooting started and secrecy had its brains splattered all over the walls, El would most likely take the insane route through the middle. Nothing that would give a target time to sneak away ahead of him.

The minutes brushed by beneath Sands' fingers, three of them now since the gunfire stopped. And he was left standing here with no fucking clue whether El was a hundred yards out and gaining fast, or sprawled out dead somewhere inside. Nothing even close to a sure winner to choose, and both of them equally likely to throw him flat on his ass if he jumped on board the wrong horse.

Christ. He hated this fucking miserable country and the way it did this to him every goddamn time. Always trying to figure out which choice of disaster would trample him down into the dirt with the least hoofprints over his spine.

The breeze twisted over the wall and hooked cool around his neck, strands of hair drifting forward to catch in the sweat along his jaw. He wished he could just tie the whole lot back out of his fucking face.

The stone pricked across his shoulder blades through the thin cotton of his shirt.

Screw it. Mexico was a complete fucking cunt, and she'd fucked him over once and he wasn't gonna stand around here, hand her a twelve inch dildo, and wait for her to fuck him again.

He elbowed the camera further behind his hip, out of his way, and finished the creep back towards the gate – slow, cautious, and not just because he was listening for trouble. The rough brush of the wall dropped away from his skin; on past the break for the gateway, picking up stone again the far side, almost skinning his goddamn knuckles on the edge.

Sidewalk tapping away beneath his feet, finding and matching any unevenness with his memory as a double check on distance. Absolutely no rush, no extra stretch to the stride, steps steady and natural and measured, fingers at his hip brushing light along the wall, counting back towards the intersection, back to the car.

Toes at the kerb, over the cross street and up onto sidewalk, cars buzzing past unconcerned just the way they'd been doing all morning. Tap, tap, tap, the rhythm of his feet on the concrete and the numbers in his head, closer, close, reaching roadside to find steel and his hand going to the keys in his pocket.

He'd never actually used his set since they were cut. Maybe he should have checked the fucking things worked.

Metal slid and clicked easily in metal, turning with only a slight jiggle, and he popped the trunk open. He pulled his cane from the straps securing it to the side and tucked it under his arm, tossing the Olympus back into the depths. The tourist photographer thing wasn't gonna hold up too well once he started tapping his way around.

He pulled on his gloves, leather sliding smooth over his knuckles, then locked the car again before he left it – an old Chevy wasn't a likely thief magnet in Polanco, but he definitely wanted it to be there when he came back.

He counted his way steadily back to the intersection and on along the wall. He wasn't spending any longer than he had to walking around Mexican streets looking obviously blind - no point reeling in more trouble than they already had.

The numbers gave him the spot where El had gone over, confirmation in the same dense brush of leaves overhead and behind the wall. Beyond it stretched the space barely known, where he'd edged, cautious and intermittent, no count for his natural stride.

He swung the cane down from under his arm into his left hand. Okay. Now he could hitch up the pace a little.

El had said another sixty feet to the gate, give or take, Sands judging it in the smooth, even swing of the cane over the sidewalk, touching light at the base of the wall with every arc to the right. Until the cane found space, and he flicked upwards to tap gently onto metal.

He found hinges on the right hand edge, drifted fingers across to the latch. He half thought he'd find a lock and have to go for a climb, but the gate swung inwards and he slipped through, leaving it fully open behind him in case he wanted a fast exit. It was hardly a secret now that somebody had gone walkabout inside.

Out of full public view, his hand dropped automatically to the silenced Sig at his belt, then pulled back; he undid a couple of buttons on his shirt, reaching through to pull a Beretta from under his arm. The auto pistol wasn't exactly subtle, but subtle had already been raped three times and dumped in a garbage bag in an alleyway.

He followed the stone path towards the house, regular blocks even under his feet, cane poking into something softer, grittier, when he swung it wide. He stayed with his smooth, fast pace, disrupted only when something straggly snagged at his cane. He wasn't expecting to find anybody out here – the gunfire had all been inside the house, and anyone who was headed away from it would've headed right the hell away, not stopped to admire the flower beds.

The path stayed straight till he hit the side of the house.

The door wasn't locked. Sands suspected that had more to do with El than an innate lack of security.

He pulled the door open, wide, fast, stepping back against the wall with the Beretta up –

Nobody shot at him, which was always a good thing, but especially now when he was kind of distracted by the clutching spasms crawling in his throat as he sucked in air.

He'd conveniently managed to forget, over the last year and some, just how fucking bad the stink got in these abattoirs of El's.

It wasn't just the blood, though enough of that in a tight space had a thick, edged scent that caught unpleasantly at the back of his tongue. It was all the other crap that leaked from corpses, from just about every orifice, in every state of matter – liquid, solid, gas, it was all in there, and desperate to crawl up his goddamn nose.

Leaving the door open served a nice dual purpose – this place was in serious need of some ventilation.

He poked around the nearby floor, finding the two bodies sprawled along the hallway, testing carefully for any slickness beneath his shoes. Moved off towards the north side of the house, tapping slower now, lighter over the smooth, perfect tiles, head swinging to catch the angles on any sounds. He knew something of the basic layout of this place from El's report on it - Mission Revival, the trend of the moment when this whole district had first gone up in the thirties, all squares round central courtyards.

Sands didn't give a damn about courtyards and colonnades – Salinas wouldn't have been outside taking the air.

He ignored the first rooms he passed. El had been inside a while before anyone shot at him, he'd have gotten a lot further than the door.

Sands found another body just around the first bend in the hallway, at the start of the long sweep east. This one was a short fuck with a paunch.

He hoped like hell that El was awake in here someplace, because otherwise he'd have to search this entire fucking mansion kicking every sprawled shape with his toe-cap till he found the one with guns in all the right places.

He could just dial El's cell and follow the buzz, but that risked attracting the attention of anyone else who might still be alive, and he didn't want anyone else taking a closer look at El first.

He stayed with the outside wall, keeping the impenetrable solidity of it at his back, poking across the hallway for doorways and layout. The house oozed the night's lingering cool from the stone, no sun yet through the north side windows, and well insulated. Sands' undershirt clung damp across the skin of his back and shoulders, and stickiness gathered in a line at the waistband of his jeans.

Some half way along the second 'wing', he started taking more of an interest in the rooms off the hall.

Exploring was considerably more of a pain in the ass with furniture getting in on the act. Sands circled the walls of each room as close as he could, cane sweeping wide around him in deep arcs. Couple of times he found corpses; mostly he found rugs and chair legs, snagging his cane with deep wooden whacks that carried a lot further than he would have liked.

Creeping out of the rooms he'd tap-tap-tapped around, back into the hallway - well, that really took the fun to new heights. Edging up along the frame, gun around first, ready to send a burst at any mulefucker who thought to take a pot shot at his hand –

Movement off to his left, back the way he came, and low - he whipped the Beretta across his body to send two bursts its way, and it stopped.

Maybe he just shot the cat.

Whatever it was, it definitely wasn't a threat now, and that was good enough for him.

Of course everybody left alive in the entire goddamn house knew where he was now too, but he'd slap those gnats when they showed up.

Back to the wall again, moving on to the next room, rhythmic flick of the wrist testing ahead for the doorway.

More movement, coming up from behind, and this time it definitely wasn't a fucking cat – some fucker trying to creep up on him in soft-soled tennis shoes that squeaked like a sewer full of rats.

He slipped back into that last doorway, just inside, to wait. Wait while the squeaky-squeaky made it around that last bend, let him close in, let him get confident, then stick the Beretta out and hose the fucking hallway with four quick bursts. One soft, slow thump under the bullets.

Sands pulled his hand back fast, but nobody returned fire.

He stuck the cane out first, and everything stayed quiet.

Edging out, delicate, easy, then back to the wall and feeling his way along again, towards the next door.

"Sands."

The voice was quiet, and not close, not direct, some muffling of walls between. He stopped, instant, still, angled his head towards where he thought....

"Sands." No question in El's words, absolute certainty of who was there, and Sands didn't find many opportunities to be positive about the fact that he had to tap his way through the world with a fucking cane, might as well take what he could get.

"Keep talking." Easier to follow sound past barriers when it was constant, not a game for guessing.

"Off the hallway. Right side. Past the table." Stripped phrases with gaps for quick, laboured breaths, but El was with it enough to be getting out the relevant info. Tapping forwards faster now because if anybody was out that way they'd have shot El already, hallway bending left round a corner of that courtyard, following the right hand wall past doorways till he struck wood, light and delicate, the leg of a too-fussy little telephone table or some such shit.

"In here." Sweeping strokes past the table to the doorway, unsurprised to find the tight confining echoes of what was more like a big cupboard than a small room, because El had gotten himself tucked away inside someplace where he only had the one approach to worry about.

El's voice had come from down low - not flat on the floor height, but he wasn't on his feet.

No time to use his hands, find out for himself. "Where?" he demanded, and El answered right away, but his voice faded out into a hiss.

"Ribs, low on the right."

Which ran the possibilities through as lungs, liver, diaphragm, maybe guts or stomach depending on the angle of entry. Not a great set of choices, but El had been shot full in the chest before and lived through it, no reason to suppose he'd be cashing in early for anything less.

Sands didn't ask any more. If there was anything important like he was hosing from an arterial bleed, El would get around to mentioning it. "We need to wrap it."

"I already did. I just didn't feel up to taking a stroll."

"Or making a phone call," Sands said, dry. He holstered the Beretta and grabbed a hold of El's left arm, bending low to pull it round over his shoulders. "Now get on your goddamn feet." Messy taps and scrabbling slide of boots as Sands hauled upwards, weight lurching uneven onto his neck, dragging him down and sideways, and for a second he thought he was going to drop the bastard. But El got his feet under him, got them into some sort of balance, with El wedged between Sands and the wall.

"I don't think I was awake to call," El said when his rasping lungs had regained something like rhythm. "I tied the bandage, and then I heard you."

"Nothing like a few bursts from an auto to wake a guy up." It was all too likely El would have passed out, between the shock and the blood pressure drop and the fact that pulling down tight would have hurt like a fucking bitch.

Low, fast clicks from El now, the familiar tap of cell phone keys. The sidekicks, presumably, and Sands didn't ask what he planned to say.

A single bleep from El's phone and he slipped it back into his pocket. "Give me a gun."

"Fuck a gun, just keep pressing on that hole."

"Left hand."

Sands reached around El's hip to find a holster that still held a Glock, slapped the butt against the hand draped over his shoulder. "You fire that thing, it better be because we're about to fucking die." Losing an eardrum, even on a temporary basis, wasn't anywhere on his list of Things To Do, and he wasn't wholly in favour of taking a .45 casing to the face either. Even if he didn't have to worry about his eyes.

He wiped his cane over thoroughly and tossed it away some place he wasn't going. He needed one and a half hands for El and what was left over for a weapon, and getting out of here was gonna be a complete bitch.

Beretta back in his right hand, wrapped around El and hugged tight to his hip, left hand gripping El's wrist at his shoulder. "Get moving."

Another lurch, and more weight dragging at him as they moved back from the wall; deep, heaving breaths from El close on his neck, but they were making progress in something close to a rhythm, the tap of El's boots almost regular with little slur or catch as they turned into the hallway.

"The front door's closer." El was moving with him physically, but the goddamn Mariachi still had to fucking argue.

"This way's clear." He knew where to find the door he'd come in by, and he wasn't going to consider El an entirely reliable source of details right now.

No cane to guide him, but he'd kept the count automatically on the way in, knew where the doors and the bodies were - if this broken, shuffling gait didn't screw with his calculations too much.

Christ.

"I got him." El's words jolted short, close at his neck. "Salinas. He's dead."

Like Sands gave a flying fuck either way. Salinas had never been their problem, and El wasn't gonna be doing any favours for anybody for a while, no matter how big-eyed the kid got when he put the pressure on.

His silence didn't discourage El any. "Torres too. They're both gone."

Now that was relevant. Couldn't leave people walking around who'd gotten a good long look at El Mariachi, even if they only figured that part after the fact. "Good. Now shut the fuck up, unless you've got something to say that helps get us out of here."

"Something like, 'Don't fall over the body a metre in front of you'?"

That agreed with Sands' ongoing count, the skinny guy just before the hallway took a turn to the right. "We already met."

Two more steps and he lifted his toe forward slow to poke at solid, fleshy obstacle. The body was angled along the hallway, feet on the right the most convenient part to step over. He eased round sideways, tugging El after him; weight sawed across his shoulders uneven as El's boots slurred and stumbled, breath rasping rough and broken and warm on Sands' shoulder through the shirt.

"I don't think I'll be helping much longer."

Sands curled his fingers deep into the muscle of El's arm, felt the press onto bone beneath his glove. "Oh no you don't, you miserable Mexican piece of camel cud. You pass out on me, I'll drop you right where we stand and I'm leaving, got it? I'm not gonna drag your ass out of here."

Christ, he wasn't even sure he could. El was close enough the same height, but he was built bigger, and Sands had tried to keep himself tight but he knew he'd lost muscle. Running two to five a day was an option that had disappeared right along with his eyeballs, not to mention the effects of various bullets in his legs, and there was always that little stint of chain-smoking he'd indulged in. Once he started tripping over shit and fell flat on his face, he'd never get El hauled upright again.

"I wish I got to make the choice." El was breathing hard through every word, but there was something like a smile there below it.

"Shut up and press harder." He eased back his grip on El's arm before his fingers cramped up. If the pain of a fucking bullet wound wouldn't keep El awake, Sands digging his nails in him wasn't gonna make a goddamn difference. "And walk faster."

They couldn't have much time left. The police in Cash Cow Central wouldn't be the slowest or the stupidest, and probably they'd be here already if Salinas hadn't paid them to maintain a certain amount of discretion over anything that happened round his properties.

El finally did as he was goddamn told for the keeping quiet part, or as quiet as a guy could be who was heaving breath in and out with the force to feed a blast furnace. It was the walking faster part that wasn't coming off, the dragging slide of El's boots grating through Sands' head with each jerking step.

El wasn't talking, but it was unmissable as a lightning strike the instant he passed out.

The bellows snapped silent alongside Sands' ear, and another two fucking tons slung itself into place over his shoulders, his knees sagging and steps faltering under the stress. He let go his grip on El's wrist, making a grab for the Glock before it slid loose to the floor, because it sure as fuck wouldn't have the safety on.

His thumb found the catch and flipped it as he slipped the gun into his pocket, and he reached up to grab a hold of El's wrist again just before the arm slithered from round his neck.

It was a few more seconds before he could be sure he wasn't gonna go sprawling or drop the fucking mariachi.

El's weight dragged down the whole right side of his body, sucking from him any sort of balance. El's boots trailed and tripped at his own as he shuffled forwards. His count was fucked all to hell now, every step a slow edging of sole paper-thin above the tile, his left elbow brushing the wall to keep him straight, stop the pull from spinning him like a curve ball.

El was still breathing, lighter, shallower, faster now at Sands' shoulder, which was good if it meant most of that heaving for air had been the pain, and not a lung full of blood.

There was another bend ahead here somewhere, that last ninety degree before the thirty foot run to the door.

Then he'd have to cross the garden, and drag El a block along the street, to the car he couldn't drive.

Right now, toeing his way pathetically down the out-sized hallways of some Mission monstrosity, he'd be grateful enough for the fucking door.

Sound, right on the edge of his perception, and he shoved El and himself up against the wall, frozen.

Feet, more than one person, back along the hallway, back the way they'd come. Getting closer, following, that careful compromise gait between quiet and quick.

And maybe he would have been good in that mass gunfight after all, because he wasn't about to shoot the owners of these feet right now. Sands was fairly sure there weren't going to be too many situations where he'd mark it a plus to meet up with the sidekicks, but this definitely racked the count up to one. He twisted his head around back over his shoulder, trying not to eat a mouthful of El's shirt. "Get over here, you're late."

Feet coming faster, surer, a smooth almost-run echoing sharp through the corridors, and the kid slid to a stop right up in his face. "Jesus, what the fuck happened?"

"Chat later, grab his other arm and get out."

For once, the brat didn't argue, some of the weight tugged from Sands' shoulders and the drag easing off as Lorenzo lifted from the other side. And Christ, his spine really fucking appreciated that.

"The door's past that next left, then it's a straight run to the gate."

"I'll check it out." Fideo peeled away, soles padding fast and smooth, the sound dropping off dull as he put wall between them.

El's body lurched and shifted at Sands' neck, a sharp, hitching rustle from the kid. "Take his leg."

Sands would clarify his position on taking orders from the brat later - for now, it was easier to carry El between them than have his feet dragging behind, boot tips snagging on the corpses.

He shoved the Beretta back in the holster under his shirt, hooked his arm behind El's thigh and lifted, El hanging, swaying between them, as they took the first steps.

The dipso had better be on the fucking ball, because the kid wouldn't be in any respectable position to shoot anybody either.

They found the bend in the hallway, the kid tugging sideways, dragging him round the turn. One more landmark down as Sands adjusted to the pull in a couple of unbalanced steps, though he would have preferred it if his escort had said something first instead of yanking on him.

With their rustling, tapping movements to bury sound, without El's face draped over his neck in waves of warmth, Sands didn't know if El was still breathing or if they were dragging a dead man out of here.

He'd just assume El was still hanging on in there so long as the kid wasn't swearing and freaking.

The air was shifting around him with more than their movement now, a flow tugging and drifting over his cheek. They had to be close.

"Two dead guys coming up, in front of the door." Too imprecise, not the level of detail Sands could use, but at least the kid was kicking up his brain and making the effort. Sands knew how they were arranged from finding them on the way in, so once he got a toe at the first leg, he was good with the rest. Step careful past the head, mind the patch of wet-and-slippy streaking outwards, turn sideways to edge the three of them through the door.

