Wires

Tiggy Malvern

Mostly Mojavedragonfly's fault for being far too good a pimp on the crack_van comm. The rest of the blame falls, of course, on Robert Rodriguez for being far too good at everything! Grateful beta thanks go to Ms Anon and andmydog.

It took him five days to track down Sands, and that was two more than he had thought.

The reluctance of anyone to talk at first surprised him. These people had no reason to hold any loyalty to an American, and especially not to an American like Sands. But El knew some people, and those people knew others, and as the word filtered through Culiacán that he was on no-one's payroll, that he was 'safe', the information he slowly pieced together began to make more sense.

It wasn't Sands the people were protecting. It was the boy.

The story he heard was deeply disturbing, enough to make him think his choices over. Sands was a man who created chaos around him and walked through unscathed, and to find that this time he had not made him wonder if Sands had lost his role, if the clarity of vision that held him distinct from madness had finally slipped.

But he had known chasing Sands was a gamble when the idea first came to him. This new information didn't change his odds of getting what he wanted, only the nature of the risk.

Something else lurked beneath his renewed decision too - the shifting of his curiosity. The temptation to see the man brought low stirred deep, rippling over his soul, undeniable.

Nine days after the Day of the Dead, he walked down one of so many side streets, a pale concrete dust blowing around his feet and settling on his boots.

The city looked almost normal here, far enough from anywhere of importance to have escaped the bullet holes and bloodstains of the centre. The appearance was superficial and defective - anyone with ears knew the quiet, the subdued nature of the place and its people, the effects of the failed coup stretching over a far greater area than eyes could tell.

The houses were all alike, but he knew the one he wanted. There was a lengthy pause after he knocked, the door opening slowly, cautiously, but that was true of many of the doors he had knocked on in the last few days.

A young boy looked up at him, wide eyes flicking back over his shoulder before he caught himself.

El hated this feeling - that he was now one of the men who frightened children.

"Señor?"

He didn't know if the boy even realised who he was hiding. It was better to keep it simple. "I'm looking for the American," he said.

"There's nobody else here. Just my family." It was boldly spoken, but the child was no liar. Even if El hadn't already known this was the place, it would have failed.

"Arroyo told me he's here," he said gently. He crouched down to level himself with the boy, eerily aware of the length of the street at his back, of the windows and the houses opposite. "I won't hurt him, or your family," he said. "I came to talk."

"Are you his friend?"

The urge to laugh was almost choking, strangling down past the tension tight in his throat. "I don't know him well," he said truthfully, "but I'm here to ask for his help."

The child studied him in sullen silence. "How do I know I you're not lying?" he asked finally.

El looked him in the eyes. "I'm not sure you can ever truly know when someone is lying. You can only believe." He took the gun from his visible holster slowly and placed it on the dusty sidewalk between them.

The soft quiet returned, the tense emptiness of the whole district.

"You don't talk like them," he decided eventually. El wondered how much contact this child had with 'them' simply through living in this place, to be so certain of that.

The boy moved aside and back, drawing the door open wider. A man stood in the room behind, gripping a fire iron, further sets of eyes staring from another doorway. El picked up his pistol and replaced it at his hip as he rose to his feet and stepped inside. "I meant what I said," he told the man.

The man watched him and didn't answer.

"Wait here," the boy said, and vanished into the back of the house, quick and noisy. Voices, too low for him to hear the words, the rapid high Spanish of the child, and then that unmistakeable English, soft and sharply angry. The exchanges snapped back and forth, the boy's voice shakier with each babbled sentence, then sudden loud footsteps.

The boy darted from the room, his eyes on the floor as he passed El.

Sands' voice followed after him, bright and drawling. "Well, hi, El. I guess you should come on in, since you've gone to all this trouble to visit."

The house smelled strongly of cheap tobacco, and beneath it the sharp almost-taste of antiseptics as he stepped forward. He'd noticed something low in his throat when he first entered, but it was only now that he could name it.

He supposed that was good. He hadn't dealt in injuries for the last two years.

It was a small room, with a bed against the opposite wall visible from the door. The bed was empty, and made up neatly. Sands sat in a heavy chair just beyond the foot of the bed, facing the doorway. He wore loose clothes obviously not his own, and deep bandages over his eyes.

His hands were spread flat across his knees, deliberately unarmed and unthreatening, the pose of a man who didn't want to get himself shot. El didn't trust that image, but it seemed Sands still had plans that involved staying alive, and that worked for El.

It was pointless to make the standard greetings, so he said nothing.

"Still not inclined to talk much, are you? I suppose that makes a pleasant change, since the kid rattles on non-stop all day unless I kick him out."

El shrugged. "I talk when there's something to say."

"Well, you've got something to say now or you wouldn't be here." His voice slurred and flattened into boredom. "Feel free to fill me in whenever you're ready, any time's convenient for me."

El had thought over the days exactly how he should phrase his demand, and had decided to keep it simple. "I want you to help me."

"Yeah, that's the same cracked up camel shit the kid said you fed him." The fingers of his left hand tightened on his knee, fabric wrinkling into scars around them. "Maybe you skipped over the newsflash, but I'm not the best choice of mariachi sidekick right now, seeing how I don't aim so well as I used to. And I never did learn the guitar."

"Unlike you, I don't ask men to shoot others." His words were fast, and not entirely true, but lying to Sands wasn't something he was going to consider a sin. "I've been doing that very well on my own for many years."

The corner of Sands' mouth quirked. "What, no friends wanted on your little quest?"

"I have friends," he said flatly. "You are not one of them."

"Glad to hear it, El, here I was worrying you might turn all sentimental on me. So what the fuck do you want? Because you hanging around here is going to bring the kind of attention I don't particularly need right now."

It was interesting, hearing that rising note creeping through as he spoke, the words spinning faster, watching him struggle on the edge of control. So different from the man who had delighted in shaking the ground beneath others.

"They didn't take your brain when they took your eyes," he said, deliberate and casual. Oh, yes, that got through, Sands' whole body locking rigid for one lingering instant before he forced it back. "You have information. And you know the people who can supply the information you lack."

Sands laughed abruptly, every sound of it clipped tight and blackened. "I hate to disappoint you, but I'm thinking my network of connections is going to turn out a little less extensive and a lot less cooperative than they were a week or so back."

El smiled, cold, instinctive, before he remembered it was wasted and it fell away. "I don't think those people ever cooperated out of love for you. I think you had ways of persuading them."

Sands grinned in turn, lips stretching out knife blade thin. "Either way, I've got jack shit reason to help you. You screwed up your end of the deal as much as anyone did."

"The President didn't deserve to die." He made it a simple statement of truth, no recrimination. "He believes in this country, in its people."

"Just like you do, yeah, that's real sweet, El, but if the fucker was dead, I'd still have a way back in."

He watched the man in the chair, the set of his face below the bandages, and he knew Sands didn't believe it either.

"You said it yourself, El, you've always done a great job finding people to kill without my help. You keep right on gunning down the bad guys and stay the fuck out of my way."

"My methods are slow," he admitted. "I'm forced to start with those at the bottom. You work from the top."

"Not any more. I'm done with this leaking piss-basin of a country. The only thing I'm giving a fuck about right now is keeping myself alive."

'I wouldn't want to be you. Tell me, is there anyone who doesn't want you dead?' It was interesting how much a week could change things. Sands had fallen from untouchable to marked, the same walking dead man he had claimed El to be.

And that was his way to get to Sands.

He drew in a breath, slow, deep, let it go as he looked away from the chair over to the window. "You know you have no more time here," he said. "There's been some feeling of loyalty since the people brought down Marquez' army, but that will end. They are talking to me now, and soon they will start to talk to others. Those who care more for money than for Mexicans will not lie low for long."

Sands didn't answer, the deep silence from the rest of the house more than obvious in the pause.

"Why did you let them bring you here?"

Sands pulled his lips in tight, a chalk line scratched over his teeth. "I didn't let anybody do anything, you brainless fuck, I passed out from bleeding all over the fucking street. And given how it felt when I woke up, I'm not about to wish it'd happened any different."

Three sharp knocks echoed loud over tile from the front of the house, and El snapped around, his hand at his shotgun, eyes sweeping through the room, the window behind him. He caught the sudden tension in Sands, part of his brain keeping track as he reached beneath his seat and produced a silenced M11. No real accuracy at any distance, but a machine pistol was a useful weapon for a blind man.

As long as that blind man didn't care who else he shot alongside his enemies.

"It's okay!" The boy stuck his head around the door - he'd been listening in all along, El knew - his face glowing with a wide smile. "It's only the doctor. He comes at the same time every day, so we know it's him, see?"

El swore quietly and turned back to Sands as the boy scampered off to get the door, but his anger checked when he saw that Sands had frozen, the muscles along his jaw bunched tight.

Sands had no way of knowing the time, and would have spent most of the last week heavily drugged. Or at least El hoped that he had.

Sands tipped his head at a slight angle to the doorway, the gun muzzle still pointed directly towards it at chest height. The boy's voice came from the front of the house, and then another belonging to an older man. Sands obviously recognised it, shiver-twitch through him as he relaxed fractionally. When the child came trotting back with only a single set of footsteps following, the M11 disappeared back beneath the seat just before the doctor reached the door.

"Good day, señor." He had the forced, cheerful greeting common among his kind, and Sands didn't answer. The doctor glanced over at El, a look of instant jagged suspicion that told him exactly what kind of clients this man was used to dealing with, before he switched all his attention wisely back to the inside of his bag.

Sands reached into the pocket of his shirt, drawing out a cigarette and a cheap plastic lighter that El very much doubted was his own. He put the cigarette to his lips, ran his fingers down to the tip, then back a couple of centimetres, holding it. His right hand brought the lighter up until it touched the end, lowered it slightly, then click and flame. The whole process had the smooth quality of a familiar ritual, and El imagined Sands had been working on lighting cigarettes since he became even half-lucid.

The doctor spoke little as he examined Sands, beyond the obligatory, "Does this hurt?" He rolled up his left sleeve, quickly checking and redressing the gunshot wound above his elbow. Sands smoked his way through the cigarette and largely ignored him. Twice he felt his way down the leg of the chair to the ashtray on the floor right beside it, tapping away the embers.

"You can fuck off now." The doctor blinked, startled, then realised Sands was talking to El.

El had no morbid curiosity about what was left of Sands' eyes. He'd seen more than enough of the things men did to others. "I'll be waiting outside."

He had no doubt that wasn't what Sands had intended.

The boy was still lurking by the doorway, and El gestured him through to the front of the house. He put his finger to his lips, and kept his own voice low. "Tell me, where is he hurt, besides the arm and his eyes?"

The boy looked at him with that same mulish expression he'd worn at the door, and El remembered that Sands had already snarled at him once for listening to him. He sighed, and lowered himself to the floor, sitting back against the wall. "He's a proud man, you know this." The child nodded once, solemn. "He won't tell me if I ask, because he hates to feel weak." He nodded again, looking ridiculously serious for a boy of his age, and El had to work not to smile. "But if I don't know, then I don't know how to help him."

He thought on that for a while. "He doesn't like you, señor."

"No, he doesn't." After what he'd overheard, there was no point in denying that. "But I don't think he likes anyone right now."

Reaction, immediate and beacon-bright. He'd suspected Sands wouldn't have made a pleasant houseguest, even before he arrived to worsen things.

The boy watched him a little longer before pointing to his own body, high on his left thigh and then above his right knee. That fitted with most of the stories El had heard over the last few days. "Thank you," he said, finally letting the smile show. "I won't tell."

The boy grinned back at him, suddenly looking the child he should be. "I won't tell either."

It was so simple, one of those ordinary moments common to so many children, and he had to look away, his smile gone.

The boy sat down beside him, matching his pose against the wall, his legs stretching across and not quite reaching the painted plaster opposite. He looked confused, uncertain again, and El simply waited.

"What will happen to him, señor?" His eyes were knotted on him, wide and pleading.

El paused, and considered. "When he is healed, he will most likely go back to his own country," he said.

The boy thought about that, and nodded. "That will be better," he said, and gave El a small, grateful smile.

It made him feel still more awkward. He was handling this badly. This child didn't deserve to be lied to, but he had done nothing to deserve having to face truth either.

If Sands hadn't contacted the CIA before now, it was because he knew he would be unwelcome. America was closed to him, and Mexico was death.

"Hey, kid, get back in here." Sands' voice carried along the hallway, a casual demand that irritated El. The boy scrambled to his feet instantly and raced off towards the bedroom.

El took it as his own cue to return, following more slowly.

The antiseptic smell was stronger now, and so was the smoke. The doctor was finishing redressing his face, carefully wrapping the bandages behind and above his ears. El could imagine what Sands would have said to anything that obscured his hearing.

He knew Sands knew he was there, but neither acknowledged the other.

"Get him to leave more of those pills, kid."

The discussion that followed was fast and animated, the doctor reluctant to give many painkillers to a patient with obvious potential for suicide, though he didn't say that last part openly. Sands lit another cigarette, growing impatient as the child made no progress. "For fuck's sake, just give him more money."

The boy started just briefly, then reached into his own pocket and carefully counted through the cash there. He seemed largely unaffected by Sands' anger when it wasn't aimed at him.

The doctor eyed the roll of notes the boy finally held out to him. "If you are determined," he said. He pushed the money inside his jacket before returning to his bag for the drugs. "The large bottle has the painkillers. Take two each time, no more than four times a day. The others are more antibiotics, one morning and night as before."

"Yeah, got it, thanks." Sands sounded distinctly bored. "See you tomorrow an' all that cozy cocksucking shit."

"Goodbye, señor." The doctor had lost the false cheery attitude of his arrival. Spending time with Sands seemed to have that effect on everyone.

"Go see him out, kid."

The boy was puzzled, looking from Sands to El and back. "Señor?"

Sands breathed out slowly, smoke streaming from his nose. "I mean, 'Fuck off.'"

He hesitated, obviously torn between wanting to stay and not annoying Sands, but he turned and left after the doctor, quick footsteps pattering through the building.

The front door opened, then closed with a definitive click, and the house sank back into its erratic silence.

Sands leaned forward, running his hand down the chair to crumple his cigarette into the ashtray. "Well, I guess you do have a point, El. This place probably won't be healthy for much longer." El had a moment's odd disorientation when he realised Sands had deliberately avoided using his label while the doctor was there. 'You can fuck off now.'

Sands was pushing himself to his feet, letting the weight settle onto his legs gradually. "So where do you want to start?"

"You're coming with me?" It wasn't what he'd expected. The change was too sudden, too eager.

"I don't seem to have many other offers coming my way right now," Sands said, his tone obsessively light. El felt like pointing out that he hadn't offered either, he had only demanded information. But he couldn't stay here, and it would take far too long to get facts from Sands if the man didn't want to give them.

"I assume you've got a car?" Sands asked.

"In the next street." He hadn't wanted to park outside the boy's house.

"Oh, yeah, that fits this whole fucking scenario real snug around the balls," Sands muttered. He leaned forwards slowly, right hand on the foot of the bed to steady himself, the other feeling beneath it and bringing out a bag. He opened it up while he rescued the pistol from the chair, and El made a point of seeing inside – a matching M11 and a pair of semi-automatics at least, all with holsters and clip belts.

Sands had collected his arsenal from Barillo's men, yes. That too fitted with some of what he had heard about the Day of the Dead, let him separate further layers of fact from the rumours.

He could have asked the boy for more, but he was reluctant to press the piece of trust he had been given. The child was naturally kind, and deserved better than to be used because of it. Sands had done that more than enough.

Sands threw a couple of shirts into the bag - presumably also borrowed, though with what he'd seen Sands wear before, it was hard to be sure - and lifted it. "Time to go," he announced, and stepped forward, his leg held stiff and unbending.

He reached out to take Sands' arm.

He jerked away the moment his fingers touched the fabric of his shirt, staggering back, barely keeping from falling as he grabbed at the chair. "Fuck off!" His voice was almost a shriek, crawling somewhere along the edges of panic, and El saw the instant wince as the man realised exactly how he sounded.

Sands steadied himself visibly, his breathing back under his control with just a few inhales. He'd kept hold of the bag through it all, clutching for support only with his injured arm, and El began to wonder if he might actually live a short while before the cartel got to him.

"I know my way round the fucking house," Sands said, low and furious. "I can still take a piss on my own."

"That's good to know," El said, deadpan. "I had no plans to help."

Sands snapped back into total control of himself, or close enough that El could no longer see where it blurred, still standing awkwardly but somehow casual with it. "Well, I can already tell this is going to be a truly marvellous little road trip - just think of all that caring and sharing to come." The words were drawn out slow to hang in the space between them with perfectly timed threat. He swapped the bag to his left hand, his right trailing along the wall as he walked carefully to the door. El wasn't sure if it was more for guidance or support.

The boy's parents stood in the entrance to the kitchen, saying nothing, their expressions dried and set in plaster. However much they did or didn't know about Sands, it was clear they didn't like him, or want him here. El had enough idea of what Sands' first days must have been like to feel real sympathy for them, and he wondered that the child had managed to persuade them at all.

He had, of course, reappeared at Sands' side as soon as Sands stepped from the room. Sands lifted his hand to touch his shoulder. "I need a hat," he said, "a big one, with a brim."

He looked up at him, his face stripped bare. "You're leaving?"

"Yeah, kiddo, and so are you. You got relatives somewhere else you can all go and stay with a while?"

The boy turned to his parents, translating into Spanish.

"No-one too close," El added. "Cousins or less, or just friends."

The two of them looked at one another, more resigned than surprised, and leaned together, discussing low and fast.

El wondered why Sands never spoke Spanish when he understood the language so easily. Probably he spoke it badly, heavily accented and flawed. Sands wouldn't allow himself to look less than perfectly in control - to attempt something and fail would be no part of the image he desired.

It was a good thing for Sands. If these people had been able to understand his words, he would have been thrown out days ago, despite the child.

"We have somewhere," the father said finally.

The boy looked up at him, a bright mix of curiosity and excitement. "Are we going to –"

"Shut up!" Sands' voice was pistol-fast and as instantly effective. "Don't tell us, you stupid fucking brat. You don't tell anyone, got that?" The boy's face crumbled into distress, and El wondered if Sands had any idea what he did to him when he spoke that way.

Probably he didn't care. He would see no reason to care.

"I'll get the hat for you," the child said, and El was surprised by how steady he held his voice.

He very much hoped he didn't intend to imitate Sands in other ways.

"Leave tonight," El told the father. "Or at least before this time tomorrow. Don't tell your neighbours. It's better if no-one sees you go."

The man exchanged a silent look with his wife, then nodded. "How long?" he asked. "How long do we stay away?"

"Months, or more," he said, his voice making the uncertainty clear. He looked past them to the three other children watching with identical wide eyes from the kitchen. "If it were my choice, I wouldn't come back here at all."

The mother's face bleached as she reached for her husband's hand, and El felt no regret.

He wouldn't want these people to learn the painful way that the passing of years did not make you safe. Only unprepared.

He locked his full attention back to Sands at the first distinctive scrape from that bag of weapons.

Sands stood with his shoulders against the wall as he drew out a gunbelt, double-checking the spare magazines were all in place. He fixed it around his waist, no hesitation with straps and buckles, his fingers running through it all automatically. He slid his hands down the holsters, feeling for the hem of that oversized shirt he wore to ensure the guns were hidden.

El knew he would have checked the guns earlier.

A door slammed, and the boy was back at his unchanging high speed, now carrying a cheap sombrero, as big across as half his height. He stopped in front of Sands, reached into his pocket for the rest of the money he had there, and touched the notes to the man's hand. "This is all of it that's left, señor."

Sands brushed his hand away. "Keep it," he said, impatient. "Did you get the hat?"

"Here." He gave it to Sands, smiling brightly. "I remembered Guiomar next door had one, I've seen him with it."

"You didn't steal it, did you?" Sands asked, his voice dark and dramatic.

"No! I paid him for it!" the boy insisted, then added sadly. "He made me pay too much."

"Well, kid, when you want something badly, that's just the way it works," Sands told him, adding a quick, closed-lipped smile. "You may as well learn it early." He slapped the hat on his head, and followed it with a pair of dark glasses. "How do I look?"

His hair hung forwards loose, obscuring the sides of his face. The hat was pulled down low, and what part of the bandage wasn't covered was heavily shadowed by the brim, and further hidden by the sunglasses.

He looked ridiculous, the worst kind of tourist idiot, but Sands had never concerned himself with such things. He was happy enough to use that image when it worked to his advantage.

"You look fine, señor," the boy insisted.

Sands' lips curled at the edges. "I kind of doubt that, but thanks for the vote, anyways."

He beamed up at him, the delight clear in his voice. "I'll come with you to the car."

"No, you won't, you'll stay here." Sands had lost that mocking glitter, entirely serious now. El had to agree - the child had been seen too much with Sands already. But he was pained still by that look of quiet devastation.

"Good luck, señor," the boy said, a little subdued now.

"Yeah, have a nice life, kid," Sands answered without turning his head, and El opened the door onto the street and stepped out.

He hesitated, wondering whether to try and guide Sands again. Indoors was one thing, but he wouldn't have been outside since he got here. "Get moving, beanbrain," Sands said, with pointed impatience. "I don't think we want to be standing around in the street waiting for everyone to get a good look. I can follow you to the car just fine."

The idea of walking even a short distance with a man like Sands at his back made his skin hitch and crawl all the way up to his neck. "I think I like you better where I can see you."

Sands' lips thinned, and El supposed that Sands would feel a lot easier if he could see him too. But that was Sands' problem to deal with, and El didn't care. "If I'm behind you, I know I'm not going to be walking into any window ledges or street signs, asshole."

That was logical. It didn't make El any happier. "Give me your guns."

"Are you going to be handing over yours?"

"No."

"I thought not. So fuck you."

Damn. They shouldn't stay right outside the boy's house like this, and this wasn't an argument he could win quickly. He tried to force himself to think like Sands, balancing the reasons he might want to kill him against the reasons he might not. Sands wasn't lying when he said that his options were few, and while El was his only route to somewhere safer, he should be fine. Sands could pull a gun on him, try to control where they went, but Sands wouldn't know if he cooperated or not, and wouldn't dare shoot him anyway. Not even in the leg, not if he wanted him to drive.

At least not until he knew they'd be in an automatic.

"This way," he said.

He made himself walk slowly. It wouldn't be a good plan to annoy Sands by moving too fast for him to keep up. He placed each foot deliberately, the sound of his boots on the sidewalk obvious in the quiet street.

His instincts screamed at him with every careful step, his senses straining backwards to keep track of the killer who followed him.

Sands quickly matched step with him, his right leg moving forward when El's did, the left with more hesitation and slide, the scrape of sole over stone. That bullet near the hip couldn't have been good. He kept the rhythm, though, recognising it as the only way to follow a man so closely without risk of tripping.

Over their footsteps, he could hear Sands breathing hard, but steady.

He cast frequent, trigger-light glances back over his shoulder, reluctant to keep his eyes off the man for long. Sands did nothing that even hinted suspicion, seeming to focus all his concentration on just listening and moving.

"Right," he said quietly, and made the turn at the side street. Sands stumbled as he twisted on his injured knee, harsh rattle from the bag, El jumping and spinning fast to see what he was doing.

Sands recovered himself, tight-lipped and pale, and readjusted to his steps.

El was wishing he'd parked closer. He didn't give a damn about Sands having to limp down the street, he just wanted to be rid of that creeping sensation up his spine.

He could see the car now, past the others in the row, closer with every slow, careful step.

If Sands had been going to shoot him, take him in the back with a silenced 9mm, that stumble at the corner would have been it, and he hadn't, so that meant he wouldn't.

Unless he would, and that had been planned to make him relax.

That wasn't going to be happening any time around this man.

"This one," he said, and Sands put his hand out to the left, touching the trunk of the car, following the line of the roof to the door, and down to the handle. El walked round to the driver's side, and the relief in just being able to watch Sands was stark as he unlocked it.

Sands opened his door when the lock clicked, his hand skimming the edge of the seat before he swung his bag into the back seat. It landed with an inelegant thump that made El glad his guitar case was upright behind his own seat.

"Fuck!" Sands had forgotten to allow for the sombrero as he climbed in, grabbing for it just before it was knocked into the street. He tugged it further onto his head, and eased himself slowly back into the passenger seat, shifting to get comfortable. "So, where are we going?"

"Isn't that for you to tell me?"

Sands stared ahead, and El could almost see the information ticking over his stilled face, facts and rumours he had gathered all through his time in Mexico shifting in priority.

He wasn't staring, of course, but El was unable to shake the impression the man gave.

"Lázaro Cárdenas," Sands stated finally.

"Lázaro Cárdenas?" Over a thousand kilometres along the coast, more than a day's drive.

Sands shrugged, then tensed. El could imagine how the pain of that simple movement would have shocked all through his arm. "We can go somewhere else if you like, but this arrangement isn't going to work too well if you don't listen when you ask."

El didn't bother arguing further, just started the engine and pulled out into the road. He wondered if there was any chance it was a coincidence, Sands directing him to a city named in honour of a Mexican president, but for now, the important thing was getting out of Culiacán. He had time along the way to get his explanations.

The street was cobbled, like many in the city, and El didn't drive it slowly. He saw Sands' jaw lock, his fingers clench white on the window handle, and he smiled a little. That was payback for how he had treated the boy.

Sometimes, a little justice felt as good as ever.

He took a left, and headed south.

Sands slept for most of the journey, the normal effect of injury and drugs. When he was awake, he said nothing, just wound down the window and smoked those tightly wrapped cigarettes.

El wished he wouldn't. It made him want to smoke too, and he hadn't done that since before Loída was born. His mind reeled him back through the fierce arguments and then the apologies and the laughter as he and Carolina had quit together.

Part way through the afternoon, Sands took out the pill bottles, shifting in his seat and reaching into his pocket with clenched teeth and inaudible muttering. He tipped out two capsules, swore in clipped tones, and put one back, dry-swallowing the other.

El had been there in the past, balancing pain against the dulling of his reflexes, and felt a quick flare of sympathy.

He drove on, squinting beneath the visor into the lowering sun as he tried to work out what he was actually going to do with Sands.

When he had set out to track him, he hadn't anticipated finding a blind man. His plans had gone no further than trying to get the information he wanted, since he would have been lucky to get this far at all. There had always been a good chance their meeting would end in him shooting Sands dead, and a somewhat lesser chance that Sands would have killed him.

When he heard the stories about the mad gringo with the bleeding eyes, he amended his expectations to Sands either telling him things or not. More likely not. He had never considered trading Sands' safety for his help.

He found himself travelling now with an amoral murderer who suffered from mostly justifiable paranoia, and the problems started at the most basic of levels.

They would have to stay overnight in Tepic, a city with enough of a tourist trade that another tasteless American wouldn't stand out too badly. He had no trust for Sands, and was reluctant to let the man out of his sight. At the same time, he didn't much like the alternative of sharing a room with him.

He considered pausing in Tepic and kicking Sands from the car, driving away and forgetting the whole plan. As he would have had to do if Sands had simply refused to talk to him.

The only thing that stopped him was having no more idea what he would do then.

But if he wasn't going to rid himself of Sands, he would need to learn to read him. Difficult with a man he had met only twice, and who had been changed between.

Sands' speech was one of the more obvious differences, altered with stress and pain. He still used language to attack, deliberately aimed words spoken in the most casual of tones and disguised by a kind of eloquence; but the constant cursing was new, the giveaway of failing control. There were cracks in the image now.

He wondered whether that would work more to his advantage or against him. Sands so far off balance, besides being a satisfying experience, was possibly more likely to cooperate with him. But he had been dangerous even when everything around him moved to his planning, and now that his world was unpredictable, the man might become even more so.

He was no closer to any real conclusions when they reached Tepic. He drove into the main tourist area near the cathedral, and booked them into one of the cheaper hotels and a shared room. That would fit with the image Sands was wearing, and the staff would simply assume he was showing his idiot American friend around.

Sands followed him from the car, that same taut, wary silence strung out between them. The stairs were around the back, out of view of the desk, which was useful. Sands cautiously felt his way up them, leaning heavily on the handrail, pale and sweating. El made no offer to help.

He unlocked the door of the room, and stood to one side as he switched on the light, letting Sands follow him in and the door close behind them.

Sands took one step into the room and stopped.

He thought fast. "The foot of the first bed is four steps ahead and two to your right. The second is two steps the other side of it. The left wall is here beside me, the door to the bathroom a metre in front of me. There's a small table against the right wall between the beds, and another beyond the bathroom door with a television." He paused, frowning. What else?

Sands turned away from him, edging forwards, slowing until his shin caught on the bedframe. "Fuck," he said quietly. He reached out his hand to check the height, letting the bag drop to the floor as he sat on the bed, lips pressed and moulded into wax. He felt again for his differently-sized pill bottles, swallowing one from each. "Floor?" he asked.

El looked down at his feet. Sands would have heard and felt the tiles. What...?

"Mats, trash cans, broken tiles," Sands said with exaggerated patience. "What else am I going to fall over in this cockroach pit?"

El swept his eyes over the room. It was cheap, and a little worn, yes, but still aimed at tourists. "This isn't such a cockroach pit. I know, I've slept in those."

"Oh, I just bet you have." Sands smiled wide for a moment. He didn't have the teeth for it, smoke-tainted and uneven. "But as entertaining as tales of your charming lifestyle may be, for now I'd prefer it if you'd answer the fucking question."

He stuck his head briefly into the bathroom - small, barely enough room for the shower, the toilet and the basin. "There's nothing like that." He laid his guitar case alongside the other bed, by the window, and pushed his shotgun beneath the pillow before he lay back. "The garbage can's in the bathroom below the washbasin."

"That's nice, since I don't know where the basin is."

"You'll find it."

Sands was already starting to look better, not so pale, and his breathing had steadied. "While you're being so informative, care to tell me where the ashtray is?" He was digging through his clothes for cigarettes again.

El's eyes swivelled to the table between them, and the large round metal ashtray sitting there. "It's a non-smoking room." He didn't know if this place even had such a concept.

Sands lit the cigarette anyway. "Given how it smells, I won't be the first to ignore that."

Smoke drifted his way within seconds, heavy and enticing, tugging at something old within his soul, reluctant to let him go.

He opened the window, but it didn't help much. Being around Sands would make anyone tense enough to smoke.

He lay back on his bed again, determined to ignore it.

Sands pulled off the sunglasses and the hat as he worked his way through the cigarette, once again bared into someone wounded, instead of merely stupid and drunk. His dressings were clean still, no giveaway ooze of blood or infection.

He was holding his breath longer now, the smoke seeping slower from his lungs.

He flicked the ash carelessly onto the floor, and when it had burned right down, he trod the butt methodically into the tiles under his boot. And then he got to his feet and began exploring the room.

El had expected him to start from the door, but he didn't. He trailed his fingers along the bed to the corner, standing thoughtfully with his hand on the frame, then turned a few degrees and walked, his hand held ahead of him at waist height. He missed the bathroom door by less than half a metre, and when he found the wall, he instantly turned the right way.

Sands had a good sense of direction, at least. He would need it if he was going to live much more than a week.

The basin was right by the door, set low. Sands found it by catching the edge on his thigh, and swore several times with variations. "Okay, taps," he muttered, and ran both with his hands beneath until it was obvious which he wanted. He began swallowing water fast, drinking messily from his hands because he didn't know about the glass on the counter.

He drank for a long time. El remembered the side-effects of opiates too, and cringed inwardly.

Sands turned off the tap and groped for the door, shutting it with a bang.

He stayed in there quite some time. The toilet flushed at one point, and later there was a short, harsh rattle of water as Sands worked out the shower controls. When he came out, the ends of his hair were damp, curling a little where it had hung forwards as he drank.

He was walking much more easily than when they'd left the car. The pills would be helping him now.

He worked his way over the hotel room systematically, clockwise from the bathroom. He didn't just examine the obvious, running his hands right up the walls to the ceiling and down to floor level. El wondered vaguely what he was expecting to find in a place like this.

He wondered less when he remembered the 'mace' he owed his life to all those years ago in Acuña.

He reached down and pushed the guitar case beneath his bed as Sands investigated the window locks.

Sands established the edges of his bed, and otherwise avoided it. The section of wall above El's head was the one part left unexamined.

He ran his hands over the table, finding the lamp first, setting it wobbling, and then the ashtray. "Fuck you too, El," he said, taking the ashtray and positioning it deliberately on the corner of the table nearest his own bed. He put the bottles of pills beside it, just back from the edge.

He finished his circuit of the room, spending a considerable time with the door handles and locks, and then carefully stretched himself out along the length of his bed. The creaking cut off as he settled, and the room fell into not-silence, the noise of arguing carrying clearly through the walls from the next room.

Sands was reaching into his pocket for cigarettes again. "Well, a day as fascinating as this one always makes me hungry. I hope your plans include feeding me, El, even if you won't offer to hold my dick."

El stared up at the yellow-tinged ceiling of the room he shared with a murderer he despised, and he could almost have laughed.

They ordered in to eat. That way, Sands wasn't seen by any more people, and El didn't have to take his eyes off him for long. He paid at the door, while Sands stayed out of sight.

Sands complained at length about the food - not hot enough, too bland, wrong spices – and about the absence of a bottle of tequila to drown it in.

"You shouldn't drink with the pills," El said mildly.

That changed the direction of the tirade predictably, but Sands was tiresome company. He reached for the remote, clicking on the room's small TV, and Sands tensed instantly at the sounds, falling silent.

He flicked idly through the channels. Too many soap operas, and nothing he would normally watch, but it was an improvement on listening to Sands. He left it finally on a hospital drama, a badly dubbed American show that at least provided the distraction of trying to work out what the English had been.

He had expected Sands to ease once he realised what El was doing, but he didn't. He lay stretched out across the other bed, the muscles in his neck drawn into ropes and his fingers hooking at the covers.

El puzzled over it vaguely as he half-watched the dramatics of the TV patients. Sands had been relaxed while they ate, and had done nothing to trigger a sudden pain that wouldn't die down again.

When he saw it, it was obvious; appallingly so. The television was obscuring the sounds of the real world, flooding everything in useless, false signals. Sands could no longer know what was going on around him, could no longer follow what El was doing.

In something so simple as turning on the television, he had completely shattered Sands' remaining confidence.

It was an interesting thing to know.

He left the show running, but he was watching Sands now instead, all his attention bent and tied to his reactions. He knew he wouldn't ask him to switch it off, and risk him knowing that it bothered him.

The Sands from before would have countered uncertainty and disadvantage by finding some secure ground from which he could attack. He wondered what this man would do.

Sands shattered the rigid stillness with a sudden clawing at his clothes, reaching for and lighting another cigarette with untrustworthy fingers. The cigarette trembled in his grip, and the smoke left his lungs in broken ripples.

He smoked deliberately, taking short, hard pulls and holding, the exhales lengthening and slowly losing the shiver. His teeth and lips parted slightly, the sharp definition fading from the muscle by his jaw.

He reached out confidently enough for the ashtray when the cigarette was burned through, only a light scrape of metal across wood as his fingers found it. He shifted himself into an upright position on the bed, pushing with his right hand and a little with his feet until his back rested against the headboard, and then he turned his face deliberately towards El.

