Frayed

Tiggy Malvern

Following on from 'Wires' and 'Strung'. Enormous thanks to my beta, Ms Anon.

Awake.

He was awake, and somewhere in the back of his head was the dull throb that said it hadn't been anything like long enough, somewhere lost under the shrieking of his senses, and for all that screaming, everything was almost barren when he reached for it –

Heat soft over his neck, heat in a pattern with air, slow and steady; and he was listening still, checking, pillow scratching over his hand and gun smooth-ridged under his fingers, but the static all dropped out of his head, leaving just the expected, and the nothing that was night instead of threat.

Whatever had dragged him awake again, it hadn't bothered El.

He had no idea what the hell kind of senses the Mariachi had rigged up as alarms, but if it was all about to go screwy, El usually knew about it right before.

His hand stayed curled on the grip, thumb over the safety.

The hotel had the early hours quiet; no voices or TV babblings through the walls, no footsteps echoing up the concrete stairwell or along the corridor. His breathing and El's breathing, not even a car from the street outside, everything dead in this piss-ant town. And it figured he should like that, knowing he could hear anything if it happened, but it was still creeping him out, every time, the world seeming so fucking empty.

He was starting to think maybe some things wouldn't ever quit.

The one thing there, the one thing he could sense besides himself, changed, each breath sliced shorter, blunter instead of fading through into the next. "Go back to sleep," El muttered, accent thickened and drowsy, words warm past his neck before El rolled away in a rustle of shirt and sheet and stilled back down to just the movement of air.

'Go back to sleep.' Right. Good plan, and easy as taking a piss for a goddamn mariachi who settled back and slept in the car down a fucking forest track when he had to. Sands liked sounds, but he liked ones he knew and could predict, not some fucking animal snuffling round, all sneaking and furtive. Especially when most of the time sneaking and furtive meant some dickless bastard was gonna start shooting at him any second.

Not that he was entirely averse to a little mayhem, but he'd always been more a behind-the-scenes guy than the full-frontal-assault kind, only the bugfuckers they played .38 tag with these days weren't too big on respecting the distinction. He had a more limited range of lifestyle options than he used to, it was true, and this one was still a whole flight of stairs up on the Mexican peasant idyll, but the fighting and the running and the never staying one place long enough to have a motherfucking clue where he was started to grate him like he was mozzarella after a couple of months. El might be the fucking automaton - just wind him up and let him run, oh but look out while you're priming, 'cos one tug on the wrong wire and he'll go up right in your face - but Sands was thinking he'd like to maybe get a through night's sleep more than one in four.

So Paraguay-stroke-Bolivia-stroke-wherever-the-fuck-wasn't-Mexico was right back on the top of the Sheldon list, but he wasn't deluded enough to think it would be entirely that easy. The shit-shovellers had some interesting cross-border tentacles, true international businessmen that they were, and some even longer memories - just ask dear El about that one - and the Company cunt-suckers would keep one sleepy eye all over the Americas.

El didn't know it yet, but he was coming along too.

He'd pried the guilt-steeped dickbrain out of the Happy Jesus-Freak Guitar Hovel and the rigor-mortised finger-hooks of a wife who wasn't gonna be anybody's nomination for sainthood, with the knife-rack and the tendency to shoot her exes. It was really no surprise El had gone for her - hell, she sounded like someone Sands might have enjoyed passing some time with himself - but bodies rotted just fine without babysitters.

With the Bride of Satan down, it should only take a bit more effort to kick Lucifer out of Hell and into some country that, if just as backward and shitwit screwy, at least didn't have it in for him personally.

And maybe sleeping could take a step down for now in favour of working through the potentials.

All it would need - all anything ever needed - was the right angle to push from.

He lost track of the days, and he sure as hell lost track of the bars.

They seemed to spend half their time in fucking bars, always ordering the booze and never drinking it. The bars were all the type of dives where the floors didn't get washed too often, sticking to his shoes and making him wonder what the fuck he was walking in. And they all had shitty music, and sometimes even shittier musicians.

Thank Christ for the smokes, at least. He made a point of lighting up at the door, leaving it hanging from his lip so his hands stayed free.

This one was pretty empty this early - not that it was a likely place to ever get lively, given the town they were in had two streets worth so much as a dog turd. A couple of conversations were going on down at table level as they walked in, and another higher with the clink of glasses - barstools up ahead.

Casual bang of a door to one side and fast flow of air with it, footsteps across in front and a squeak-scrape of chair. Restrooms off to his left, then. If he needed to take a leak, he'd only have to follow the stink, that so-revealing combination of bleach and badly-aimed piss.

Fuck, he'd have to be desperate before he'd use the facilities. Bad enough not knowing what was underfoot out here.

He followed El on past the bar, through another door into a smaller room, this one empty unless someone was deliberately keeping quiet. El brushed up against something, and Sands pulled the chair back a foot to sit in it, table right there to prop his elbow on as he scraped forwards again.

"Here." El pushed something glass-heavy across the table towards him, and he flicked his cigarette into the ashtray, his T-shirt dragging damp with his arm beneath his jacket. El wandered back off bar-wards to buy the usual prop drinks, and Sands tracked him half-aware through the other sounds. Knowing exactly where El was every second of every day was a fast-settled habit.

A couple of fans hummed lazily overhead, the slow shift of air something of a loser drawn against the July heat.

It could be worse. Back in Sinaloa right now, he'd be just as hot and with added humidity and regular showers of the involuntary kind.

He wondered just how much of a wash-out today was gonna turn out to be.

It was getting tougher to find reliable leaks, and they'd shifted operations to Baja and the Tijuana-run cartel Montejo had traded off with last winter. It had helped some, but he still wasn't holding out hope for much from the minor level dicktard they were meeting with. Of course it would have been easier to get quality info if they'd been offering quality incentives, but quite apart from the long term drawbacks of running through their resources too fast, they just couldn't afford to attract any more attention than they already were by adding 'guys who flash bags of cash' to their list of reasons for being talked about.

El came back fast - one benefit of a dead dive was a bored barman - and stuck a glass on the table in front of him, which he noted only so he wouldn't knock it over and coat himself in sticky booze fumes like some fucking bum.

El sat tapping at ninety degrees to him, fingernails quick and light on wood, irregular brush of fabric tied to the creak of his chair. Sands didn't like this sitting around any better, he just preferred not to take out the full page ad in Impact bold.

He wondered vaguely if they'd gotten here early or if the dipshit rat was showing up late.

Some of the sound dropped out too sharp - the low conversation from out front had hummed through the door, a constant background, and now it was gone. All he heard beyond the fans was traffic.

He leaned forward as he crushed his cigarette into the ashtray, keeping it low. "El?"

"Yeah." Nothing like a question, much more of an 'I know', and shit, but he'd kind of been hoping he was paranoid.

He knew he had a long-term fling thing going on with Paranoia, even with the Mariachi around. Not the kind of romance that was headed for marriage, just the regular dinner-and-a-quick-fuck type flirting that hung around, comfortable, till something better came along. He didn't like to think of it turning serious on him while he tried guarding his own back twenty-five-seven, which was another reason to keep El all bundled up with his South American plans. He liked the relationship he had worked out with Reality right now, thank you so much, and he didn't plan on throwing her over for any interloper. And, hey, a permanent room-share with Paranoia might just interfere some with that sleeping plan he had lined up.

"Exits?" he asked, because it was nice to know, even if he was kind of neutral on the answer.

"No."

Only the one way out, but only the one way in for the bastardfuckers too, and he already had a gun on that door.

Footsteps heading away, main door opening in a rush of traffic noise, falling back again with the slam. More feet, and a different door.

Two guns on the door now, and both out from under the table. Fuck subtlety at this point, no-one else was gonna be playing it that way. El's guns had already clicked down into his hands.

He'd be a lot happier up against the wall, reduce the line of fire from that door when it opened, but it might be a bit late now for that. He pushed his chair back a foot, wood squeaking harsh.

"Table," El said.

Not exactly the most promising suggestion he'd ever heard. "Is that the best you can do?"

"Unless you have better."

Footsteps right outside the door, and if that was somebody's idea of stealthy they'd skipped a few classes in hired goon ed. He put a burst of automatic rounds straight through it, because it had sounded just as cheap as everything else in this dive. Drawn-out silencer thrum brawling with a chipboard explosion in his head, low thump when he stopped and a "Shit" from further away.

He smiled. Nice.

But there were more feet already right there, and the door was kicked open to slam back against the wall. El shoved the table forwards and over in a high crash and shattering of glass, Sands dropping down behind the sound. Short bounce and rattling roll as it hit, and the light, wobbling feel of it under his elbows had told him it was a heap of laminate shit that would be even less protection than that fucking door, but it stopped him being sighted direct as he flattened himself and fired round at the doorway. El's crouched movements and gunfire were right alongside him, and he emptied the rest of the M11's clip in a weave between the doorframes, reloading fast as El took the more controlled shots.

"Go." El's voice low at his ear; El bounced and rolled off forward and out into the main bar in a barrage of two-way gunfire, Sands on his heels and shooting high over him as far as the door, then flattening back against the wall.

El hated feeling cornered, liked room to move when he fought, and it had the added benefit of splitting the forces coming after them. Most of them would go after the obvious moving target, which was just fine with Sands. Knowing next to fuck all about the layout of the place, he was staying right where he was with only the one door to worry about.

El was clear now, off across the room, so Sands stuck his semi round the door-post and took out a few of the stupid fucks too busy shooting at El to be paying attention to what was behind them. That brought some bullet-whistling attention back his way fast, and he whipped his hand back in while his fingers were still attached.

The doorframe thudded and splintered alongside him, and he backed off along the wall, shooting the two noisy brainfucks who tried coming in after him. He stepped back into a chair that scraped high-pitched and too fucking obvious over tile, and he was still too close to the door, didn't like the angle they'd have on him. He kept both guns up, using his hip to guide him out and round the table and chairs by the wall, feeling backwards with his feet, cautious and slow.

The gunfire outside was more muted, feet thumping upwards somewhere above him - seemed like El had found the stairs. But there was still someone down here with him, shuffling and creeping not far from the door, trying to stay covered by the noise and almost making it. Sands stopped, held his breathing, tipped his head - listened as they came closer, edging along their own wall towards the doorway. Almost there - so close - and he opened fire across the door as they stepped in.

And the sound of it was all wrong, solid thunk of wood and wall, no satisfying wet squish and no change to the breathing, the breathing that was too fucking low, and the bastard had kept down, beneath the bullets –

His leg was gone from under him, and he was falling, falling away from the table into the room and who-the-fuck knew what, and he dragged both guns sideways as he fell, so much noise and he couldn't tell a damn thing that was happening as he sprayed bullets all round that fucking door. His shoulder smacked tile and his skull right after, no chance to brace for it, and he kept firing right at the door at the level he was sprawled at till both hands clicked empty.

Quick, scrabbling reload right where he lay, but he couldn't hear the breathing now, nothing close outside the high whistle of air down his nose and the ever-buzzing fans, and he dragged himself half-upright and oh, Christ, pain -–

It felt like his fucking leg had been blown off, and he stashed his semi and ripped a glove off with his teeth and ran his fingers down and oh, fuck, thank fuck, it was still there, if all a bit wet and –

And fuck, fuck, fucking Jesus, that fucking hurt, and he really shouldn't poke at that hole in him, 'cos he'd a feeling he'd be shrieking if he only had the fucking breath –

But he hadn't felt anything move that normally didn't, and he figured his bone was still all shaped the way he liked it.

Okay, okay, so it couldn't actually be that bad, right?

Right.

His finger-memory had gotten pretty good by now, one of those skills he could have lived just fine without ever knowing he had, thanks, and the hole above his knee wasn't too big, neat-edged - probably a nine mill, or a thirty-eight - and thank Christ he'd at least passed on the option of higher calibre, 'cos that could've really messed him up, like he wasn't already, and shit, there goes the calm, rational moment, thoughts breeding and squeaking in his brain like trapped mice, and –

Stop.

Breath was good. Air slow and heavy through him, all blood and powder stink.

Okay.

The gunfire rattle dragged on with the fast-thudding steps overhead, explosive shotgun double-blast ripping through and over everything. El was still around and taking the fuckers down, and that definitely counted as A Good Thing right now. He tuned down through the range, listening beneath for the low hiss of stressed breaths, shuffle-tap of cautious feet on hard floor, and got nothing. Count two on his side, and speaking of which....

He pulled the glove back on, tiles hard everywhere beneath his fingers, and otherwise the tips all coming up empty. Swap the gun over, check the other side - nothing within reach except a sticky corpse. He couldn't even find his shades, which had slithered off to parts unknown while he'd been paying more attention to the bullet in his leg and shooting the fucker who put it there.

He had no clue about wherever the hell he was except the vague impressions he'd gotten on the way in, which right now meant the door to the main bar a few feet ahead and to his left, the upended table a few feet to his right, and not much else.

That part could be better.

Sweat was bubbling over his skin, itching and dripping down towards his (eyes), and he swiped the cuff of his jacket across his forehead. Remembered when the smell of blood suddenly got stronger that he'd just been groping over his leg and that oozing corpse to his left.

Fucking perfect.

Sound stopped.

All of it, or almost, just the droning buzz of traffic on what passed for the main street at the end of the block; nothing at all now from upstairs, no guns, no feet.

He turned his head, reaching for anything through the intrusive, stretched quiet; finally found the steps, steady, careful.

"Sands?" El's voice carried low and cautious, and not too far from the door.

And here he was still sprawled all over the floor and nicely coated in the leaking stuff. Christ, he'd probably make a real good Prom Queen Carrie right about now.

If he was going to get to his feet, he'd want a wall. There was one of those going free right by the door, and he squirmed over onto hands and one knee, groping ahead of him, hoping the shattered glass from their table hadn't spread too far this way, because he could do without slicing up his sole functioning leg at this point. His left leg was dragging, a lump of screaming lead chained on tight, and hey, better that way than the other.

"Sands?"

Slight sounds in the doorway, and then the shift of air with no breath.

Staring silence with really fucking obvious eyes all over him, and his hand stroked the wall for something to grab that wasn't old, roughened plaster, probably that burnt orange Mexico was so hot on, as if half the goddamn country wasn't already hot and burned enough, and it'd be looking real pretty now with the new red hand-paint effect.

El was moving again, in the room and circling around him, and Sands gripped at the doorframe, pulling upwards while he brought his right foot forward and under him, but his left knee was forced down onto tile, pain shrieking up through him and air tight in his throat, and he froze, arms locked and holding, fingers squeezing tighter.

Bullet-splintered wood dug needle-sharp even through the glove.

"Fuck, that hurts," he said eventually, when he felt like he could breathe, not choke.

"Then don't get shot." Something vicious and angry there beneath the dry, and oh, thank you so goddamn much, El. He got that he fucked up, thanks, his leg was actually telling him that part too.

El moved close now, closer, breathing warm on him and touching, and then Sands was gasping and almost heaving as he was hauled the rest of the way upright, El pressing him to the wall and easing his shoulder up under his left arm. "Anybody would think you were new to this," El told him, words by his ear, low with heat, and still not exactly good-humoured.

"Last time, I got the drugs in and running up front. Apparently that makes a difference."

El took a step forwards, and Sands moved with him, pushing his leg out ahead against the pain, braced for more when he transferred weight to it. And there was more, Christ there was more, and his knee buckled, his fingers clutching and dragging at El's jacket as he lurched sideways onto him. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

He got his right leg back where it belonged, which for now seemed to be about under the middle of him, standing balanced with El only a light pressure against him. "Shit, it doesn't look that bad, right? I should still be able to fucking walk on it, right?" And his voice sounded almost okay, enough of the frustration in there to make it seem like there really wasn't a thread of panic weaving through it like a drunken frat party exodus, because he could deal with being blind, he could, he had, but he didn't know if he could deal with more, if his knee was fucked and he couldn't walk for months, and he was trapped –

El shrugged his shoulders up beneath his draped arm. "Sometimes the body over-rules you. It's nothing to do with how strong you are, it's just how it is."

El sounded normal again now, that dark, angry undertone gone. He sounded casual, unworried, and Sands decided he was going to believe that, because El should know more about gunshot wounds than just about anyone outside an ER, and believing it was a hell of a lot better than not.

"I hope you found the back door, because I don't feel like taking the tour out front." It wasn't even so much the horror freak show thing - if the locals could ignore that much gunfire, they could ignore a couple of blood-bathed guys who came staggering out afterwards just as well - but they'd parked the car round the back of the block and he wasn't planning on walking any further than he had to.

"I found it," El said. "Round the other side of the bar."

"So let's get going." Might as well get the worst of the pain part over with. It wasn't like it exactly went away when he was standing around.

El reached across him to his free hand, the one that wasn't wrapped around El. "Here." Light, familiar shape through the gloves. His shades. He flicked them open one-handed and put them on.

"Thanks." Nice to know El wasn't just being a complete asshole bastard while he was ignoring him dragging himself up off the floor.

They made their way back through the main bar, slow and uneven.

When he followed El, it all just worked, smooth and easy, placing his feet right where El had stepped, avoiding even the minor annoyance of small, loose stones. Forced to limp alongside him, it was a fucking disaster, and not just because his left leg bailed on him with less than a quarter of his weight.

They had to turn side on to get through doorways, Sands practically hopping, and lurching into El with every gritted-teeth excuse for a step. El didn't even have to say anything; Sands could feel him tense all alongside him, muscles locked and braced against him.

Walking forwards wasn't much better - slippy-squashy bodies and skittering guns and shattered wood waiting everywhere to trip him, and El was trying to steer him, but even Sands couldn't be sure where the fuck his feet were gonna end up as he stumbled his way past the bar, so no way in hell could El judge.

They shuffled their way along some narrow corridor behind the bar, Sands trying not to go crashing into either the wall or El and making a lousy job of both. Finally, air that didn't stink like a barbecue in an abattoir as they edged through the last door, the sun sledgehammer hot on him - one guess for an enclosed yard, all bare concrete and stucco.

El turned him and eased him back till he felt wall solid against him, and he sagged onto it, grateful.

"Wait here," El told him.

"Well, I'm not quite planning on taking a stroll."

El didn't say anything, just turned and jogged away, clinking and echoing footfalls.

The car couldn't be more than a block or so away, judging by the distances they'd walked to get round the front, but it still seemed to be a fucking age of standing and hearing nothing. Nobody out on the streets - big surprise there, the populace would keep themselves scarce till all the crazy bastards with guns were long gone. Still some cars moving around, though, just passing through, no clue what had been going on down a side street ten minutes before.

He was getting a serious case of déjà vu.

Major fucking pain. Check. Can't fucking walk. Check. Sweaty, sticky, wall baking him through his clothes and sun broiling him the other side. Check. Start of one vicious mother headache. Check. Seemed there wasn't a whole lot of difference there between smacking his skull on tiles or on stone.

(Mind-freezing, throat-choking horror, terror eating him through till every muscle shivered and cramped.)

No. Not even close, not now.

Drugs.

He fucking wished.

He carefully peeled off the gloves (remembering the blood this time, thank you, brain) before he fished out and lit himself a cigarette. Gun in one hand, smoke in the other, long, relaxed inhales as he listened, half his attention back on the door to the bar just in case, and while he could have used something stronger than nicotine, things could have been a hell of a lot worse.

The car was finally rattling its way along the street towards him, slowing alongside. Goddamn wreck really needed its tappets fixing.

Familiar sounds of doors and El, and then even more familiar hands brushing away the last of the unwanted flashbacks as he was shuffled and steered into the car seat. He thumbed the safety on his pistol, and pushed it in the glove compartment instead of risking the contortionist wriggle to get it back in its holster.

El had the back door open, and clicked up the guitar case lid behind him, distinct double latches. "Here," he said, dropping a cloth onto his shoulder. "Clean your face."

He worked his tongue round his dried out mouth, sucking on his cheeks till he could spit on it, and rubbed it all across his forehead, switched the cloth round and wiped over the rest of his face in case. He didn't have to look great, just pass a quick glance through the windscreen from cars coming the other way.

El was back in the car and groping round in the footwell by Sands' ankle. "Sit still. I'm going to cut the cloth away."

Yeah, he was gonna sit really fucking still, because he'd sliced his fingers finding one of the knives in that guitar case before he'd learned - El didn't piss around with knives any more than he did with guns, and if they were there, they were in perfect working order. A tug at his jeans, the smooth rip-sound of fabric sweeping up his leg, air flowing behind it over the sweat on his skin.

El stopped the cut at mid-thigh; a few seconds' silence as he looked, but he didn't start poking at the hole, thank Christ. Sands didn't want any more gunpowder adding to the mix of crap already in there.

"It will match the other leg quite well," El told him.

"Just two more for the full set, yeah. I think I'll pass on the subscription."

El dropped several things light and plastic-crinkly into his lap - dressing pads and bandages when he felt at them. "Bind it up for now. We'll deal with it properly later." El snapped the case closed and started the engine, pulling away while Sands unwrapped the dressings.

He'd really prefer not to touch it at all, especially not in a moving car, but they'd been hanging around too long already, and he could feel the slow ooze of blood over his skin both sides of his leg. He guessed a through shot had to be an improvement on having a bullet dug out of him, at least.

He couldn't remember much about the last time. He remembered getting shot, remembered those parts all too well considering, but not what came after - by the time the quack had doped him, combined with the leftovers of whatever the hell that bitch had shot him up with, it all got a lot hazier, if still a long way off any of his favourite trips.

He suspected he wasn't going to like this much.

Oh well.

Half his leg was throbbing at him in long, drawn out waves, a slo-mo Slinky kind of pain, forever tipping down the last couple of stairs. But even those waves had a focal point, and his fingers knew exactly where he'd found that hole in him, and he dropped a pad over it without touching. The out-hole was trickier, on the underside of his leg, and he had to press and hold the pad in place while he wrapped the bandage around one-handed; and that fired the pain right up, Slinky out of control hurtling down stairs too deep and steep, twisting sideways and falling....

It eased back some when he was done. Not as much as he'd like since he'd wrapped it tight, pressure to stop the bleeding. Back to throbbing, but with sharper points, yo-yo waveforms with a whiplash flick at the ends.

He figured he'd done as good a job as he could expect. He'd bandaged himself blind often enough before, but that had been with more space and in a room that wasn't moving. And with drugs. El was taking the corners steady, wide and sweeping, no sudden lurches, and that helped.

He fumbled El's pot of painkillers from the glove compartment, tipped two into his palm (right hand, since the left definitely had blood drying all across it and the right was only a maybe), swallowing one for that building headache - not likely to do much for the leg, but he might as well fix what he could - and holding the other out to El. Chains whispered instantly, and he let the capsule drop when El's fingers brushed dry beneath his.

"Thanks."

A couple of times early on he'd thought of pointing out that El didn't have to throw himself about quite so much and pull those lunatic stunts if it fucked him up afterwards. But it seemed to keep El alive and in as close to one piece as he was ever going to get, so he didn't bother questioning it.

Today's scuffle had been fairly short anyway. El would have some bruises, but a quick dose of the non-steroidals would keep him moving the same as ever.

He'd be a hell of a lot better off than Sands was.

Sands lit a cigarette, dragging deep on it before he passed it across to El. Lit another and kept that one for himself. El cracked his window open, air sucking all through the car and rippling past Sands' hair. He wound his own window right down, leaned on the door and stuck his face out, letting the dry air beat down the nausea faint in his gut, hint of salt as the wind veered in from the west.

He came to a fairly peaceable arrangement with his leg that if he didn't move around, it didn't bitch at him too much. The ibuprofen kicked out most of his headache. It was still a lousy state for travelling, but not the worst.

El drove a couple of hours before he pulled into - some town, Sands didn't really give a shit where. Bigger than the last one, wherever they were, big enough for El to make frequent turns weaving through the streets while he checked for a tail. Big enough with enough places to stay they could get lost in it. Stop, start, stop, start, while El did the pickier version of his hotel scoping. They'd want a place where a limping guy with blood-soaked sliced-up jeans could sneak in unnoticed, or just where nobody cared a horse's balls about it.

El found some place he must have figured would pass and left the car parked down some quiet side street while he checked in, traffic humming off behind Sands, flattened through the glass.

He wasn't looking forward to getting out. He'd gotten quite used to that peaceable arrangement, and wasn't so keen on breaking it.

He fired himself up another smoke while he waited.

El was back by the time it burned through, and he flicked the butt end out the door as El opened it, hearing the boot grind it into the street. He slid his legs out first, hanging onto door and roof to take some of his weight as he hauled himself upright, El's hands light on his ribs to steady him. He reached back in to get the gun from the glove compartment, before he arranged himself around El.

"So where's the back door?"

"Maybe twenty metres. You ready?"

Hell, no, but that wasn't gonna change. "Yeah, get going."

His leg seemed to have gotten over the immediate bullet-shock and decided El was right - it agreed to take most of his weight without checking out on him, at least, and he was only barely leaning on El when they made their way up to the room. The stairs were still a complete bitch of it, concrete impacting hard against his boot, and some bastard stabbing a knife hot into his knee every time he flexed his muscles to make the next step. He tried to fixate his brain on the odd feel of air swirling round just one leg, the denim flapping loose against him, but no big surprise it didn't work so well. They seemed to wind on up for fucking ever, though it could only have been the one flight.

El didn't bother with the usual routine, just steered him straight through to the bathroom, all buzzing fluorescents with tight, tapping echoes, and pine-scented bleach. At least it was the kind of place that understood the concept of cleaner, not always guaranteed in some of the dives El liked hiding out in. He felt the edge of the toilet bowl low against his legs - quick grope behind him, lid down, check - and sank back onto it, breathing out slow against the pain.

El was running the faucets - note the basin for future use - soap scent and scrubbing sounds to go with it. "Take the bandage off," he said over the water, "and I'll have a better look."

At least the bastard knew to wash his hands first.

Sands worked on unravelling the slightly twisted mass round his leg, which was fine till he got to the last few layers and it all started to stick. Bandage stiff with dried ooze beneath his fingers, layers clinging together, a tug to separate them each time around that went sharp through to the skin and the wound beneath, sending the yo-yo spinning and whirling again.

The dressing pad behind his leg was solid and still slightly damp, but nothing there was feeling too fresh, all tacky jelly blobs against his fingers. There was some ooze sluggish and clammy over his skin when he peeled it away, disturbing the clot, but if it had stopped once, it'd stop again fast enough. He dropped both pads to the floor, heavy thwock-splat on tile. He was dripping everywhere anyway, a bit more blood wasn't going to ruin the artistic ambience.

El was back and moving in close beside him, sitting on something that squeak-creaked plastic. Edge of the tub, most likely. "I'm going to clean it up so I can see."

Coming up, bullet fun for everyone. He pressed his teeth together. "So stop farting around and get it done."

He breathed in slow through his nose, braced for the first press of cloth soggy and warm over his thigh.

It wasn't so bad as it could have been. Not something he hoped to be volunteering for too regular, but El kept it light, starting away from the wound before he worked in, teasing the blood away from skin and hair instead of just scrubbing at him. It kept the squealing of his nerves damped well down under manageable through most of it, only rising into full knife-wielding bitchery when El briefly poked fingers round the holes in his leg. "The entrance wound should be left to let infection out," he said finally. "The exit wound's a little bigger. It needs stitches."

Sands had had his fingers in that medical box more than enough, and he knew perfectly well what was in there. Well, most of it anyway, he hadn't a fucking clue what was in the bottles. "You're not sticking a needle in me."

Slight pause then while El dug out his dry humour from the Mariachi repertoire. "I stick my tongue in you. I stick my cock in you. And now you're saying a needle is too much to trust me with?"

Well, there it was, dropped in so easy after all these weeks, the reference to how they fucked; and not only casual, but crude with it. Interesting timing, El. But it still wasn't happening. "Medicing by amateurs is slow and painful." He let his smile widen slow until it was all teeth. "You fucking me's only ever one of those, not both."

The amusement was there in the huff of El's breath before he even got as far as words. "You think I'm such an amateur? I learned from some of the best books, and I've had practice."

"If half those scars on you are your own work, damn straight you're a fucking amateur. I'll wait till we can dig me up a semi-qualified tailor, thanks."

Rhythmic brush of hair over jacket as El shook his head. "No doctors."

Sands leaned himself back against the cistern, resting a bent elbow on top of it, casual, stubborn, and fuck his leg and the way it screamed at him for moving. "A town this size has gotta have a local quack tucked up down a back alley somewhere who'll take cash instead of explanations. You know how to find them the same as I do."

"Any doctor whose ethics we can buy can be bought by others too," El said, level and soft.

Sands raised eyebrows at him, high and obvious over the shades. "You think I'm gonna live with bullet holes on aspirin?"

"There's stronger in the box. And only one bullet hole, or are you planning on more?"

"One bullet, two holes, dickbrain. And if you've got the good stuff, shouldn't you have fronted up by now?"

"Not before I knew how much you were going to bleed."

Yeah, some doctor El was, knew fuck all about drugs. "Screw that, I'll clot just as fast with the poppy juice in me."

"I'd like to be sure you're unconscious because of the drugs and not because you're dying." And it didn't matter how light El kept the words, the flicker-pause before was way more than enough.

Sands smiled, quick and quirked with amusement. "Well, that's real sweet, El, but I know I'm not dying and that's good enough for me, so cough it up."

El was already up on his feet and rattling at the countertop alongside the sink by the time he answered, voice as moisture-free as the desert air he'd spent the last couple of hours sucking in. "I think by now anyone would be sure you're unlikely to die."

You weren't, though, were you? Had something of a nasty moment by the door back there in the bar, didn't you?

He wondered just how much El didn't want him dead now.

He'd be willing to bet the Mariachi couldn't even call that one himself, not on any level he knew about. Wouldn't really know till he had to make a choice, and then it'd be a snap thing, right there.

But he'd be grinding the gears on it after today.

"Here." El stepped back his way and dropped four pills into his palm, all coated oval capsules but not the same size when he ran fingertips over them. The amusement stripped from Sands in a fast band-aid tug, and just as harsh. "What are these?"

"Two are the painkillers, the others are antibiotics." El ran water loud and splattering, then let it swish into a glass, set it on the counter beside him, thunk-ring.

The pills sat there in his hand, his head tipped down towards them automatically. Christ, he could still hardly believe he was reduced to this, just swallowing whatever he was handed and assuming they were what he was told.

Maybe his really big mistake had been taking Spanish and not French, but he'd no illusions the cunts wouldn't have strung him up and buried him in the fucking Congo with just as much glee.

He actually did believe El wouldn't harm him, not now - he wouldn't go quite so far as to say not for any reason, but not for most of them anyway. He'd worked hard enough to make damn sure that was how it was.

It wasn't the same thing as believing El wouldn't lie to him for his own asshole reasons, because he damn well would if it suited him, but it was the best he was going to get.

He stuck the pills on his tongue, took the glass and washed them back.

He reached into his pocket to his cigarettes, fished one from the pack and lit it, pulling smoke in deep and letting it drift out through his nose. He'd fucking well need it if he was going to do this.

"So what now, Señor Médico?"

El moved, fast, light, and the cigarette was tugged from between his lips. "You take a shower. You need one, and you're not doing it after I bandage you up." El's voice was altered, accent slightly slurred, and Sands reached out and snagged his smoke right back from the source of it.

"Fine," he said. "In maybe twenty minutes when the pills have kicked in some."

"In that case, you can finish smoking outside while I clean up." El backed off, reaching out, and something flapped slow through the air towards him. Sands grabbed it before it hit him in the face, rough loopiness of towel wrapping round his hand. "The bed's a metre and a half from the door at sixty degrees. The ashtray's on the table left of the head. Don't bleed all over everything."

"Not when I have to sleep in it too." He got to his feet easy enough with a bit of help from the cistern and the tub, wrapped the towel loose above his knee and limped through to the bed without too much hassle. Sank back onto it, laid out flat, pulling hard on the smoke settled between his lips.

Smiled when the bathroom door clicked shut behind him and the shower started up.

He might just have found that angle he'd been looking for.

Not that he'd been planning on getting shot precisely, because who the hell did, but he was never averse to taking an unholy fuck-up and making it work for him instead.

Not right now, though. This particular marinade needed time to soak and simmer a bit, since the Mariachi wasn't always the fastest thinker on sunset coast. A few days, definite, maybe closer to a week.