It wasn't till he got the first snap of breeze through his nose, clear and leafy over the perpetual city fumes, that he was hit again by just how choking the air had been inside, how thick the stink of blood that he was mostly carrying with him.

Fideo loped up alongside in muted footfalls, sliding over turned soil. "It's clear."

Sands let go of El's wrist to dig in his pocket and held out his keys, rattling deliberately. "Get the car. Left along the street, past the intersection." They were snatched from his hand, Fideo trotting away along the path ahead of them.

It was easier to move out here, knowing the stone ran straight and clear, no furniture, no walls, no bodies, just move, matching his steps to the kid's to keep it smooth, El held steady at his neck.

His right arm was going numb, El's thigh bearing down over the bone of his forearm, and he didn't want to try and shift or he might drop the fucker.

They stopped inside the gate, hanging back out of sight, waiting till the familiar engine slid into idle on the street right alongside.

Fideo jumped out, running round to tug open the door, and they dumped El's ass on the edge of the back seat, Sands smacking his head on the roof fuck as he backed out from under El's arm. Round the other side, sliding into the back and pulling to lay El out across the seat, his head tugged over Sands' lap as the other mariachis shoved his feet in and slammed the door.

Sands reached for the jacket he'd left in the back, wrestling with it as he shrugged it up along his arms, which would have been a hell of a lot easier if he didn't have to consider not tossing El off of his lap to flop around on the floor.

The engine fired up as soon as the kid hit the driver's seat, and he swerved out hard into the flow of traffic. "We need a doctor."

Paper rustled and crackled stiff in Fideo's hands, and Sands guessed he was unfolding the map. "Do you know one here?"

"Why the fuck would I, I've never been near this fucking city." Solid thump against the plastic of the steering wheel. "Shit, where's the hospital in this fucking district?"

"No hospitals," Fideo said, fast and flat. "The police will come, take fingerprints, and they've got enough of El Mariachi's to match."

"You think he'd want to die instead?"

"He wouldn't like prison." Fideo's voice this time was lower, softer.

"So you're happy to just drive around and watch him bleed."

Sands finally got the jacket dragged over his shoulders, buttoning it all the way to cover the Hawaiian disaster and the blood. "You guys didn't think to have this conversation a while back? The whole 'what to do if I'm not around to kick your asses' bit?"

"Did you?" Lorenzo snapped back.

Sands hadn't sat down for any such conversation with El, but he had his own ways of dealing with things that worked just fine. These two dickfeeds needed step-by written instructions to take a bath. "Get us onto the major streets and shut the fuck up."

He took the cell from El's pocket - it was less hassle to ditch and replace than his own, which he actually used - thankful he always set both phones up for international as he dialled.

The phone rang four times, then stopped with a click. At least the number hadn't changed. He could've found the new one, but not with the time limits he was working under.

"I know you're there, Sam," he said into the silence.

The pause dragged on a while longer before she spoke. "Sands?" He didn't answer; she didn't need him to. "So you are alive. I bet on it in the pool Jasinski's running, figured that way I'd finish ahead even if you were still around."

The car lurched round a tight left-hander, El rocking and swaying against Sands' lap, and Sands dropped his left hand to his chest to steady him. "No time for pleasantries, sugarcheeks, I need a name. I want an accommodating doctor near Polanco, and he'd better not be an idiot."

"Polanco, D.F? You're still in Mexico?" Surprise snapped her voice out of its usual slow, lilted rhythms.

"Not long enough to do you any good." He smiled the words through the connection. "Call this number when you've got an answer."

Quick, amused huff of air at his ear. "You're not worried what else I might be doing?"

"We both know you won't report this, and we both know why." He disconnected and flipped the cell shut before he snapped the smile off.

"How long's this gonna take?" Lorenzo demanded.

"Minutes." Foreman knew her shit, and it was low-level intel, kept around because nothing was ever tossed away 'just in case'. "Give me your phone." And the kid had some fucking sense when it mattered, because he didn't question it, rustling in his pocket to pass it back.

El was still breathing beneath his hand, a movement harsher and more ragged than natural sleep. Sands slid his fingers across to El's arm and down to the wrist, the pulse there jumping fast and light against his skin.

The kid hauled the car around again, traffic buzz building heavier outside. Sands tightened his grip, his forearm resting across El's chest, braced against the roll.

He'd never worked directly with Foreman, not close on the same investigation, but they'd been based out of the same office space on paperwork days, and her rep was pure efficiency, getting things done fast with minimal fuss. Not exactly one of the agency's whiter-thans, but she steered a more cautious pattern of radar avoidance than Sands had ever bothered to do.

He could see her; Christ, he could really see her, hair in a dark wavy tail hanging over one shoulder, the curve of her neck bare and flowing into the length of her back as she peered at her screen from that bouncy, 'top-chiropractors-recommend-it' stool, legs and feet curled back elegantly round the base of it. Nothing special in the face - not baying at the moon beat, just a little nondescript - but she spent most of her off-hours on the squash court pounding anyone stupid enough to take her on, and she dressed and played that body of hers for every inch it was worth, just the way he would have done it. Elbows on the desk, chin on her linked hands, and yeah, that rendered the spine-special stool kind of moot, but that wasn't the point. Tits pushed together between her forearms giving her the cleavage of anyone's dreams, blouse pulled tight behind to cling down the undulations of her spine and the muscle running with it, and Sands had the twitch at his groin to go right along with the image. Just the basic hint of reaction, no real hard-on. The unconscious guy sprawled across his lap, heavy with the stink of blood, wasn't exactly conducive.

Sands had never screwed her - she knew him a little too well to make the offer. He'd considered it, when he'd dug up her cash-trickling scheme, thought of her beneath him, accepting and hating, face twisted into something beautiful by the loathing. It would have been fun once or twice, the rape of the willing, but generally Sands preferred someone in his bed who'd use some skill and effort to get him off instead of the mummy from the crypt, and it would have been a waste of such a useful lever.

He counted it a good decision now, with El breathing uneven against his thighs, the bounce of blood at El's wrist dropping away beneath his fingers, and Foreman's dark tapered nails tapping at her keyboard in his head.

El's phone buzzed alongside his thigh, skittering away across the seat. He snatched it up and flipped it open without speaking.

"I've got your man. Goes by the name of Sanchez, but I'm not pinning any guarantees to that part."

"Close?"

"Works out of Claveria." A couple of districts north, headed away from the centre.

"And the part about him not being an idiot?"

"He's the knife of choice for Guerrero's people."

Which meant he was competent, but a long way from Sands' idea of safe. "A cartel man wasn't exactly what I had in mind."

"He's freelance, not kept. Give it an hour, and I might be able to come up with an alternative, though."

Sands paused, let the connection hang silent while he counted off the seconds, five, eight, ten, long and dragging. "Give me his details and keep looking." It would at least keep Foreman off the rails some - she wouldn't know he'd be going right there.

He repeated the address she gave aloud, a little slow, as if memorising or writing it down, and the car swung a hard right as he finished.

"You got a number to go with that address?"

"Will do in another ten."

More seconds tapping past, counting down in the distant click of fingernails on keys.

"Got it." Sands keyed the numbers into Lorenzo's phone as she gave them, then passed it forward to Fideo.

"Ring it." He shaped the words near-silent with his lips.

Foreman was there at his ear again, her lingering hints of southern twang sharpened by amusement. "I'd hope it's something serious, but you don't sound like you're dying."

Sands smiled his voice down the line. "Oh, I think I'll be just fine. I'll be sure to let you know if I'm not." She wouldn't be expecting him to call in this favour for somebody else, and it was information he liked her much better without.

He flipped the cell closed and switched it off. The other call would be going through, and it was a typical enough note to ditch her on that it wouldn't set her thinking.

Fideo didn't hand the other cell back when he got the connection. "I've got a friend who'd like to see you, very soon." Pause. "No, he can't talk right now, he's asleep."

The dipso had the sense to play it cautious over an open line, and Sands was more than happy to leave him with the phone. Broadcasting his American-accented Spanish across cartel connections wasn't on his list of smart moves.

El's pulse threaded past Sands' fingers, and he slid his right hand under El's shirt, onto the curl of hair. El's skin was cool beneath the tacky salt of old sweat.

El was never cool. His hands, his feet, sometimes, padding round the apartment barefoot on the tile; but his chest, his stomach where the hair tapered to a line and skin moved taut over muscle, his body was a furnace in Sands' bed, heat pressed up close beneath the sheets.

Sands left his hand there, light, to rise and fall with the heavy sounds, the brush of El's air over his knee, his mind background tracking Fideo's half of the quick Spanish exchanges till the dipso leaned round the seat to demand, "Was he awake?"

"Yeah, and talking just fine." Sands stuck with the Spanish, but deliberately slurred. The cell would distort it more for him. "He shut up maybe three minutes before you showed up."

Fideo switched back to the phone, checking the info had made it over the line. More short snatches of detail, pauses for the questions, Sands following for any points to rebuff or elaborate on, until two words snatched and clicked in his head. "A positive."

Sands hadn't known, wouldn't have been able to answer a question like that when he needed to.

He wouldn't forget it now, and he made a mental note to tell El his own type later.

It might not be a bad idea to give El the details of a few people he could tap for information too, just in case there was a time Sands wasn't as around and awake as he might like to be himself. Though he should probably scratch Foreman from the list - now she knew he was alive, she'd start to think, and she might have some ideas in place ready for the next time someone called.

A storage box with encoded details of his accounts might be a reasonable precaution too.

Hell, he'd tell El all that shit now, if El had any interest in that side of the business. But if he had to go toes up, he'd rather El got his cash than the ball-squeezing banks. Even if the stupid fuck did just go and toss it all out to the grasping peasants again.

Sands' pulse jumped fast through his body, keeping beat with El's at his fingertips. The itch crawled high in his throat, the twitch tugging through the fingers of his right hand, the lifetime call of the nicotine to calm and soothe and steer his thoughts.

He reached for the pack in his pocket, felt the hitch in El's body along his thigh as he breathed, and he let the carton slide back down.

A low beep came from the seat in front as Fideo cut off the call. "He'll be there. He wanted to know how we got the number, so I said a friend told me. He asked which friend – I said I'd have to check with them first."

Sands tipped his head back to the seat behind him, nails tapping on the plastic of the door. He wouldn't think about cigarettes. "We can't give him the names we know of, he might decide to check. We'll keep it that the friend prefers to stay low key."

"You got that place on the map yet? Am I sticking with Escobedo or taking Nacional?" The kid's voice was terse, strained, but everything he said focussed on the practical. Sands was starting to see why El liked having him around.

"I have it. Take Nacional."

The car picked up speed again, a pressure at his back and a lurch to the left with a change of lane. Brakes sharp, bringing them down to the flow of traffic, and El's body rocked, swaying towards the seat edge. Sands dropped his hand back to El's arm, gripping tight against the pull. "Ease back on the driving, I don't think we wanna talk to a traffic cop right now." He didn't want to end up puking either.

Christ, he needed a smoke.

El's phone pressed against his hip through his pocket, under El's weight; El's phone with Foreman's number sitting there in its memory, in its call log.

He'd made the contact. Any wad of seagull shit aiming for his head because of it was already on its way down.

He could do it. Temptation, his first and favourite fuck, and no reason now not to lay her again.

He reached for the phone, switched it back on, slow five count till it bleeped ready to go, and hit redial.

No characteristic silence this time as the ring sliced off, just Foreman short and snappish. "What?"

"I want one more little favour."

"Fuck off, I've done your deal. We're one for one."

"Do this one thing, and you won't hear from me again."

Old-familiar huff of air across the connection. "Yeah, sure, because I’ll believe you."

Sands smiled, easy and confident. "You know, I think you will."

He didn't say anything more as the pause lingered, as the seconds ticked in his head. Her curiosity would win, it always did.

"Just what the fuck is it you're chasing?"

He couldn't ask for everything - get too greedy, too much risk, too much time, she'd tell him to go fuck himself, and he'd lose the lot. Keep it sliced lean to the most important detail. "I want you to take a sweep through the files for me. Find out whose idea it was to put me in the right place to buy the sewage farm."

"So you can plan another outing with some pet assassin?" Her voice was back high, amused. She'd never liked him, but she hated boredom and routine the same way he did. "Why the hell should I?"

Sands tapped a finger on the casing of the phone by his ear, light and plastic and slow. "Because you're not completely tidy yourself. Because I know you too well to think you'll keep your nose shiny white for long. Because you don't want the people who fucked me over to start counting up the tab on you."

The connection went silent again, no breath, not even line crackle, just the pure absence of digital at his ear.

It didn't matter. She was still there.

His hand was sliding to his pocket, to the square pack of nicotine tucked inside the fabric. Pressure shifted in a steady, fast rhythm along his thigh, the cyclic push of El's shoulders and ribs.

Her breath was back. "I'll call this number when I've got it."

Sands set his smile in place, wide. "Don't bother. I'll be in touch."

He thumbed the line dead, pulled the card from the phone, wiped the case clean of prints. The car had picked up speed again, rumbling traffic in multiple lanes around them. He cranked open his window, whistling rush of air and thick stench of fumes in his face, and dropped the cell to be crushed under the wheels.

The fake moustache prickled at his lip, sticky with trapped sweat. He reached up to peel it away, short, sharp, wincing at the drag, the tingle lingering on his skin.

The car rolled and hummed and bumped along in spurts and stops, and El still breathed.

Nothing to do now, all of it fixed, just sit and wait. The crackle of the map, the low words as Fideo passed on directions to the kid, the voices from the sidewalks dropping back and fading out. Less traffic now, and most of it big, heavy, industrial. Warehouse district.

No medic-for-hire held his clinics on a busy street, with prying eyes taking a good long look at his clientèle. They were getting close.

Lorenzo slowed the car, cruising, drifting it to a slow, cautious halt streetside.

Sands let Fideo get out and go knock to make the introductions. He was the one the medic already talked to.

The kid shadowed him, with that boring predictability. Sands dug the silencers out of the door pocket alongside him, screwing them in place on the tips of his Berettas.

The sidekicks were back within minutes, tugging open the door by El's feet. "Looks legit. Get him inside."

The space they carried El into was big, but not open. Thin walls tapped hollow against Sands' elbow as they hustled him along - cheap partitions, little more than chipboard, doing almost nothing to dull the sound, the sensation of distance behind it.

He let Lorenzo lead, let him edge them sideways through a door, slide El's ass onto a surface. With sheets at Sands' hand and metal edge at his hip to guide, stretching him out was easy.

Sands found himself a spot by the door where he could overhear everything in the immediate rooms and left the Two Stooges to do the talking. It was obvious enough the kind of doctor they'd come to when he didn't bother mentioning how El should be in a hospital. Lounging against a dividing wall that shivered at his weight, Sands was just another guy in dark glasses with a jacket draped over too many guns. If he moved around too much or opened his mouth, he instantly became the Blind Gringo, and he wasn't feeling like being memorable right now.

Maybe he should have spent more time speaking Spanish with El, it might have smoothed over his accent. The last couple of years had worked to iron out El’s English - not that it had ever been so bad, but those stilted phrases that marked the ESL had eased back some.

Soft, efficient sounds around El, the doc's shoes light and shuffling on the smooth floor; cupboards and drawers opened and closed, the squeaky metallic rumble of something on wheels dragged towards whatever was serving as a bed right now.

'Sanchez' moved back from El, sliding over to the corner where the sidekicks were keeping out of his way, passing words fast and quiet between themselves. "I'm giving him blood to replace what he's lost. He'll need surgery to find the bullet and fix the bleeding."

"So do it." Lorenzo, as charmingly direct as ever.

"I start at forty thousand dollars. Depending what I find inside, it could go up to two hundred thousand."

Sands' lips twitched at the choice of currency. Nothing said drugs south of the border quite like the US buck.

"We’ve got it," the kid said. "Not right here, 'cos you know, this isn’t the kind of day we planned on, but we can lay hands on it inside an hour."

"That's fine. I’ll start work when you get back."

A rustle from Lorenzo, short, distinct. "I told you we can get it." His tone had snapped taut, right along with his body. "So fix him now."

The doc's voice stayed perfectly light and pleasant. He probably met street thugs with guns on a daily basis. "I don't know who you are, and you won't give me the name of your 'friend' as a reference. I might have chosen not to see you at all."

Sands pushed himself away from the wall, obvious movement to attract attention, and smiled slow and thoughtful with closed lips towards that low tenor voice. "You’ll start now," he said. "And I’ll stay here to see that you do." He spoke in English with exaggerated Spanish inflection, dramatising the accent El carried in his worst flashes of temper. The doc would know he wasn’t Mexican, but he wouldn’t know what the hell he was behind it.

He tipped his head, let the smile widen a little more. "Just consider me insurance."

Silence from 'Sanchez', a still silence that carried, and Sands held himself casual, unconcerned. The doctor was an educated man, and his background included meetings with a wide and interesting variety of people.

Sands eased the smile back to a faint twist at the edges of his lips, and let him study.

The doc dropped back into motion, feet brushing towards El. "If you're staying, you can help me push him through for surgery." He twisted round to aim words over his shoulder at the brat. "You get going and bring the payment. I want you back in an hour."

Sands could find El, that was no problem, and he moved forward to rest his hands on those metal edges. More low muttered words between the sidekicks, and when Lorenzo tapped back through towards the door, fast and fluid, Fideo went with him.

Fideo's feet paused at the corner. "We'll be back, and you'll get your money." Low voice with no threat, just steady fact.

It was probably a little late to start playing good cop, but confrontation never was the dipso's style.

"I'll wheel him through, you push the oxygen cylinder," the doc said to Sands, no response to the departing mariachi.