He stayed that way, completely still, expressionless, a parody of staring. He knew El would be watching, and he was going for an effect.

El was perfectly happy to wait.

When Sands finally spoke, his voice was normal, his body curved casually, no hint of the man who had quivered taut just minutes before. "I've got to say, El, it kind of surprised me when you showed up today. I thought you would have bolted right back to hiding away in your little backwater hovel."

"I did," he said simply.

He had stayed for three days, but he had found no peace there. He had sat on the roof and played, and it was hollow, unreal, the tension strumming along his spine and through his fingers as he stared out at the horizons.

Sands tipped his head to one side, the quirk of his mouth barely visible over the curve of the lamp on the table between them. "And it all felt so horribly wrong, didn't it?"

El's fingers tightened around the remote, flash-memory of sitting at a table as this man he had never met told him so casually who he was and how he thought.

It had taken him those three days to realise it wasn't going to change. This time, he was unable to convince himself that he could simply live. He had been reminded once too often that the violence always sought him out, that more people died when it found him.

He trusted his instincts, every time.

So he had decided to seek the violence out first. And to seek out the man who had brought it back into his life, if he was still in Mexico, and repay the gift.

That last had turned out to be an unnecessary revenge.

"You can forget about taking the fifth, I'm hearing silence as a guilty plea right down the line." The satisfaction rolled into a purr all through Sands' voice. "So here you are, back to fulfilling your self-appointed role as the modern-day Zorro, hero of the people. You know, that's terribly noble of you, El. Sacrificing your own quiet life to kill for your country - it has such a streak of Latin romance." He stretched himself against the bed, headboard creaking like pain at the shift in his weight. "You should write your own songs about it, I'm sure they'd be a big hit around here."

El breathed in long and slow, controlling the urge to simply punch Sands and shut him up. He had anticipated this. Sands had been vicious before, and pain and maiming weren't likely to improve him.

He could deal with Sands if it was the fastest way to get the information he needed.

"And what of you, Agent Sands?" His voice was calculated, steady, stressing the last two words with the slight and precise level of venom. Some reaction there, yes, a flicker along the muscle of his jaw. "Is that why you joined the CIA? Because you wanted to serve your country? Or just to kill for it?"

Sands laughed, ringing like chords with the fifth tones far too high to be natural. "Oh, the Company isn't a place to go looking for idealists. Everyone's running their own little agenda, watching and waiting to grab the next thing on their list, and not caring a rat's balls who they fuck over to get it."

"Just like you," El said, distaste open and pouring.

Sands didn't react this time, a hint of a shrug quickly cut short by pain, or its memory. "Well, maybe not exactly like me, but I won't argue the principle."

"So it was all for your own personal sense of fun," El pressed. "Become a spy, and gain a legitimate way for you to torment and to kill."

Sands' lips parted, his face still. Surprise? The expression was gone after a moment, slipping into genuine amusement. "Really, El, not everyone's like you, twisting murder into a higher calling, a life's devoted work. For some of us, bodies are just an incidental by-product, not the reason for the opening night party."

He froze into immobility, locking his muscles down until his instinctive response could be checked and reasoned with.

He wanted to hit him, wanted to beat him until he admitted the truth. That this murdering American bastard could suggest that his way was better, that El was worse than someone who killed for convenience with no thought, who looked on it as casual -

It was many things to him, but never that.

The not-quiet jolted and broke, yet another person dying among the chatter from the television, a woman screaming hysterically at the doctors who were trying to save her sister, and being restrained, sedated.

He wondered what the normal response to death really was. He no longer remembered. Not his own, not even when he had lost Carolina and Loída, and certainly not Sands'.

Sands' reactions to many things were bizarre, and sometimes seemed to run almost counter to his own ends. But Sands had a reason for everything, just not one always easy to see.

Sands was blind, injured, and for the moment, largely reliant on El. So what did he have to gain by deliberately antagonising him?

He looked over at Sands again, able to do so now without the urge to slide his arm around his throat and wrench.

Sands was no longer so relaxed, something of that earlier tension creeping back through, there in the line along his jaw and the too-straight fingers on his thigh that fought the urge to curl. He was losing that control again, losing what he had clawed back with so much effort, and he realised then that Sands needed him to talk.

As long as he was talking, Sands knew where he was over the television, could gauge a better idea of his mood and what he was doing. What they discussed wasn't actually the point of it, but he had guessed right - the Sands of before would have countered disadvantage by attack, angled to unbalance his opponent down to his own level, and it seemed he was not so much changed.

There were obvious drawbacks to that, but overall El decided that it leaned in his favour. The man still worked to a pattern, and a pattern he could learn to read.

For now, he only had to resist Sands' more deliberate remarks, and he'd learned some control over his temper with the years. Mostly it flashed fast and sharp, and retreated again the same way. If Sands thought he could confuse and distract him with words, he was going to learn differently.

Sands was the one flawed here, weakened, and that wasn't going to change.

He thumbed the power button on the remote he held, letting the room drop back into the almost-quiet of a cardboard hotel. He wasn't prepared to answer to Sands' style of conversation, and he didn't like being deliberately cruel.

He was aware of Sands unwinding again, the slope of his body against the headboard easing into something more natural as the muscles of his spine loosened and flexed.

It was probably a good thing Sands had so many of those opiate pills - if he went on locking himself up tight that way, he would need them for more than gunshot wounds and mutilated eyes.

Sands was lighting yet another cigarette, his fingers once again smooth as they flowed over paper and plastic, aligning everything neatly, precisely. The flick of a thumb into flame and the soft hiss of burning, familiar, and if El didn't know it was impossible, he would have thought Sands had chosen it deliberately, another thing designed to drag at his nerves.

"Well, I guess if I ever want to shut you up, I've found just the way to do it," Sands said, almost amused. "Not that I really suspected that was going to be a problem, but who knows? Maybe you'll turn out to be the chatty type when you get to know me better."

El already knew Sands far too well for his own taste. He knew enough not to answer.

Without the added pressure of the television, Sands didn't have the same urge to get him to talk; that was his last attempt at driving some response from him. He smoked through the rest of his cigarette in silence, not calm, but near enough to fake it passably.

Sands swallowed more of the painkiller and fell asleep soon afterwards, his body finally relaxing into true rest among the sheets instead of a facsimile.

El lay on his own bed, the stink of tobacco clawing at his throat and the knowledge of a murderer beside him crawling through his bones.

He wouldn't sleep, even if he tried. So he didn't try.

Sands woke in a nasty mood, which improved only a little after he dosed himself with the pills. El chose to ignore him and his acid-blade comments; that might have actively made Sands worse, but silence was his best defence.

Being drawn into argument with this man was too likely to release the resentment that circled in deep river pools inside him, send him spinning in flash-flood.

The nearest Sands became to civilised was his taut demand, "I'm assuming I can rely on you to have bandages."

He did, of course. He'd restocked all those supplies when he'd realised he was going to accept Sands' deal to kill Marquez.

He brought the medical kit from the car, wondered briefly whether to offer his help, and decided against it. He pushed the box against Sands' hand until he gripped it, and then left him to it. He was in the bathroom far too long, but he made a reasonable effort of redressing himself, the bandages over his eyes only a little uneven. El had certainly done worse on himself in the past.

The journey was a repeat of the previous day, with Sands mostly sleeping. El fiddled with the radio, seeking out the changing stations as he drove, keeping it low. He preferred Sands asleep. When he woke, he sometimes talked.

They arrived in Lázaro Cárdenas in the late afternoon, and he drove through to the tourist areas north of the city nearer the beaches. It was harder finding a room here at short notice, but he booked them into a place near the edge of the district, leaving Sands in the car again while he dealt with the desk staff.

He went back out to the car without bothering to check on the room, and pulled the door closed after him with a heavy thunk. "Now are you going to tell me why we're here?"

Sands' lip curved, faint, a comfortable tilt at the edge. He'd been waiting all along for him to ask, El knew, but he was tired of that simplistic game. "Barillo had a vacation house here, out towards Playa Azul. It's officially owned by his cousin, so there's no legal grounds for the police to come poking around it. With all the activity in Culiacán from various branches of the authorities right now, I've a feeling at least part of his operation will have opted to decamp down this way."

El considered that. It was plausible, but not what he'd been hoping for. "That's a poor chance to drive a thousand kilometres for."

Sands reached forward to fish through the glove compartment, bored words and rattling fingertips. "You wanted what I've got. This is it."

He lit another cigarette, and El wound down his window, since Sands didn't.

End of their conversation.

He wondered just how much Sands was holding back, but decided he had little choice other than to go along for now. He had nothing else to work from, and they were already here.

Sands gave him an address, and he called at a bookstore for maps.

"It should be an orange house set back at the apex of a hill," Sands told him as they neared the area. "High wall and gates."

The detail was unexpected, didn't quite fit. "You've been here before?"

"Fuck, no. I saw some surveillance pictures of the place."

"So you know the layout?"

"Only of the buildings, no interiors."

That was better than nothing. He braked a little, checking for numbers and names by the gates of the driveways they passed. They weren't in the town itself, but one of the roads outside it, more space and larger houses.

"Don't slow too much. I don't know what we're driving, but it sounds like the serious heap of shit line of automotive development rather than precision engineering."

"It is." An old Ford was functional enough for him, but it wouldn't meet his passenger's standards.

"I suspected we wouldn't be blending right in with the nice neighbourhood. It's a pity we couldn't pick up my car." Sands rubbed his fingers along the length of his nose below the bandages. "Hell, it was probably stripped out inside a day. Unless Ajedrez made someone a present of it, and it's being driven round Culiacán by some drugged-up greasy turdfucker." His lips thinned right down, and he turned away, towards the window. "Christ, I'd rather it was fucking stripped," he muttered.

El watched, his interest in Sands more than what he said. "It was only a car," he said.

His head jerked, as if to turn back, then stilled. "It was my car," he said, as if that made all the difference, and possibly, to Sands, it did.

It seemed odd to El that Sands could hold so much bitterness over the fate of a car when so much else had been lost.

But then he thought maybe that was the point.

"We're here," he said.

It lay where the road crested, as Sands had described. The house was just visible over the wall, low-sloping roof tilted at various angles, an irregular building with wings. The gate was set mid-way along the length of wall, two ornate metal halves the same height as the stone and watched by cameras. El drove on past, taking in as much as he could in the one sweep, but there was little to note. One quick glimpse of the house through the gates showed a square, two-storey frontage with open gardens lacking in cover.

He turned his attention to the surrounding roads, and the slope of the hills that rose up on the other side of the highway. Somewhere there would be a vantage point that overlooked this house; hopefully it wouldn't be too distant, or too obvious.

He glanced down at the map, open across his knees, mentally marking the location.

He drove around the area a few more times, avoiding passing the house itself again and retracing no routes, learning the local roads and areas of visibility. Most of his attention was outside the car, but the buzzing awareness of Sands seared constant, of his minimal, delicate movements as he smoked and flicked ash through the open window.

The Sands he had met before had used dramatic, expansive gestures, aimed to fill far more space than he did physically. He wondered if what he saw now was the result of pain, or another change forced on the man by his own mental faltering.

The movements of his hands and eyes were automatic as he drove back to the hotel, everything honed to his passenger. But Sands sat still and slightly hunched, giving him little to work from.

The room here was larger than the last one. It was costing him more - only because of what was vacant, not his own choice. He described its basics to Sands, remembering to include the floor, and then called for food, settling onto one of the beds while Sands methodically checked over the room.

Sands told him what he knew of the house as they ate; a roughly U-shaped building with a swimming pool in the courtyard between the arms and a few small outbuildings. He tried to sketch it out, but his words were mismatched with what he drew as he lost track of the lines on the paper. It was a frustrating exercise for both of them that resulted in more ill-temper, a sniping spiral that threatened to curl down into true viciousness. But Sands gathered himself, his head back, drawing in slow air through widened nostrils, and went on with his detailed descriptions.

He had lost the mirror-smooth, reflective surface that El had seen on him before, the flaws that had always lain beneath it exposed now, and brittle. But it seemed he would force the edges back into a ragged semblance for as long as it took to get what he wanted.

By the time the food was gone, El knew as much about the house as Sands did, and too many hours of evening spun out restless ahead of him.

He had discovered long ago that he could be at the same time very tense and very bored. Travelling with Sands, he was finding further extremes of both, still coexisting.

He reached beneath his bed for the guitar case; Sands twitched at the scrape of it over the tiles, his head shifting as El flicked the catches and lifted the false lid.

He sat cross-legged on the bed, with the case open in front of him, and began the long routine of stripping, cleaning, checking. He didn't need to do this - all his guns had been fully prepared before he began tracking Sands - but it was simply habit to run through them before he might use them.

Distinctive snicks and clicks as he unloaded and separated slide and barrel, sharp solvent stink as he prepared a swab, and Sands breathed lighter again across the room.

"So what are you keeping in there anyway?" Sands asked.

He circled the patch in the chamber, ran it along the bore. "Why do you want to know?"

"You're always so suspicious, El. Maybe I'm just curious."

Curious or bored - it was likely Sands was finding this experience just as enthralling as he was himself.

It didn't matter if he told him. Sands wouldn't ever be getting near the case. "For now, two Glock 30s, two P14-45s, and some custom weapons of my own." He liked to get to know the guns he used, their characteristics, their limitations, but he wasn't rigid, and the contents of the case adapted with time and circumstance.

"Why not the G21? Three extra rounds, and you don't have the muzzle velocity loss."

"Sometimes it's better to have a gun you can hide."

"Subtlety, El?" Sands' voice rose in amusement. "Not something I'd have expected from you."

"That's because you know nothing about me." It wasn't as true as he would have liked it to be. But Sands only knew one part of his life, only saw the killer and the vengeance-seeker.

He was still more than that, even now.

"I remember certain sources who turned out to be quite reliable describing you as a 'real nut'. Me, well, I'd say that choice of wording was a little mild, and you deserve an upgrade to at least 'batshit crazy'."

El looked up from the gun in his lap, his fingers still twisting the brush. "Because 'batshit crazy' would be so very different from a wounded blind man who seeks out gunfights in a war zone?"

The pause was there, not quite too long. "You can believe me when I say it wasn't a topping the list kind of choice. I'd have taken another way if anyone had thought to leave me one."

Something beneath the humour felt like an honest response, and he gave his own in return, soft. "And so would I."

The flicker of truth was gone, acid-licked sarcasm back in full drawl. "I don't think the two quite compare."

He worked the brush along the bore, fingers moving by habit and resisting the urge to scrub over the metal. "You know nothing, like I said." Sands had lost his eyes, and effectively his life, in both senses, yes. But he had seen every dream he had torn away in the bullets of one day, so much younger and hopelessly idealistic then, and no-one could say it had shattered him less.

He didn't want to have this conversation; not with Sands, and not with himself.

"Your own choice of guns isn't so subtle," he said. "There were all kinds that day for you to take, and you picked simple force."

Sands laughed, bitter-lined with sounds harsher than his pure mockery. "That wasn't even down to me. That was the kid. Never touched a gun in his life, and he stood there while I killed a guy, and then got right to work stripping the corpse of weapons and just handed them over. I honestly couldn't have asked for a better assistant." He turned his head towards El then, bandages staring white on his skin and his hair. "You won't mind, will you, El, if I tell you this Mexico you're so fond of is one seriously fucked-up hellhole."

The boy at the house - sweet and generous and quick to trust, and completely desensitised to blood and violence. "It isn't the place," he said. "It's a good country. It is only some of the people who make it that way."

"And so you're going to kill them."

"Yes." That wasn't close to all of it, but... children like that were a good reason.

Maybe the family had gone south, to a part of their country that wasn't so controlled by the drugs.

Maybe.

They talked about the guns again as El stripped and cleaned his way through the case, the models they had used, the advantages and the compromises involved in each. It was a safe enough subject to hold back the splintered silences, at least while confined to theory and principles, and El avoided thinking about what he knew of Sands' experience with guns outside a shooting range.

Sands was interested in his customised pieces, and he described the modifications and the reasoning for them, but he wasn't about to put any weapon directly into Sands' hands. Even unloaded. There was a principle to it.

Sands was obviously interested in his slide-arm pistol assembly too, his head angling to catch the sounds when he disengaged the ratchets, but he kept the details of that to himself. Sands could listen all he liked, it wouldn't be enough.

It was finished then, his fingers emptied of all the distractions he could find for them.

His mind balked at the renewed nothing, crawling and itching for something else.

He looked over at Sands, and considered. "Here," he said, and threw the cleaning kit over onto his bed near his hand.

Sands' fingers found it instantly, opened and identified it within seconds. "Thanks," he said, a flat, meaningless use of the word, but El thought he might also be surprised. He doubted Sands would have had the chance to clean them since the Day of the Dead.

He watched with interest as Sands worked through the guns in the bag and from his holsters. For weapons not his own, Sands was remarkably fast and familiar with the pistols, identifying solvent and degreaser and gun oil by smell. He felt a little for the pin on the first M11, and had a couple of false starts before he found the right size of bore brush, but his experience with a range of guns obviously went much further than theory, and El found himself wondering again how long he might survive.

He ran through the process with the second M11, surer this time, standard sequence of wet patches and brushes, more wet patches and then a dry one.

The final patch was still smeared as Sands reached for the oil.

"It's not clean yet," he said.

Sands stilled, his head dipping towards the gun in his lap.

Seconds passed with Sands just sitting as if trying to stare into the gun in his hands, and he realised Sands didn't know whether to believe him. Whether he might be lying, amused by the idea of watching the blind man struggle to clean a gun that didn't need it.

It irritated him that Sands would think that of him.

Sands moved, reaching for another swab and the solvent. "Christ, I'd at least have hoped it was clean to start with. How is it I have to get a gun from the only one of Barillo's bugfuckers who didn't sit around all day rubbing at it like it was his goddamn cock?"

It didn't mean that Sands believed him; only that it was safer to assume he was telling the truth.

He began the routine from the start again, spending longer with the brush this time, twisting it through the barrel over and over. The swabs were clean now after the first two, but Sands continued, mechanically running them through, his face set, and El began to wonder if he would go through his whole supply before he stopped.

"It's fine now." He tried to keep his words to the minimum, to the least intrusive choice of phrase.

This struck him as something so much more basic to have to be told than simply where things were in a room. The furniture Sands would find for himself if he had to, but some things he would only ever be able to guess at.

Sands gave him no direct response, but he put the solvent back in the kit and ran the final dry swab, moving on through the rest of the treatment and reassembly. With all the guns in their original places, he pushed the bag back under the bed, double-checking the handles were tucked away. He took his bottles of pills from the table beside him, and stood, walking unhesitatingly to the bathroom.

Ten minutes later he was back, stripping off his shoes and sliding into his bed, lying with his back to him.

"You should think about sleeping tonight, El. Take it from me, it's not the best of ideas to walk out into a gunfight when your brain's skipping along a track or two behind you."

So Sands had been listening last night, feeling for him through both kinds of darkness, and noting each time he woke that El was too.

He wasn't surprised. It only troubled him that he couldn't say when Sands had been awake.

He didn't sleep that night either.

Sands had nightmares. El sat, listening to the shifting of body and sheets, the soft, hunted sounds, and did nothing. There were better reasons to get shot.

Sands was as trusting as he was, sleeping clothed with guns beneath the pillows. He had no illusions Sands would be sleeping at all, if it wasn't for the drugs and the demands on the body of blood loss and healing.

He was better off asleep anyway. Awake, the dreams would be remembered, and real; if he slept through, they would be gone. Though he suspected Sands always remembered these particular nightmares far too well.

The hours shuddered through unevenly; pieces of sprawling time spent just studying the man, his breathing, his movements, seeking the clues that would tell him whether the image of sleep was a lie; fragments of hours that slipped away from him, chasing his own thoughts, his own doubts.

He found no more answers.

Sands revealed himself officially awake just after seven-thirty, taking the medical box into the bathroom and running the shower. El used the opportunity to slip out and fetch coffee and breakfast, the sleepy-eyed man at the desk directing him to a place along the street.

Sands was still in the bathroom when he returned, and for some considerable time after. He came out surrounded by steam and that unshakeable antiseptic stink. He had shaved, removing the last two days' growth down to uniform smoothness, and El could see no marks of error on his skin.

That explained what took so long.

"I brought you breakfast," he said. "It's on the table."

Sands felt his way over the surface and found the coffee cup there, tasting it cautiously. "It's cold."

"So next time you want me to wait on you, you will let me know when."

Twitch of muscle before the reply in the inevitable provoking drawl. "I don't remember asking to be waited on, but I doubt you'd go for my suggestions of a good restaurant."

El watched, with narrowed eyes. "And you are so eager to be seen? You were hiding very well on your own before I came."

He smiled, a quick, even curve of lips. "Different city, different rules. No-one's looking for me here."

Sands didn't believe it was that easy. He wasn't so stupid, or at least not any more. He was disagreeing only to annoy him - it fitted with the way he'd acted ever since he'd met him.

Or maybe that consistency was really the point - maybe he was trying to cling to the bitter-sharp fragments of that untouchable mirror he'd believed in.

Maybe he was desperate enough to lie to himself, as well as to El.

He let his head drop, his hair swinging forwards to blinker his vision. So many thoughts, so many speculations, and he had no real idea how close he was to the truth with any of them.

It was confining, claustrophobic, Sands' ever-presence a choking strain after less than two days. The man poisoned the very air around him, and he drew the taste of it over his tongue with every breath, until it strangled him in his own misgivings.

Leaving the room for the car and Playa Azul felt less like a purpose than escape.

He had a fairly good idea of where he wanted to be, after his observations the day before. The first road he tried was a failure - too many trees breaking line of sight before it curled around the edge of a hill. The second gave him his spot. Not quite ideal, his angle on the house leaving one corner of courtyard out of view, but he was unlikely to find better.

He parked the car under trees a few hundred metres away. It would be seen only by people using this road up into the foothills, and it would stay a little cooler, which he was going to appreciate later. He took the guitar case, binoculars and water from the trunk, and settled in to watch, resting his forearm along the guitar case as he scanned around with the other hand. Binoculars were more comfortable for long use than a scope, and a lot easier to explain if he was seen.

The day was heavily clouded, but already the temperatures climbed towards the predicted twenty-nine. That suited him - little sunlight to reflect and reveal, more than warm enough to bring these people out into his view.

The wall encircled the house as Sands had described, just over two metres in height and unchanging. He found cameras like the ones at the gate as he worked along it, some just as large and obvious; but there were others too, smaller and partially obscured by vegetation. He found more of that second kind when he checked the house beneath the eaves and the plant that had been trained over sections of its walls.

It made him wonder how many more he was missing.

Everything about the house was perfect - no crumbling stucco along the wall, heavy shutters hinged straight, solid panelled doors either new or kept to look that way. The courtyard was stone paved with no weeds straggling between, the pool blue-tiled and leafless despite the climbing plants around it. He could see little of the house interior, dark against even the clouded light, the rooms deep beyond the windows. What he did see fit with the wealth of the house and its neighbours - good furniture, large flat-screen TV, all of it pristine like the outside.

He half-sprawled across the earth and watched, barely aware of the heat, of the sweat already starting to cling.

This was the one time he found ease in stillness, no impatience in inactivity when it was so much a part of what he did, no boredom in restraint while his attention scanned the house and his mind ran through scenarios, approaches, possibilities. It absorbed every sense of him, a strange kind of peace with no place for his near-constant doubts.

He waited almost two hours before he saw people. A man and a woman, both perhaps mid-thirties came to sit in the chairs by the pool, clothes light for the heat, casual, but styled in a way that spoke of expense. The door they left the house through was wide, and the way it moved meant solidity, weight. He was too distant to see clearly, even with the binoculars, but there was a suggestion of a lot of metal, of heavy locks.

They read through several different newspapers while they sat, the woman moving on to a book when they were done, the man simply resting. He went back inside for drinks a while later, and for food some time after that, no sign at any point of staff to do those things for them. They stayed by the pool, alternately lazing and swimming, just the two of them until the early afternoon when the visitors came.

There must have been some sort of signal from the gate, and a remote way of opening it, because they walked through from the front of the house, obviously known and expected. Two men this time, one noticeably older. They stayed for half an hour, talking with drinks, civilised and overtly friendly.

He tracked the car as it left the house, coming into sight from beyond the walls at the front; a sedan with dark glass, expensive but not flashily distinctive. He followed it a short way, but lost it among the houses and trees as it descended towards the coast.

He turned his attention back to the house just in time to see the door closing as they went back inside, and he lowered his binoculars thoughtfully.

There was money here, and all the trappings of people with time and the need to be entertained through their boredom. There was security, the kind used by people with something to hide, but there were no bodyguards lurking just in sight, no men in suits with poorly-hidden weapons. And maybe that would be the case with a broken cartel who had split and run to hide, who wanted to attract no attention to a distant bolthole, but....

Something was wrong. Whoever these people were, they didn't smell like cartel.

He took his binoculars and his guitar case back to the car, and drove away from Playa Azul.

He turned off the 200 well before the city, and headed further out into the hills.

He stopped the car some distance along a mining road, taking out his shotgun and firing off rounds, methodically reloading and emptying the barrels into the earth until he stank of gunpowder. He collected the spent cartridges and kicked dirt over the marked soil. Then he drove back to the hotel.

Sands was sitting in the chair, facing the door when he opened it. El didn't see the gun, but he knew it had been there a moment before.

"Welcome back," Sands said. His tone and his body language read casual indifference, but there was tension seeping beneath. "Interesting day?"

"Not particularly." He let his voice drop and flatten, easy to find the hatred. "They died very easily."

Sands curled his lips into one of his slow, tight smiles, already becoming familiar. "Well, that does sound successful, if a little low in entertainment value."

Sands had thought he would be so stupidly fooled, that he would do as he was told like a dog. He watched Sands smile, and the anger thickened inside him as it waited.

"I'm going to take a shower," he said, and walked away into the bathroom, shutting the door carefully.

He could shoot Sands any time he wanted, or simply beat the man unconscious. Neither approach would get him his answers. But nor would Sands alert and armed.

So he would change that.

El had too much experience of gunshot wounds. He knew the drugs, the amount that would take the edge off his pain and still leave him functional, the amount that would turn the world into a haze of uncertain impressions and vanishing time.

He washed away the sweat and gunpowder stink in soap and water and heat, but his tension only condensed into something harder.

He collected the opiates later, while Sands was in the bathroom, taking four from the bottle on the table. He broke open the capsules, pouring the powder into an emptied pill bottle from his medical supplies in the car.

He went out for food, and he ordered the coffee strong, bitter to hide the taste of the drug.

He squashed the quick pang of guilt at tricking a blind man, stamping it down, sodden, into the currents of anger to fragment. Sands deserved far more than what El was doing to him.

He drank his own coffee, fast, equally bitter, as he walked back to the hotel; he was missing sleep, and needed to stay sharp, alert. The ocean prickled at his nose with each breath, salt bite between the spikes of coffee.

He put the cup on the table beside Sands, letting it scrape across the wood, and Sands' fingers crept towards it, a little cautiously.

Sands sipped at his coffee and his face twisted in distaste. "Christ, El, you may be taking the sleep deprivation trip, but that's no reason to poison the both of us. You can just order mine regular next time, thanks."

He had an unpleasant moment when he thought he had misjudged, that Sands would refuse to drink it - but he poured three sugars into the cup, stirring idly, and drank again, and he was able to let the tension simmer low, and stretch along his bed to wait.

He watched Sands eat, quietly for once, and he wondered what evil he was plotting now, to keep him so silent and distracted. He ate some of his own food, but it sat in his stomach, greasy and sickening, and he pushed it aside.

Sands smoked his way lazily through a cigarette, ground it into the ashtray by his elbow and lit another.

El didn't mind the tug and tempt of the smoke - it was another edge to add to the ones he harboured, another focus through the scratching non-patience.

Sands began to curl more into the shape of the chair, his head angling, his ear sliding down towards his shoulder. El kept a close watch on the cigarette that hung from his fingers in a slender coil of grey.

He switched on the television, flipping through the channels until he found an action movie, unpredictably noisy and disorientating.

Sands abruptly stiffened, and raised his head.

There was a moment when El could see the thoughts flicker around him, when it was oh so very clear that it was all about to fall apart, and then Sands had a silenced .38 in his hand and put four rounds whisper-fast into El's bed, where he'd just been.

Where he wasn't any more, because he was across the room and grabbing Sands' wrist, twisting it away from him until his fingers spasmed and he dropped the gun, retching gasp low under the hollow clatter. Sands was reaching to his other holster and finding it empty, because that gun was already in El's hand. "Bastardfucker!" His fist and his foot shot out at the same time, El sidestepping both and arcing on behind the chair, still gripping his wrist and jerking it around with him.

"Stop," he said, pressing the barrel of Sands' own pistol up tight under his jaw, and Sands stilled instantly.

El breathed out slowly. He wouldn't have liked to try that sequence of moves without some assistance from the drugs, not with someone as paranoid and reactive as Sands. As it was, he hadn't been slowed as much as he'd hoped, and El watched and felt every inch of him.

He didn't believe this was where it ended.

Normally he would look in the eyes, to see if a man was going to move.

He tugged Sands' arm up behind the chair a little further. "Now you are going to tell me what today was all about," he said, low and slow, letting Sands' shocked and dizzied mind absorb the threat.

Sands took a single long, careful breath. The crazed, furious man who had yelled and lashed out moments before was gone so fast, leaving one who appeared quiet, calm, but El felt the movement in his throat as he swallowed, carried through the barrel of the gun.

"So did you figure it out before or after you killed them?" Sands asked.

"Before, or you would be dead now." Stripped, raw truth.

El didn't like this position, twisting around to catch Sands' profile, shadowed by the lamps behind. He wanted to see more of Sands' face, to gauge some idea of reaction, of what was truth and what wasn't. Even with the drugs dulling his thoughts, he had no illusions Sands would lean towards honesty.

"I'm going to release your arm now," he said. "I'm going to walk around in front of this chair, and you are not going to move, because if you do, I will shoot you. Do you understand that?"

"Sure do, El," Sands answered instantly, "and I'm happy to play along, because I'd really like to have my arm back while I've still got one that works."

El wondered how much effort it was taking to keep himself focussed for this, or if the opiates had slowed his mind as sparingly as they had his body. Either way, he wouldn't be making any assumptions about Sands' compliance.

Sands would have done better to act drugged. He was surprised that he hadn't.

Or maybe he was too close to that edge of control to fake being without it.

He let go of Sands' wrist and stepped in closer, half-expecting Sands to push himself and the chair over backwards at him - but he stayed completely still, his right arm hanging loose by his side.

He circled around the chair, always keeping the silencer right there under Sands' chin. In some ways, it wasn't a good position; a man with a gun up against him could attack and make a grab for it. But he didn't know how much Sands' drugged mind was being concentrated by that circle of pressure on his skin, suspected Sands would be more likely to fight him if he couldn't feel the gun was there.

"The house does not belong to Barillo. So who are those people?"

"Old friends of mine." No hesitation, no proof of drugs slowing his thinking.

"What did you think would happen? Did you hope they would kill me, and help you out?"

"No, you braindead fucker, I hoped you'd kill them and save me the trouble."

The way Sands spoke, the irritation seeping through his words, El had no doubt that this much at least was the truth; and the anger that had been deepening and twisting through the hours as it waited was right there. Not the sharp temper that flared and subsided, but the coiled, slow-smoulder compulsion that drove him on through weeks and months, needful and wanted.

He bent lower, closer to the man in the chair. "You think you can point me at your enemies, make me your assassin?" The hate spoke quiet and low, familiar. "You think you can give orders and have me kill on command?"

Sands didn't react to the change, still holding himself carefully, but no overt fear. "You were perfectly happy to use me when I was running low on options, El. I felt a little quid pro quo was pretty much in with the deal."

El sucked in a tight breath, and stilled. He'd intended to do whatever it took to manipulate Sands into helping him, yes. He had only disregarded, in his eagerness to get out and do something, that Sands out-classed him in the game.

He pressed the gun barrel harder beneath his chin, forcing his head to tilt. "You're no use to me if I can't trust your information. Give me a reason why I shouldn't shoot you."

Sands smiled up at him, lazy and confident. "I don't have to. You're a man who needs a reason to shoot people, El. I'm the one who needs a reason not to."

El said nothing. He wasn't going to shoot a man who was blind and drugged, and he had no leverage when Sands knew it too.

But he would enjoy hitting him. Not just for today, but for all of it; for all the remarks Sands had stabbed him with, for dragging his life back down to this, for the other lives Sands had used and ruined and murdered.

He uncurled his finger from the trigger, the silencer still held taut against skin. His other hand drew back, and he lashed his fist forward below Sands' cheekbone.

Sands' head snapped sideways, unable to brace for a blow he couldn't see coming, and he went wild.

His left hand seized El by the wrist, and he kicked out with both feet, one heel catching him hard on the knee, pained hiss sucking his lungs of oxygen. He kicked again, aiming for the same spot, El barely managing to dodge it while his wrist was still held, and Sands' right hand was up and grabbing for the gun beneath his chin. El punched him again, harder, skin parting over his knuckles, and took the second of Sands' instinctive flinch back to flick his wrist and send the gun skittering across the room out of reach.

If he hadn't taken his finger from the trigger, Sands would have had his brains blown out with that first crazy lunge.

Sands still clung to his wrist, dragging and twisting now as El slid sideways to avoid the boot coming at his gut, and El hit him again, throwing his whole body weight forward behind it, ignoring the heel that smashed sharp edges into his thigh. The chair went over backwards taking both of them with it, El using his momentum to dive over the top as they fell, jagged, wrenching pain at his shoulder before Sands finally let go of his wrist when wood and bone met tiles with a vicious crack.

He swung around, crouched on his feet, and found Sands rolling clear of the chair onto his back, blood streaking all across his cheek from his mouth. El threw himself over him, grabbing and pinning his right arm to the floor, cold and sharp on bruised knuckles. Sands' knee came up hard, and he shifted to take it on his hip instead of his groin. He dropped down onto Sands, holding him with his bodyweight so it didn't happen again, and Sands slithered and jerked beneath him in an effort to dislodge, all of it silent except for their panting breaths and the constant harsh rattle of TV gunfire, neither wasting energy on words or threats.

Sands' injuries should have been screaming at him by now; he should have been incapable of prolonging an attack like this, and El began to appreciate the drawbacks to drugging him with opiates as he waited for him to give up.

But Sands had his left hand forced between them, wriggling fingers just below waist level as they struggled, snag of adrenaline vivid-bright all through him and he knew there had to be something else, something he hadn't allowed for; something there, something hard, familiar, and fuck, he had a gun, and El had known he wasn't unarmed when he walked into that room at the boy's house, and the M11 beneath the chair hadn't been it, because Sands would always have a weapon on him and fuck it, he should have guessed. But while the gun was jammed close between their bodies, Sands couldn't turn it to fire, and he hooked his feet around Sands', pressing his weight down tighter against him, praying that Sands wasn't crazy enough to just shoot and let them both take their chances.