He could live with that.

He lay and smoked his way through his cigarette, slow, thoughtful, and then he just lay because he'd got a bum leg and nothing better to do.

When El came out of the bathroom in a wash of humid heat, Sands could feel the kiss of the drug around the edges, the slow seep of it through him. Enough to saw the points off the yo-yo, keep it slinky when he moved, not enough to have him hazing out in the shower.

Perfect timing.

He almost felt like humming as he swung his feet round to the floor, but it would be a pity to spoil the effect he had going, and he limped his way back to the bathroom silent like he'd been most of the trip here.

The air stretched along his skin with hot, clammy fingers when he stepped through the doorway, Sands suddenly fully aware of the layers of sweat clinging over most of his body. He left the door open to get rid of some of the choking dampness. It made no difference to him, and very little to El either that he could figure.

Stripping was easier than it might have been - El had sliced his jeans high enough so they slithered loose over his knee, no dragging. Bending that leg to pull off his boot and sock wasn't so great, but it was a beautifully numbed down take on pain compared to the earlier hot poker style fun on the stairs.

He started the water and let it run vaguely warm, shampoo bottle and soap lined up by the controls like always. Scrubbed over his face and pushed his head under the flow, rinsing fast while his hair soaked through. Stink of bleach and clashing flower-soap, flat and muffling gurgle through his head, nothing there beyond the cramped plastic-spray of the shower until he shook the water from his ears, and found again the soft steps and rustles and chinks of El dressing.

He soaped up his hair, rubbing at it a good couple of minutes, dragging his fingers right to the ends through the tangles, because he was fucked if he was gonna be walking around with dried gore in his hair. It'd be a hell of a lot easier if he cut it shorter, but there was no way he'd be taking a pair of scissors to it himself, and from what he remembered of El, that guy wasn't gonna be scamming cash as a quality barber either. It might just be worth doing if he could get rid of most of it, but he'd always have to keep it long enough to hide the fucked-up mess he could feel round the edges of where he used to have eyes, so he didn't see the point.

Water ran fast down his leg, past the throbbing, past the holes he could almost feel through him now his brain knew exactly where they were. No touching, no washing anywhere near, not yet. He tipped his head back high under the shower, scraping and squeezing his hair out behind him, keeping the soapy flow of it clear of his ears.

The door snicked shut, sudden, loud, immediate past the water. Not the bathroom door up close, the outer door distant and vital, and somebody was here.

He grabbed for the controls and snapped the water off, almost losing himself to go sprawling in the tub as he twisted on his leg, gripping hard on the faucet through the wobble and the shivers; slow drip, drip, drip behind him, his guns the other side of the curtain that would broadcast dramatic plastic 'come get me's if he reached for them, and... no.

Nobody was there, no threat out there because there was nothing, all silence, no El.

El had gone, and he hadn't said, and where the fuck had he gone?

He was alone with a bullet hole in his leg, and if anything happened now he couldn't run, didn't know where to run, didn't even know where he was - and oh, fuck, he didn't wanna be here, not like this, not again. He wasn't ever gonna get away from this, it was always gonna be there waiting for him no matter how many times he –

No. It fucking wasn't. He was going to fix this. Had it all laid out and just how to get it, and inside a week he'd have it played out exactly like he wanted. He was a seriously long way from being fucking helpless, and he wasn't ever, fucking ever going to do this shit.

He turned the water back on. Listened to the water as it flowed over his shoulders and down his body, hot and ending the shivers, listened through the water to the emptiness beyond; listened to the water splatter in the tub at his feet, wouldn't listen through it because there was nothing there, he knew that, and he wasn't paranoid, jumpy, over-reactive, any of those things that weren't about reality.

Fuck, but he could use some more of that opiate in him right about now to sand the corners off, leave him smooth and curved to roll instead of jagging and snagging on every change, every ripple in his predictions.

Or maybe he needed less of it, because Christ, he hadn't freaked out like this in months. He had his moments, yeah, 'cos hey, no-one'd be a hundred percent straight-threaded with the deal he'd been shuffled, but he had a handle on it. He went weeks now without any big-time brain-quakes, and he didn't lose it over minor shit like taking a goddamn shower.

The thing earlier in the bar, he could forget that, because that was about suddenly getting a bullet through the leg, and that didn't exactly fit into anybody's pattern of things to do on a good day. But he'd pulled it together now, he'd been good for hours, and he knew where it was all going, and fuck, he didn't need this. Not now.

He turned the water off again, and maybe he hadn't gotten every last bit of soap out of his hair, but screw that, it'd come out well enough with a towel. He stood dripping on the floor by the tub while he cleared all the water from his ears, then rubbed the rest of him half-dry.

He didn't think he was bleeding now, couldn't obviously smell it on him, but when every part of his skin was warm and damp it was a bitch to be sure. He wrapped the towel round his knee in case - no point in dressing when El was only going to start poking at his leg again.

When he got back. He hadn't said where he was going, but he always turned up again.

He grabbed his gunbelts from the toilet lid and his cigarettes from his jacket, wandered through to flop back down on the bed and lit up. Smoke in his lungs, air cooling as it sucked the last of the water from his skin, traffic buzz from outside (windows to the right, something close to six feet), voices through the wall, muffled some but not deliberately quieted.

Yeah, it was all good.

Heat flared over his face as he drew on the last of the cigarette, and the mattress was dragging on his bones in that perfect opiate way, extra dose of gravity laid on just for him.

He tried to keep track of the time until El got back, but it kept sneaking away from him when his brain wasn't watching hard enough, so he just lit another cigarette - or was it another another by now? - instead. His leg was still pulsing, regular rippling slow-wavy that made him think of the sea at childhood beaches, but it wasn't attached to the rest of him anyway, so his head didn't much care.

There were footsteps outside in the corridor, stopping by the door, but that was okay because they were the right steps, the ones he listened for, and the door clicked, and El came in rattling like plastic bags. Which was odd, until he considered the possibility that El might actually be carrying plastic bags, and that seemed plausible enough, so he quit worrying about it.

There was something he'd been meaning to say to El, but now when he wanted it, it had wandered off down a corridor somewhere in one of those twisty little ridges in his brain. Maybe it had gone looking for the missing Time so they could party along. He found himself saying instead, "Well, hi, El," which was a bit dull and unimaginative when he thought about it, so he added, "Long time, no see," because that just seemed a whole lot funnier.

El didn't laugh - no big surprise, he hardly ever did, had no clue about the whole concept of having a good time - and Sands rolled upwards, planning to prop himself on his elbow, but someone had tied his hair to the pillow and it was hard to balance. Or maybe it was the weight of the gun in his hand dragging him down, and he didn't actually want one of those right now, so he disentangled his fingers from grip and trigger and let it fall to the bed. It didn't seem to help much, and he dropped back full length himself, because it was just easier that way. Easier except his knee started waving at him faster and more dramatically, practically jumping up and down to get him to notice it, and oh, yeah, some dickless bastard shot him in the leg earlier today, and suddenly some things were making a lot more sense. "Fuck, what did you give me, horse pills?"

"I gave you enough. You'll want it."

And that made sense too, because hey, most people wanted drugs when they were offered. Especially right after they'd been shot.

El rustled over and sat on the bed with him, the plastic bags rattling too when he dumped them down between them, and the bags didn't smell of anything, but El did. Smelled of that cheap flower soap in the bathroom, exhaust fumes and the first hint of sweat layered beneath, and Sands curled in and sniffed seeking-close for those, because El really shouldn't be about poppies and TV ads with long-haired women draped over photoshopped meadows, clashing magnet pole images refusing to ever meet up in his brain.

Shiver of the mattress with shifting weight, El reaching over him in air-sound whisper, low chink and slide of Sands' gunbelts and the pistol that had been in his hand as El took them, and that wasn't right, he needed those, and he struggled to sit up but he was being pinned down; but he wasn't because there were no hands on him, there was only El, and El didn't do that unless he wanted him to.

"Sands?" The leather and buckles slither-clattered onto the table by the bed, and - okay, still there, still within reach, no problem, so he stopped arguing with the bed and let it suck him back down, because it was nicer that way. "Are you okay?"

Well, that was kind of a stupid question, 'cos why shouldn't he be? But El asked a lot of stupid questions. "Yeah, I'm juuuuuust fiiine." Funny how words could be almost like singing. They made everyone sing, made them sing all about themselves in little tones and notes and stresses, so pretty and perfect when you knew how to listen.

"I'm going to clean up your leg now, okay?"

El was being stupid again. "You already did that." He remembered it, cool and wet and painful like it wasn't now.

"I know. But this time I'm going to do it properly, so there's no infection."

"Okay."

El never tried to hide what he sang, and that almost made it more confusing because he sang so many different things, all tangled up in the weirdest way, switching fast between tunes where the notes met and crossed in thick, squiggly knots. But every snatch of music he heard from El's voice, from his body, they were simple, open melodies, no bass drive clashing and devious. Sometimes for other people, not for Sands.

El turned rustly again - lots and lots of plastic bags and paper bags and unwrapping, but still El beneath it, thick rubbing fabric with low metal whispers, stale smoke jacket hanging open to brush against him, gunfire and oil and leather flickering with the movement so he could ignore the flowers and the lolling blondes. Something else sudden and sharp that made his nose itch inside, all edges and no flavour.

"Ready?"

"Hmmm." His hair was damp and cool and some of it was stuck to his face over one cheek, but that was nice enough when the rest of everything was shimmering like muffins right out of the oven and too hot to eat.

Something else on his skin, something starting cool and turning colder - maybe too cold, he hadn't quite decided; cold except where it burned right through him, fire shocking into his body, and it was almost - almost - vicious enough to drag him into moving, except it was already dying, flash-flame with no fuel, fading back.

He was Wile E Coyote, stunned and blinking after he tripped the explosives, only without the blinking.

"What the fuck was that?"

"Alcohol. I bought some. Believe me, you don't want to try cigarettes." Bright wash of humour over the surface, and something else, the troll lurking under the bridge, but that wasn't devious or double-dealing, that was El.

"Vodka, huh? No smell, no taste - hate it. Smokes are better."

"In your mouth, maybe. Not on bullet wounds. And it's medical alcohol." Movement, and scrapes over table, and lighter-click. "Don't set fire to the bed." Soap and tang-sharp fingers at his lips, and a filter was pushed between them, and smoke was good. Smoke made anything better, even a good drug high. Which he was settling back into very nicely now his leg was kindly shutting the fuck up again.

El's fingernail flicked the clinging hair from his face, fast, light sting. "Don't get too comfortable. I still have to stitch you. Turn over."

He was just fine where he was and how he was, but he wasn't hazed far down enough to miss the point that he'd be better off getting this shit over with while the drugs were still all there, and he wriggled over onto his stomach, careful effort to prop himself up on his elbows so's not to squish his cig into the pillow.

He clamped his teeth tight round the filter when El poured not-vodka over his leg again (and hey, lucky he'd kept that towel there, blood and booze for the bathroom instead of the bed) and tighter still when he started stitching, 'cos no amount of opiates was going to entirely remove the sensation of somebody sticking a needle through him, the slow dragging of thread.

His hair strung damp round his neck and shoulders, and it was easier if he concentrated on that, the cool fingers of sticky strands, waiting for tickling drips that didn't happen because it was just that bit too dry; but he was always still just that bit too aware he was lying naked on a cheap, sagging bed while El Mariachi sewed his muscle and his skin back together, and this had never made it into any of his varied plans for his life.

His smoke suddenly tasted foul, and that was because it'd burned right down and the filter was starting to smoulder, but he liked it where it was, squashed down flat and deliberately shaped round his teeth, so he kept it there till El reached over him and tugged it away.

In its absence, he threw his elbows out wide and flopped his chin down into the pillow. Which needed to be deeper and fluffier to really rate, because he stopped up with more of a jolt than a squish.

It was a lot easier to get comfortable once El stopped making voodoo with his leg and bundled it up instead.

Time went off wandering again for a while - could it be a while when Time was already missing? - maybe scoping out the hotel, or just chilling by the pool with tequila shots. But there wouldn't be a pool here, so maybe not.

El shivered and flicked round the room, the bed, the chair, the floor. Snick of guitar case, magazine and slide clicks, heavy, invasive solvent stench - all of it normal and El, along with the sleigh bell cliché jingling, sensation shifting through his senses without ever reaching out for it, solvent thick on his tongue making him swallow, dry-mouthed.

"Hey, can a guy get a drink around here?" And maybe El said something, Sands didn't much care so long as he showed up to hand him a glass. Water, even chlorine-laced straight from the main supply, tasted pretty good once you got desperate.

And then the water poured frigid all down his chest as he grabbed, because those were his guns scraping soft over wood, and no-one could have those, not even El, and he was trying to take them. And his fingers missed, he actually fucking missed, but the leather and metal dropped instantly back into place anyway, and El took the glass from him instead. "Okay. I'll get a towel."

Boots clicking on tile, and El was back with a flow of air that draped itself across his stomach, coarse-soft and bobbled. Not the original blood-and-vodka towel, it smelled of laundry, but he quite liked the water where it was, spread between his ribs and trickling down his sides. It felt strangely drier than some of the other bits of him, and cool was nice enough, and he brushed the towel away from him. He took the glass from El again, and there was more water, so he gulped it down.

Time seeped back in after that, less of the flickers and jumps between odd spaces. Sounds linked together, overlapping smoothly, scents flowing and fading in with the airflow. It was better when everything around him happened in some kind of reasonable order, no distracting random snatches.

The downside to it, and it was kind of a big one, was his leg wriggling its way back into a significant part of his consciousness again. And once the pain had reattached itself to the rest of him, it got noticeably harder to drift, and that left him noticing other things too.

Like just how much he needed to piss.

He pushed himself upright on the bed, setting off the screeching sirens in his knee again. His hair was hanging all round his face, and he could feel the tangles in it already, since he hadn't gotten around to combing it through before he flaked out on the bed for the duration. "Fuck."

"I take it you're actually back this time," El commented from across the room, and Sands already knew there was a chair there, wooden feet that squeaked against floor and a frame that creaked with El's weight.

Sands tipped his head and considered that. El's voice was clear in his head, distinct without rippling edges, even though Sands couldn't be a hundred percent sure right now if he'd succeeded in sitting himself fully upright. "Seems that way."

He reached over and snagged his semi from the table beside him. Okay, bathroom and toilet he had mentally flagged, if not a whole lot else - swinging his legs down to the floor and getting the direction was easy enough. Just a few steps across the room, and his knee had already settled into its new level of irritation, nothing too drastic - yeah it hurt, but so did a lot of things, so fuck it.

He rested his gun hand on the counter while he pissed, taking the weight off his leg for the duration, then drank something like half a basin full of water from the faucet to replace it, till his tongue felt like it fitted his mouth again. His hand slid out across the countertop automatically, and his comb was there, where it should be, so he dragged it through his hair a few times, enough to get rid of the worst of the knots before his knee started ramping up again, and he limped back out to the bed.

He leaned his weight on his hands, lowering himself careful onto the mattress, and tipped his head over at El's chair. "So, are you gonna tell me anything about this place?"

El gave him the rundown on the room and the length of hallway outside, details locking into place in his head, building his own maps round the numbers. Usually he double-checked, let his fingers familiarise with catches and handles, but his leg preferred he stay put for now, and it had been a while since he'd caught El on any mistakes or important omissions.

El had bought food too while he was out on the drugstore run - several somethings that might once have had aspirations towards tortas-dom, wrapped up cold in plastic, which explained why there'd been nothing to smell. And sodas to go with them.

Christ, he was so sick of fucking sodas. Though at least Coke with the capital gave him a half-passable caffeine fix.

He was still draped across the bed decoratively naked, and he had no real idea what he was about to eat, except there was definitely something cheese and something tomato-based. If he dripped salsa or some such shit all down him, it was gonna be easier to do laundry than to shower himself right now, with the bandage hassles. He reached down under the bed and yeah, his bag was right there too, so he found himself a T-shirt to dress in. Fuck pants, that would hurt.

His stomach was twisting around some, but it felt more the kind of uncertainty that would die back with food than a serious threat, so he nibbled carefully at the edges of the roll and let that settle before he tried anything else. It seemed to be safe - he didn't want to end up needing another shower today because he'd trailed his hair in puke, not after the experience of his last exercise in bathing - and he ate most of the rest. It didn't have much taste, but that was probably the best thing about it.

He ran a hand over his chin, auto-check for stray food, and shit, he needed to shave. That little matter had been bypassed in his earlier, drug-curtailed attempt at a shower. He must look like a fucking war zone refugee right now. But hygiene would wait a while longer, because there was still powder residue congealed and setting solid all over his guns, and that was gonna be a bitch to shift if he didn't get on it.

And the guns were right there, easy reach of his hand out left to grab them, but his leg was reminding him not to go wandering off round the room when he didn't have to. He unscrewed the silencer from his P14, ejecting the mag and chambered round in an obvious series of clicks and scrapes. "I'm guessing you're still hoarding the kit there, El, so toss it on over."

No fabric whisper from El, no strained squeak from the chair. "I can do that instead," he said.

Sands twisted his head to El, muscles set in what any stupid fuck would have to recognise as a glare. "The bugfucker shot me in the leg, not the head, and I can clean my own guns."

El shrugged. "You can, but you might prefer not to."

"Or I might prefer you to shut the fuck up and hand me the kit."

El made no more comments, and he did move, something landing on the bed a few moments later. Sands reached out to plasticised fabric, unzipping the case then flashing his hand up to snatch the silicone cloth from the air.

Cleaning wouldn't take so long - he'd only used the two guns today, nothing like the full set, and yeah, he felt it, the tug on torn muscle every time he twisted for the bore brush or solvent, but he'd looked after his own damn guns when he was in a much more pitiful fucking state than this, and no reason to break the trend. El sat rustling newspaper across the room, Sands following his breathing each time he pulled a patch from the muzzle and reached for the kit till he got the brief pause that told him the last one was clean, and he took another swab and ran it dry instead.

El always watched him when he cleaned, waiting to see if he ever fucked it up. He wondered if El actually knew he was giving him the cues so he didn't. Probably not - that degree of detail would exceed El's subtlety levels.

He ran fingers careful and slow everywhere he could fit them before he reassembled, squeezing his pinkie along the slide checking for chips or hair cracks, finished up by working the action through smooth and rubbing the surfaces down, and finally reloading.

By the time he was done with the auto, his head felt like it had been flexed out of shape then tapped back in with a precision hammer. Not pain, just disconnection and everything taking too long to process, and he had no clue whether it was still early or he should have been asleep hours ago.

He still hadn't shaved, and he limped his way back into the bathroom, his leg seeming to drag again, muscles seized up like something several hours dead, which as far as parts of his flesh were concerned wasn't so far off.

He brushed his teeth to get rid of the last of the tortas imposter, and decided to hell with anything else.

Except he wasn't going to sleep with his dick hanging out while there was any risk of some bastard sneaking up on them in the night, so he grabbed the loosest pants he owned from his bag and sat on the bed to ease them up careful past his knee. Some pain was inevitable, but not too bad, considering.

"You should take more pills," El said, and chinked through into the bathroom to rattle bottles, dropping the identical four capsules into Sands' palm when he returned.

"Which are the antibiotics?"

"The smaller ones." Sands swallowed both of those, along with one of the opiates, and held the spare back towards El.

El didn't take it. "You need to sleep."

"Not as much as I need to get out of the way if some fucker tries shooting me again. And while we're treading somewhere around the vicinity of that particular subject, I don't much appreciate being drugged up and then ditched."

"I thought I'd be back sooner." El didn't often bother actually saying sorry for his fuck-ups, but it didn't matter much when his voice got so low and quiet, just shining with the all-over guilt glaze.

Probably he didn't bother because he knew Sands didn't care horse shit for his guilt. "You're lucky I didn't shoot you the second you walked in."

"You didn't even react." Smile small and half-smug in El's words, and the bastard wasn't taking this fucking seriously.

"That's because I still had it together enough to know it was you." But he didn't know by how much. And if he'd taken one of those brief trips out like he had in the shower, he had no clue what the fuck he might have done.

He had no general objections to killing people, but he did prefer to be in charge of who he was shooting and why. Especially if he might start shooting at a guy who'd beat him damn near unconscious the last time.

"You've never failed yet," El said - still quiet, but he'd ditched the attitude.

No, he hadn't failed, because he made the goddamn effort for it. He could nail El half way across a crowded bar, but he needed his brain fully wired up for that. Or he'd always figured he did. Obviously he was better than he'd thought, which was kind of good to know.

Not that he was going to be thanking El for it.

He rolled back all the covers and sheets to the foot of the bed, and laid claim to the half of the bed next to his guns, settling slow on his right side with his left leg stretched out long to the corner.

He lay listening to the sounds of feet and water, fabric and steel, El cleaning up in the bathroom and then stripping himself of guns, which always took a while.

The mattress shivered and sagged as El stretched out alongside him.

"If you think you're getting laid tonight, you're going to have to reconsider."

"I had no plans." High, dessicated words, trademark twisted El take on humour. "You Americans are all the same."

"There's really no need to get personal, El," he said. "People who've just been shot usually aren't feeling too horny, and nationality's not got a whole lot to do with it."

El half-snorted, hinted layer of laughter under the dry. "I had a bullet hole and knife wounds too when I met Carolina, and it didn't stop me."

"Yes, well, we've already established you live at the far end of the bell curve. The rules applying to normal people don't seem to stick so well to you."

"I hope you're not saying you are one of the 'normal people'." El's voice changed in the pause, humour gearing through into thoughtful. Christ, he could almost hear the clutch dip. "Sometimes I don't know what you are, but you're definitely not normal."

"Well, obviously, else I wouldn't be here." Sands let the quirk at his lips drawl through the words. "Normal's no use to you, El, it'd bore you to suicide. And don't try and kid either of us you've been normal, because most men's wives can't stick a knife in a guy's throat from thirty paces."

"No, I have been normal. But it was a long time before." El spoke slow and quiet, the taking himself way too seriously voice that always made Sands want to snort with laughter. "Carolina was normal too, when she met me, normal for the place she lived. She only became like that because of me."

"Smart girl. Or not, of course, because the really smart thing would have been to head out of town as soon as you crossed the horizon."

The bed rippled again as El rolled sideways, words closer and propped higher over an elbow, amusement flowing back in. "If that's the right thing to do, what does it say about you?"

"Well, there you go with the obvious again. The really smart guys are the ones who don't get themselves strapped to a table and blinded, I think most people would agree."

El stilled behind him, and the pause dragged on long enough he actually started to think he might have shut him up. "We've both made mistakes."

And Sands almost, almost had to laugh, because that had to be about the biggest understatement on the loose since he told the bubblegum brat it was 'kind of a bad day'. "Oh, yeah, and we make the fuck-ups as full-on spectacular as we make everything else."

This time El did stay quiet, which would help if either of them were going to be doing any sleeping. Though the way his leg was still throbbing at him, it didn't feel like he would any time soon. Christ, he wished he could pop another pill and just drop out.

He tried rearranging his leg, bending the knee a little, feeling for a position that didn't put any of the muscles under tension. It hurt a fuckload more while he was doing it, but it seemed like it might settle better when he was done.

Not that it would stay that way if he did get to sleep. At best, he could look forward to waking up all night every time he moved.

He was too awake right now anyway. Oh, he had the tired-buzz drilling slow at the back of his brain, and if he had eyes they'd be blinking and raw, but it wasn't enough to beat down all the chemical alerts his body was feeding him.

It was kind of odd lying here so awake, aware of El there breathing in half-tension behind him, and not touching.

They fucked most nights. It was better that way, easier to sleep after it, and the bitching and complaints over sharing a bed had proved less drawn out and irritating than the arguments over who had to clean up, get dressed and go sleep in the other room.

Sometimes they were both too exhausted, El stiffening up like boil-washed leather, strides slow and careful. One of those times he'd passed out in the chair in Sands' room, waking in the early hours still clompy and more tight-assed than ever. Sands told him then that if he was going to snore there all night anyway, he should at least be fit to drive in the morning, and that had been the last of the separate rooms.

He wondered if El liked it better having someone else equally well-armed and twitchy around while he slept, or if that was another of those privileges reserved for the eyeless.

El shifted and edged in closer behind him, more of the heat, no dip of sheet between them, and he almost thought El was gonna touch him despite the no-fuck warning. But El obviously had too much respect for his fingers for that, because he held off, body curled and shaped around Sands' with almost no contact.

Not that it made so much difference. He'd likely end up with El draped all over him anyway, once they were asleep. He didn't wake up that way every time, but often enough, and it showed no hint of wearing off.

It got almost too repetitive keep kicking him away, but this goddamn country was hot enough already without a mariachi wrapped round him all night.

El's head dipped towards him, breath flowing against his neck through his hair, the rhythm of it slowing and spreading. Calm, eased, sleeping, and that helped.

The sounds of the traffic hummed regular through his head with the multi-sense of El.

His wired-up brain finally eased back on the signals, let the drugs in and let him relax.

The next days were just a dose of the same shitty song cycling through on repeat. Something way too bouncy by one of those PR-manufactured teenage wannabe-hookers that made him want to fucking choke every last one of the bitches.

They wound their way south along Baja, dodging the Drug and Firearms checkpoints. This really was a lousy part of Mexico for them to be running and hiding in. Christ, right now they wouldn't even technically pass the drugs half, which was fucking funny given whose car he was riding in.

They only drove a few hours each day. Keeping off the biggest highways when the choices were there, the roads were pretty shitty and Sands' knee filed its complaints with the rest of him in an intermittent but regular series of reports, a bureaucrat who really loved his work. When they did use the highways, the world's most melodramatic take on speed bumps were laying in wait for them every time they came near a town, jolting vicious all through him no matter how slow El took it. And when the pain died back, he itched instead, sweat soaking into the layers of bandage and rubbing over skin and stitches.

It didn't matter much where they went, only that they kept moving, and some days they ended up doubling back a ways to avoid the military. El Presidente might just make some quiet arrangements on the Mariachi's behalf if they got themselves carelessly tangled up in one of his bear traps, but Sands considered it a short odds bet he'd end up somewhere he wouldn't much like.

They stayed in hotels with no air-con and small multi-legged scurryings in the night, while he limped obediently everywhere after El, knowing next to fuck all about anything.

The only good thing about it was his leg seemed to be healing faster this time. Maybe he'd gotten lucky with the bullet, maybe it was because he still had one working leg to take his weight, or maybe it was just because he didn't have multiple other bleeding holes in him all demanding their share of the attention, but he figured another week should see him back close to functional.

And meantime he worked to keep his seething frustration at the entire motherfucking situation from lashing out its full viciousness at El. It wouldn't do to piss the Mariachi off too badly at this point and fuck over his own longer term plans.

El picked up on the vibes quick enough, and kept conversation locked down to basics, minimising the provocation. Sands got him to buy papers and read the news to him - all of it. Listening to El ramble on got old inside a day, because he was really only interested in the details of what was going on through a few countries, catching up on some nine months of politicking. Things could change fast, and he didn't plan on going anywhere uninformed.

Mostly they drove, ate and sat around hotel rooms in silences that revved fast beyond comfortable, barrelling downhill straight through awkward till they hit positively tense, Sands constantly roping back the comments and retorts that would have lashed out automatically, and doing it only pissed him off more.

But all the while that loop line train would be rattling its rounds in El's skull, covering possibilities, likelihoods, outcomes, over and over. And he wouldn't be liking the tracks it covered, because he'd seen them all before, and there were no new ones.

Not yet.

Not till Sands laid them out for him.

He definitely had El's attention now, fixed and waiting for the change; stillness through the Mariachi that oozed his tension far faster than the drip, drip of all his shifting and tapping. Focus swinging inwards from the world, hard onto Sands with the knowledge that this wasn't even close to a steady state - and part of that would be his awareness, the very real need to see what Sands might do, but the rest of it was pure El. The killer's own instinct for violence and its potential, the draw of it through him, his body's responses automatic and inflexible. Seeking.

It was always intriguing to provoke that, to control it; to slowly stretch it tighter and feel it there quivering alongside him.

It gave him a little something extra now to play with through the mosquito-bite monotony of the days as he let El run his paths.

And felt El fight it.

The Mariachi knew his own stillness, his own leanings, the zinging hum of the voltage collecting within him. Sands limped a little heavier than he might have done, and shared cheap, cramped beds with El without the obvious and much too easy release of sex. It meant he lost out as well, of course, because after a couple of days he would have been good with a blow job from either end, and he spent too many hours lying awake and rigid, listening to El breathe clipped alongside him; but he knew how to play it patient, and he'd be gaining more than enough to compensate him for a few missed chances for a good fuck.

El, predictably, sought out music.

He shattered his stillness, deliberately, movements sharp with no hint of natural El smoothness as he reached for the radio controls. Fiddling through the hissing frequencies every song, or part of song, hunting down the soft, the slow; breaking mid-song more and more often as his mood refused to bend to the ballad, seeking on futile for another more effective.

Sands was perfectly content to let him try.

El plucked at a guitar through the silent hours in hotel rooms, drawn away from Sands in some furthest corner, wrapped round a perpetual prop that did no more to halt the progression than the radio did.

And he smoked as he drove, in quick, repeated breaths that burned from lighter flare to rushing window flick in about a minute.

Sands poked around in the glove compartment for yet another new pack of cigarettes, shift in El as soon as he moved and no shift back. Slow, awkward peel of the plastic, pushed down into his pocket as he fished out his lighter, quick check to the end for position, click and drag; the movement in the air that was El's breath constant all through it, eyes on him the whole time.

Now was good.

He slipped the lighter back in his pocket, settled down further into his seat, letting the words out almost casual with the smoke. "We need ourselves some kind of bolthole, El. Somewhere to go if we're injured, if they're getting too close and we need to catch a break."

Softest jingle-shiver, trapped short. "Where are you thinking of?" El's curiosity right there, flowing to him almost hopeful, and Sands tightened his lips down over the smile creeping round his cigarette.

He tipped his head back to the rest, kept the words slow and thoughtful. "You told me a while back the only place to go is out of Mexico, and I won't disagree."

He'd expected the pause, but it was hanging on too long, and too quiet, something in the low breathing less than natural. Squeak of skin rubbing sweat over plastic, and he might be blinder than a mole rat, but he could still see El's knuckles whiten on the wheel.

"You're lying."

Spoken slow and misleadingly mild, and well, there was an interesting answer. Interesting in an old Chinese proverb-y kind of way that was giving him the impression this could turn out a little trickier than he'd anticipated.

He angled his head El's way, took the cigarette from his mouth to hang from his fingers at shoulder level. "What's there to lie about? You think I like being dragged between cockroach heaps in a rolling scrapyard with fuck all suspension when there's a bullet hole in my leg? Given that or a long siesta with a tequila every day, take a guess which is getting the hole punched."

No pause this time, and no light-glinting chinks to break the certainty. "You will have to tell me why you are lying. I only know that you are."

That really wasn't a good tone in El's voice. El had a whole Rockies range of variations on angry, and while 'pissed at Sands' was still common enough, it had been a while since he'd given him the full drug dealer jizzball attitude, complete with missing contractions.

Sands pulled on his cigarette, words hardening as he let the smoke out. "So what's your grand plan for the future? Keep right on killing people till you die? Because I've got to tell you, El, if you don't have an alternative set by to cover for the fuck-ups, that's the way it's going to go down."

"There are always people who will hide me." Brushing shift from El, dismissive, words spoken to the windshield, not even looking at him any more, and Christ, but this was slipping away from him too fucking fast.

"Fans of the legend, right." Flat tones, fact, no quiver allowed in the absolute, not now, because he was right about this, and even El had to see it. "There are always people who'll sell you out too, and you can't tell one from the other, never know who to trust or we wouldn't have spent the last week scuttling miserably from hole to hole."

Quick sound from El that was almost laughter, and touching close on ninety percent cocoa. "I can't trust the man I am with now, so where is the difference?"

And that just stuck fucking big spines in his throat all the way down.