Sands didn't know where the fuck the oxygen was; El he had his hands on. "I'll take the bed." Let the doc think he was being an over-protective brainfuck, didn't matter to Sands. "You go first, you know where you want him."

The metal shivered beneath Sands' hands with a couple of low clicks – presumably 'Sanchez' was taking the brakes off the wheels. He pushed gently, experimentally, and the trolley bed slid a few inches.

The doc shuffled round towards El's head, then on, dragging something that clanked on squeaky, uneven wheels. The noise echoed from hard floor to solid exterior walls, and Sands could have followed him from half a street away. Judging how hard to push to keep a smooth pace and the right distance was harder. He missed the doorway by a few inches, the doc grabbing the front end of the bed to redirect it, but a guy with eyes who was unfamiliar with the equipment could have screwed that up.

The doc stopped hauling and started fiddling instead. "Wait outside, I don't want you in the way while I'm working."

Sands was happy enough to retreat back to the other room and his chosen patch of wall, where he wasn't at such a risk of flashing his name up in tricolour neon. He fished out his cigarettes and finally lit himself that smoke. This wasn't a fucking hospital, and nobody was gonna be throwing him out the door.

He wondered what the fallout would be the next time he contacted Foreman. He was pretty sure she had too much to lose, but... if she'd cleaned up her house some since he first tapped on her shoulder, she might just gamble that snagging the outstanding Sheldon-fish would outweigh the exposure of some old news misdeeds.

He'd still be making the call.

The doc's feet padded around beyond the wall, more rattling of cupboards and drawers.

Another door, further off, and a voice, new, deeper, and Sands was two steps out from the wall, hand on a Sig, the filter of his smoke tight between his teeth.

The voice and its one set of feet moving closer, no attempt to be subtle, moving through to the next room with El. Somebody expected, that soft tenor voice talking back, rapid, fluid, and Sands let his weight drop back, shoulders sinking to meet the wall – a nurse or some kind of tech guy the doc was giving orders to.

It made sense. Sands wasn't under any illusions this would be the full hi-tech hospital set up 'Sanchez' had here, but something was bleeping medical and regular and positive behind the door.

The talk went on; the cupboard noises stopped. A sharp, chemical note oozed into the air, deepening as Sands breathed.

The sidekicks came back with the dough, and the doc emerged, stripping gloves from his hands in that familiar latex stretch-and-slap. Wouldn't want to get blood on the pay-off while he checked its validity.

They never met the nurse guy, he stayed out back. Probably both the doctor and the nurse liked it better that way.

Sands lounged against his wall, the bleeping embedding itself deep in his head. He'd still be hearing it a fucking day after it stopped. He held himself still, listening beyond it, as the stiffness crept through his muscles and the itch crawled over his skin with every hint of sound.

He shifted his weight between his feet every fifteen minutes or so.

This wasn't a good place for Sands to be, and he had no reason to stick around. El would survive or curl up and die just the same irrespective of whether Sands hung pointlessly about the hallways, and the sidekicks could be relied on to keep watch over the doc.

He could walk out, lose himself in the nearby streets, clear of anything nasty that might show up.

But outside of himself, he'd no reliable source of information. If El died, the sidekicks might not bother to call and fill him in. If El lived, they might just drag the unconscious mariachi off someplace and opt out of asking the sociopath along for the ride. They could pay off the doc easily enough, so if Sands went back and was told El was dead, he wouldn't even know whether to believe it.

Holding the doc at gunpoint with one hand while the other groped over the corpses in the freezer out back wasn't his idea of a good time.

He had no idea how likely it was. The kid loathed him, sure; Fideo – he didn't have much to go on there, Fideo seemed to reserve most of his thinking for where the next bottle was. So far as Sands could tell, Fideo had no real attitude towards him either way - whatever was good with El was good with the drunk seemed a reliable default - but he'd probably find it easier to go along with the brat instead of fighting him over it.

The machines bleeped beyond the wall, muffled exchanges irregular and terse between the doc and his assistant. Sands probably wouldn't have understood half of it, even if he'd been able to pick out the words.

He set his shoulders back to the wall and lit another cigarette.

The wall was a single wood-based expanse, without any joins or panels Sands could detect. No hint of grain to catch against the leather of his gloves as they wandered its surface; he'd feel the irregular compressed mass of chipboard if he took off his gloves, which he wasn't going to do.

It tapped light and hollow beneath his fingers, the filter of his cigarette twitching between them.

He'd spent a while sitting at the base of it, the cool of the smooth, finished floor soaking through his jeans. But he sure as fuck wasn't going to be sleeping here, and he was standing again now, the press of almost-wood heavy over the bone of his shoulder blades in spite of his jacket.

It was a very boring wall, and Sands was already more familiar with it than he liked. He really didn't want to get to know it any better.

The doc was still around, but the nurse-tech-whatever guy had disappeared a while back, and Sands didn't like that either.

He made his way carefully along the wall, to where the sidekicks had picked their own patch of space, liquor blending thick with the antiseptic in his nose. "We're leaving. Now."

"We can't leave, he's not even awake." Kneejerk protest from the brat was obviously right back in style.

"If he was going to die, he'd have done it by now," Sands drawled, flat. "The doc said he's stable, so he can be stable someplace that isn't here."

"Yeah, and what if something goes wrong? We're staying."

Sands stepped closer, right up into the kid's personal space, his voice dropping low and slow. "We made a point of advertising that El Mariachi was back in action, and now here we are - a gunshot Mexican and an American who never takes off his shades. El wouldn't want to be on site when people get to hearing about that any more than I would." He tipped his head with a slight smile. "Our friendly neighbourhood knife is only in this for the money, and even if he doesn't sell us out, who knows when his favourite clients might choose to drop by for a fix up?"

This time there was a pause, and when the words came, they were half agreement. "How will we know if he's getting worse?"

Sands stretched the smile out wide. "Well, we ask, of course."

Shifting and scraping from the floor as the dipso scrambled to his feet, and Sands tailed the sidekicks through to the next room where the doc had holed up, wrapped in bitter coffee fumes.

"We're getting out of here." Sands laid out a statement before the brat could make it a question.

"Fine, whenever you like." Sanchez only sounded bored. Sands figured he didn't care much either way – if they stayed, he got paid for his time, otherwise he went home.

"When will he wake up?" Fideo asked.

A rustle from the doc, and a non-committal tone to go with the gesture. "It could be any time now. But the damage is to his liver, and his liver clears the anaesthetic and sedatives from his system – I kept the doses down, but it might take longer than normal."

"How long?" The brat this time, and a whole lot less friendly. Sanchez seemed to have made his way onto Lorenzo's list of those deserving the full Sands treatment.

"I'd want him awake by tonight. If not, you'll need to see somebody about getting more fluids into him."

"Get his pills," Sands said. "Antibiotics, painkillers."

"Anything else?" Light amusement from the doc, and Sands' mind drew in the raised eyebrow to go with it.

Well, he could always oblige. "We need a flashlight. And a mirror, a small one." The sidekicks had left the car somewhere a little less conspicuous than the front door when they came back with the cash, but Sands wasn't putting himself or El anywhere near it till the dipso had given it a complete check.

"You get all that when I get my payment up to date." Amusement gone, back to the brisk businessman, and Sands left the kid to deal with the financials.

When the appropriate paper bags had been exchanged, the sidekicks went off to bring the car around, Fideo to run the inspection and the brat to cover him. The doc busied himself unhooking El from the various bleepers, leaving the building oddly silent, only the hollow echoes of their feet through the walls.

Getting El into the Chevy and draped over the back seat was the usual pain in the ass affair – they'd made the transport selection based on what was inconspicuous, not what would make a good ambulance. The 'hospital' building had no windows, and the doc stayed inside and left them to deal with carrying their patient. A wise decision, since Sands would have killed him if he'd shown any interest.

It might have been prudent to shoot him anyway, but it was fine balance between controlling the information leakage and setting yet another group of thugs actively hunting them, pissed at the loss of their convenient first aid kit. Normally Sands wouldn't have worried too much about that last part, but normally he wouldn't have been sticking around.

The air was cool on his skin, the day's sweat a dry, clammy coating smeared under his clothes. He slid himself into the back, dragging El over his lap again, fingers light on his ribs to track the steady rise and fall of his breathing.

The sidekicks dropped into the front, the engine kicking in with just a couple of turns. Sands felt the fall in tension immediately, the inevitable exhaustion starting to sap at his bones and his mind without the adrenaline to keep him ticking, and he let his head drop back against the rest.

"Okay, your plan for the sudden departure, so where we going now?"

It was inevitable that the kid wouldn't leave him in fucking peace. "Anywhere that isn't here."

"Fine. Back to the apartment then," Lorenzo announced over the rising engine.

Sands raised his head to aim the glasses stare at the mirror. "That's no obvious improvement. When people start asking questions, they're going to find out where we've been seen."

"So what's your choice? Wander round the city till we fall over some shack that's empty? Or try checking into a hotel carrying an unconscious guy? We can't take him far."

Sands didn't want to go far right this minute, he only wanted safe. But safe didn't exist in this country.

Sands didn't like it any more than he'd liked anything since he found himself on a plane to fucking Mexico.

His head slid backwards again, the press of cheap cloth itching past the hair at his neck.

"So I guess that makes it the apartment."

Sands was way too goddamn tired to sink his teeth into those satisfied tones.

The irritating thing was the skipped sleep didn't seem to be wearing on the kid at all, but he had over a decade working in his favour.

There wasn't much traffic at this hour, even in Mexico City, and they made the run fast by local standards. The kid was keen enough not to attract the attention of the local blue boys that Sands' stomach didn't have to suffer, and El only rocked gently over his thighs with the turns and the lights. Sands wedged himself between the seat back and the door, and swayed along with him.

He shrugged off the lethargy and the brain-haze when the kid braked the car to a halt and killed the engine. If they'd been tabbed already, any retribution would be coming right down on this apartment.

He let the sidekicks check the place over before he slid out of the car himself; since he was stuck with them, he saw no reason not to maximise the occasional benefits of having them around.

They stretched El along the bed, stripping off what was left of his clothes after the doc had hacked them open, leaving him in underwear and bandages beneath the sheets. Sands peeled off his jacket and dropped into the chair in the corner, the holsters still wrapped heavy and secure round his body. No beetlefuck was gonna be shooting El through the window, not after Sands had gone to this much effort to keep the bastard alive.

He pushed off his shoes, stretching his feet and wriggling out his toes, and fuck, but that felt good, right there. He circled his wrists and his shoulders, flexing out the stiffness of immobility and lousy support, teasing his body to loosen and relax.

The back of the chair was too short to drop his head onto without his shades staring right up at the ceiling, so he slouched lower with his head to one side, the thick ribboned weave of the fabric pressing deep into his cheek.

That was fine for maybe ten minutes, but if he stayed that way, he was gonna fuck up his goddamn neck, the revealing little tug of tension already creeping through. He wriggled round to curl more on his side, easing the angle.

That was good a while longer, before the pressure started to tell, the numbness creeping through his thigh where bone pressed close against the frame beneath the fabric, and it wasn't even the hip he'd been goddamn shot in.

He climbed up on the bed and stretched out alongside El, because El was piss all use for watching his back right now, but slumping in the chair was a bitch on his spine, and it felt more normal this way. Even if El did stink of antiseptics and blood instead of old smoke and sweat.

Sands lay as it crept over him, wrapped around him; the stench of surgery, of blood oozing and clotting on dressings, close, right under his nose, close enough to be part of him, part of his thudding heart and his trapped and twitching mind.

El smelled of pain, and darkness, and the drowning, all-consuming fear of ever-lasting nothing, things that made Sands want to bolt from the room and get himself as far from that smell as the next fucking state; but he'd screwed that kind of reaction down hard before, and it wasn't gonna crawl back in and mindfuck him in the third act of the play.

The outline of the Beretta's grip dug hard against ribs, beneath the pressure of his own body. Solid, real, definitively practical, only less so right now when it was this goddamn tricky to get at, and he shifted to pull it from the holster. Set the gun on the bed beside him instead, under his hand.

El was stretched out just beyond it, laid flat on his back, motionless but for his breathing, slow and even and light.

El didn't know how to be still. Awake, he shifted restless like an unmedicated ADD case, reached for and fiddled with anything that got within reach of his goddamn hands, reacted to every hint of external movement in a snapped instant of altered muscle tension and a shiver of lids with the shift of his eyes. Asleep, he wriggled with soundlessly murmuring lips and twitching fingertips through the dreams, sprawled across the bed kicking at sheets in the heat and pushed up against Sands in the cool.

The Mariachi knew stillness, held patient and perfect before the strike, but the killer breathed deliberate and controlled on a very different level.

This was sharing a bed with Peasant Pedro, the man who would have slept snoring deep with a wife, ten kids and a guitar, no hint in him of everything he'd shaped and done and become. Not till Sands ran fingers over his chest, down his biceps and across his palm, over the scars with no place on the body of a mariachi picking up tips from tourists in cheap bars.

His hands always gave him the truth. Other senses could be twisted, deceived, aided by an imagination that sometimes edged a little cozy-close with the paranoid, and not enough goddamn sleep, but what he touched was real and known, didn't need to be filtered and reconstructed in his head.

He kept the touch, fingers of his left hand resting below El's collarbone, moving there with the steady sounds of his breath. His palm lay over the muscles of El's arm, slack against him now as he slept, and the first thing that would change when he woke. The Beretta lay cool under his elbow.

Sands wasn't going to sleep, he was going to shoot any motherfucker who came near this goddamn room. But his ears were good, and one positive aspect to a minor dose of paranoia was he'd react to more than he had to, not less. He didn't have the classic hassle of struggling to keep his eyes open either.

He could doze a little, where he was.

Time shrank and stretched around him in uneven patches, Sands' fingers leaving El and the gun after the longer reaches to brush over his watch, tracking it through what was left of the night. The city was the automatic double-check in his head; the rising buzz of traffic with the morning, the murmur of voices and slamming doors from the next door apartment, the inflexible weekday routine before the walls fell silent again, everyone left for the day.

And then he was awake, head sharp and focussed, senses stretching. A noise in the hallway, close, way too close, steps deliberately altered and quieted, and his arm was up and over El, Beretta rigid on the door as it cracked open.

"It's me." The kid spoke fast, but kept the words low.

"Well speak up sooner and don't creep about like that," Sands snapped. "He'll be pissed if he wakes up and finds out I shot you."

"I thought you might both be asleep, didn't wanna wake you."

Sands slid the auto away into its holster and dragged himself upright on the bed, straightening the shades over his nose. "I thought him waking up was the point."

Lorenzo paused, then offered, "I brought food."

Sands could smell that much, but kept shut on the subject so it didn't go away again. "I hope you're a better cook than El."

"I can't cook for shit, why d'you think he took over so fast?" Lorenzo grinned. "Don't worry, you're getting take-out." Heavy paper rustles as the kid came closer, dumping the bag and all its warm scents on the bed alongside him, and Christ, he hadn't eaten since early yesterday.

Now he was awake enough to remember he was goddamn starving.

He unrolled the top of the bag, the flavour-wave heavy on his tongue, cooked tomato and cheese and fuck, coffee, his fingers finding cartons with foil and the cardboard edge of a plate. Groping down alongside to warm styrofoam and easing it out, the coffee fumes already thick and rich with sugar as he peeled off the lid.

The kid hadn't moved, still standing right there by the foot of the bed. "If anything changes, I'll let you know," Sands said, dry. He didn't anticipate enjoying the company of any mournful sidekicks, standing vigil.

No great surprise when the kid didn't take the hint, but Sands was busy prioritising, the liquid bitter and too-hot beautiful, sucked in through his teeth and swallowed fast past the burn of his tongue. Half the cup downed in strangled, fiery gulps before his fingers reluctantly released it on the nightstand, and he set about unearthing the food from the bag's depths.

Something prickled in the quality of the silence, and no way would the kid manage to keep it shut much longer. He never could.

"You know, I never could figure it out." When it came it was light, quiet-thoughtful, and with more than a hint of leading edge. "You I got, but I didn't get why a guy like El would stick around somebody like you."

"El knows his reasons as well as I would." Sands angled his head up towards the kid, curled the edges of his lips into bare smile. "You must have done some experimental drilling once or twice over the last couple of months."

Lorenzo huffed out air through his nose, a level of El-inspired exasperation Sands was more than familiar with. "Sure I did. And when he stopped avoiding it all ways, he said you made him breathe, whatever the fuck that means." His voice dropped, slowed. "Whatever it was, we couldn't do it."

"It means you wasted your time playing nice," Sands said, short. For a cynic and a killer, the kid had a lot to learn. "When somebody's wallowing six feet deep in their own self-pity, 'nice' isn't going to cut it. You've just gotta grab them by the hair and haul them out, whether they'd like to sit tight in the quicksand or not."

"You're saying he likes you because you're a bastard."

"Hardly, but he crawled out of his little desert cave because I am."

Lorenzo's words hardened, sharpening into the old Sands special. "That wasn't ever about you, that was about the fucker who killed Carolina."

Sands let his smile broaden, tooth-filled and brightly cheery. "Why do you think I approached him the way I did? A discussion of price over a drink would have been easier, and much more civilised than having him collected at gunpoint, not to mention safer on a personal level when you're dealing with a notorious assassin. The problem was, it wouldn't have worked." He dumped the contents of a carton onto the plate – something with cheese and spice, he was hungry enough not to care – and flattened his expression along with his voice. "El has three really big buttons right up front, guaranteed to trigger a reaction, every time – love, guilt, and anger. He was working the first two a little too well on his own, so I pressed hard on the third."

"And got yourself El Mariachi."

"Oh, dragging him out for Marquez was too easy. Keeping him out, well, that took a little more effort." Sands' eyebrows flicked high above his shades and his smile.