Sands locked his upper body taut beneath him, and El jerked his head aside barely in time to catch Sands' forehead vicious along his jaw instead of having his nose shattered, and he had really fucking had enough of this shit. He drew his arm back tight behind him, ignoring the flare rammed through his shoulder, and brought the heel of his palm down hard above Sands' left elbow, all the force he had from that angle direct onto that healing gunshot wound. Sands choked out air past teeth that shivered and clenched, and the fingers between them twitched; he hit him again just the same, and the muscles shuddered all through his arm; a third time, and El flexed his body, pushed off with the hand that held Sands' right wrist to the floor and rolled them through a complete circle.

The smallest .38 he had ever seen slid and clattered over the floor, spinning to a lazy halt by the nearest bed.

"So what now, eh, Agent Sands?" El yelled down at him, still holding him pinned, tiles pressing harsh against his fingers and knees. "What're you going to do now, fucker?"

Sands went slack then, loose and still beneath his hands, the fight gone from his face as much as from his body. "You go right ahead, El." He smiled, odd with barely-parted lips, blood fresh and bright around his teeth. "Whatever you have in mind, I'll have had worse days."

The words wrenched him, flashing heave of nausea, and he sat back fast, releasing Sands.

He was a killer, but he was no torturer.

He scrambled backwards until he felt the wall up against him, watching Sands the whole way, wondering if he would take this chance to attack again.

Sands sat up slowly, stiff with obvious pain. He felt around him, his hands sweeping a circle over the floor, tilting his head when he found nothing.

El realised he'd lost his bearings during the fight, all his meticulously acquired knowledge of the room useless now because he didn't know where he was.

He started to push himself upwards, face twisting hard as he brought his left leg beneath him. He settled back to sitting and shifted across the floor instead, away from El, one hand groping carefully behind him. He missed that tiny silver pistol he'd been hiding by less than half a metre, finally stopping his crawl when he found himself against a bed.

El sat, listening to Sands' short, panting breaths, watching him tug the corner of a sheet free and use it to wipe the worst of the blood from his mouth so that he no longer dripped frothy red saliva onto the tiles.

He groped for and lit one of his cigarettes, swearing when his left arm wouldn't hold steady and his fingers dipped into the flame.

The smoke drifted towards El with the breeze from the open window, acrid and bitter, and wholly tempting.

Something big exploded in slow-motion from the TV speakers, morphing into the sustained roar of fire.

At least no-one would be wondering about the noise.

"Why do you hate those people so much?" he asked finally.

Sands' lips twisted, brief half-familiar smirk collapsing into a wince. "Have you ever thought your focus may be a little too narrow, El? There are bad guys out there who have nothing to do with drugs."

"I know." El made no attempt to hide the bitterness. "I'm sitting here with one."

Sands laughed, short and still wheezy. "Regretting your deal with the devil already? You're the one who came looking for me, remember. You can cut and run any time, find yourself another date, I won't mind. Just leave me in what passes for a decent-sized town in this shithole, and we'll call it sayonara."

El said nothing because it was true. He'd known it when he had knocked on the door. When he considered doing exactly that in Tepic, and rejected it.

Sands smiled, that deceptively normal way that made him look almost reasonable. "But if you're still in for the long game, I do actually plan on giving you what you want. I have a certain interest of my own in removing some of these people." He squashed his cigarette into the floor beside him. "Though if I'm going to take the grand tour of merry Me-hee-co with you, and have every drug-happy goon with a gun inside a hundred miles up our asses, it'll be when I'm ready to do it and not when you put your lips together and blow like Lauren Bacall, El, my friend."

He looked at Sands then, and they slid together in his head, the patterns he had glimpsed and chased.

If he had thought it through, if he had thought like Sands, he would have known it. It should have been obvious Sands wouldn't want to face cartel as he was now, not only blind, but with other injuries that disadvantaged him still further. And that in not wanting it, he would find a way to make sure it didn't happen. His agreement had been too easy; he'd known that at the time, and he'd chosen to ignore it.

El wasn't used to waiting once he made a decision. His marriage to Carolina had been that way, still chained together with dust on his clothes, the ceremony attended only by the priest and a few local people.

His determination to take this fight to his persecutors now had made him as blind as the man beside him.

Sands was a killer, a man he despised, but he wasn't at the level of the most evil men El had known. He was a living person, injured and in pain, and he had been fully prepared to drag him around Mexico as only a source of information, something to use.

Carolina would have been disappointed in him, that it took him so long to see it. That he didn't see it until it was smashed into his face as retaliation. "I'm sorry," he breathed softly. "I will do better."

Sands tipped his head to one side, reminding El oddly of the dogs around the town. "What d'you say?"

"I'm still 'in'," he said. "And we will wait."

"Good." Sands curled his hands in his lap, fingers exploring around his wrist, prodding and flexing with no hiss of pain. "Oh, there's just one more little thing, El. If you ever try and dope me again, I'll kill you the first chance I get." Sands spoke in the same perfectly relaxed, factual tones in which he'd described shooting the cook, and El took the warning.

He nodded, then remembered to speak. "Okay."

Sands' hand slid along the floor to the leg of the table, and he used it to haul himself upright, staggering slightly as he transferred his weight. "Well, now that's all settled, where are we headed off to?"

El looked up, taking in a limping man with bandaged eyes and fresh marks dark on his face and wrists.

"I don't know," he said.

He took Sands to the village. Sands already knew to find him there, so he was revealing no secrets, and was perhaps more protecting them. There were others who would like to make use of the information Sands held.

Everyone else who knew was probably dead.

It was that 'probably' that had been eating at him. The fight at the market with Cucuy's and Barillo's men and all that came after had left him no opportunity to count; there had been a lot of bodies. But if any of Cucuy's people had survived that, they would come here for him. Lorenzo and Fideo were spreading some rumours as they travelled, but rumours would be no help if someone still knew the truth.

He had decided when he went hunting for Sands that, whatever came of it, talk was all he would ask his friends to do this time. Lorenzo was still young, still had the chance to avoid setting his life permanently on the path that El walked. They deserved better, and the money gave them their way out, if they would take it.

Fideo would most likely drink his away, but it would take him a long time.

They arrived in town in the late afternoon, the sun slanting between his eyelashes. People stared as he drove through the streets, openly curious about the strange gringo with the Mariachi.

Sands no longer looked ridiculous. When he'd heard El's intention, he had demanded they stop at the last large town, and disappeared into the restroom of a bar. The bandages were gone when he came out, replaced by the pair of wide, black sunglasses, and he tossed the hat into the trunk of the car.

El had watched him, but didn't speak until they were back in the car and pulling away. "Are you sure that's wise?"

Sands shrugged. He could almost do that without wincing now. "I really have no idea, El, I don't have any prior experience with missing eyeballs." He reached into his pocket for a cigarette. "If I'd known, I could have asked Belini before I killed him. But hell, if I'd known, I'd have made arrangements to be somewhere a long way from Culiacán, and then the whole discussion would have been pleasantly theoretical."

El wondered with only passing interest who Belini had been. If he'd been involved with Sands, he was most likely not a good man. But when Sands turned his head and pushed his hair back behind his ear away from the lighter flame, he caught a glimpse of thick white padding beneath the sunglasses. Sands was still protecting his injuries, if not so obviously.

He drew the car to a halt outside his home, the memories sinking back into him, inevitable. It had been barely two weeks since he left, and it felt like far more.

Sands followed him inside, the too-familiar unease crawling all through him even in those few steps. He described the basic layout of the rooms, and left Sands to explore while he walked the short distance back across the centre of town.

The evening was quiet, with the cooler tint of oncoming winter. The kind of evening he would have liked, once, the relief from the constant heat of summer for himself and for his music. Guitars suffered in the heat and the staring sun, as a living thing did.

It was the only time he'd left Sands unsupervised for longer than it took to use the bathroom since the day of his visit to the house in Playa Azul, when Sands had believed him to be an idiot who would do as he was told.

Sickness heaved and curled in his gut now at the thought of what the man might be doing.

Logically, he knew Sands wouldn't be doing anything, only finding his way round the house. There was no-one he could think of Sands might contact, no-one he could make a deal with in betraying El who wouldn't kill Sands too. He had no reason to hurt the people here, who were all strangers to him, and more reason not to since the others would instantly turn on him for it. But his brand of logic wasn't adequate to the mindset of someone like Sands, and he was twisted tight with the fear that he could have missed something.

The door opened as he knocked on it, and he realised he was expected. He smiled a little ruefully, and shook his head – here was someone else who read him too easily. "Hello, Father."

The priest invited him in, smiling, made them coffee in the familiar chipped mugs while he filled him in on the various happenings in town since he'd left. In two weeks, that was a couple of new romances and the passing of one elderly man, long expected.

It all felt so very normal, something he missed when it wasn't there. A good companion and a shared drink and a little casual conversation.

It couldn't last.

"So, who's your friend?" Father Ríos asked finally.

He'd been waiting for this. It was why he was really here. "He's not my friend," he said. "He can't be trusted. He will do whatever is good for himself, and only that." He paused, looking the priest direct in the eyes. "Do not believe for a moment that because he is blind and injured he isn't dangerous. I want you to make sure everyone knows that."

Father Ríos watched him for a second, his eyes wandering to the yellowing bruise along his jaw, then nodded. "So why is he here?" he asked.

He shrugged. "He has information. When he is healed, he will help me."

The priest stared on, waiting, an unblinking patience. That was no justification for bringing a man like Sands to these people, and he'd been searching for a better reason himself the last two days as he drove.

He no longer went to confession, or even to church so much. But he still told things to the priest that he told no-one else, and sometimes found the peace in it.

"He has been treated badly," he said, "and some of that was me." He looked down into the swirling coffee trapped between his fingers. "Carolina wanted me to be a better man than I am."

The priest leaned back in his seat, old wood creaking beneath him. "Well, in my profession, that's the kind of reasoning I'm supposed to encourage," he said, the lines around his mouth cut deeper as he smiled.

"He won't be here for long," he told him.

Father Ríos raised his eyebrows slightly and said nothing.

"He won't," he said again.

There was no time limit on their agreement, but Sands wouldn't stay in a place like this. He would despise everything it stood for - a quiet, simple life that caused no harm to anyone, and the people who wanted that.

The old priest just nodded then, and they spoke no more about Sands. But El was unable to recapture that initial enjoyment which had almost eased him, his coffee that bit too bitter, and all their conversation feeling more like avoidance.

He made his escape not long afterwards, easy enough to do with a wounded blind man in his house.

He stood for a moment after the door closed behind him, taking in the peace of a dark evening in the village. There was little sound, different from much of the year, no windows open to let voices carry with the falling night temperatures of mid November. The breeze played with the trees, rustling them, carrying the soft scent of them instead of the stink of a city's fumes.

It was his home; it was simple and clean and familiar, and he couldn't feel it.

He walked away from the priest's door, taking the path to the outskirts of the town.

He resisted the prickling urge to go back to the house first and check. Sands was here now, and he would either do something that El would kill him for, or he wouldn't. It would change nothing to doubt every decision, question every fact in his head; he couldn't spend his time here in constant fear of things Sands would most likely not do.

The road darkened as he left the orbit of the houses, moonlight more than enough for a path so well known.

It was a small cemetery for a small town. He followed the low wall around the edge to where their graves lay, a simple cross for each of them and a single name that didn't connect them to him. Father Ríos had married them, but he and Carolina had no certificate, no record of it outside the memories of the people here.

He always came back here. He hadn't left often since they died, and never for long, but when he returned, this was where he came.

He still felt the guilt that he hadn't been here for the Day of the Dead. It hadn't been his choice to leave then, but it was his choice to stay in Culiacán and kill.

Realistically, he knew he wouldn't have been allowed to return here peacefully if he had refused Sands' offer. But realistically, there had never been a chance that he would.

He sat on the earth alongside their graves, reaching out to touch Carolina's cross, damp beneath his fingers in the cooling air. "I want to protect this place," he said.

He could have left Sands and let the cartel come. He understood the cartel men, at least, their motivations simple, their tactics even more so. All the things he'd learned, his knowledge of why people acted as they did, was barely helping him to hold onto Sands' reasoning after the fact.

"I hope it's the right thing," he said. "I think it's what you would want."

Carolina had come to loathe evil men almost as strongly as he himself did. But she was also compassionate, hating to see pain and fear in others where it could be fixed.

Sands' pain would die back as his injuries healed, but his fear, at some level, would stay. Only a stupid man or one who didn't care about dying would not be afraid, and if Sands hadn't wanted to live, he wouldn't have survived the Day of the Dead.

Sands wanted to live, and he wanted revenge. And that combination could make a man do many things.

He was risking the lives of everyone here that it would make Sands hold his violence in check until it was time to unleash it. Sands killed by design, not by impulse, and his designs now were much altered.

The cross was cold to his fingers, moisture dragging the heat from his skin.

Moonlight leeched the colour from everything, even the cemetery. No hint of the vibrant blues that decorated some of the graves here, the flowers sapped down to all shades of grey through black. The wind shifted through the trees, dark leaves rippling sound around him. He couldn't feel it, low to the ground, sheltered.

He came here seeking the peace it brought him. It was a sad, sometimes almost painful kind of peace, but peace all the same.

He couldn't find it now.

He gave up on defying the restlessness, and let his feet take him back through the town, the dirt roads deadening his boots, sound refusing to carry through the quiet.

The house was in darkness. That gave another pluck to the lurching fear inside him in the moment before he thought about it, and realised that of course Sands wouldn't turn on the lights.

He flicked the switch as he closed the door behind him, blinking against the sudden yellow glare. He listened, but heard nothing obvious.

He'd never noticed before how dull the illumination from the bulbs was, how it left his house a maze of shadows and dark corners.

Once he would have found it romantic.

He walked through to his living room, following the stink of burned tobacco, his feet tapping with each step, the singing of metal sharp in the silence.

Sands sat in an armchair, smoking one of his cigarettes, flicking embers onto a plate that rested on the chair arm. "Sorry, El," he drawled, without turning. "You forgot to say where you keep the ashtrays."

He felt it collapse inside him, the stretching apprehension that had been with him since he left the house, his body finally able to loosen and his mind to stop.

He was so tired.

"Don't smoke in the house," he said, and went to his room to sleep.

He walked Sands around the town the first day, starting at the house each time and taking him to the various places he might need to know. He would only have to do this once, he knew – the man was trained to gather information, and forgot nothing that might later be of use.

Spending a full two hours with Sands keeping every step behind him did nothing at all to reduce the level of crawling discomfort he felt in doing it. But every time he looked back, Sands was pure concentration, tilting his head to hear the sounds, raising his finger to feel how the breeze flowed around the buildings, reaching mentally for the landmarks El described to him.

He included the church on his list of locations, and when Sands worked out where he was, it earned him a fast punch to the ribs and some very pithy comments on religion, but the amusement was worth it.

By the end of those two hours, Sands was limping obviously again on his left leg, but it was still much more than he'd been capable of a week before in Culiacán.

El hadn't offered to stop when Sands began to limp. Sands wouldn't have appreciated the suggestion.

Over the following days, Sands retraced those paths - even to the church, El noted with some surprise. Slowly at first, increasingly hesitant as he neared the end of his route, feeling cautiously for the building ahead, but with growing confidence as he established more patterns and landmarks.

Sands wouldn't learn only the simplest way by counting steps, nothing so short-sighted that it would leave him equally lost the moment he left this place for somewhere else.

He spent a lot of time each day just sitting in the square. Often, he appeared to be asleep in the sun, but El watched him, saw the slight adjustments of his head, and knew him to be listening.

The people mostly avoided Sands; his warnings to Father Ríos had been spread and heeded. Sands had contact with them only when he bought things, usually his packs of cigarettes, and the conversation then was entirely polite, but minimal, each time El overheard. The children too kept away from him while he sat there, playing and staring at a distance.

They had finished eating on the third evening when Sands asked, his voice acid sweet. "Would you care to enlighten me on exactly what you've told these people about me, El?"

El didn't intend to deny it, sipping at too-hot coffee only to make Sands wait. "The truth," he said evenly.

Sands tipped his head, considering. "Well, I guess that would do it."

"I thought so."

Sands stirred at his drink, the spoon scraping rhythmically around the edge of the cup over and over. "Did you know the kids in this charming country haven of yours have me down as the local bogeyman?" His voice dropped and slowed a little. "You get to overhear the most interesting things from children."

His every muscle went still, dropping into that momentary relaxation before he moved.

Despite all his awareness of who Sands was, he had never seriously considered whether he should just put a bullet through the man's head.

Sands had killed for less than an insult, he knew. But he hadn't heard anything to suggest that Sands' unpredictable violence ever extended to children.

He remembered the boy at the house, thought of the desperate pleading it must have taken to convince his parents to harbour a bleeding, screaming madman. However Sands had spoken to the boy, he must have done something to inspire that loyalty.

El wondered what it was, and knew he would be left to wonder.

He closed his eyes briefly, clearing his thoughts. It was draining, always trying to twist his mind to fit with Sands', to predict him and his viciousness.

He didn't want to think like Sands.

"They make up stories to scare themselves," he said. "All children do."

"Mmmm." Sands' wordless reply was intentionally unrevealing, he was sure of it.

But he didn't think Sands would attack the children.

After those first few days, Sands began leaving the house at night.

El watched him sometimes when the moon allowed, simple curiosity stirring, as well as that driven need to better understand the danger he had brought to his home. Sands retraced those same routes of travel he walked during the day, beginning slowly again. The noises were fewer at night, and distinctive; the atmosphere changed, and sound travelled differently. Although the paths were the same, Sands would have to relearn them, the broader echoes, the absence of other voices to guide him, darkness altering his world almost as much as for a sighted man.

When he could move with equal confidence night and day, Sands began to change his nocturnal patterns.

It was a fascinating thing to watch, Sands using those painstakingly constructed mental maps to navigate between places without first returning to the house. He walked steadily, with utter concentration, the length of each stride precise and constant now that he no longer limped. El struggled to imagine the concentration and discipline involved, using sounds and vectors to establish a direction and step out into nothing, fighting the urge to waver and doubt.

He made errors, yes. He walked into buildings he should have passed, his lips moving with muttered curses El couldn't hear from the window where he sat and watched. But he would re-orientate himself each time, and set out again with the same measured determination. He learned with rapidly increasing speed, and he only had to get something right once to know it.

When Sands began using those new pathways in daytime, he was almost flawless.

El had done enough observing to see that Sands was a little slower than when he truly knew, that he shifted and angled his head constantly as he reached to triangulate sound. Sands had learned the varying characteristics of dark and daylight, and he applied that knowledge now to the routes learned in darkness without fault.

The villagers stared openly at the blind man who now walked around their town with no guide, in absolute certainty of where he was.

It was astonishing to El, and he had anticipated that Sands would prove highly adaptable. To anyone who hadn't observed his rigid learning curve, it would have seemed impossible.

But Sands could also still be thrown into desperation.

El never knew what caused it - some unexpected sound he didn't catch, maybe, something Sands perhaps felt - but Sands suddenly twisted and dropped one night, rolling across the square with his gun drawn, before flattening himself motionless to listen.

He lay for long minutes, a black shadow on grey earth. El scanned his senses over everything fast, then again slower, third, fourth times, but heard and saw nothing to alert him.

When Sands rose back to his feet, in slow stages with more listening pauses between, he had lost his bearings. The confusion was instantly obvious as he turned on the spot, his head tilting for sound, reaching for something. He circled slowly several times, tapped his heel on the ground and listened for echoes from the buildings, but his posture remained one of uncertainty, hunched and defensive.

When he moved, his exact, measured strides were gone, his feet shuffling cautiously through the dirt, his hands feeling the air before him. The lengthy dedication and effort of several weeks meant nothing as Sands was once again completely disorientated, reduced to groping around with all his confidence leached down into the soil.

He watched, and resisted the urge to engineer some distinctive sound.

Sands would hate him for it.

He walked slowly, feeling for the ground with each step, his arms sweeping circles around him. His path stayed straight - he was lost, but not careless - following a slight diagonal across the square. He missed the last of the guitar stalls by metres, finally halting when his arm found the wall near the church. He ran his hands eagerly over the surface, but it was undistinctive, nothing to mark it from the others surrounding various parts of the square.

He stood slumped against the wall, his head resting on the stone.

He stayed that way, moments long enough to make El start to wonder if... but then he gathered and straightened, following the wall. He walked more confidently with a guide, one hand trailing over the wall, the other ahead of him.

He stopped the instant he reached the church grounds, his fingers marking the difference in the quality of the work. His left hand swept upwards over it, tracing the distinctive balustrade at its top. The change in him was fast, marked even at this distance, his body losing the forced stiffness to stand sure and natural.

El had expected Sands would return to the house after that, but he didn't. He stood a few moments, his hand against the curling stonework, then resumed his deliberate explorations, moving with steady grace once more.

It wasn't a mistake he saw him make again.

He wondered if Sands practiced that too, out of his sight - he had no doubt Sands suspected that he watched - twisting and diving through the blackness until he could do it without losing track of the rotations, until he could get back to his feet and still know where the world was around him.

It was something El would do, after that kind of experience, and he anticipated no less of Sands.

The other place Sands spent a lot of his daylight hours, once his legs were healed enough to take the stairs, was on the roof of the abandoned hacienda.

It annoyed El at first, that Sands would invade what he regarded as his place, the place he chose when he simply wanted to be alone with the music. But Sands kept the same pattern there as he did in the square, hour after hour locked in concentration, shifting his position from time to time and listening again.

He never asked El to stop playing, not even when the music fought him, when his left hand stiffened on the cooler evenings or it simply wasn't right, and it wasn't hard after a while to ignore him, to forget the silent man opposite, giving all his attention to the guitar as it demanded.

It took him longer than it should have to realise that Sands was using the music as something to listen through, a distraction to put aside while he sought out the other sounds that mattered beneath it, the sounds that drifted up from the town below, scattered and broken by gusting breezes.

The next time he needed to gain an advantage over Sands, the television wouldn't be such an ally.

The whole time that Sands was learning, El learned too.

Sands often spoke with his hands. Not when he was manipulating, probing with words; then he was all cool, interested detachment, feeling for the reactions he sought. But when he had something to say, a point to make, he stabbed at the air with his fingers, trailing smoke from the cigarette between them.

He hadn't done that in those days they travelled after leaving Culiacán. El recognised again just how much pain he'd been struggling to hide, and felt the guilt circling him. He'd been pleased to see Sands suffer, had in some small ways deliberately made it worse, and now it made him feel like a boy pulling wings from flies to watch them crawl.

He didn't like to think those things of himself, but they were there. They were always there.

And Sands knew it too.

He asked him about the coup, carefully choosing one of the quiet moments in the evening after they ate when Sands seemed almost settled, the rare time when he wasn't pushing. "How much of it was you?"

"Why does it matter? It doesn't change anything." He didn't sound surprised to be asked, only bored.

"It matters because so many people died, and I want to know what you were responsible for."

Sands only shrugged. "You killed a few people yourself, El. I heard you left quite a trail from the market, and I wouldn't care to guess what you got up to during the coup. Whether Barillo killed them, I killed them, you killed them, it's not so different."

El breathed in air still laced with spice and onion from his cooking, let it drift down through his lungs, swallowing that first angry response with it - he'd become practiced at that now, too aware that when he yelled and spat his words, Sands took it as instant victory. He held his voice bound to a colder level of hatred that Sands respected, the accusation still clear, but controlled. "I'm nothing like you, or him," he said. "You kill because you want to. I kill because I have to."

Sands finally turned towards him then, and El felt the illusion of shiftless stare from behind the sunglasses. "Really, El, if you must try to bullshit me, then you go right ahead, but it's a sad thing to see a man lying to himself. We both know how much you liked killing Marquez, and Barillo. Hell, you probably even enjoyed killing your own brother. You may as well just accept it and get over it."

El said nothing. Sands was wrong about César – that had needed to be done, but he hadn't ever wanted to do it – but the others.... That moment when the gun went off in his hand, as they looked at him and they knew, it felt like justice, hot and good. In that moment, he wanted to do it again and again, to clean his country of every last scrap of filth that walked within it and have them know why.

It was only later, when he sat alone, all his weapons cleaned of the blood and gunpowder, that he started to question. Not what he had done, he never questioned that. If he had, he would have perhaps stayed away from the killing, instead of always going back. He questioned instead the way it made him feel, and those perfect moments became edged and tainted with guilt.

"The men I kill deserve to die," he said finally. "All of them. You kill at random."

"No. I don't." Sands' face was still fixed towards him, unsmiling now, unmocking. "I always have a reason."

El believed him, oddly. Or he believed that Sands believed it, which was truthfully one of the more disturbing aspects of the man. "Making a point isn't a good enough reason."

Sands shadowed his thoughts easily, never needing to question his meaning. "I knew you'd check," he said. "If I hadn't killed him after that little speech, I don't think you would have quite taken me seriously."

"You're wrong," he said slowly. "I already did." He had met enough dangerous men. He knew them when he saw them.

"Oh, well," Sands said, no change in his tone. "It was still a great metaphor, wouldn't you say?" He was half-smiling again, complete unconcern. "I was making it up on the spot, you know - I had this whole speech ready in my head about how it would be good for Mexico, and then when I watched you sitting there, so determined to ignore me, I just knew you were the kind of man who'd appreciate the more direct approach."

He didn't hide his disgust, his bitterness. "You truly did think I was so stupid."

"It really wasn't anything personal, El, I just find it's easiest to assume that about everyone."

He didn't bother to ask whether Sands had changed his mind.

"So was it you?" he persisted.

Sands looked mildly amused. "The coup? Hell, no, Barillo came up with that idea all by himself."

"And you just took it and used it."

He shrugged, uninterested. "Why not? It was there."

He still didn't know if 'you' was the CIA or just Sands.

He wasn't sure he wanted to. He didn't know what he would do with the answer.

He set up wind chimes made of spoons and cans in the trees outside town, and Sands shot them down day after day. He was surprisingly accurate when he began, but he improved still further, and Sands wouldn't stop until he could hit every one with the first bullet, from a draw.

It was an impressive skill, as so many things about Sands were turning out to be, but it was very different with moving targets and distractions, with no time to aim except for instinct. El held out little hope for Sands in a gunfight. He would only win with the aid of surprise.

El knew Sands had been able to kill Barillo's people because they were stupid enough to think a blind man was no threat. They could have killed Sands easily many times, but they'd chosen to play with him instead. It was an advantage of a kind, but he wondered if it still existed, or if the stories of the Day of the Dead had already spread too far for that.

That was something Sands would discover when they left this place.

He wondered when that would be. Neither of them had mentioned the deal they had struck that had brought them here, and the cheap paper colours that draped the village through Christmas were already weeks gone.

He sat on the roof, enjoying the sunlight while it lingered, much of the town already cast into shadow below. He let his fingers run over the strings, not playing any particular tune, just leaving them to make their own way and listening to what they found.

It was odd, dissonant, almost a melody, but not. His hands and the guitar caught his mood, and there had been more of this lately. The shifting tension that had driven him from this town before edged back into him, the knowledge of somewhere else he needed to be.

"For a guy who got himself a tag as El Mariachi, you sure hit a lot of half-assed notes," Sands commented lazily.

He wasn't really sitting with him. As so often, he had settled himself some metres away, slouching back against the wall above the facade.

"Do you think you could do better?" he asked, not stopping the wanderings of his fingers.

"After thirty years of practice, damn right I could."

El considered that. "You could be technically good," he admitted. Sands would do anything that he set his mind and his will to, but he didn't strike him as someone who would ever feel the music.

"Why, El, I'm getting the impression you don't really consider that a compliment." Sands cocked his head, amused expression dropping from his face into that blank of utter concentration. "You might want to check the north road," he said.

By the time he reached the roof edge, El could hear it too, the deep, heavy rumble of powerful engines, unstressed and moving at speed. Nobody here owned cars like that.

That feeling tight through his body had been right; they wouldn't ever leave him.

Whether Sands was ready to do it or not, it was here.

He swung up onto the balustrade and whistled, long and piercing. The people in the square looked up briefly and began grabbing things from their stalls.

"So the guests are finally arriving," Sands said from behind him. "How many?"

He could see them now, past the trees – SUVs, smaller models to stay manoeuvrable on bad roads, raised suspension. Two of them, but that wasn't what Sands meant. "Eight, maybe ten."

"That's a little on the low side. Shouldn't be more than a quick warm-up exercise for you."

El didn't miss the significance of that last word. "And what about you? What will you be doing?"

"Oh, I don't intend to do a thing, El. These gentlemen came looking for you, and I wouldn't want to be the third wheel on the Harley." Sands tipped his head, amused. "When you're tugging all the strings along together, you learn never to interfere with a man in his area of expertise. And this, my friend, is definitely your area of expertise." He was grinning cheerfully at him as he finished, and the fact that he was right left El with a faint curl of sickness. Mass killing wasn't something he had ever wanted to be considered a specialist in.

The momentary nausea didn't even begin to damp the lazy anticipation coiling within him, the glowing hum threading itself through every joint and muscle of his body. More than two months without it, and it settled as familiar as the rhythm of his breathing before he slept.

It never left him. Even after years without fighting, it had been waiting inside for him to want it again, rushing through him greedily as he stood on the balcony of the church in Culiacán. Every sense stretching easily outwards, to know and feel everything around him, to predict and to move and to kill.

"Fine. You stay here." He pulled his hair back into a fast ponytail and headed for the stairs, ready to greet his visitors.

"You should know I'm going to shoot anyone who comes through that door," Sands called after him, "so you'd better not let any of your little friends come wandering up here."

El very much doubted that would happen. The warnings to stay away from Sands applied tenfold when there was a threat. He half-turned back. "What happens when I come wandering up?"

Sands snorted. "I know you, asshole. You honestly have no idea how many things give you away, do you?"

Sands, apparently, still believed he was an idiot. There would be no point to him shedding the clothes of a mariachi. Even without them, there were too many other, deeper things that marked him out as who and what he was.

"I know," he said softly, turning to go. "I never chose to hide them."

He took the stairs fast, knowing already where he wanted to be when they arrived.

They would stop in the square. They always did. Strategically, it was an ill-advised move, exposed and flanked by high buildings. But these people thrived through the fear of others, and that fear depended on them showing none themselves.

It gave him an advantage every time he fought them, one he was fully prepared to use as he slid into position behind the archway on the second floor, waiting.

It didn't bother him that Sands wouldn't fight. That wasn't why he'd gone after him. He preferred to fight alone, without the worry of someone else getting in his way, or getting killed. Even when he fought with Lorenzo and Fideo, he went separately, working a pincer movement with them.

He reversed his mental paths briefly, and picked his way through them again. He discovered that yes, he would have worried about Sands. At the most practical level, a dead Sands would give him no information. But he didn't want the cartel to kill him either, not after he'd fought so hard against them, and against what they'd done to him. Sands deserved now to outlive his tormentors.

El was more than happy to help him do it, expectation tuning his nerves into high voltage buzz, ready to inflict hurt once again upon those who would destroy him.

The engines dropped in pitch as they neared, slowing a little in the narrow streets between the houses. His fingers tapped steadily against the wooden stock of his shotgun, playing out a rhythm of fast beats and long pauses, tension focussed and checked.

El wanted no more incidents like Cucuy's arrival. Everyone knew now not to attempt to cover for him if trouble came, and the two SUVs drew up, trailing thick dust, in the square of what appeared to be a ghost town.

Tap tap tap. The vehicles stopped alongside one another, a couple of metres apart, close to the abandoned stalls. Tap tap tap. The doors opened and men climbed out, some in the inevitable dark suits even here, and all with readied automatics.

He waited, and counted, let them all take a look around and start to step away from the cars. Nine, yes.

This was going to be easy.

Closer, just a little closer, the men spreading out across the square, the first two almost there....

He angled the shotgun over the balcony; the first blast ripped open a man's chest, the second barrel taking the other lower, in the guts and off-centre as he spun, and he went down into the dirt, screaming.

He ducked back behind the arch as stonework exploded into shrapnel and sound, breaking open the shotgun and reloading. He dropped to the floor, crawling forwards on his elbows through dust and falling brickwork, a P14 now in his left hand. Flattened himself still further, slithering fast to the edge, guns slotting between the stone supports of the balustrade.

Most of them were behind the cover of the cars, but one had moved too far, was still running back. He tracked him with the .45, taking him down with the first bullet, three more rounds into the falling body to be sure. The shotgun tore off an automatic-wielding hand that stuck out too far from behind a fender, the second shell finishing the man as he staggered forwards in shock. He snaked back from the edge, from the multi-calibre hail concentrating there.

Easy, yes.

The gunfire was all forced above him, protected by the angle from bullets from below, and they aimed at the rail, waiting for him to come forward and attack again, or to rise and try and recover the protection of the arch. Stone splintered above him, painful shards and choking dust as he holstered the .45 and pushed two more shells into the shotgun chambers.

He went the way they didn't expect - down. He dropped from the corner of the damaged balcony, grabbing for one of the posts as he fell and pushing, swinging himself sideways towards the pillars by the main doorway. He landed with his body angled, rolling forward with the continuing momentum into the cover of the columns; straightening and sprinting for the archway, P14 back in his hand, gunfire and fragments behind and alongside him all the way as he emptied both weapons backwards, unaimed, to distract. Sudden, sharp pain across his calf, but nothing like being shot, and he dashed on through the entrance, cutting off their line of fire on him, and then he was out into the courtyard, up against the wall and reloading.

Now they would have to come through the archway for him.

The gunfire stopped. The screaming didn't, echoing high-pitched and rasping around the square.

A fast glance down at his leg - he'd been scored across the muscle, probably a stone shard - sore, but minor. Footsteps sounded across the square - three of them coming in after him.

Good.

It was shooting bottles on a wall. They didn't know the layout, and they didn't know where he was. The first one who moved half into sight stopped a close-range shotgun shell, and then he was melting backwards as the other two rushed him together, hammering automatics and heavy feet ringing off stone. He weaved around the columns, both .45s out now, no time to reload the shotgun, and his attackers had no skill. Like so many of these cheap, hired men, they relied on the gun to do the killing for them - they didn't move fast enough, and they sprayed bullets when they need only take the time to aim.

He killed them both.

He vaulted from the low wall surrounding one of the trees, grabbing for the branches and scrambling up, then across back onto the second floor of the building. He reloaded as he circled around to where he had a good view of the entrance.

At some point, the screaming from the square had stopped, and the feet sliding cautiously into the archway were obvious enough, amplified by the enclosing stone.

"No, wait!" The footsteps stopped, obedient.

So there was a smart one remaining. Maybe this would prove interesting after all.

The footsteps outside crept away again.

"There are other people in this town, hiding." That same voice carried clearly through the building, echoing slightly. "How long do you think it will take us to find them if we start looking? How many would we have to shoot, I wonder, before you come out?"

A smart one. And a very dead one.

He dropped cautiously back down into the courtyard, working his way around behind the columns. He didn't think it was a bluff to cover them coming in, but it paid to be sure.

He swapped a .45 for a convenient Tec-9 from one of the dead men, changing the empty magazine for a new fifty-round clip he found on his belt.

He didn't have to hurry. They would wait for him to come out before they went looking. They wouldn't want to be halfway across the square and exposed when he showed up.

He edged along towards the archway, stopped a few metres from its corner.

Most likely they were back behind the cars. They couldn't know which way he would appear - he might be up on the second level or on the roof, so they wouldn't risk waiting by the entrance. Most other places in the square were exposed to line-of-sight from the building, or too far away to be useful for them to shoot him. So they would stay where they were familiar, by their vehicles.