He'd practically been a paragon of the god-pissing Virgin Mary, he'd been so cautious about treading all over El's frankly fucking inconvenient moralistic sensibilities. So many cheap rat sell-outs they'd been dealing with, and safer to see them dead than leave them loose to move onto the next highest bidder, cranking the handle on the rumour gears all the way. But a good half were still kicking up mile-high dust trails somewhere so far as he knew, and the half that weren't had drawn their own straws.

He stretched himself out across his seat, arm settling over the back, lounging part across the car door to face El head on. "Perhaps you'd care to enlighten me on how you reached that particular conclusion. I've found you whatever information you wanted, I've covered your ass, and that includes following you into some pretty fucked-up situations when you weren't inclined to play it too logical, if you don't mind me mentioning it. I don't recall giving you one single reason not to trust me since we started this arrangement."

"Not until now," El admitted, though his dramatic, swooping tones weren't exactly saying agreement. "But I can't trust a man who will lie to me."

"I haven't told you any lies."

"Maybe not." El's voice clicked back down a notch, slower, but not enough, nowhere close to enough. "But there's more you're not saying."

Sands tipped his head just one degree off and raised an eyebrow at him. "El, much as you may be hankering after the good old joys of married life, the day you and I have ourselves a real open heart to heart with true confessions will be the same day the aliens land and blow up the White House."

"This time you're hiding something important."

Every answer coming back faster, and Sands deliberately drawled each sentence out longer. "Are you planning on hearing me out any time in the next hour, or should I save this conversation for a day when you're in a more reasonable mood?"

"It doesn't matter. I'm not going anywhere with a man who's lying to me."

And that was it.

He'd lost it. Argument going circular, El with that spur of his dug right down to bedrock, and there'd be no lever long enough to shift him, not now.

Christ, this was going to take fucking weeks to fix, and that just blew Bolivia all to hell, because he wasn't even considering going without El.

He wasn't going anywhere without El, except maybe down a hole in the ground with dirt thrown on top, and he planned on skipping that one a while longer yet.

Well, fuck, wasn't that just the sweetest thing to know?

He didn't do relationships. He didn't do friends, and he didn't do long term fucks. He'd done the witchbitch far enough to factor her into Brazil, but he'd never considered it 'till death do us part' on either side, which just made those all-around murderous intentions all the funnier in hindsight. But now, apparently, he did mariachis.

El was just too fucking convenient to have around.

He could do it all as well on his own - okay, almost as well, it was always useful to check he'd wiped that last spot of blood off before he put himself on public show - but it already took enough time and concentration just to get through every single fucking day. When cutting his nails had turned into a ten minute adventure of double-or-quits, he was taking all the easy outs he could get.

Fucking Christ in the desert, too many reasons to glue himself to El, and he just couldn't see himself as another clinging Mariachi sidekick and fucktoy. He really should cut loose before his hair got any longer and he started answering to Carolina.

Leave.

Right.

The feeling rolled all through his gut and hacked up cyanide fast and smothering into his throat, and he almost wanted to throw up just to get rid of it, burn it out with the acid, except right now he'd probably goddamn choke on it.

Well, fuck all of that.

The decision was right there, spitting out the words with the draining smoke. "Your choice, dickbrain. I'm heading out."

That got El's attention right back on him, real fast. "Heading out?"

"Done. Leaving. Getting the fuck out of this goddamn country where too many people are keen to fill me up with the latest in fine lead-copper composite and setting up someplace I don't have to share with the roaches."

And that actually got El laughing, finally, sawing up from his lungs with broken teeth dragging tangled through old growth. "Oh, that's great, just great. You wanted this. You made this happen, and now you say you're leaving, just like that."

"You can cut the horse shit dramatics, El. You made yourself, years before I met you." Cigarette twitching as the corner of his lip curled around it. "You were always going to crack. All I did was poke around at the weak points here and there so I didn't get too bored waiting."

Another long nicotine drag, heat flare over his fingers as the smoke ran deep, and he dropped the window a couple of inches to flick out the butt.

"So when exactly do you plan on leaving?" Slow, stressed words, accent lead-dense, and yeah, El was really laying it on for him.

"Any time you care to stop, since I'm not so inclined to jump from moving vehicles as some people might be. Though I'd prefer a town to the desert," he added, because it never really paid to be ambiguous on these points. "Just pick an intersection the bus runs through more than once a week."

The world lurched under and around him in a stressed, rubber-clutching squeal, goddamn near cracking his skull apart wide and bright as he met the side window, hard. He grabbed for dashboard and seat back to stop his slide over the vinyl until everything settled and straightened up again.

El stomped his foot across once more, engine revving high, car accelerating in full slug on greased glass style.

Sands pressed his shades back down straight over his nose before he turned to El with tight jaw and flat words. "What the fuck was that?"

"You want a town, we passed one ten minutes ago."

That wasn't entirely what he'd had in mind either, but El always had been a guy for direct action. "Don't forget the part about the bus."

"It's big enough." Voice strapped down with steel cable, and not a lot of wriggle room left between the coils to work with.

One town, another town, what the hell, it wouldn't make such a difference. Every place around here was just some pit in the ground trying to work its way up to the exalted status of toilet.

Air sucked past his ear through the gapped window, hot and grasping, tugging at his hair, whipping it damp round his neck. He wound it lower, and pavement rumbled dull and only mildly Mexico-bumpy beneath the wheels; the breeze past him was grit-heavy and no hint of salt.

Baja central strip. Lovely.

There were cars passing, headed the other way - not so many, maybe one a minute, enough to make the route decently-travelled. A mix of types, some trucks, some sedan-sized, and not all of them sounding as beat-up as El's high-rattling wheels. Wherever El planned on ditching him, it obviously counted as civilisation by the local standards.

He could manage to relax a little more for the rest of the ride.

Which was less than ten minutes as he judged it before the car slowed and the sounds changed, tightening up with the buildings. More traffic edging closer, first snatches of conversation.

They passed a couple of intersections, slowing, stopping, cars and some people crossing ahead, before El hit the brakes the final time and took the car out of gear.

"This is your stop, I think." Pancake syllables, cartoon man emerging crêpe-flat from under the steamroller.

Sands turned towards El and smiled, wide and cheerful. "Well, thanks for the ride."

He fished through the glove compartment, helping himself to an unopened pack of smokes. People walked close past the window, sidewalk right alongside, so he pocketed a couple of his spare magazines a bit faster.

He opened the door wide in the gap between passing feet, reached into his jeans for a few notes and dropped them over El's lap. "I hope the tip's good enough, it's kind of hard for me to tell."

Sharp crinkling of paper with a fast jingle his way, and he figured his cash had itself a meeting with the sidewalk. "Fuck you."

He angled his eyebrows high a half second. "Not any more."

He stuck his leg from the car, feeling for the kerb with his boot. It was right there, so he climbed out onto the sidewalk, found the rear door handle and ran his hand over the seat to his bag. It had been sliding about some with El's less than delicate driving. Lucky it hadn't taken a dive to the floor, and El really should know better than to treat weapons that way.

He couldn't be quite sure when El's temper would depart entirely and he'd just hit the gas, so he shut the door and eased the bag down to the sidewalk, leaning over it carefully, left leg loudly yelling its unhappiness about the whole bending part.

He opened the zipper barely enough to get his hand in - no points for displaying the contents to the passers-by on a public street - slithered fingers through metal till the wood of the cane was smooth against his palm and he eased it out and stood upright again.

The engine revved up beside him and the car pulled away, drowned in the flow of other traffic around him in seconds.

He was facing along the road, reaching after the sound, breathing too deep, too fast, sucking in the Mexican perma-dust dry and gritty on his tongue with every lungful, so he stopped. Lit himself a cigarette; inhaled careful, controlled.

Well, that had gone well. He had no idea where he was, couldn't even drag up the name of the goddamn town. And he had a half-healed leg and a stick.

So he'd just have to work it all through from the basics.

Christ, it felt like he'd been doing it forever. Same old shit.

He swept the cane out in front of him, using it more like a walking stick, moving away from the kerb a few steps till he found the wall of a building. Sun-hot and not too gritty-feeling on his palm, so he settled back against it, bag tucked close between his feet and the wall, warmth bleeding through jacket and shirt to his skin.

Better, yeah. Now he only had the one-eighty to work through, and a foot thick guarantee no fucker was gonna be creeping up on him from behind.

He took another drag on his smoke, held it back, let it go, slow. Perfectly valid reason to be propping up a wall, relaxed, no hassles, nothing for anyone to see or remember more than ten seconds after they passed him.

Intersection, right. A crossroads, and a fairly busy one. Traffic way too fucking close and loud, constant rise and fall of cars buzzing through his head, and too often the drilling rattle and harsh diesel stink of bus or truck that screwed him for just about everything else.

He held the cane tucked in alongside his leg, waiting for the world to come back. It pressed tight against his palm, slick under his fingers.

Some kind of restaurant along the block, food smells stronger when the breeze gusted from his right. At least he could fix being hungry when he hit that. Fruit somewhere too - he'd need to keep part of his brain watching out for the half-assed maggot-ridden home-grown stall set up sprawled across the sidewalk. Mid afternoon and more heat on the right side of his face, so he had directions.

People drifted past him, most alone or in silent couples, irregular stream of footsteps approaching and passing, no hesitation, no shift in the patterns, nobody paying any attention to the lounging gringo, though somebody stopped to pick up his cash El had tossed into the street. He listened in on the chatter of the groups who talked, fragments of mind-curdling gossip and bitching, nobody giving him anything useful like information on where the fuck he was, and he gave that up after a few minutes, flicking the last of his smoke out into the street during a break in the feet.

He shifted his weight, then shifted it right back because fuck, his leg ached when he did that.

Okay, so first up was papers - that part was easy once he got himself and some of his dough to Mexico City.

Shit. He wasn't exactly looking forward to experiencing the Mexican long distance transit system. He didn't have to be intimate with that form of travel to know he wasn't going to like it, but taking a taxi half the length of Mexico would make him stick out in the mind of some cabbie like a goddamn freak.

It'd be a hell of a lot easier to stop a car down a side street, pull a gun and get himself another driver. He still had enough sense of direction and clues from the sun and traffic to tell him if they were stiffing him, taking him to the local cop hangout instead of the highway. But he'd have to kill the dumb fuck and any annoying passengers when he got there so they didn't run squealing to the police with his description. Hey, no big problems on the principle, but the execution - so to speak - just got messy. He'd have to do it someplace quiet, which still left him stuck outside city limits trying to grab another ride or pick up the bus, only this time wondering vaguely if he'd cleaned all the blood off.

Christ, being blind dug fucking big holes in more than just his head.

At least sitting on buses all day would rest his leg up some more.

Cab to the bus station, right. After the money. So he needed a phone and a bank.

He didn't have a goddamn motherfucking clue.

There were a dozen cities in Mexico he could've just grabbed a cab, given an address and tapped his way to the phone. Why the fuck did the goddamn shit-sucking Mexican have to dump him in some random pisspot in Baja?

Time to practice smiling sweetly, Sheldon, you're gonna put it to good use.

There were a lot of things to like about Caracas.

Having so neatly side-stepped Mexico's rainy season, it was a pity his trip had to coincide with Venezuela's instead, but the climate was otherwise reasonable. The coastal influences kept the temperatures moderate for the latitude - it was still unpleasantly hot some days, but nothing like the soul-meet-pitchfork hell-pit that was Mexico's northern interior.

The weather was having one of its more cooperative moods and predicted to stay that way, so he had the cab drop him at the edge of Parque los Caobos for the longer walk. The car hadn't been going anywhere in a hurry anyway. Goddamn traffic was worse than Manhattan.

The park was a usefully multi-tasking environment, so long as he stayed clear of the huge fountain with its rushing, splattering water and all those people and their shrieking brats. The traffic noise and fumes dialled down behind him, the trees taking over, shivering and rustling above him in easy sound, low and steadily variable with the birdsong. The city was toned back from its enclosing, dense primary colours, but not lost anywhere in a park this size, always hanging misty-grey somewhere around him when he sought it out through the trees. Major roads and chiming clocks reaffirmed his sense of direction if he needed it, on sunless days back when the paths had been unfamiliar, and they kept the whole experience from being too reminiscent of the endless grinding tedium of marching the dirt roads round El's old hovel, while he waited for the dicktard to quit moping and kick his own starter. The bigger parks were more disorienting, took more concentration, and he only used those when he didn't need to think.

He still chose walking as much the lesser of the available evils. He had to keep himself in something like his old shape, and he wasn't going to be playing any ballsports on a competitive level. And he had no desire to spend time at the gym, with unspeakably boring corporate types panting and rasping heavy under excess pounds at the next machine. He'd stick with push-ups and the other at-home basics for muscle work.

He knew all the paths here, pressing the pace and using the cane as a fast check for branches after the rainstorms, or trash dumped by zombie-brained fucklets-in-waiting. Barely a ten minute walk to his bench, a spot carefully selected because it was arced close by bushes, and he took the laptop from its case knowing nobody was going to be getting line of sight on his keys without stomping on sixty or seventy twigs first. He slid in his earphone - just the one, he liked his other ear paying attention elsewhere - connected the laptop to his cell, strapped on his throat mike and dialled up.

The usual lengthy and tedious access routine broken by a couple of false inputs, but he preferred his accounts to have the extra levels of security. The first part of the money had just transferred in, and was already sweeping through automatically to his main stockpile.

He didn't play with bags of cash the way he once had. Even if he got himself a reliable double-check he wasn't being stiffed with the Monopoly bank, he'd be a walking invite for muggings on a weekly basis. Sooner or later he'd fuck up and some greasy turdball would get lucky.

Everything one step removed, right along with the rest of the world, disassociation the key to a tidy life.

He transferred a smaller amount through to his local account and disconnected the final call, erasing them from the histories of both cell and computer. Barely ten minutes and everything was repacked, and he took a series of trails the length of the park before he headed for the café.

No bleep from his watch yet when he reached the steps, figured he was a minute or so early, but the door rattled unlocked and opened with a rush of air-chill when he got to it anyway. He tucked his cane up under his arm and made his way through to the table the other side of the bar, in the corner away from the windows.

He arranged his meetings a little after opening, and the staff in his places knew to check the furniture was all where it should be if they wanted their tip. And he tipped well.

He ordered his coffee - Adriana today, she knew how he wanted it, and didn't hassle him over details - and settled back to wait, cool breeze touching round his neck beneath his hair and easing the city's damp-clinging heat from him. Air-con really was the perfect invention for anyone whose circumstances dictated the carrying of concealed weapons. It was a pity nobody had convinced the local cab drivers of the virtues.

The waitress was back a few minutes later, setting his coffee down, and an ashtray beside it. His watch bleeped again, one minute warning for his ever-punctual meet, and he smiled and thanked her briefly, but didn't reach for the cup.

The door opened out front and someone came in; heavy-built with long, steady strides and shoes that tapped over the tiles, business, not sneakers. Sands tracked him past the bar, picking up his coffee and blowing on it, deliberately unreacting as the feet clicked closer. He'd met the man a few times now - enough to have an idea, not enough to be staking any of his remaining body parts on it, especially when he kept changing his shoes.

The man stopped the other side of his table and yanked out a chair, sharp lift-drag. Definitely Muñoz.

"So what have you got for me?" No names, no introductory small talk, the guy was always straight to the point. Sands almost liked him.

He unzipped the back pocket of the laptop case one-handed, took out the papers and slid them over the table. "This is the itinerary for the whole month, with the emphasis naturally on the non-public visits."

He sipped at his still-too-hot coffee, the papers rustling regularly across from him as they were flicked through slowly.

"This is all guaranteed?"

"Multiple sources confirming most of it. I've marked the details that might not be a hundred percent."

A second, faster ruffle of the sheets. "There aren't many of those."

He smiled quick and tight, spinning the words out slower. "You're paying me for facts, not a ten page listing of maybes."

With the real ass-wipes, the ones who were going to die either way, well, he sold the truth to them too, but there'd be a little something missing along the way. Nothing too big, nothing too important, just enough that overlooked it would swing things against them, and he got to sit back and play them a little as they thrashed around in the tar-pit, digging themselves ever-deeper in the struggle to get out.

Not too often, though - it wouldn't do to get himself a reputation for being unreliable.

Muñoz paused half a second, no flap of paper, no obvious breathing. "Some of these facts make interesting combinations."

Sands smiled a little wider - he'd figured the connection with the oil, then. "Personally, I'd go with the dinner on the twenty-fifth as your opening."

Personally, he could give a rat's fart about whatever deals Castro was cooking up with Chavez, but it interested enough other people to keep his finances healthy.

Shiver through the table beneath his hand, some movement there he hadn't caught direct from Muñoz. "Maybe." Nothing committal in the voice, certainly not inclined to be trusting, and there really was a lot to appreciate in doing business with someone who knew just how it all worked.

The papers rustled one last time as his guest tapped them straight against the table and tucked them away. "Your payment's on the way."

Sands smiled at the edges. "I know."

Muñoz pushed his chair back, quick scrape-scratch absorbed into the room, but then he leaned back in instead of standing to leave, arms on the table making it quiver-stop. "Oh, and just as a little something extra, you might want to know some people have been asking around after you."

Sands left the smile fixed in place, raised his eyebrows in light curiosity. "Would you happen to know who?"

"I didn't bother finding out - that's more your line, after all. It's a different name they're looking for, but it's your description."

That figured. Not much chance of there being two of him around, really. "American?"

"Nobody's called it. The accent's not local, but they speak Spanish and English, and both flawless."

Well, that ruled out the basic coke goons, which left a fairly short list of possibilities. "I don't suppose you've got a description to share with me?"

"A man and a woman, somewhere in their thirties, that's all." His voice drifted upward the same way his lips would be right now. "If I had more, I'd have made you lower your fee."

Sands smiled back at him, one finger circling slow over the table, smooth-polished beneath the glove. "So why the tip-off? Would this be your charitable act for the week, a down-payment on your chosen spot in the afterlife?"

"You've been good for business. There's probably more chance of this set-up surviving if I tell you than if I don't." Quick cloth brush that might have been a shrug. "Either way, I lose nothing by it."

That was true enough - Muñoz would need a particularly inspiring reason to want him out of town at this stage in his dealings.

Muñoz got to his feet, shivering crockery rattle as he brushed against the table. "I'll hope to see you around," he said lightly, and clicked away across the tiles.

Sands listened to him go, the door opening and closing after him, then pulled out and lit a cigarette, huffing the smoke out fast between his teeth.

Well, fuck.

He hadn't ever been planning on a permanent deal, but he'd been hoping to keep it flowing a little longer. All that time and effort setting up connections and contacts, and he was going to have to disappear again.

Venezuela had been good to him. Caracas, like most cities, had a wide range of inhabitants with an equally wide variety of views and affiliations, and there was always space for a facilitator between. Someone who could get information from the slum scum, including the ones less motivated to cooperate, then slide right back in with the people who made things happen. Just the right degree of political infighting and corruption around right now to create plenty of interesting employment opportunities, not enough to make daily life unpleasant, and even better, a government that was no friend at all to Washington.

Nobody was ever going to be dragging his ass back to the US through legal channels.

A couple more pulls on his smoke, and his hand reached out automatically to the ashtray, quick flick of his fingers at the edge.

He wondered if this meant the hunt was on for El too.

He'd resisted putting the feelers out for information on El Mariachi. If the dickwit had ever gotten careless and dead, that news would have filtered down fast with the fine Colombian imports, and as long as he kept himself alive, the details were irrelevant. Asking would have sent too many unusual vibrations both ways along the wires.

But El was too good a Plan B to lose just because the brainfuck was clueless someone else was painting themselves into the picture.

Christ, he should have stuck around long enough to arrange some kind of system. He'd place some major bets that El's happily enriched mariachi tag team could get word to him inside a day if they ever needed to. He was gonna have to start right over from the basics, which was just too fucking tedious.

If he decided he was going to do it.

And wasn't that quite the question?

Adriana was hovering non-intrusively, making work a few tables away, and he waved her over. "What's my tab running at now?"

"I'll check for you, Señor." Not quite hiding the surprise - normally he'd stay longer, eat lunch.

He pulled out a roll of notes from a pocket tight against his ass - all one denomination, fresh from the ATM, anything else was too much fucking hassle - and counted them off. No sense pissing off the locals over something as minor as an unpaid bar tab, not while there was any possibility he might end up round this way again sometime. He handed her two extra. "Keep the change." He wouldn't have any use for bolos himself tomorrow.

"Thank you, Señor." The smile was bouncing all over her voice, obvious as King Kong on the Empire State swatting planes. It wasn't the worst way to start a shift for a waitress cutting minimum wage in a currency running over thirty percent inflation. She'd figure it out in a week or so when he didn't show. "Should I call you a cab, Señor?"

"No. It's a good day, I think I'll walk."

When she left, he scooped his fingers through the left pocket of his jacket, pulling out the change and smaller notes he'd collected over the last few days and left those as part of the tip. That junk only got in his way.

His cigarette had burned through, and he crushed it into the ashtray.

He fired up his laptop and hooked his cell in again, quick check on a few extra details and news reports. A couple of short calls got him the full range of transport possibilities, and then he wiped the memory and records on his cell blank. He didn't leave much in there anyway, but no point tossing out even the small crumbs. It was amusing to consider the possibilities of having the Company go poking into the affairs of some of his less amenable contacts, but the potential drawbacks of bringing together any of the various people who didn't much like him were too inconvenient.

He packed everything away and left, using the less-travelled back streets that paralleled the arterials.

He knew his options from here, had plans in place to cover the basics, a few tentative feelers hooked out to a couple of cities.

He could push on to Paraguay, use the time it took them to track him again to see what he could dig up, try to get himself something to work with. Or he could head back to Mexico and take the blunt instrument approach to the source of it all. One got him a time limit and starting from scratch with almost no contacts, one got him a batshit crazy Mariachi and more enemies than just the ones who'd followed him here. Heads you lose, tails you're truly fucked, Sheldon.

Those types of choices were getting cosily familiar with him lately.

He'd developed a certain respect for the direct approach. Kind of enjoyed it, when it was a choice and not a lifestyle. Like most things, it lost its appeal shoved hard down his throat - he was willing to suck cock now and then, but he always pulled back when he started to gag.

The other reason he'd left, well that no longer applied.

He could taste it still, the taint of steel flooding over his tongue when his thoughts slipped; that moment in the car, running smack into the little inconvenience that had been backing him quietly from the sidelines the whole time he made his plays.

It had been fear, and not the kind that was bullets he couldn't see whining past his head and into his goddamn leg.

Fear that was standing by a doorway with the wrong people following, a connection sliced silent by his ear, and the knowledge that everything was about to go crazy and he didn't have a fucking clue.

Fear that was waking up strapped to a table in a room with a man whose street reputation was based on a liking for torture.

He'd always known he could do it - had it all figured out in his head from about day six, thoughts tacking breezy between the pain-waves as he sat mummified in a back room with a bubblegum kid. And knowing hadn't done a goddamn thing to stop the thought of being blind alone from leaving him absolutely fucking ready-to-empty-his-guts-all-over-the-car terrified.

Shit, just thinking about it now was enough to have his fingers in his pocket sliding over his pack of smokes.

It was a funny thing to look back on. When he got down to it, it was only a matter of figuring out what he needed to do and working his way through the list, same as anything else, and just as easy. Making things happen was what he did. He'd known that the whole time too, known that sitting around sifting through all the ways it could go to hell was a lot worse than just getting out there and doing it.

And he'd still had to get out and do it before he could believe it.

The only big head-fucker he was stuck with now was whether El was already on the watch list. If he was, he needed to know. If he wasn't, digging him out would add him right up near the top as somebody interesting.

No way to tell without more information, and no way to get it without putting himself out there as a target, and that was far more El's style than his.

Fuck, but he hated being pushed into decisions when he didn't have all the data. Or in this case, damn near any of it.

Footsteps across the street, light, fast, almost skipping; just the one set and exactly what he'd been listening for.

"Hey, kid. Get over here."

The footsteps slowed, stopped, but they didn't come any closer.

He reached into a jacket pocket, pulling out the smaller stash of notes there - never keep all your cash in one place, not in Caracas, and any eye issues irrelevant - and thumbed a few off slow and obvious.

Still no closer - this one was stringing him a tough sell. And then the break, high, inevitable - "What do you want?"

A girl. That explained the reluctance, not that it made any difference - he looked a complete fucking perv whatever kid he paid off in the street. "I want you to drop something off for me, that's all. You don't have to go anywhere with me."

She was crossing the street now, creeping in. Still cautious, but no question she'd bite. Not that there ever had been. "Is it illegal?" She sounded more hopeful than suspicious - mercenary inclinations developed early, just the way he liked them.

He dipped his head as she moved in, tracking her height from her voice, and smiled down. "Not this time." He held out the cash and his cell towards her. "I want you to take this phone and put it on a bus. Not a city bus, something going long distance. Just push it under one of the seats towards the back."

"They won't let me on the bus, Señor. The drivers, they watch for us."

Up close, she didn't smell great, and she wasn't so well-sharpened in the brains block either - even if he were a perv, he'd pass on this one. "So ride the bus a stop then take another back if you have to. I'm giving you more than enough cash to cover a ticket. Consider the trip out of town a bonus." The brat had probably never been more than twenty blocks over from whatever rat pit she was born in.

Sound-movement flash, and she was grabbing at cash and phone - brush of fingers that had been fuck knows where over his glove, and he squashed the instant flinch-tense of it and kept his grip. "Oh, and kid." He let his smile flatten out, running his voice sweet and dark like treacle. "You really do want to leave it. Don't get any funny ideas about keeping it."

She snatched again, harder, and he let go, her feet slapping off fast down the street.

She'd follow instructions, for that amount of cash - even she'd realise the deal stank worse than she did.

And if anyone else found the cell and stashed it, well, they deserved whoever came looking. Handing in lost property was just good manners.

He was deeply curious as to who it might be doing the looking.

With the Cuban connections, there'd be a couple of Company coyote-lickers slinking round here somewhere, sniffing up the same information. Someone could be tossing them one or two extra bones unasked for - with the rigged referendum idiocies, the opposition might just be getting desperate enough to suck American ass to be rid of Chavez.

But if the Cunts Incorporated knew he was here, he'd be expecting more by now than a few questions. There was another angle to this.

He reconnected with the main road to take the bus the rest of the way to his apartment. The buses were unpleasant, but they were frequent, and he'd got no phone now to call a cab. He wouldn't risk trying to flag one in the street, not when he'd no way to tell if he got a genuine taxi or a moonlighter who'd try taking him like some dipshit tourist. He didn't need the hassle of body disposal today, or the even more annoying possibility of some kind of public scene right outside his door.

There wasn't much to pack when he got back to his place. Some of his clothes had migrated into the closet and drawers over the months, along with the newer, rather classier threads he'd equipped himself with when he got here. He'd have to leave a few behind - he owned too much now to fit the one bag with the rest of his guns, and he always liked to keep one hand free.

He changed into something more suitable for the trip, dressing down into ten-buck tourist T-shirt under a light denim jacket, and knee-length ragged cut-offs that covered the bullet scars. He was older than the average 'adventure' traveller who made a point of hitting the borderline risk cities, but it was the least stand-out look on offer. It suddenly wore a little non-designer ripped every time he couldn't fake it out and had to obviously resort to the cane, of course, but that was true however he played it.

He threw the laptop case in the trash, and shoved the computer and most of its accessories in the bag too, between the clothes - no way was he losing that, not with its adaptations and after all the hours it'd taken him training the voice recognition software up to speed. Christ, but if he ever found himself within range of the stupid fuckers who'd coded that piece of horse shit, he'd shoot their dicks off. Learning to touch-type even at this belated stage might actually have been quicker.

Fifteen minutes after he got back, he was set to go, and he knew where he was going.

The idea of fleeing with rabbit ears down across South America, trailed every step of the way by some irritating bugfucker jackals he couldn't even finger, really yanked at his balls. So Mexico it was.

And if he brought El some more unwanted attention, well, that was hardly new. El could watch his own back well enough if he knew what to watch for. He could always disappear again, if he hadn't already.

Sands reached for the phone and dialled up a cab.

The cab driver asked him if he was sure about the address when he gave it, which wasn't scoring as the most auspicious of signs to start.

The planes tracked them on the drive, parallel courses on approach, louder with altitude drop as the highway headed north from Saltillo itself towards Ramos Arizpe, closer to the airport. Drivers didn't often try to screw him, but it was always smart to be paying attention.

The jets whined high, close in and engines revved up for climbing, but the planes were losing out badly to the people once they got into the centre of town. Voices chattering, yelling, music from guitars and cheap trumpets and blaring out of radios, shoes on concrete all round as the cab slowed and slowed to crawl on through the streets with the other traffic.

He told the driver to stop right by the entrance, so he'd know exactly where it was.

The noise was too obvious inside the cab, but when he opened the door, it hit him like a goddamn wall. What the fuck was this, carnival day? He was a month late for Independence and it sure as hell wasn't the Day of the Fucking Dead, but the goddamn country had so many local excuses for over-indulging in the margaritas in every single piss-basin village, it was impossible to keep track of them.

This street at least wasn't quite so busy, off the main traffic route, some flow of people round the open door but not heavy enough to be choked and stuttered by the obstruction. He stepped out into the protected lee it cast over the sidewalk, sweeping his cane out wide and obvious before he shut it behind him and let the cab rattle off. Most people who saw the stick could at least be relied on to keep the fuck out of his way.

A few steps forward, and he found a building and a doorway where they were supposed to be. He'd just have to believe it was the right building. He tapped out the width of the doorway, the height of the step, the shape of wood and stone and the cracks in the sidewalk nearby, so he'd know it again.

Time for a quick scope around before he went in - he wasn't going down any kind of hole without knowing where the outs were first.

Easier to move with the stream of people, so he slowed his normal steps to match with the feet ahead of him, tracking the edge of the building with the cane. The street was a clinging mire of smells, worse than the usual - all kinds of food from spiced through candy, perfume, sweat, cheap smoke. He could probably give a half-decent description of the last six people who passed him, and none of them would be flattering.

Going with the flow was leading him in the direction of the worst of the noise, predictably, and when the wall dropped away from his cane, everything beyond went with it. Space opening up all round within a couple of steps, space that was nothing but people, pulsing, disorganised, random and constant change. He stopped dead, twisting to swear at whoever the fuck walked into the back of him, some bitch in heels and cheap scent, probably stitched into a dress ten years too young for her. She cursed him right back in fast, vicious Spanish with a creativity he might have admired if he hadn't been a little occupied, before she tripped and teetered off past him over uneven stone.

So many hundreds of feet and voices, all echoing off distant concrete from every angle, and he couldn't pick out a goddamn thing more than ten feet away.

This place was the fucking pits. And didn't that just figure?

He backed up, finding the wall again where it headed off at ninety degrees, anchoring himself to it.

Stalls set up all through that open space, vivid-clashing food and cooking stench, sellers pitching trash merchandise, individual voices close up yelled loud to be heard over everyone else doing the same. Feet flowing and twisting between them, everywhere, strangled tight where streams met in slo-mo whirlpools, and Christ, if he got sucked into that, his directions would be completely fucked in under a minute. No solar assistance in that department either, still tight enough to the tail of the rainy season to be hanging overcast.

He'd never much liked the mass of humanity, and he liked them a lot less now.

He considered leaving this till later, but he'd a suspicion if he did that, there wouldn't be anyone here.

At least if he found himself needing to lose somebody in a hurry, he knew exactly the place to do it. And yeah, he'd lose himself too, but that could always be fixed at some more convenient and less bullet-filled later.

He echoed the buildings as he walked, tracing walls a foot out to allow for window ledges and doorsteps, circling fast with sweeping stick, the oncoming feet skirting automatically round him. Found himself in the corner of the plaza and being steered further from where he wanted to be, so he retraced to that first side street. Moving entirely against the people now, narrow sidewalk and choking, slow-moving traffic fumes, and most of that was everybody else's problem because he was swishing along the wall, and let the other fucks figure out how to get around him.

He hooked himself back up to that distinctive doorway of his, found the handle and let himself in. A couple of minutes too long with the hygienically-challenged mental deficient out front had him directions to the room he wanted, and he headed on up the predictable one flight of stairs.

The stairwell didn't smell too good, something very stale and not too well disguised, and he decided against trying to name it. Concrete echoing round him and uneven underfoot, cracking and crumbling at the edges with long wear. He was glad he wasn't going right up top, however far that was.