"Yeah, it would." Another short pause, and this time it was pure silence from the kid, without the constant, restless twitching. "You actually love him." He almost left it a statement, only the slight tail lashing loose at the end to make it a query.

Sands shrugged, sliding his fork in from the edge of his plate till he hit food. "I highly doubt it, but really, I wouldn't know."

"I guess you wouldn't." A shift of a sole as Lorenzo turned, three steps towards the door before he stopped again. "Don't let anything happen to him."

"I'm not the one who brought him back here," Sands pointed out, stiff.

"I didn't ask him to come."

"But you knew you didn't have to, right?" Sands' eyebrows drew in, angled, the muscles of his face held tight and flat. "One quick phone call disguised as a warning, and he'll come running all on his own."

"It wasn't like that."

"Probably not. I don't credit you with being devious enough to do it."

The brat sniffed, deliberate, obvious. "Maybe I just don't want to fuck with my friends."

"Except when it suits you." Sands smiled, cold curl with an edge of teeth. "You'd be happy enough to talk him away from me, if you had the slightest idea how to do it."

The kid took the last few strides back to the door, and he didn't turn to look when he answered. "Maybe."

The door closed behind him, a single soft click.

Sands' head stayed tipped towards the door as he shovelled food into his mouth and chewed, listening to the footsteps move away down the hall.

Well, that was something of a change.

He didn't have enough information yet to decide if change and the kid's illusions were likely to be a good thing, or yet another Lorenzo-induced pain in the ass.

El breathed alongside him, repetitive monitored sound, low, slow, steady.

Sands had done some research on love in the past. It made people do things they wouldn't otherwise do, and that made it useful, and that made it worth the effort of understanding. Unfortunately, the entire concept had turned out to be so ridiculously nebulous that no two people could ever agree on how to define it, and Sands had gone right back to the detailed studies of individuals and what they'd do for what leverage. The method worked, and Sands didn't waste too much time over what tags people chose to put on the leverage.

But for something nobody could define, the idea was still powerful enough that even somebody as burned out as the kid was pitifully eager to slap the label on anything that half way shaped to the mould.

Sands hadn't ever bothered to examine how closely his arrangement with El might be interpreted to squeeze into that particular mould. Now, though, the kid had gone and tossed a whole new set of variables out into the room, and Sands was going to have to work with them and around them over the next few weeks.

He chewed mindlessly through the food, running over the files stored in his head, the little consensus he'd managed to drag together of what the kid might be seeing.

Taking relatives out of the equation, wanting to fuck someone more than the few times it took to get bored with their attempts at conversation seemed to be a basic component. And wanting them close by at least part-time outside of the fucking scenarios.

Maybe that's what all the romantic eulogising about love ended up as - someone you could stand being around most of the time, without wanting to beat their brains out through their ears more than a fleeting once in a while.

Hell, from what he'd seen, love was probably more about being fucking desperate; somebody getting to be important enough that not having them around screwed over a big part of your life, and badly enough you could never quite get it back. That's what the wife with the knives had done to El, and unfortunately that was the likely effect El's absence would have on Sands - kick him a couple of thousand feet back down the mountain he'd clawed himself up with his fucking fingernails rammed full length in the dirt. He could get himself another fuck, a hired gun with decent reflexes, could always find a mental plaything or two to keep him interested – he'd run through those options more than once, when El pissed him off by playing particularly stubborn – but only as long as the money held out, and with the constant risk of someone unpleasant offering more.

Some people might consider he'd been a bit too short-termist, reconstructing his detail sourcing with the mariachi built into it somewhere down near foundation level, but he hadn't exactly had the luxury of a few years to do it the ideal way (as if there could be anything fucking ideal about having somebody poke your eyes out then hunt you down); he'd needed to get himself functional whichever way was quickest and worked.

Sands didn't have much use for labels. There were some people around who just fell too neatly into certain categories not to be made use of, but most labels were simplistic and led to screw-ups, especially the ones people applied to him. He didn't have a convenient descriptor to hang on all his tangled reasons for keeping El around, and if Little Lori wanted to call it 'love', Sands saw no reason not to let him. Somehow he doubted El would use the word.

Kind of a pity, really – he could always use another lever to pull on for those occasions when the Mariachi dug his spurs in on him.

His fork scraped unhindered over cardboard, and he swept it around once more to be sure, then downed the last of the coffee.

He wasn't even sure what the hell it was he'd just eaten, outside of the obvious flavours still lingering on his tongue. The food was a vague memory of automatic shovel-and-swallow, and the pleasing absence of that pinched feeling under his ribs.

He dumped the plate in the bag and the bag on the floor, and he was still so fucking tired he just wanted to stretch back out and let the time roll past in waves, but damn, he needed to piss.

El's breath was there in the room, regular and unbroken, a background rhythm all through the conversation with the kid, behind the slow grind through his jaw as he ate. Sands dropped his fingers to El's wrist, to the pulse leaping up alongside the tendons, the unshakeable certainty of touch.

He slid his hand away and picked up the Beretta before he moved to the bathroom.

When he returned, he stretched himself over the bed alongside El again, water-damp fingers settling onto El's ribs, the definitive monitor of movement through the doze. Too-soft mattress creaking below him as he wriggled into place, feeling the fur settle in at the edges of his mind, warm and quiet, thought slipping back to awareness of now and here.

He couldn't have slept for long. Silence still from the next apartment, nobody home yet, internal clock telling him some time mid afternoon.

And El was awake beside him.

The muscles beneath his hand tightened, a shift on the pillow alongside his, and El's breath tickled slow over his cheek.

Sands' forehead dropped forward two inches, sinking deeper into the pillow as he relaxed, closer to that flow of warmth. Which pissed him off when he made the time to think about it because that was El's kind of shit, not his.

But it was something of a relief, knowing things weren't going to change.

It almost made him fucking laugh right there, because most of his life change had been what he thrived on, what he chased, the only thing that stopped his world spiralling into uncurtailed and wholly frustrating boredom. But that attitude had been rather forcibly rearranged when every basic thing in his day was strapped down into precision routine, when simplicities like brushing his goddamn teeth needed a system to make it something he could deal with. When he'd learned that change could mean someone tying him to a table and drilling into his eyes.

He could almost think that now without instantly living in the feel of it. Well, not think about it, because that still brought up the heaving sweats and the spinning disconnection and the one-fifty pulse, and it was something he spent a lot of his time not doing. But he could shape the words, the empty concept in his mind, in a way that was almost neutral.

He wondered when El was going to stop thinking and get around to saying something. At least he wasn't the type to wake up all woozy and demanding the clichéd, 'Where am I?'

Sands had been waiting the better part of a day; he could lie here a few more minutes while El figured out what he needed to know, before he decided to let the world know he was back in it.

The breath slid away from Sands' cheek, a rustle across the pillow, El turning back to face the ceiling.

"So I didn't die," El said.

Sometimes the mariachi had a tendency to overstate the obvious. Evidently that hadn't changed either. "You never do," Sands pointed out.

"No. People like us don't die. We only get to live with it." El's breathing hadn't changed, still the same steady rise and accentuation of ribs as the skin pulled tight between them.

Sands sniffed. "I'd prefer a 'Thank you'."

There was a pause as if El were considering, or more likely patching back together what scraps he remembered of the trip out, shaping them into the quilt. "Thank you," he said eventually. At least the bastard sounded like he meant it.

"Don't imagine you're welcome. And don't expect me to haul your ass out of a fuck-up again, or I'll shoot you myself."

"I'll try to remember that."

Sands pushed himself upright on the bed, running his fingers down El's arm to the pulse at his wrist. "It's about time you woke up. Much longer, we'd have had to hook you up to the bags again, and I'm warning you for next time, I make a shitty nurse."

It was right back there again, catching at him, the simple 'next time' creeping in thoughtless and relaxed; the assumption that because El would live, he'd be with Sands.

"The uniform wouldn't suit you."

Sands tipped his head, his voice lightening to match El's. "Oh, I don't know, I could probably work with a skirt if it's cut below the knee."

"I meant the man's uniform, or do you have some other tastes you still haven't told me about?"

Sands curled his lips, the smile deliberately crooked. "I think you can guarantee that. I always keep a few secrets in hand for special occasions."

"And cross-dressing is one of them?"

"Well, if I told, it wouldn't be a secret any more, would it?" The sixty count at Sands' fingers was normal for El awake and relaxed, the back of his hand resting against the bandages that wrapped around El's torso. It had been close to twenty-four hours, they'd need changing. "You know, El, 'Don't get shot' was probably one of the more useful pieces of advice you've given me."

"I'm glad you've taken it."

"Well, so am I. Now I guess it's just you we've got to work on."

El didn't answer right away, and when he did, the humour was all stripped out, bare and bleak. "I was too slow."

Sands sometimes wished he could still stare down his nose at people. He guessed the effect worked out if the shades did half as good a job as he thought they might. "I worked that part out when I found you on the floor."

El's hair brushed rustling over the pillow as he shook his head. "I knew it was coming. I heard, and I knew, and the guns were loaded in my hands, but I was too slow."

She's not supposed to be here, not yet, but she's here, shaking her hair to flow over her shoulder as she slides into the chair right across the table. Palm cupping her cheek, smiling with slanting mascara eyes and those big, glossy lips he likes dragging his teeth over, slow like threat, and he knows, he knows for maybe two entire stretching seconds before the needle pricks at his neck -

His fingers had tightened, digging down into El's skin.

There wasn't a whole lot in his head he'd genuinely want to lose, but he wished he could scrape out every last memory of that dog-sucking bitch - every one except the instant she twitched, her lips and breasts and breath hitching against him when he'd put a bullet straight through her sick and twisted guts, the quick little jump of her body into the hooked rigidity of pain before she fell away. That one he'd keep and digitise so it didn't degrade.

El didn't know the first goddamn thing about too slow, and Sands had racked up maybe five hours of sleep in the last fifty-six, and self-flagellation had never been the biggest attraction to wake up to. "You shot the fucker right after, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"And I'm gonna take a guess from all those scars I grope when we fuck that it's not the first time you screwed up, so it's just another chalk mark on a very long list. Don't start making this one out to be anything special."

A ripple through the mattress as El shifted closer, then froze, the distinct, tensed rigidity of surging pain. His breath held, still, ribs spread wide against Sands' fingers, then he eased it out slow, tentative, forcing himself to relax. "So what's the damage this time?"

"Well, you don't have as much liver as you used to. Apparently it's easier to carve out a chunk than try and stitch together something that looks like oatmeal."

Another soft rustle from El, movement small and cautious. "That's not so bad. If it was Fideo's, we'd have a problem."

Sands breathed sharp down his nose, a short, distinct huff of air. "Fideo's is so pickled it wouldn't know how to bleed."

"Not a theory I'd want to test." More of those delicate wrigglings, the systematic check-list of what worked and what didn't. "So where are we?"

Sands had been standing on the earth, familiar beneath him and solid, and suddenly he found it was a platform all along, rotten right through, leaving him to lurch and fall, heart spiking and stomach rolling at the drop. They hadn't changed a goddamn thing, the same bed, the same room, the same apartment they'd been living in for weeks. "You don't know?"

"I know I'm in a bed," El said easily. "I'll tell you the rest when I open my eyes, but you'll have to let my arms loose first."

Sands uncurled his grip, ran fingers light over El's cheekbone to the layer of lashes sealed and sticky over one eye. Okay, yeah, anaesthetic and a day or so unconscious, that would do it, and he should've thought before, but screw it, he'd already said he'd make a lousy nurse. Quick enough to fix, and his pulse was already dropping off with the relaxed tone of El's words. "Wait up, be right back."

He damped a facecloth in the bathroom, and filled a glass of water too, because the doc's injections would be wearing off any time now, if they hadn't already. Sands' personal take on getting shot was you could never have too many painkillers.

He didn't hear anything from the sidekicks; they'd probably be trying to fit some sleep into the day too.

He handed the cloth to El while he dug the bottles from his pocket and counted out pills. His role in keeping El alive and well ended once the mariachi was moving; he could fix his own bed bath.

He did hook an arm around El's shoulders, help ease him part way upright to take the drugs, holding the water glass for him as he sipped. He damn well didn't want El spilling it everywhere, it was his bed too.

El swallowed the last of the antibiotics, his head dropping back away from the glass and onto Sands' shoulder. "You need a shower," Sands told him.

"Not as much as you do."

"You stink like you've been dunked in antiseptic," Sands pointed out.

"Maybe I'll concede." The distaste was clear in El's voice. "You smell like... normal."

"Oh, that's real smooth, El, first you lecture on my likeness to an open drain, then you say it's normal."

El's head shifted at Sands' shoulder, his face turning closer into the fabric of his shirt. "I was enjoying normal."

"That's because you're batshit crazy." Sands set the glass back on the nightstand and wriggled his arm back out from behind El. "I suppose I should prod the sidekicks now you're awake. The dipso's stayed only barely drunk the last couple of days, it's almost impressive to see."

El didn't sink back down, his hands pressing creaking dimples in the mattress as he shifted higher, propping himself against the pillows. "Lorenzo keeps him in line when he needs to."

"I guess there's got to be one person who'll take the kid seriously." Sands tipped his head into the sound of footsteps along the hallway. "On second thoughts, looks like I can stay right here." The brat was bounding ahead in full Labrador style, the dipso trotting after him, and the door exploded inwards to smack against the wall.

"El! You're awake! We thought we heard voices, and the psycho here's not the talking-to-himself kind of psycho." Not even the reference to Sands could suck the grin out of the kid. "How you feeling?"

"Like I've been jumped on hard enough already, so please don't add to it." El's smile was there for the brat, instant and easy, like always.

"Hey, hey, I can keep my hands to myself when I got to." The kid had stopped six inches short of the bed, so Sands didn't have to beat him off.

"I don't think your women would say that." Fideo was hovering right behind him, talking over his shoulder.

"Yeah, but women like me that way," Lorenzo said, brightening the smile another couple of megawatts, before toning it back. "How are you, really?"

El shrugged, the movement a little stiff and shrunken alongside Sands. "It hurts. It's been worse. I've taken the pills."

Fideo pushed in closer, rustling past the kid. "Are you hungry? We ate before, but we picked things we can reheat."

A pause before El answered, taking time to assess the signals behind the all up front and obvious pain. "I don't think so. I think I just need to sleep."

"Come on, it's been over a day, El, you should eat something."

"No point pushing food at him, he'll just turn stubborn," Sands said. Between the appetite-suppressing effects of pain and the appetite suppression and nausea that went along with the opiates, El would have to be half-starved before his body admitted it, and Sands didn't want him throwing up. That wouldn't be comfortable for either of them.

"Not that he needs an excuse to be stubborn," the kid said, that smile dialling up again.

"I'm not stubborn, I just know what I want," El protested.

"See? That's stubborn, right there." Fideo's humour was dry and straight-faced, like always.

Sands swung his feet off the bed and walked over to the chair in the corner, fishing his cigarettes and lighter from his jacket pocket while the mariachis chattered in the background. Nicotine wasn't something he needed right now, but El's lungs were just fine, and he didn't want the brat getting the idea he was welcome to hang around.

He didn't need it, but the first heated roll of the smoke over his tongue felt good anyway. It always did.

He tightened his lips and released it as smooth little rings, jetting across the room to spread and disperse around the kid.

It was the dipso who made the offer to move, though, elbowing the brat none too subtle. "Hey, Lori, he said he needed to sleep. We should go."

"It's okay," El said, predictably. "You can stay a while, if you want."

Something else passing between the sidekicks, something almost silent in the barely-there gap. "Nah, we got some sleeping of our own to do," Lorenzo conceded with a grin. "You kept us up all night, we need to catch up."

"I'll try not to inconvenience you all so much next time." El's smile was creeping back in again, never gone for long when the kid was around.

"You damn well better not. I'm done with your emergency surgery sessions, they're getting too fucking old."

"It's only been twice," El pointed out. "As an emergency, anyway."

"And if you don't think twice is too fucking often, we'll make sure they take a look around inside your head next time too." The eye-roll that went along with the statement had to be a real piece of melodrama. "Next time you're awake, you gotta be hungry, 'cos we're not giving you a choice, okay?"

"I'll see what I can do," El called after him, flashing another of those quick smiles as the sidekicks hustled each other out of the room and pattered away along the hall.

Sands walked over to the door and shut it behind them.

El wriggled himself cautiously down the bed, a drawn-out drama of low creaks and harsh breaths as he made it back to the full length stretch. Sands tightened his lips to hold his cigarette and pushed the pillow back down flat under El's head.

He swung his feet up, stretching his legs out along the bed, but he didn't lie down himself, ignoring the pull of fatigue tight at his temples. El wasn't going to sleep anyway – the mariachi had the tight little buzz jangling all through him, too many thoughts roaming his head, alive with circling issues.

Sands dropped his head back to the wall, drew the smoke in deep and slow.

"When I die, I want to be buried at home."

Sands cocked his head El's way, let the glasses stare for him. "Shouldn't you be having this conversation with the sidekicks?"

"They won't be there, I hope," El said simply.

Sands plucked the filter from his lips, considered the balance of it as it rolled between his fingers. It was almost smoked through. "Where the hell's home for you anyway? Back in that miserable peasant dustbowl?"

"It's not so much the village. You said it yourself once - my home is with my family. My wife, my daughter."

Sands trickled the last of the smoke out slow through his nose, and crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. "If I'm still around and you take care to leave yourself someplace more subtle than the police morgue, I'll see you get freighted on ice. But somebody else is gonna have to piss around with funeral arrangements, because I'm not dragging a corpse back there personally."

"I wouldn't ask you to. Father Ríos will see to the rest."