He listened, and heard nothing that would either confirm or deny.

It was tempting to empty a magazine or two into the gas tanks, but the cartel had an irritating habit of sometimes adding an extra layer of metal plate around them. Opening himself up for nothing was a poor option here.

Wherever they were, they would expect him to do any number of things before they would expect him to come back through the main archway, but that would buy him maybe a second.

The low sun backlit the hacienda from their viewpoint, long shadows stretching forwards down the length of the square. The entrance lay in deep shadow for the whole of its length, and between that and the angle to the cars, he would be perhaps half way through before they saw. That second's delay would bring him into the open, and leave him a lot of ground to cross while they had cover and he didn't.

But they were only two now.

Edging through the archway, back to the wall, sliding, creeping, and then that moment when he knew, some change in the quality of the silence screaming along his spine, and he bent low and he ran.

He was four strides across the square when the first burst of gunfire came.

Ohhhh, they were slow.

Not that he would complain about that.

He unleashed a quick burst from the Tec-9 into the SUVs, careful of spending too many rounds, unsure he'd get time to reload.

They disappeared back behind the bodywork, gunfire ceasing. They'd learned the lesson from their handless friend dead on the ground there. No hope of accuracy with this gun and this lurching, sprinting range, but they'd been conditioned, and it was so good to see they remembered him.

He ran on. And he ran fast, but everything slack, slowed, strung out, all the time he needed to think and react, as it always was. Over half the distance closed before they risked firing again, the dust kicking up thick and heavy around him, in his lungs, and he couldn't see them through it, but he didn't have to, knew they were there....

He threw himself to the ground, sliding forward through the dirt, firing ahead between the wheels, and a man went down with a shriek as his legs were ripped from under him, his torso taking the rest of the burst, and El rolled and spun back onto his feet alongside the rear tyre.

One to go.

One behind the other SUV, the metal bulk of both vehicles between them, and an intriguing game of stalking to play out.

He wondered if the one still there was the smart one or the dumb one.

"You don't have to stay here," he called, keeping low to the roof, cursing the darkened glass that denied him any flash of movement. "You can take the car and go."

Sometimes he would have said that and meant it. He couldn't let anyone leave here.

No reply, no sound of activity. With no feet on show either, that meant the smart one.

He hung the Tec-9 on his belt, hooked his fingers into the ridge along the windows, and stepped up carefully, quietly, one foot on the sill, the other on the tyre, slowly easing himself towards the roofline. There was a squeak from the suspension of the other car, a low metallic bump, and he froze, listening, hair straggling across the edges of his vision where it had escaped the tie.

THUMP, and the SUV he clung to shuddered, and his opponent was so far ahead of him, he was on the roof, and he dropped the .45 to grab the barrel of the automatic as it came over the edge, and pulled. His fingers tore free of their scant grip on the bodywork, and he fell backwards, dragging the gun free, rolling sideways as he hit the ground, AK slithering away into the dust, and the man landed right where he'd been.

He was back on his feet and twisting around, reaching for the Tec-9, when the arm hooked around his neck. He elbowed him hard in the ribs, and the grip across his throat slackened, but his other arm was already coming around at him, orange-metallic glitter brilliant in the low sun.

Fuck, he hated knives.

He grabbed hold of the knife-hand with both of his and twisted, but he didn't have the leverage, not from this angle, and he only held the blade away while the pressure built on his neck and the air whistled and stabbed in his throat.

He angled his head as far as he could and dropped his right hand to his belt, fingers groping while the knife edged closer, unable to hold it with just his left, and he unhooked the Tec-9 and slammed it back over his shoulder, barrel first.

The wet crunch of bone was loud, distinct, as something spattered at his neck; the man released him and dropped. El checked him quickly - dead, yes.

The gutshot man was still alive, but not by much, staring eyes and harsh, wheezing breaths dragging through his chest. He wouldn't be saying anything.

He put a bullet in his head.

The town was abruptly silent.

He listened for long seconds, and heard nothing. No engines, no hint there might be more on their way.

The best place to check was from the roof. He jogged back into the hacienda and through the courtyard to the stairs. And then he paused.

He wondered just how confident he should be in Sands' assertion that he would know him. It was something he really ought to discover under controlled conditions, before Sands shot him at a time that was not so controlled.

He shrugged out of his jacket and let it fall to the steps, unhooked the remaining chains and his spur. He went up steadily to the landing below the roof, then took most of the stairs fast, his shoulder brushing the wall to keep him clear of line of fire from beyond the door. He deliberately let his feet fall more heavily, the sound echoing around the curving stonework.

He slowed before the doorway to the roof, stopped, the way a man would if he didn't know who was up there. He took a single glance around the edge, and dodged straight back into hiding.

Sands was sitting exactly as he'd left him, only now with an M11 across his lap.

He launched himself through the doorway low and fast, rolling diagonally across the rooftop away from Sands, ending with his back to the stonework, ready to twist and take cover behind the tower if he needed.

Sands' head turned as he tracked his movement, but he stayed completely relaxed and didn't reach for the gun. "So, they're all dead then," he said, offering no comment on the nature of El's entrance beyond the curve of his eyebrows over the sunglasses.

"Yes." El uncurled to his feet and moved over to the balustrade, watching the roads. "Next time, you might like to give me a little covering fire. If it isn't too much trouble."

"You were doing fine without me," Sands pointed out. "Well, apart from that first interesting little trip through the archway with five guys firing automatics at you, maybe, but I thought you'd handle it."

He looked across, startled. "You could follow that?"

"El, nobody but you walks into a gunfight with a shotgun." It was that eye-rolling voice that drove El crazy. "Two rounds, and the reload time's a bitch."

"But when I shoot them, they stay down," he said. He heard the dark satisfaction in his words, the killer's voice.

"Well, that's true, but they stay down quite well with three rounds from a P14 too. And I'd still have twelve in the clip for the next guys." Sands had his right hand up and waving, gesturing towards him with extended fingers, sliding into his full lecturing style. "I swear, sometimes I wonder how you've lived so long, El. Tell me, do you ever have a plan? Or do you just go for the dramatic all guns blazing and shoot anything that moves approach every time?"

"Sometimes I plan," he said. His plans rarely held together half way before he found himself modifying and improvising, but that had never worried him in the past. He felt vaguely defensive, and that in turn was fast edging through into anger.

He'd been surviving this way far longer than Sands, and he had nothing he needed to explain.

"You let them get too close." Sands reached into his pocket for cigarette and lighter. "That last thug whose skull you broke – what's the point in you carrying all those guns when you end up using one as a club?" He was speaking around the cigarette as he slid through his little ritual of fingers to light it. "You should think about investing in some grenades. One in each car when they opened the doors would have cleared them all out with far less trouble. I know someone in Mazatlán who supplies."

He saw it then. The reason Sands had chosen not to fight. Not because he didn't want to, but because he had other priorities.

Sands had been assessing him the whole time, still the compulsive information-gatherer, wanting to know everything before he made an overt move of his own. The man had tested him, used this attack to sit back and calmly categorise him into a file of flaws and weaknesses.

The fury lit and flared, driving him forward in fast steps, words burning through his throat. "Who gives you the right to pass judgement on me? On what I do, how I do it?" Sands' head flashed around, angling, total concentration rigid on him the moment he moved. "You have no say in any of this, you understand? You don't ever get to tell me what to do. You are sick."

Sands had relaxed fractionally as he stopped before him, as he did nothing more than shout to unleash the rage.

"Interesting." For once, Sands did look genuinely intrigued instead of sarcastic with the slowly spoken word. "You realise, don't you, how much you change when you fight? Your accent thickens up a little, your voice gets an edge to it." The bastard was actually smiling, the corners of his mouth curving, stretching, tightening. "And then you rush to take the bait, all that anger just waiting underneath. I wonder, should I be wary of pushing you any more right now? Just how far could I go before you'd kill me too?"

El remained silent, taking in air long and slow, the first evening chill of it rasping along his throat.

He knew. He knew about that man he became, the one who prowled with a smiling trigger finger, seeking reasons, excuses, to fight on and to kill more. But he could control that part of him, hold it back when he wanted to, and he wouldn't, he wouldn't attack Sands now and prove him right.

No matter how much he wanted to smash his fist into the bastard's throat so he couldn't ever talk again.

"The thing about killing people," Sands said, sliding flawlessly back into his normal conversational tones, "is there's really no right and wrong way to do it. It doesn't matter if they see it coming or if you shoot them in the back. The only difference lies in the choice between the easy way and the hard way."

He swallowed hard and backed off a few steps, stamping down the hatred, his words spinning bitter. "And you choose the easy way."

Sands smiled up at him, bright and cheerful. "Every time."

El frowned. He didn't like that kind of killing. It felt like murder. When he shot a man who had a gun pointed at him, it didn't.

He knew Sands' words held a certain truth. Dead men didn't care how they'd died. But when logic came up against his feelings, logic lost. He didn't much mind it being that way. His instincts had served him often enough over logic that he didn't begrudge them the occasional inconvenience.

He never did know who had shot the boy in Santa Cecilia. Probably it was one of César's men, but he lived with the possibility it had been Campa.

He preferred to use weapons he knew he could fully control.

Sands reached out his hand and casually squashed the last of his cigarette into the ashtray beside him.

It crawled around inside him, the tension released and more of it coming, the things he had done, the things he would still do, and it made no sense, any of it. "Give me one of those."

"What?"

"A cigarette."

Sands tipped his head curiously as he pulled out the carton and threw it to him. "I didn't know you ever smoked."

He put a cigarette between his lips, caught the lighter that came his way, and turned back to scanning the horizon. "I'm glad I have some secrets from you."

Sands stretched his legs out across his peripheral vision, and gave an amused huff of air. "Only the small ones."

His ponytail had disappeared completely in that last struggle with the knife, and he pushed his hair back from his face, holding it against the breeze. Click, and he put the flame to the cigarette, drawing on it, crackle and flare. It burned along his throat, down into his lungs, and oh, it was good. He held it, letting it spread into him until that hint of dizziness hovered at the edges.

It was only like that after a long time without, before his body adapted. He took another long breath of it, stretching it out, feeling it distinct in a way it wouldn't be the next time.

"You realise I'll probably shoot you now," Sands told him.

"For smoking your cigarettes?"

"You won't smell like you."

El looked over at that. He'd assumed Sands' identification of him was based purely on hearing - the chains when they were there, but also how he walked, his rhythms and mannerisms, the sounds of his boots and the fabrics he wore. It hadn't occurred to him to think about how he smelled. He stank of sweat, gunpowder and blood now, but that wasn't normal, not even for him.

He decided not to ask. "Then I'll be grateful you learn quickly."

"You'd better hope I remember first thing when I'm half-asleep."

He never saw Sands half-asleep, not since he stopped taking the drugs. He was always one hundred percent there. "I suppose I'll just have to trust you."

Sands laughed. "I'm sure you will, any day now."

The breeze played over him, cool on his arms without his jacket, dragging at the smoke as he exhaled, snatching it away, uncontrolled. The horizon hung, unchanging, no engines, no dust, the roads still and empty.

The drug curled through his lungs, through his blood.

There were no more coming, it seemed. For now.

That was good, because the muscle in his calf was starting to stiffen.

He smoked the cigarette right down, killed the last of it into the ashtray beside Sands. "I'm going to check if our dead friends have anything to tell us."

Sands slid the M11 back away onto his belt as he stood, and headed for the stairs. "I left my jacket near the bottom," El warned him.

"I know."

The square was silent still, dust settling heavy onto cars and corpses alike, beginning to mask the blood. They were being watched from the windows, he knew, but the people wouldn't come out until he signalled it was clear.

He hadn't expected to find anything of interest on the bodies, and he didn't, just wallets and weapons. He knew one of them from when Cucuy had come for him, but there was nothing to say who they were working for now.

"They didn't really think they would find me here again, or they would have sent more. These people were looking for leads." He frowned. "If they knew they could track me from here, why didn't they come sooner?"

"With Barillo and that hellbitch daughter of his turned fertiliser, the cartels will have been busy fighting each other for a while," Sands said. "It was a twenty-four carat opportunity just waiting for anyone to reach out and grab a hold of, and more than one will have tried."

That made some sense. "It could be someone from the inside who's in charge now. There were still a lot of men at the Barillo estate when I left."

For the first time since he had known him, Sands looked genuinely amazed, his eyebrows angling high above the sunglasses and marking deep lines in his forehead. "The Barillo estate? Holy Christ, El, what were you doing there?"

El shrugged. "If they'd offered me the choice, I would have said no."

"So that's where you disappeared to," Sands mused. "You did leave me wondering."

"Not wondering enough to help me out," he said, pointed.

"Well, I found myself a little busy right around then." The sudden lightness in Sands' voice let El know exactly what that had been, and he shivered briefly.

He looked again at the bodies. Their cellphones wouldn't have worked if they'd tried, not from here, but they would have patterns. "When these people don't report back, they'll know."

Sands smiled, his lips parting smoothly over his teeth, and it would have looked attractive on anyone else, without the intent clear behind it. "Yes they will. And that means it's time for us to head on back to Culiacán before they know we're coming."

The anticipation inside him uncoiled again, never really sleeping.

Pay-off time. They were finally going hunting.

"You know where we need to go?"

"Not for sure," Sands said, with unwavering confidence. "So we're going to drop by and see an old friend of mine who will."

El narrowed his eyes at the stresses on the words. "Will this 'friend' be glad to see you or will he want to kill you?"

Sands tipped his head, considering. "Well, that's an interesting question, El, and you know, I can't really say. He didn't shoot me the last time we met, at least."

Something of the amused drawl dropped out of that last sentence, words suggestively serrated. There was more here than he was telling, but that was often the case. El supposed he would find out more when he discovered who they were meeting.

For now, he didn't bother to ask. Sands wouldn't fuck with him this time, not when the danger was here, seeking them down. It had come to his home, and they would find these people, and he would destroy them all.

He could still taste the burn of the smoke, heavy and perfect in his throat.

They went via Mazatlán. They had to do so anyway, to pick up the main coastal road to Culiacán.

El was content enough with the guitar case in the back seat. "There are different ways of fighting," he said. "Lorenzo would die if he tried to fight like me, nor could I fight like Lorenzo."

"Right," Sands said. "And my way involves making sure I've got some big surprises ready when I need them. Which is why I brought along a shopping list."

He handed El a piece of paper with irregularly-sized writing that didn't follow the lines. It looked too much like a child's letters, the wrench of them entirely unexpected and deep.

He breathed once, long, and pushed it aside, skimming over the list. "You're going to stand out a little with an M203."

"I'd prefer the MK19, but it's not quite portable enough," Sands grinned. "The point is they're not going to see me. Just the grenades."

El felt the pressure sliding at his jaw, but he'd never tried to place his own restriction on those he fought alongside. On Lorenzo's flames, or Fideo's love of explosives. "Fine. What you do is on your own conscience."

"Well, that's something of a debatable point." And then the levity dropped from his words. "But it certainly isn't on yours."

He didn't answer that.

They were parked in the south of the city, overlooking a warehouse just outside the official confines of the port. It was a very ordinary-looking warehouse, scratched metal doors and a scattering of graffiti. According to Sands, it was the base of trading operations for his arms contact.

They'd driven around the area while El investigated routes of approach and traffic, and checked for possible observation points. There weren't any good locations for that, which was probably deliberate. Any car watching for too long would be noticed.

"All we need now is a hotel and then a street phone, so you can call him," Sands said.

El instantly disliked this plan, staring at Sands through the thin cigarette haze swirling between them. "Me? Why?"

"Because you'll be making the pick-up." Sands spoke as if it were obvious, as if it were already decided.

"No. You're the one he knows."

"Exactly." Sands showed his teeth in a way that was entirely unfriendly. "It wouldn't be healthy for me to see him."

That was easy enough to understand. El had the urge to roll his eyes, and made sure his voice carried that over. "Oh, yes, of course. I had forgotten for a minute that everyone you meet hates you."

"Actually, the few dealings we had were mutually agreeable and entirely without rancour," Sands answered mildly.

"Then why?"

"The man sells weapons for cash with no questions asked." There were lines marked around his mouth when he spoke again. "I'm fairly sure he'd be just as happy to sell me."

"Or me," El pointed out. He hadn't liked this from the beginning, and now he liked it less.

"Probably, but he doesn't know who you are. Keep it that way and you'll be fine." Sands turned his head to him now, his face expressionless and still managing to give the impression of being entirely disparaging. "Of course, we'll have to get you some different clothes first."

"I won't wear a suit." He looked enough of a killer already, without looking like a drug dealer too.

"I don't much care what you wear, El, just as long as it's a little lighter on the chains and scorpions. Whatever you choose, I can guarantee you won't be offending my sense of aesthetics."

"He's going to ask questions," El insisted. "He won't meet without knowing who I am, without a guarantee that I'm not AFN."

"You'll tell him your name is Fermin Guajardo. After that, he won't want to know any more."

"That's it?" It sounded too easy, and it made him suspicious. "Who is this man?"

"I dropped Honaker a few names a while back, as associates who may want to contact him at some point. I provided them with backgrounds, you'll stand up to an initial check."

"You gave him a Mexican name?"

"And another name I mentioned was American, and one was even female," Sands answered, unusually patient. "I was allowing for future problems and I covered the possibilities."

El smiled. "You were allowing for him hating you."

"Well, there's always that chance of something going wrong, so effectively, among other things, yes."

Sands seemed to have planned this out a long way in advance, and El didn't like that. He particularly didn't like the way he was being cornered into doing this, Sands with an answer already prepared for every objection he raised. "Maybe associates of yours aren't so welcome any more."

"He's a businessman, El, above anything else." Sands let smoke trail from between slightly parted lips. "Whatever the situation with me is, he can't come the heavy on his paying clients just because they happen to know me. Word like that gets around, and half his customers would suddenly be filling their orders with alternative suppliers." He tossed him a quick, cheerful grin. "Don't worry, he'll play nice with you."

This idea seemed to involve an awful lot of trouble - on El's part anyway; it was only too obvious that the plan didn't inconvenience Sands - and all for weapons that they would do just fine without.

He looked again at the warehouse, set in a buffer zone of light industrial buildings between the docks and the residential areas. It was away from the main thoroughfares to the port, the roads travelled mostly by commercial traffic, and externally it was no different from the others of its type along the street.

"Don't," Sands said. "I know what you're thinking, and just don't."

El glared over his shoulder, a useless gesture, but one he was unable to break. Sands probably got the idea anyway, from his movement and the changing angle of his voice. "You don't know what I'm thinking."

"You're completely still, and your breathing's changed, a little longer and slower. Whatever this place looks like, it isn't, and whatever you think Honaker looks like when you meet him, he isn't. There's no way to go in there and just take what we want."

"I don't remember wanting anything from here," he pointed out.

"What we want, what I want, it's still a very bad idea." Sands opened his door a crack to throw his cigarette out into the street. "There are only three kinds of arms dealers, El. They're either mob, ex-mercs or ex-firm."

He could guess which one Sands was likely to have an arrangement with, but none of them were people he wanted to meet.

He was going to do it anyway. He had demanded Sands' help in this, and if this was the way Sands was comfortable doing it, he would go along. "You introduce me to the nicest of people," he said, wanting to keep the sullen resignation from his words and failing badly.

Sands grinned, wide and bright. "I introduced you to the President, El. Now I'm just evening things out a little."

They found a hotel in the tourist district to the north - a deliberately average place, instead of one of the cheapest dives, since Sands no longer looked like a classic idiot - and El hesitated, then booked them two rooms. He'd long since stopped lying awake at night with an obsessive need to know what Sands was doing, and it seemed sensible to keep to the arrangement they had at the house, one which allowed them to share a limited space without too much animosity.

The payphone they chose was some distance away. El dialled the number Sands gave him, which wasn't local, and a man asked his name, then told him to call again in two hours and hung up.

They went shopping. It was the first time they'd been near a large town since Sands recovered, and he demanded some more clothes, ones that actually fit. El found doing something so oddly normal as exploring a department store with Sands entirely surreal, despite the fact that he'd been living and eating with the man for almost three months. Hiding and healing was a very different level of experience from taking a murderer out shopping.

Sands stuck to jeans and basic black with white shirts and T-shirts, so he couldn't 'fuck up and look like a grade A asshole'. El smiled with the brief temptation to point him at turquoise and orange - he saw no reason for Sands not to look like an asshole, since he was - but the fact that he would have to live with the results stopped him. That, and he really didn't know if Sands might shoot an assistant or a waitress who didn't whisper quietly enough.

Probably he wouldn't; he could no longer afford to be so casual about the attention he attracted as he had been when he thought himself untouchable. But a joke would be a poor reason to find out.

They used a different phone for the second call, in case the first was being watched. It was the same voice, and just as short. He was given a location to meet that evening to hand over his list.

El found all this secrecy irritating. Dealing with his own people, he would have been clear and hunting by now, but Mazatlán wasn't his city.

They went back to the hotel first, since Sands wouldn't be taking this particular trip. El described the layout of his room to him, then retreated to his own.

He had no idea what people wore to meet with a professional arms dealer. Sands had told him that Fermin Guajardo was a mercenary, mostly working in South America, in whichever revolution or coup someone would pay him for. He didn't care much for his borrowed role, but he thought that everyone wore jeans, and they would pass for a mercenary too.

He found the bar he'd been told to wait in, and ordered the food he'd been told to order. He poked the bland calavacita around his plate in disinterest - obviously the dish was used to identify contacts because no-one else would ever ask for it.

He twisted the fork in his hand as he waited, rolling it over and over with short flicks of thumb on fingers.

This was exactly the kind of ridiculous assignation Sands would have found it amusing to set up. He could imagine Sands back at the hotel, knowing just how much of a run-around Honaker would be giving him, and laughing.

He hoped he choked on whatever he was eating.

A number of people came and went - the bar was busy enough that the people entering wouldn't stand out, but not so busy that someone inside was hard to find.

"Señor Guajardo?" The voice and the man were Mexican, and not the man from the phone. He had at least two guns that El knew of.

"Sí," he answered, sharp pitch of relief that this wasn't Honaker twisting after the annoying realisation that he hadn't asked Sands if his 'background' included speaking English.

"You have a message for me?"

He handed over the list, copied onto hotel paper with the header ripped off. He'd added extra supplies of his own ammunition to the bottom. Sands owed him some repayment for the food over the last months.

"Call in the morning, and we'll let you know."

Everyone who worked for Honaker seemed to learn the same conversational style. The man left again immediately, through the kitchen - it was almost a pity the cook would survive it.

He ate the calavacita before he left, because he'd eaten worse in the past, and he had to pay for it anyway.

It was a little after nine when he got back to the hotel. He stretched out along his bed, but his body remained taut, unwilling.

He didn't like all this waiting around. He wanted to go to Sands' 'friend' and find out what they needed to know, before any more gunmen turned up in his village. He wanted to be doing something - he'd never been good at playing things the patient way, and these delays crawled through him, left his fingers twitching restless over the sheets.

He could bring himself off and that would help, a little. If he touched himself he would think of Carolina, and he wanted that, but.... A vow already broken was gone for good, but he didn't want to use Carolina's memory, not like this.

He flipped himself upright, his back against the headboard, twirling a pistol on the trigger finger of each hand. Round and round, repetitive, constant, mind-numbing absence of concentration, but while it stopped his thoughts, it didn't stop the feeling, the utter wrongness of just sitting here. He could have wished for his guitar, but he only carried the one case - he knew how it was when he tried to play like this, how his fingers tensed on the strings and strangled the notes.

Music couldn't take this edge from him. Only the guns could.

But not this way, the clicking of them loud as they spun, the hotel so still around them, watching the clock flick through the minutes.

He realised he hadn't spent so much as an hour truly alone in months now. Even when Sands wasn't right there with him, he'd been watching Sands, thinking about Sands.

They had separate rooms at the house, but that was where they slept. In the evenings, after eating, they most often just stayed by the table. Usually he played. Sometimes they talked; sometimes they ignored one another, because it happened often enough that one had deliberately annoyed the other a step too far. But there was obviously someone there, an awareness of breathing and life that stayed with him.

He was thinking about Sands again now.

He straightened from the bed, made his way along the corridor to knock on his door.

"Come on in." Sands' voice was drawn-out, bored. He lay on his back, smoking next to a half-full ashtray, holding the cigarette awkwardly with those black leather gloves. He'd pulled them on in the car before they reached Mazatlán, and El hadn't seen him without them since.

He waited until the door closed with a low snick. "No gun?" he asked, mildly amused.

Sands drew hard on his cigarette. "I think I can rely on you not to be knocking on my door because someone has a barrel pressed up tight against your neck."

El smiled briefly. Maybe Sands no longer thought of him as an idiot, but he still didn't believe there wasn't a gun.

He leaned back against the door, feeling it creak and settle with his weight. "How long are we going to be here?"

Sands rolled up onto his elbow to face him, instant switch to brisk words, pure business. "We'll have everything we need by tomorrow, and then we can be on our way. I really don't want to be left hanging around here any more than you do."

He didn't trust that utter confidence of Sands'. He was too sure of too much to be genuine; the difficulty lay in spotting the bluff. "How do you know?"

"Honaker deals in big weapons and big numbers." Sands dropped the end of his cigarette into the ashtray and left it to burn. "What we're asking him for is chump change, not special order."

"So why use him at all? We could have bought what you needed elsewhere, from someone less dangerous."

"Because he's a professional, and he gives a professional service," Sands said. "You can guarantee you'll get what you ask for, and he won't supply any cheap Chinese copies you might just be unlucky enough to lose your hand to."

El could see the value to that. Wherever he bought guns, he stripped and checked them, tested them, and then stripped them again before he agreed to pay.

"You may as well take a seat, if you're staying," Sands said, his tone flat.

Was he staying?

Sands had told him what he wanted to know.

The room was thick with the stink of burning fibre, the cigarette smouldering down in the ashtray against the other discarded ends.

He turned and put his fingers to the door handle. "I don't think so."

The mattress creaked lightly behind him as Sands rearranged himself. "You know, just before you go, El, I was wondering vaguely how the state of your cash-flow is these days. Because I only have useful access to around a third of my bank accounts right now, and, well, I have to admit they're not quite the retirement plan I was hoping for."

The handle stopped, a quarter turned.

There was a note in Sands' tone that was almost revealing, and he was suddenly sure that he knew about the money. He had no idea how Sands would have found out. No-one in the town would have told him anything. But he knew. Somehow.

'You get to overhear the most interesting things from children.'

Oh.

Sands most likely knew every raw hint of village gossip, every half-sentence he overheard filed and waiting somewhere in his head for the pieces that would complete it. His memory must have been good before, and he would have trained it ruthlessly now, anything around him used as an exercise in a world without written words.

He would have been interested to hear how El Mariachi had returned in a storm of pesos.

He would have been interested to hear any number of other things too. He'd half-joked about having few secrets from Sands, but he wondered now just how much Sands really knew of him.

He turned back into the room. "If you know, then you also know what I did with it." His words were unstressed, but there'd been too much delay for Sands to believe it.

Sands gave a flickering smile, vanishing before he spoke. "All of it? I don't think so."

"No. My friends took most of it." He hadn't felt the need of it. His life in the village cost almost nothing, and he hadn't known then that he would be leaving again.

"Oh, that's right, your interesting little team." He sounded genuinely amused. "I do hope they're entertaining a better class of joint these days."

"I don't know where they are," he said. They weren't going to be sending him postcards. He could find them with a single phone call, but Sands didn't need to know that, and they definitely didn't need any kind of connection with Sands.

Sands only smiled at his defensiveness. "You can relax, El, I'm not coming begging any time soon. Honaker wouldn't want your pesos anyway, he only trades in international currencies."

He was curious now to know exactly what Sands' situation was. He'd shown no concern for money in Culiacán, but he'd probably thought of little then beyond pain and immediate survival. El had booked and paid for the hotel rooms they'd stayed in, and in the months in the town, Sands had bought almost nothing except his cigarettes.

He wandered away from the door and dropped into the chair against the far wall of the room. "So how will you pay him?" he asked, choosing the flat, business-like tones Sands had used earlier when discussing Honaker.

"Wire transfer," Sands said simply. Quick twitch of eyebrows over black lens as he added, "From an account he doesn't associate with me, of course."

"You make it sound like he associates a lot of accounts with you." One of the more useful ways to get Sands to give up information, he'd discovered over the months, was to lean a question more towards accusation.

"No, just the one. I really wouldn't want him knowing any more about my finances than he had to." His jaw shifted, lines appearing tight around his mouth. "Not that I could use that account now, anyway."

"An American account," he guessed.

"Close enough." El wondered what that meant, but he knew nothing of banking legislation and jurisdiction. "It's a pity I had to leave that money, but they get nervous when you start moving funds around. It makes them watch."

It was obvious enough who 'they' were, and he suspected from Sands' flat expression that they'd been watching anyway.

His eyes were wandering over the room as they talked, noting idly how Sands had arranged all his things as they were at the house, as far as the limitations of furnishings would allow. His jacket hung over the back of a chair set alongside the bed; his shoes carefully tucked under the foot of it, right by the leg; the locations of glass and toothbrush and toothpaste by the washbasin, which he could see because Sands hated doors to be closed without a good reason.

The one thing out of place was the cane standing in the corner.

Sands didn't need it around the village, or anywhere while he was with El. But wherever he had gone to eat tonight, in a strange hotel in a strange city, he would have been forced to use it.

He couldn't even pick up the phone and just call out for food, because he couldn't read.

The idea of Sands groping cautiously around the hotel and acting blind hit him as something like shock.

He hadn't seen anything like that from him in almost two months now. He never forgot, but sometimes the fact that Sands was blind began to seem like a minor thing, because he was so very good at making it look that way.

But it wasn't. He would have tapped his way along the corridors and the streets while people watched him and pitied him.

The image was glass in his mind, crystal sharp and cracked, everything about it entirely wrong.

He wasn't sure if it was the people or Sands who made him more angry.

It was easier to twist the pricking frustration onto Sands, accusation flowing naturally now. "So you have money," he said. "Enough to spend with Honaker, to buy these weapons nobody needs. But still you planned all that you did just to steal more."

"Oh, I've got enough for now," Sands said, "but not enough to keep me for as long as I'm hoping to stick around."

He almost asked what he would do when his money ran out, but it was obvious enough. Sands had always traded in information, digging out the facts and making sure the right pieces made their way to the right people, and he could continue to do that for payment.

He didn't ask the other obvious question either. Would you sell me? Would you sell my home after I've done all this to protect it? Sands would only be amused, sarcastic. He would gain no reassurances, and certainly none he believed.

"You're awfully quiet over there, El. Something on your mind?"

Sands was just as amused that he wouldn't ask.

That was fine. He could pretend ignorance equally well. "Should there be? I think you'll find some way to avoid begging on the streets."

Sands gave a low snort, not quite humour. "I'd have the cartel shoot me in the head first." He cocked his head a degree more, considering. "No, I'd do it myself. Someplace nice and quiet so they'd keep looking for me, running all over Mexico for years chasing down rumours."

"Not the most satisfying form of revenge," El commented.

"Well, it's one I'll keep for the bottom of the list," he said. "Somewhere below exhuming Barillo's corpse to piss on it."

He thought about Moco, the way the man stalked him through the nights still a decade later, corrupting even dreams of Carolina, though he'd been long dead before El ever met her. "Probably not worth it," he agreed. "He wouldn't smell too good."

Sands raised his eyebrows. "Ah, the Mariachi voice of experience."

"Not really. I don't usually wait around quite that long."

He was intrigued, discovering a few things in the last fifteen minutes that nearly three months had failed to tell him. Leaving Sands alone to become truly bored seemed to be a useful tactic.

"How do you know this Honaker, anyway?"

Sands tipped his head towards him, letting him see the smile slanting through the pause. "Well, obviously, we met on a fishing trip."

El shrugged, unsurprised to find himself called. "I just want to know who I'm meeting."

"Actually, I don't think you do," Sands said, the curl of his lips dying back part way. "But there's a good chance he won't show anyway, just leave the lackeys to meet with you. Minor level deals don't usually merit the personal touch."

He thought of the 'lackey' from the bar earlier, that moment of hanging uncertainty. "So what about 'Fermin Guajardo' then? Do I speak English?"

"Well, of course you do." Sands spoke now with that exaggerated patience. "You're a mercenary, you'll work for anyone. And the people who hire you really don't like using interpreters, it can allow certain," he lifted his arm and circled his hand through the air, "shall we call them 'miscommunications', to happen."

"How very trusting."

Sands grinned, quick, crooked. "Aren't we all?"

El took the point. "If Honaker's people might feel the same, I should know all of this 'background' you made. I don't want them asking me questions and not liking the answers."

"Caution and forethought, El?" His eyebrows twitched, his grin sliding wider. "Maybe you can learn after all." But he began to list the details about the identity, from birth information in Jalisco through streams of dates and countries and wars and outcomes. He spoke steadily and confidently, never seeming to reach for the information or lose track, everything chronological and ordered.

El sat quietly through it all, watching him as he talked, wondering if he could gain any further glimpses of Sands through this persona he'd created. The amoral killer who would do anything for money had elements of Sands in itself, but there would be a limited range of backgrounds useful to pass on to an arms dealer.

Sands' information was only the stripped facts, empty of anything on why the man would have become a mercenary, no details of his life between 'contracts', or his family beyond his parents being conveniently dead. El supposed that was the most practical approach. Filling in too many spaces would make things harder if the man who took the role didn't fit them, and the reasoning there was perfect Sands - nobody would care about the man's private life while there was money to be made from his line of work.

With the information he had, the only inconsistency was him having to look five years younger. He knew he'd aged after the loss of his family, and spent too much time sitting with his guitar beneath the Mexican sun, but he supposed he would pass - a mercenary's life was unlikely to have been so much easier than his own.

Sands had fallen quiet after his dates reached midway through the previous year, waiting until El shifted in the chair before he spoke again. "You got all that?"

"Most of it," he admitted. His memory worked better from written notes, and a list would have been much easier for him than this steady recital of facts. But he wasn't going to ask Sands to write it down.

"Good." Sands killed his latest cigarette into the ashtray and sat up, swinging his feet down to the floor. "Well, as entertaining as your company can be, I'm sure you understand that I'd prefer you to get out of my room while I sleep, so that makes it time for you to fuck off around now."

He remembered then that he hadn't intended to stay.

Another day, and another payphone. El was beginning to wonder if they'd work through the city's whole supply before Honaker finished with his games, but this time he was given a cash figure, as Sands had predicted. "Arrange the payment and collect at 1pm."

He was told neither where to go, nor where to send the money. It seemed Honaker would only do business with people who had their own ways of finding out.

Sands took over the phone then, trailing fingers across the buttons to tap in an international length number. There were some numbers he wouldn't ever have stored in his cellphone, but if Sands had been a little less untrusting and relied on written notes instead of so much on his memory, he would have found his life much harder now.

El walked away before he was told to fuck off, watching from along the street.

Sands lounged against the surround, one arm resting on the metal, the phone tucked between his shoulder and ear, half-hidden by his hair. The jacket he'd bought hung away from his body, loose, hiding the lines of the guns. Another tourist calling home, the only flaw the way his hand stayed on the keypad, but that wouldn't stand out if he didn't already know.