He brushed fingers along the wall, marking the doors he passed, and he hoped the retard downstairs had got that part right because he'd probably been counting with his fingers too. He wouldn't want to go tapping his way down the hallway, preferring to stick to a low warning approach for now.

He was getting quite the slice of life as he strolled on towards the end of the corridor, conversations drifting clear and inane through half the doors, people fucking behind a couple of them, and some brat screaming shrill from past the other side of the stairs. His fingers found a patch of stickiness on the wall, stretching after him tacky when his hand moved on, and he didn't want to think about the possibilities for that. So many practical reasons for choosing a good pair of gloves.

Eight doors later, and this should in theory be the one. He listened a minute, and didn't hear a thing as expected, so he flicked his cane up to knock.

The door only opened a crack, air swished, and a barrel smacked itself cold and nothing like gently against his temple before the hinges even finished grating through his ear.

Always nice to know his information was still good.

El breathed light and steady and the barrel didn't move.

"You don't seem all that surprised to see me," Sands commented mildly.

"I heard you were looking." Flat, nothing in El's tone to give him a clue, and that all by itself told a lot more than the Mariachi wanted it to.

"And you didn't bother to drop by and say 'Hi'? I'm offended, El."

Silence - one second, two, then something darker in El's words. "I hadn't decided if I wanted to be found."

"Well, now that's not an issue any more, how about we get inside before the other nice people in this hooker-stop get interested?"

The gun disappeared at last, not that it bothered him either way. El had such a thing for the big, dramatic gestures - he'd almost missed it, playing poker with the stick-asses in Caracas. The door-frame shrieked again - didn't anyone believe in oil in this dive? - and he swung his cane up under his arm and followed El the whole two steps he backed into the room before the door was kicked shut behind him.

The room stank, or maybe it was just El. Gunpowder, smoke, sweat, solvent and blood in the order they crawled up his nose and waved, that last one a bit downplayed, so if it was El's, it wasn't much. Christ, had he smelled like that when he was shooting back-up to Zorro? Probably, only with added Chanel Number Fuck-Juice for that perfect, lace-edged detail.

Oh, well. It hadn't bothered him then, no reason it should bother him now.

"Why are you here?"

El wasn't sounding any friendlier. He always had to make such a big production out of everything, never could just chill and run with whatever happened along. Sands tipped his head the smallest fraction and smiled wide. "Would you believe I just happened to be in the neighbourhood?"

"No."

No hint of returned humour - Christ, he'd figured this was gonna take a fair bit of effort, and sometimes it was a complete pain in the ass how he always turned out to be right. "I guess it seems the tiniest bit unlikely - this isn't really my kind of neighbourhood."

El huffed vague amusement at that, but not the promising kind. "Nobody's stopping you from leaving."

"Well, I figure since I'm already here, I may as well soak up the local flavour for an hour or two."

Glass exploded off to the right, ringing high in a sharp automatic jigger-blast, and Sands was on the floor with silenced semi and auto, distinctive gun-draw rattle from the Mariachi with the thud as he slammed himself up against a wall.

Window over there, stay down. Got it.

"You let them follow you here?"

Oh, El was pissed, his daily special of self-righteous scorn ladled out in front of Sands at full volume over the gunfire, and that gave him something close to a mouthful and a half of cardamoms to chew on.

"Fucking Christ, El, I'm blind! There could have been twenty of the fuckers in chorus girl outfits with signs for all I know!"

El bounced and jingled off closer to that window. "I think there were, only without the dresses." More breaking glass and an explosive boom, and of course El had to use the goddamn shotgun that practically deafened him.

He crawled on his elbows back towards the door, pistols up. Scrape and pressure of barrel on wood. "So next time you hear I'm looking for you, either show yourself or hole up down a nice quiet back street, not right off the fucking market square." Hinged on the left, so handle on the right, and El muttered something he lost in the gunfire behind him as he found it and hauled open the door.

He stuck the M11 out and fired an auto arc knee height across the corridor in each direction - no way he was gonna get screwed by the same shitty trick twice. A shriek, and a door slammed further along on the same side. The next stupid gawking fucks would get their heads taken off.

He slithered on forward, both guns shoved round the doorframe and nobody fired back, but there was what sounded like a goddamn herd on the way up the stairs. And fuck it all to Christ, but he didn't have enough ammo on him for this shit. "Where's the case?"

"Under the bed," El called back over the reload of shotgun shells.

Yeah, and a real fucking useful that answer was. "Send it over this way." The first of those feet reached the hallway, lighter as the sound came direct without echoing up the stairwell, and he weaved another burst of automatic fire towards them - nicely satisfying flesh-splatter and rattle-thump.

El had emptied the shotgun again and moved on to pistols. "I'm busy."

More coming Sands' way, and he took one down, but the other bastard dodged back into the stairwell before he got to him. "Well, fuck, so'm I!"

El's pattern of fire and reload was constant, repetitive behind him, and the on-off whistle-thud of automatic bullets through the room into bed and walls slowed, then stopped. Sands was getting seriously pissed with the goons on the stairs playing chicken with him - they took a quick step or two out, jumping back to cover the second he opened up. He was keeping them pinned, but he was blatting through his ammo way too fucking fast, and he needed to be killing the bugfuckers.

He let the next bird out of the bush get closer; six steps towards him before he unleashed the automatic, and that one wasn't making it back, shout high and sharp cut off as he raked the fire up.

Baked in a pie.

But he'd already chewed through one thirty-mag and was well into the second, and then he'd be down to the handgun. "Gonna need that case real soon," he warned during a lull in the gunfire.

El emptied the shotgun out the window again, second round tight after the first. Swivelled back against the wall with a scrape of boots and low metallic whisper. "Get in and close the door."

No fucking way!

Sands slammed that reaction back before it got out, but its fingers were still wedged tight in his vocal chords and wriggling.

They were on the second floor, like most times - El's rooms always were when he had a choice, so nobody was likely to try coming in the window, but he could get out that way easy enough if he had to.

It was the kind of El logic Sands had lived with because it was less hassle to ignore, and no problem when the circumstances never came up. Only now they had, and he'd never actually gotten around to explaining the part about how blind guys didn't jump out of fucking windows.

But he had to be close to empty, and if El thought the window was the best way out, then it was.

"Fuck it," he muttered, and angled the last of the M11 clip towards the stairs. He curled back in past the door, slamming it shut with the back of his hand, hearing the lock catch automatically. He stashed the empty auto away and stayed low as he crawled over towards El. Found the corner of the bed with his shoulder along the way and swept his hand under it, dragging out the guitar case. Nice to know El had kept the habit of everything tidied away.

He flipped it open and helped himself to one of El's pistols, checking the clip and thumbing off the safety.

"I think I've got them all," El said over the sounds of latches and creaking frame, sudden inrush of air and traffic fume stink entirely different from the gunfire. "Ready?"

Up and flat against the wall by the window, opposite side from El. "Yeah."

Movement fast as El brushed past and out, and Sands swung around, guns out the window as El dropped, but nobody was firing. Barely a second till El hit the deck and rolled, and Sands holstered a pistol and slammed the guitar case shut, dropping it down, hearing the easy slap as El caught it.

"Come on!"

Jump. Right.

He climbed up onto the window ledge, and fuck, gunfire blasting and splintering loud through the door, and it didn't have an angle on him but that cheap piece of laminate shit wasn't gonna hold up for ten seconds.

He shoved El's gun in his pocket, hooked his fingers onto the ledge and slithered over the edge.

And while he knew where the ground was, knew because he'd heard El land and call up to him, some part of his brain that was stuck at the evolutionary level of a small lizard was shrieking alarms through every muscle he had at the idea of just letting go and dropping into Something Unknown.

Sands was really learning to hate his lizard brain. He'd told it to go fuck itself when it was screaming he had to stay with El, and it could definitely go fuck itself when it wanted to stay clinging here and get shot.

He let go.

He unlocked his knees, relaxed for the impact, but it was kind of tricky to be ready for the re-brace without knowing just when it was coming. He staggered on the landing, his feet dragging him out away from the wall of the hotel - no traffic noise this side, at least he wasn't about to get hit by a truck.

"Move!" El's hand was on his arm as he re-balanced, then firing up over his head at the window before El was off along the - close, heavy echoes, narrow - alley. Sands had his guns back out as he chased after El, ready to go the second any shots came after them, but so far nothing. Thud, thud, thud, too closed in, tight distorting echoes, and he fucking hated this shit; so much harder to follow El at speed, couldn't put his feet in exactly the right places, expecting every step to trip on uneven path or loose stone, and having to ignore all that and just keep going.

El took a left from the alley - wider road, no echoes, traffic - and Sands followed him straight across the road through the tyre squeals and horns, through the shrieks and gasps of people scrabbling to get the hell out of their way.

"Right a metre," El told him, and he swerved and stuck his hand out left as El veered the other way, swearing when his fingers smacked into the car's metal. He knew the kerb was likely to be there and still stumbled at it, shoved one of the guns in his pocket as he followed the bodywork to the handle to let himself in.

El threw the case in the back and started the engine, the sound of it wrong, off, and Sands banged his knuckles on plastic as he reached out to the glove compartment. "Fuck!"

"Different car," El said mildly. "They knew the old one."

Shitting Virgin Mary, everything had to go and change on him. "Got too close, did they?" He had the glove compartment open, groping through it for ammo. Nothing rigged for the M11, of course, useless goddamn Mariachi, but he found a couple of clips for his semi and stuck them in his belt.

Now he couldn't find the fucking window winder. Didn't even know if he was feeling for a button or a handle in these ancient Detroit boat-wrecks El drove.

"How the hell do I get this window open?"

"Three centimetres down and ten back. Don't stick that thing outside, not here."

He did the math, wishing again he'd been able to train El to talk in feet and inches, and found the tip of a handle. That figured. "We got friends?"

"I don't think so."

His tails would have had to park up after they followed the taxi, and now they'd have to get back to the cars before they could come after them. They might just lose them from the start.

He had the window open, fumes and dust flowing faster by him as they picked up speed, El taking the turns that gave them a clearer run with some last second lane switches and horns blaring around them. He turned towards El and smiled. "Just let me know if they show up."

El didn't seem too willing to share in his good humour. "Where are your things?"

"At my hotel, where else? The Quinta Real, Boulevard Sarmiento."

"You should have brought them."

Standard procedure with the Mariachi lifestyle - never leave anything important where you might not get chance to go back for it. El had apparently forgotten he'd opted out of those living arrangements. "Show up on your doorstep with all my worldly goods in tow? I came to chat, not to move in. I don't think anyone would be offering to move into that dive."

"And what did you come to say?"

He let his smile slide crooked and flashed his eyebrows high. "Well, as it happens I was planning on telling you there are people interested in me, but I guess you know that part already."

Soft rustle as El shifted, and he could feel his eyes on him. "People other than cartel?"

The pause had been too long, and El sounded... curious, and - "They were cartel?"

"Yes."

"You're sure?"

"I've seen a couple of them around before."

That didn't make sense. They had to have followed him, the timing too tight, but why the fuck would cartel do that? He'd been missing from the picture for months, they knew El had been alone - they should've shot him, not tailed him.

"We stop by your hotel for your things and then we leave."

So El wasn't planning on kicking him right back out the door again, which hadn't been such a given twenty minutes ago. He guessed he was moving in, under the circumstances, at least for now. "You stay with the car. You're not coming in my hotel if you look anything like you smell." Not that he'd be looking much better himself after crawling all over the floor in that shithole of El's, but at least people would read him as the blind incompetent, not the town psycho.

El's fingers tapped fast on the wheel. "If they followed you, they might be waiting there too."

"Well, if they are, I'll shoot the fuckers." And he was just the right amount of pissed off with today to really have fun with it. "There won't be many, they'll have sent just about everyone in the neighbourhood after you."

"Only if they knew I was there. Not if it was just about following you."

That was true, so far as it went. If any of this had been making any kind of fucking sense at all, he could have taken a good guess at which it was, but none of it was hanging together.

"Drop me at the entrance, then keep circling the block till I come back out."

"I think I'll wait out front."

"Looking not the least bit suspicious in a beat up old wreck with the engine running. If anyone's there, they'll be trying to keep it down. Cartel don't hold running shoot-outs through the hallways of hotels full of foreign businessmen, it's bad for their image."

"What's your room number?" El's voice came to him direct now, head turned his way.

"Two-twelve. You'd like it."

El wasn't taking him up on that comment. "I'll circle for ten minutes, then wait where I drop you. More than twenty, and I come in."

More than twenty and no question he'd be leaking blood lakes all over the fine ceramic floor of his hotel room. But he'd prefer El to double check on that before he got the hell out. "Fine. Just don't blame me if you have to shoot the doorman to get in."

It was another ten minutes of weaving turns with no sign of a tail before El announced, "We're here." Ten minutes Sands spent finding his way among the more obvious and important things on his side of the car, like the door handle and locks, between giving El directions. And the radio controls, because while El had ignored it for this short trip, he'd start listening to some bad shit later when they got out on the highways.

Sands tucked the gun away back inside his jacket while the car still had some speed - this would be a lousy time to ruin his rapport with the doorman. El pulled round the arcing driveway into a smooth stop.

"Door?"

"Right here, ninety degrees. Three paces to the step."

His fingers went to the handle, and his boot found the sidewalk, stepping out easily enough and pushing the door closed too hard behind him. Something rattled in the slam, and he hoped El's latest heap of bolts wasn't so fragile in the important parts.

The engine revved up behind with an unhealthy stink of burning oil, and El pulled away.

He didn't have his cane - that was somewhere back in El's room, when having two hands free to shoot and hang from window ledges had felt more important - but he'd been here a few days now, and he could find his way from the lobby to his room just fine without it.

Provided no inconsiderate fucker had left their luggage sprawled everywhere while they checked in.

He took the first couple of strides forward, aiming a smile slightly over to his left. "Hi."

"Welcome back, sir." The words and the faint swish of the door opening set the world into place around him, and he walked in confident and unhesitating, the step right where it should be beneath his boot. "Would you like any assistance, sir?"

The guy was wondering about his clothes and the missing cane - not completely unobservant, apparently. Sands smiled slow and let it widen - maybe he'd tell him the truth about it on the way out. He wondered if there was any chance a brainfart who held doors open for a living was smart enough to take him seriously. "No, I'm fine."

Left thirty degrees, heading for the stairwell.

He didn't do elevators. They were fine when they were empty, but too often it was too many people all squashed up close, no way to know who was staring (and somebody always was, he could feel it) and what they were planning, and no room to ever get to his guns fast enough.

He crossed the lobby slower than usual, same length of stride but keeping his weight over the back foot while he felt forwards a little cautiously. The lobby was quiet this time of day, and he didn't find anything to fall over before he reached the fire door, which was good, because that would really have stripped the varnish from his little performance out front.

The stairwell sounded out footsteps like gunshots, and nobody was moving around higher up. And sure as hell nobody with plans to stay discreet would be starting a gunfight in here, even with silencers. He jogged on up the first flight, stairs always easy once he found the first one, same rise and depth of tread all the way.

He was more cautious about the doorway, still not seriously expecting trouble at this stage, but the chances were warming up if not quite starting to bubble. He listened close against the panels before he moved out onto the second floor, holding the door so it closed with only the softest click.

A lower floor made sense for a guy who didn't use elevators, but it was useful sometimes when his own preferences just slid right in with El's obsessive habits.

He took it slow along the hallway, quiet on every step, left hand trailing light along the wall and counting the doorways. He had his pistol free of the holster, but still tucked beneath his jacket till he was close up by his door. And Jesus Fucking Christ, twice in a day with the deliberate stalking of hotel rooms, and wasn't it just that obvious he was back in Mexico?

He stood tight to the wall alongside the doorframe for over a minute, counting, breathing slow, and heard nothing.

No big surprise. If anyone was here, they knew he was blind, and they'd be keeping real quiet.

He could wish the doors here were thinner. Or else thick enough to stop a bullet instead of some useless place between.

He reached round the frame to push his keycard in the slot - the goddamn thing had better work first fucking time or he was screwed way in past the head - pulled it out and let it fall to the floor, slamming the door back wide with his hip as he drew his other gun, stepping in crouched with both semis angled forward and out.

Silence over the poolside murmur, and eventually a door opening back along the corridor, someone wondering about the bang.

They'd better not come for a closer look or he'd just have to shoot them.

He edged on up to the bathroom, swinging a gun round to cover it - unlikely anyone would be in there, too much tile and echo, too hard to keep it down - waited again for the sounds that weren't there.

On past the bathroom to where the room opened out wide, expecting the shock impact in his chest with every single fucking step.

Christ, some slick show-off bastard could just walk straight up across the rug and slice his throat open with the right shoes and training, and he wouldn't know about it till the blood emptied out hot all down his front.

Carpet under both his feet and still nothing.

He stood in the middle of the room, head angled, unmoving for minutes. Not easy to convince himself nobody was there waiting him out when there should be, had to be.

And there wasn't.

He slid one gun away, went back to the door and toed around till he found his keycard, pocketing it. His bag was still in the bottom of the closet exactly where it belonged, and he ran a quick check through its more important contents and then over the rest of the room.

There was no hint anyone unfavourable had been in here, everything right where he'd left it, the only trace of stray smell that cheap perfume the maid wore. She made the bed up every day, but he was unconvinced she put much emphasis on the dusting while the guest wasn't going to be complaining about appearances - the ashtray, the lamp, the phone, they never moved so much as an inch from the lines he'd set them in, and they hadn't now either.

He didn't like this. He didn't like it one fucking bit. It felt way too much like he was being played.

But whether he was or he wasn't, there was jack shit he could do about it right now. They had to get clear of Saltillo and the goddamn coke goons before they could work on anything else.

He grabbed his bag - packed and ready to go, because he might be slacking a bit on El's level of precautions, but he wasn't ever going to get too casual - and strapped on another set of his holsters, then took the stairs back down to the desk to check out. Wouldn't do to give his new ID a record for unpaid hotel bills, even if it was already leaking at the edges and due another overhaul.

His day's luck was sticking right where it'd started, and some dicktard at the desk was bitching about his room and the quality of the amenities. The goddamn linen closet in this chain had to be better than some of the places El had introduced him to, and it was getting seriously tempting to make that statement at gunpoint to the brainfuck in question.

Christ, this whole scenario was really pissing him off. He could use a handy excuse to shoot another fuckwad this afternoon.

He wondered how he was running on El's twenty minutes - it had to be getting tight by now. Hopefully he'd notice him standing right there in the lobby before he made any unsubtle decisions on barging in.

Or maybe he'd make just the entrance to get this American donkey-sucker out of his and everyone else's fucking face. The Mariachi could be attention-grabbing enough anywhere, just by being El on a mission; he'd certainly catch everyone's interest if he came clinking into this place with his spur and his scorpions. And while anyone getting too close to Sands right now would find themselves wondering what the hell kind of weird cook-out he'd been to, one whiff of El and they wouldn't be thinking anything but gunsmoke.

There were notable pros and cons either way.

The desk clerk finally called out some luckless under-manager to deal with the whining fuckwit, and Sands checked out routinely enough. No time to have fun baiting the doorman after all that - coming here had given his tails plenty of chances to find them again.

If they even wanted to.

That different car note was right there pulled up out front. He'd only felt the one door when he traced along the body to get in the first time, and that door clicked open as he headed over to it. He ran his hand down the edge of the seat to find the tilt lever, and dropped his bag through into the back.

El waited till after the door was closed and they were pulling away to ask. "Anything?"

"No."

El didn't need to be told just how fucked that was.

Click of lighter, then a second time, and El passed him a cigarette, sudden harsh stink of burning and smoke as El breathed out, touching the filter to his hand. Sands took it and dragged hard on it, smoke rough in his throat and half-bitter with something he figured was gonna leave a lousy aftertaste. He breathed it out fast from between his lips, saving himself the double insult of inflicting the whatever-the-fuck on his nose. "Your latest brand tastes like camel shit, El."

Whisper of cloth and hair in El's quick shrug. "They're not so bad."

"They're some local dung-grown no-name pipe tobacco reject, and cheaper than a Tijuana hooker."

El didn't bother denying it.

It wasn't so much of a surprise El had fallen right back into the no-income peasant village habits - the guy set like Quickcrete and just as rigid.

Sands opened his window an inch, letting the airflow suck the smoke out. He'd stick with the stink of gunpowder saran-wrapped all round him for preference. El took a couple of lazy turns from the hotel and stopped at an intersection, cars rolling across slow in front.

"Where have you been hiding, anyway?" El was watching him again, cautious, full-on voice with no reflections, the deliberate studying of him and his answers.

He could stare all he wanted as far as Sands was concerned, he'd no plans right now to lie. "I took your advice and got out of Mexico."

"And they followed you."

Sands shook his head. "If they followed the paper trail, it was too slow. If they didn't, it was too fast." He took another pull on his smoke, and it still tasted foul. "I'm left with the unfortunate conclusion it's someone who knows me."

"The CIA." El spat the letters out black, deliberate emphasis on the English pronunciation. Apparently his willingness to fuck Sands on a regular basis didn't mean he'd forgiven that little thing with the President.

"Not necessarily." Sands cracked open the door and flicked the cigarette into the street half-smoked. "I've some thoughts of my own on that one."

He figured the pause before El spoke again was about more than just the lights changing and the engine rev. "So where do we go to check on your thoughts?"

"Lázaro Cárdenas."

"Your 'old friends'?" Who were now shipped into the same El category as the CIA. Interesting.

Sands angled his head El's way and smiled. "I seem to recall mentioning they might be trouble, El." He reeled the smile back, muscles tightening down around it. "But if it was them, they're just the middle men, and what we really need to know is who's paying them."

El's words dried right out, mud cracking in the Chihuahua and just as life-sucking vicious. "So we should go and ask them nicely."

Sands curled his lips up tight at the corners. "Oh, I think we should ask them any way that works."

And with anyone else, that would have been the end of it right there - agreement reached, no more hassles. But shit, no, he was sharing this car trip with El Morality, and apparently Sands was still floating oily on top of the list of suspects for interrogation. "So what have you been doing while you've been outside Mexico?"

"Oh, just the usual nosing around where not everyone might want me." Quick flicker-smile of amusement, knowing El was watching for it. "Don't worry, El, I didn't kill too many people, not who didn't have it coming anyway. That bitch on the ferry doesn't really count. When a guy's throwing up in the privacy of his own cabin, anyone banging on the door and telling him to keep the noise down deserves what they get." She'd given this interesting little gurgle when he'd opened the door, like she couldn't quite shriek. Puke round his mouth, shades off so they didn't drop in the piss-pot, he'd have looked a bit different from the Latino drunk she'd likely been expecting. Silence in the corridor behind her, and she'd stopped gurgling quick enough when he'd slapped a hand over her mouth and snapped her neck.

A couple of days in port before they sailed on to Caracas had given his gut a much-appreciated break, and it had been amusing watching the police trying to figure out who'd murdered the woman in her own cabin. As it happened, her husband had been elsewhere on board when Sands had returned the body, so most of the questioning automatically fell on him. The blind gringo in the next cabin was no murder suspect, and no use as a witness either, since he spoke lousy Spanish and didn't understand anything he might have overheard.

El didn't say a word. No moral lecture, no dark comments, and Sands wondered just how much leeway he had with the Mariachi these days.

It might be fun to test that out once they weren't quite so otherwise occupied. Though he'd plenty to amuse himself poking around with just for now.

He stretched himself out across his seat a little more and crossed his ankles in the footwell, settling in for the ride. "Well, it's nice to know you went on fighting the good fight in my absence. I'd half-wondered if you might have found a convenient hole to hide yourself down again."

"I can't do anything else." Every syllable clipped back as short as the accented vowels allowed. "You showed me that."

"You're sounding a little bitter there, El. You're not still blaming me for every reason your life stinks, I hope?" Christ, the self-pity gig from El got so fucking old. He really didn't have so much to bitch about, not while he still had all the body parts he was born with.

Literally all of them. It had felt interesting, the way the skin slid so freely over El's cock in his hand, and he suspected it felt interesting for El too.

"I have better places to lay that blame," El said finally, slower with the thick red Mariachi thought-stamp bright all over it.

"But blaming the dead's not too satisfying, is it?" Sands half-dipped his chin, as if to peer at El sideways. He'd discovered some amusing reactions to that; the effect seemed to be disconcerting. "Revenge done, and your life still sucks a lake's supply of leeches - it's easier to keep moving your target on up the line." He smiled, small and crooked. "Maybe you'll get to God, eventually."

"No, I did that long ago." El's answer was immediate, voice strung high across rueful and amused, swaying the rope-bridge between.

Sands felt the smile tugging, and jerked his head briefly in El's direction. "That didn't work out so well for you either, huh? Pity, it was probably the best place to aim. You know, any God you pray to, El, has to have one fucked up sense of humour."

El didn't answer that. He never had responded to any of Sands' cracks on religion, giving him either a matter-of-fact answer or just ignoring him. Hell, even if El still believed, really believed it, he had to figure he'd mislaid his free pass to God a while back now. It would take the most forgiving Jesus variant on offer to want El Mariachi socialising with his holy virgin mom at any of heaven's alco-lite cocktail parties.

He seemed to have successfully kicked El out of the twenty questions phase anyway, which improved prospects for the rest of the trip immensely.

Except, as they drove out on to the highways, El seemed to have been kicked out of everything.

The car rumbled steady in a way that said 'cruise control on', catching no other traffic, the odd one catching them, probably right on the speed limit. El's movements were smooth, casual, as much as he needed to control the car and a little more, and for anyone else, it would have been normal. For El, it was missing all of the restless time-filling habits, the still tension or the grated humour, driver running on auto-pilot as much as the car.

He didn't even bother with music, leaving the afternoon all about the rolling tyres and constant wind and El's tiny, frequent movements, too quick-soft for Sands to pick up specifics. Sands would have guessed the radio was broken, if it hadn't worked fine when he fiddled with it earlier.

He'd spent enough time sitting through El's patented brooding silences, and this was different, more. Nothing stilted or forced about him, but there was something seeping through, El more than just there; something not completely unfamiliar, only rare or altered.

El was almost buzzing. And not the pure, compass-point-focussed hum when he needed to kill.

They stopped briefly to eat in some dive they passed, and El lifted the menu and ordered after a glance, easy decision with no feeling behind it, because that was someplace else, not suppressed but... considering, maybe. Distracted?

Sands listened to him eat, fast, regular, economical sweep of fabric and chink of fork, and wondered what he had here. Whether this was El as he had always been, what he became when he was caught in the endless two-way hunt, alone, or if this was reaction, something Sands himself had provoked, created.

It was a fascinating question, and more than enough to keep him from getting bored when they got back in the car.

There was enough of El there familiar and obvious, immediately recognisable, that the vibes weren't disturbing. It was only the proportions that had changed, a different mix of colours to muddy the pattern; it should be easy enough to tease him apart over a few days, to judge El's reactions once he'd decided where to start probing for them. El was a little different, but that was a change that had happened, not an active choice, and one of the consistencies Sands recognised was that there was no deliberate attempt to disguise or conceal himself. El became so very unnatural and artificial when he tried that, it was actually funny.

Sands jerked out of his assessments when his elbow smacked hard onto the inner door handle, and fuck, but that was an inconvenient place to put a nerve. He flexed his suddenly tingling fingers repeatedly while the feeling died back.

The car was bouncing and jiggling over some road that was more hole than surface, and this probably wasn't leading them to any kind of hotel, even one that lowered itself to El's standards.

There was breeze out there beyond the slow wallowing of the car, uninterrupted flow without the high sway of branches and leaves.

"Just so's you know," he said, "my plans for tonight don't include an impromptu camping trip in a field."

"That's good, I hadn't allowed for one." El responding easily, normally, whatever had been going on in his head all day, and he arced the car round a one-eighty before he switched off the engine.

Sands tipped his chin and raised an eyebrow. "Home for the night, I take it?"

"Of a kind." Light, amused answer that told him pretty much what he was going to find. He hadn't been expecting a choice of restaurants.

He followed El's odd, weaving course from the car - more potholes, he supposed - and through a door that creaked the full sixties stalker flick. Everything smelled musty and cardboard-stiff, like the air in here hadn't moved in decades. "What the hell is this, a cow shed?"

"It's... safe."

Sure it was. Too much hope and not enough fact, because nobody knew better than El Mariachi there was no such fucking place.

His shirt was glued damp over every inch of his skin, and he was guessing this joint didn't come with air-con.

He propped himself against the doorframe while El gave the place a quick scan over from room to room - there obviously weren't many, and not big ones either, just a few strides each way - and El was heading back in under a minute. "I assume from the lack of gunfire that we're all good."

"No," El said. "Not quite yet." And El moved, fast, cloth and air shimmer, El's hands on his shoulders hard, wall pushing at his back and mouth sharp at his throat, and Christ, El had to have skipped on the shaving for days. El's body curved all along his, cock pressed hard and distinct at his hip, and while fucking wasn't exactly unexpected, he'd been expecting it to put in an appearance a little further along the line.

"Okay - that's - okay, yeah." More than okay, really. Sex wasn't one of the things at the top at of his priority list right now, but it wasn't something he usually turned down when it was offered. And yeah, El still needed to meet up with some soap and water, but hell, so did he by now.

El's hands were good on him, always had been, moving over him fast and hungry, and El's breath close on his skin sucked half the tension from him so fast it almost gurgled as it spiralled out through the drain. His spine shaped and flattened to the wall, his weight dropping back, feet sliding forward to brush alongside El's.

He groped a hand out to his right, some kind of flat surface there, and he peeled off the gloves, sliding them onto the whatever-thing and back against the wall so he'd find them again. And if the acrid-cheap taint of the smoke beneath the gunpowder was off, everything else was right, was what he remembered, the weave of the fabric rubbing past his palms, the lines of the muscles beneath, and it would have been embarrassing how fast his body and his cock reacted if El hadn't been hard before he'd even touched him. Pushing into El, sliding himself up against him, head back to the wall at the scratch of teeth, El's hair stroking along beneath his jaw and then pressing and twisting to force him higher, skin taut and stretched all down the length of his throat.

He laughed, soft and light mocking. "I'd almost forgotten how obsessed you are with necks." Felt the buzz of his words against the shifting pressure of El's mouth. "If people knew, they might have given you a different name, though I'm not sure El Hoover would carry quite the same mystique."

El's hands were at his waist already, tugging at belt and zipper. "I'm not so sure people would think of necks if you gave me that name." Breath and lips brushing over him with the words, a hand pressing down inside his jeans to grip him, and oh fuck, yeah, he was right there with that. And not above returning the favour, but it wasn't so easy getting at El when the guy was rubbing over him with his hand and damn near the whole of his body, and everything right in the way of where his fingers wanted to be.

He stroked light along the hairs at El's wrist where it was pressed up against his belt buckle, tendons moving smooth beneath his touch as El's fingers tightened and eased round his now fully hard and very happy cock. "You'll have to let me in if you want your share."

El's lips curled along his jaw, and his thigh pressed in tighter. "Oh, I plan on getting mine, don't worry."

Sands tugged his smile high enough that El would feel the quick movement of it against his mouth. "I'm not worried, El, I just don't want you hassling me too long after I get off." He twisted his head round, his lips brushing over harsh, rasping chin as he chased down El's mouth, because El's tongue could be put to much better uses than talking, as a trashy porno script would say. But El was sliding away instead, freeing his hand from Sands' jeans and pushing them lower, turning him round to press him down to the wall. Arms crossed and forearms along the plaster to support him (no fingerprints even in this unlikely rat pit), cracked stucco scratching rough against the back of his hand, braced hard with his asshole already twitching as El's fastenings chinked and scraped behind him.

"Up against the wall? That's real classy, El, I'm assuming this place does have a bed. But on second thoughts, I'm guessing this dive isn't so classy either, so maybe I don't want to think about the bed."

"Won't you shut up, just for once?" El's breath came fast, his words rustling rough alongside the fabric he shoved from his skin.

"I guess that's my invitation to say, 'Make me,' but it's a bit too cliché for me."

El's voice backed off a few inches and dropped low. "There are many different ways I could make you."