Sands lifted an eyebrow, his lips quirked. "Not the done thing, having the latest fuck show up to the family reunion?"

El's head moved, a repeated heavy drag of hair over the pillow. "It's not worth the risk for a corpse."

Sands' smile twisted higher at one corner. "You know, El, some people might think that sounds a little odd, coming from a man who spent so many years shooting bad guys in the name of dead people."

The pause spread and stretched through the room, till he almost thought El wasn't going to answer.

"Sometimes I wish I'd known what I know now when I was twenty-five. But then I would never have met Carolina, and my Loída would never have been born. And then I think if she'd never lived, she wouldn't have had to die that way."

"So you're not gonna go all romantic on me, wax poetic about how the time with the love of your life was worth all the rest of that shit?"

"It was for me," El said, quiet, with no hesitation. "Sometimes I wonder how they would value it."

"El, you were being shot at when you met your wife." Sands made no effort to hide his amusement. "She knew what she was getting into, she could've bailed any time. And it was her choice to get herself knocked up too, since I'm assuming you weren't both just idiots."

"Oh, we were idiots," El said, bitterness thick and instant, dripping like molasses. "We were stupid enough to think we were safe."

"Well, that's an oversight of an entirely different kind."

"It's not something I'll forget again." El tipped his head to look directly up at Sands. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Is there somewhere you'd want to be taken?"

There was genuine curiosity in El's voice, and Sands huffed air, amused. "Me? Hell, doesn't matter to me, just toss some rocks over me where I die. But don't use my name, it's more fun to leave people guessing."

"That part I knew." Something of El's natural humour back behind the words, thank fuck; Sands didn't have the patience to deal with prolonged doses of morose Mariachi.

He hitched himself down the bed, his head flopping back onto the pillow. "Good. So you got rid of the sidekicks by bitching about needing your sleep, and if you didn't mean it, I sure as Christ do."

"I meant it." El was still smiling.

"Then you should quit whining and try it."

"I would, but I seem to be lying on your automatic."

"That's not too practical, El, I might want it."

"I'm not the one who put it there." The mattress dipped and creaked as El's weight shifted, slow.

"You weren't lying on it when I left it," Sands countered. He reached out to El's shoulder and pushed, rolling him onto his side while he retrieved the Beretta, the length of the silencer trapped by El's weight.

"So where are mine?" El asked as he eased back down.

"Where they always are." Mostly, that meant under the bed.

"They might need to be closer," El said, with some consideration.

Sands pulled one his own Sigs from its hiding place and shoved it under El's pillow. "Now shut the fuck up or I'll whack you round the head with it. I'm starting to think I preferred you unconscious."

"I know I preferred it." El was shifting again, slow, small movements, the futile attempts to get comfortable that Sands knew too well. "I think I need some more painkillers."

"Not if you're going to get yourself shot in the liver," Sands said, dry. "You're on strict rations. The doc seemed to think letting us kill you afterwards would have wasted his time."

"I'll work on making it somewhere else next time then." El finally stilled, no bets on how long for.

Sands was used to El wriggling the whole damn night through. It wouldn't disturb him now just because the reason had changed.

It was easier, though, when El was asleep and not tight with tension, a slow seepage of wrongness nibbling at the edges of Sands' mind.

El's hand stretched out over the sheets, fingers moving to rest on the denim at Sands' hip. Sands let himself relax under the touch, muscles loosening, and El in turn softened behind him.

The apartment was quiet, the background rustlings of the sidekicks faded into silence. The first sounds from beyond the wall, the light, running feet and slamming door, the neighbouring kids back from school already. High laughs and rushed Spanish chatter, damped into incoherence by the layers between. Casual, unforced, everything normal.

El slept, and finally Sands did the same.

Sands slept light and restless, the straps of the holsters dragged taut round his body when he moved, his shirt wrinkling into ridges beneath. When he gave up and let himself be awake, El was still out.

His jeans seemed unnaturally tight around his thighs, and it felt like his socks had melted right in between his toes.

El was right, he needed a goddamn shower.

He fished El's Glocks from under the bed and dumped them next to his pillow to go with the Sig. El would wake up if he needed them.

He brushed his teeth for the first time in over a day and flossed meticulously, because it was all-important that any future he might live through didn't involve cavities.

The water only trickled over his body from the feeble low pressure head, but it could be set somewhere just above cool as the soap stripped the sticky sweat from him. He scrubbed fingers through tangled hair that felt even worse than his skin did, and there were times it was useful not to know exactly what was swilling away down the drain.

He tied his damp hair back out of his face, and with a clean T-shirt pulled on beneath the holsters, his brain was finally starting to liven up and anticipate the potential for... something, anything to happen.

When he came out, El was waiting by the door.

He missed things every single time he took a fucking shower.

"About time," Sands said. "You'll need to change the dressing."

"Not my first thought," El said, dry. "It was get up or wet the bed."

"Good choice." Sands swung back into the bathroom, pulling bandage rolls and dressing pads from the cupboards and setting them on the counter, because El wouldn't appreciate doing much in the way of bending or stretching right now.

El's bare feet padded up behind him. "I can do the rest myself." Brush of loose cloth on Sands' wrist as El reached past him for a clean towel - El had hung a shirt over his shoulders, but hadn't tried to wriggle his arms through the sleeves.

Sands tipped his head El's way, with a quirked smile. "Well, I wasn't planning to stay for your shower, I just dried off." And El wouldn't be feeling like a round of cubicle-contorted sex for quite some time. "If I hear a crash, I might come looking."

"If you don't, somebody will." So El's low-key humour was sticking around. Nice to know he hadn't lapsed right back into morbid.

"Then I'll just take it easy and leave the lapdogs in charge for a while."

El's fingers skated light over Sands' arm as he left the bathroom.

Sands fired up the laptop in the bedroom and skimmed through the news channels. He found only puff pieces on the murder of a prominent local businessman, nothing with El's name on it. Somebody was putting some real investment into keeping that part quiet. Since this was Mexico City and the 'victim' was significantly rich, it merited a few paragraphs in the national websites too, but they were even less revealing. Nothing about possible suspects, nothing on police leads, and absolutely nothing publicly connecting Salinas to unauthorised income.

He ran the standard international checks – Morales was several points ahead in the polls now, and the momentum was all his. The rest was just a matter of counting down to election day.

By the time they made it back to Bolivia, the country would have a new president, and a whole new set of politicos for Sands to tap into and play with. It was going to be fun.

Sands was still assuming El would be coming back with him, ready to pick up exactly as before. Well, it did seem like the only assumption worth working with.

The thin background patter of the shower had stopped a while back, and El hadn't reappeared in his low-level radar. Sands angled his head, tilting past the dullness of his earphone and the exterior traffic buzz, and caught the edge of a quick crackle of plastic.

El was working on the dressings then. He was taking his time over it, but he'd be taking his time over a lot of things for a while.

Sands wouldn't have appreciated any offers of help, and he didn't intend to hand them out either.

He flipped the laptop fast through a few other sites – traffic just in case, American news, currency exchange rates. The US dollar wasn't stretching as far in some circles as it used to, and while some of the people he dealt with were too stupid to know that, others certainly would.

He was still listening when the fabric shift came from the bathroom, the near-silent touch of bare feet from beyond the door. Feet that were steady, forcibly so; slow, tentative, and even.

Sands wasn't the only one who'd noticed them, Fideo's short strides pattering from further along the hallway to catch up. "Hey El, you know most people would stay in bed a few days after surgery."

"Most people don't run around getting shot in the first place," Sands drawled, his fingers tapping through to another site. El wouldn't be staying put anywhere, and hinting that he should was as pointless a waste of existence as any of the hours the drunk spent dipping into a bottle.

"I think they might have the right idea. It seems to hurt more every time." The truth of it was there in El's voice, bare under the expected wry humour.

Sands tipped his head, angled up to El, soft tug of plastic at his ear as the cord pulled tight. "But it doesn't stop you. Not for long."

The wood of the door jamb creaked under El's shifting weight. "I thought I would stop once. I meant it."

"And then you fell right back into it, with just one little prod."

El shrugged, cloth rubbing loose against the frame. "If I stop, I die, and I want that less."

"If you don't want to die, don't try so hard," Fideo said cheerfully. "And come and eat now you're up, Lori's already fighting the microwave for you."

"So why are you standing around? You need to rescue the food before it shrivels up and dies." El's voice flipped right back to match Fideo's mood.

"I'm going, I'm going. I just thought you might like an invitation first."

"Don't worry, we'll invite ourselves when we smell food," El called after the footsteps pattering away down the hall.

Sands set the laptop to sleep, pulled the earphone away and dropped it to the desk. "I think I'd eat anything right now, even if the brat cooked it."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd ever tried his cooking." El's smile was still there, but his voice was tight again behind it, with another creak of the door frame. "I'll wait here a few minutes, till Fideo and Lorenzo stop arguing over how to reheat things."

Sands pushed his chair back, fingers brushing over his watch. He took the pills from his pocket, shaking out the right numbers. "Then swallow these while you're standing there, you're due again." He wasn't, not for almost another hour, but that wouldn't kill him when bullets wouldn't.

He pressed the bottles into El's pocket as he passed him in the doorway. "I'm sure the doc wrote the instructions on there."

El's fingers were at his wrist, stopping him before he pulled away. "Thank you."

Sands shrugged, the movement tugging his hand back. "They're your drugs." Sands would have shot anyone who tried to keep control of his supply after the Day of the Dead.

He headed off down the hallway, leaving El to make his own way without an audience. Sands planned on waiting for the food to arrive in the living room, and blocking out the inanities from the kitchen – he'd gotten more than enough experience at siphoning the sidekicks' relentless chatter into background noise.

The chatter was definitely there, but so were the scents, spreading through the room on waves of heated air; it was the same dense spicy-cheese-tomato mix he'd dined on earlier, but Sands wasn't feeling too particular, and he slumped into the sofa to wait.

The food smells strengthened a minute or so later, carried along with the kid's footsteps. Footsteps that stopped dead right around the doorway. "Where's El?"

The kid's words were terse, but it felt more like habit than accusation. "Swallowing pills, if he's feeling smart," Sands said, deliberately blasé. "I'm sure he'll turn up eventually."

Air sucked in sharp and fast, but whatever the kid was going to say didn't make it past the brain filter. At least there was evidence he had one he was occasionally willing to use.

"Yeah, he gets that way," the kid said finally. His feet came the rest of the way in, and he slapped a plate down on the low table next to Sands. "Sorry about the tamales, they kinda dried up on me."

"That's because you left them in there for five minutes," the dipso said, walking in with an extra layer of odours, more onion and a darker, richer, meat. "You couldn't expect them to live." He dumped some of his own offerings alongside Lorenzo's. "Try the picadillo, I got to it first."

Picadillo wasn't one of Sands' favourites – no skill or subtlety in the preparation, just throw everything together in a pan and fry it fast – but it would take a lot of abuse and survive it. It could have been invented for the age of batch cooking and freezing. And Sands was goddamn hungry.

He picked up the second plate, exploring with careful fingers. He found the picadillo sitting in a pile with tortillas on the side, and opted not to take the messy, dripping option for food, keeping the two separate and using a fork for the meat.

El's footsteps came towards the door some five minutes later, slow and halting along the hallway. His bare soles padded irregularly with the pain, the stretch of muscles on the side with a bullet hole more cautious, more hesitant. The sidekicks ignored the approaching feet too, keeping right on with their mutual accusations till El stepped through the doorway.

"Good thing you're here, El, Lori was about to go looking and force feed you," the dipso said.

"Hey, you know me, I make a promise, I keep it." The kid's voice glowed bright, the laser beam pinpoint that flipped on instant whenever El was in the room. "And like you wouldn't have been right behind me."

"Well, I'm here, and I'm fine," El said, smiling. "You can even watch me eat." El lowered himself into the sofa alongside Sands, weight settling slow, careful, nothing close to his usual relaxed thump and sprawl.

"Oh, sure, you're fine, we can see that." The kid could somehow still manage to roll his eyes through that cheerful voice, a trait that had to be unique. He was up and handing El a plate that smelled like the picadillo.

"Maybe not right now," El admitted ruefully. "But I will be."

"Probably." Satisfaction with El's confession heavy in the grin as Lorenzo flopped back into his chair. "One thing I can say for sure, El, as long as the psycho sticks around, you won't need to spring your cash for a guard dog."

Sands flashed teeth the kid's way, wide and fleeting. "I'm single-minded."

"Then you're the only man I've met who can be single-minded about five things at once," El said, his elbow touching light against the sleeve of Sands' jacket while he scooped up food.

"I'm the only man you've met who does a lot of things, El," Sands replied easily, letting his tone add the slide of sexual connotation.

The brat for sure wouldn't miss a forty watt innuendo from three city blocks away, but he didn't pause or falter at it. "And thank fuck for that, I wouldn't wanna find too many blind guys running round the streets waving guns the way you do," he said, his tone sticking with the light and breezy.

Sands wasn't aware the kid had ever used the word 'blind' to his face before, instead of couched, sly references to the things he couldn't do.

"Neither would I," El said, his hand there flat on the sofa between them, the edge touching against Sands' thigh. "I would only trust the one."

"You're a fool to trust anybody," Fideo said, superficially as cheerful as anything that has gone before, but something of an edge lurked beneath it.

El tipped his head towards the chairs across the room. "Even you?"

"Even us," the dipso confirmed, his words underlined by the familiar scrape of a bottle top. "People can be tricked, can betray without meaning to."

"Hey, you speak for yourself," Lorenzo protested. "I'm smart enough to spot a scheming bastard out to dig the dirt, even if you're not."

"Are you sure about that?" Sands asked, dropping his voice low and slow. "You'd want to be very sure."

"I spotted you, didn't I?" the kid said, grinning wide. "Called you out as a psycho inside a flat minute."

Sands angled his eyebrows lightly, the rest of his face expressionless. "I wasn't ever trying to hide anything."

"What would you hide?" El said, and his hand was there again, the light pressure that barely touched. "You are who you are. We all are." His voice set flat, and Sands could feel that gaze settling over the sidekicks as it had coiled around him across a table in Culiacán.

"Yeah, we are," Lorenzo said, almost matching his tone. "And most of us don't advertise so hard, it attracts less trouble."

"Well, when El here's such a magnet for armed wannabe assassins, really, my own small contribution barely seems to register." Sands tugged the corners of his mouth into a quick smile that didn't part his lips.

"If you want to be as famous as me, you'll need to work a little harder at it." El's soft humour was right back, flowing smooth between the bites of food.

"I think maybe the gringo's too smart for that," Fideo said. "Sorry, El, you'll always be the first target."

"And only myself to blame for it, don't tell me, I know," El said, smiling.

"Well, at least you got that part nailed in," the kid said, catching the mood again. "Now it's just the rest of your idiot ideas we gotta fix."

"Like you don't have so many. Maybe we should work on yours first."

"Me? Hey, I live a life of charm and carefree innocence, what's to bitch about that?"

The conversation was deteriorating again, Sands' fork screeching lightly as he circled it, and he set the empty plate back on the table alongside him. "Well, as charming as this discourse has been, I've got a Beretta to clean." It had the unarguable benefit of being true, if not something Sands had been looking forward to. It was close on thirty-six hours now, and the residue would have baked and set nicely along the barrel and in the action as it cooled.

El's head tipped to smile at him as he stood. "Don't use all the oil, I'll be there when I finish eating."

Sands raised eyebrows at him. "You'd better be. A bullet hole doesn't mean you get to ditch it all on me."

He'd end up cleaning half of El's mini arsenal whatever. He always did, because the alternative was the scrubbing lasted half the night when Sands was trying to sleep, though he left the shotgun to the attentions of its owner, just to make a point.

He stopped by the kitchen to make himself a coffee, the rattling cupboards and boiling water enough to be sure El knew where he was. El would carry on eating a while, turn up and join him when there was actual work going on.

The coffee smelled too fucking good. Smelled like evenings with ideas and papers and information, like sitting up too late as plans formed and swirled, were rejected and settled on.

He swallowed half the mug back, hot, took the rest of the pot with him to the room.

Sands stretched his legs out across the floor, his back against the bed, and started with the Beretta, the one from the left holster, the one he'd used. He wasn't in the mood for a general clean of the others, not with five or six of El's selection to add to the list. Stripping this particular model still wasn't pure habit, took a little thought behind the slide of his fingers to find the releases, and El's footsteps were there as he laid out the last of the sections in front of him.

El settled onto the bed alongside him, knee at Sands' shoulder. "Lorenzo means well."

Sands tipped his face up to El with quirked lips. "Decided to make an effort, has he? Treat me like one of the guys?"

"Something like that," El smiled. Metal clicked and sprung free beneath his fingers.

Sands handed him a solvent swab and a couple of sheets of newspaper. "Don't get grease on the bed."

El didn't say anything more, concentrating on the movements of cleaning the Glocks, finding the position and arrangement of materials that worked out best for his sliced up muscles. The cleaning was mindless, a twenty-year ritual of patches and brushes, and Sands tracked the subtly altered and slowed patterns above his shoulder, El's body language the purest barometer of his level of pain, because El sure as fuck wouldn't tell him.

Sands had his own questions lingering about the kid, but they were best asked when El didn't have so many distractions, when he was resting as drugged and comfortable as he was gonna get, instead of twisting past the objections of his muscles, screaming from under his dressings.

Best asked when the cleaning was done, when El was finished wriggling into sheets and pillows; when Sands had washed the cordite from his hands and flossed the onion from his teeth and was sitting upright on the bed alongside him with a smoke hanging familiar between his fingers.

"So what's the thing with you and the kid?"

"Thing?" El's tone slashed his raised eyebrow across Sands' mind.