This was what other people saw, the ones who met him in passing and didn't use their eyes to look.

He hung up a few minutes later, shifted away from the phone box to slouch back against the wall. Entirely in his place, his face turned into the sun reaching over the buildings opposite, every hint of that intensity and focus burned back into directionless, casual ash.

Lying ash that could reconstruct itself into murder at any instant.

Sands attracted eyes and attention, and often he wanted both. But now the eyes of the people around fell on him and moved on, only the briefest catch as they slid over him.

El was the one standing and staring.

Sands swept his head around at his approach, his smile bright and, for once, close to genuine. "Well, it looks like you're on. I sure hope you know how to play to an audience, because this one calls for a truly entertaining performance."

He smiled slightly. "Oh, I think I'll manage."

He'd never be the effortless chameleon that Sands could make himself when he chose to, but Sands had no idea how often he'd relied on it in the past.

He drove out to the warehouse, taking the fastest, most obvious route along the arterials, no real traffic hassles at this time of day. When he pulled up outside, the man from the bar looked out to identify him, and then the big delivery doors opened and he was waved inside. He swung the car around and backed in.

The warehouse was big, and much of it empty, a void rippling with the noise of his engine and the metallic squeak and bang of the doors as they closed. It was unevenly lit by high windows, with no other entrance that he could see.

They searched him, predictably. He wore a Glock for show, which they took, but they didn't find the other.

Footsteps from the back of the warehouse fired his attention that way, someone behind the boxes stacked near one wall. "Hi there, come on in," he called over as he strode into sight, the English dipping and rising just too much on each word. "I don't usually bother with the introductions, we both know what we need to know."

This wasn't the voice from the phone, or the man from the bar. This man was entirely about the image, slick in a well-cut suit with precisely combed and parted hair, and a smile of perfect teeth that made El wonder how much he'd paid for it. Everything about him was sleek, practiced charm, and it did nothing to disguise who he essentially was.

His own weapons would have come from someone like this originally, he knew, but they took a very indirect route. The people he dealt with were nothing like this. Those people lived in dusty towns, taking the money they needed from wherever they could get it. This man lived his life exactly how he wanted it, and grew ever richer selling the blood and misery of thousands.

He was exactly the type of man El killed.

He forced himself to smile back, though it wasn't as friendly. "I like to be direct myself."

"Well, social niceties have their place all right, but I'd say it's more at a dinner party than in business. Have a seat." He waved him on through to an office area, and a desk and chairs much plainer than he would have expected from this man. He guessed Honaker didn't spend much time here.

Unlike the man from the bar, El watched him and couldn't be sure where his guns were.

"I'm glad you called," Honaker said as he took his own seat across the desk. "I'd been wondering if you would."

"You were recommended," he said.

Honaker smiled, pleased. "I try to keep a good reputation. A reliable service is the key to being successful in any business." His grin widened, his eyes wrinkling down almost convincingly. "Of course, you came recommended too, and everything seems to be working out smoothly. My bank tells me the financial angle's coming along."

"It should be straight-forward." If he would rely on Sands for anything, it would be to have his money where he wanted it to be.

Honaker seemed amused by his concise answers, swinging his elbows up onto the desk and linking his hands together beneath his chin. "I can see why certain people respect you, and I admire your caution in a new business arrangement." He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows a little. "Maybe next time we'll be able to fit you out with a bigger order?" Even when he was so obviously fishing, he kept the too-friendly smile, designed to slip past any possible offence.

"This isn't about a job, for now it's just personal supply," he said. "Some things were 'mislaid' in Colombia." He didn't follow the international news, but he heard enough to know Colombia could be relied on for violence and rebels.

"Well, sorry to hear you've had problems, I know things can get a little tricky sometimes." He blinked rapidly several times in the pause. "But since it's brought you to me, I guess I can't honestly be too sorry."

Honaker wasn't feeding him a single genuine reaction, his whole over-the-top attitude a projected screen for what was really going on in his mind. And he was good at it, his body language and habits a practiced enough lie that El could see the falsehood, but few of the real truths lying behind it.

"Ah, here's your order." Honaker waved a hand vaguely past El, to where two men set a large case on the floor by his car. "Feel free to inspect, of course."

"I don't think I need to." He wanted to leave this place and this man, and it could not be soon enough. "I was told you're a professional. Of course, if that turns out not to be true, I'll come back."

Honaker laughed. "You know, I like you. I'm sure you'll be back for all the right reasons, and we can do business again."

"Oh, I think so." He hoped keeping his answers short would discourage the man from more conversation.

Honaker waved over at the two men who stood by the case, and they loaded it into the trunk of his car. They made no move towards the interior, where his guitar case was loosely covered by a blanket.

El thought that should be his cue to leave, but Honaker just sat watching him. His own eyes were on the car, but he could feel it, and he didn't like it, his instincts drawing him back around to check on him.

Which seemed to be exactly what the man was waiting for. "You know, I was thinking the other day about our mutual acquaintance." His tone said casual conversation, but his eyes were too singly focussed. "You wouldn't happen to have heard anything of him recently, would you?"

El shrugged. "Only that he's most likely dead."

"I'd heard that very same thing, actually," Honaker said cheerfully, "but his old associates don't seem quite sure. They're still looking."

His mind flickered through the implications, and his guts slammed into cramping sickness.

He'd gone to find Sands in Culiacán knowing the cartel would be looking for him, but that changed nothing for El. All his plans had revolved around his old enemies.

He had taken the man back to his home, and he hadn't given a thought to the CIA.

He had also been quiet almost too long.

He tilted his head and wrinkled his forehead slightly. "You think they're onto something?"

"The stories going around are interesting." Honaker smiled and raised his eyebrows. "Maybe a touch on the fantastical side, but interesting all the same."

"I know the ones. They're crazy." He could imagine how the truth would have been further distorted since the versions he'd heard in Culiacán three months ago.

His smile only got bigger. "Hey, some are definitely crazier than others, I'll give you that. But some of them mention a kid too."

He didn't react at all this time.

He'd hoped the boy would have faded out of the facts by now; it made a much better tale if the blind man stalked and killed alone, instead of clinging to the hand of a ten-year-old. But someone was obviously still selling a version of the truth.

"Some of them also say he had three arms," he said.

Honaker only watched him across the desk, the silence reaching out, and El narrowed his eyes. "You think he's still alive."

Honaker put his hand to his cheek, fingers rubbing slowly at his temple. "I've got to say probably not, but, you know, if anybody would've wriggled away with their skin, it would've been him. I'd love to know for sure, either way."

His face was entirely open, friendly, and his eyes were entirely not. Honaker admired Sands, yes, but he would betray him in a moment. El too, if he had any idea who was really sitting here.

He wanted to kill him.

He wanted to kill him, and instead he sat and watched him, watched him smile in his tailored suit, and he tried to act bored by it. He tried to act... exactly like Sands would.

He didn't know how this could get any more sickening.

"Knowing for sure would only spoil a good story," he said.

"Ah, so you're a cynic, Señor Guajardo." He almost sounded disappointed.

"I know what's realistic."

Honaker sighed dramatically. "You could be right. A mystery's probably more entertaining than an old corpse." He gave a quick smile and held his eyebrows raised. "But if you hear anything new, remember, I'm always interested."

El smiled back. "I'll keep that in mind," he told him, taking care to keep the truth of it from his eyes.

"Well, I'll definitely look forward to hearing from you again, whatever the reason." Honaker rose smoothly to his feet, leaning forwards to extend his hand across the desk. "It's been good to meet you."

El stood too, taking the offered hand as briefly as would avoid an obvious insult. Honaker's grip was as pristine as the rest of his image, smooth, dry palm and long fingers with neat nails. "Thanks for your help," he said, casually neutral.

The two men who had loaded his car still stood near the trunk. He demanded the return of his Glock wordlessly from the one who had searched him, sliding it back into its holster.

The man from the bar had the doors opening as he climbed into the car, and he drove straight out. As he turned onto the road, they were already closing again behind him with their harsh rattle.

Making the turn at the end of the street was enough, settling back further into the seat, losing the pointed awareness of how the air moved through his throat and into his lungs.

The drowning relief on exiting places and situations was becoming too familiar since he'd met Sands.

He took the minor roads to wander north through the city, switching direction and keeping watch on the mirrors. He could feel the Ford's altered responses, the weight shift and the lowered suspension, the greater momentum of the tail as he cornered. Its acceleration hadn't been good before, and it suffered noticeably now. He hoped they weren't going to have to rely on it; it would be a serious problem if they were ever followed.

He saw nothing.

Every city had its places where people would take care not to notice what went on around them, and those parts were easy enough to tell. He traced one of them close to the railway lines, letting the cracked roads lead him past buildings increasingly battered and peeling, where there were fewer faces and none of them American.

He pulled into a service alley, rancid with garbage in the heat, and opened the trunk.

Honaker was too curious, and reminded him too much of Sands. The surface was different - Honaker's was pure silvered reflection, where Sands more often wore the darker obscurity of one-way glass - but it was still a mirror, protecting the same viciously pitched mind from those too stupid to see beyond it.

He had no fears about opening the case - Honaker would have let him inspect everything, and he wasn't expecting anything crude and obvious. He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, but he knew weapons, and he started by removing everything from the case and pushing it into the garbage skip behind a bar. He stripped down the guns one by one in the trunk, the lid resting on his shoulders to stop anyone watching from the windows above. He was expecting to be ignored, but there was no point in being stupid.

Sands was right in one way - every gun was beautifully crafted and in perfect condition, freshly cleaned and minimally oiled and lubricated to avoid dust. He'd never used the Barrett M99-1 - and he couldn't imagine what Sands had in mind for such a weapon anyway - but he knew a number of smaller calibre bolt-action rifles, and the principles were the same. Plus, there turned out to be a manual if he'd needed it.

With the guns reassembled, he checked through all the boxes of ammunition and grenades. He found nothing that didn't belong.

He closed the trunk and left, still watching the mirrors as he drove.

He parked back at the hotel and went directly to Sands' room. He didn't knock, just used the key he'd taken and let himself in - he believed now that Sands wouldn't shoot him accidentally, and knocking would be no help if it was deliberate.

He stood his guitar case by the door and walked to the table where Sands sat, leaning his hip on the edge. "Give me a cigarette."

"Don't you think you should get your own?" Sands asked. "Maybe I'll buy you a pack for your birthday."

He ignored that as he took and lit the cigarette Sands offered. "I won't do that again," he said. "I'll shoot him first."

Sands gave a slow, closed-lipped smile, his words spun just as long. "So you got to meet the man himself? He must have been interested."

He put the lighter back on the table, low hollow tap of plastic on wood. "He says the CIA are looking for you."

Sands showed no reaction, no hint of surprise or concern. "Well, of course they are. The Company doesn't like agents who just disappear. It's not tidy." He paused while he clicked flame to his own cigarette. "Someone can't cross the t's on their report and sign it off, when they'd really like to be able to file it away in a dusty, spider-decorated basement and forget I existed."

El breathed out slow, watching smoke spread away from him, stretching to fill the room. "You're sure that's all it is?"

"Right now, they're looking for a body in a ditch. They're just going through the motions." His mouth twitched at the corner. "It only gets messy if I turn up alive."

"Which you are about to do," he reminded him.

Sands turned his head up towards him slowly, until he was staring into his own reflection in the black arc of lens. "No. I'm not."

So anyone who would say otherwise was going to die.

El could understand that. And he could accept anything that would keep himself and his town from that kind of investigation.

He'd been right about the cigarette, he thought, watching it smoulder down slowly towards his fingers. It was good, yes, but it was missing the unerring edge that the first one had carried.

That was no bad thing. He shouldn't make a habit of this again. Eight years ago, he'd been able to fight and survive on tortured lungs, but he wouldn't like to try it now.

He reached across, crushing his cigarette half-smoked into the ashtray without disturbing its position by Sands. He rose to his feet and collected his guitar case from the corner.

"So, where do we find out who's waiting for us in Culiacán?"

Sands knew exactly where they were going when they reached the city, giving him not only an address, but confident and accurate directions.

This was nothing like visiting the boy's house. This was a wealthier part of Culiacán, low walls around gardens, and trees to screen the roads from view. Not rich, but a long way from poor.

They left the car out on the street, Sands following El closely up the curving pathway to the house. Only part of the building was visible from the gate - single-storey in a modest design, simple window frames and screens. The front of the house was obscured by the placing of sweetly aromatic bushes of some kind. El wasn't much interested in gardening, and only ever bothered to remember which ones had spines when he crawled through them.

They were over half way along the path when El realised all his attention was sweeping out in front of and alongside him. He was aware of Sands' footsteps behind him, matching his own, there, and more than that almost unimportant.

He stopped, muscles flash-frozen by the depth of chill.

Sands had taken one more step before he too locked down, right behind him now. He could hear him breathing, light and slow, hear the slide of hair over a collar as Sands tipped his head to listen.

"Something wrong?" Sands' voice was so low he barely heard it, but he could feel it, the movement of air past his ear.

"No, nothing." He spoke in a normal voice.

Nothing, except he had started to trust Sands.

Maybe Sands had been right when he told him he was already dead.

He began to move again, keeping his steps relaxed and natural with an effort. The shot of adrenaline shivering through his muscles was read by his body as fighting, not walking up someone's path to knock on the door.

Sands remained still a second or two longer before he followed, and El's quick glance over his shoulder showed his face utterly intent, still walking with that odd-looking tilt to his head.

Sands didn't believe it was nothing, but that wasn't his problem.

"Steps, three of them, onto a verandah." Sands followed him up without pause.

The door was solid, no windows near it, no way to see as someone came to answer. He rang the bell, a well-worn metal button-push, and stood aside, leaving Sands to deal with his 'friend'.

The footsteps that came a moment later were firm and confident, no attempt at stealth, but they halted behind the door, and El knew they were being checked.

The door opened a little cautiously, behind it a man with a creeping hairline and a neat beard, watchful eyes fixed on Sands.

He knew this man. The one who was fighting Barillo before he killed him.

The man glanced at El, the recognition sharp in his eyes, but his real focus stayed with Sands. "I wondered what had happened to you."

"That's a real nice change of heart, Jorge. You didn't seem so concerned before."

'Jorge' ignored the comment, but the damning flicker of guilt was too obvious to El.

"El, meet Jorge Ramírez, intermittently retired from the FBI," Sands continued. "Jorge, you should feel privileged. You get to meet the legendary El Mariachi himself."

El flashed a pointless glare at Sands, before his attention snapped back to Ramírez.

Ramírez was looking to El again, studying more closely this time. "I knew you had to be another of his players," he said, his eyes flicking briefly to Sands, "but I wouldn't have thought it of that name."

El stared back evenly, easing the pressure from his teeth. He was at the man's home, and they were here asking for favours. "I had my own reasons," he said.

"As did we all." Ramírez gave him a sharp look. "I still don't know that we did more good than harm."

"I do," El said quietly.

Ramírez raised his eyebrows fast. "Really? A lot of civilians died so that three evil men could die with them." His eyes hardened. "Just how much did you know, or suspect? How much did you ignore for your 'own reasons', when instead you might have stopped him." His eyes swept over Sands.

He'd thought of it, many times, if he'd acted differently instead of simply taking the deal. "I couldn't have stopped it," he said. "It was too big. No one man could have stopped it, I think. Not even him."

"As it happens, no, I probably couldn't have, not by then," Sands interrupted, vivid, cheerful contrast. "Even if I'd wanted to, which I didn't," he added, with a flashed smile. "I'm perfectly happy for you two to carry on hashing over old times, though, but I'd suggest not out here."

Ramírez' stare flicked between them, and El could imagine how much he didn't want them in his house. But he stood aside eventually, and El stepped forward first, with Sands shadowing.

Ramírez led them through to a room at the back of the house. Its furnishings were simple, elegant in a slightly old-fashioned way, very much in line with the style of the house and of the man himself. El brushed his leg along the arm of the chair nearest the door, slight jar and catch of fabric shifting his chains out of time. Sands settled into it easily as he took the next one himself. Ramírez sat opposite them, careful, and made no gesture of playing host.

"Why are you here?" His eyes wandered between them, asking clearly why they were here together.

"Straight to the point, as ever." Sands was drawing out that lazy voice of his still further, deliberately annoying. "It's good to know you haven't changed."

"And nor have you, it seems," Ramírez said, his quiet words tight with distaste. "But I doubt that you could."

"Oh, you'd be surprised what can change when you're not looking carefully enough." He spoke in the distinct, casual tone that El recognised as pure threat.

Ramírez breathed out slowly, and his shoulders lost their stiffness. "I'm not going to play your games," he said, flat and hinting at frustration. "Just tell me what it is you've come for."

Sands drew his hands up beneath his chin, creak of gloves as he steepled his fingers together. "I suspect you've been doing a bit more than putting your feet up and sampling your way through your wine cellar since we last met, Jorge, my old friend. So I was wondering if you'd care to share with us what you know about the reorganisation of the former Barillo cartel."

Ramírez didn't answer right away, watching Sands and weighing his choice of words before he spoke. "My business with those people is done."

Sands tilted his head, raised eyebrows and faint smile, a mockery of polite interest. "You know, you probably do believe that," he said slowly. "You probably believe you were never going to do anything with the information, just put it aside for a rainy day when you might need some insurance." His lips twitched at one corner. "If nothing else, you'd poke around a little to keep your hand in, stop yourself from getting bored. Agents don't retire, remember, Jorge."

"And that's why you're here - because you are not retired." His eyes swept across, including El in the statement.

"Well, the cartel certainly aren't, and I don't like it when they come looking for us."

"So you will get them first."

"With a little help from my friends," Sands said lightly, sudden bright smile hanging in place.

Ramírez held himself expressionless all through, every muscle in his face still except to shape his words; this man revealed very little of what he was thinking, unless he wanted to. "Nobody really knows about my involvement," he said eventually. His gaze passed briefly from Sands to El. "Anyone who knew was dead, or disappeared. Oh, they came, and they asked their questions, and so I lied. With no other witnesses, they were stuck with believing me. Or pretending to, which comes down to the same thing." He rubbed his hand thoughtfully over his chin. "I have nothing at all to gain by talking to you, and an awful lot to lose."

Sands drew his legs in beside his chair and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "Did it feel good, Jorge?" he asked, smiling. "Killing them? Watching them die?"

Ramírez watched him with his own tight smile. "You know it did."

"Well, there you are. I gave you what you wanted."

"Only because you thought it would get you what you wanted."

"Yes, well, that part of it didn't quite go to plan." The mocking tone dropped from his voice, and he finished flat and drawling. "The bottom line, Jorge, my friend, is you got the score and I got screwed. You owe me."

Ramírez settled back into his chair, his hands sitting clearly visible in his lap. An old-style clock ticked loud somewhere in the house, counting through the lengths of silence before he spoke. "Be sure this is what you want from me, because you don't get to come back later for more." He switched his stare to El. "Either of you."

"Oh, I think we can agree to that."

Sands' instant acceptance of the condition wasn't right. El would have expected him to negotiate, to blackmail, to keep Ramírez available for information-tapping in the future.

Sands could simply be lying, of course, but that seemed less his style than to play with the truth.

It bothered him that he didn't know why.

Ramírez continued to watch Sands, and El suspected it bothered him too.

Sands sat, content to wait, a delicate stretch to his lips.

Ramírez took a single, slow breath and then he began to talk.

And he turned out to be everything that Sands had predicted.

He had followed the obvious stories of infighting and the invasion of neighbouring cartels into Sinaloan territory after the disastrous coup. More deaths, more disappearances - all of that was effectively public knowledge, available to anyone reading the papers and buying drinks for a few members of the local police. But he knew too the details of what had happened when the overt battles ended, the deals that were struck, and the sell-outs. El continued mostly to listen, content not to interfere - Sands asked many of the same questions and clarifications that he would have himself, and Sands knew this man and how to work around him.

The cartel had reformed under the control of a man named Montejo, one of Barillo's people who had been in charge of shipments and supply routes. He'd been away from Culiacán when everything happened, and unlike many, who bolted from the influx of AFN and government soldiers in the aftermath, he headed straight back to the city. It was his organisation that had kept at least some of the drugs moving, and with it the cash to pay the men. That and the strategic yielding of certain areas to a Tijuana-based outfit had ensured the survival of the cartel as an independent entity, and his reward was that the money now all came to him.

He ran his operations from a large house some way outside the city, and had been kept busy shifting routes away from the renewed government interference and re-establishing contracts. That had bought them the last three months. Until now, when operations were back to normal and running smoothly, and Montejo was finally able to spare men against outsiders.

And El was once again important enough to chase.

"That's everything I know." Ramírez said eventually. He looked between them for a moment, appearing to consider something, then stood. "I have one more thing for you." He moved to the door, and looked back over his shoulder at El. "Wait here," he said, eyes and voice making it more than a request.

El didn't like not knowing what the man was doing. He knew exactly who they were, and the easiest way to guarantee that peaceful life he wanted was to be rid of both of them.

He looked to Sands, who was listening automatically, his head drifting around as he tracked the sound of footsteps through the house. He sprawled easily enough in his chair, his hands settled on his thighs instead of by a gun as one gloved index finger tapped thoughtfully in time with Ramírez' steps. His tension was at the most basic of levels as he counted and marked directions, and El had watched him long enough now to tell the reality from the pretence.

He didn't trust Ramírez, any more than he trusted anyone, but he wasn't expecting deceit here.

El wondered what gave him that confidence, and then remembered the flash of guilt at the door.

Ramírez' choice of hiding place must be accessible enough if you knew where to look - his footsteps were returning already, and El's eyes moved back to the door. Ramírez was watching them in turn as he walked in - both of them, but always more centred on Sands. He carried a roll of papers beneath one arm, and he stopped by Sands' chair. "This is a copy of the plans to the house." He didn't offer it, he pushed it forward until it touched his hand and Sands took it from him.

He knew. Either he was incredibly perceptive, or he had already known.

Sands just smiled and handed the papers over to El. "Well, thank you, Jorge. I knew all along I could rely on you to come through for us, but that's a little more than even I was hoping for."

Ramírez still stood near the door, impassive. "I'll show you out," he said. His voice hollowed all the normal polite overtones from the words.

"Oh, don't worry, we won't be out-staying our welcome." Sands was sliding to his feet as he spoke, and El took the cue to do the same. "There's really nothing worse than a guest you can't persuade to leave, so I'm always happy to take a hint."

El stepped ahead of Sands and met Ramírez' eyes. "Can you tell me what Montejo looks like?" he asked.

Ramírez laughed soft and short, a flashing glimpse of someone almost friendly and much younger. "I can do better than that. He's already started establishing himself with the local communities." He crossed the room to a magazine rack, rustling through it, then tossed El a copy of the local weekly. "Page five."

He opened it to find an article on Montejo's donation for much-needed repairs to a local school. There was a picture of a man almost ready to be called middle-aged, smiling wide beneath his moustache as he stood by the peeling sign outside the school.

Always the cartels bought the people. It never changed.

"Thank you," he said quietly, refolding the paper and tucking it beneath his arm with the plans.

Ramírez turned and walked out down the hallway to open the door for them. He stopped El as he reached him, looking him in the eyes - not hard, but direct. "I mean it. Don't come back."

"We already had this discussion, Jorge," Sands said lightly from behind him. "I might be offended that you don't trust me."

Ramírez ignored Sands, clearly placing no value on what he said. El held his gaze and nodded.

He still didn't look convinced, but he could gain nothing further in reassurance from a man he knew only by reputation.

El turned away down the steps, Sands moving with him instantly, echoing the creak of his footsteps on the sagging wood.

Ramírez didn't give him the feeling of a man who couldn't be trusted, and Sands and his own senses would tell him if the man made any unwanted movement. El looked back only briefly.

He stood silent on the verandah where they had left him, his shape melding into the wood of the frame he leaned against, watching with flat eyes.

El had the feeling he would stand there until they were long gone from his property.

He unlocked the car, tossed the papers into the back with his guitar case, and slid behind the wheel. He waited as Sands trailed a hand light along the hood, faintest trace through the scattered dust, following the curve of metal to his own door and his own seat; waited until the door closed and Sands stilled.

He held the keys in his hand, his finger sliding back and forth around the sun-warm metal of the ignition. "Don't ever tell people who I am."

Sands shrugged, the movement distinct even as he reached forward to the glove compartment for a new pack of cigarettes. "You shouldn't get yourself too worked up over that. I won't be making a habit of it, but Jorge's safe enough."

"You don't trust him."

He sat back in his seat, speaking slow and in unusually good humour. "You know, in an odd sort of way, I kind of do, but only because I know exactly how far I can trust him." Plastic rustled between his hands as he felt for the pull tab with leather-clumsy fingers. "He's one of those lovely people who never change; one moment to the next, one year to the next, he's completely inflexible in what he believes, and he considers it a virtue."

Sands pushed the freed wrapper deep into his pocket before he took and lit his cigarette. No untidiness around Sands ever, absolute knowledge of where everything was, even the truly insignificant.

"He regrets it." As he spoke, he wondered whether Sands needed to know this, whether the past might be better left. "Whatever it was when you met before, the guilt has followed him."

"Oh, I thought it might," Sands said. He smiled slowly. "Jorge likes to think of himself as one of the good guys. He can do things that most people would consider completely shocking, and still firmly believe he's right every last inch of the way, at least while he does it. Don't you think that's interesting?"

Sands didn't even bother to turn towards him. El got the point anyway.

He was no wiser on if he'd done the right thing.

He started the car and drove back through too-familiar streets towards the centre.

The temptation brushed at him to go to the boy's house to check, to see if anyone had been looking there, to make sure they had stayed away; as he drew closer, its fingers seeped deeper through him, near-corrosive. But it would be a bad idea to create that connection again if there was any chance at all it might fade.

He hadn't told Sands that Honaker had mentioned the child. That conversation would only make one of them pointlessly angry and frustrated. Most likely himself when Sands simply didn't care.

If the family were being tracked, the only thing they could do to help was what they were doing anyway - destroy those who chased them.

He stopped at the stores and bought a large scale terrain map of the area around the house and a newspaper, then found them a hotel. El took Sands back to his room - he could go through his obsessive, deliberate checks of his own later.

There would be no drive-past and no surveillance of this house. It stood alone in the hills outside the city, and any vehicle in the area would be too obvious.

El studied Ramírez' plans, and the map, letting them settle together in his head and describing the resulting picture to Sands. He covered all the angles on layout and approach, first running over generalities, and then adding layers of specifics and exact scale. Sands mostly listened in silence, questioning details occasionally, making scathing comments on Montejo's taste in architectural styles rather more often.

Eventually Sands sat back, playing thoughtfully with the unlit cigarette between his lips. "Well, that definitely makes this one a night job. Too much exposure otherwise, unless your old friend El Presidente's willing to lend us a tank."

El had come to the same conclusion with his first look at the plans twenty minutes earlier. "I don't think his thanks will go quite that far."

"Save the life of a President and all you get for it is a pretty sash. Sign another one onto the list of what's fucked up about this country, El."

He shrugged. "There was the money too, if I'd wanted it."

Sands laughed, his real humour with no glass between the layers. "That was never his to start with. It's no big burn to the soul to start handing out someone else's carefully hoarded dough."

His words slipped through his smile as an exaggerated lilt. "And yet I don't think you would have been so happy to do it."

"Well, no," Sands said with perfect honesty, "but I'm not the President. I never claimed to be about the high ideals."

El thought that was a very good thing - it was one deception in which Sands would never be able to convince.

He looked down to the map again, to the planning and the killing. "We'll have to leave the car where the road curves around the final hill. Beyond that, we'll be in full view."

Sands followed his shift back into business, shedding humour without pause. "What's the range from there?"

He shifted his attention between map and plans, feeling for a more accurate idea of low level scale. "One hundred metres to the wall, maybe a little more."

Sands tipped his head, quick concentration shifting over him. "Three hundred and thirty feet, and another couple hundred to the house from there." He smiled. "That's a good sort of range for the M203. I wonder how Montejo will like waking up to a few grenades?"

El's eyes swivelled up from the table. "Who do you think will be firing these grenades?"

Sands angled patronising eyebrows at him, his whole forehead wrinkling deep with it. "Well, me, who else?"

"You can't aim," he told him. Not in the night's silence, and from a distance.

"It doesn't matter a damn where the first one hits, they'll all start running around and yelling once it goes off, and then I'll know exactly where to aim."

That was true to a point. The house was surrounded only by empty hillside, deliberately isolated to protect it. There were no innocent bystanders if Sands missed the compound. "Even if you're accurate, the weapon isn't," he said. "You won't know whether or not you hit your target."

"Oh, I think they'll scream differently when there's a grenade right there." Sands was grinning, pure focussed delight; the blood behind it almost visible, welling up between his teeth. "They're going to tell me everything I could want to know."

He didn't like this obvious joy in killing. It might be there, inside, because that was how it was, but he didn't have to revel in it. "If we're doing this at night, we might as well try and do it quietly."

"El, you never did anything quietly in your life. I'll bet you wake the neighbours every time you fuck." The cigarette between his lips tilted upwards with his smile, and El's mouth dropped open for an instant retort before he clamped his teeth back together hard. He wasn't going to start discussing his sex life with anyone, and not with Sands. "And besides," Sands went on, oblivious, or more likely pretending to be, "it's a big place, and at the tail end of a drugs war that means a whole lot of goons. If you'd prefer, you could give your friends a call and see if they'd be willing to help out."

"No." His voice was flat. That wouldn't ever be negotiable.

"Right, so that makes it you and me and one chance at surprise." His mouth kept the quirk, but his face slipped sharper in the pause. "I'm really not so hot on the catburglar creeping and climbing angle, and you can take maybe five, six with a silencer before someone knows you're there and everyone in the place comes at you. And while I'm not doubting your ability to somehow make that work for you, it's much easier to take out as many as we can right off and save the one-on-one for when they're scattered."

El shifted in his chair until he was facing him direct. "Ramírez said Montejo has a wife," he said quietly.

"So?"

"If I went in there, I would spare her. That weapon will not."

"Barillo had a daughter, as I recall." His voice stretched, swinging tones pushed further with each syllable. Two months ago El would have been annoyed, with Sands so blatantly amused, patronising. Now he knew he wasn't quite reaching it. "Would you have let her live too?"

He might. He'd met women who fought, as if Carolina would ever let him forget, but not so many - the cartel men more often chased looks than brains or courage. If she was holding a gun, he would kill her without thought, but if she wasn't, he doubted he would shoot.

Sands smirk twisted and fractured, a flickering moment of everything acid-warped inside him. "You should take real good care of your eyeballs, El, you'll miss them when they're gone."

He looked away, over to the window, to the traffic noise rising from the street. "You think there's a reason to justify killing anyone. The innocent, the bystanders."

"I believe I was just saying how this is a screwed up kind of country you have here, El," Sands said, flipping back into a tone of airy conversation. "One of the things I've noticed while I've been here is that revenge is quite the popular deal. Sometimes they'll come after you right away, and sometimes they wait for years and then show up one day when you thought they'd forgotten all about you; but if you leave someone alive they'll always come back to get you."

It wasn't something he could deny. He'd done that to others, and others had done it to him.

And Sands.... Sands was about to come back to complete his own revenge that had waited since the Day of the Dead.

He didn't like it still, but this fight was about Sands' revenge perhaps even more than his own. It wasn't anyone's place to interfere with that. "Fine. We can do it both ways. As long as you stop firing that thing when I go in."

"Well, it won't be any fun for me if my designated driver doesn't show after the party, stuck out in the middle of Mexican mulesville. I might get thirsty before I find a store." He angled his eyebrows upwards. "So that only leaves the question of when."

El shook open the newspaper. "It will stay clear tonight." Anything else would have been unusual for winter in Culiacán. "Half moon."

Sands tipped his head a fraction. "That could be too much."

"It makes no difference. There will be perimeter lights." Sands might have advantages in darkness, firing with a range weapon, but he liked to be able to see.

And he had done far too much waiting now.

"Wind?"

"Seven kilometres." Low enough for the grenade launcher.

Sands reached to the table beside him for his lighter, finally touching flame to the cigarette that angled from his mouth. "I know it's something of a cliché, but I'd recommend the early hours. Jorge didn't exactly paint Montejo as a party animal, but I'd prefer the best chance of catching everyone asleep." His words were patterns in the air, clouds and curls of smoke spreading between them. "What time's dawn these days anyway?"

"Around six-twenty. No light before six." He didn't need the newspaper for that.

Sands pushed his chair back, harsh, multi-pitched squeak of wood over tile. "So I guess I'll get some sleep in, and see you around three." He swept the lighter up into his pocket as he stood and smiled. "I'll assume I can rely on you for that, or else I could leave a wake-up call with the desk?"

He didn't bother to answer that. He pushed up onto his feet to go with Sands to his room, trying to ignore the anticipation that unfurled, twisted, within him.

He never could.

The drive was just over an hour, empty roads and colourless landscape sucked of life by low, distorting moon-cast.

He killed the lights for the last few miles, following dirt curves slow into the hills. He didn't know how much of a watch they kept at this hour, but he wouldn't invite attention by arcing twin beams across the valley sides, even beams weak as those of a rusting Ford.

He slung the binoculars and a short grapple line from his shoulder - he could climb anything he could get his hands onto, but almost four metres of predictably smooth wall was that bit too much. They angled their way along and a little way up the hill until they had a line of sight across to the house, crouching behind brush.

Sands double-checked the M16/203 while El ran the binoculars over the house. There were lights along the wall, as he'd guessed, but the place wasn't glowing like the Christmas department store he'd half-expected. Someone inside must prefer darkness for sleeping.

He didn't see anything that differed from the plans, no obvious later additions or changes. Nothing that would affect the details they'd discussed on the way.

There were two men standing by the main door, no others obviously in sight.

That would change.

He focussed on down the left wall, checking for assets or obstructions and finding neither.

He lowered the binoculars as Sands unclipped the strap from the front of the M16 so there was no risk it would interfere with the grenades. "Start with thirty degrees elevation at two-o-clock," he told him as he got to his feet. "Give me thirty seconds to reach the wall. Ten minutes, then I'll be inside."

Sands half-turned his face, quick grin in profile. "Got it."

"Count slowly," he told him, knowing well how accurate Sands' sense of timing was when he concentrated, and he was off towards the wall before Sands could retort, keeping low among the scrub as he rounded the hill.

He zig-zagged fast between the bushes, holding a tight basic course but taking the cover that offered itself along the way. The murky, slanting light of the drive seemed to morph now, the moon splintering bright around him to throw dramatic contrast between undergrowth and bare earth, and presumably approaching mariachi if anyone cared to look at the wrong moment.

He slowed a little as he came closer, his footfalls lighter and more deliberately chosen.

He wasn't quite at the wall when the first launch coughed behind him - he had a suspicion that might just be Sands' choice of payback for his parting comment.

The grenade flashed brilliant some way off to his right, hurling thunder and pressure and dirt just outside the compound, and he took the last metres in a dead sprint, seeking the cover of the wall before anyone started looking outwards for the source of the blast, pounding footsteps buried in the heavy thump and shiver of earth.