Sands grinned at him wide over his shoulder. "But not so many you wouldn't be regretting for a long time afterwards."

El seemed to be through with the chat, shoving two slicked-up fingers high into him instead, and he shivered with the fast shock of it. "Christ, you could have warmed it first."

"That wouldn't have been so much fun." And with El's fingers pushing and twisting inside him it was pretty fucking obvious how this was going to be, and while he wouldn't normally be objecting, there were some practical considerations to the deal. El pressed in deeper, another finger, quick stabbing move that had him twitching up onto the balls of his feet; not exactly away, just a little less. "Fuck, take it easy, okay, it's been a while."

He wasn't expecting much in the way of a response from El, the way he was coming at him with full headlight glare, and it wasn't like he was entirely against a little recreational pain. He'd no plans for stopping this unless El really crossed a line. But El's hand stilled instantly, other fingers brushing at his hair for a quick whispered "Sorry" up close by his ear; and when the fingers inside him moved again it was easier, slower; and El was all about the rhythm, the mouth on his neck slowing with it, stubble brushing light not scraping as the pressure eased.

And El damped it back too much, or maybe the bastard was feeling sly and got it just right, because that even, gentle pressure circling steady over the muscle inside him wasn't what he wanted from this, his spine flexing and arching moments later as he pushed deeper onto El's willing fingers. El smiled into his skin and nipped at him, fucking him lazily with his hand, only not right, and Sands angled his body and dipped his knees and spread himself wider, El moving with him so he never quite got those fingers where he wanted them.

"Fucking Christ, El, this was your idea, so why don't you stop farting around?"

El seemed to hum and vibrate alongside him. "Gladly." Damp fingers slipping out and spreading him, cock pressing against him and right up and into him, all the way, his head dropping forwards onto his arms, shift of his sunglasses to rest lower over his nose.

No pause, no holding, the slide back immediate and steady, his body relaxing around it and into it, moving with it naturally so the next push was perfect, muscles shuddering all through him with the delayed rush of it, and tightening down onto El's cock as it slipped back.

And then El stopped playing it easy, and just fucked him, and that was fine with Sands, arms locked against the wall and hips angled so he took it exactly how he wanted it, the push and the buzz and the weave of his jacket sleeve pressed sharp along his cheek. El's fingers gripped tighter through the sweat on his hips, and he dropped one arm from the wall to curl a hand round his own cock, second set of nerve endings splitting the rhythm of El's burn over the first, flaring signals into his balls and his brain and every part of his skin that touched anything, and oh, fuck, he'd almost forgotten how goddamn sweet this part of the deal was. Jacking himself nothing compared to jacking himself with a slick cock tight in his ass, searing fabric friction over his skin with the drive of it, El's breath short and heavy by his ear, and this wasn't gonna last, not with both of them strung up so high, and he slid his fingers faster, twisting over round the head of himself, because El was not leaving him behind in this, and he came sudden and gasping, jerking through it with El's continued fucking, head forced to the wall as his muscles sagged; still quivering round every thrust till El finally shuddered and stilled, and draped heavy across his back.

El's heart thumped hard through his shirt alongside his spine.

Sands smiled, face still pressed down into his sleeve - always good to know his partner had been putting the effort in.

El might not always like him, but he obviously appreciated having him around on at least one level. It was useful to know what he had to work with.

He wondered if El had ever thought of him when he was jacking off, or if that was a sunset-tint Carolina special. The music-moping mariachi would have clung desperate to Carolina, all loyalty and guilt and regret; but the killer - the blood-stained, barrel-seared man who fucked as hard as he fought - he suspected that El would have gripped his cock as he showered away the gore and thought of Sands.

It seemed a reasonable division - Sands had no use for Carolina's El.

El stepped away to settle against the wall alongside him, steady, regular movements of hands and fabric and metal. Sands tugged his jacket down to snag a tissue from the pocket and cleaned himself off, or at least the worst of it - cock, hand, stomach, ass, his hip where El's lube-slick fingers had gripped him, and damn, he'd almost forgotten this end of it too. Pulled his jeans up and buttoned the fly to hold them, because he liked to keep some dignity and pants round his knees wasn't it, but he left the belt.

Rustle of El with the whisper of chains, then a sharp lighter snap and burn.

"Want one?"

"Christ, no, I'll stick with my own." And even that heavy, clinging leaf-stink from El held some appeal, and it had been a pretty good fuck given the limits of the location, so he fished one out and lit up, settled back against the wall. Let the cigarette hang from his lips, smoke in his lungs and seeping through his nose almost drowning out that bitter-tang of El's cheap-ass stick, while he reached out with the back of his hand to find his gloves and tugged them on. El made no mention of an ashtray, so Sands just flicked the residue off sideways, treading the butt into the floor when he was through.

He pushed himself away from the wall and turned to raise curious eyebrows at El still lounging beside him. "So now we've got the potentially awkward reunion fucking issue out of the way, how about you fill me in on where the hell we are?"

'Here' turned out to be predictably nowhere, buried somewhere in the vicinity of a backwater mining town in Zacatecas, an area notable for its lack of frontwaters on show to start with. And also for being probably the most northerly state in Mexico where El hadn't killed anybody yet, which made it as good a place as most to hide out the night.

El gave him the fast summary of the house - this room, a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen, and Sands wasted some twenty minutes checking the place through. He'd been in bigger hotel rooms once or twice, but it was still plenty big enough for the dust that had it in mind to suffocate him, drifting choking in his nose and throat when his fingers followed corners and window ledges.

He grabbed his bag, still sitting by the doorpost, and wiped off the table with a really cheap T-shirt, then shoved it under a leg to stop the nodding dog effect before he started on the day's guns. El sat opposite with his own set of familiar clicks and cloths, the double thunk of shotgun shells on wood as he unloaded.

It was easier with a cleaning kit each instead of having to split one. He should have gotten hold of his own right back at the start, then he wouldn't have had to go through the annoying stage of relearning a different packaging layout, after being so used to El's.

He made a point of cleaning that pistol of El's he'd never actually fired before he gave it back, wiping the clip too before he replaced it. He didn't want El running round with his prints all over the magazine for the next year, and it wasn't something El gave much concern for.

El's fingers ran through the motions entirely smooth across the table, the series of snicks and slides and springs of unloading and stripping semis rhythmic and flawless fast. The things the Mariachi did without thought were unchanged - driving, weapons, no indication through them of the differences. But El still had that buzzing vibe wrapped all round him like a generator coil - seemed it was about more than Sands being just that hot and El needing to get laid.

His attention snapped to the break in El's sequence, the pause, the rustling - and then the lighter flick-flared, and moments later El's hands were back with the pistol, instant pick-up of the routine, and Sands ran the swab through the M11, smoke kicking heavy and sharp through the solvent in his breath. Not exactly health and safety, but he'd done it himself often enough. The banks weren't going to be giving either of them a mortgage.

He reversed the patch and ran the swab again, and the El-sounds in his head were all holding the pattern, slick like synchronised swimmers, but there was a feeling some way beyond it, and El was watching him. Genuinely watching him, not the intermittent make-sure-the-blind-man-doesn't-screw-up-and-accidentally-kill-himself shit.

"You smoke less," El said, curiosity a gold-rich vein threaded through his voice.

Sands lifted his head towards him. "And you smoke more, but as a conversational topic it's a little uninspired."

"I was wondering why." And there was the other half of it, the granite stubbornness that wouldn't let it go short of dynamite.

His face turned back towards the kit beside him while he found the next swab.

He didn't fight the old, empty habits. The actions weren't pointless while they stopped him breaking the illusion of sight when he played it.

"It screwed with my sense of smell." Something that hadn't bothered him so much back when he didn't have to be entirely aware of every hint of anything, every single fucking second. "So why d'you smoke more?"

Light twitch of fabric that was El shrugging. "I always did."

He smirked half in El's direction. "Goes with the killing people full time, does it?"

"It seems to." Casual words, clear right down to bedrock, no muddy resentment circling the waters.

Quick twitch at the edge of Sands' lip - El was getting much better at that.

And maybe that was some part of the change, a deeper level of indifference that went with the long-term lifestyle.

Possible, but hardly convincing. El had always flipped in and out of killing and contrition like an MPD case, no reason that should have found a miracle cure after ten years as a chronic condition.

He finished up with the auto, El's silent guidance kicking in just fine for the details. He wondered about that while he stripped his pistol, because he'd been dissecting through El's oddities half the day, but he hadn't questioned whether the basics would work. Probably because everything had flowed so smooth when the bullets had kicked off in El's rat-hole, goal line freshly whited, straight and bright.

Nothing uneven about El when he had a gun in each hand; it was only off the field of play he went a little warped.

Sands ran through the semi and silencers, and El chinked and rubbed metal opposite, and Sands didn't think either of them were really there with the guns.

He packed everything away back in holsters and bags, and went to find out what he could achieve in the bathroom. The place actually had running water, but only cold and the shower didn't work anyway, so the best he could do was splash himself down from the washbasin. It wouldn't make him too much cleaner, but it at least made him feel less sticky. And he could change out of the clothes stiff with sweat and come and gun grease.

When he left the bathroom, El was standing by the window, still, only his breath telling Sands he was there.

They'd ended the drive with lights, the off-on click of full beam distinct and regular surrounding every car that passed the other way, and there couldn't be a whole lot out there to see.

El left the window moments later and crossed to the other, pausing there again, then walked into the kitchen. Sands tracked his movements through the three rooms, since the bathroom didn't have a window, repeating pattern of steps and stillness, till El returned to the main room and padded past the table towards that first window again.

"Will you quit that? Christ, if I could see, I'd be dizzy."

El stopped without turning, words thinned by reflection. "Something's wrong."

"Well, no shit, El. Got anything I don't already know?"

He did face him then, swivelling fast on a single boot. "What exactly do you know?"

"Not enough. Not even close." And no nearer to getting it, despite the inconvenience of being shot at again. "Next time we're getting a place with internet. What the fuck kind of hole are we hiding in anyway?"

"It's abandoned," El said simply. "I've used it in the past, and now it belongs to a friend of mine."

"You should tell him it could use some fixing up."

"Then people would wonder why no-one lives here."

Sands snorted, amused. "As opposed to now, when people wonder why someone pays to keep water running to an empty hut."

El only shrugged. "Less people will notice that to wonder."

That was true so far as it went, though Sands would have preferred any of a half dozen tidier arrangements. But El had given up on the perimeter check at least, and was headed for the bathroom, so Sands went on through to the bedroom. If you could call it a bedroom when the bed was a mattress on pallets. But his watch would bleep eleven before long, and insomnia was a fucking witch with a sleep-wake cycle that couldn't reset naturally to daylight, and he'd found it plagued him less when he kept a routine.

He took the guns from his holsters and stashed two under the pillow and the others where the pallets met the wall, because while he had no plans to undress, they were a bitch to sleep on. No table for his shades, so he put those with the spare guns.

Not that he was likely to be doing much sleeping, given the entire set of circumstances, but he could at least lie half-comfortably. Like the running water, the mattress was a pleasant surprise, half-decently sprung instead of the sagging wreck he'd anticipated. Nice of El's 'friend' to make a few practical concessions.

He stretched himself out along the bed - the sheet over the mattress and the pillowcases were dust-free, El had fished those from some cupboard earlier, wrapped in plastic. He automatically followed all the sounds through this downmarket flophouse, shitty construction letting him hear everything in every room from right where he was, but he'd gotten used to hearing El take a piss long ago.

Gotten used to hearing every movement as El stood by the bed and slid pistols from sleeves and waist and shotgun from along his spine.

He'd wondered if they'd fuck again after El's earlier impression of an eighteen-wheeler low on brake fluid, but El didn't make a move. Obviously once was enough to clear the angry-horny combo from his system.

Pity. Sands could have used something to take the edge off right now, but he wasn't close to desperate enough to ask for it.

Maybe El was showing his age and his recovery time wasn't so good - it wasn't something they'd ever tested, with the inflexible fucking-and-sleeping routine. The idea was almost - almost - amusing enough to get him to prod the mariachi and find out.

But not quite.

"We need to ditch the car before we go much further," he said. Too big a chance someone had seen them leave either hotel. At least he hadn't wasted much of his time getting to know this one.

"I know a place we can pick up another tomorrow." Immediate, simple answer, and El had spent part of the trip down doing some forward planning, which was good to know.

"Can I put in an advance vote for working air-con in this one?" Zacatecas wasn't so hot in October, but Lázaro Cárdenas would be.

"Only if you pay for the gas."

Sands sniffed, short and deliberate. "You can't seriously be broke again, not when you've kept yourself so busy. One or two of those dead junk-shovellers must have supplied you with something along the way."

"I never did get so much of a taste for stealing from corpses." El wasn't quite making the deadpan he was aiming for.

"You shouldn't be so picky, El," Sands told him lightly. "All you really need's a supply of good quality disposable gloves. Remind me to fix you up with some."

El wriggled alongside him, and he got the feeling he was being watched again, though it was unlikely unless there was a good moon at the right angle. "Sometimes I wish I knew exactly when you are being serious."

He smiled, just in case. "Oh, I'm almost always serious. It's just useful now and then if people choose to assume I'm not."

"I know," El said softly; and then he shifted again, the mattress stilling back right after.

The house dropped into quiet with it.

The humidity and cloud cover were still high enough to even the temperatures, no fast swings in October to make walls and floors settle and creak, and Sands lay listening to the flow of air even and smooth beside him.

It wasn't odd, after the months without it. The breathing had been there, and then it wasn't, and now it was back.

That was fine, because it was the same breathing.

No traffic, airlessness hugging the house in the non-shuffle of grasses.

The breathing spread through the silence, so it wasn't.

He didn't sleep, but he drifted, comfortable considering where he was and that he was all out of practice at sleeping in jeans. The mattress was good, and everything was regular, and his watch disturbed him briefly as it bleeped the hours with improbably short gaps between, El shifting alongside him each time.

And then he was fully awake, and the glitter-ring of shattered glass was still in the air with the end of a heavy thud, and his hand was under the pillow finding his guns, while he stayed low to the bed. "I think they followed you this time, dickbrain."

Jingling shiver of mattress and a low thump as El rolled away onto the floor. "They can't have, I -"

And there was no gunfire, why the hell was there no gunfire? Just El breathing and creeping and a soft whispering.

"Get out! The door! Move! Move!"

"Wha-?" But he was already rolling across the bed and swinging his feet out to find the floor, and he was reaching, he was listening, but he couldn't hear anything to tell him what the fuck was going on, just himself and El scrabbling for the lock and -

Whispering that was kind of more of a soft, steady hissing, and something sharp in his nose and his throat and -

Gas? Fucking gas?

He heaved out all the air inside him, forced his lungs empty till his chest felt like it was going to collapse with the ache of it, his lips clamped tight, and the door wasn't where it should be, he should have reached it by now -

Oh shit, oh shit, oh motherfucking shit, they were drugging him, they were drugging him, and he couldn't stop it and he'd wake up strapped to a table and there'd be drills, and the guns, the guns were there in his hands and he had to - and they shivered in his fingers and he was shivering and they were heavy, too heavy, and –

Awake.

He was awake, kind of, and somewhere in the back of his head was the muzzy pounding jackhammer that said it hadn't been his choice to be asleep. Oh, that was really gonna wind itself up into something hellish when he woke up some more.

Still.

Check.

Breathing beside him.

The body that went with the breathing shifted just slightly, metallic whisper under the brush of fabric.

He barely managed to hold his own pattern of breath.

Fucking pathetic how hearing that actually made him feel so much better, when he'd be a shitload further ahead with El free and clear on the outside.

But Christ, he wouldn't have liked to be sitting here alone, wondering if there was any hope for the cavalry or if El was already serving as a grow bag for the local cacti.

"Ah, so you're awake now."

A voice river-pebble-smooth and familiarly smug, one of the voices that still had an image to go with it - slicked-back greying hair and big eyebrows dancing prominent through the thumping that was substituting for his brain right now. Too much of the rest lost to the fuzziness, but he knew the way the bastard's lips curled, too-confident and schmoozing.

Honaker.

Okay, okay, that made some things better and some things worse. No drills, no drills at least for now, and just knowing that much made a pretty fucking big difference right there, even knowing everything else.

But shit, Honaker knew he was awake now, and maybe he'd hit on that from El's tip-off or maybe Sands had tensed up himself, but whichever low subtlety he'd picked up on, it was a fucking bad sign.

"Don't bother faking, Sheldon, it's really not worth it."

The words carried and echoed in a big, hollow, open way - a warehouse, then.

That didn't have to mean Mazatlán. Honaker had them sprinkled around various places all over Mexico.

He lifted his head higher, and huh, he actually had his shades on, familiar plastic curve settling back close against his nose. Thoughtful of someone, or more likely they just got bored with the view.

He angled his face up to meet the voice. "Hi there, Robert. Nice of you to tip off the cartel."

"I was feeling a bit curious about some of the stories doing the rounds. Obviously I didn't want to send my people to find out how much was true." Sands didn't have to hear the smile in the words, he could practically see it glued on - the fucker never stopped smiling. Guy really liked to show his teeth, in the literal sense even more than the metaphorical.

"I hope you got the answers you wanted."

"Most of them."

Well, that explained why he didn't have a bullet in his skull yet, though it was starting to feel like he did.

There were other people breathing in here too, not just the three of them; a couple more at range weapon distance, way too far off to get jumped.

He sat up a bit straighter, slow, cautious. No objections from his body apart from his shoulders and wrists, because his hands were unsurprisingly tied behind the chair. Not metal cuffs, but nasty plastic zip-strips with no movement at all between his wrists, and the possibility of cutting off his circulation or crushing his nerves if he wriggled too much. That was just fucking lovely.

"You know, I was expecting our friend Señor Guajardo to contact me again after our first deal went so well," Honaker said. "When all those months passed and he didn't, I checked around a bit, and I found he'd vanished. And more than that, for a guy who got about so much, some people who really should have known him seemed not to."

Sands was still assessing his way down his body, carefully tensing muscle groups for reaction, and shit, his ankles were thoroughly strapped to the chair legs too. "So you naturally thought of me. That's nice to know." Honaker talking was good, he just had to keep feeding him the lines, draw him on if he stalled. He hadn't been killed outright, so there was a door here someplace, he only needed Honaker to point him at the right lock to work on.

"As it happens, I'd been thinking of you for a while. Didn't your friend here mention that? Well, maybe he didn't, he doesn't seem to talk much."

Oh, fucking Christ, how long had he been out?

No. El's breathing was steady, natural if a bit heavy - he was pissed, but that was all.

"I always liked him better that way," Sands said brightly. And he sure as fuck hoped El would stay that way for the duration - he was usually pretty good at keeping shut and letting Sands deal with the chit-chat, but this time they were really gonna be ski-ing across the avalanche slopes.

"Ah, I generally prefer my guests to be more sociable myself. I found I was left with a few questions about my visitor, and questions always make me want the answers." Honaker liked to talk, and his voice still swung exaggerated same as it always had, calculated to make him seem a dipfuck, over-friendly, easy to underestimate. Must be a real serious habit by now, 'cos he knew it didn't work with Sands. "I knew who he wasn't, but then I had to wonder who he was."

Sands twitched up one corner of his mouth and flicked his eyebrows high. "Well, I got bored and picked myself up a fucktoy. When in Mexico, do as the tourists do."

"That seems a tiny bit shallow, even for you, Sheldon."

"Why should everybody else have all the fun? The body's decent and the voice has a certain something - I can't be too sure on the rest, but it doesn't bother me so much." El was going to want to kill him for this later, but he could keep himself entertained working round that one when later happened and he was still bullet-lite.

Something creaked right by Honaker - more behind him. Quick slide of shoe on floor, and Honaker's voice coming from normal height; he wasn't sitting, but he was definitely leaning on something. Partial dividing wall, or desk maybe.

"I just can't help thinking it's funny how when someone pokes at you just a little bit, you come straight back to this one. And then the two of you take off, running together like sheep. You'd think that was interesting in my position, right?"

"Well, he knows one end of a gun from the other, as you probably noticed." Sands dropped the smile and flat-lined his tones all across the chart. "But if you really need me to get blunt, Robert, and I would have thought it was blindingly obvious even to you, he's got eyes, and I don't." Abrupt shock back into life, slow and drawling. "Let me tell you, when you put out the call for applicants to play guide for blind, hunted gringos, the line doesn't stretch too far along the block."

Another creak, slow, pitch rising, and what the fuck was that? The glimmer in his head between the blackening thumps was telling him wood, for sure, but he couldn't make out more.

"So what would his angle be in all this, then? The deal's starting to look a bit one-sided the way you're telling it."

Sands tilted his head and smiled right up at him. "I'd love to say it's because I'm just that hot a fuck, but more likely it's because I pay him so well."

Honaker's voice slowed, stringing the speculation right out. "You know, I appreciate you're missing out on the display here, but he's sitting there looking at me like he wants to rip my throat out with his teeth. And I think he'd do it too."

Fucking Christ, couldn't El manage the meek act just for ten fucking minutes? He'd had to suck it down and play helpless some in the last few months, he didn't see why El Moody Mariachi shouldn't suffer it too.

"Well, he's got quite a temper on him, you know these Latin types. And you've done more than enough to piss him off." Sands widened the curve of his lips to show leering teeth. "He only likes bondage when it's consensual."

"So you're not going to object when I have a couple of guys take him out back and shoot him?"

He pulled his mouth in tight, and wrinkled his nose lightly. "It would seem a pity, since in theory I'd need to find another lay, but I take it your plans for me don't include me going right back on with my life?" He left a pause hanging for the answer that wasn't going to come. "So on balance, it really makes no difference, I suppose. Do what you like."

If Honaker sent a couple of goons with guns somewhere quiet with El, there was a very good chance it wouldn't be El getting his brains blown out.

But Honaker started laughing then - continuous sound ringing high from walls and roof, lots of metal, and this was definitely a big warehouse, and empty - and rearranged himself against whatever thing he was propped on. "It's a nice try, Sheldon, but really, given the jacket on the table and the interesting guitar case, I think not."

Yeah. Too much to hope for that Honaker's people wouldn't have taken the time to search the place.

He huffed out air through his nose and briefly lifted an eyebrow. "Oh, well, it was worth a rehearsal."

"How like you to get yourself a legend for a bodyguard. I really am impressed."

Sands smiled, smooth and self-deprecating. "I just work with what's available. It's knowing how to make it available that takes the talent." He was racking up the negative El points with about every second sentence, but the mariachi was sticking to the Strong and Silent archetype just fine so far. Sands was starting to wonder how much further he'd get to push it before he hit the limit, and El came crashing in with the desert plateau in December lines.

And with the wondering, he was listening for El - listening, instead of tracking the background there-ness with Honaker sucking all his attention through the ache and the tilting nausea. El breathing that bit heavy, high and almost whistling through his nose, no hint of softer air-flow between lips.

Holy Christ, Honaker hadn't gone and gagged him?

It might actually make sense, stop El tipping off Sands on what Honaker already knew, no unforeseen interference with the flow of conversation.

But if he had, it was something of a miscalculation, because Sands was left entirely free to say whatever the fuck he liked.

His attention flipped right back to Honaker as he re-launched into the casual dinner-style chat. "Unfortunately your inspired solution has turned itself into my minor problem. You can see the difficulty I have here. You I could kill right now and get my payment with no questions asked, but if I hand the cartels some dead Mexican and tell them he's El Mariachi, they just might not believe me."

Oh, Christ, but that was almost funny. With El's habit of sticking his fingers all over every available surface and weapon, it'd take the cartel maybe half a day to get some pet police stooge to check the prints on a corpse - and it would never occur to someone as innately cautious as Honaker.

Sands had thought vaguely about buying El some mittens and strapping them to his fucking hands, but he was a few years too late in the game to bother.

He let himself smile a little. "So don't shoot him. I'm sure the cartel will oblige once they're happy with the ID."

"I already thought of that, but rumour suggests keeping him alive might be too much trouble. I wonder if it would help if I arranged it so he can't see? You're the voice of experience, Sheldon, what do you think?"

For about a second, he didn't think anything at all.

And then his brain overflowed with too many images, too bright, too vivid, snatches of technicolour thought all scrambling over one another to reach the top of the pile and swamped back under in an instant by the next, all blood and lurching horror, and he was gonna throw up, really gonna throw up any second now -

- and he wouldn't do it.

All sense of El beside him had dropped away, too still and no breath.

He wouldn't do it.

Honaker had never been a guy for torture, saw it as vulgar the same as a briefcase full of cash. He liked to hold himself several steps clear of the unpalatable criminals, keep that neat and tidy image. Sands was in general agreement with the whole torture thing - it was completely lacking in finesse, too crude and unreliable to be generally useful, too easy to be entertaining.

He might have made an honourable exception for Little Bitch Barillo, though, if he'd had a bit more time available and actually been able to keep himself upright.

Honaker's threat was an idle one, fishing for a response. And he'd got one, yeah, but it didn't tell him shit. Anyone who'd had their eyes poked around in while they were awake to think about it wouldn't react so well to being reminded.

Sands let himself smile, careful and slow. "Sadly, it doesn't seem to be as reliable a method as you might suppose. You could double check that with Barillo or Montejo."

"Ah, so that was you at Montejo's house." Honaker's voice brightened right up another couple of lux on the dimmer dial. "I was wondering. Obviously it was him," heavy emphasis on the word as a big pointing finger, "but the reports coming from the various parties who took an interest all suggested more than one attacker."

Sands curled his smile deliberately wider. "You know I couldn't have done it without you, Robert."

"It's always good to have another satisfied customer. I'm glad you feel you got value for money." Honaker sounded almost genuinely cheerful at the compliment. Almost. "Well, you might be right about the seeing thing, but I think I'll blindfold him anyway."

El flicked back into existence alongside him, breath, and the deep-shuddering click of a joint released from rigidity.

Breath that flowed smooth at speed, unrestricted, obvious in the absence of high notes. Interesting. "I always preferred him gagged myself, but I realise you don't have that concern." El was cooperating well so far, but Sands would take an opportunity for a reminder.

"You know, I find it intriguing you're not trying to cut a deal with me, sell him out to save your own skin."

Sands shrugged to the limits of his cuffs, uninterested. "It wouldn't have worked."

"Neither did your little fucktoy speech, and you still played for it."

He tilted his head and let the corners of his mouth rise. "Well, that was entertaining. Begging wouldn't have had quite the same style."

"And then there's the way he's willing to drag a blind man round with him instead of ditching you like so much dead weight."

The muscles flicked taut all down Sands' cheek, because that was just a little cocoa-heavy coming from a guy who always had a dozen people to hand and never cared to get himself dirty. "If you'd like to untie me, Robert, I can show you just how much dragging's involved."

"It's an intriguing offer, but no, I like you where you are for now. Your friend, though, I'd prefer to get rid of sooner, while he's still inclined to be practical."

Sands had a number of possibles to say to that, but the distinctive metallic click from Honaker sidetracked his thoughts a bit, and the single step forward leading to a cold circle pushing up hard under his chin prolonged it. It would have been a nice opportunity to disarm the fucker, if he hadn't had the full set of limbs tied and a couple of other guys playing guard on top of the samba beating in his head. Which was why Honaker hadn't even bothered cocking the thing till now.

"You and some of my people are going on a trip." Honaker's voice was aimed away this time, towards El, brushed aluminium smooth and suddenly without any hint of that surface friendly shine. "If anything happens on the way, if you escape or my people don't turn up to the meet, I'll shoot this one here in the head the second I hear about it. Got that?"

"Got it." El's accent as thick as it ever got through just those two words. Not spitting them out, holding them back, controlled, all slow and swirling with scorn - El knowing exactly what he wanted and fully prepared to play patient to get it. El thinking, planning, and Sands almost smiled because Honaker had no fucking idea.

The barrel disappeared from his skin, and Honaker stepped aside to rustle cloth by El at head level - presumably that would be the blindfold, now Honaker was done with his little demo drama. Then a couple of sharp plastic snicks down near the ground.

Sands angled his head back over his shoulder. "While we're reorganising the seating arrangements, I need to take a piss."

Quick air-movement from Honaker, and one of those other guys headed over towards them. "Just before you start thinking too hard, Sheldon, there's a man to your right with a gun on you in case."

Honaker really could be a stupid bugfuck sometimes. The lackeys hadn't been so quiet, and it figured they wouldn't be holding bow-tied bouquets. "Thanks for the info," he smiled. "I always like to know where I stand."

Rustling and scraping from his left as Honaker and El stood, and El was led off, stunted footsteps that scraped low over concrete with the regular chink of the spur. Maybe fifty feet before a door opened, metal squeaking over the influx of sound from outside - and then a sudden nasty flick-click of knife from Honaker's goon right beside him.

The guy cut the ties on his legs first, as Honaker had with El, and Sands eased his feet out slow, nothing that could be misconstrued as a kick, flexing and circling his ankles, releasing the tension on the muscles along his thighs. Single snip at his wrists, and his hands were free of the chair, but still tied to each other. "Get up." Looked like they were going to stay that way, and he brought his feet back under him, wobbling slightly as he eased up slow. Christ, every joint in his body had locked up, all his oil burned out through the exhaust a way back down the road.

One guy beside him, steering him with quick tugs on his arm, one guy hanging back a safe distance, and they were headed for the same door El had just used. Stumbling over the door rim with breeze and trees and no hint of traffic or people, and his guide held him straight for about fifteen feet, keeping the line of fire from the guy still inside. Tidy.

An engine sparked up to his left, deep and smooth, arcing round the building as it pulled away, and that would be El's delivery van on its way.

He knew vaguely which way was out now, if it was ever going to do him any good.

The guard following was finally out of the building, footsteps dirt-dead instead of concrete-metal echoes, and Sands was prodded sideways, the soil turning looser underfoot with small stones scattering before his toes. The hand on his arm tightened, stopping him, then fingers were at his fly, opening and reaching inside, and the tension punched shrill all through his teeth, because he could knee that fucker in the balls right now and kick his nose up through his brain as he curled down.

Except that would be the quick route to getting shot, and he wouldn't like it any more this time than he had before.

He turned his head just enough to smile right at him. "I'd prefer doing it myself, if you wouldn't mind."

No answer, which was only what he'd expected. Honaker trained that into his people early.

At least the guy was wearing gloves. He probably didn't want his hand on Sands' dick any more than Sands wanted it there.

It wasn't the easiest thing taking a piss with some greasy turdfuck stranger holding him, but he wouldn't get another chance for a while now he'd asked, and he managed to relax enough to let it go, splattering onto the dirt.

He hoped it wasn't splashing his boots.

The fucker actually shook his cock when he was done to get the drips off, and that might have been more disgusting than being tucked back in wet.

This pleasant little interlude would have been the end of the .38 at his crotch anyway, even if he hadn't divested himself of it in favour of sleeping.

He was steered back inside the warehouse in a studied reversal of the previous actions; straight line through the door, pushed down into the chair to have his hands strapped to it, then his ankles, one guy always hanging well back. He knew the arrangements now and it got him nowhere, everything too practiced and slick.

Nobody else in here but the three of them; he wondered if Honaker was still around somewhere or if he'd gone with El.

No, he'd said he wasn't going. Shit, steering his thoughts right now was like ladling spaghetti with a coffee stirrer.

The footsteps of both his escorts echoed away over the concrete, door closing after them with a metallic ripple heavy through the building. The breeze was severed instantly, trees and birdsong damped down in muffled distortion.

Okay, this wasn't looking so good.

He had a time limit running on him, and no fucking clue what it might be.

Even if he knew where he was, and where El's handover had been arranged, it wouldn't mean a goddamn thing. Honaker was going to put a bullet in his head sooner or later anyway, and El would know it, so that threat had no hold on him. El would stick his spur in his chance wherever he saw it.

Though being El, if that crack in the door looked likely to hang open a while, he might leave it till the last minute to buy Sands some extra space. He could at least figure that bullet was unlikely to be coming any time in the next hour.

Of course, Honaker could have had him shot two minutes after El was out the door, but Sands was reasonably confident that wasn't going to happen. Honaker ran his business dealings on trust - anything less than complete honesty and his clients would vanish elsewhere and close down a nicely thriving little enterprise. To Honaker, this was just another kind of business transaction, and he'd apply those same rules. And as back-up for the supposition, if he'd planned on shooting him right away, he wouldn't have gone through that hassle with letting him take a piss. So, yeah, no bullet for Sands till some mysterious value of 'later'.