So he was gonna have to get explicit to stop El wriggling away from it. "He'd stick to you like a leech if you let him. You like him, but you keep on peeling him off and flicking him away into the weeds. And don't feed me that camel shit about protecting him from your bad rep, because that's a part of it, but you don't kick the dipso down so hard."

He'd figured El would take his time over his answer, fixing the words up just right, but they came fast and casual, openly resigned. "He wants to model himself on me. I'm not a good role model."

Sands smiled, stretching his lips long and lazy. "Well, no, but I wouldn't be kicking the pretty smitten boy away from my bed, so you're an obvious improvement over me."

Little Lori really didn't have a thing for El that way, but El didn't bother pointing it out. "You can't stand the 'pretty boy'," he said, light.

"That's not to say I wouldn't fuck him. Might make it more fun." Sands wound the humour back, his voice setting flatter, harder. "But you don't need to worry about him turning out like you. The kid's too motivated by money for that."

"So he has both our flaws, instead of only mine. You're not making me feel better."

Sands' mouth curled tight at the corners. "Not my job, El, I just sell the facts."

El tipped his head back to the wall, the soft solidity of bone and the rough sweep of hair over plaster. "He became a killer much younger than I did. I wonder how anyone gets through that and keeps their soul."

"Oh, the kids take to it real well." Sands flashed a full smile, all teeth. "It's hardly a coincidence that all those gangs stirring up their little African war zones make a habit of recruiting twelve-year-olds, get them used to killing before they start to think about it too much. Statistically, you're the one more likely to have gotten burned out by it all." He lifted his eyebrows high, quirked the edge of his mouth. "If it hadn't come so naturally to you, of course."

El shook his head slow. "I'm not sure so it didn't burn me out."

Sands tipped his head to give El the full stare of the lenses. "Well, I'm sure. You might have been irritated by all the little lifestyle inconveniences that come as part of the package, but the quiet hidey hole was always a deliberate decision for you, not a reaction to the nightmares giving you the screaming heebies."

"I have nightmares," El said softly.

"Sure you do." Sands kept his tone entirely reasonable – as if anyone who'd spent more than a week in El's bed could miss that he had some bad dreams. "But not the kind where you see the faces of the people you killed, the moment you killed, the shock and the blood and the daytime flashbacks." He lowered his voice, let the darkness creep through it with a soft smile. "People like you and me, El, our nightmares are all about the people we didn't kill soon enough."

El rustled faintly, the new, slower version of his shrug. "The dreams are still there. Maybe why doesn't make such a difference."

"It makes every difference," Sands said, brisk, unshakeable. "It's the difference between you sitting here having a rational conversation about it, and an extended stay in a quiet room with soft walls and no razors." He curled his lips, pressed together close in flat humour. "The wrap-around jacket wouldn't be a good look on either of us."

"A lot of people would disagree," El said, easy shift to match Sands' tone.

"A lot of people are boring, spineless cowards who won't twitch a pinkie to shape the world the way they want it, so their opinions are meaningless." Sands drawled the words out in exaggerated disinterest.

El shook his head. "The voices count for something. That's why we earned our democracy."

Sands curved his eyebrows high and mocking. "El, surely you don't fall for that 'one man's vote can change the world' crock of camel shit? The only people who make a difference are the ones who tell the herd what to think." He sucked deep on his cigarette and tipped his head El's way, angling the smoke from the corner of his mouth in a smooth stream. "Hell, you would have died in jail years ago if you didn't have such a good publicity machine. Hundreds of people could have turned you in, but they don't, because you're the local folk hero. You and I both know it's so much snake oil, but the masses like the better story."

El turned back to face Sands directly, his words warm and unruffled. "People want to believe what gives them hope."

"Exactly," Sands said, smiling wide. El always responded best to the personal angles. "Feed them the right hook and they're ready to swallow any old BS."

This time, El didn't bother to disagree, only wriggled and shifted, rearranging himself stretched out long across the bed.

Not that it was so much of a victory, Sands considered, reaching for the ashtray on the nightstand. He'd started out probing El about the kid, and ended up talking fucking politics.

It was almost worse that he was pretty sure the diversion wasn't deliberate, just the tangled salmagundi of wires in El's head. Tug on one, and you never knew what the hell else would come knotted to the other end.

It was one of the annoying paradoxes about the Mariachi. He could irritate the crap out of Sands with his stubbornness and irrationalities, but if he was entirely predictable, Sands would have tired of him long ago.

Sands had more than enough self-awareness to realise that his tastes and his choices weren't always ideal for his own best interests, but what the hell, better dead than bored.

He set the ashtray back down and considered steering things around to the kid again, but El's breathing was already sliding into a pattern alongside him, rhythmic and slow. The drugs would do that.

Himself, he'd been napping through most of the goddamn day, and he probably wasn't going to get too lucky with the sleep thing now.

The sounds of the world flowed in over El's breath, the drone of the traffic on the arterial a few blocks over, the chatter of TV from the next apartment muffled beyond the wall. No trees round this apartment to encourage the surging background of bugs he'd hated in Acapulco, just the irregular coughs and rattles of dying engines in nearby trucks and cars, Mexico still flowing late into the evening.

Sands sat with his back to the pillow and his head to the wall, drawing smoke through his lungs and details through his head as he listened to the city outside the glass, to the passing of the night.

If El was good enough to drag himself out of bed for dinner, he was good enough to get the hell out of the apartment, and the next day Sands relocated them all to a hotel. It was one of the places they'd scoped and rejected for the intended meet with Salinas. Not flash, but not too cheap, and not too far – even with the drugs, El wouldn't be feeling like a lengthy trip. That hadn't stopped El from hauling a doped up Sands half way across the country when it suited him, but Sands wasn't looking for an opportunity to repay.

As a bonus, Sands figured this way he'd get a little more time to himself without the sidekicks hanging around, but the mariachis banded together and insisted on rooms with connecting doors, just in case. That meant the three of them stuck to the familiar pattern of congregating in one room for endless sessions of tedious prattling. Sands took the only victory he was going to get by insisting on having the door locked when he didn't want to be disturbed.

Lorenzo disposed of their been-around-the-block-a few-times-too-many-now Chevy, switching it out for another battered vehicle of dubious providence, but otherwise they stayed inside, keeping out of sight. They had food delivered from a variety of places so nobody outside the hotel staff figured out they were set for the long-stay package. Sometimes they sent Fideo to collect their orders instead, as the least likely to be picked out of a crowd, and he came back reporting the area clear, no obvious watchers.

Sands didn't even get out to the end of the hall, his days spent trapped with laptop and radio and the brain-sucking zombies that inhabited daytime TV, and his boredom level was spiralling by the hour. He turned his attention back to some of those old, lingering questions about the sidekicks, passing time lazing quiet in the background beneath the games and the chatter, testing theories against observation. Well, he had to take his entertainment where he could find it.

And it was still worth his while trying to figure out exactly what angle the kid was planning to hit from when they announced they were leaving. After a week, El was a long way from healed, but he was a whole lot more mobile.

Sometimes the mariachis sat around and played cards to waste the hours beneath their chatter. Sometimes they plucked at their guitars instead, rolling through tune after tune or playing around with whatever patterns of notes dropped into their heads. Those times the music wandered oddly, and while the tempo stuck tight, the mood wasn't always headed the same way from each player. They didn't sing too often, thank fuck, not since the evening some neighbour got pissed and banged on the walls. Now they mostly kept it to the early afternoon, when there was nobody much around to annoy but the cleaners pushing carts up and down the hallways.

Sometimes they stole Sands’ laptop.

It always started with El, which was fine, but then the sidekicks would invite themselves to join him, which was not so much, even though any files Sands considered important were in hidden folders locked down with passwords.

Sands didn’t think El had spent a whole lot of time online before the two of them became acquainted – during most of the onward march of home computing, El had been hiding away in his desert dustbowl, where cable and wireless weren't exactly standard features of a des res – but regular exposure to technology had apparently convinced him of its benefits. El still wasn't an avid user, though, and he'd wander away once he had what he wanted, leaving the sidekicks to poke around out of boredom.

"Hey, El, you seen the stats on the new Para Lite Hawg? Forty-five sub-compact, ten plus one with a tac rail and only a three inch barrel."

El was stretched out along the bed, and he didn't bother to go take a look. "Forty-five is too much power for a small handgun, they get snappy. They should make it a nine millimetre with a few more rounds."

"Reviews say the grip's better, easier to handle," Fideo said, huddled up next to Little Lori by the screen.

"Have they fixed the reliability too?" Sands drawled past the rim of his coffee cup. "The old P10 had a nasty little reputation for feed jams. Not something I'd want to bet my life on." He stopped huffing breath over the liquid, and took a cautious sip. It flowed over his tongue with just the right burn, but he was wishing for the thousandth time he had his old AeroPress here. Coffee tasted like shit out of styrofoam.

"Never picked up a Para new," Lorenzo said with a grin. "Always let somebody else work through the manufacturing glitches."

"But you won't find too many law enforcement types carrying Paras. They pay the extra couple hundred for a Glock or a Sig." Sands raised his eyebrows obvious above the cup. "I try to avoid direct disagreements with the police."

"Good habit." The kid tossed the words back over his shoulder, light. "So how about a lasergrip instead? You seen the Crimson Trace sights for those Glocks of yours, El?"

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to tell me I can't shoot straight," El said, dry.

"Well, going by the latest evidence, maybe not," the kid teased. "When d'you last get your eyes checked? Maybe you could have used a little help."

"I could have used a few less people shooting at me," El said. "That would have been helpful."

"Or maybe you should just stay further away," Fideo said, fingernail tapping on the touchpad. "Take a look at the latest Leica range-finder here – it's the same inside as the 1200, but this one fits in your pocket."

"That would work, with a bazooka to get all those annoying walls out of the way." El's voice clung to his deadpan humour, but he was interested enough in that piece of kit to slide off the bed and check out the site.

Sands was more interested in the kid's newly-developed tolerance, and just how far it could be pushed. Among other things, the entertainment level over the last week had dropped off in an unfortunate way.

He left his experiment till the drunk had passed out for the evening, and El was tucked away in the bathroom, cleaning up before bed. El was still sleeping more because of the drugs.

Sands stretched himself relaxed over the armchair, wriggling back into it to swing Lorenzo's eyes around his way, and lighting himself a cigarette for that extra touch of provocation. "Shouldn't you be trying to talk him out of playing with guns, instead of encouraging him?" He breathed smoke out slow through his nose, dipped his head a little so he could almost be staring over the glasses. "Isn't that what a 'friend' would do?"

Lorenzo only shrugged. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't want to."

Sands smiled crooked around the filter between his lips. "That doesn't stop you lecturing the dipso when you feel like it."

Lorenzo swung the chair around away from the laptop, to look straight at Sands. "El likes it as much as you do, as much as we all do," he said after a pause. "He just won't say it."

Sands wasn't sure they all liked what they did quite equally; he was certain they didn't all like it in quite the same way. But it was interesting to see those flashes of a brain that came through when the kid flipped the off switch on his temper.

Sands thought the kid might actually be starting to like him, instead of just tolerating him. Well, that would fix itself fast enough - Little Lori still hadn't figured out how this was gonna work.

Sands didn't bother himself with the alco-drain's opinion; if the trend held, he'd drink himself right back into a stupor inside a couple of days and not give a goat's balls what went on around him. But poking into the why of that was at least a little more brain-stimulating than the TV zombies.

There wasn't much point asking the dipso direct. When he was half-way sober, he was defensive of his personal back-story, and when he was a few bottles down, he passed out. He never turned into one of those babbling, rambling drunks – if he did, El would likely have ditched him years back, and if not, Sands would have killed him already. Asking the kid wouldn't work either – Lorenzo didn't like him quite that much.

That left Sands with one other source to tease at, though El wasn't always entirely forthcoming either.

Sands waited till El finished brushing his teeth before he led the conversation around that way, because giving El an excuse to stop and think before he answered was always the wrong choice.

"So what's his deal with the bottle, anyway? What exactly is he running from?"

El half-turned, still patting at the water round his mouth with the hotel facecloth. The towels in this place were cheap and worn, but that wouldn’t bother El. "Why do you assume he is?"

Sands lifted an eyebrow. "Everybody you know's running from something, El. Even that priest confessor of yours back in muletown was hiding from a world he didn't want to know about, from the guys who'd shoot one another for money." He twisted his lips, obvious and wry. "He must've been ecstatic when you showed up at his door."

El swung back to the sink, to the mirror that wouldn't have hidden him from anyone, and didn't hide him from Sands. The facecloth dropped to the counter with a soft flump. "What makes any of us who we are? His father liked to drink too much, his life has been difficult, and now he does the same."

"So that's how it is for you? Everybody doomed by their genetics, no free will?"

"No." El didn't answer slow, but the words were careful all the same. "I'd say more that we all live with what we've learned."

"So what have you learned?"

"To survive."

Sands raised his eyebrows, exaggerated and deliberate. "That's it? Will the last man standing please turn out the lights? Nothing more edifying to add?"

El reached out, hanging the facecloth back onto the hook on the wall. "There's more, but... that seems to be most of it."

And that was most of what Sands got that night too, because El wouldn't be sucked in any deeper.

The days in the hotel crept by with no sign of pursuit.

The kid started slipping out for food sometimes instead of the drunk. Sands was left with the walls of the two rooms, unseen and mostly untouched, the trap in his head as confining as the one around his body.

The days merged into the passing of weeks, quiet and slow and frustratingly similar.

A few weeks was more than long enough for Sands. And long enough for certain lingering loose ends to be cleared up.

He chose his evening for the weather, for the direction of the breeze, not too strong, and tied his timing to the sun. Sands had hung out his strongest 'do not disturb' signs through the late afternoon, and the mariachis' voices rippled through the door behind him, crashing and overlapping and settling back into murmur.

He pocketed the pay-as-you-go he'd had the dipso pick up for him on one of his food trips, and let himself out of the hotel room. He wasn't enthusiastic about his visibility for this part, but he didn't want interested ears listening in on his end of this conversation, and he sure as fuck didn't want any unfortunate background chit-chat leaking over the line the other way.

El would hear him leave, and be curious, but he wouldn't interfere.

Sands knew a little about the area round this hotel from their earlier investigations, enough to know where to head for and to make it there with the cane. He turned west, into the sun, the soft rays still warming over his cheek along the length of the street. Easy to follow the herd for a few blocks, crossing intersections when the people around him did, guided to avoid obstacles as much by feet and voices as by the cane. The cane just told the cattle on the streets not to go crashing into him, because he wasn't gonna be moving out of their way.

He headed south now, the sun fading from his skin in the long shadows of the buildings, and when the breeze stirred again he caught trees and green and open space through the ever-present burn of gasoline. He let the air tug him on, adjusting the rough street map in his head to the reality as he walked, detail and numbers adding layers, depth, to keep the trip back to the hotel simple when his nose would be no help.

The park was growing quieter as the sun lowered, most of the feet headed the other way past Sands, the natural distrust of the human species for deepening gloom.

Sands didn't give a bat's fart if it was dark in there, and that had been almost as true when he could still see.

The breeze steered him towards a grove of bigger trees, leaving the path for soft grass over hard soil, tracking the thick rustle of leaves with each sweep of air. The cane found him a good thick trunk among them, Sands invisible from the path now if anybody else was roaming the park at sunset, and his ears would know if someone was around.

He peeled off his glove, propped a cigarette between his lips, cupping a hand round the lighter as he touched it to the end and flicked up the flame. Heat flared on his skin, that bit too close and biting, but he sucked the burn into the smoke before he pulled his palm away.

The best lies worked because they were the truth, with all the evidence there to back them up.

He flipped open the cell and dialled the number.

He didn't get the silent delay this time, only the answer. "Figured it might be you. You're later than I thought."

"I wanted to give you plenty of time, make sure I'm getting the right answers."

"I got answers for you. Not sure if they're what you'd call the right ones." Her tone, light and easy, didn't much care what he thought.

"So spill and find out."

It wasn't going to go that fast, and the smile in her voice was no surprise. "You're not the only one who wants to know things, Sands. And since I'm doing you a favour here, I thought you might like to give a little in return."

Sands didn't like to give anything, but this was the price for dealing with Foreman. The smarter they were, the harder they'd screw you when they had you dangling.

He widened his own smile across the line. "What's your line of interest, sugarcheeks?"

Foreman's grin grew just as bright in return, and she'd always had the orthodontist-special teeth behind those barely-painted lips, stretching and parting in his head. "There's a lot of talk doing the rounds up here – I wanna know how much of it's for real."

Sands laughed, pure amusement he had no reason to hide. "I'm not sure there's a whole lot you could have heard that wouldn't be the truth, or close enough to it."

"You really ran some deal with that headcase vigilante out there? Hit the old Barillo clan, took out that Honaker fuck?"

Sands shrugged, the bare disinterest of old news filling his words. "A lot of people were annoyed at the both of us. It seemed prudent to pool resources until they were gone."

"Yeah, you finally found somebody else who matches your talent for pissing people off." She laughed across the line, genuine, or real close. "So which one of you actually killed the devious old bastard?"

"Oh, that was all El," Sands said, breezily. "Something of a short fuse, that one, not always the most reliable ally. I wanted Honaker alive a week or two longer myself, while he supplied me with the same information you're about to give up."

"So that's why you ditched him," she said, amusement tangling with curiosity, rich and thick across the line.

"I departed for less hostile climes," Sands said simply, smoke slipping out with the words. The best lies worked because they were the truth.

"So did you ever find out who he really was?" Foreman was way too smart to fall for the folk hero bullshit, but too persistent not to poke at a good mystery.