Every light brightened within seconds, interlocking beams leaping outward over soil and scrub, inward to drown the house with light, blinking out much of the arc of night sky.

Voices raised from inside the compound, broken chatter on radios, loud calls along the length of wall for damage reports, yelled questions and directions

He trotted along the base of the wall, half-crouched in the relative shadow below the beams. Another distant whump, a second grenade shattering somewhere behind him, and he picked up speed again with the cover of the noise, rounding the corner of the grounds.

The explosions fractured on through the night as he skirted the walls, not-quite-regular. Reload time, aim correction, and then a variable gap to throw off anyone trying to track the source of the attack. Once the gap was longer, and El imagined Sands crawling along the hillside, varying position.

Sands wouldn't make himself easy to target.

He gauged his distance along the rear wall, the house between him and all the activity out at the front, but not wanting to go in too close to this door. Most of the men would have been sent to deal with the obvious assault, but there would still be guards left in the important places.

He waited for another grenade before he swung the grapple line, cover for the noise it made, or any he made as he shimmied up and over, risk of metal singing on stone.

He dropped down into the compound, rolling automatically as he landed while he established no gunfire tracking him and no shout.

There were some things plans wouldn't tell, and it had been too much to hope for that the grounds would be lush planted with tall bushes and a glut of ugly stonework like the old Barillo estate. The land nearest the house had been worked on, but he had some seventy metres of near-raw packed earth with a few trees and straggling bushes before he reached it.

Maybe Montejo had future plans now that the cash was rolling in, or maybe he just wasn't much for gardening either.

He drew both P14s, silencers on, and used what there was, dashing between drought-scraggy cover with the vicious flash-howls of high explosive. He was barely tracking events on the other side of the building now, registering and using the detonations automatically while his attention focussed closer, reaching for the low sounds beneath, for the slight movement sweeping across hearing or vision that would hand him the extra second.

He made it to the building almost on schedule and undiscovered. From here it would be easier.

Irregular walls to keep the house 'interesting' let him slide along to within sight of the door, pausing to check on a few windows along the way.

Two men on guard with the inevitable automatics, and too much of their attention on what was happening on the other side of the building. A camera on the wall above them - no way to know if they fell in its field of vision or anyone was watching it.

He waited, counting the seconds. Reload, aim correction... pause.....

Four rounds whisper-clustered into each man and they crumpled, almost together, clatter of guns on stone deadened by the fading shock of the grenade.

The door would be locked. They would have keys if he searched them, but without knowing what he might find on the other side, he preferred to take a less obvious way in.

No-one else came, so he could discount the camera. Anyone checking them was probably concentrating on the ones at the front.

He scooped up a fallen AK and slipped back around to one of those interesting windows. A darkened room, a closed door sealing it, and the key left in the window lock. Nobody here was worried about burglars, and the security alarms would have been turned off now everyone was up and moving around.

Wait, ready, and the butt of the AK smashed through one of the smaller panes with the next explosion.

He was past his ten minutes now and Sands was supposed to have stopped the high explosive assault so he didn't accidentally kill him, but it was turning out too useful to be more than mildly annoying. He seemed to be keeping the range deliberately short; nothing had come near this side of the house.

He opened the window and dropped through onto a muffling rug in a sitting room, the furniture sparse and elegant in a highly ornate way; a woman's taste. He slid up behind the door, plans filtering through his mind - corridor outside, with the door he'd seen some metres to the left; multiple rooms both ways, but more to the right, stairs at the end.

It could get complicated.

He listened, ear cocked against the wood - voice speaking low to the right, intermittent in a way that meant radio or cellphone, too low to catch the words. A second voice occasionally adding brief comments.

He wondered where he would find Montejo. Nowhere obvious like the master bedroom, not any more, but if he was typical of his kind he wouldn't be too near the doors either. Not when he had so many guards with guns taking his money for those risks.

He checked up against the walls to the sides, but he couldn't hear anything obvious from the rooms next to this one. He hoped that meant they were empty.

Last seconds at the door, hearing nothing this time; call over, it seemed. He turned the handle enough to free the latch, opening it just a crack, the P14 right back in his hand. Light shattered through the gap, and he peered into it, blinking, still but for the shiver-dance of his pulse with every humming second.

Faint sounds from the right again - not voices, just life and breath uncontained, careless in the air. Not enough to hint whether two men still or just one now. His eyes altered and settled, light resolving into a wall and the sharp edge of a doorframe, hints of curved shadow telling him of lamps above in both directions.

He edged the toe of his boot into the crack in the doorway.

Sweeping the door aside, stepping through with a .45 raised to cover each slice of hallway, looking right and trigger murmuring an arc of death across the two men standing by the staircase.

A change in the air, a whisper in pressure, and he whipped left, firing reflexively before his eyes had settled on the man in the half-open doorway. The two behind him dropped with echoing force, bodies thumping and guns rattling over tile. A shout from upstairs, feet starting to move, and the target in front had a gun on him just before his chest shattered in clusters of red, a shot-blast and a single bullet whistling past El while he dived to twist back the other way.

Both pistols on the man headed downstairs, the right clicking empty, the left taking him down before it ran dry, but there were others already following. He dropped the P14s, flicking the Glocks down into his hands instead, far faster than reloading and silence blazed into ashes as an ally.

The sound of them exploded in his head.

Everything was bullets and movement, shooting by instinct, jagging between the noises at stairway and door, guards running and shooting from both directions. He ducked back into a doorway; quick, clicking reload on the Glocks, shoving one into his waistband and reaching back for the shotgun holstered along his spine. Fast, forced breaths, oxygen rushing back into his muscles, and he pushed out again into the focus.

Targeted before he even passed the frame, dropping low and rolling straight through into the doorway opposite, emptying the shotgun at the crowd on the stairs, Glock blasting the man at the door. The vase by the wall fragmented as he slid into cover, hanging shattered in the air for moments before it and the small table beneath it crashed to the tiles, the sound of it nothing in the choking enclosed echo of gunfire.

On his feet against the wall, reload, double click. Three left near the stairs that he had seen.

Swinging out again and no hiding this time, angling across the hallway through the shower of dust fragments to take them, whipping the Glock around behind to bullet-halt the movement screaming in the corner of his vision.

Wall sharp against his shoulders, house quiet. Stillness through the plaster haze hanging along the hallway, swirling with the currents from the half-open door.

Reload.

Slow along the wall, one leg across the other, gaze flashing each way. Pausing to pick up his P14s, far too good to leave; stepping over chunks of shattered wall and decor, over bodies and blood as he approached the stairs.

So much for the Señora's elegant lifestyle.

There was gunfire outside, behind him, distant through the crackle of flame, quick bursts of three or four rounds, sometimes the strung-out rattlesnake warning of an automatic.

That was Sands covering the gate now, taking down the ones who thought to flee.

He moved on past the staircase, checking further along the corridor, glancing into rooms and closing doors as he went. He didn't want to be followed up the stairs, or at least not without warning.

He went as far as the door on the east side of the house, opening it wide to kill any guards. There was only a corpse and the remnants of a shattered trellis, wooden beams barring the entrance at every angle, still trailing stems and leaves of the plant they had supported.

He lifted his eyebrows with a flickering smile. Dangerous, but useful.

The stray grenade, and the man who had sent it.

Back to the stairs, faster now, confident along a hall of sealed doorways, the promise of noise to warn him before any attack. Wall sliding curved along his back as he climbed up past the dead men, and the scrape of a shoe on tile flash-loud from above as one appeared still living.

Both barrels, an explosive jar of noise and blood, and the man slumped to slide down towards his friends, blood streaking unevenly over the stone.

He slid the empty shotgun away, .45 in each hand as he reached the floor above.

Another corridor full of gaping doorways. Wonderful.

With the men he'd shot who had come from upstairs, he hoped there weren't too many left.

Edging forwards along one wall, attention flickering over the doors in turn.

A barrel swung out two doors ahead, and he was diving before the spray of unsighted bullets crossed the width of the hallway at chest height. Twisting and sliding to lie unmoving with his back to the wall when the firing stopped.

Long seconds of reaching echo, then the low, quick murmur of words.

The man stepped out fast to check, shrieking as the bullets took his knees, silenced as El's aim moved over his chest.

That was suddenly looking the most interesting room in the house.

He was on his feet and crouched at the doorframe, swinging around it, his guns flowing through air to target the two men standing armed, one of them a lined face and a distinctively clipped moustache.

Montejo.

He shifted his aim as he fired, two rounds through his arm, and the gun clattered to the floor before it had even been fully aimed. Montejo shrieked high once, reaching for shattered bone with his other hand instinctively, and pulling back just as fast before he touched it.

The other man had already dropped after El emptied the second Glock into him.

This room was the security centre, computers at several desks with monitors covering the grounds out at the front, dark smoke roiling across in waves. One screen sparked briefly in the quiet, ripped into dead plastic and glass by a through round.

His face had washed white in shocked pain, but Montejo steadied himself to face him again, speaking past jagged breaths. "So I guess this would make you El Mariachi?"

He'd known the man who could force a fractured cartel to hold together wouldn't be a coward. The lack of whining or screaming only made this easier. "How many know where to find me?" he demanded, holding him with both pistols. Montejo didn't know one was out. "Answer or I shoot the other arm."

"All of them," Montejo answered instantly. "Every last man who works for me knows, and killing as many as you can find even outside here won't help, because there'll always be more."

That was a lie. If everyone knew, more people would have come looking for him, hoping to be first to the money.

If he had to lie about it, most likely the information had been passed to very few, and there was a good chance that killing Montejo and those here would be the end of it, at least this time. "Then I guess my only hope is to make sure there's no-one to pay the reward," he said, and pulled the trigger, four .45 rounds direct to the chest and a final one to the head to be sure.

He turned away even as the blood still spattered towards him, was at the door when the body hit with a dull thud. He paused to reload all the guns, swapping a Glock back out for his shotgun.

This side of the house was darker, quieter, the restless snapping of the fires outside muted by the depth of walls.

He listened, and heard nothing. If there was anyone else up here, they weren't obviously coming to get him.

He hooked up an MP5 from the floor and fired into the computers in case any cameras had picked him up along the way. They shattered into a satisfying pile of plastic and circuitry before the clip clicked dry, and he tossed the gun back to its corpse.

He ducked out into the hallway and spun, but nothing moved. He slipped along to the end of the corridor and a cursory check into the last of the rooms, and found no-one else.

He made his way down the other staircase, cautious, paused again to listen at the bottom.

There.

Someone further along the hall, slow, careful steps, quiet, but not enough. He moved to one of the rooms, just inside the doorway.

The footsteps slowed, paused - he'd reached the bend in the hallway. Two steps, loud, fast, he'd be swinging out with gun raised -

Wait.

Steady and even shoe-scrapes now, relaxing again as he walked along the empty corridor, and El dodged out from the doorway, both guns, shotgun round to the face and an arc of semi-automatic bullets across the width of the hall.

The man dropped with a ringing clatter of rifle on tile, metallic note hanging loud even after the shotgun blast.

El slid along the wall towards him a little, reloading the shotgun as he went. Stop, listen.

Move again.

Three clustered gunshots whispered ahead of him, and he dropped into a crouch instinctively, though there were no bullets and the silencer echoed too distant, some way beyond that bend.

He held there, listening. There was a thump, and no further gunfire.

Silence.

A fast, even tap-tap-tap that wasn't familiar and he knew should be; footsteps below it, slower and lower-pitched than that light rhythm. Footsteps absolutely steady and regular, unchanged on the approach to the corner where most men would slow.

He waited, still, as the cane snicked into sight and Sands paused where the wall fell away, head shifting in blanked concentration.

He took the corner sharp, towards him, following the wall in those measured steps until the cane's tap missed, resting on the leg of the man El had just shot. Sands prodded a little harder, checking the consistency, his face twisting briefly as he felt his way along the corpse to the feet, shaping his path between body and wall.

One boot left vivid footprints that faded only slightly with each step.

He stopped a metre away. "You missed a couple," he said.

El checked back along the length of corridor over his shoulder. "What are you doing here?"

"I was getting bored."

"How did you get inside?"

"I walked." His head angled towards the body he had felt his way past, and his nose wrinkled. "Of course, it would have been easier if you hadn't left such a mess behind you."

El thought of the explosions outside and the screens upstairs, and wasn't sure that walking completely covered how a blind man navigated through that. "I only make a mess with the people. I don't think I want to know what you've done to the yard." He pressed himself back to the wall and took the opportunity to reload his pistol, half-empty clip swapped out to the side of his belt. "Is that all of them now?"

Sands tipped his head, listening. The flames outside were dying down, the glow over the walls static instead of dancing, the crackles muted. El stood motionless as the seconds stretched out towards a minute, and heard nothing. "If there are any left, they're staying quiet," Sands said, matching his own assessment. "We don't have the luxury of going digging through the cupboards to check."

The house was isolated, but the explosions and flame would be attracting attention from a few miles around. Someone would make the gesture of calling the police eventually. Montejo might have called in extra men too once El showed up inside, but there the distances definitely worked in their favour.

"Christ, it fucking stinks in here." Sands swung his cane up beneath his arm, drawing a second pistol instead. "The east door's closest."

He was battered by the gunpowder, blood and piss thick in his every breath.

He'd grown used to it until it was mentioned, and he wished Sands had kept his complaints to himself. "It's also buried," he said. "We'll go the way you came in."

"North door, then," Sands amended, and El moved off along the corridor, silent now as they felt for enemies.

He skirted bodies and light debris instead of stepping over as he normally would, Sands following his curving paths without hesitation or question. His presence was simply there, an underlying tone constant through his senses, and the memory of that realisation outside Ramirez' house dragged ghost fingers over him when he thought of it.

But it occurred to him then that Sands had been forcing himself to trust all along, because his first choice had been to trust and follow or to shiver uncertain in the dark.

He took the lengths of wall steady and almost rapid, fast as would avoid harsh-echoing footfalls. He slowed for doorways and corners, edging lower, quieter, before taking the turn as a lunge and a spin, guns raised to cover the spread of room, and Sands trailed him near-faultless through all of it. After the first couple of doorways, he slowed almost exactly as El did, judging distance to the next turn by memory and steps and adapting himself easily to El's habits.

When he fought alone, El had no fear, swamped in awareness and knowledge and reaction; immediate decision-movement, where risk existed only as a relative thing to steer him.

It could work that way when he fought with others too, adrenaline pounding the repeating rhythm of a gun's kick to each hand, time slurring and then steadying, altered, around him, the world all movement and killing.

The problem came in the half-fight, caution without gunfire, senses empty and too much thought loose and tangling in his head. That was when the fear shackled him into a maze of second-guesses and misgiving, never fear for himself, only for that someone else.

The problem came now.

Except with Sands, it didn't. El felt himself light and fluid, melting through hallways and doorways with the plans he'd studied superimposed over the rooms he saw, effortless pre-knowledge of everything he was going to do.

He trusted Sands to notice danger, to kill, yes, but that had been true of Carolina, was true of Lorenzo. That wasn't the difference.

It worked now because Sands wasn't a friend.

He didn't want the man to die here, would go to some effort to cover him if he ever needed to. But if the mistake happened and Sands dropped behind him to bleed at his feet, it wouldn't tear a gaping hole through his life with only guilt and blame to fill it. It left him to move through the building as he would have alone, with only the barest of changes to allow for the man who followed.

It was a strange combination - the luxury of trust, the absence of tension over attack from behind, and without the sapping doubt that had accompanied it in the past.

It set the killer entirely free.

Everything focussed ahead, seeking out, no caution, just the hunt.

He quivered; breathed, and launched himself into the next lifeless room.

It was almost disappointment.

Uncurling again and moving on, corridors and rooms sharp even in the blur of movement, guns silent, unneeded, until he reached the main door, looking out over the curve of driveway to the gate.

The door was three quarters open, held that way by the body sprawled across its frame and half-slumped against the wood. El stood pressed back by an internal archway where the entrance widened into the main hall. "Five steps to the door," he said, turning to Sands, low-voiced. "Mind the corpse."

"Ah, I know the one." His mouth shrank right down, too much humour slinking at the edges to be real distaste. "He makes a messy doorstop, sorry, but he was the best I could find at the time."

"You put him there?" No surprise in him, just curiosity.

"Well, if I had to leave again at short notice, I didn't want to be shot in the back while I stood there feeling around for the door handle."

Practical enough. A blind man in a hurry might still trip over a body even if he knew it was there, but down on the floor wasn't always the worst place to be.

He peered out across the arc of grounds he could see beyond the door, his senses reaching out and past the distractions he had fully detailed in that first instant.

Two cars burned in the road not far beyond the open gates, blackened hulks with remnant flame and dense smoke coiling upwards to obscure a shifting cone of stars. The orange cast shimmering along the wall said at least one more inside the grounds, over to the right outside his line of sight. The lights along the wall and driveway were all out, fires and moon slurring colours and shadows indistinct, but the grenade-shattered earth and the sprawl of dark-clothed corpses stood out to his eyes anyway.

Only the flame-driven shadows shifting, silence to hear above the low burn.

Habit-driven flash-glance back the way they had come, then out fast to the door, angle of view sweeping, widening, and still nothing to hint of the living. Sands followed a second after, settling his back to the wall, guns aimed on into the house as his head shifted.

He waited, his own thoughts confirmed by Sands' continued silence.

The yard wasn't a good place to cross, far too open. If anyone still in the house was going to take shots at them from the upstairs windows, there would be nothing they could do except run.

On the positive side, if anyone had been going to do that, Sands would have been shot on the way in. The risk was probably low.

He set out steadily, erring more towards stealth, not wanting to advertise to anyone who might still think they were inside. He tracked shadow where he could, but it was far from perfect.

"You might want to pick it up a bit," Sands said, close, sudden flow of air past his ear. "There's still quite a walk to the car, and I'd prefer to be gone before anyone else turns up."

El doubted anyone was coming just yet.

Sands' involvement with Mexican law enforcement would have been almost exclusively AFN, and they were different. The local police were slow enough to react to incidents in the cities, and anything that smelled of a drugs war basically guaranteed they'd wait an hour or so until it was safe before they came to investigate.

He thought nothing of them at all.

"We could have taken one of their cars, if you hadn't blown them up," he said.

"The point of this was that none of them got away. They started the engines, I took them out." Sands tipped his head just a few degrees, and smiled, fire-glow flashing over his teeth. "Besides, it was amusing."

He'd suspected it for a long time, that part of Sands had always been crazy. Reliant almost entirely on his hearing now, still he would compromise it to sow chaos, seconds of his sensory input destroyed in blast for the entertainment of making others react around him, when half a clip in the engine would have been enough.

The recklessness that had shattered his plans in Culiacán hadn't left him, because it was innate.

"You weren't supposed to fire that thing once I was in here," El reminded him.

"It was obvious enough where you were," Sands said. "No changes there."

El still didn't think its aim reliable enough to want to risk his life on. But he was still here, again, and he wasn't shot, which happened sometimes, and it wasn't worth arguing a point that was done with.

He stayed close to the wall on the approach to the gate. It was the easiest way to avoid most of the bodies and parts of burned vehicle instead of picking his way between them. He took the gateway a little cautiously, but it was clear, and they followed the edge of the estate towards the car.

"Keep an eye out for the M16, won't you?" Sands said. "I left it by the wall before I went in."

It made sense. It wasn't ever going to be a one-handed weapon. "Where?"

"Well, I don't know exactly where. Not too much further, I guess."

El turned to stare back over his shoulder as he walked.

"What? Yeah, so I lost count a couple of times on the way in. It got a bit distracting now and then."

He looked ahead again, his eyes casting over the ground, leaving his ears and Sands to warn him if anyone was still going to show up.

The basic mistakes, the very human ones, almost threw El more.

He found the rifle laid precisely along the base of the stone, the moon-edged dark of it obvious against the bare earth. If Sands had come back this way alone, cane following the wall, he couldn't have missed it.

He picked it up and swung it around to tap against Sands' hand. "You brought it, you carry it."

"And I was counting on you as my personal pack-donkey," Sands said, holstering his pistols to take it. His fingers slid along the underside of the barrel to reattach the strap to the front clip and then checked the safety before he slung it over his shoulder.

The short trek back to the car was uneventful. No sign of movement, no night animals after all the disturbance, and the crackle of flames dying back fast with distance and the absence of fuel.

Sands tucked his cane higher under his arm and lit two cigarettes, holding one out to El.

The smoke wisped upwards lazily past his nose. He shrugged, and took it.

"Open the trunk, will you?" Sands pushed the M16 into his bag, along with the cane and the other weapons Honaker had supplied him, all except the M99 which wasn't going to fit. El dry-swallowed an ibuprofen from the pot in the glove compartment and smoked slowly, long, satisfying pulls drawn back to hang in his lungs, watching Sands puff irritatedly at the cigarette clamped between his lips.

"Shit, well I guess I need a bigger bag," Sands said as he gave up on trying to rearrange it, and left the rifle in the trunk while the bag went on the back seat as usual.

He took the dirt roads faster on the way out, no reason not to use the lights. No-one who saw them leaving would interfere, and Mexico had no shortage of old white Fords. The authorities wouldn't be out here yet, and he wanted to be on busier roads when they met them.

The scrub bushes swept by, dark and twisted in the beams as he rounded the curves, the engine note burning high as he pushed out of them.

"You shouldn't have come in," he said. Out in the night, no-one would realise they were being targeted by a blind man. Wandering round the house with a stick wasn't something they'd discussed.

"It had all gone kind of quiet, I figured you hadn't left too many kicking around."

He was watching the road, not Sands, but he picked up no concern at all from the words. He took the car around a pothole, black in the silvered road, unslowed. "If you're seen, word will spread. They'll know you're alive."

"Well, that's one of the reasons I shot the ones who saw me."

"You don't know that." He never had seen Montejo's wife in there; maybe she wasn't home, but more likely she'd been hiding. And while part of him was glad about that, it meant there could have been others doing the same.

Maybe just hiding. Maybe hiding and watching.

"What would anyone say, exactly? That Montejo's place was taken apart by a blind man with a cane? I don't think that'd sound too good coming from one of his stray bodyguards, not if they're looking for a new employer."

He glanced over at Sands, who was not-staring back at him with a twisted hint of smile. "The stories are out there," he said quietly. "People have heard them."

Sands laughed outright then, harsh-bright in the closed space. "Nobody believes that crap, El. A drugged up blind guy roaming around Culiacán in the middle of a coup, shooting cartel? Please. Even I find it unlikely, and I was almost there for most of it."

El thought of Honaker, and all his probing suspicions. "A few people are willing to believe," he said. "The ones who knew you."

And that would include some within the CIA.

Sands only grinned, vivid echo of teeth in the dark windscreen catching his attention. "Well, I guess it's always nice to be remembered, but I still have a way to go before my reputation reaches yours."

He looked back to the road. "You wouldn't want it to," he said quietly.

"No, I really wouldn't," he answered, suddenly more serious. "A legend like that's a little too much trouble for my taste."

For his own too, but it was far too late to change it.

He wondered how long he'd bought himself this time - another few years, or merely months again.

They changed their jackets in the car and wiped themselves of blood and dust enough to pass a glancing inspection. They stank unmistakeably of gunpowder and sweat, but it was still before six when they arrived back in Culiacán, and easy to keep a distance from anyone on the way into the hotel.

They spread weaponry across the floor of El's room, the gun cleaning kit between them as they worked, sitting with their backs against the bed frame. The limitation of a single multi-bore cleaning rod for all the handguns might have been annoying, but El anticipated and arranged his use of it while Sands was busy with his automatics.

His shirt was sealed along the length of his back, and all down the skin of his arms. His hair hung in greasy straggles before him as he hunched over the pistols, hints of blood stench still clinging. His body crawled for a shower, but there was no point to cleaning up before he cleaned the guns.

Sands looked no better, and El watched him as his hands slid and flowed over the weapons.

Sands had always been a killer, but his way was neat and fast, limited, not this ongoing destruction with blood clotting underfoot. He remembered Sands bandaged in a hotel room, dripping derision about his 'charming lifestyle', and wondered how he felt now about tasting it.

At the time, the adrenaline and raw survival absorbed anything. It wasn't the same feeling an hour later, rinsing the flecks of someone's brains from his hair.

Sands tilted his head to face him, silent, knowing he was watching. His movements seemed entirely natural, no sign he was disturbed by El or by anything else, and El supposed that odd disconnection of his mind that separated him from all guilt and consequence would protect him equally from his state now.

Sands clicked the barrel back onto his semi, oiling and working the slide action, then wiped the whole thing down. He reached for his cigarettes, lit one, held the pack towards El. "You?"

"No." He didn't feel the need for it now, for the drug or for the motion, his hands and his mind occupied enough.

Sands slid the pack back away and got to his feet. "Ashtray?"

He didn't have to look up. "Table by the TV." This room was a mirror of the layout in Sands', and he found it easily enough, dropping back into his spot by the bed with the ashtray next to his leg.

Sands reached for the M16, ejected the magazine and began the routine of cocking, safety, bolt, chamber check. "I'm going to stop by and pay Jorge a visit before we head out again," he said.

El paused in his inspection of the Glock. "He didn't want us to go back there."

"El, I would have thought you of all people would have got past the idea that everyone can have what they want in this world." His words held a hint of a slur as his lips curled round the cigarette, his hands busy with the gun in his lap.

He unlocked and pushed the slide, rephrasing more forcefully over the clicks. "I told him I wouldn't go back."

"I didn't hear you say anything like that." Sands turned to face him then, the truth of it not-innocent in his smile. "But you're missing the point here. You're not going to see him, I am. If you have issues about playing the chauffeur for this particular trip, there are a few hundred cab drivers who'll be happy to take my cash."

He saw no point in answering a statement that was obviously true.

Culiacán was Sands' city. He'd catch a bus if he had to, though El didn't imagine he would enjoy it much.

"Why are you going back?"

The rifle lay loose across Sands' knees now, his hand waving in El's direction. "Well, he did prove a little useful this trip out, I'll admit." The cigarette angled upwards as his smile widened. "Don't tell me you think I should just let him go so easily."

He'd never expected Sands to leave Ramírez alone; not when he'd made the offer and not now.

He wondered what Sands held over the man, what he would use to work his way back in. He was still missing something, that same awareness he'd had at the house the day before; something important in the history that he didn't know.

He would only find out what that was if he was there.

He looked back to the Glock, pulling the barrel from the slide. "Okay," he said. "I'll take you. But I won't help you if I don't like what you're doing."

"I never expected anything else from you, El."

They worked through the last of the guns, El pushing all the used cloths and patches into a pocket of the guitar case - they looked a little too obvious in the trash. Sands finished with a solvent wipe to clean the bloodstains from the tip of his cane. "Did I get everything? I'd hate to shock the guests in the hallway."

El climbed to his feet when the door closed behind Sands, one hand pushing off from the bed. His muscles had started to stiffen during the drive back despite the drug, and another hour sitting on the floor bent over the guns hadn't helped that at all.

He felt hunched and uneven as he moved through into the bathroom, shoulders protesting as he shed his jacket onto the floor, pulled his shirt over his head. He swallowed another ibuprofen and ran the water a little hotter than usual, needing to soak the ache out fast before he got back in the car.

Sands, more or less his own age, maybe a couple of years younger, had slid up onto his feet and reached back down for his bag with utter grace, even with the more recent gunshot wounds. But Sands' part in the attack hadn't involved running, dropping, spinning, nor had he spent years destroying his body.

His muscles still did whatever he asked of them to keep himself alive, but he paid more for it later, too many old injuries half-neglected and badly healed. He could feel every one of them, remember the bullets and knives and the wrench of the joint strains as he twisted under the flow, steering the force of the stream onto each echoed pain.

The drain was slow, water collecting in the tub, circling lazy and faintly pink from where blood had seeped through his clothes onto his skin.

He closed his eyes and pushed his head forward beneath the flow, too hot on his face, soaking all through to his scalp and trickling round the sides of his neck. He groped blind for the shampoo, eyelids held tight as he washed twice through his hair, suds and water coursing down over him, the knots in him gradually starting to ease.

When he opened his eyes again, soap clouded the water round his feet, and everything looked clean.

He took his time over the rest of the shower - he might as well get something from the hotel for his money, since he hadn't slept in the bed, and they weren't going to be checking out until an hour that would be unremarkable for a tourist. By the time he'd towelled off and dressed in clean clothes, he felt considerably better than a man who'd just done the things he had had much right to.

It had always been that way, any guilt born more from a knowledge of what should be than a real sensation.

Sands, when he went to collect him, looked immaculate in the part of the freshly-risen traveller off to another destination, at least to anyone who didn't see the guns beneath the jacket. He'd shaved, of course - he always did, sometimes twice a day, because he refused to ever look as if he couldn't - and his hair was tied back, still damp. El had passed on the shaving in favour of simply soaking for longer.

It wasn't easy to see the killer as Sands stood in the doorway and smiled. "Ready to go?"

He pulled out the tie and shook his hair forwards as he bent to pick up the bag. The glasses weren't enough to cover the damage from every angle.

"So, do you know where you're going?" Sands asked, arms crossed on the roof of the Ford as El arranged the guitar case behind his seat.

El contented himself with a glare, sure that Sands got the idea.

He knew Culiacán now better than he would ever have wanted to.

The drive to Ramírez' house wasn't long, but the morning traffic was heavy and frustrating. More frustrating was the itch to question Sands about Ramírez and knowing there would be no point.

"Fucking fumes," Sands muttered, and wound his window closed, trapping them with his smoke and the already-rising heat instead. "Christ, it's like there's not a car in the goddamn country under twenty unless it's owned by cartel." He smiled crookedly over at El. "Maybe you can ask El Presidente for that reward of yours, and have all these toxic heaps scrapped by government health order. He might even go for it - it would solve those congestion hassles he's been whining about so much too."

He slouched lazily in the passenger seat, seeming no different from the man he'd been yesterday, and little changed even from before the Day of the Dead. "How does it feel," El asked, "to have your revenge?"

Sands didn't answer right away, drawing several times on his cigarette, smoke drifting from his nose with each cycle of breath. "How did it ever feel to get yours?"

That was always how it seemed to be.

"Temporary," he said.

He'd thought once that Bucho would be the end of it. After he'd found César, and Carolina, he'd been convinced it was the end. The grand gesture with the guitar case, throwing away the guns.

If he hadn't gone back, they would have died within days.

"Well, that sounds realistic." Sands tipped his head a little and smiled faintly. "I'll have to think about mine and let you know."

The traffic cleared as they moved away from the centre, and they made better time. El wasn't even sure Ramírez was going to be there. They'd found him at home yesterday, but that had been the end of the afternoon, sinking towards dusk and still too early for most people to head for the bars and restaurants. There was a much higher chance mid-morning would find him gone.

He parked on the street by the gate as before, leading Sands along the curving path through the garden. When they rounded the bushes and the front of the house came into sight, Ramírez was already standing by the door.

He stared briefly at El, but most of his attention was aimed over his shoulder at Sands. "I told you not to come back here."

"I know you did, Jorge," Sands said, as he climbed the steps onto the verandah. "Don't worry, we don't plan on staying."

El stepped to one side, no intention of taking any part in the conversation, and Sands pulled out a silenced semi-automatic and shot Ramírez four times in the chest.

El grabbed his wrist and twisted, whipping around behind him and sliding his shotgun under Sands' jaw as the pistol fell and skittered over the planks. "Nice moves, El," Sands said, entirely calm, no hint of fighting him.

"Why did you kill him?"

Sands smiled. "That was revenge." He tilted his head towards El, the flesh of his chin folding to scrape across the barrels. "You should understand."

"Revenge for what?" he demanded, low and harsh.

"How much did you find out about the Day of the Dead, El?" From the shapes of his words, Sands could have been discussing the weather, except Sands only used those tones for killing. "Did you ever hear about the part where he walked right past me? He stopped by for a quick chat and returned my cellphone, which was thoughtful of him, I suppose, and then he strolled off home and left me to die in the street with the rats."

El released him and took several fast steps back along the deck, keeping the shotgun on Sands. When Sands still made no move, he risked a glance down at Ramírez.

There was no doubt the man was dead, or close enough that it made no difference. He had a .38 revolver by his hand, but he'd waited to draw until after Sands attacked, and that would never have been fast enough.

Ramírez had obviously never truly understood who he was dealing with in Sands. "You should have told him about the cook," he said darkly.

Sands laughed. "Why, El, it's a little early in the day for you to have found your sense of humour." He took a stride forward alongside Ramírez' body and reached down for his gun, his fingers sliding over just a few inches of boards before he gripped it.

"It's not a good idea to shoot FBI," El said, "even in Mexico."

"Late of the FBI," Sands said lightly. "That's a very important distinction to make. He was really just another boring civilian, and if there's one good thing I have to say about this sewer-fried country of yours, it's how easy it is to shoot someone and have nobody worry too much."

He knew that too well. It had played in his favour many times, but it wasn't something he considered admirable about the workings of his world.

His life would have been different if the police had cared about a terrified young mariachi being chased through the streets of Acuña. But they had been paid too well to care.

"I might have left fingerprints in the house," he said. The doorbell would be a mess of unusable streaky prints - had he touched anything else? He couldn't recall anything specific, but it was hard to be sure.

Sands only found it amusing. "You're worrying about that now? Christ, El, you've left prints all over half the murder scenes in three states. It really doesn't matter when no-one has you on file, except as 'Unknown gunman number six thousand and seventeen'."

Sands didn't understand. "This," he waved a hand vaguely at Ramírez, "is not me." He had enough that he had done to take the blame for.

"Worried about your reputation, El Zorro?" His smile glinted condescending, tightening El's fingers around the stock of the shotgun still in his hand. "At least I didn't shoot him in the back."

He looked away to the man on the floor, his blood spreading and dripping between the boards of his own home. "That doesn't make so much difference."

Sands actually laughed then, soft and too real. "So now you agree with me? If I'd known all I had to do was shoot someone to get you to see things my way, I'd have done it weeks ago."

The blood pool shifted and curled at the edges, creeping out over the planks towards them. It wouldn't touch them, already slowing, too much lost down through the wood. "Must you make everything into a joke?"

"That's how he left me." He stretched out a foot until the toe of his boot poked Ramírez in the ribs, enough for the body just to rock, as if he would try to get up again. "See you later, Jorge. But not too soon, I hope."

His gun disappeared back inside his jacket and his fingers drifted out to the rail, tracing his way along it and down the steps. He stopped when he reached the bottom, the hard click of soles on concrete. "I was good enough to use a silencer," he said, without turning, "but we should probably still leave now."

El shivered out of his stillness and slid the shotgun back into its holster, planks creaking beneath him as he took the steps down two at a time.

He walked on past Sands, unspeaking, making no allowance in his speed for blindness and an uneven path. He didn't care if Sands couldn't follow him. He just wanted to be somewhere that wasn't here.

Sands followed him anyway.

---

It was an unpleasant experience to repeat - a hasty exit from Culiacán, with Sands in his passenger seat and neither of them inclined to talk.

El drove steadily and at the speed limit, nothing to distract him from his thoughts.

He'd been under no illusions about Sands; he'd known men in some ways like him. He was a poisonous enemy and a highly uncertain ally.