Which was a definite improvement on 'now'.

Unfortunately, he wasn't coming up with any obviously constructive ways to pass the time.

They hadn't even bothered leaving him any guards, because they figured he wasn't going anywhere, and it was a serious motherfucking irritation that they'd nailed that part solid. The plastic was tight round his wrists and ankles, and probably not something he could break loose of even with hours to play with, but if he had eyes, he'd have given it a decent shot.

They could've left him in here untied and he still wouldn't be going anywhere. No goddamn hint of where he was or where he should go. If he even found the gates, they'd pick him up a half a mile down the road when they got around to looking. And sure, he might kill one or two before they beat his face down into the dirt, but none of that would stop him ending up dead or right back here.

He was stuck playing a waiting game for the first part of this; he just had to figure out what he was waiting for.

If he knew his guy - and he did, no question he'd got that one down more than well enough, despite that niggling something he was still working on in his currently not-so-free time - El would be coming back. He'd come back for Honaker, for the threat to his life and because he was generally that pissed at him, and he'd come back for Sands because he was just that kind of guy. Even with the revenge angle taken out of it, he was too long on guilt trips to ever ditch an ally in the shit and run.

But he'd have to kill or evade Honaker's people, re-equip himself with some decent weaponry and get back here, wherever the fuck here was, with some kind of attack plan. All that was going to take a while.

And a while was going to be way too fucking late from where Sands was sitting, because he'd be missing most of his brain cells long before.

His watch beeped off the change of an hour. At least they'd left it with him. It would have been a pain in the ass to be sitting here with no clue at all how long he was hanging on to his life.

He was vaguely irritated if he was gonna die some time later today that he got to spend most of his last hours unbearably bored. And with an evil drug hangover chainsawing through his skull and swinging on his guts.

But he sure as fuck wasn't gonna sleep them away.

There was an angle here, if he only looked in the right places.

There always was.

His watch told him all about the five more hours that passed before anyone came back, making him glad he'd taken that piss while he had the chance.

Four people coming towards him when he picked out the real from the building's echoes, and his target was front and left, because guys who mixed in polite society didn't stomp around like cheap hired thugs in size fifteens, and they didn't stalk like professionals. Guys who went to dinner parties with the state chief of police and half the local government walked steady and confident with regular taps, and Honaker hadn't changed his shoes from earlier.

No point risking leaving these things too late, so he fixed on a deliberate smile when Honaker was less than half way across the warehouse. "Hi again, Robert, I was hoping you'd decide to drop by sometime today. You know, I've been thinking this guns and gangsters drama lacks a little something as a way to end a pleasant acquaintanceship. How about you and I work ourselves some kind of arrangement?"

Footsteps splitting and fanning out across the concrete, goons to either side at a distance, and wood creaking again ahead and slightly right as Honaker settled back into his old position. "So what've you got in mind?" Honaker sounded somewhere between pleased and amused, because he would've been expecting him to try and talk his way out - Desperate Sheldon next up on the list of the day's entertainments. Which was caustic like a sulphuric suppository, but not a good enough reason to ditch the only functioning plan he had standing in line.

Always start with the easiest play and work up from there. "Whatever anyone else is offering, I'll double it. You know I'm good for the cash."

"You always were, but I'm thinking that might not be the way of it now." The answer sparked back too fast, that angle considered and cut off before Sands had even slipped it onto the table. "You've been running a long time, not to mention you don't have the backers you once did."

His muscles set round the smile, the sunglasses fixed still on Honaker. "I've been missing a long time, it's really not the same thing. Running sounds a lot less dignified than any word I'd use." He shrugged, as light as he could given the circumstances, and still feeling the tug in the plastic tight at his wrists. "Besides, neither of us will ever know if you won't give me a figure."

"Whatever I say, you'll tell me you can beat it. I don't see how I gain anything." Honaker was sounding bored already, and that came under the hard-line category of Not Good.

"Well, you gain twice the dough if I'm telling the truth, but I'm going to assume business is still going well for you." He dropped his voice, took the drawl out and ran it through as straight fact. "We both know you're not in need of the cash here, Robert, that's not what this is about. But you've got the full set of answers now, and when you're the man who caught El Mariachi, a blind ex-spook isn't going to make a big splash on your resumé."

"That's true, but you came as a two-for-one package. I don't get anything but an annoyance if I turn you loose."

"I'd say that depends what kind of arrangement we come to." He lifted his eyebrows slow and arching. "I'm sure I can dig up a little something that's worth more to you than the cash."

The offer put the tolerant amusement right back in Honaker's voice, which was one big leap of improvement over the boredom. "Your information's a bit behind the times now, isn't it?"

Sands tipped his head a little and quirked his lips at one corner. "Some of it's a little time-sensitive I'll admit, but enough of it comes canned for long-term storage."

"So make me an offer, and I'll let you know if it's good enough."

Sands curved his eyebrows up all the way, feeling the stretch in the scar tissue fixed and inelastic beneath. Shit, he'd be able to act this a whole lot slicker if his hands weren't strapped behind him to the fucking chair. "How should I know what's going to interest you, or what you already know? Give me a topic and I'll see what I've got."

"You want me to guess what's in your head? It's not worth my time to spend an afternoon playing Go Fish." Honaker was flattening out bored again and fuck, he always did have the attention span of a gnat missing its Prozac.

"So maybe you'd like to know what the Company has on you and your various dealings."

Honaker laughed then, genuine and loud, high metal echoes bouncing in the roof, smothering sound and movement, slashing the world disconnected in a blade of static. Seconds, only seconds, it wouldn't last, but tied and cut off and unknowing, and fuck –

Dying back, and everything unchanged, Honaker and the three other shifting breaths, nothing lost in the blank.

"My information on that's probably more up to date than yours," Honaker told him, humour swinging the words crane-high on a Sheldon-sighted wrecking ball. "They don't like me, but they know they can't come get me. And they won't be asking for extradition, not when I might start talking along the way." His voice dropped, flipping back to bare fact. "As long as I stick to business, it's a stand-off. They have no interest in tidying up the world, and if it wasn't me, it'd be somebody else."

Sands angled his head the extra inch and smiled slow, because Honaker's liking for chat just gave him another curling corner invite to a conveniently-sized chisel. "So you've got yourself a minimum security records clerk. You couldn't keep anybody big on a monthly retainer."

"They get me enough when I want it."

Sands was still smiling, no backing down now. "And what about outside the CIA? What about information on your business rivals and their sources? You think I didn't check them out too before I came to you that first time?" He slouched a little lower in his chair, ignoring the burn notching up through his shoulders, and angled his head deliberately, casual." I had access to just about everything I wanted even loosely connected with Mexico for two years, and that meant some interesting little chats with people from various other friendly governments, not just Langley."

Honaker was quiet just a half second too long.

He had him. Had him pinned right there, and that was his door, his way out of the box, and now he knew where his fingers needed to be, loosening the lock with a last squirt of WD-40 was the easy slide home for the key.

"So who do you think might convince me?" Honaker recovered it smooth enough - his voice hadn't changed at all, that same casual near-disinterest he'd been dangling in front of Sands through most of the verbals, but too late now to toss a blanket over the leaked oil when the grease was already streaked in a line all down his ass. "Like you said, business is good, and mouse bait isn't going to interest me."

"Ardelle, Doering, Morel. If you can muscle in on their operations a little, you'll have a very nice monopoly running for a year or two before someone else cuts in. I think that should be worth a bit more to you than my trade-in value."

Another gap of breath and the stir of trees outside, and Honaker wasn't even trying to hide it this time, the thought, the sale. "I'd need a sample I can verify before you go anywhere, obviously."

"That's fine with me," Sands said instantly. "I expected you would."

The only delicate question was just what to serve up for him. Whatever he laid out, Honaker would want to dig around it personally after Sands had baked him up horseshit on a bed of rice with 'Fermin Guajardo'.

There was still a chance all this could go unfortunate kinds of wrong. His information was definitely showing some fingerprints where the dust had settled in by now, but most of it should still be valid. Of course, if he happened to luck onto one of the few places things had changed, he was screwed harder than the prison bitch.

Better if Honaker or his lackeys took a longish trip for their investigations, leave El a bit more time to get things together just in case.

A long trip from wherever-the-hell here was, which unfortunately he didn't know.

He didn't have any soreness over his veins like he'd been stuck, and gas was both nasty to use and a miserably unreliable way to keep someone asleep any length of time. In the absence of an experienced anaesthetist, assume he'd lost an hour or two, not days. Somewhere south would be ideal then, close to the tip of Mexico as he could get while avoiding border issues, and he didn't know anything interesting in the Yucatán, but he could manage Chiapas.

"Morel has an arrangement with a Mexican general called Covas, who cuts him into the military supply line and sources close on half his stock." No play now, just facts, listing them fast and flat. "The weapons go through the various army bases in Chiapas, and then Morel ships them out to South America from Tapachula."

Faint creak just ahead, the stresses changing again on Honaker's wooden support. "Why do I get the feeling that isn't a random piece of information you just gave me?"

"Well, you know how it is," Sands said lightly. "I can't give you too little, and I can't give you too much or you might decide you don't need the rest and shoot me anyway."

"If it takes too long to double check this, Sheldon, I might get bored waiting and shoot you."

Sands half-tried to shrug again, experimentally, but all it really did after the extra strain was make his fucking shoulders scream like a pig stuck with a knife. Honaker was probably watching close enough to get the idea, though. "It shouldn't be a problem. There's got to be enough army goons on those bases taking their sliver of a cut not to see. Pay them a bit more, and they'll start remembering a few rumours."

"Not the sort of thing that's easy to check from a distance, you'd say, then?"

Sands tilted his head, held the pause, and too long would be counter-productive now, just over a second. "It could be done, but not as fast. People talk more when the cash is right there in a box for them to see."

"Chiapas sounds a bit hot and wet for a visit this time of year," Honaker said with mild distaste. "You couldn't have picked somewhere less tropical?"

"I can lend you an umbrella for the trip," Sands told him cheerfully. "Or probably not, on second thoughts, I think I left it in the car. Sorry."

Honaker's smile was suddenly a really big thing. "You don't have quite the right idea on this, Sheldon. I'm not inclined to split my men and leave you sitting around here, just in case." His voice was bouncing up and down the scale like an ever-cycling arpeggio - and fuck, Sands figured he must've spent too much time in that mule-piss village listening to El talk to himself if that was the direction his analogies were running. "And besides," Honaker added, "I'd like to have you where I can shoot you if it turns out you're bullshitting me."

Travel wasn't any part of Sands' plan. His plan was very much about being here whenever El chose to show up. "Isn't that going to be a bit inconvenient? Dragging me round Mexico at gunpoint might bring some attention your way."

"You know, one of the benefits of the right resources and connections is that nobody gets to watch you too closely." Christ, Honaker's face must be splitting like a Cheshire cat on ecstasy by now. "I think I can manage to keep you tucked away out of sight."

In Honaker's place, he'd take him with him too, and he just didn't have a good argument to counter it.

So now he was going to Chiapas. Fuck. This could take days.

And okay, that was overall scoring a few touchdowns better than dead.

His head still had a mule kicking around in there, but his stomach was slowly settling into something more agreeably millpond. He didn't have any solid idea how long it had been since he last drank anything, but his mouth was sucked unpleasantly raisin-wrinkled, and so far nobody was offering up refreshments. And though liquid was the priority, he may as well negotiate the full terms while he was putting in requests.

"Well, since we're all going to be taking the grand tour together, I hope you've allowed for lunch before we leave. I find my memory for the finer details starts to turn unreliable when I get too hungry." He remembered sprawling over a cheap hotel bed and saying something similar to El the day of their second abortive agreement. The difference was, he'd known perfectly well the Mariachi would feed him if the obsessive bastard was kicked out of his stuck groove, and Honaker was just enough of a prick not to bother.

The other difference was that El had only sat and glared at him from across the room, not strapped him to a cheap-ass and consequently ass-numbing metal and plastic chair with no useful sharp edges.

"Getting thirsty, are you?" Honaker asked. "You're not sounding quite at your best." Some movement, some signal Sands couldn't catch, and one of those sets of lungs at a distance turned into feet thumping off across the warehouse - a squeak of a bad washer, then water, running water. And maybe it was hearing it, or maybe it was knowing he wasn't going to die for another forty-eight hours, but the gritty itch in his throat was suddenly scraping deep and raw, some bitch's tapered fingernails clawing and scratching way back of his tongue.

The feet came back his way, and someone pushed a mug into his face under his nose, none too gentle so his lip squashed up tight and painful against his teeth.

He wondered if this was the same casual fucker who'd had his hand down inside his pants.

Either way, he could keep his fingers this time, just for a day or two longer, and Sands rearranged his lips round the edge of the mug instead of ripping sideways with slashing teeth. Water dribbled down his chin and onto his T-shirt as Pre-Fingerless tipped the mug, and he swallowed careful, measured mouthfuls, stopping before it was quite empty, because while he didn't want his brain dehydrating, he was in no hurry to take another piss either.

"That's all I've got for you right now, sorry," Honaker said, about as apologetic as a hooker cuffed in a raid. "But don't worry, I'll fix you up with a little something more along the way."

"I'm always willing to wait a while for a good restaurant," Sands told him. He'd almost changed his mind about eating, knowing he'd end up being fed from some greasy turdfucker's filthy hands.

Fingerless was suddenly grabbing at his wrists with that quick and nasty knife-snap, and Sands couldn't hold the twitch, felt the flat of the blade slide cold against the skin tight over his tendons before it was snatched away.

Fucking Christ, he'd almost gotten himself sliced, and he really needed to keep on top of this shit, because he'd missed Honaker's signal completely.

His wrists were freed first from the chair, and then from each other, but his legs were still tied to the chair he was sitting on, so it was no real advantage except to his joints. He wasn't inclined to give Honaker the amusement of seeing him go sprawling, dragging some tasteless plastic piece of shit from the Home Depot over on top of himself.

He started to stretch out his arms, his shoulders, his hands, but they were seized and retied in front of him.

Oh well, it was a change, and a lot less of the inquisition on his joints.

His legs were cut loose, and his arm was grabbed, hauling up and forwards and tugging him to his feet with a wrench all through his shoulder, and that fucking hurt. Someone else was at his other side as he staggered, both arms gripped now with vicious-tight fingers, dragging him towards the door before his legs ever had a hope of getting it together, his boot-tips catching on concrete every step till they were over half way across the warehouse and he caught the fast rhythm of their feet through his stiffness.

Honaker hadn't followed, talking low, intermittent behind them - cellphone, maybe a satellite link from here? - words shivering quiet that he couldn't catch beneath all the footsteps and echoes.

Out into the open, the dirt underfoot, the trees and birds, no sun, an atmosphere that hung close and heavy like rain. And he was walking just fine now, thank you very much, but that Fingerless fuck on his left was still yanking on his arm, a blunt paper knife stab through the muscles round his shoulder with every second step.

He could take him out, a two second move at most, all done before Anonymous there on the right stopped marching to time and woke up. Highly tempting, just on the basic principle of the thing, but it would earn him a hell of a lot of pain and maybe that bullet in the head he was looking to avoid.

He'd stick with the deal angle while it was running for him, and he let them shove him forward and up into some kind of maybe SUV, catching his boot as he felt for the step. Back seat, of course, with a goon squeezing in either side of him.

One of them reached down and tied his ankles again, but only to each other instead of anything else. He was left with a lot more mobility, joints and muscles not locked into one strained position. His unpleasantly close companions aside, it was quite an improvement in comfort level from the arrangement five minutes ago.

He didn't bother digging into the goons, because they wouldn't talk back. Honaker was his only possible source of information - not the easiest target to get at, but he could be made to leak a little round the edges when he was squeezed in just the right places.

Honaker's shoes came tapping along a few minutes later with another (three? no four) lackeys all clambering on board with him. Big SUV or minivan then. Big engine to go with it when it fired up, and noisy, but catching fast and running smooth, and they swung around in a wide one-eighty before straightening out.

The car bounced and jolted down a typical unpaved Mexican back road. Sands hoped like hell that wasn't gonna go on too long. It really wasn't doing anything to settle that irritated mule in his skull, and he was starting to wonder if the hangover from whatever the fuck Honaker had gassed them with was ever gonna wear off. Christ.

"This truck of yours has some suspension issues, Robert, my old friend. I would have thought you'd be willing to indulge in your own comfort for these long drives instead of renting from U-Haul."

"Ah, did I forget to fill you in on the itinerary?" Honaker drawled out the faux-apologetics, smug enough to make Sands wish he was closer to puking just to make a point. "This one's the local runabout, since we're only going as far as the airstrip. I hope you'll find that method of transport more to your liking."

That piece of information wove a little lycra through the schedule, shrank it back down into something tighter.

Sands wrinkled his nose up, plastic frame resettling over his skin. "Just as long as you're not putting me on a fucking boat."

"Not a sailor, Sheldon?"

"Only if you've got the right drugs." The bitch of it was, he'd always been okay with boats. Not great, but okay. But right along with that little inconvenience with his eyes and his thoroughly fucked-over sense of balance, it seemed he'd flipped to dramamine-mandatory.

He was never going on another boat if he could avoid it. He couldn't keep his steps regular when the floor moved, making it a real hell to judge distance, and when it got rougher, things didn't even stay where he fucking put them. That whole trip had been one of the more miserable experiences of his life, beyond the kind of obvious.

"And here I was thinking you'd joined the grand anti-pharmaceutical crusade," Honaker commented, that smile stretching through his voice again.

"Crusade?" Fuck, but if he wasn't being subjected to a little non-con bondage with associated circulatory and pain hassles, he'd have to laugh. "Not really my scene. I just like to make a point of getting people before they get me."

"I wonder, though," Honaker mused theatrically, "how easy it is to stay uncontaminated, once you've got your fingers stuck in the drains of other people's obsessions."

"I was doing just fine in Venezuela," Sands reminded him. "You might have heard." Not that El was any kind of crusader either - he killed people because it was personal, all the way. Sands would have bet his trigger fingers El had never had a single thought stray off to drugs or drug dealers his whole life till they started shooting at him. The Mariachi raised self-involvement in his own particular slice of world to tropical thunderhead heights.

All of which was information Honaker was less problematic without, as far as Sands was concerned. He could believe the saviour of the people idiocies if he liked the romantic version better. He might find it turned out to be a bit over-salted for his tastes.

Ten minutes after they set out, everything changed as the car made a left, a smoother ride and the high rumble of tyres constant - so Honaker's warehouse of choice wasn't so very far from some kind of civilisation. Good to know, just in case he ended up orienteering through some alternative options. And it would be easier and quicker for El to find his way back here too.

Things were polishing up shinier by the minute.

Though he was starting to feel almost sickly hungry, in a way that dented the chrome a little.

Honaker had implied he'd get some food at some point, and that wasn't something he'd bother to lie about.

Sands liked being right, particularly in this case when the car stopped after some twenty minutes and one of the goons disappeared briefly, then passed rattling plastic around, and someone pushed a sandwich at his mouth.

He kept the bites small, nibbling cautiously forward with lips pulled in close to his teeth, because he didn't want to find himself licking some greasy asshole's fingers.

He stopped when he judged he'd be close to the end. He wasn't hungry enough to eat the last part where those fingers had definitely been. Not without knowing if the guy on the other end of them ever cleaned his nails. But he'd eaten enough to convince himself he definitely wasn't going to throw up.

Someone poured some more water into him too, before he was steered from the car and up into something else, presumably the plane. He kept his head bent low in case - he didn't need any more layers adding to his bedrock-established skull pain - and he hoped he was right and didn't look some shrinking, terrified fucking jackrabbit. He was tied to the chair with his hands behind him again, already on an unfortunate downslope from the situation in the car.

As the engines fired up, he separated them into twin sounds, one per wing, with propellers. Definitely a small-ish plane.

He was glad he'd ducked.

The plane bumped along over rough ground for the take-off - dirt strip, not a real airfield. It might even be for Honaker's private use for his shipments, and so intrinsically of no use to any of Sands' plans.

They left the earth and glided smooth into the air, Honaker's pilot as practiced and competent as the rest of his employees.

The flight was dull. Sands kept track of the passing hours till they landed, guessing at likely distances from Chiapas from the flight time. It kept him distracted a little from the stiffness creeping all through his body. The answers fit reasonably with his earlier supposition that they hadn't been moved too far while they were unconscious, improving his mood some.

The airfield they landed at was bigger - still dirt, but there was the engine of another plane off to one side, and a couple of cars passing close. One car pulled around beside the stopped plane, and they were off on another short road ride.

Honaker didn't have any of his convenient hide-aways in this part of the country that Sands knew of, so he was unsurprised to find himself hauled into some kind of apartment complex - not a conventional hotel, more open with courtyards still and breezeless, and echoes from the concrete on all sides. Much closer to real civilisation than being holed up in that cheap metal warehouse, and just as useless to him since he was strapped back into a chair sixty seconds after he made it through the door.

"I'm going to trust you not to make a noise, Sheldon," Honaker warned him. "I can assure you, my people will shut you up fast."

"They'll shoot me, yeah, I get it," Sands interrupted, drawling it out, bored.

Even if they wouldn't, he'd have to be really fucking desperate before he'd sit here yelling for help.

Honaker moved off into another room, smaller with more echoes - kitchen, bathroom? - and shut the door. Brief snatches of speech too muffled to decipher, with some longer gaps. Three, maybe four phone calls, quick and decisive, and then he left without another word to Sands, most of the goons following after him in a herd, as subtle as wildebeest.

Sands was getting a distinct ache from his knees, and twinges through the muscle just above them where he'd previously been introduced to bullet lead. The metal rim of the chair back was nestled half way up his spine, pulled in tight and trapped by his elbows where his hands were tied behind.

This was going to be the long downside to preserving his skin.

The goons came and went in some kind of four-hourly shift pattern, always two of them with him. He couldn't tell most of them apart, not yet, since they all thumped around in boots and none of them could be entrapped or provoked into a single word. He hadn't expected anything of it, but digging at them helped to pass some of the time.

He got to know Fingerless when he was around - that fucker was always quick to grab at him and drag him about when he had to be moved, so he learned to quit asking on those shifts - and someone else showed up every third rotation and spent the whole time with a coffee and a hardback book, turning pages so regularly Sands could tell where the chapters ended with the text cut short.

He got what he asked for immediately and silently, provided he stuck to asking for food, water and the bathroom. Anything else was ignored. They wouldn't untie him, so he didn't even ask to shower or shave - it was bad enough when he had to take a piss. He never got Fingerless holding him for that part - that bastard would probably yank his dick off - it was someone (or maybe someones) else he couldn't pin down, someone who didn't grip and twist at his arm like he was revving up a Hayabusa on the drag start, but Sands didn't want anybody's hands down his fucking pants. And not somebody who was practical all through, and even trying to be 'nice' about it, like there could be anything nice about being groped by some unknown and unwanted fucktard.

Mostly, he was bored.

It was easier to be bored when there was a good chance he was waiting around for something more positive and interesting than dying.

And okay, maybe he wouldn't have minded El's hand inside his pants, because that was as good a way to cure boredom as any other he'd found. Not that he'd had many chances to get thoroughly bored since he'd persuaded El to fuck - there'd always been something to plan, some scent to follow, a game to roll for.

He spent a bit of time thinking on contingencies - not plans exactly, because plans suggested some detailed knowledge or expectations of what was coming, and all he had was a few thousand variations on possibilities. He could cover a basic outline or four, but guys like El and Honaker were unlikely to stick within the pages of any pre-written script.

He didn't sleep. Not that it would have been easy, strapped to a chair except for his much-delayed trips to the bathroom, and every joint aching through him in a serial circuit, but he wouldn't anyway; not when a sound could become a hint that would change everything, when something missed could be the reason he ate an unanticipated bullet.

He slumped in his chair like he was sleeping, neck twisted onto his shoulder, and that was another dose of pain to add to the list.

The thumping in his head slowed, ebbed, eased into a dull buzz that let his other body parts share their voices equally instead of yelling everything else down. He wasn't sure it was an improvement.

He waited, because he had no choice.

And he listened, because he did.

Honaker came back on the second day.

He came tapping light and steady along the corridor and through the door with the four missing goons tagging behind, and he'd dropped all his affectation in the switch to pure, efficient business. "Bring him, and the stuff, time to go."

The lackeys swept into action, Book closing his namesake with a soft thump and swilling the last of his coffee into the drain, others grabbing bags that rattled.

On the whole, Sands considered this likely to be a good development. He had confidence in his information - no reason an arrangement that had been rolling smooth on well-greased bearings for some five years should have snagged up during the last one - and yeah, Honaker sounded like he might be a bit pissed beneath the whip-fast orders, but that was just as likely because Sands was right and Honaker had found himself trapped into the kind of deal he couldn't turn down, not necessarily because he'd been chasing so much fairy dust and he was going to shoot Sands' balls off as soon as they got someplace less civilised.

Sands was close to convinced by now that anything had to be an improvement on staying in this room, anyway. Though he would like to keep his balls.

Someone cut his hands loose, retied them in front, freed his ankles, same old predictable deal. Hands on his arms, lifting, the one on his right curling into his muscles to press on bone, and he turned his head to let the lenses stare, smiling faintly.

Well, hello there, Fingerless. Enjoy yourself, it's the last time, fucker.

Down and outside and into fresh air for the first time in a couple of days, snatching breaths of it heavy and deep before he was dumped into the seat of the car. Everything and everyone was inside fast, smooth, tailgate thumping shut behind him, moving off maybe five minutes after Honaker walked in to give his orders. It really was a slick operation Honaker had going, the kind it was useful to have available for side ventures now and then. It was a pity the guy himself had to be such an annoying prick to work around.

Honaker was feeling particularly prick-sharp today, obviously, since he didn't say a word to either Sands or the goons the whole way to the airfield. Nothing to give the slightest hint which way this was swinging, nothing but the rise and fall of engine tones and the dull roll of tyres to fill the minutes, and Honaker was stretching it out to let him sweat, leave him wondering if there was a bullet coming at the end of the ride.

Sands slouched himself as loose as he could without rubbing up against the bugfucker zombies either side, and left a faint smile curled across his face.

Out of the car and into the plane, hands back behind him and all tied in snug to the chair again, everything just the way it should be in this phase of the negotiations. Honaker dropped into the seat opposite and clicked his belt on for take-off, the engines coughing up and revving before the last guy in shut the door.

The plane bumped and rumbled over the earth, irregular shivers through his seat, gathering speed to pull up smooth and bank into a turn.

Honaker waited for level flight and the slight fall in engine noise before he opened up the dialogue. "So far what you've given me seems to check out, Sheldon, so I suggest you start talking again and fill me in on the details you skipped." Fast and certain, like his orders back on the ground, not inclined to play now they were down to real business. Good. Sands wasn't in the mood for dragging this out either, and his wrists were definitely keen for an early exit.

He would have shrugged, but he was tied a bit tight for that, and he settled for a tiny jerk of his head. "There's not a whole lot more to tell. The deal's been around long enough every transaction runs smooth through the same well-greased hands, and it holds as long as none of those weapons start showing up in the hands of potential Zapatistas, since they're still not popular with the military, dialogue or not. Which is why Morel makes a point of shipping them straight out of the country."

Honaker hummed a little in pleased interest. "So anyone intercepting those consignments and distributing locally would end the arrangement."

Sands twitched the edges of his lips in a quick smile. "I only pass on the information. What you do with it from there is your ballpark."

"And you say you've got the same kind of detail on Ardelle and Doering."

"The nature of the information's a little different, but it can be put to similar ends." This time he smiled wider and longer. "You'll appreciate I don't intend to share it with you right away."

"And you'll appreciate it would be a poor choice to hold back when I ask for it."

"Well, obviously." Sands wriggled slightly in the chair and slouched back some, a slow demonstration of getting comfortable. As if that was fucking possible with his hands dragged down behind him and his shoulders locked up tight. "So, now we've got that all settled, we can discuss my end of the deal," he said cheerfully.

"Your end is that I pass up all the cash on offer. Isn't your life enough for you these days?" Honaker's voice had dropped out of the habitual smile again. The guy never had liked finding himself on the unexpected end of a negotiation.

Sands tightened his lips, faintest hint of curl at one edge. "It's not enough for you. If you want that information of mine, you'll have to give me a reason not to kill you the second you turn your back."

"You're making shooting you sound more appealing again, Sheldon." Honaker drawled it out bored, a man checking his nails and contemplating finding another manicurist.

"Your choice," Sands smiled, because that threat was already stretched out in a mahogany display box by the altar with the lilies all round. "It depends just how badly you want what I've got. You know I only fuck people over on deals when I don't feel I'm getting a reasonable trade."

A fast-ticking second before that bee-swarming curiosity of Honaker's broke loose, the double-edged sting of it perfectly on cue. "I take it you've got something in mind to make your end hold up?"

Oh, he did, very distinctly in mind. He'd started this deal to keep his skull intact and his skin from acquiring any more of those little round wrinkles that felt so much like quarters, but that was no reason not to take the bonus. "I want your tame insider to get me everything Langley has on me. I want what they know I did and what they think I did, which rumours they've heard and which they believe. I want their current assessment on the probability of me being alive. I want to know where they're searching the hardest, both inside Mexico and out, and I want to know who's doing the looking. And most of all, I'd really like to know who was dragging their pointy toe-caps through the mud when I put out the call for assistance, and just how far up that decision went."

That lengthy list was always going to get the contemplative response.

Sands held himself relaxed through the studying, till Honaker finally broke the silence. "Aren't you asking a lot from a 'records clerk'?"

"Maybe." Sands smiled, quick and crooked. "I'm embarrassing, but I've been missing quietly enough for a while now, I should be slipping down the priority list."

"I'm not willing to risk my contact for you." Utterly flat, and Christ, Honaker wasn't tracking this the way he might be.

"That's the last thing I want," Sands told him, short. "If this gets screwed up, and their assessment on me flips from ninety percent dead to ninety percent alive, it does me no favours at all. I presume you picked someone with a few ideas about feasibility and discretion."

This time the pause strung out longer, rumbling engines and studied stillness. "Everything goes through me. I'll get you what I can, but I call when it stops."

It wasn't great, but he wouldn't get it any better. He arched his eyebrows lightly. "So we have a deal?"

Honaker's smile was creeping right back in. "I think we do."

"Good. Now untie me and get me a fucking smoke."

Honaker must have nodded at one of the goons, because there were fingers on his wrist and the quick, regular tugging that meant knife. He sat real still till they were gone, and the plastic dropped away with them.

"Sorry, I don't smoke," Honaker said mildly.

No, he wouldn't. Probably still never touched coffee either, or anything else that might take the shine off his goddamn teeth. "One of your people must, I don't much care who's donating." He really wanted to ask for an Advil too, but he was fucked if he'd give Honaker that particular laugh. Honaker would be expecting him to demand the nicotine fix, and the better Sands fitted with his predictions, the smoother the rest of this trip would go.

He stretched out his hands, flexing wrists and fingers deliberately, his ankles too as they were freed - stiffness through him, inevitable, but no warning cramping or deadening of damage. Rustling and plastic crackling over the engine drone, and the movement of feet and air warned him so he skipped over the auto-twitch when fingers put a cigarette to his hand. He stuck it between his lips, holding his hand out for a lighter - and got a book of matches, fuck. That screwed his system over, and he wasn't sitting here in front of Honaker fumbling and burning his fingers.

He left his hand where it was, and tipped his head up to the goon who'd supplied. "On second thoughts, would you mind?" He wriggled his fingers deliberately from the base. "I'm just getting my circulation back and I wouldn't want to risk leaving holes in your boss's upholstery."

A quick pause - the inevitable check with Honaker, and the okay - and the matches were taken away to scratch and flare. He inhaled slow through the cigarette, harder at the first paper crackle and hint of smoke, the match shaken out before him in a rush of phosphorous stink.

The smoke wasn't his brand, and not something he'd have chosen, but fuck, it still tasted good, the flow of it hot and burning through his throat. Playing into Honaker's expectations had some satisfying side benefits.