"He didn't say, and it didn't seem to matter." It really didn't, which was almost odd; Sands was a compulsive gatherer of information, and it should have been munching on his toes this whole time. But what the hell, he already knew most of what there was to know about El, a name wouldn't give him anything more.

Foreman was just too fucking smart not to catch the anomaly. "You must be slacking off some, Sands, that doesn't sound your style at all." Her voice had dropped darker, instincts pricked, circling and seeking.

"I was planning to use his skill, not ghost his bio." Sands drawled the words long, bored. "There were a few other things tying up my lines of inquiry at the time."

"Yeah, I guess you had enough going down to keep you busy." Her voice light again, the hunter gone, and she bought it because that was the truth too.

"That's all you're asking this time, a little local colour for the prize?" It might not be the wisest move, taunting Foreman before she leaked his info, but Sands made a habit of playing it smart, not wise. "Your price is dropping like a junkie whore's, sweet cheeks." If it pissed her off, well, it would steer her back the way he wanted her.

But he got nothing from her except that crooked smirk she loved to turn on when she was winning. "Sorry, Sands, but I don't think you've got a whole lot left to offer me."

And that was an interesting reveal right there, even while the barb caught at his throat like cheap tequila. They really hadn't tabbed onto anything he'd been doing the last couple of years, outside of the flashiest episodes. "Maybe you just need to know the right questions to ask."

"Maybe." And the absence of any other follow-up meant she was growing as bored with the point-scoring part of this little chat as he was.

"So if you're finished with your cross-examination now, how about I get my verdict?"

"The order to let him die came straight down from heaven," she said, her tone falling easily into report style, brisk, efficient, disinterested. She was talking about El Presidente, and too well versed to say it over the line. "Way above where I can track it. And it came down in that vague, generalised kind of a way."

He knew the style. Somebody made a passing remark to a subordinate who might just pass it down another rung. No details, no paperwork and no accountability, because if it ever back-tracked to bite them on the ass, hey, it was just a lazy joke, and damn, some idiot really acted on that? "So who's the first to put anything in writing?"

"Slater." Just two steps up the staircase, the boss's boss. "No specifics, no names, just get someone in Mexico to keep a watch on Barillo. Drug guy's getting too cocky, too ambitious. Next step's Rothman who pegs you, because you're already in Culiacán and sitting on a couple of sources." Yeah, stuck on that dead end corruption detail that had been boring the fuck out of him for more than five months. That had been a big chunk of his decision to take the cash and go independent right there. "Copy says he left it to you whether to pull in the local AFN or run the watch alone."

And that could have swung either way, but when he'd run scans over the AFN he'd found someone interesting. Someone bored and bitter and perfectly corruptible, and as a side order, pretty enough to be worth a fuck.

Somehow he'd managed to miss the fact that the bitch had been corrupted from birth.

"That's all very nice to hear, candy lips, there's nothing like a bit of historical background to set things in perspective." The drawl was for show, and not designed to cover his impatience with the irrelevant sidetracking. "But what I really want to know is who the fuck sold me out?"

"Nobody."

His lips pinched hard and flat. "Meaning you don't know."

"Meaning nobody," she snapped. "There was no big conspiracy to hang you, Sands, there was just you. Maybe somebody decided to give you the extra rope down there just to see if you'd wrap it tight round your own neck, but the job was straight, and if you'd played it that way, it would've run the routine." Her voice lost the tight edge, softened into something close to sympathy. "The back-up headed in when you put out the call, but you weren't at the meet spot. And then the whole city went to hell, and looking for you just wasn't the top priority."

Sands didn't want anybody's fucking sympathy, and certainly not hers. "So now I get to be a legend all of my own, sugar cheeks." He plastered the smile on broad. "Spread the details anyplace you like, just don't go spilling the source."

She was laughing again, clear and real at his ear. "Like any fucker would believe me." Then the laughter was gone, but her humour still coloured the speculation. "Hey, since it's you we're talking about, they just might."

"So roll it on out there and find out," Sands said, his smile unconcerned. He wasn't giving her permission to do anything – he didn't have any influence over what she'd say, the choice was all her own, and that had been the gamble from the start. And if he picked up a little renewed interest from old Uncle Sam, well, the relatives would start looking in all the wrong places.

"Maybe I will," she said easily. It was laid out to be ambiguous, but Sands had something of a read on her, and if she planned on spreading it about, she'd either tell him that, flat fact, or fake him out like a thousand buck hooker. "Oh, and Sands, just one more thing."

"What's that, sweet thighs?"

"Don't call again." The phone clicked into silence by his ear as she hung up.

He flipped the cell closed, wiped it off with a cloth, and slid it into his pocket. He had no intention of getting back in touch.

Their working relationship had remained agreeable after he left his fingerprints on her little scheme only because he'd never put the pressure on. After this, she'd be poisonous, and that was never a pretty thing to watch. It had always been single use only material.

He shifted his weight into the wrinkled bark at his back, crossed his feet at the ankles and lit another cigarette, smoke trickling from his lips, sucked away with the breeze towards the buzz of the streets.

That was it. They were all dead, had been for two years, back on the Day of the Dead. No revenge to take, nothing left to chase.

And maybe it meant he could have gone back instead of running. If he really didn't have a personal nemesis waiting inside, and with most of the people who knew what he'd done conveniently dead, it wouldn't have taken too much effort to tidy up the dangling strings....

Gone back to disability and a pension, maybe a desk job typing up other people's slightly sensitive reports. Right.

He'd definitely grabbed himself the better end of that deal.

He dropped his smoke to the ground half-burned and screwed it into the grass with a boot tip. He didn't plan on decorating any particular stretch of lawn any longer then he had to, and the evening was already starting to cool for the walk back to the hotel, the last edge of sun sliding over his cheek as he moved out of the shade of the trees.

He dumped the cell in a trash can that got in the way of his cane a few blocks along.

Sands cornered Lorenzo on his way back from the breakfast run the next morning, waiting stretched against the wall in the stairwell, senses reaching for the right set of feet.

"You're going to rent us a car," he said, when the rustling bags stopped beside him. "El's good enough to drive now, and we're getting out." His little chat with Foreman had been more than long enough to triangulate on. She'd have it down to within five or ten city blocks.

"Screw the money-lending," the kid said with a quick grin. "He can rent his own car, but I'll drive him out to the office."

"Then anyone who gets a lead on our IDs can follow us right to the airport and onto the plane," Sands said, flat. "I don't want anybody looking for us leaving, at least not for a while, and you don't want them knowing where we went either."

"Yeah, I gotcha." The kid was serious himself now, the humour gone. "I'll take Fideo, pick one up later this morning when he's awake."

The single most predictable thing about the kid; he'd always protect El.

Sands tipped his head, smiled slightly beneath the glasses. "I thought you'd make more of a fuss about him running out on you."

"Figured it was coming." Lorenzo spoke neutral and unruffled. "He'd have vanished right after if he'd been able to." He walked on up the stairs past Sands, rattling plastic at him deliberately. "Get your ass inside. I don't know about you, but I wanna eat while it's hot."

Sands turned his head to track him, let him get a few steps ahead before he straightened to follow.

He liked that flash of the practical that escaped sometimes from under all the kid's attitude. If it showed up more often, he might actually be useful.

Breakfast was just the three of them, like most days. The sound of a shower came mid-morning, after Fideo had slept off last night's liquor, and he eventually oozed through the connecting door as close to sober as he would ever get.

The kid must have been thinking on the same lines, didn't even give the dipso the chance to flop into a chair. "Hey, if you're finally up, grab yourself a coffee and let's get on. I'm gonna go rent a car for El, I need you to bring the Nissan back."

"Hey yourself, Lori, give a guy a chance to wake up, won't you?" Fideo protested, instant and inevitable.

El shifted alongside Sands, head turning his way. "Time to go?"

Sands could almost hear Lorenzo lock rigid across the room.

"He didn't bother to fill you in on that part, huh?" The kid's words were thick with the suspicion that had been mostly absent the last few weeks. It really didn't take so much to bring it back.

"Sands knows when we need to move on," El said simply. "My own history with those choices isn't so good."

"You let him decide, every time, and you just follow along?" the brat demanded, high and sharp.

El only shrugged. "I have no home now. It doesn't matter so much where we go, when we go."

"Doesn't matter a thing, so long as you let us know where we can reach you when you get there, right, El?" Fideo asked cheerfully.

"Right," El said, smiling soft.

The kid actually stayed quiet that time and let the drunk's assessment hold.

The sidekicks headed out some thirty minutes later, turning up again around noon with a mid-sized Chrysler. It still smelled new inside, all thick plastic and cleaner. It probably screamed 'rental' from three blocks distant, but it was all they were going to get outside of having the kid lift another vehicle, and Sands didn't want to leave a stolen ride at the airport either.

There wasn't much to pack. They were still living the El Mariachi Mexico lifestyle, and pretty much the only things not in bags already were the clothes they were wearing.

El wasn't in an ideal state to be hauling luggage around yet, however much he might have protested it, and Fideo had settled in with his delayed morning bottle, so it was easy enough for Sands to arrange to be loading bags into the trunk alongside the kid. And from there to take him by the arm and steer him into the alleyway by the trash out back.

"What's going on?" The kid was asking questions, but he hadn't resisted the walk. A few weeks back he would have screeched the length of the street if Sands had tried to drag him off somewhere.

Sands reached into his pocket and held out a piece of paper he'd printed off from the laptop earlier. "This is a name and an address. You call the number before you go, and you tell him Stamford sent you. You do as the nice man says, and he'll get passports for you and the dipso, and then you leave. You do not go back to your place in Acapulco, or his, or anywhere else in this pox-pitted country. Got it?"

"What the fuck are you on about?" Lorenzo was confused, but he wasn't pissed about Sands handing out orders. Not yet anyways. "We're good here, we fixed everything."

"You haven't fixed a goddamn thing," Sands told him, flat. "You're screwed, both of you, you just haven't admitted it yet. Somebody already worked it out, connected the cookie crumb trail from you to him." He quirked his lip at one edge. "Do you think that's going to go away, the rumour that just lies down and dies peacefully one day like a convenient old grandma?"

"Who's gonna tell it?" Lorenzo said with a snort. "We killed the bastards."

"That approach never worked out so well for El," Sands reminded him. "And actually it went worse, for you. The only car we planned to leave on site was the one you lifted that morning, but you ended up ditching the Chevy in the killing fields too. All those weeks of driving it around - can you be sure you didn't leave any prints on it?"

"Who the fuck cares? The cops got no prints of mine, or Fideo's." The brat's trademark arrogance was swelling up to the high tide mark.

"Well, they do now, and right alongside some nice full sets of El Mariachi's." Sands let the first layer of smile slide over his face. "It really wouldn't be a good idea for you to be picked up and questioned about an unpaid parking ticket, not any more."

"So you're saying we gotta be careful." Some of the attitude was peeling away into resignation. "Okay, we can lay low a while, no problem."

The kid still wasn't bothering to read ahead. He had a set of wilful blinkers big enough for the goddamn Trojan horse.

Well, Sands was more than happy to enlighten him. "I'm telling you to take him" – gesturing up and back in the direction of the hotel room – "and get your asses the fuck out of this country and don't come back. I can recommend Caracas, though personally I don't give a fuck where you go, just as long as it's nowhere near me." His smile crept wider, and harder, thin curve of lip drawn across a face held deliberately flat. "And if you want to stay healthy, make sure you don't go calling El either."

"Fuck you!" Sands had that angle nicely covered, but he had to admire the kid's attitude, just a little. Most of the people who weren't too scared to get up in his face were just too stupid to see. "You can't threaten me, and you know it. You lay a finger on me, or Fideo, and El's gonna dropkick your ass hard off of the nearest cliff."

Sands didn't doubt it. El Mariachi had created himself as a mechanism for revenge, and he was good at it - there were tripwires in him Sands didn't ever plan to touch on. But the best part was that he never had to.

He stretched his lips slow, all the teeth in the tone instead of the smile. "I don't have to do a thing. It's amazing how rumours can get around, how the right words can go skipping along a predictable trail until they find themselves in the right ears. A passing comment made to one particular guy out of a thousand, and suddenly you find it's everywhere."

"I could do the same favour for you," Lorenzo snapped.

"But you won't." Sands said, relaxed and entirely confident. "Because anybody who comes to find me finds him too."

"And you're in deep enough you won't risk him finding out you set us up." The bite ran deep and satisfied through the kid's words. "So I guess we've got ourselves a stalemate."

The kid took a while to get going, but once his nose was pointed the right way, he could add a few things up on his own. Sands had figured as much if El considered him worth the time. "A genuine Mexican stand-off," he agreed. "But there's a little extra something you might want to take into consideration." He lowered his voice, speaking soft through his smile, still tacked wide. "If you suck him into any more of your ten cent troubles and get him killed, I can promise it won't come quick or easy for you."

He'd expected the threat to bring him more of the kid's whiplash self-righteous fury, but instead he got pure stillness. Stillness and words that came slow, thickened with curiosity. "And you think that means you get to start laying down orders on us, huh?"

"Think of it more as some strongly-felt advice. Telling you to get out of Mexico, that's for your own health." Sands smiled wide and bright beneath tilted eyebrows. "The El part, well, that's all about your health too."

"We're supposed to just up and leave our homes and our country because you say so?"

This conversation wasn't actually getting Sands anywhere, the brat tossing back the same protest every time, wrapped up in new packaging. The stubbornness the kid had obviously learned from El - pity he hadn't picked up on the sense too.

Time to change tack a little, before the stench of rotting food trapped in this alleyway finally made him gag. "Have you noticed anything about El during this little sojourn? Would you say he seems, maybe, a bit more relaxed than the last time you saw him?"

"Last time we saw him, he'd been drugged, kidnapped and gotten the shit kicked out of him because of some old friends of yours."

Well, that part was kind of hard to deny. Sands shrugged. "So go back further, the time before. I'll leave you to decide if any changes are down to the influence of my personal charm, or just getting clear of this piss-pot you live in."

"It works for El," Lorenzo admitted. His tone hardened again. "Doesn't mean it would work for us."

"But you'll do it anyway," Sands said flat, entirely confident now that he'd steered them onto a path the kid couldn't just argue away. "There are just too many good reasons to give a vacation a try out, and not enough good ones to stay."

The kid was eyeing him again through the pause, almost thoughtful. "And if we do, if we go, like you say, what are you getting out of it? You don't give a fuck what happens to us."

"With you gone, there's no reason left for El to ever want to come back to this putrid goat's colon of a country where everybody wants us dead," Sands said simply. It never did any harm to give an extra little push on those El-protective instincts the kid clung to so fiercely.

Movement, fast, and too close, movement flashing his way, but the kid was no threat to him, and Sands held himself still and almost casual as the paper was snatched from his hand. "We'll think about it," the kid said, brushing past Sands to head out of the alley in long, even strides.

Sands aimed a crooked smile at his back. "Are you going to go trotting off now and tell El all about this little chat?"

The kid paused, swivelled on his heel. "Why would I? You'd only deny it," he said in disgust.

Sands raised an eyebrow at him. "What would be the point in that?"

"You'd twist it all around so he wouldn't know whose take was real."

The kid said it like it was so very obvious, and Sands didn't bother to hold back the laugh. "He really won't appreciate you treating him like an idiot."

The kid paused before he answered, suspicion thick in his voice. "You're saying he doesn't trust you."

"He trusts me," Sands said easily. "He also knows me. Apparently the two aren't mutually exclusive."

"You really don't care if I tell him what a fuckcase you are."

Sands shrugged. "You're the only one who'd learn anything from it. He knows who I am - it hasn't made a difference by now, and it isn't going to."

"You saying he knew you'd pull this shit when he brought you?" Most of the anger flash had fizzled out of the kid now, and what was left was raw curiosity.

"Somehow I doubt he gave it any thought, occupied as he was with feeling guilty. But he won't be surprised when you fill him in."

"Then I guess there's still no point in me bothering, huh?" The kid took a few steps back towards the car, then stopped, turning to face Sands again. "You knew it was pointless, all of it, the whole time. So why the fuck did you play along instead of just saying it?"

Sands aimed him a bright flash of teeth. "Because it wasn't pointless, of course." He dialled it back to a quirk at the corner and raised his eyebrows. "Oh, it was pointless for you, tossing and twisting on the end of the line, desperately trying to get away from the inevitable, to get back to your nice house and cosy little lifestyle." He leaned in a touch closer, the extra emphasis for his words. "But El's repaid the debt now, gotten that last niggling obligation out of his system. The next time you might call him up and recite some pathetic tale of woe, it shouldn't be too hard to persuade him he can protect you better by staying away."

That got him the quick, light feet and Lorenzo spitting right up in his face again. "You little fuck, you think you can piss with his head and keep him away from us?"

Sands stayed relaxed, unfazed, holding that faint tail of a smile. "It's what he thinks anyway, you accused him of it yourself. I'm just going to encourage it a little, that's all."

"And you'd do all this, fix the whole thing, send El out to get shot at, just so's you could get an angle on him."

Sands spent considerable time and effort on cultivating an image, and it was always good to know the image held, but the kid had been in the picture long enough that he really ought to know better. "El would have done what he did whether I signed off on it or not. It's easier to play along when it happens to get us both what we want."

"And what about when it doesn't?" Lorenzo asked, quiet now, all the aggression sucked back. "Have you even figured out which one of you's gonna get screwed the hardest when you decide you want different things?"

The kid turned again, heading back out of the alley towards the car, and this time Sands had no intention of stopping him.

It was an interesting final shot the kid had chosen to leave him with. The brat might actually have managed to learn a few things from him over the last months. Though he still had a hell of a long way to go if he thought anything he said was going to rattle Sands, instead of just amusing him.

Sands waited just a few more moments before he started walking to follow the kid back inside, only too happy to leave the alley alone with its trash.