Knowing what he now did, it was no surprise that he had shot Ramírez. He might even have done the same. But the way he'd chosen to do it - seeing him talk with Ramírez so easily, and then kill without warning - it made him reflect back over his time with Sands, and wonder if he'd done anything that Sands would hold a grudge for when he considered him to be of no more benefit. Sands could justify killing over very little, and El had used him and drugged him when he was alone and suffering.

He hadn't thought back to that in recent weeks, but he was left looking at it now.

Sands often made him look at himself in ways he usually chose not to.

When he had agreed to take Sands along three months earlier, he had planned to be rid of any further threat from the remnant Barillo clan, and then be rid of the man.

That was still his plan now.

They would stay overnight in Mazatlán again before he faced the long drive back to the village tomorrow. It was one of Sands' requested 'decent-sized towns', and he would leave him there, get the man out of his life and that of his people.

And maybe find out if he intended to kill him. El had no immediate concerns over that, since it had been tried by better killers than Sands.

Though if Sands did want him dead, he would most likely wait a month or longer, and then dissolve in out of the night. Sands preferred to fight only when he had an advantage.

He had more than a few qualms about leaving Sands to roam loose around Mexico. He knew too much about him, far more than just the name of a village.

His only choices were to live with the risks, or to shoot him now, and that he wouldn't do.

But the idea of just leaving Sands in Mazatlán filled him with a vague, slithering guilt he knew of old he couldn't ignore. It would perhaps be unfair to abandon Sands in the same town as Honaker. Sands might also see it as further reason to consider El an enemy. He could easily take Sands to a different town before he went home, Durango or Tepic.

Though Sands had enemies in Lázaro Cárdenas too. He probably knew unsavoury people in every city in Mexico.

Shit.

His guilt was irrational, that was the biggest frustration. Sands would survive on his own, at least for as long as either of them was likely to.

He decided to just ask him where he wanted to go, and then Sands would be leaving through his own choice, and not because El pushed. He didn't look forward to the idea of a possible drive to Yucatán, but it was a solution his conscience would let him live with.

The journey to Mazatlán was fast, routine, and he headed for a different area of the city, away from where they had stayed before. It was better to avoid any possible connection with their earlier visit.

He booked them into the second hotel he tried, then returned to the car for his case and his passenger. Sands followed him as easily as ever into the hotel and to the bottom of the stairs, then stopped dead as El took the first two steps. "Where's the desk?"

El stopped too, only half-turning back. "It doesn't matter."

"I need to get the key to my room."

"You don't have a room. You're in mine."

Sands reached out a hand to find the stairway wall, and propped himself against it, head back to the plaster and his feet crossed at the ankles. His hair slid over the plastic, glimpse of polished scar-skin and darkness beyond the frame that curved back to his ear. "Well, I'm a more than a little disappointed in you, El. I kill just one guy for my own personal reasons, and rather valid ones I have to say, even by your odd standards, and suddenly you don't trust me to be on my own again."

"Shut up!" He was fairly sure Sands knew there was no-one close enough to overhear, but it still wasn't a discussion he wanted to have in a hotel entrance.

"Is there a problem? You sound like you might be a little nervous." Sands stayed exactly where he was, smiling faintly, a stark black and white contrast under the fluorescents.

El chinked his room key against the chains on his cuff a couple of times, then started back up the stairs again, his steps steady and even by habit as he watched over his shoulder.

Sands had ignored the deliberate sound, but his head tilted towards him the instant he moved, and he slid himself away from the wall to follow.

He looked to the stairway again before he reached the corner, the footsteps echoing clear behind him continuing to reassure.

He had thought Sands would come with him, rather than take the annoying alternative of trying to find out for himself which room his personal driver was in later, but it was hard to assume anything about him. His cane was in the bag he carried, he could have booked and found his own room. But having Sands tapping his way round the hotel would defeat the point of this.

He let himself into the room on the second floor, and dropped his guitar case heavily onto one of the beds. "If you want to get your own room, you find another hotel."

Sands stood by the door in silence, his head slightly angled, perfect mimicry of someone watching him, thoughtful. "My old acquaintances really do have you rattled, don't they?"

He sat on the bed alongside the case, opening it and taking out the cleaning kit. "The CIA don't care that El Mariachi came out of hiding to attack more cartel," he said. "They will only be interested in me if they hear that I'm linked to you."

"So we're back to me creeping in from the car and then lurking shut up indoors. How charming. I'm so glad you felt the urge to discuss this with me first."

He checked the levels of solvent, degreaser, oils. He had a loose idea from the morning's cleaning, but he'd been tired, distracted.

At least he felt awake now.

"I don't care what you think. I don't want those people coming to my home." He couldn't mess this up, make mistakes, not now, not when Sands would be out of his life in just another day or two.

Sands was still, standing on the edge of his vision, his shoulder to the wall. El looked up at him. "This isn't a good town for you," he said.

"So give me the name of one that is," Sands said instantly, high and saw-tooth edged. "I believe you're familiar enough with the problem. Any advice to spare?"

He was going to need some more patches.

He had never managed to hide for longer than a few years himself.

"You have to leave Mexico."

"I'll want a passport for that."

"You don't have one?"

"Several. Some are even in places where I can still get at them. And every last one of them's stamped 'Undesirable, please return to sender' in large unfriendly letters on the cover."

He had imagined Sands would know the kind of people who provided passports without questions. But maybe the ones he knew were like Honaker. No stand-in contact would work where a photo was part of any deal.

He rolled up the cleaning pouch and put it back in the guitar case, closing the lid on the familiar smells of oil and degreaser. "Who were those 'friends' of yours, in Lázaro Cárdenas?" He had asked before, and hadn't been given an answer.

Sands tipped his head forward, eyebrows sloping high above the glasses. "Thinking of helping me out there, are you, El?"

"No."

He had done this for Carolina and for Mexico, removing the last of the people who had worked with Marquez, to protect his town and its people. Now he just wanted to go home.

"That's something of a pity. They're really not nice people, you'd be doing everyone a favour."

"Especially you," El said, flat.

Sands half-smiled, a crooked tilt that only he would call humour. "Well, yes, but that doesn't change the big picture, does it?"

"You won't tell me the big picture."

"If you're not interested, then no. I never bought a ticket to the 'Sharing is Fun' show." Sands lit a cigarette, left it stuck between his lips while he bent to rummage through the bag at his feet. The heavy metallic chinks drew El's eye instantly, instinctive, but no tension in the checking.

If Sands turned on him, it wouldn't be anything so obvious.

He stood, pulling the cane from the bag. "Right now, I could just use a piss," he said, and tapped his way along the wall that didn't hold El's bed until he found the bathroom door, closing it after him with only a gentle click.

El's eyes were fixed on the door, its surface slightly cracked and peeling.

He'd forgotten. Sands had stood by the door, waiting so apparently casual, knowing nothing about the room except the location of one bed and an angry mariachi.

There was no point in apologising for it. Sands wouldn't believe he wasn't intending to be petty, that it wasn't payback, would only despise attempts to explain it.

Knowing didn't stop him from wanting to.

He pushed the shotgun under the pillow, the guitar case under the bed, and lay back, his arms folded over his head.

In another day, maybe two, Sands and his problems and this careful braking of conversations that were about to go crashing downhill would be gone, and he could go back home.

He wanted to go home.

Home was his grounding. It was his peace.

He had lived the last two years that way, and it had been enough.

It had been... odd when he returned after Marquez, when the life there refused to settle on him. Strained and careful with the people whose lives went on unchanging while his veered erratically between them. But it had been different again through the long weeks with Sands – watching the man, studying him, his determination and the speed of that driven mind.

He'd lived the last months with the basics of casual conversation, the sensation of there being someone to talk to whenever he might have something to say. Sands' words in turn were often neither pleasant nor entirely welcome, but that had proved a challenge in itself, and of late he'd been returning more of Sands' own hard verbal tactics upon the man.

That only made Sands laugh, and encouraged more disparaging comments.

It was an odd thing to have grown used to.

Maybe it hadn't been good to spend as much time alone as he had after Carolina died.

No, he'd known it wasn't good. He just hadn't liked the alternatives any better.

He won't be here for long. He remembered Father Ríos' silent reaction to that, and swore. Sometimes he felt he was surrounded by people who knew what he would do long before he did.

He'd never found it easy to sever his connections to people, once formed. Not even to César, not with all he had become. 'Juanito,' César had called him, the joke that still strayed over from their childhood, and he hadn't wanted to lose that; but he had been forced to choose, or have everything taken from him a second time.

Choices for him were always about loss. Every decision snipped something more away from his life, wire-cutters slicing through one of his strings, leaving him stunted and forced to wind tighter to make himself fit.

He wondered what he was losing with the choices he made now.

There was no animosity with the morning, but their words were held to neutral basics - "I'm done with the bathroom, it's all yours." "There's coffee on the table."

El was once again too aware of Sands, his tiniest movements wrenching at him, unable to look away for long, watching his impassive face for... something.

Sands today should have been natural flowing acid, telling him to get his head out of his ass, get over it, and quit acting like a broody chicken, or some more Sands-laced angle on the same idea. When he didn't act as predicted, when he didn't follow his own patterns, it left El faintly disturbed.

He was too careful, too controlled.

El's only positive reading from it was that he hadn't been that way when he shot Ramírez.

He needed to ask where he should go, but Sands had stripped back every cue El had learned from him, and he could find no clear place to start in the not-quite-stilted gaps between their words.

By the time they were ready to leave - not that there was ever much to pack - he still hadn't spoken to Sands.

His fingers strummed lightly over the dashboard as Sands dropped his bag onto the back seat beside the guitar case. "Getting impatient, El?"

It was the first living sentence Sands had said to him, that barely prickling rise through just three words. He stopped the tapping, and found his thumb and forefinger rubbing along the ridged metal of the key instead while Sands got in and closed the door.

He pushed the key into the ignition, rattle sharp through the enclosing air, but he didn't turn it.

"What do you want to do now?" he asked.

Sands wore that relaxed stillness, head tipped back and hair flattened to the cloth of his seat. "Well, we're both sitting here in the car, so I was thinking along the lines of me being a passenger while you drove."

"I'm going home," he said.

He only looked bored, his voice stretching the sarcasm a level further. "Maybe you'll really make an effort and surprise me sometime, El, but I'm guessing it's not going to be today."

It was something so close to normal. He just couldn't decide if 'close' was because it was false, or if remnants of that earlier rigidity lingered to corrupt some level of truth.

He reached out his fingers to the wheel, tracing the indented edge by touch, even as he still watched Sands. The chains at his wrist shivered faintly, selling out his restlessness.

Sands wouldn't ever expect him to be still anyway.

"You have helped me, like you said," he tried again. "You have no obligations to me now."

Sands turned his head towards him slowly, whip-tight mouth and staring black lenses. "I never did, you brainless fuck."

El breathed slowly, resisting the urge for it to flow as a sigh. That had been a stupid choice of words with this man, and he wondered how much of the mistake was his own reluctance to have this conversation at all. "We had a deal, and now it is done. So now the deal is I will take you where you want to go."

"Still making deals without me? That didn't work out so well the first time." Immediate, fast words that would have been a snap except for the quiet of them, and his own frustration pitched sharp into response. "I could kick you from the car right here instead."

Sands' face ran empty of all expression, along with his words. "You really don't want to try that, El."

His hands tightened around the wheel, plastic pressing deep against the pads of his fingers. No, because if he'd wanted to do that, he wouldn't have offered him a choice.

He started the car and pulled away into the clinging morning traffic. He saw no point in saying more, with Sands like this. He would head towards home for now, and eventually Sands would tell him where he wanted to go.

He picked up the 40 just outside the city, and went east.

The terrain changed rapidly as he drove, climbing fast through the foothills and into the true mountains, leaving Sinaloa. He dialled between radio stations, seeking through the static as they dissolved one by one into spikes of notes and hiss, until Sands swore at him and told him to turn the fucking thing off.

In truth, it had annoyed him too.

Sands smoked with the window cracked open, head tipped back into the seat, hair whipping around the sides of his face in the turbulence, ash ripped from his cigarette as it formed.

El wondered how dull it must become, a passenger on a long drive, unable even to look out, just the noise of engine, tyres on road, and wind. He opened his own window a little, feeling the rush of air cool past his ear, the brush of his hair over his cheek, the scent of the mountains damp and green distinctive beneath the fumes from the cars.

It was something, but it wasn't much.

The landscape shifted again, with an abruptness that never failed to startle, the mountains turned barren and then gone, leaving the road to plunge on bullet-straight between the grass and low scrub of the plains.

He stopped for fuel and food, Sands communicating in the same economical near-silence he'd used earlier in the hotel. He said nothing about any kind of destination.

If Sands still had any yearning for living by the sea, El thought, he'd better choose a place on the east coast, because he was in no mood now to simply turn around and go back.

The road pulled him on deeper into the interior. He turned off the highway, leaving pavement for the dusty, endless tracks that were more Mexico to him now than the cities and towns he had once tried to earn a living in. The noise of the tyres jumped from firm rumbling to a deader sound, a hint of a scrape beneath the wheels as they started to slide before El adjusted the tail-heavy characteristics to the loose roads.

Sands wound the window closed to keep out the dust.

It was then that El believed he wasn't going to say anything.

He didn't say anything either.

He pulled up outside his house in the angled light of late afternoon, and he still had an ex-CIA killer with him.

He was a little relieved, and almost as appalled.

Sands peeled off those black gloves that had lived on his hands since they left, tucking them inside his door compartment. He waited to follow El to the house, no starting reference without knowing exactly where El had parked. Once El unlocked the door, his markers in place, Sands walked unspeaking through the house to the bathroom, still with his bag of weapons, closed the door and started the shower.

El thought it was a good thing he'd taken a piss when they stopped.

He took the guitar case to his room and stored it away in the bottom of a cupboard he rarely used. There was too much space around for the belongings of just one person.

The guns he was wearing stayed with him. He had learned too well that he couldn't be without them any more, not even here.

He pulled the door shut quietly when he left the house, not wanting to alarm Sands with a sudden bang over the noise of the water - showering made him jumpy, and he kept them short.

The easiest way to deal with this Sands was not to, to give him his isolation. He hadn't been planning to stay anyway.

He crossed the square, waving greetings to people as he passed, to the guitar sellers who called out to him as they packed up their stalls for the evening.

One or two looked at him differently than they had before, following with more wary eyes.

It was one thing to know who he was, and another to watch from the windows as he slaughtered people in the town where their children lived, to see the blood and to bury the bodies.

Friends, good friends who had taken risks for him, had turned from him in the past after they'd seen. He felt too much gratitude for the ones who seemed able to treat him as normal to hold any bitterness.

Once again, the door opened to him as he arrived. He glared hard at the priest. "Don't say anything."

Father Ríos smiled, gap-toothed and completely uncomplicated. "How about, 'Come in and have a drink?'"

The priest chattered on as he rattled around in his kitchen, finding cups and milk and boiling water to his own easy monologue of gossip, used to El's silences, and to filling them. El lounged against an unused countertop, strung somewhere between listening and his own hounding thoughts.

Thinking hadn't helped him over the last twenty-four hours, but that made it no easier to stop.

He was sitting at the table with the bitter-strong coffee scent rough in his throat when he noticed that his companion had paused, left the quiet to settle.

The priest was watching him with obvious concern. "You look tired."

"A little." He wasn't, not physically. It was the uncertainty that wore at him, dragging all through the previous night and on.

He liked his life easily defined and contained, but Sands didn't fit well in boxes.

Father Ríos wouldn't ask what had gone on while he was away, not unless he first offered to tell. It was an old arrangement between them. The priest had long since given up on persuading him to make confession, losing each time to El's truth that there was no point to confession, no absolution where there was no repentance of the sin.

"I see he came back with you."

"Yes." Even that much was stating the obvious. He slid his finger along the grain of the table, no point to saying more.

Father Ríos let the pause linger for a while, before he spoke again, quietly. "So what happens now?"

El shrugged. "I don't know," he said. He traced the wood to the edge of his mug, wrapped his fingers around it, still. "I couldn't just tell him to leave."

The priest rubbed at his moustache and smiled a little. "I should hope not."

El looked up with the jagged realisation that his warnings were worthless, the truth of them eroded and scattered by the months. This good man across the table didn't believe what Sands was really like, and that was probably true of others in the town too. And nothing he could say was going to convince them, not while Sands remained here, distant but basically polite, and their only point of reference for a killer was a man they accepted and liked.

"He hates this place, and everyone here." The acid futility burned pits into the words.

He breathed, shattering the column of steam, the mug tight and barrel-hot between his hands. "He needs time, I think, Father. To consider some choices."

He had never been able to plan beyond the revenge he sought, never focussed on what happened after. Whenever his mind had drifted that way, he'd dragged it back, because 'after' reached out hollow, spanning years.

For all Sands' long constructions and scheming, maybe in this he was the same.

"I take it he's hunted, like you," the priest said.

El considered that, turning the realities slow through his mind, flaws gaping through all of them. "Perhaps worse than me." He had no idea what the CIA's plans would be, how those people worked. Sands was the only one he knew, and the CIA didn't seem to like him either.

Even if they stayed within laws, if they would take him back to America and imprison him for the things he'd done, it wasn't an existence Sands would ever accept.

His own freedom now consisted only of choosing where to hide, but the thought of losing what little was left made every part of him cramp and heave in revolt. He didn't know where Sands could belong, but it wasn't in a cell.

The priest was still watching, patient with the knowledge of a man who had spent many years listening. "I didn't know that part when I brought him before, or I wouldn't have done it," El said. "I'm sorry."

Father Ríos smiled and waved a hand out over his coffee mug. "That's not an issue. The drugs men have come, the army have come, and no-one has ever asked you to leave. The people here will stand up to whoever else comes just the same."

He thought of the ones who had stared across the square. "You can't speak for all of them, Father." He wondered why he'd never heard any hints to be rid of him, why the family of the murdered guitar-seller expressed no disquiet - whether it was the last ties of loyalty to someone as entirely beautiful as Carolina, or whether they might just be scared of his reaction.

"Not all of them, perhaps, but more than enough." His eyes crinkled further into the lines around them, his moustache twitching along with his lips. "We're a democracy now, remember?"

He was smiling back, inevitable in the face of this gentle, open humour. "I remember." It would be twenty years, more, before anything could really start to change, but he remembered. Some people would have their freedom, even if he never would.

"Good. Now drink your coffee, I don't make it for you to stare at."

"Okay, okay, don't waste what you have, I know." He lifted his mug, blowing on it hard before he took a swallow, though it really wasn't that hot. "See?" He held the cup there, in front of his smile. A little money really wouldn't change some people.

"Looks like even you can be taught eventually," the priest grinned.

'Maybe you can learn after all.'

Sometimes he wondered if he would ever get Sands' voice out of his head.

"So, now we've got your guest half sorted out, what about you?" Father Ríos was still smiling, but his eyes were watching again.

He stared, sipping coffee, but his friend gave him no further clues.

He put the mug back to the table, curled within his hands. "How do you mean?"

"If he's here to think, to make decisions about his life," he said, "what about your own?"

He didn't have an answer for that either.

He drifted back into his old routines in the village.

They weren't entirely the same as before the Day of the Dead, adapted to allow for the presence of Sands, but the differences were slight. He worked with the old men's guitars, shaping and sanding and treating the wood, moulding and teasing the quality of sound until the notes shimmered in air instead of only existing. He played for hours most days, proving the new guitars through the changing atmospherics or just exercising his own, familiar tones singing for him, and sometimes joining them himself, though his voice was too much out of practice now, and roughened. He settled into the old music, and battled with new melodies, untangling the possibilities and letting the song decide which was right.

Sometimes he was accompanied by a distinctively Sands-branded commentary; others he was wrapped in quiet, as Sands found his own places to be. El saw no reason to interfere with these choices - it had little effect on what he did, and Sands could do his thinking when and in whichever way worked best for him.

They always ended up back at the house in the evenings, with conversation or the lack of it mostly following the pattern of the day. He didn't mind which. He had rarely found silence awkward.

The routines brought him no more than the absence of void, but he didn't know how to go about making new ones.

He wondered if there was any hope he could be left to his peace this time. He didn't have that feeling from before, that knowledge through him that everything was wrong. But he had thought he was safe here once, and someone had still known, had given him to Sands.

"How much was I worth?" he asked. The house and Sands were still. The guitar filled its spaces, calm and melodic, old tunes familiar to him for so many years now. The evenings weren't yet warm enough for his hand to let him sit outside and play.

"Hmmm?" Sands sat in the armchair, with his back to him, and most people would have thought him half asleep.

"When you tracked me here. How much did that information cost you?"

Sands' voice was tapered when he next spoke, the deliberate shaping of words that gave away his interest. "Ah, that. I was wondering when you'd get around to asking." He tipped his head to one side, as if assessing, judging. "If it makes you feel any better, I killed the man who gave me the information."

He thought about that. It didn't make him feel better, no, beyond the vague relief of knowing that he would pass that information no further. But he certainly didn't feel bad about it. "It makes little difference now."

"Well, that makes you and the rest of the world who don't care too much either way. The fish probably liked him a lot more than anyone else ever did."

He ignored Sands' conversational sidetracking. "Are you going to tell me?"

Sands let the pause draw out before he gave him his answer. "Ten thousand."

"Dollars?"

"Well, ten thousand pesos won't buy you a sack of coffee beans." From this angle, El could barely see Sands' fingers tracing slow over the fabric of the chair. "It may interest you to know I thought someone with your skills was worth more. I offered fifty."

"Ten, fifty, what matters is that you could buy my life."

"Don't you think you're being just a touch dying swan here, El? I didn't want your life, I wanted you to do a job."

"And what happened to me afterwards wasn't important to you."

"Plan A involved me on a Brazilian beach with a bottle of tequila, so why would it be?"

Those answers would have made him angry once, but now they didn't stir him even as far as mild irritation. He'd known what he was going to hear; he expected no different from Sands.

He preferred it that he didn't try to lie to him.

"You know, of all things, I miss the booze," Sands said. "It would be nice just to have a drink or two sometime, but every time I think about it, I think about waking up with a gun to my head and it loses most of its appeal."

El huffed out air through his nose, amused. "Every time I look at you, I see you with a cigarette, and you say you're worried about staying alive?"

Sands shrugged. "I'm blind. If it ever comes to literally running for my life, I won't be kissing the dirt because of the state of my lungs."

He had no words to follow that.

Sands had no expectations of growing old, and it seemed no illusions about the situations he would and wouldn't survive. El imagined him sitting him in the house in Culiacán and working through all the practical outcomes within days of waking up, carefully assessing what he would have to do to hang onto his life for as long as he could and what wouldn't matter.

"How far do you trust me?" he asked.

He half expected a sharp retort, but Sands actually paused, thinking about it. "I don't really know," he said eventually. "To a point, I guess."

"It's fairly safe here," El said. "As safe as it can be anywhere. If you want to drink one night, I can stay awake."

Sands drew on his cigarette, held it back, and shook his head slowly as he exhaled, hair drifting forward along the plastic frame. "Somehow I don't think it would be quite the same."

He wasn't surprised. Even if Sands accepted that to briefly hand over control of his safety under these circumstances wasn't such a big thing, his instincts wouldn't let him do it. He would be left with that same crawling feeling of wrongness that so disturbed El.

"No," he agreed quietly. "It wouldn't." Nothing ever was.

Sometimes their conversations would fall into a topic where Sands became truly animated - a classic Corvette or a certain type of food, sometimes a movie, though El was hardly up to date on those - and for a moment he would seem entirely normal, a man who spoke with enthusiasm and flowing hands about something he admired. But his ideas were particular, rigid, and the wrong prompt or question from El triggered the immediate return of his usual flat disdain.

When El simply stayed quiet and let him talk, watched him smile without edges or double meanings, it never lasted long either.

Even here, almost secure in a town he knew perfectly, Sands couldn't sustain a projection of normality. And for every conversation that was peaceful, amusing, there was another sharp and bitter that dragged up some of the old, spiked hatred.

Sands didn't compromise, and he didn't change. Anything he perceived as pressure was countered by drawling sarcasm, or occasionally by that low, even-voiced calm when he became truly vicious. And he saw threat to his personal integrity where it wasn't ever intended.

He hadn't been like this when they had stayed before.

Before he had been too busy learning, his every second driven by teaching himself to survive, preparing himself for revenge. He had a focus, one he completely accepted and gave himself to.

Now he was simply bored. He wasn't a man who could exist in a 'little backwater hovel', and El wasn't sure why he was still here. He couldn't return to America, but there were many places in Central and South America a man could hide, and ways to cross borders that involved money instead of paperwork.

He stayed because Mexico was his country. There was nothing holding Sands.

He waited over a week before he asked, timing it to one of those rare, quiet moods of Sands' when he got something close to the truth.

Sands took a long drag from his cigarette. "I could ask you the same question, El," he said, smoke twisting outwards with his words. "Why do you keep on coming back to this particular rat-hole? I'm really not seeing the big appeal."

El shrugged. "I have friends here."

Sands half-swallowed a noise that still left his reaction perfectly clear. "Ah, yes, those would be the ones who come knocking on your door to visit so often."

"They used to visit sometimes." He had no need to add the rest, that they no longer came because of Sands, that he had told them to stay away.

Sands didn't seem to move, but his body language changed entirely, a shift in the tone of his muscles almost more than his voice. "If you really gave so much as a horse's balls about any of these backward peasants, you'd head on out and leave them to get on with their henceforth much more peaceful lives." He tilted his head just barely, edge of eyebrow glimpsed above glasses. "How many times have the men with automatic weapons followed you here again? I'm starting to lose count."

Three now. Including the time that Sands had sent them for him.

"It's my home," he said.

Sands had his elbow on the table, rolling the cigarette he held slow between his thumb and forefinger. "You know, there's an idea I remember from back in the States, one that I heard around a few times in various places. Something about how home isn't really a place, home is the people in it. And as I expect you've probably noticed, your people are gone." His face was expressionless, not even bothering with the mockery. "This isn't your home, El, it's your mausoleum, just waiting for you to die along with the rest of them."

Sometimes Sands' truth was acid and bitter; more so when it bore the stripped bones of reality within it.

He had nothing here. He knew that. But it didn't mean he wanted to leave. "Then I can have no home any more," he said. He had thought it would be painful but it was only flat, a statement of a truth he had known for too long. "So here is as good as anywhere else."

"Or anywhere else is as good as here," Sands switched instantly. "Somewhere nobody comes looking for El Mariachi." His voice dipped into liquid black, spreading oil-thick and slow. "Or maybe you like them to come looking. Maybe all you really want is the justification, a reason for you to go out and find some more people to kill."

His teeth pressed and scraped, rough, a pulse through the bone. "That is you, not me."

The corner of his mouth twitched into something that might have been a smile, had it lasted. "Oh, no. I can find my own reasons, I don't need to wait around and have them handed to me."

It seemed to El that that was exactly what Sands was doing.

His eyes wandered over the familiarity of his kitchen; dark stains of years on the paintwork above the stove, battered wood low on the cupboards where Loída had bashed her toys into them while she played. His normality was here, to the extent that he could ever hold onto it. "If you are right about this place, if it is everything you say, then it's more reason for you not to stay."

Sands' cigarette had been burning through as they talked, column of grey ash lengthening unseen at his fingers, and it crumbled and spun to the floor with the tiny shiver of his hand. "There's a lot of places I could go. I just can't think of a reason why I'd want to go to any of them." He spoke the words casually, but not right, something almost desperate slanting through the chinks between.

El resolved not to use those odd moods to pry in future.

But he no longer lived with the suspicion that Sands might turn on him. He couldn't remember the last time Sands had referred to him with that drawling, sharp 'my friend' that meant anything but. He had called Ramírez that, but he no longer turned it on El.

He knew that he was still using Sands to avoid looking at the emptiness that made up most of his life. Sands gave him a focus – before, watching him adapt, now, simply trying to work out what the man was thinking. He suspected that Sands was to some degree using this place he despised to ignore that same echoing absence of anything else.

So he began to watch Sands with intent, to study and plan. It was a useful distraction for himself to keep the past from eating at his days, and he hoped to find Sands another spark now that revenge was gone.

He made no more guitars when Sands kept his distance; he watched.

Sands' own patterns in some ways weren't much changed. He sat in the square, listening, as he had before, but the obsessive edge was gone from it. It was a habit, an unthinking precaution, not a drive.

He was restless and shifting, tiny movements and alterations in muscle tone instead of disciplined stillness.

The children weren't so wary of Sands as they had once been, the exclusion zone around him still there, but shrunken, irregular. They ignored him now, their initial scared excitement at staring from a distance long since worn off.

It was hard to keep believing in the bogeyman, when he sat there day after day in full view in the sunshine and did nothing.

He wondered again about the boy at the house, what Sands could have done to generate that depth of loyalty from him. The interactions between the two of them still puzzled him - Sands had treated the child with near-constant contempt. Yet he had also told the family to leave, had been angry when the boy had almost said too much.

He shifted his attention to the children.

He watched their games, how they played, who organised and who followed, who started disputes and who calmed them, filtering everything he saw with his knowledge of their backgrounds and family history.

He focussed on an eleven-year-old girl whose mother had died several years before, leaving her playing a maternal role to three younger children. She was astonishingly mature for her age, a rare combination of practicality and caring, and most importantly she knew how to follow the instructions that mattered.

He talked to her one evening, sitting together in the gentle sunlight, fingers running through some of her favourite tunes as she named them. Many of the children liked to hear him play for them, but he couldn't bring himself to do it often.

"I wonder if you could help me with a problem I have," he said.

She looked up at him, bright, instant curiosity. "What? How?"

"I'm worried about Señor Sands," he told her. "He's very sad."

Her enormous eyes widened further. "Why is he sad?"

"Lots of reasons. Because he had to leave his home, and people in Mexico don't like him."

Sands wasn't going to be liked anywhere, and didn't want to be, but he would probably prefer it if he could live in civilisation without being shot at. "I think he gets lonely sometimes, and he might like someone besides me to talk to."

"You want me to talk to him?" She was quick as well as earnest; he couldn't have made a better choice.

"Would you, Elena?" he asked gently. "You know, sometimes he's not very nice. He gets angry because he's unhappy, and he says things he doesn't really mean." Flashing back to the house in Culiacán, and here he was again telling appalling lies to children because of Sands.

"I know," she said, quick smile full of crooked teeth. "Like when I tell Carlito he needs a bath, and he says he hates me, and I know he doesn't."

"A little bit like that," he said, smiling back, her impact irresistible and almost a pain. "So don't worry too much if he calls you names, okay? I'd like it if we could help him between us."

"Because he's your friend," she said, with all the seriousness of fact only someone her age could manage.

No, he wasn't, but he couldn't begin to explain what he was. "Yes. But right now there's just one person who's unhappy. It won't help if you end up sad too, so if he says anything you don't like, anything at all that upsets you, I want you to just walk away, do you see? Sometimes he's better left alone, so you can go back to your friends and forget about him. Will you promise me that, Elena?" Stress on her name telling her how important this was.

She nodded at him, her eyes huge and dedicated. "I promise."

He stalked Sands even more closely through the next day and a half, hovering back a hundred metres or so whenever Sands went anywhere without him.

Sands spent a lot of time walking now, following the roads further out of the town, guided by the border between flattened dirt and rougher soil and grass. He still walked fast and confident, but with his steps slightly altered, more of a slide than a lift, finding and avoiding the twigs that fell to the road.

El stood beneath the trees when he turned to come back, watching the tilt of his head as he tracked every sound from the birds, from the breeze, held his breathing stilled when he passed.

On the second day, Elena looked up from her winning hop in the ongoing game of rayuela, and spotted Sands sitting further along the square beneath one of the young trees. She scampered over and flopped down beside him, looked up at him with that vivid smile that had clawed at El's heart and Sands couldn't see. The scattered shadows of leaves swayed over her face, but he could see her lips moving fast, chattering away a greeting, and then more.

Sands didn't turn to her, face fixed level on the horizon, but he did talk in return.

El burned to know what was being said, but he would never get close enough to listen without Sands knowing he was there, and exactly why.

Several minutes passed, and some kind of rather broken conversation continued, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. Elena had lost her smile, more thoughtful now, and she was doing most of the talking. A final short comment from Sands, and she stood up and walked away, back to the other children, her face incredibly serious.

El watched her go, his anger curling deep with every one of her short steps.

Whatever Sands had said to her, he wanted to beat his brains from his skull for it.

Doing that wouldn't change his own fault in it.

She called aside some of the other children jumping the lines scratched in the dirt, pulling them into the quiet huddle that meant conspiracy. Sudden flash of his own childhood, himself and César with a gang of the other neighbourhood boys plotting out the most dubious schemes to make money. The ideas were always doomed, and it never stopped them.

He'd wanted so little then, but it had been more than he could have.

He could do no better in anything he tried, even now.

The tangle of dark hair broke apart, all the children turning to look across at Sands. Elena marched off towards him, her expression and her stride absolutely determined, the others straggling after her.

Oh.

He hadn't actually told her not to involve any of the other children; he'd thought she would understand that much.

This wasn't going to go well.

Elena dropped into her place beside Sands, the others forming a circle, sprawled around him in the dirt.

A few months ago, he would have had a pistol in his hand watching this.

He wished he knew what was going on.

He wasn't the only one. The parents of some of those children were watching too, staring over at Sands and then looking to him, as if he should know what was happening, what to do.

He avoided their eyes, fixed on the group by the tree.

He could see when Sands was talking, Elena and a couple of the others, but some of the children had their backs to him. He couldn't even tell now if the conversation was ongoing, or fractured and uncertain.

He wondered what Sands was saying. He would be teaching them some interesting language, if only incidentally.

He hoped he wasn't discussing life philosophies.

Sands lounged back against the tree, his legs stretching out with knees slightly bent, the image of his body completely relaxed. But his hands rested still on his thighs, missing the gestures and movements that went with simple conversation, and his head shifted a few degrees too far, a little too often. El knew that closer, he would catch the slight twitch at the edge of Sands' lips as he found the answer he expected, the brief deepening of the lines in his forehead as something caught his interest and he switched his angles.

His only consolation was that none of the children seemed obviously upset. Thoughtful, yes, maybe... confused.

It took longer than he would have guessed, and in the end it was Sands who stood and walked away.

El was already moving to follow him when he saw the madness of it, Sands too alert and interested, too suspecting right now for him to have a hope.

He went to the guitar stalls instead and sanded the wood, the quick, repetitive movements wearing down some of the burn of waiting, of wanting to be somewhere else.

It was inevitable that evening, the words coming between forkfuls of rice. "El, have you by any strange chance set the village brats on me? Those idiot peasant's bastards seem to have had a somewhat striking change of heart."

He shrugged in an obvious rustle of cloth, neutral tones practiced and ready. "They were asking about you. I said I didn't think you would shoot them."

"Oh, you could have said quite a bit more than that. You certainly did before." Sands was smiling faintly, a twitching curve of his lips that didn't settle. "It's interesting that you should have been so reticent this time."

He speared a piece of chicken too hard, high screech of tines. "They're harmless."

"Obviously."

It was impressive how much derision Sands could drawl through a single word, and he breathed slow to keep the humour from his voice. "So it doesn't matter if they talk to you."