The lackey dropped something light into his lap - metal ashtray, aluminum, and Sands stood it on the little side table that folded out of his seat. He hated having to stick his fingers all over the damn things, but he doubted Honaker would have brought his gloves along. Leaving prints wasn't something he'd had to worry about with his hands permanently tied, but he couldn't go the rest of the trip now without touching anything.

He let the smoke dribble slow from between his lips, and tipped his head over Honaker's way. "There's one thing I've been wondering about - you were following me, so how did you know which car to put the tracer on?"

"I didn't. I had my guys tag around thirty parked by the hotel after you went in."

Magdelene-fucked Christ, he'd been tailed directly by Honaker's people as well as cartel, and he hadn't had a fucking clue about any of them. Next time he got himself an invite to a street party, he'd definitely pass. "That seems a bit extravagant just for me," he said.

"Not really. They collected most of the spares after you left, and I'd proved they worked before I sold them on. It was a double benefit on the whole."

Yeah, that was an entirely Honaker approach. Everything complexities and multiple layers, so what went well all dropped into place like beams in a gantry, but once a section or two started to unravel, the effects spiralled till it was Apollo 13.

He wondered which way this arrangement was going to work out for which one of them.

His seat had turned out to be considerably more comfortable when he wasn't pinned to it like a dried-up bug. Decently cushioned for a cheap, light prop plane, enough room to stretch, since the goons had needed to get round him to tie him, and he settled himself back, head to the fabric, dragging slow on his smoke and stringing it out, flicking ash casual after every few doses to his lungs.

He could sleep now. He had a deal with Honaker that would hold, he had his life, and he could let it go, just a couple of hours till they landed.

Except he couldn't. His brain wouldn't, locked into the holding pattern, to the thoughts, the instant tracking reaction to every sound that broke the drone of the props, every swirling hint of air around him.

And then there was still the second part of this to play out, and the timing on that one was going to be tight.

Tight, and planning for it wouldn't change anything. Not exactly his favourite situation.

He was going to be awake anyway, while his brain churned the butter on it pointlessly rancid.

The plane lurched and dropped, quick high scrape from his ashtray shifting on the table.

Sands inhaled through the cigarette, measured, thoughtful, clinked a fingernail against the ashtray as he flicked ash again. That would get Honaker looking. "I take it that was Angela and Joaquin you sent out to track me," he said casually.

Honaker puffed out air, amused, and his breath and voice were there clear and direct, watching him just as predicted. "They weren't very happy when I told them they had to let you know you'd been found. It offended their professional reputation."

Another long pull on the smoke, breathing it out slow with Honaker fixed in the glasses stare. "You know this deal falls apart if I find them sniffing around again."

"I called them off days ago." Honaker spoke fast, dismissive, and probably the truth. "They'd done their job, what else would I pay them for? Though I think they'll be annoyed when they hear I cut them out before they trailed you to El Mariachi."

Sands wasn't so sure about that - that pair didn't have Honaker's arrogance, placed their bets with more of an eye to the cards instead of their own good luck. And they were sharp enough at counting the cards that had gone before. "They might get more annoyed when they hear you changed your mind about me," he said, letting his lips curl together at the corners. "But while you've put us within the state lines, maybe you can fill me in on just where you lost El."

"Ah, yes, you and the Mariachi and the mutual protection pact." Honaker coughed out a short noise back in his throat. "You know, that would almost be sweet, if it wasn't quite so Dante messy."

Sands raised his eyebrows and smiled with his lips pressed in close. "Whatever label suits your melodramatic tastes. Pooling resources is the established approach to a common problem, so where exactly did you leave my back-up?"

"Right where I was supposed to. My people handed him over as arranged, and I didn't much care where he went after that."

Fuck. Honaker's people must hold it just as tight even when the man himself wasn't around. Still, the drug goons had a record of incompetence repeatedly proven over a number of years. "Neutral ground or Cartel Central?"

"My pick at an hour's notice. Those people make bad businessmen, they don't have the best reputation for honest dealings."

Sands revised his estimate for El's reappearance a little closer again - minimal warning meant local guns, whoever happened to be on the spot, and a good chance El and his escort never made it as far as back to base. "You might like to give me a gun, Robert," he said.

"No, I don't think I would." Sands could hear it in the words, those dramatic eyebrows climbing right up to the tree-line for the birds to nest in.

"Your choice," he said, entirely neutral. "But El's going to be a bit pissed when he gets back, and he won't be inclined to wait while you explain."

This time he got the gap, the reaction, and when the words came there was interest paddling muddy-toed through the amusement. "You seriously do think he's coming back."

"I wouldn't bet against him." He wouldn't, overall, but the guy still could and did fuck up, and he just hoped he wouldn't have picked now as one of those inconvenient times, with no-one around to kick his stupid Mexican ass out of whatever-the-shit mess.

"He really is that good?" Honaker asked, instant switch to curiosity and lightning thought, and while that was never a particularly good thing, it was a lot less wanted when they already had a settled deal.

"Well, he was the best I could unearth at short notice. His methods aren't always the most orthodox, but he mostly gets the job done."

"You know, there are times I could use someone like that."

Sands curved his lips out, stretching quick and thin. "Good luck with that, Robert. Unfortunately, he won't work for cash, you've got to feed him the right incentives."

"So what incentives do you find to offer him?" Honaker asked, with barely half the spanning arch Sands would have anticipated. Coming from Honaker, it might even count as restraint.

Sands shrugged, reaching out to squash the last of his smoke into the ashtray without turning his face from Honaker. "Lately the same people seem to like irritating us both, so I don't have that problem as much as I used to." He settled back into the chair, legs stretching out to cross at the ankles. "Oh, and I hope you kept the guitar case. It might make him less annoyed if he gets it back."

"That went with him as part of the deal," Honaker said. "Supporting evidence for the claim."

And fuck, he said it so easy, genuine absence of interest, and Sands didn't have to fake up his reaction. "You put El in the same car with his own weapons?"

"The case went in the trunk, my people didn't exactly leave things lying around." Honaker's voice hadn't changed at all, and the cock-brained fucker honestly didn't get it. "I kept your bag, though, since you're asking."

Sands tipped his head close on an inch and smiled. "Well, that's very considerate of you, Robert."

"Not really. I was just waiting for the right buyers to come along. You've got quite a nice collection there, though my own are obviously the stand-out pieces."

"I'd certainly hope so - I wouldn't pay your prices for inferior goods. I was willing to tolerate a little wear on the others since they were donations to my cause."

"I don't suppose they were voluntary donations?" Honaker asked, high and lilting.

Sands let his smile show some teeth. "Well, their owners didn't seem to need them any more."

"I'm almost surprised you didn't just borrow from your mariachi friend. He seems to have quite the range of equipment, but I suppose he'd have to, with the nature of the jobs he takes on."

Back here again, and Honaker too interested to be easily side-tracked. Christ, the last thing he needed was Honaker thinking he could hit up El for assassin duties.

"You really don't want to go there, Robert." This time he kept his words flat, the blunt object that even Honaker's shock-proof skull would have to notice. "He just doesn't like you enough."

"So that's where you come in. You know how he thinks, you persuade him of the benefits."

"It can't be done." Sands let his right hand drift into the air, poking through it for emphasis. "Put too much pressure on too obvious, and he'll refuse on principle. He responds well to a more subtle approach, eventually, but that can mean months." He gave a quick, dry smile. "He has his own inconvenient slant on morality that sometimes needs a little working around. I'm assuming that's not the kind of timescale you have in mind when you want a job done."

"You're making him sound like a complete pain in the ass, Sheldon."

"Well, he is. Stubborn, uptight, guilt-ridden, it's a lousy combination."

Honaker breathed out air fast down his nose. "You've convinced me, I'll pass." Back to business mode again, fast words and straight tones. "We can just finish up our deal and go our own ways. There are plenty of drop-offs I can use, no need to keep that one."

Sands simply sat, unmoving, letting the pause hang till he could be sure he'd have all of Honaker's attention, focussed pinpoint sharp. "You really have no idea, do you?" he said slowly. "All the things you hear, oh, they get some tinsel wrapped around along the way, but most of them aren't too far off. He's the original goal-oriented type; you might say a complete obsessive." He tilted up one corner of his mouth, something not even close to a smile. "If he decides he wants you, he won't ever stop looking, even if it takes years."

"So you get hold of him and tell him the deal's changed," Honaker said, not a hint of ruffle through that sharp-cut suit he'd be draped in.

"How the fuck should I know where he is? I don't even know where he was. And he doesn't carry a cellphone." Though maybe that was something that needed working on, since this entire fucking mess wouldn't have gone down this way if he'd just been able to reach El when he wanted to.

"But you know where he's going to be, or you think you do. I don't have anything pressing lined up, I can wait a day or two and see if you're right."

Sands breathed out air, deliberately slow. He did have to credit Honaker with the full set of bowling balls. Not many people told that El Mariachi was out to hunt them down would deliberately hang around for a meet. But Honaker had never been the type who'd enjoy constantly checking back over his shoulder.

Neither had Sands, but he lived with it in preference to the alternatives.

The plane had started bouncing around more the last few minutes, and there was the first splatter of rain now against the fuselage, hard with the winds.

Honaker unclicked himself from his seat, going forward the few steps to talk to the pilot. The conversation was lost in the pulse of the engines, but he'd likely be checking on conditions.

The flight calmed again not long after, the pilot flying out of or around the low front, to Sands' relief. He had no desire to find out if his new-found puking reaction to boats was just as responsive to turbulence.

The plane started its descent after the right number of hours, pressure change heavy and muffling in his ears, dulling the engine noise. He circled his jaw repeatedly to pop them, not liking the loss of clarity, the glass cage sensation shrinking in around him.

They landed on the expected dirt, an impressively smooth touchdown considering, but jolting over ridges to a short stop. Someone went for the car and pulled up alongside, misting of light rain on Sands' face as he crossed between the vehicles.

He stayed alert for the timing, for the changes, and his cues matched up with the trip out in reverse order. They were definitely headed back to the same place, wherever that had been.

The car stopped along the dirt road and the front seat passenger got out, metallic squeak and groan of heavy hinges as he dragged open the gates.

Sands wondered if they were being watched, right now, glasses trained on the windows.

The door slammed a second time and the car pulled forward, slow and uneven, halting again a minute later. Everyone else was getting out, so Sands did too, sticking close to Honaker's wet crunch of mud and stone in the mass of goons, trailing him to the warehouse door.

The lackeys fanned out away in various directions, making Sands wonder if there were more buildings here or if they were just going to guard the fence. The breeze seemed to swirl, disrupted as it blew in from the direction of the gate - that might be down to the trees, but they didn't sound nearly close enough. He'd bet on a little more storage space, and maybe not all of it so empty as the familiar warehouse accommodations. Honaker was likely combining his business trips again.

Sands followed Honaker inside at much the same angle from the door they'd used before, that high-stressed wooden creak right after he stopped. Sands took another two steps, fingers just in front of his thigh finding the desk, and he settled back against it the other end from Honaker. His hand crept to his pocket for a smoke before he remembered, and fuck, he should have demanded another before his supply wandered off.

"You might want to move some of your men out of here," he told Honaker. "It seems a shame to waste them all."

"It doesn't suit anybody's purposes if this devolves into a mass gunfight," Honaker said easily. "My people won't start anything."

"That's nice," Sands commented, "but El won't wait to see if he gets shot at."

A flicker of movement from Honaker, and Sands could imagine the look that went with it.

He thought maybe Honaker was starting to see the full impressionist wall painting now, and too late to re-evaluate the strategy.

Decisive shift beside him, and there was the heavy crackle of a radio at Honaker's hand as he listed orders sharp and quick, instant replies of acknowledgement with no discussion. The whole outfit really did seem to run with complete efficiency, even when the plans were being rewritten as they went along. If the CIA had managed to work half this well, he might just have been tempted to stay, but the bureaucracy had thoroughly outweighed the amusement value.

Sands listened in almost casually as Honaker sent a group of men out of the compound in one of the cars, leaving four to watch the boundaries. "I'll keep a few around - they'll let me know when he's coming," Honaker said, as he clicked the radio off. The echo-tipped quiet was nearly physical after the buzzing interference.

"Well, depending how he plays it, they might." If El was feeling unsubtle, they'd get to be the warning instead, but it was all the same thing in the end. Sands hoped one of them was the fucker who'd been groping him every time he took a leak the last couple of days. One name on the stay list he knew by now was definitely Fingerless, which was pleasant to keep in mind for later.

The desk creaked beneath his ass as he shifted his weight, easing out his left knee. Shit, it was gonna take a few days to work all the stiffness from that muscle again. He should add 'being tied up for days' to the list of things not to do within a few months of a gunshot wound.

His watch bleeped out another quarter hour.

And even though he half-knew something was coming, he couldn't stop the quick jerk of his head as the world exploded off to his right, shattering over everything, rippling along the muffling metal of the walls. All some distance outside, but still a shiver from the concrete, alive through the soles of his boots.

Ah. Definitely one of El's less than subtle days. That didn't bode so well.

He turned to Honaker, expression still and flat. "Decision time, Robert. But your only way out of this is me with a gun and you without."

Honaker snorted out the irritating, choking laugh he kept for idiots he didn't have to schmooze. "You're not expecting me to go unarmed?"

"Well, no, but I'd suggest you don't start waving them around." He waited for the second explosion to roll past and die back into resettling roof beams; this time he didn't even flicker towards it, fixed on Honaker all through. "And you should find yourself somewhere else to be while I explain the new arrangements."

"I'd prefer to stay and listen in on that little chat, if you don't mind," Honaker said smoothly.

Everything rigid, no reaction because that wouldn't change things now. "It's your risk to take."

"You believe you can stop him."

Sands tipped his head, ignoring the hair that slipped forward to swing across one raised eyebrow. "And you're going to trust me on it?"

Honaker was smiling again, the voice of unbeatable argument. "I know how much you want that information."

Sands could smile just as hard. "Well, if you know that, there's no reason I shouldn't have a gun."

Honaker actually laughed then, breaking through the snapped burst of gunfire from outside. "That's true enough. Here."

Sands reached out to take the gun Honaker was rattling, slid his fingers fast over the surface, finding features and ridges. Semi-automatic, not a model he instantly recognised, but standard enough. He checked the safety and the magazine, a thirteen or fourteen round double layer clip by size and fully loaded by weight. He slammed the clip back in, and chambered the first round. Slid away from the desk to stand upright, angling himself slightly to the door; reaching, waiting.

"He does like to make a lot of noise, doesn't he? The legends got that bit right, at least." Honaker's voice had shaken out drier than a 007 martini, a look that would go so well with the suit, and Sands didn't have the fucking concentration to spare for him right this minute. "Shut up!"

"Ah, sorry," Honaker said conversationally. "I suppose I should be making allowances, shouldn't I?" And then mercifully he did shut the fuck up, only the too-heavy breathing and the restless shifting of cloth there at the other end of the desk.

Sands tipped his head into the sounds, the gunfire outside, not hearing the right patterns in the bullets as he strained around the occasional explosion, and there had to be something –

There. Barely. The steps quiet and unevenly spaced, one leg crossing before the other, crabbing sideways along the wall, caution and speed coiling together in smooth consistency.

Sands raised the gun towards the doorway, slow and obvious as El's feet reached it. "Wait! Don't shoot him." Snapping it out short and inflexible, whip-contrast to the steady flow of his arm.

The footsteps jinked through the door and half-slithered as they stopped beneath his words, Sands adjusting his aim with the movement, silence in the room blazing over the explosion outside.

Sands would have given quite a lot to see the look on El's face.

"Why not?" Flat, clipped demand, and no question he was talking to the killer.

"We came to an alternative arrangement while you were gone." He wondered vaguely where El's second gun was pointing. At least one would be on Honaker, but he'd be interested to know if the other was aimed at him.

"He sold me. For money." Heavy-accented and vicious, and that was understandable, and might be a little tricky to work around.

"That wasn't anything personal, El, it was just business. And now we've got a better deal that suits everyone concerned and doesn't involve anybody leaking brains."

"He was going to shoot you too."

Yeah, and he really hadn't forgotten, didn't need El to poke that fact into life. He pushed his voice a little lighter, sliding it smoother between the words. "Well, that wasn't personal either, and he agrees now it was a bad idea."

More footsteps just outside, slower, more careful, someone else coming, and his gun barrel swung instant from El to the door.

"No! Don't!" El's voice, high, stressed, and Sands kept the gun on the door and his finger shivered at the sounds, but he held the final half inch.

"Who the hell is it?"

"A friend." El shifted, one step, his voice aimed now towards the door. "I told you to stay outside." Oh, and wasn't El just pissed at everybody today?

"What the fuck's going on here, El? I thought this was about bailing out a friend of yours." It was a young voice, and distinctly irritated, which wasn't so surprising with El in this mood. Obviously El had roped in one of his crazy sidekicks for this.

"So did I." Double espresso answer from El, and all unsweetened.

Correction, both of El's crazy sidekicks had been recruited, Sands decided, as another explosion sound-shivered outside. He raised an eyebrow towards El. "You thought I was going to sit around and wait to be rescued? It's not really my style."

"So maybe you should've let us know that before we dragged our asses all the way out here." That was Irritated at the door cutting in again, and shit, but this conversation was handling smooth as a Chevy truck with a slipping transmission just with El on board - adding this guy too was packing ice under the wheels.

"Leave me your number, I promise I'll call next time. But since there are no damsels here, how about you fuck off now while I finish my chat with El?"

"Go check on him." El's voice was reeled back, moderated, but Sands knew too much to buy into that. "It's all okay here."

"And tell him to quit blowing up my stuff, too, won't you?" Honaker said mildly.

"Who's he?" Irritated demanded.

"A dead man."

Irritated turned distinctly more cheerful at that. "Finally, something's making some sense."

The footsteps trotted away, and Sands swung his gun back around onto El. "We're having a civilised conversation here, El, can't you leave out the death threats for five minutes?"

"I'm inclined to agree," Honaker commented. "We've got your opinion clear by now, the repetition's getting dull."

Sands turned his head to face him, expression set flat and taut. "You shut the fuck up." Christ, El at least had the brains to know when to keep dumb, why the screaming well-fucked Madonna couldn't Honaker manage it?

No external reaction from El, but there didn't need to be one. The Mariachi sliced it back when he got to this place, too much happening inside while he waited for the move.

"You want him alive."

It wasn't a question, El's words mud-thick and slow with contempt, but it was easiest to answer anyway. "Well, it'll be hard to get our deal wrapped up neatly if he's dead."

"Of course he wants me alive," Honaker said, almost smooth. "I'm assuming he doesn't point a gun at you every day. Though with Sheldon, I suppose I shouldn't be assuming anything."

El didn't move, no telling whisper of fabric or metal before the warehouse split into waves of sound, gunshot over gunshot over echoes and shattering wood.

The blood stench got very strong very fast.

The reports went on past the thump of the body hitting concrete, too fast to count, but way more than a single clip.

So both guns had been on Honaker the whole time. That was good to know.

Sands lowered his pistol to hang by his thigh. "Well fuck, El, you didn't have to shoot him."

"Oh, yes, I did." Instant, and drawn out near-flat. "He gave me to the cartel."

"So did I, once," Sands reminded him. "You haven't gotten around to shooting me for it yet."

The pause drew out through seconds, moments of silence punctuated by quick bursts of gunfire outside, but when El spoke it was the same tone. "You expected me to live."

"I hoped you would, since I'd have wasted a good bit of time and cash otherwise," Sands admitted. "But I did stack the decks against you, with that small matter of you being unarmed."

"No, I wasn't." Iceberg smile lurking there, satisfied under the words, and Sands tipped his head obviously to consider.

"Well, I guess that really isn't so surprising, given Cucuy's well-demonstrated lack of good judgement. I should have checked you myself."

"You wouldn't have found anything." The Mariachi was winding back some with the conversation, humour starting to seep upwards, chinks glowing in the flat vindication.

Sands dipped his chin and lifted his eyebrows all the way. "El, I know everywhere you keep guns, and none of them are places I wouldn't have looked."

"You wouldn't have checked the guitar."

"There was a gun built into the guitar?" The words stretched out as he smiled, because oh fuck, as a reveal that was genuinely funny. "Maybe I should have placed more faith in Belini's stories."

"I saw no reason to be unarmed. Nobody else was," El said pointedly.

"Well, that would have been a little stupid for a meeting with a notorious killer. But waving guns around at you wouldn't have been too productive either."

"That didn't stop you today."

"I notice it didn't make a difference." Sands angled his head a degree more. "I only half expected it to, since you are crazy."

El half-shrugged, quick rub of jacket beneath his arms. "I knew you wouldn't shoot me."

A little too much casual confidence in there for Sands not to like, and his own words were darkly neutral. "You sound very sure about that."

"You knew I wouldn't shoot you. It's the same thing."

He had known that, but he hadn't expected El to say it. "Your assumptions and mine obviously aren't quite the same thing, El."

"You pointed a gun at me." El's voice drifted like sand, drier than the Sonoran desert. "I don't believe you are suicidal, and if you were going to shoot me, you would have done it right away when I came in."

Well, that part was true enough. No point giving people time to react, after all. "I might have shot you for killing Honaker."

"Why?" El sounded almost amused. "You weren't going to let him live."

"Well, not for long, no, but I'd have made a point of getting what I wanted from him first. It really was a sweet deal you screwed over." He turned his head back in the direction of the corpse beside him. "I guess I should have known you'd have to kill him after I told him you were queer."

That same tone from El, with something that was close to humour. "I think you actually told him I was a queer whore."

"And now you're going to say it doesn't bother you, and some of your best friends are whores, right?" There, the slight catch in El's air, and Sands smiled just as quick. It was always good to keep El interested, keep him wondering just how much he knew.

He tipped his head into the sprawling silence, no gunfire or explosions, just tree-breeze and El. "They've gone very quiet out there."

El took a half-step, swinging back towards the door. "The place should be clear now. There weren't so many."

"I had Honaker send a few guys away. I was trying to avoid you rushing in here all hopped-up and trigger-happy."

Slight shift from El as he considered. "It worked, a little," he said.

Yeah, it had, to the point it was ever going to, and the shock of Sands with a gun on him had broken the immediate reaction sequence. But that capacity in El to be the deliberate, calculating assassin was one of the things he liked about the guy, and it had always been trying to stop El the decisive murderer that was the delicate call.

"You should have a quick look over the warehouse before we leave," Sands said. "Honaker said he'd kept my stuff around here someplace. I hope your friends haven't blown it up."

El turned on the spot and sniffed at the air. "At least they haven't set fire to anything."

"That would have been somewhat stupid around an arms dealer. Not that I'd be advocating explosives either, mind you."

"That was mostly for show," El said easily. "Or it was when we planned it."

"I take it they stick to the plans as well as you do."

El was already moving off across the warehouse. "I don't think you would be so keen to work with someone who couldn't improvise either," he called back.

Sands angled himself to keep track of El's footsteps through the echoes, squashing back the immediate instinct to follow. "There's improvising, El, and then there's hurling yourself from a third floor window and careering through the guard dog run to make damn sure you leave the plan helplessly staring after you inside the first five minutes." He turned to the desk behind him, running fingers across the bottom of drawers, most of them empty. Not something he liked doing without gloves, but his prints were already all over the thing, and if he took it slow he could avoid stabbing himself on the bullet splinters. He was finding a few pens, stray paperclips, the kind of crap that built up in any desk even if it wasn't a sometime office.

"That way, I usually leave the bullets behind too," El's voice carried across the warehouse. "And your bag's here."

There was an engine outside and tyres heavy on wet dirt, but it didn't sound like whatever Honaker's people had driven away, and El was ignoring it. "Anything missing?"

Pause with zipper and rattles and rustles. "Everything I know of is here, and a few extras." They were both talking about the guns, because El wouldn't give a cow's tits about any changes to Sands' wardrobe over the months.

El skipped most of the warehouse tour - obviously not a lot around, as Sands had suspected, good lines of sight. He was back with Sands in under a minute, metallic thunk as he dropped the bag on the desk, opening more drawers alongside him. "Here, have these." Sands handed El a couple of pieces of paper to check, not expecting much from the small, crumpled strays.

"Packing crate receipts," El said dismissively. "There's nothing useful here." He shut a drawer with a rattling slide and a slam.

Only what Sands had guessed, but it never hurt to check.

He picked up his bag and strolled over to the door, waiting against the wall for El to pass, his adequate level of knowledge severed at the step.

It was still quiet outside, the sun slanting warm across one side of Sands' face. He could smell the earth from the earlier rain, feel it give, squishy beneath his boots. Knew the way the steam would be drifting up from the soil in the heavy humidity against his skin, coiling in front of the wall of trees.

There were other footsteps sounding wet through the thin cling of mud, but El kept walking, relaxed, and Sands' finger stayed loose on the trigger.

"It looks clear out here," Irritated said a little dubiously as he got closer, "but we only found four."

"Well, four sounds about right," Sands told him with a quick smile. "If I'd known you wanted more, I could have kept them around to entertain." It would mean Fingerless had gotten to keep his digits in the end, but dead worked just as well for Sands. Unlike El, he didn't feel it important to deal with everything personally, as long as the result came out right.

More feet from the far side of the warehouse, and something heavy slapping alongside a leg with every other stride; neither of the other two raised gun-hands, so it had to be Sidekick Number Two.

"There's no-one else along the fence." The newcomer stank of booze, and more than one kind, which made him Fideo, and Irritated defaulted to Lorenzo. No other names for either of them that he'd ever dug up, but one name was one more than he might have expected from El's little assassin coterie anyway.

"Aren't you going to introduce me to your friends, El?"

"No."

That was succinct, even by El standards, and Sands smiled slightly. Nice to know El still had some of his Sands lines uncompromisingly diamond-carved.

Fast swish of air from Lorenzo, the presumed guitar case hitting the dirt with a wet thud. "This was a complete waste of fucking time."

"No, it wasn't." Something not quite a smile in El's answer, satisfaction with Fideo-strength fumes at ninety-eight percent proof, and yeah, El had been jonesing after Honaker right from that first meeting.

"Well next time you decide to do the heroic rescue bit, you should make a point of showing up a little sooner," Sands said, turning his shades on Irritated. He was sticking with his first choice of name, it suited him better.

"It would have been quicker if you'd stayed where you were," El said beside him, and Sands whipped his head back around his way.

"Much quicker, yeah, I wouldn't have been going anywhere with a bullet through my brain."

Instant snap through El's body, breath stilled under the flick of hair, feeling El's eyes on him.

"Take a look around some of the buildings," Sands drawled towards Irritated. "Unless you blew up absolutely everything, there should be more than enough here to cover your expenditure." He tagged on a quick, curving smile. "And while you're investigating, see if you can find me some grenades for an M203. I need to do some restocking myself."

"I'll check the crates in the sheds behind the main warehouse," Number Two said, wandering off the way he'd come, completely non-reacting to the rest of the conversation.

"El."

Some signal there from Irritated that Sands was missing, because El was turning away after him. "Wait here." Edged tones that made him feel like some fucking mutt being told to sit and stay, but tagging along anyway would look pathetic and desperate, and going wandering over unknown ground without a cane didn't appeal either. Not with El's merry mariachis all ready to watch him stumbling and sprawling in the mud.

He back-tracked to the warehouse and arranged himself against the metal doorframe, feet crossed at the ankles and face turned up to the sun. Attention following El's steps over loose-packed grit, with Irritated before him.

They didn't go so far. Maybe Irritated thought he was deaf as well as blind. More likely he just didn't give a rat's dick, it fit the personality type.

He really should watch that attitude, it might lead him some unwanted places. Probably at gunpoint.

"Whatever you owed him, El, I hope you're all paid up after today." Of course there was still the sideline possibility of another dumb Mexican assuming the gringo wouldn't speak Spanish too well.

"It's not about payment." El's words were just as tight for Irritated as for Sands; good to know he was sharing the delights of his mood equally.

"I know what you told us, but he's vicious."

"And you think I'm not?" When El had a point, he knew how to use words to make it. Personally, Sands would have left any critical debate till El had wound down from the gleeful murdering an hour or two - well, unless he was deliberately going for the poison ivy to the balls effect - but Irritated wasn't striking him as the patient type.

"You can turn it off. With him, it's part of the basic package." To extend him some small line of credit, he wasn't letting himself be hassled any by El's attitude. Sands supposed everyone had to have one sentence to be said in their favour, even Irritated.

"I told you that, if you remember, when I was telling you not to come inside."

"I know, but -"

"But you didn't believe me."

Irritated was scowling audibly at the interruption. "You don't normally choose to hang with psychopaths."

El laughed then, as charcoal bitter-warped as Sands had ever heard him. "Did you think I was taught to fight, to kill, by 'nice' people?"

"Hey, you told us about them, remember? You learned from okay people, people like you."

"Sometimes. But I worked with anyone who had something to teach me, and not all of them are good to talk about."

Footsteps past the side of the building, Sands' attention snapping back round, gun up, but the boozehead had been over that way - feet at the corner now, no surprise, no hesitation when they rounded and found Sands and a pistol barrel, they just carried right on his way.

"You're not going to join in?" Fideo asked, and that was a definite win for the leading 'Irritated just doesn't give a fuck' assumption. The guy's steps were different now, more weight as the heel went down and a little slowed - obviously he'd found something worth carrying.

"Aren't you?" Sands smiled. "Not trying to save your friend from evil influences?"

The footsteps paused. Quick brush of cloth, a shrug or a headshake, and a distinctive rattle-ching of weaponry with it. "I don't like him telling me what I should do either."

He walked on past, rhythmic metallic scrape of a top being unscrewed.

Sands might almost have called him smart, if he didn't permanently steep his brain in the pickling juice. Alcoholics, even the still-functioning ones, didn't climb so high up his evolutionary scale.

He tracked after him anyway, because it held more potential to be interesting than draping himself over a damp doorway, catching up with him as he clanged metal at chest height. Sands took a guess he was loading the something interesting into the bed of a pick-up or the tail of a mini-van, and swept his hand forward to lean his forearm along the bodywork.

"I don't suppose that would be my grenades?"

"Not yet, but I think there'll be some." Sidekick Two here didn't seem to do antagonism or confrontation, every line basic acquaintance-friendly conversation. Sands wondered how the hell he coped with Irritated's moody attitude and demands, or El's come to that. He must have developed indifference through exposure and self-preservation.

"So what are you taking?"

"It's not really taking," Two said with a thin trace of humour. "Like you said, we're compensating." Steady metallic twisting back there under the words, his arm lifting the (bottle? flask?) again. "And it's only ammo. We don't need anything else."

"You could take the rest and sell it," Sands suggested.

More liquid sloshing before he answered. "We don't need to do that either."

Sands smiled, tight all along his lips. "No, I don't suppose you do."

Fideo didn't answer, wandering off again, back in the direction of the warehouse and the other buildings.

Irritated had given up on lecturing El by now, which wasn't surprising since he must have known it wouldn't work in the first place. Obviously he was the type who liked to make a worthwhile gesture. Both men headed off after Fideo, who was already on his way back, carrying more stuff for the truck.

Sands kept himself out of their way, using his feet to follow the edge of the road where the wet-packed dirt became grassier. If El's sidekicks wanted payment for their pointless, noisy attempt at a non-rescue, he wasn't volunteering to play porter for it.

He tracked the road round to the gates, which were closed again - that would be El's mariachi pals allowing themselves some extra warning if anybody came back. He trailed fingers light along the fence, turning his face into the fresh dampness of the air after the days shut away inside. The rain kept the cloying dust down for a few hours and it felt good to breathe, the flow of it easy with humidity. He walked the perimeter circuit, getting a feel for the size of the place and its potentials. The information was far less likely to be useful to him with Honaker dead, of course, but sometimes the oddest little things came in handy at surprising times, and he wasn't one to pass up an opportunity.

He tracked around to the gate again, and followed the road back to the truck. The other three were done with the load-bearing part, and had started up with some traditional male bonding crap instead.

"You know you can call us, anytime," Irritated was saying. "Don't wait till it gets bad."

"I know," El said, in the tone that meant he wouldn't.

"You better had, else I'll shoot you myself," Irritated threatened, and then there were heavy fabric sounds and back-slapping that went on far too long. Fucking Hispanics and their weird-ass ideas on masculinity. "Look after yourself, okay?"