The kid didn't say anything more to Sands as they loaded the last of the bags, and he joined in the routine mariachi chatter brightly enough back in the room. He tagged along when they went out to the car, El walking almost normal now, just something barely slow in the rhythm of his boots in Sands' head.

The dipso stayed inside, too soaked already to leave the armchair.

Sands settled into the passenger seat, into shaped foam curling up alongside his thighs, stretching his back along the curve of the rest. The car dipped and twitched as El slid in alongside him, the door closing with a low thunk. Soft whirr of a motor as El's window rolled down, and Sands was still feeling the panels for the controls to his own, the car hot and airless from the noon sun.

The kid leaned in, propping an elbow on the driver's sill. "Hey, El. You do know what you're doin', right?"

"Don't I always?" El smiled.

"No, you don't, you goddamn nut-job, look at the image you went and landed yourself with." The kid was rolling his eyes again. "That could do with a major fucking overhaul."

"I know what I'm doing." This time El's tone was taking the kid and question seriously. "Are you happy now?"

"As I'm ever gonna be, I guess." The kid backed off a little, straightening. "Take care of yourself, okay?"

He offered no aspirations for Sands' welfare, or any acknowledgement of his existence at all, but that suited Sands just fine.

"I will." El started the engine in a fine healthy purr of new mechanicals that Sands hadn't experienced in a while, and then they were moving away into the growing traffic growl.

The breeze from the window circled through the car, tugging strands of hair to tickle light along his cheek and chin. It brought with it the stench of fumes and dirt and pollution, the rumble and chatter of a city with too many people going about their mundane and pointless little lives, and Sands sucked it all in, let it dissolve into white noise through his head, because he was getting out and he wasn't ever coming back.

He was getting out of goddamn bitch-fucking Mexico. And this time he was doing it before the cunt-licker shoved him face down in the dirt to eat her dust.

El's hands moved over the wheel, fingers reaching to flick the turn signals, a constant low background of shifting sound alongside.

They were out, and they were getting the hell away, but Sands didn't believe for a second that his warnings would keep the brat from poking at El again. And he wanted to know what El's reaction was going to be. Oh, Sands would set his plans in place, responses styled to work around the various contingencies, but a little advance warning was never unwelcome.

El had said the sidekicks wouldn't be there when he died, and implied that Sands would be, and that seemed a reasonably flat statement of intent right there. But El had been known to change his mind a whole lot of times about a whole lot of things, Sands himself notably included. If Sands didn't know the details of exactly why El stayed around, he wasn't in any position to make sure those reasons didn't wander off along the way.

He waited till El had navigated his way through the Mexico maze, waited till the traffic moved thick in lanes either side, the arterial headed around the city taking them right to the airport. He really wouldn't want to get lost and miss the day's flights.

He reached inside his jacket for the pack of smokes in his pocket, slid a thumbnail under the edge of plastic wrapper. "So tell me, El, what is it you want?"

El's head swung his way, slow and curious. "How do you mean?"

"Well, if a guy's gonna go after what he wants, he's got to know what that is." The best way to get an answer from El was to keep it simple, impossible to misinterpret. "So what do you want now? Really want?"

There was an instant before he answered when El stilled, breathless, and Sands already suspected the question was a mistake. "Someone asked me that once before." The words came flat and empty. "I answered 'freedom'. I found out later that answer was wrong."

That someone just had to have been the wife. Everything always came back to her with the Mariachi. Oh, well, he'd already trailed his footprints all through the wet cement; no reason not to get his answers now or he'd just turned El all moody on him for nothing.

Sands shook a cigarette from the pack for himself, offered the rest in El's direction. "So what's the right answer?"

El shrugged, ignoring the carton. "There isn't one. What I wanted is gone, and now I don't want what I should."

Sands slid the pack back away into his pocket. "I didn't ask what you should want, I asked what you do."

He didn't get why El had to make a big, protracted drama out of it. Christ, it couldn't be that fucking hard. Sands would have had his answer inside a nanosecond, the one thing he wanted from his future more than anything.

He didn't want to be tied down and tortured. He didn't want anybody slicing into any part of him, or scraping anything out of him, not unless it was in a hospital under full anaesthetic, and preferably not even then. And he wanted his teeth to last him too, because he wasn't sure he could ever sit in a dentist's waiting room and listen to that sound through the walls and make himself walk towards it. More likely he'd be groping and stumbling his way past the door jamb to heave his stomach into the gutter.

If he had to couch it in terms of what he wanted instead of what he didn't, he wanted to win. Every single round, not just the long game.

Maybe that's what El wanted too. He'd fucked up and Carolina and the kid had died - maybe El needed to win.

It could explain why he'd stayed with Sands. The brat hadn't swallowed that El being miserably lonely was enough to swing it, and well, he was probably a better judge of the impact of that kind of emotional wallowing than Sands. It would cover a whole chunk of it - an appreciation of how their areas of skill intersected and complemented, El's smooth, purely instinctual method of assessing, of fighting, and his own slower, cooler, more logical application of triggers and consequences.

Sands drew smoke into his body, deep and drowsy, let it trickle cooling between his lips while he waited for his answer.

El flicked the turn signal, a soft clicking behind the engine's purr through the change of lane. "I don't want anything." There was no maudlin self-pity in it, just a statement flat and bare.

'I don't want anything I don't already have.'

That was the same crock of camel shit El had dined out on while he'd been hiding away in guilt-fuelled hermit mode, and it was even less helpful to Sands now. It was kind of tricky to offer a man what he wanted when the guy himself didn't seem to have the first fucking clue.

On the other hand, if El couldn't manage to rustle himself up a goal worth pursuing, well, he wasn't going to go wandering off to chase it, was he?

It was still there in Sands' head, the sentence he'd laid down earlier, confident and natural. It hasn't made a difference by now, and it isn't going to.

He hadn't just been feeding out a line to the kid, he'd believed it.

Sands had a number of different reasons why he trusted El not to kill him, why he trusted the man to watch his back and stop him screwing up if he ever looked like he was losing it. Solid reasons based on fact, on logical assessment and precedent. It pissed him off that he didn't have any concrete reasons to trust El not to ditch him, but it didn't change the fact that he did.

Maybe assuming wasn't so bad a thing, not so long as he was right.

Sands rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it out through the strip of window half-smoked. The whistle of air droned past his ear, monotonous, unchanging.

El was almost still beside him, as still as he ever was, pushing into Sands' awareness as breath and presence and the soft skim of hands over the wheel.

Sands stretched his feet further into the footwell, wriggled his ass down into the seat. Resisted the urge to turn and study with more than peripheral senses, to watch with eyes he didn't have.

Even if he was right, assuming it just wasn't very satisfying.

He found himself wondering absently what the brat's take on El's attachment to Sands would have been. Though the kid's verdicts had already shown themselves to be laughably unsound, and El's own angle on it would be much more interesting to tease out. It was one way to enliven a dull drive.

The subtle plays didn't work too well with El, and most of the time it wasn't because he didn't see them, he just chose to ignore them. The easiest way for Sands to get his answers was to trap him with bluntness - that way, if El wanted to be evasive he still would, but at least he had to be obvious about it.

Sands turned now to face El, twisting in his seat to hold himself there without cramping up his neck, still and silent and entirely focussed.

He weighed the pause, shaped the words out careful with suitable dramatic weight. "You know, the kid thinks I actually love you." He let his fingers roll slow over the denim stretched tight across his thigh. "I've been wondering if he might be right."

El flicked his head briefly Sands' way. "Good." His amusement burned through the word.

"Good?" Sands would have expected pretty much any reaction but that one. It really didn't seem to follow on too well from what should have been a heart-felt, life-in-hands kind of statement. "That's it?"

El shrugged, the standard quick rustle. "If you need to think about it, that's close enough. It doesn't matter so much if you decide in the end you do or you don't."

Sands stilled his fingers in his lap, stretched his lips into a taut line of smile. "For a guy who thinks it's such a good thing, it's noticeable how you're in no hurry to reciprocate."

"It's not what I felt for Carolina, but that doesn't matter either." El's words were quieter this time, no trace of his humour left, but they still flowed simple, instant, with no space for thought.

Sands tipped his head, curious, and decided to keep right on pressing. It wouldn't be any fun at all to stop now. "What if I think it does?"

El's head jerked back his way, fast. "Do you want me to cuddle with you on the sofa, call you 'darling'? You told me once that you weren't my wife, and that still seems to be true."

The brush of anger and bitterness through it was interesting – El didn't get annoyed by questions he didn't like, only those that really poked at a nerve, that he couldn't or wouldn't answer.

"El, if you didn't have that part soaked right the way through your skull, I wouldn't have stuck around too long."

"I know." This time it really did seem like the end of the conversation, but Sands could live with that. It wasn't the first thing El had refused to tell him, and that was just El.

He hadn't expected anything from the answer anyway – it would take a particularly self-deluding kind of idiot to fall for a sociopath, and for all his romantic streak, El wasn’t, on the whole, an idiot. Sands could entertain himself by keeping right on guessing.

Except El's attention wasn't back on the road. His breathing was a little too deep and deliberate to be natural, and the edge of it warmed the air faint at Sands' ear, El's head still half-turned his way as he watched him.

Sands could be patient enough when he needed to, and he could out-wait El any day. He wriggled himself a little deeper into the curves of his seat, dropped his head back to lean against the rest, his own breath flowing light and even.

He was beginning to wish he'd closed his window before he started this. The December breeze sweeping past his neck was getting chilly at this speed, even if it did stop him choking on the new car plastic and polish.

El turned his head away, eyes locked straight onto the road before he spoke. "I'll do anything that's needed to keep you here. That wouldn't be any different if I was in love with you."

Sands held his posture draped back into the seat, but his fingers curled tight to bite through the denim into his thigh.

From an obsessive like El, that was pretty much the heaviest statement on the shelf, and it came without even a high school diploma in the way of qualification.

So that's what El wanted over everything - he didn't want anybody else dying at his feet. It slotted in nicely alongside the whole guilt thing he'd spouted for Little Lori that first night in Acapulco.

It also brought along a whole other set of issues.

Sands had known for more than a year now that he'd hauled himself into the top few spots on El's priority list, and it might have been nice to have it confirmed he was standing on the peak so he could relax and take in the view. But it wasn't, not with that line.

In a twisted kind of a way, El had just handed Sands responsibility for his life. It wasn't something he wanted, not beyond the standard making sure no dip-fucker got close enough to shoot either one of them anyway. Not to mention, there was something faintly unwelcome about the wording - that 'keep you here' instead of a maybe more understandable 'keep you alive'.

If Sands ever decided he was bored with El's company, he was gone, and the mariachi didn't get a fucking say.

Admittedly, it was looking unlikely he'd be making that call in any future he could see coming.

The aim of this whole play had been to make damn sure El never got any thoughts about heading off without him. Sands hadn't weighed in the possibility that there might be such a thing as it working too well. He probably should have, knowing his own talent for it, and dealing with a guy whose tendencies leaned just a teensy bit off to the obsessive side of normal.

Right now, it fitted in with Sands' own plans too well for him to get overly pissed about it. And Sands didn't have any aspirations to drop dead at anybody's feet either, so hey, that part worked for him too.

It was looking more and more like this arrangement was set till one of them finally took that inevitable bullet to the brain - or possibly both of them, since Sands wasn't entirely illusionary about his own chances of dealing with someone who could get through El. Clearing out of Mexico didn't change the ending, only delayed it.

But for now, the delay seemed to be working out nicely.

The car hummed low, wind around his ears and pavement under the wheels washing over the steady note of the engine. Sands reached forward to the centre console, finding and fiddling with the radio controls, skimming through stations till he found one that played something more like classic rock than classic Mexican. He settled back into his seat, fingers tapping soft and lazy over his thigh. The traffic was getting heavier this close to the airport, and he left the window open as the car slowed.

El's fingers were moving too, rhythmic on the plastic of the steering wheel, a low hum on his breath following the music, then taking it and twisting around it, adding layers under the melody. When Sands was working on a problem, that kind of shit pissed him off, but right now he was happy to lose his head in the swarm of sounds around him, let the time pass in a semi-doze, drifting him closer to a friendly jet and the airspace of some country that wasn't goddamn Mexico.

The car braked, almost hard, the traffic locking up around them, and the background staccato of El's fingers stopped with it. "So what time is our flight?"

Sands stirred himself in his seat, stretching deliberately and flexing his ankles. "Well, that depends. We're not going back to Bolivia. Not yet."

"Why not?" No suspicion, no protest from El, not ever, just simple curiosity. Sands could work with that.

"I feel like I could use a vacation." Sands needed El fast, flawless and unshakeable before they went near La Paz. It was a notable disadvantage to the bodyguard angle that people wouldn't always appreciate quite how much damaging El would piss Sands off. Any hint of a weakness might just encourage somebody with ambitions to have a go at taking him out - sometimes image really was everything. "Any thoughts on where you want to go?"

Sands had the right hair and should be carrying a good perma-tan by now - when they changed papers again, he might claim himself a Hispanic parent and make them cousins.

Rising notes of engines from ahead and around, and the car moved off again, slow, the hold-up brief. "I haven't seen the sea in a long time," El said softly. "Not as it should be, to stand and watch the waves."

Not since before Culiacán two years ago, for both of them. Their last coastal visits hadn't exactly been about relaxation.

Sands wasn't going to be seeing the sea either way, but he'd always liked the ocean - maybe now would be a good time to take that delayed trip to Brazil, but El didn't speak Portuguese. Belize had good beaches and a good rep, but was just a bit too friendly with the UK, and by connection the US.

"Perfect. I believe Cuba's got a nice climate this time of year." Neither of them would be stripping down much on a public beach, too many nice round bullet scars advertising exactly what they were, but he liked the scents and touch of it, foam breaking warm across his ankles, salt and seaweed heavy in the breeze over skin and sweat. A few more weeks would get El back close enough to full action, before Sands had time to tire of the inactivity.

"Can you go to Cuba?" El asked, curious.

"I can go anywhere I like," Sands answered with a smile. "It just means a little more paperwork, that's all."

"Cuba sounds good," El said. "Do we have a flight to make?"

They would have missed the day's direct flights, but Sands preferred to route his departures from Mexico through a third country anyway. And contrary to El's perceptions, he didn't carry the entire schedule for every airline in his head, just a few pertinent destinations. "Not particularly. We could go through a few different cities, stay overnight." He'd get more details on those at the airport. Anyplace that wasn't in Mexico.

The air bled past his nose, heavy with scents of gasoline and pollution and world, the car swaying and dipping beneath him, the soft sounds and movements of El a constant slide into his head. It felt like three fucking decades since it had been like this, without the Ghosts of Sidekicks Present perched in the background, waiting to intrude on a good day.

This little trip was getting pretty close to just how Sands would want it. Apart from the bit where El was scarred and stiff and healing, of course, that didn't have much of a place in Sands' plans.

Sands wasn't one of those guys whose entire pathetic existence seemed to focus on their next chance at getting laid, but he did enjoy it from time to time.

Sex for Sands hadn't often been about the sex, not since he was in high school and barely even then. It had been about access, about control, about watching and pushing and finding the easiest way to take what he wanted. And hey, that was fun in a special way all its own.

But sometimes, when the exhaustion pricked at the edges, when the rats scampered and sniffed in endlessly pattering feet through his head, sometimes it was good to drown out the press of thought in the sheer physicality of the act, and the body alongside him, and that particular take on sex was now an El exclusive.

They'd traded blow jobs a couple of times the last week, nothing energetic to strain the still-healing muscle beneath the sealed, raised scar under El's ribs. Sands wasn't generally inclined to object to getting his cock sucked, but variety was a useful herb for the soup, and something a little more flexible in all senses of the word was starting to appeal.

He still had images of Foreman flicking through his head, the round neck of a baby doll Tee curving past her collarbones and clinging over the rack up front. Alice and Sophie too, a dozen others, some names he couldn't remember, just the weight and swelling shape of a tit beneath his grip, beneath his lips. Christ, even that evil witchbitch of Barillo's was there in his head, because she'd been a seriously hot piece of cunt as well as a twisted, double-crossing sadist - and he wanted it, wanted them, because fucking El was good, but it wasn't the same sensations, and the little differences really added life's cardamoms to the curry. Not that it was ever going to happen when he was just too fucking strung-out wary to appreciate a good screw even if he didn't get a needle in the neck and –

And he wondered if El would do it.

Given their current living arrangements, it might be something of a stretch to say El was straight, but he would have lived any near-normal life without ever thinking about dicks that weren't his own. It had taken a particularly twisted combination of grief, guilt and isolation to drive him to a man, though prison would probably have worked well enough too.

El had to want it, just the same way Sands did, and he didn't have much left in the way of Catholic hang-ups, if they'd ever really gotten a hold. Hell, he'd fucked his wife the day he met her - marrying her had been the afterthought some lengthy time later.

El's instincts as a double-check on Sands' judgement, the back-up against the knife blade, the counterweight to the it's-not-paranoia-when-they-really-are-out-there – it would work that way. El seemed to make the better choices overall when it came to sweet pieces of ass, though Sands didn't need a woman who'd get herself shot full of holes for him, just one who wouldn't sit back and laugh while some fucker drilled his eyes out.

He could make it work. He could make anything work. Especially when El already wanted to be persuaded.

Sands rearranged himself angled on the seat, elbow on the door and head tipped against the rest, casually braced for the car's twitch, the slight jerk on the wheel. Waited for the lack of movement, the stillness after motion to grab at El's awareness. Waited for the curiosity, the shift of El's head his way before he let the smile creep out slow.

"So tell me, El, have you ever gotten yourself in on a three-way?"

The end

Home page