"I will." El was smiling, the genuine one that hardly ever showed, all through his voice. "And you too. Watch that weight before you end up like him."

"Hey! I look good for my age." Sands smirked lightly - so Number Two would join in the idiocies when he came under a direct attack.

"See you stay that way," El told him, and there was more of the obvious hugging shit.

Sands tapped fingers lazily over the metal of the truck as he reached it. "When you're done reaffirming," he drawled, loud and precise enough to carry across the gap through the breeze, "I've spent more than enough of my time in this mud-pit over the last few days, and I'd like to get somewhere more civilised before tonight."

"It's not someplace we'd ever have chosen to hang out either, in case you'd forgotten," Irritated said. He opened the door and swung himself up into the truck.

Sands took a step along the truck towards the passenger door, metal sun-warm beneath his fingers.

"Not with them," El said. "My car's over this way."

Assuming not even these dickbrains were dumb enough to let the boozehead drive, that left Irritated with the Mine's Bigger Than Yours style in vehicular ownership. Figured. Sands had a vivid mental image of something all tripped out with the latest in High Bling chrome, and maybe some tasteful neon underlights. He wondered vaguely if he used it for picking up tourists, or if he'd quit that particular sideline when he stopped needing the cash.

Sands moved to follow El, the ring of metal heavy in each footfall ahead, no attempt to lose it now in stealth. He stopped after a few steps and turned back, El instantly halting and scanning with him. "Oh, Lorenzo, Fideo, I almost forgot. Whichever one of you owns that nice place up near Zacatecas, you might want to get a plumber in to fix the shower. It feels so impolite greeting guests when I'm not at my best."

He twisted away to head smoothly after El, not waiting for the response. No reaction from El anyway - he just went on walking, once he was reassured there was no danger - but there was some resentful muttering from Irritated in those high-pitched tones of his, and a low, steadying comment from Fideo.

El's gait was a little off as Sands followed him to the car, faint scrape with the left boot, slower and flatter, not reaching forward the same. Sands hadn't picked up on it back in the warehouse, but it probably hadn't been there then. Anything minor El would have ignored for the duration, buried it under adrenaline till the job was done and he could allow a weakness.

El stopped, unlocking what was obviously the trunk, and crouched down to speak from the level of Sands' waist. "You want to give me a hand?"

Sands bent, feeling forward to the edge of a metal case and a handle. "What's this?"

"You wanted some grenades."

Sands smiled. "So I did."

He lifted right-handed, the left feeling for the lip of the trunk, struggling to stay level with the mariachi as they straightened; there was nothing fluid or easy in the movements from El's end of the case.

He slid into the car and found himself sitting on leather instead of the usual vinyl, the seat shaped at the sides and curved along his spine. The interior handle was soft and smoothly recessed, successive controlled, low thunks from the doors as they closed that absorbed into the interior.

He tipped his head El's way. "This isn't quite your usual style, El."

El fired up an engine that whuffled instantly, low and smooth. "It was Lorenzo's choice. He said he'd fight, but he wouldn't play mechanic for a breakdown on the way."

Sands smirked at that - the pretty boy Cucuy had described was likely worried about his manicure. "I take it he paid for it too."

"I didn't have a lot of cash with me at the time," El said, stake-dry and pointed.

"Well, it's good to know that money still shows up working to my benefit now and then. Though I've got to say, I prefer this example to the other night's pied-à-terre." Sands snagged the pot of painkillers from the glove compartment - El might have had the car barely a day, but the essentials were already guaranteed - choking a couple down through his desert throat. It wasn't even a straight headache any more, more like a continuous brainbuzz, but what the hell, it might help. He rattled the tub towards El. "Want one?"

"Not yet."

Obviously he was off El's schedule.

"There's a water bottle under the seat."

He reached down, and finally got his fingers on it after a bit of groping around - damn thing wouldn't keep still while El was driving over potholes. There were limitations even to decent suspension, and this road was a thousand feet the wrong side. He swigged back what felt like half the bottle, barely cool, but enough to strip the gritted layer from his insides. He waved the bottle at El, who took it for a few quick swallows, still steering jerkily round the worst of the bumps one-handed.

He reached out his hand for the bottle when El finished glugging, and stopped the cap. "So where are we going now?"

"Before we were interrupted, we were going to Lázaro Cárdenas," El said.

Sands turned his way, and smiled with his lips curved together tight. "Sounds good to me."

"We can stay overnight in Guadalajara."

"That would be more helpful if I actually knew where we are." He'd have screwed himself with a Chipotle-coated dildo before he'd have asked Honaker.

"Nayarit, north-east of Tepic."

That put Guadalajara just a couple of hours down highway 15. It wasn't that late in the afternoon yet, but no surprise El wouldn't be keen to keep going the whole day.

Sands spent a good part of the trip trying to figure if there was any way he could track down Honaker's insider, and had to reluctantly conclude there wasn't. Honaker would have buried those trails so deep nothing short of a full official investigation would find them. The money would have gone four or five different places after leaving Honaker's accounts before it got to the mole's, and he'd never trace it. Not on his resources.

Shit, maybe he should have shot El for getting over-hasty with the bullets.

Somehow he didn't think Irritated and the alco-sponge would be giving him a ride back to civilisation right now.

He definitely should have shot Irritated and evened things up a bit.

He could almost wish El had turned a gun on him, then Honaker might not have been so ridiculously confident that El would just do as he was told.

But only almost.

El had stayed oddly quiet the whole time Sands had been running his situational assessments. The guy could do Silence as an art form through Ice Ages, but he scored amusingly high on the nosiness ranking too, and without so much in the way of tempering patience.

El rustled and whispered now only with the car, the necessary movements of hands on wheel and foot between pedals, the brush of hair with the smooth idle as his head turned at intersections, even that much dying back with the highway. He lit a smoke once, an offer Sands declined, though whatever El had scrounged up along the way didn't have the ash-bitter edge like the last pack. El smoked with it fixed between his lips, breathing distinctive through and around it, minimal. No radio, no fiddling with controls for airflow, no shifting in his seat with the miles.

Having El around was a physical presence in his life different from anyone else, and not just as the hand on his cock and the dick in his ass, though they were quite the side benefit. El was the dozens of meaningless touches as they passed food and cigarettes and bullets between them, the dry, calloused brush of feet against his own in the night, another level of sensation merged into his reality.

Before they'd fucked, El had never come near him at all, and when Sands thought about it, there was no transition marked in his mind. The first time El had touched him other than to push him up against a wall or down onto the sheets should have run a purple flag with pea green stripes up a fifty foot pole.

It wasn't there.

El's touches never surprised him, never made him still in studied non-reaction. And maybe that was because his ceaseless, unthinking monitoring of El made him aware of all those moves before they happened, or maybe it was just the tolerance of chronic exposure, the arachnophobe surrounded by pictures of hairy, eight-legged friends.

He didn't think it would have happened that way if El had tried to get touchy-feely from the start.

It was odd now, sitting alongside an El without those things.

Whenever El got to thinking too hard, the results had a tendency to be annoying. At least when Sands hadn't anticipated and allowed for it.

He stretched himself back in his seat, crossed his feet casually and tipped his head a few degrees El's way, hair tug-sliding over the rest. "So what's your name, anyway? It only seems an even trade to cough it up now you know mine."

He got movement then, the twist his way in the expected spinning pause. "You don't know?"

But not the expected answer. "How the fuck would I know? Nobody else does."

"I always thought you knew." El's words were slow, careful, dragging along behind his brain on a short length of rope - Sands could almost see the furrows in the mud. "You knew about Carolina, and César."

This conversation was jinking off on some weird tangent every sentence so far, and it wasn't a feeling Sands much liked. "Who the hell's César?"

"My brother." El's voice was high, surprise speaking out immediate, then tailing off.

The air slipped from him fast, amusement real and uncontrolled. "El, I know shit about your brother except what you told me."

"You were bluffing...."

"Well, of course I was, you gave me an opening like the Lincoln Tunnel." Christ, but El had been entertaining that day - all clammed up after that opening threat, and twitching like a fish on a line, ripples spreading for fucking miles.

Just like he was broadcasting now, spamming every frequency unencrypted, confusion swirling mud-brown in uncertainty, reassessing past conversations with the new information, and -

"César was Bucho."

Well, that did explain quite a lot. "Interesting family you had there, El, I can see why things soured up a bit."

"Things, as you say, had soured a lot some time before. Bucho was only how it ended." Flattening out as the words went on, drawn in tight like balls in chilled water, and the pills had half-worked but Sands' head was still humming high voltage, and now would be a shitty time to steer El any further north.

No name then, pretty much as expected. Could have been interesting to look into, but El worked just fine. It was probably better not to know if he was taking it up the ass from a guy called Pedro or Agapito.

El was quiet again beside him, but not the same quiet, movement through it now, and all Sands had to do was wait.

Wait through the watching for the flare.

"What was it you wanted from him?" There it was now, the curiosity, and this was how it should have been going all along. Sands might have smiled if the subject matter didn't piss him off so thoroughly.

"Access to some information I don't have. Including the name of whoever set me up for a long, slow, Mexican deep fry."

Tick-tick-tick, paused seconds with only the low notes of engine and wind. "He would have broken the deal."

"Well, of course he would, and so would I. And we would have traded off happily enough inbetween, before one of us decided to get our bullets in first."

"If you can't do anything about it," El said quietly, "maybe it's better not to know."

"Very philosophical of you, El, but somehow I don't see you saying that if it were you."

"Probably not," he admitted. "But it would still be true."

The tension only bit deeper all along his jaw. "I don't know if there's anything I can do. Not while I don't know who it was."

El wriggled and shuffled briefly in the seat beside him, lit a cigarette with a click and a long, smoky exhale. "You want one?"

Sands sniffed a little deeper, weighing the heavy taste of it in his throat. "I think I'll pass." He'd buy himself a pack of something decent later.

El brushed his hand along the door to buzz his window barely open, fingers rubbing over the plastic because his eyes were still on Sands. "You do smoke less."

Sands tipped his head to El and angled his eyebrows. "As you've mentioned before. So why the ongoing interest in the state of my lungs?"

"I thought maybe you'd decided you don't want to die."

Every muscle shrank tight along his face. "Fuck that, I never did."

"But you thought it was inevitable."

Sands tilted the corners of his mouth up uneven. "I'm still inclined to be realistic about it."

"And now realistic means leaving Mexico."

He let his lips curve distinctly wider. "Well, the thing about your country, El, is she doesn't seem to grace me with much good fortune."

Light shift from El, and when he spoke again, his words echoed hollow from the glass. "I've seen no real proof she's lucky for anyone."

"And yet I don't see you leaving."

El shrugged, rustling brief in his seat. "It's my country."

Dumb patriotism wasn't something Sands had ever subscribed to, but no big surprise El stuck to the plate, even when every ball pitched him was a no ball.

He'd almost changed his mind about the smoke, and he reached out, trailing fingers light over the roughness of El's jaw to pluck the cigarette from him. Two quick drags, just enough to take the edge off before he put it back where he found it, El's lips moving dry against his fingers to take it.

It didn't taste so bad.

He still wanted his own.

They drove into Guadalajara as afternoon slid into evening, and El didn't waste his usual half hour circling the streets, just pulled over somewhere not busy enough to be central. Sands grabbed his bag and followed him from the car till El made a right turn, someplace narrow with echoes, the ground cracked and uneven. "Where the hell are we going? I'm not signed up for the mystery tour till later."

El stopped then, put a hand on his shoulder while he walked round behind him and through the full circle. "You should change your clothes."

"I'd love to, El, right along with a shower, so why don't we go inside?"

"I think it's your turn to reserve the room. You look less conspicuous than I do for now."

Given how he felt, that must be putting El pretty low on the scale. "Jesus, El, you're not being a little impractical here? I don't know where we are and I don't have my cane." El didn't answer, and Sands just wanted to get indoors someplace with a bed. "Then I guess that makes you the helpful if slightly freaky cabbie. Here." He pushed the handles of his bag at El to hold while he groped inside for a clean jacket and pants. The T-shirt could stay - not much of it went on show if he buttoned up, and his holsters made changing it too much hassle. He pressed himself to the cooler side of the alley behind El as he tugged off his belt. "If the cops drive by while I'm stripping, you're fielding the indecent exposure rap." It was pretty disgusting anyway, dressing in clean clothes when he felt like a baby-oiled porn star rolled in grit and jello. The brush of cool fabric on his skin only lit up his all-over clamminess in stage-spec spotlights, and he'd been making a pretty good job of ignoring it.

He ran his fingers through his hair, tugging out the worst of the tangles and smoothing it down, feeling it hang forward greasy along his cheeks. "Do I pass?"

El leaned and shifted, peering at various angles. "No," he said eventually, "but I don't think it can be fixed."

"Thanks for the vote," Sands said dryly, pulling on his gloves; his fingernails probably weren't doing anything for the image either. "So now you're done with the fashion check, get moving, Señor Taxista."

Back to the main street and along the block, and it was almost a shock just to walk.

Cane, laptop, bag, gun - he'd gotten so used to clutching part or all of his life, always, everywhere he went, the things he couldn't let go of, couldn't get through the days without, and now both hands swung free at his sides, empty and unnatural. And he was tracing El's sounds, following his steps, but that was automatic, unthinking, and he hadn't just walked, unencumbered and unthreatened, in so many months. Not since they left El's morgue of a village. The street around him, the people, the traffic, everything there in the most casual way, and he used to do all this time, when the only thing he might need in his hand was a cellphone.

"Two steps, wide and low," El said, and his concentration was back on the sounds, on the differences, reaching for when El made the step.

Abrupt wall of air-con as they walked through the door, and maybe El's choices were moving up-market.

They walked on through the lobby - big, empty lobby - and when El stopped, Sands stepped up to halt right next to him. El put their luggage down deliberately either side of him, the guitar case the harder, more defined sound on his left. "Stairs," he said, quick and low, "seven metres, eight o'clock." Sands made an open show of fishing out notes and handing them over, and then El turned and chinked away, back towards the doors.

Sands reached forward to the desk and slid his hand up onto the surface, tapping gently through the glove, a man trying and failing to hide impatience. With his hand already there, it wouldn't stand out when he ran his fingers over the surface to pick up the key.

He fished out a passport for ID when the desk clerk finished her phone call and came his way; she had a room free and pushed a guest card over in front of him.

"Could you show me where I need to write? The print's a bit small." He smiled apologetically. "I'm partially sighted." He'd found that line worked a lot better for brief contact than admitting to being blind. Partially sighted covered quite a range, so well-meaning fucktards didn't instantly assume he was a helpless idiot, and the less well-meaning didn't assume he'd be the too-obvious fleece. It got tiresome clearing up the after-effects.

"Oh, I can fill it in, if it's easier," she said, dropping right into full helpful smiling mode. "I'll just copy your details." Paper rustles and the press of a pen, before she pushed it back towards him. "Just sign here, at the bottom." Faint scratch of a nail, and he found the lower edge of the card and scrawled deliberately big and looping parallel to it.

"Here's your key, it's two-twenty-six. I'll call someone to take up your bags."

"No, it's fine, I'll take them." He didn't want some fucking valet swinging them around and wondering about all the rattling. There was something of a knack to the handling.

He pocketed the key and reached for the handles on his own bag, groping around a bit with the less familiar guitar case.

Eight o'clock. Right.

There hadn't been any unwanted sounds from that direction since El gave him the clear route, no maids with vacuums or would-be-guests dumping luggage. He took it slow - not enough to look odd, and it'd fit right in with a guy stiff and dusty from a day travelling. Counting, judging distance, and of course the fucking guitar case was the first thing to smack into something solid. A doorframe when he got his hand on it - only just off, not bad for a whole shiny new place. He found the handle - natural enough to be clumsy about it, juggling bags and guitars with not enough hands - and it didn't echo like a stairwell the other side, but El tapped his spur up ahead and the stairs were there further along the corridor.

El's limp was worse despite the painkillers, and even more on the stairs; more of a lag between steps, extra weight obvious in the ching-thud with the right foot. Definitely nothing he'd picked up at the warehouse, there hadn't really been any action. Must be a souvenir he'd collected courtesy of the cartel - that wouldn't have been a fun experience, no matter how short he kept his stay.

He didn't bother mentioning it. El could chat about it himself, if he felt inclined, but the Mariachi wasn't much of a disciple of trauma counselling.

The room brought its impressions on a wave of cool air when El opened the door, neutral and fresh through his nose, nothing immediate or overwhelming. He dropped his bag by his feet and made use of the doorframe while El gave him the standard run-down. The place was a decent size with a regular spacing of furniture, the layout logical and pre-planned. El's taste for slumming it had definitely been more than satisfied by the last few days, and Sands wasn't going to complain.

"You shower first," Sands told him. "You stink even worse than I do."

He could hear the eyebrows right there in El's voice. "I think you only say that because you're not so aware of yourself." But he wasn't turning down the offer, boots ringing uneven across the tiles.

Sands left his bag on the bed out of the way while he ran fingers over the room; fast double-check on layout out of habit, slower and detailed with locks and handles. El would be in there a while, checking over and working through the bruises and the stiffness.

He picked up the phone and got reception on the second guess, ordering in room service and a pack of his own smokes from the bar, because he sure as hell didn't feel like going anywhere else today, and it seemed unlikely El would be volunteering.

The food showed up before El did, along with chilled water, and he downed half of that right off because it was El's choice to still be in the shower, and no point leaving it to get warm. He figured he ought to be more hungry than he was, beneath the ache and the sleepless fuzz balloon-inflating in his head, and he nibbled on some fairly mediocre tamales. The standard of a tourist hotel was never a reliable guide to the standard of the food.

He ate enough to take him through to morning without his gut bitching at him and left the rest. Still no hint El was close to done, and he went through into the bathroom, heavy with soap and steam and rattling water, because drinking had brought on the need to piss. El was there as the squeak of feet on tub and the irregular breath of a head pushed under the shower flow, and Sands' brain drilled on slow and relentless beneath it all, sampling cores through the ice.

He washed his hands, and then went through El's pile of clothes folded neat beside the doorway, sniffing tentatively at each gun for the bitter-choking cordite. Just the two pistols, and he took a towel and sat on the floor, back against the bed, to clean them. It might not be a perfect job without El's sparse tips along the way, but it would be good enough for a one-off, even for the Mariachi.

El came out as he was finishing up, distinctive slap of wet feet on tile, and drank down the rest of the water - light, hollow tap as he put the jug back on the table.

"I'm done with the food," Sands told him, running the cloth over the pistol to lift off the prints. "It's all yours."

El sat back onto the bed above him, and didn't reach for the plate. "Thank you," he said softly.

Sands twisted his head to face up towards him. "Don't expect it to be a habit. I didn't want you rattling while I'm trying to sleep."

He left the guns where they were and went to strip off his own grease and grit, scrubbing it fast from his hair and body. He shaved there in the shower, water flowing warm down his back as he slid the blade over his face, and Christ, it got more of a hassle with a few days' growth to fight, and it hadn't exactly been easy for a while now. But getting rid of it made him start to feel something more like a human being again, and not a freaking Sasquatch.

He towelled off the worst of the water from his hair, and tugged on a T-shirt and slacks over still-damp skin. It was too early to sleep, but he hadn't been keeping quite to his routine the last few days, and he doubted El would have been working round a regular eight hours either. He threw off most of the bedcovers and shoved his guns under the pillows. Climbed in under just a sheet, while El padded off back to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

Tracked El's sounds automatically with the dregs of his mind, the quiver through mattress and sheets as he joined him.

He'd figured there'd be no sex tonight, with El all bounce-less and limping despite the drugs, but El reached over and moved up against him and kissed him anyway. And Sands pressed back and kissed back and touched back, and the whole combination had its usual effect of making him really horny and at the same time more relaxed than he ever got, and Christ but he needed some of that after the past few days. He really liked the idea of his brain just shutting the fuck up for maybe ten minutes, 'cos it was like he'd been treading the goddamn Grand Canyon in the carpets up there the last week, and he just wanted to sleep without the circling chainsaw buzz in his head.

Damp hair straggling between them, between his fingers as he pulled El in, and El flinched just barely against him with quick breath. He stopped the push, drew his fingers from El's hair, wondering - El's lips intact beneath his tracing tongue, maybe his nose?

He angled the kiss a little more, and El pressed a little deeper.

They didn't bother to undress, opening clothes and pushing them aside, reaching through to the skin beneath.

It was eased back from how it often was, Sands finding the scabs fresh and ridged on El's body, the places the muscles tightened beneath his fingers, and then avoiding them, because there was fuck all erotic about those sorts of bruises and he had something of a vested interest in El keeping his hard-on. El moved slower and less forceful against him, and they curled and rubbed themselves together, hair straying between lips and skin, working each other with hands. He thought about turning El on his back and fucking himself on him, but his thighs still ached after having his ankles strapped to a chair for most of three days, and what they were doing was just fine and didn't need him to dig out the lube.

It took a while, building rhythmic and steady instead of desperate and hurried, but there was nothing bad about sex that lasted. His hand slow on El's cock, skin sliding easy beneath his fingers till El came sticky over him with his lips and tongue touching lightly on Sands'; lost his movement on Sands through it, dragging Sands from slow-fucking lethargy long enough to curse him; gathered himself to grip with a perfect hand, slicker and smoother on him, and Sands came with his mouth over El's collarbone and El's breath damp and close through his hair.

Messy and sticky, and he was too lazy even to think about cleaning up, reaching out to wipe his hand on the sheet down the edge of the bed. The maids didn't give a shit, they'd seen it all twelve hundred times already.

El rolled away afterwards, mattress firm for once under the movement; reached over to click off the light Sands hadn't thought about.

Rolled back in again to touch, shaping deliberately around him, arm sliding over him.

El was instant furnace against him, but Sands ached, and kicking him away would be too much effort.

It was kind of good to know it wasn't just him being (pathetic and clutching) blind and paranoid. That an exhausted and battered Mariachi liked it better having someone else there, someone to cover the drop in his guard.

His T-shirt was wrinkled under him where El had pushed it aside as they moved, the weave of El's pressing into his skin along his back. His jeans hung open, belt buckle touching cool at his waist by El's still-damp hand, and it was easiest to ignore all that and sleep for however long his brain was willing to shut down and let him.

He was alone, but scent and heat and langour told him El had only recently gone.

Feet and fast gossiping words in the corridor outside, the annoying bastards who'd woken him up already moving away. Traffic and voices beyond the window, frequent, nobody making an effort to be quiet, and it had to be late.

He didn't give a shit about late. He was enjoying sleeping. A decent bed, perfect morning temperature, sheet warm beneath him with the rising scent of laundry and mild sweat and sex.

And okay, one of the buttons of his fly was digging in his hip, and there were uncomfortable ridges of cloth scrunched up under his ribs, and when he shifted to fix that, his cock felt dry-glued to his underwear.

He debated a while whether he was relaxed enough to be able to ignore all that, but El was back now anyway, so he sat up as the door opened, closing again over coffee and something baked, and El with just the slightest off to his steps now.

He wondered lazily if El could be provoked back into bed - being thoroughly fucked would be a good way to finish waking up.

"I brought breakfast," El said unnecessarily. He put things soft plastic and cardboard on the table. "We need to leave soon. We should have left before." Measured and calm and all business, and business to El was killing the right people.

Sands was in cheerful agreement with the main item on the day's agenda, though there was still the sleep-woolly incentive to put the meeting back a bit, the old irritation of extended sleep leaving him almost less functional than exhaustion.

"Ten minutes," he said. "I can eat in the car." Five was enough for a regular, non-battle-gore level sluice-down, and another five to run the electric razor over his face. Not quite as good as a blade, but it passed, and he wouldn't want to meet up with any old friends looking like he'd been inconvenienced.

He made a point of dressing in smart-casual, with a wool-based jacket heavy between his fingers that would survive the journey time.

El wasn't quite pacing when he was done, but he was teetering with a plastered leg and a crutch right on the edge of it.

Sands grabbed his cooling coffee and drained it down, following El out to the car eating some kind of doughy, shaped egg roll one-handed. Christ, El could have spared the few minutes to go one better than the nearest McDonalds.

But that wasn't the kind of mood El was in.

The drive was quiet, and Sands didn't break it. El got himself quite the focus when he'd a specific kill in mind - he'd checked out the place once before, and he'd be running scenarios and options and outcomes. For a barely-bothered-to-finish-school Mexican, El's thoughts ran with impressive efficiency once he found himself a particular motive, and his silence now beside Sands was tension-low, the barest of leashed anticipation, movements minimal and methodical over the low background notes and burble of the radio. Sands sat relaxed, slouched across his seat, tuning out the guitars and the chatter - his body wanted to sleep, but if he did that he'd be feeling machine washed and tumble dried on non-delicate later when he had to be awake.

Any real planning would have to wait till they reached Lázaro Cárdenas - El's information was close on a year out of date, his own more like two. He settled for drifting, his mind wandering idly over a few possibilities, the usual steady monitoring of El for any change in the tension running smooth beneath. Not all the possibilities he had flitting around in his head were good ones, but some of it was out of his control, and he left those lurking back in the corners. El's hands moving light and familiar over plastic of wheel and turn signals and radio dials were distinct through his thoughts, and it was easy to drop into thinking of those hands on his body, and how good it was going to be to have El fuck him after this, just enjoying sex with no stress.

He put the brakes on that early and the wheels up on blocks, because a hard-on now would be inconvenient, and jacking off at the next restroom stop wasn't what he had in mind.

Timing and noise and choking traffic in combination told him when they got to the right city, and El crawled them straight through and out onto the coast road to Playa Azul. Sands opened his window to catch the breeze heavy with salt and humidity, because the hours of cycling air-con had freeze-dried his nose and his sinuses, and it felt good tugging through his hair, ruffling between the strands over his neck.

El took a right off the arterial, and they were headed upwards, the curves increasing and speed slowing till the pavement faded out from beneath the wheels, packed dirt transitioning looser and stonier as they climbed. El pulled over someplace that sliced the sun from Sands' cheek, trees whistling overhead as he killed the engine, keys left rattling in the ignition.

El opened the guitar case on the back seat, quick, distinctive scrape-slides of metal screwed into oiled metal, twice over. One would be the scope, and maybe a silencer in case, or it could just be stock assembly. He didn't know the details on what El was keeping in there right now.

Sands closed his window and stayed in the car. It was cooler and less buggy, no flies to land unanticipated and creepy on his skin, and he wasn't at his most productive on these observational runs anyway.

He settled in for quite a wait, but El was back after just fifteen minutes, stalking up to the car tight and deliberate. "Something's wrong." He started the engine and swung the car around back down the hill.

No more explanation offered, and Sands didn't question.

El took them back down to the main highway and on into town - residential areas, no noise from the sidewalks, only the regular pauses at intersections. It was obvious enough when they arrived where they were going because El did the full block tour, four consecutive rights before he pulled over and climbed out.

This time, Sands let himself out, ready to follow as El crossed in front of the car onto the sidewalk. Just a few strides till El stopped, rattling metal tall and minimally mobile, and Sands remembered curving double gates at the end of a straight, lawn-enclosed driveway.

"They've gone," El said. "Most of the furniture is still here, but they are not."

El didn't mean they'd taken a day trip to the beach, and that was one of those possibilities Sands hadn't liked, looking at him right there in his face. "One of Honaker's people must have tipped them off to the loss of contact. They'd always leave an insurance line into the inside of any deal."

"So where do we find them now?"

"We don't." His lips pressed tight around the words, and it was just about the bitterest thing that had been shoved down his gut inside the last year. "Right now, they've got us beat on both time and resources."

"Will they just walk away and leave," cloth and chains and air as El swept his arm around towards the gate, "all this?"

"I honestly don't know. It depends on what exactly they've got stashed away in other places, and I never did get the details on that."

El stilled beside him. "They're you," he said softly.

Sands stilled too.

"Those people," El went on, "they did what you tried, and they succeeded."

Sands put his hand to his hip, thumb hooked into his belt, and tipped his head. "Well, I wouldn't say they're quite like me - they weren't juggling coups and drug barons and generals as I recall - but they took the opportunity to help themselves to a little something extra along the way, yes."

El twisted away on a boot heel, his hair brushing further over fabric. "And still it's not enough for them."

"They run a bit of a sideline to keep from getting bored with the lifestyle, that's all. I wasn't lying when I told Jorge that agents don't retire, El. No need to, when a judicious dose of the truth will get you a sale with a lot less effort."

And maybe that wasn't the best thing to say, because El's tone had hardened basalt-black. "Just how many of you people are there in my country?"

"That's the full set, that I know of." Sands thought a moment and half-shrugged. "Of course, there'll be my replacements now, and maybe a couple of others still nosing around after me, but they're the official contingent, not the strays."

El was looking back towards the house again, his words snatched irregularly into the breeze as it faltered and swirled. "We can't leave them to come after us."

"They only do what they're paid for," Sands told him. Angie always had been practical that way. "Honaker's not paying them now, so unless somebody else does, they won't be hassling either of us."

"They might try taking their payment direct."

Sands considered that, but only briefly. "They've got it pretty good, and they don't need the cash. I doubt they'll weigh the entertainment worth the risk with what they've just been told." He twitched up one corner of his lips, disparaging. "They prefer the kind of challenge where the odds are distinctly with them."

"So they do this to us and they just walk away."

"For now." Not forever. They'd resurface, set up in business again, just like he would, and they'd all end up talking with the same people in the same country eventually.

El had caught that certainty, a rustle and low chink as his body shifted, relaxing out of the stillness.

The sun was ready to stew Sands slow through his jacket-wool marinade, and the brush of air over him didn't change it, a dense and sultry convection for added combi-oven speed. He retraced his steps precise and even back to the car, fingers going straight to the handle, and climbed in, door clicking heavy beside him, sealing Mexico back outside.

It was a few minutes more before El's feet crossed in front of the hood to his own side of the car.

El sat in the driver's seat, door snicking quiet into place, and keys rattled at his hand, but he didn't start the engine. "If you want a town with buses, we are near one," he said.

Lázaro Cárdenas really wasn't such a bad place, given the overall context of Mexico - coastal with good highway links and the train option too, and a lot further south than he'd started out last time. Though transit wasn't half so pleasant as a car with good seats and air-con, and waiting at a station was really no comparison to having a chauffeur.

El made some things easier, and a few things just a Matterhorn or two more of a pain in the ass, but alone was perfectly workable too.

Sands liked having choices.

He pulled out a cigarette, tapping it deliberately on the carton before he put it to his lips. "You know, El, you still need that bolthole." He reached out a hand to take the lighter El was rustling for. "And before you argue the obvious, yes, I know you can live this shit full time if you have to, but I can't imagine you want to."

"You're the one who told me that hiding was only waiting to die." No real reaction in El's words, straight reporting of a fact.

"Well, that depends a lot on why and where you're hiding." He tagged on a quick, tight smile for that extra bit of emphasis. "If you disappear for a few months, they'll wonder where you went, and they'll keep on looking. But when you don't show up, they'll start to relax a bit, and it'll all be a whole lot easier again when we come back."

"You plan to come back?" Low, guarded, and still slightly more than curious at that final, dangling plural.

Sands dragged deep on the smoke before drawing it down, let it trickle slow through his nose. "Only if you're going to be practical about it. I'm not signing up to die for anybody's good cause or anybody's vengeance trip, not even my own. And I sure as fuck don't plan on dying because I couldn't grab enough sleep in the last few weeks."

He slipped El's lighter into his pocket instead of offering it back, the plastic smooth under the curl of his fingers.

He wouldn't have to wait for long. This was one of the instant decisions, all the thinking behind it already done, whether El was aware of it or not.

He pulled deliberately at his cigarette; opened the door to flick ash because the damn windows didn't open without the ignition.

Keys twitched and rattled below the first catch and steady rumble of the engine.

"So where do we go now?" El asked.

Sands felt the smoke leave his lungs, heavy and fast, tossed out his cigarette half-smoked and closed the door. "We hit Highway 37 and pay a quick visit to Mexico City."

"Why?" Curiosity right to the bottom, and not a single edge of reservation.

Sands turned his head towards him and smiled.

"El, have you ever been to Paraguay?"

The end

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