"Harmless doesn't mean the little brats aren't annoying. There's not one of them could match the brains of a one-trip pack-mule." He flicked his head, a noise and a gesture highly suggestive of spitting, but didn't actually do it, which was good because it meant El didn't have to hit him. "Turn them loose in a city, and they'd be hooking for their fixes inside a week."

It wasn't so surprising.

Sands had talked with contempt all those months ago about a city and an existence that hardened the youngest of children to death and bloodshed. But it was that enforced practicality and sense for survival that had allowed Sands to tolerate the boy at all.

He still wasn't sure if Sands had no time for people who didn't meet his standards, or simply no time for people he couldn't see a way to use.

But the boy had been unharmed while Sands had expected to die.

"You should tell them to fuck off again, El," Sands went on, "because if you don't then I will, and I'm sure you'll find a nicer way to express it."

It was, in many ways, a relief.

He gave Elena a wooden doll he'd carved and jointed together with the help of one of the guitar makers, and explained to her that Señor Sands was still too sad to want to talk much. She understood, knowing too much of grief and its forms, and gave the doll to her sister.

Everything about her made him ache.

He didn't want to ache. He'd done that too much.

He gave up on people, and thought about getting Sands a dog.

He saw him approached by the dogs that wandered the town while he sat in the square sometimes, and he patted and scratched at them absently before they wandered off again. Maybe he didn't actively like dogs, but he didn't dislike them, and training one would eat through much of his time. And an animal wouldn't care about Sands' ever-unpleasant way of expressing himself either.

A dog would be unpredictable, though, would lie around in different places for Sands to trip over. He knew that blind people did keep dogs, so it must be possible to train them not to do that. But if Sands was to train it himself, the period between would be difficult.

In the end, it was the concept of blind people and dogs that stopped him. He could see in his mind the moment when Sands imagined he was giving him a dog to act as his eyes, and he thought he might have found the one thing that could still make Sands want to shoot him. And the dog.

His possibilities reduced to inanimate objects, he saw how little there was in his town.

He'd always known that, and it had never bothered him. He didn't need anything more than he had.

It was easier to live that way when the choices had been taken from you, but it was an attitude that would hang from Sands, drowning him, ill-fitting and shapeless as an old widow's dresses.

Skimming back over months of casual conversation and passing references left him with books as something missing from Sands' life now that could still be replaced.

Sands had been surprised by El's knowledge of books, which had made him smile for another small secret he still kept. He hadn't always been fond of books - growing up, they'd been something of an obligation, a very poor second to his music - until he'd married a woman who adored them. Carolina had wanted to bring literature to an entire town, but she had settled for one mariachi.

He could fix the lack of books in a single day - one trip to the big stores in Durango, and there would be audio books of every kind.

He didn't suggest it.

Books would fix nothing, band-aids to a brain-shot, the futility of it all dragging him into laughter, black and bitter.

His instincts were back with him, whispering through his nerves and his blood that something was coming.

He could hear it all around the edges, all the time, a ticking that itched in his head, shivered unbroken through his sleep to leave him unrested and sense-dazzled, inputs stretching crimson-vivid and inescapable as stress hormones drove to compensate.

It came from Sands.

He coiled across El's chairs in the evenings even as his body and limbs sprawled.

His gestures flared and exaggerated as his muscles strung tauter, subtle alterations to the outline of him as he walked, the way he sat. He twisted his cigarette ends into the base of the ashtray, crushing and shredding the fibres, every sensation of it close and too familiar, identical vibrations triggered all through El like sympathetic strings.

Sands still checked himself with the villagers, but barely. He held a semblance of politeness in Spanish when he spoke it - his usage perfect even as colloquial, though always with the undeniable American accent El had guessed at so many months before - but he knew exactly which people around him spoke English and how well. Watching Sands release a small amount of his frustrations by eloquently and smilingly insulting the people he lived among disturbed him. Not the petty exploitation of their ignorance, which was minor by the standards of such things, but as a symptom.

El had too much knowledge of what a bored Sands was capable of.

Sands had to leave, and soon.

El didn't say it.

He trailed him constantly, both of them Sands' walking dead, haunting the town and each other.

He watched him pace the town and the roof through the lengthening heat, watched him shift and quiver in tight, tiny motions. He watched the sweat swell at his hairline, trickle down over his temple to be lost in the dark plastic curving back to his ear, and saw pure nitroglycerine.

Sands would overhear, eventually, someone talking about his mariachi shadow, and he waited for the confrontation, breathless, eager.

Because the ticking was also within himself.

Something was coming, and before he had turned to hunting it, but now there was nothing to hunt.

There was only Sands, who should be gone.

He still played in the evenings, when Sands was there, within sight, within reach, eyes drawn over him as his fingers flowed and faltered over the strings, pressure catching at his hands.

"El, have you ever considered learning to think with your brain instead of your hands? It's like a fucking taiko band starts up the second you stop twanging."

Sands' face was empty, plaster-fixed as the words ended.

El wondered vaguely what taiko was, but he stilled the rhythm in his fingers, splaying them flat over the warmth of the wood. "The hands are only an outlet," he said. "If the hands need to think, you make mistakes. The guns, the music, it's the same thing." He slid his fingers back to the stretched wires, soft notes, uncaged from immobility.

"Then would you mind sticking a cork in your goddamn outlet? I can live with the guitar, but the drums are a bit too fucking much."

It was gone, the amused flicker that lived with the spite.

He had a better idea about taiko now, though.

"At least I give myself an outlet," he said. "I'd recommend it."

"Well, that's just what I need, advice from the great El Mariachi on how to waste my life hiding in the sewers of Mexico."

"You asked my advice once."

"And you think that's an open invitation? When I'm willing to declare myself dead and rejoice in the peasant lifestyle like you, you'll know because I'll borrow a needle and stitch on some chains."

He understood it, the loss of the humour, because he felt its change in himself, growing closer to lashing out in response to comments that would have amused him just weeks before. Frustration clawed through his patience, and it had never been strong in the beginning.

He stopped playing and laid the guitar on the table beside him.

Whatever was coming, this wasn't it.

He went to his bedroom, closed the door quietly. Laid his head back to the wood, solid against the curve of his skull.

Ran his hand down over his shirt to the cloth at his groin, stroking.

He did this more often now, his tensions easing out along with the memories.

So many memories of her over so few years; the confident, ever-teasing owner of the bookstore, the aggressively determined woman who had fled with him from both their pasts, unshaken, the one who had shed everything to make a life with him here in a town that held so little, and been happy to do it.

His hand slow over himself, his eyes closed, fabric ridged against his fingertips and Carolina's scent and smile so bright in his mind. The orange dress she'd worn that first day, the long tails that swayed around her legs as she walked, his lips on her skin as he opened the buttons over her breasts.

Buckle and zip parted, and only his own fingers and the tepid air to touch.

It wasn't the same. It wouldn't ever be anything like the same as having her there, having her hair flow around him as she shook her head and laughed. The hair she had cursed loud and often as untameable and he'd never seen as anything but beautiful.

He moved to stretch out over the bed, his face turning into the pillows as he slid his hand up along the line of hair to his stomach, pushing his shirt away. Any trace of her had been gone for so long, but he still used the same washing powder she'd always demanded, their bed still carrying something of the scent he knew from when they had shared it.

The press of the mattress against his ribs, the encircling rhythm of his fingers and the brush of his thumb, the sound of her giggling as noses bumped or her nail caught in his hair, his breath starting to choke as his hips and hand moved faster.

It didn't take long.

When he lay afterwards, still, the ticking through his head was distanced, deadened, though the effect didn't last.

He wiped himself on a tissue and walked out to the bathroom, washing his hands slowly, heated water and soft soap, the bubbles sucked away, spinning.

Sands was stretched lazily across the armchair, elbow resting on the arm as he smoked.

"You know, they say you'll go blind doing that. You must have heard, a good Catholic boy like you." He twitched his fingers deliberately, embers drifting into the ashtray below his hand. "You should go out and get yourself a girlfriend, then I can listen to my own personal porno flick instead."

He took his guitar from the table and leaned his hip against the edge, the temptation to laugh smooth and brittle. "I don't think that's likely."

"Come on, El, why not? It can't be that hard to pick up some cute young mule-brained piece of ass around here; you were pretty enough to manage that much the last time I looked, or could have been, scrubbed of a few layers of dust." He kinked one edge of his mouth into a not-smile. "And I hope you're not going to go off on some self-pity jag about how everybody dies, because that would be just too B-movie cliché."

His fingers rippled over the strings, chords to check tuning a habit though it had been much less than an hour. "I was thinking more that I share my house with a murderer with no morals. And sometimes men with guns come here for me, and people die." His hands wandered into a song, an old one he'd used to warm up for decades, movement with no thought. "The women I know don't seem to like those things."

Sands laughed, oddly real for the words that followed. "Forgive me, El, for not sharing your pain on this one. But since I am that freaky little sociopath, oh and not to mention the whole inconvenient eyes in a pickle jar thing, I think my chances of getting laid have to be a bit worse than yours."

"If I wanted to 'get laid' as you say, I could."

"What, no quick fucks for the great Mariachi?" He grinned wide, lilting the words so dramatically he was almost singing. "Too much romance in your soul?"

He stopped playing, not liking the way Sands' mockery tracked the rhythm, corrupted the sound. "That's not why." He'd had sex that way, knew it could be good. But that attitude belonged to the cities, not to small country towns where it could never be anonymous or easy. "I know all these people," he said. "I see them every day."

And he really wouldn't want to face Father Ríos when he heard he was sleeping with the women here on casual terms.

"Well, it's starting to sound like we're the both of us equally screwed, or more unfortunately, not." Sands gave him that even, balanced smile that missed innocence only because of the man who wore it. "Hell, maybe we should just jerk each other off. It's one step up from always doing it yourself."

He let the words roll out unstressed, casual, the opportunity there for El to brush it away, to ignore it the way he ignored Sands' overly-spiced threats.

Except it wasn't, something taut in the long sprawl of his body over the chair.

And El didn't.

He never touched Sands. Had never attempted to after that first panicked reaction at the boy's house. Except for when you drugged him and hit him, of course, his guilt insisted on whispering.

All these months with the man sharing his house, all the conversations wandering between viciously probing and genuinely comfortable, all the long practice sessions with Sands' pistols before they went after Montejo, and he allowed Sands a bullet-thick barrier around him that he never tested. He took absolute care not to let his hand reach for a plate when Sands did, curled his feet out of the way when it seemed Sands might brush against him as he walked past his chair.

It had never bothered him that he had to do these things; he had some hint in his imagination of just how paranoid and prone to over-reaction he might become, living under threat without his sight. It was simple caution.

The casual invitation to touch now rocked him, and not just because it was sexual.

Sands stretched himself out, crossing his feet at the ankles and leaning his head to one side to rest on his fist, relaxed and arrogant in the silence. "What's the matter, El? Too shocked even to hit me? I was really hoping for some kind of reaction, because just being ignored puts one dinger of a hollow-point into the old male ego."

He saw it all then. Where this was going if he didn't choose to stop it, where it had always been going. Other people moving things around him, the world shifting, and he was too busy thinking about the now to see it.

It was possible he hadn't wanted to look.

He saw it all now.

Or he thought it was all....

He turned and walked out.

He went to the roof.

It was breezy and chill, his hair swept back from his face as he stood by the balustrade, the shock of cold air exploring round his neck. An almost-clear night, the stars there, but only the brightest hinting at their real patterns through the drifts of thin, high cloud.

It would blaze away in the morning, when the sun came.

Sometimes he wondered about destiny. Even before he'd shot a man, before anyone had wanted to kill him, he'd had too many dreams that took an unexpected shift to the violent and disturbing. And he wondered if he had ever had a chance to be anything different.

He didn't like to think he'd always been doomed to this. But he didn't like to believe it had all been his choice either.

The cold of the stone crept into his skin as he sat, seeping fast through his clothes while his fingers slid over the strings. The wood held the warmth of the house where it rested against him, the taut-shivering wires chilling faster as the air sucked past them. He played low, soft; gentle movements of his hands, letting the wind rip the notes away and twist them into nothing within metres, most of the town dark and unmoving below.

The ticking had died with the knowledge, its underlying thrum exposed in the low and steady glow of old embers, banked and waiting; and the music ran with it, formed its patterns around it.

The notes drifted easily, simple tunes of habit flawless and light, added complexities feeding from instinct to wind their way through the basic melodies, his voice humming another layer mellow over them. It was almost odd the way it flowed, with everything he knew and more he suspected. He supposed that little would really surprise him now, when his world had already twisted to the point where he lived with Sands because he wanted to.

So his life would change again, and he'd been dragged down and then spat back out onto the rocks so often by those same tides that it didn't seem to matter.

He wondered when he'd actually made the decision, because it wasn't a choice now.

His fingers moved smooth and unhurried, living with the sounds instead of the tension for the first time in weeks. Leaves rustled beneath the notes, the wind twining both together as it brushed over him, sweeping his hair past his eyes and the smell of smoke and cigarettes with it.

He played until the chill dragged its bullet-echo through his hand and his fingers refused to curl to the strings.

He expected Sands to be awake, waiting, and he was.

He was sitting by the table with his back to the door, cigarettes and ashtray arranged in front of him, no reaction to El's return.

The ashtray had filled up a lot. Sands smoked so heavily anyway that it didn't mean anything.

He set the guitar gently in the corner and walked round the table to lean against the cupboards opposite, where he could watch. Wood creaked beneath his weight, a force pressing against his spine.

Sands just sat, long after he settled.

"They will be back," he said.

Sands took a cigarette and lit it, slid the pack across the table towards him. "Who?"

"The cartel."

"Even if we got every last one, which we didn't, there'll be someone else just like them," Sands agreed mildly.

"So we should go and get them."

Sands' lips curled up at the edges, stretching outwards and widening ever so slowly into that bright and satisfied smile that El knew far too well. "Well, that took you long enough, El," he said, each word strung out and lazy, as if he was tasting the shape of them on his tongue. "I was actually starting to wonder if I might have misjudged you."

It was disconcerting, watching the real Sands, the killer, uncurl and stretch from inside the man who'd been existing in his house since Culiacán.

It would have been less so if he didn't recognise that feeling from the inside.

He had known he was right. He just hadn't known it would be so blatant, the life taking shape in the slow-spreading glow, and he wondered if people saw it like this in him before he took hold of his guns. If Carolina had looked at him and seen this.

Sands wasn't ever going to live quietly, here or anywhere. If he'd found his Brazilian beach and a bottle of tequila, he would have been probing out suitable targets for his malice within weeks. He had nothing unless his brain was twisting, analysing, and the only thing that truly interested him was manipulation, playing for the highest of stakes and dealing out death.

He wondered if his head had actually been clearer before he started to think of Sands as human, when he was just an annoyance in his passenger seat, something to be used.

Sands was Sands now, and would remain that to him, whatever he did.

There was never a path back.

He reached for the pack of cigarettes that lay on the table between them. "If that's what you wanted, why didn't you ever suggest it?"

"Because you would have said no." Sands spoke with easy confidence.

"You could have persuaded me." Sands knew how to work him, he always had, and he would have been an easy sell. In many ways, it was easier to be that man than not to.

"I could have." No doubt on it from Sands either. "And you would have killed some people with me, and then afterwards you would have come trotting dutifully back here and rotted through all your months of mournful penance again. This deal really only works if you choose it for yourself."

He rolled the cigarette between his fingers, finally put it to his lips and lit it. "So you just sat back and waited."

He smiled, leaning back more heavily into his chair. "Well, more or less. It kind of depends on how you look at it."

Sands wouldn't make the mistake of trying to lie to him, not now.

He wondered when it had become so important to him that he didn't.

The smoke drifted heavy and slow over his tongue, in, out. "You don't think by telling me this now, I will become annoyed and change my mind?"

"No." Sands was still smiling faintly, no effort to disguise it. "You've already decided what you're going to do, and if you back out now, because of what I say, then you're letting me control your future, and somehow, I don't think you want to do that."

Part of him could have laughed at the obvious flaw. Sands was controlling his future either way; had been ever since the day he'd knocked on a door in Culiacán.

No. If he was honest, it had been before that. A week before, when he'd left this place to find him; from that point, every decision he made had already revolved around him.

It was too easy to look at where he stood now and tell himself it was because of Sands. It wouldn't have happened if he hadn't allowed it, his own obsessive, driven nature resurfacing and focussing after so many years.

It felt too good to have something to chase again.

El thought again about Ramírez, and wished they hadn't had to lose such a useful man. A thoughtful man, and most likely a good one. "You have other people who can get us information?"

"Oh, I always have other people, El." Sands' lips twitched and there was a quick flash of eyebrows above the sunglasses. "Sometimes they just don't know it yet."

It wasn't just Ramírez - Sands had also spoken of the man who'd told him where to find El. "Do you have anyone you can manage to leave alive for a while?" he asked.

"That depends entirely on them." Sands flicked his cigarette into the ashtray. "We're going to become remarkably popular, and you'd be surprised who turns up willing to sell you out."

"I had to kill my own brother," El reminded him.

Sands smiled, wide and cheerful. "And that's precisely why I hold out some hope for you, El."

So much of Sands right there, a smile and a sentence, the judging of someone's worth by how ruthless they were willing to be.

He was tying himself to a man who had no other purpose to his existence beyond the hunt, the control over who would live and who would die, who needed it to hold what was left of himself together. And that man was tying himself to El because El would help bring it to him.

But he himself was not so different now. He had found after the coup that he couldn't settle into the life here any more; it wouldn't fit, wouldn't hold, and he had left to chase the violence. Their reasons were different, but both of them were trapped in the cycle.

As long as Sands was with him, Sands would kill with purpose. That vicious clarity within his mind that set him apart from madness, it could be focussed and unleashed on those who deserved it.

And he was already bound to Sands in enough ways that one more didn't change things.

'He won't be here for long.' His own words, the lies he told himself.

"Did you mean it?" he asked slowly. "What you said about doing it to each other?" The heavy emphasis through his words would leave no doubt what he meant.

Sands smiled slow and wide and not entirely welcoming. "Well, of course I did, El. I never make an offer I'm not prepared to follow through on. I have to say, though, I'm a little surprised - I didn't honestly expect a good Catholic like you would consider taking me up on it."

"I haven't been a Catholic for many years." He still believed, still prayed sometimes, but the trappings of it meant nothing to him any more.

"Oh, that's right, I forgot. You only go to church to kill people now, don't you?"

That wasn't entirely fair, but it wasn't so untrue either. He'd used his share of churches to meet friends, contacts, to discuss murder, going back a decade.

He was choosing that life again now, and his death with it. But he'd chosen the other way in the past, and lost it all. Had lost the innocents he had dragged down with him.

Sands at least had chosen this path himself, as El had.

He stepped forward, letting his hands trail over the cloth around his arms as a warning.

He wanted to touch him.

For everything he knew of Sands, the man forced his attention in a way no-one else now came close to, like the golden desert scorpions whose images he wore. Dangerous, deadly, yes, but his awareness was held when the risk was past, fascination in the pure economy of purpose, the same oddly compelling beauty that lay in his guns.

His own nature had always been essentially tactile, the touch of something beneath his hand letting him feel it on a level that purely conscious understanding could not. And he wondered how Sands would feel to him.

He slid his grip loose down onto his hand, his wrist, the exposed skin there. Fine hairs beneath his fingertips, muscles tensing against him; even when Sands allowed his touch, there would always be reaction there, instinctive, intrinsic to who and what he was.

His fingers wandered around his wrist, the steady-beating life and drive of him right there against tendons now strung as tight as his own.

Sands snapped his fist up and punched him below the cheekbone, hard enough to force him back a step, and he was up on his feet fast behind it.

"Let's get one thing straight here, El. I am not your little wife. This is about getting off."

The ache through his teeth was nothing. "Oh, I know you are not my wife." He didn't even want to hide the bitterness. "My wife was generous and kind and loving. She was beautiful."

"Yes, well, I think we'd both say we're lowering our standards just a bit here." Sands' words sliced as obliquely as his own. "Though, I guess I'll have to admit most people would say yours have dropped further, since I'd have to pay mental trauma compensation to a hooker now." He dipped his head unerringly into the light spreading outwards from over the table, reaching up to tilt the sunglasses down his nose.

El had never seen him without them, but he'd seen enough to know. So many months sharing space, watching, always watching, and a thousand glimpses from all the tiny motions Sands would barely be aware of - sweeping his hair behind his ear to light a cigarette, dropping his head forward in ingrained habit as his fork searched out the last of his food, the glasses following his fingers a centimetre or two when he rubbed along his nose before he pushed them back. He knew what was there and what wasn't, the staring emptiness and the scarring, the angled ridges of unevenly healed tissue with a slick-smooth surface that glistened almost wet with the flare of the light.

If Sands was expecting to shock him, it failed; but the constant, deliberate spiking was just as sharp.

Two steps forward and a push Sands couldn't brace for, and he had him backed against the wall, Sands' fingers still gripping tight around the glasses, pressing them back into place before they could be lost to scatter across the floor. "You are so obsessed with 'pretty'?" Spitting back the word Sands had painted over him earlier with such derision. "Here, look for yourself." He tugged the tail of his shirt up over his body, and grabbed Sands by the wrist. Sands snatched back hard, instinctive, but he had nowhere to go, no leverage, and El kept his grip and dragged his hand towards his chest. "You feel that?" He drew Sands' fingers across the scars scattered rough across his chest. "Those are the bullets from Marquez' gun when he killed my family. And this," he pulled Sands' touch, no longer resisting, down the length of his ribs, "this is where they cut me open to take those bullets out." He let Sands' hand drop away from his body, but his grip around his bones tightened. "I have more if you want to see." Using the word deliberately, and waiting for the backlash.

Sands only laughed, high and ringing past wickedly carved lips, pushing forwards and twisting his body into him. "Yeah, that's more like it, El. Now you're getting the idea."

He grabbed for Sands' other wrist, holding them tight by his sides, and stopped that acid mouth with his own, hard and vicious with the ragged anger.

Teeth nipped at El's lips, sharp and painful, and he bit back, unthinking. Sands didn't move to strike him this time, fighting his grip only enough to put his hands to his hips and drag him closer. This, this, the feel of someone moving against him, the pressure of lips warm on his, a slick and practiced tongue pushing at him, all of it shooting through him like a flare, and he wanted more, all, wanted -

"Your room," he said.

This was different, but he wouldn't have Sands in Carolina's bed.

"Why, how considerate of you, El. I'd only fall over things in yours." Sands knew exactly why, the derision strung taut and neon all through his words, and it was easier to hold his lips with teeth and tongue than to listen to him. And Sands didn't fight him this time either, pushing, yes, but only making it better.

His chin was obsessively smooth, flawless within the grip of his hand - even here, in this village, he often shaved more than once. And it was one thing to know Sands' habits, and another to experience them against him, unmarred skin rubbing over his own as their lips and bodies angled and drove.

He stripped the leather binding from his hand, seeking with every nerve and sensation that still ran through his palm and his fingers. He curled them tight into Sands' clothes, fibres harsh contrast to the slide of his cheeks and his mouth, pulled at him, tugging towards the doorway.

Sands jerked away, two staggered off-balance steps, shoving with previously keen hands. "What the - " And then he got it and moved with it, pressing back in as they found his room, hard edge of plastic scraping over El's cheekbone while they clashed noses and teeth. He had his hands inside Sands' jacket, pushing at it, tugging at his T-shirt beneath it, wanting to touch, wanting to know -

Sands looped his forearms up and outwards, shoving his hands away, and took two steps back. "You can quit that right now, El. I'm not playing hide and seek with my fucking clothes half the night for a quick jerk-off." His voice hung swaying between bored and irritated, but his tongue dragged over his lips, and he shivered faintly in air that was not so cold.

Sands couldn't lie to him now, not so long as he watched.

Sands stood by the bed and undressed himself, no tease, no play, just ridding himself of clothes. El decided it was easiest to follow his example, and did the same.

"You leave any mariachi crap where I'll trip over it later and I'll shoot you in the balls," Sands said.

Sands carefully folded everything and laid them across the chair by the bed, his gunbelts on top. El looked around, and in the absence of anywhere better near him, he folded his own clothes into a pile and pushed them beneath the edge of the bed.

He stood there naked, with another naked man. It wasn't the first time he'd done that, of course, but it had never been... like this. Never a man with an erection as obvious as his own, and with intent....

It occurred to him, looking at Sands stripped bare and with that empty plastic stare aimed right at him, that he really had no idea what he was going to do. Oh, he knew principles and basic ideas, but that was never the same as actually doing and he -

"I hope you're not turning frigid on me over there, El," Sands remarked, "because it's not considered polite to leave a guy hanging, and I really don't want to have to do all the work myself."

"Shut up," he said, and he walked forward and gripped his hair and kissed him hard, so he would have no choice.

A little odd to be kissing someone his own height, surprising with someone who came to him with teeth as much as with tongue, someone who matched his force and summoned more of it with sharp nails in his shoulders. Startling, arousing, Sands wholly with him in this, and his fingers untangled from his hair to run over his neck and along his spine.

The simplicity of skin. Touch. Oh, God.

He hadn't realised.

With Sands, he'd avoided even the most casual of contacts, and spending so much time with him had restricted his interactions with the townspeople still more than his essentially solitary ways after Carolina's death had already done.

He hadn't understood how much he'd cut himself off from something so vital, until now when it shocked all through his body in flashes and ripples.

It was muscle and angles against him instead of muscle that shifted into curves, but it was the touch that mattered, the skin beneath his hands, the fingers raking tight over his own.

He'd wondered what he would find when he touched Sands, and the answer was simply... more.

Sands gripped him and pressed up against him with lips and hips, demanding, pushing, inevitable. He was taut, bunched muscle beneath his hands, never relaxed, even when he gave that impression, always coiled and edged. He shivered and reacted, moving his hands over El's body as El explored his own skin, never still, not for moment, and that was true of all of him, his mind ever-restless and seeking even while he held his body motionless.

There was nothing new here - he already knew this man. Not his past, not the details, but as much as he needed.

The touch here was of someone known and trusted, and to his body that meant more than he'd guessed it would. Familiarity made it easy, took this practical easing of loneliness and made it different from sex with a stranger.

And he was so familiar.

His hair had grown, straggling even with his own, and it fell forwards across both their cheeks as Sands nipped along his jaw. He wondered vaguely how long it would become, if Sands would ever let a stranger near his neck with a pair of scissors. But his hair brought with it the smell of his own shampoo beneath the clinging tobacco, and his skin was clean with the hints of El's soap, and he realised how much was common to both of them now. They ate the same food, smoked the same cigarettes, though El smoked them occasionally and Sands all the damn time.

He debated pointing that out to Sands, that there was not so much difference between them any more - the reaction would be amusing, but it might also get him kicked out of this room to finish himself alone, so he stayed quiet and used his lips and teeth on Sands' ear instead, the fingers that gripped at his body tightening in response.

Now that he knew this, Sands against him, beneath his fingers, open to his lips, he wanted it, would continue to want it, and he wouldn't stop. This was his now.

If the touch did this to him, he wondered how it was for Sands, who couldn't see.

But he knew something of it, knew it from the compulsive movement of hands over his own body, from the pattern of the breath that flared warm and jagged across his shoulder.

He grabbed hold of Sands' arms and hooked a leg around his ankle, flipping them so they both fell sideways onto the bed. The fingers on his arm and thigh tightened reflexively, curling into painful hooks as they landed, the bed quivering and creaking beneath them.

He bought good, strong furniture; it would take it.

"Christ, El, how about some warning next time?"

"Maybe," he smiled. He liked Sands a little off-balance, a little surprised. It made him easier to deal with. He shifted a hand to his hip, tugging them together and holding him there, the press of another erection against his own hot and real, and not something he'd ever thought to want, but now it made him shudder and crumble and need.

"Fuck." It was more of a slow breath than a word, Sands' frequently mocking, lazy voice much more appealing this way.

Yes, fuck. That sounded... interesting too, maybe, but...

He tightened the muscles in his stomach and thighs, and rolled himself against Sands, the movement rubbing along him, slow and perfect and urgent, dragging through him, irresistible, so that he did it again. Watched Sands suck on his own fingers and lick along his palm with the smoke and poison tongue that he had welcomed into himself.

Sands' breath was a warmth on his neck, short and irregular, and his hand pressed between them, damp fingers wrapping around him, holding them both together so that he shivered with it even before the fingers began to move. Sands worked them fast almost from the start, the cool curl of his fingers sharp against the heat of his body and beautiful with friction, and that was so much of a good thing that more could only be better, adding his own hand, twining his fingers over and around Sands', into the hint of wetness, catching the rhythm instantly.

His head fell forwards to Sands' shoulder, his lips and teeth moving over his skin, fast, keen, eager, wanting, demanding, and Sands, Sands angled his head and extended his throat and let him take, fingers hooking into his hip, gripping him tighter, and that, that drove him further, made him want it more, and his hand kept the rhythm, fingers sure around them both, but his body was losing it, trembling, Sands suddenly jerking, shuddering hard and breathing hard alongside him, all sweat and damp hair against his nose, salt beneath his bite, violence contained in his hands; and orgasm was a release from all of it, any fragments of doubt or conflict leached away with the tension from his body, with the warm, clinging come on his fingers and stomach from both of them.

He was sweaty and sticky and he was... good. His fingers resting on skin, his body passive with release, a tempting-deep lethargy safe from thought he obtained no other way.

Sands rolled over onto his back, breaking the touch. "Well, that was a little more than I recall suggesting."

His voice was breathy and cracked beneath the dry tones, and El smiled. He knew what Sands had envisaged, though, a single hand on one another, dry and distant. "Isn't it a bit late now to object?"

"There's really no such thing, El. 'Too late' is just what most people use as an easy excuse for doing nothing." Sands appeared to consider briefly, then twisted away onto his side, tugging the wrinkled sheet out from under him. "I'll give you my take on it later, when I wake up."

"I'll remember to duck." He wiped his hand on the edge of the sheet. It was messy enough already, it didn't matter.

The night wasn't warm, but it was enough, indoors, breezeless. The fingers of air drifted over the sweat on his skin, cooling; not unpleasant, though it might become so in the few hours of darkness still left to it.

Light angled in from the open doorway, the rest of the house still bright as they had left it.

It could stay that way.

He lay, ignoring the lingering, distant stickiness of his body, almost scared of any movement that might break the acceptance. He lay, the ceiling hanging closer before his eyes, his limbs shattered and idle, listening to the soft, whistling hiss of breath.

Sands was asleep beside him.

It still felt like insanity to trust him, but at least his insanity was shared.

It only seemed fair, since he was about to share in Sands'.

He didn't think he would sleep, but it was nice just to lie, unfettered by guilt.

When he woke, he was holding Sands, curled in behind him, his arm stretched along his ribs and over his hip.

It wasn't surprising. This was what he'd been used to, what sleeping with someone had always meant. Not always love, but always liking and enjoyment, a desired closeness. He accepted it as an inevitable hangover from his old life. There would be more.

He thought about pulling back, about walking out of this room and leaving Sands to wake alone. It would be safer. But safe had no place in his life any more, and Sands' reaction would at least be interesting.

He lay, relaxed, his eyes closed, inhaling cigarettes and sex with every breath. Sands felt good against him, warmth and contact if nothing more. His body fed him the soft ache of bruises where Sands' fingers had gripped at his hips, at his arms. It was a low, throbbing stiffness, worth it for being touched and wanted.

He circled his jaw carefully, and winced. He could have done without that first punch, though.

He knew the moment Sands awoke, his body locking rigid beside him; and then his hand flashed out to his gun on the chair.

He couldn't stop the tension that jarred through him, but he didn't move for the shotgun. He lay entirely still, and so did Sands, his fingers white around the grip.

He had marks circling his wrist where El had held him.

"When you've decided whether or not you're not going to shoot me, let me know," he said. "If I'm going to live, I'll have to think about breakfast." Sands didn't cook. He said he'd never cooked when he could see, and certainly wouldn't now.

Sands took the hand from his gun and straightened his sunglasses. "Sorry, El." He didn't sound it at all. "You know, the last person who was in my bed went and had my eyes drilled out. I guess that kind of thing will leave a guy on the cautious side of crazy."

El remained still. He'd wondered about Sands and Ajedrez, if Sands had made that error; about how someone like him had been trapped by Barillo's daughter.

He had no place to judge him on that mistake - he himself had only been stupid enough to sleep with drug dealers' girlfriends. He supposed some would say he had escaped lightly, with no more than the loss of them and some bullet scars to punish him.

Sands coiled his body into himself before he even moved. El could feel his skin crawl away from his touch moments before Sands slid away to the far edge of the bed.

It was the obvious reaction, and had in truth perhaps taken longer than he had expected, but the abrupt withdrawal still left him missing the touch.

It wasn't what he used to have, but it was more than the nothing.

Sands sat upright and ran a hand down his stomach with an expression of distaste. "Christ, that's messy. Now I remember why I hardly ever fuck guys."

El felt like telling him to get used to it, but that would definitely put him far outside the bounds of luck. Mostly, he was glad that one of them knew something practical of sex between men, though he'd assumed as much when Sands made the suggestion. "So take a shower," he said, his disinterest in Sands' complaint clear. "It washes off."

It clung to him more than the blood did. The blood washed away so easily for what it was.

"If that's your idea of morning after charm, El, it's no wonder you weren't getting laid."

"I'm letting you use the shower first," he said. "And the women never threatened to shoot me in the morning."

Sands half-turned his head over his shoulder, barest twitch of his lips at the corner. "Then you must have picked a better class of woman, because I can't always say the same for mine."

There was a line along his cheekbone, a curving mark where the sunglasses had lain crooked. He doubted Sands normally slept in them.

They were annoying anyway. They would have to go.

Sands would refuse, of course, but that could be worked around. Maybe, a cloth... like a blindfold. Dark, like his hair, dramatic, like him.

Sands had a deep sense for the dramatic, a conscious flair to almost everything he did, but he suspected he might take some persuading to apply that to his sexual involvement with El.

He knew what they did physically would progress; it had smashed through them both with too much starved intensity not to, and he wasn't wired to ever take percentages. He either did something or he didn't, and in wanting Sands now, he wanted him.

Sands had lines of wound steel, curled and ridged into strength beneath the touch, but that would only slow, not stop it.

The bed shifted beneath him as Sands left it, walking over to the cupboard to take one of the towels from the second shelf. El had noted the disappearance of some of his linens over the months and said nothing, recognising Sands' need to claim some simple things as his own, instead of everything being El's.

It was more annoying that Sands had taken the best ones.

He came back towards the bed, lifting the holsters from the top of the neat pile on the chair before making for the door, and El watched him through every precise and deliberate step.

He'd been living with this man for close to six months, and until today he'd seen no more than his hands, the skin that clung along the angle of his jaw and the curve of his throat. And now he walked naked and casual, pale where his clothes kept the sun from him, and distinctively bullet-scarred, uncaring of anything except the presence of the plastic shield curled around his face.

He really shouldn't walk through to the bathroom that way, because the windows on that side of the house were overlooked. He suspected Sands had worked that out just fine for himself, and was only doing it to see if it would get some kind of reaction from him.

Given the things his neighbours already knew about him, the things they had watched him do, they could probably live with knowing that he and Sands wouldn't always feel the need to be clothed around one another.

It wouldn't matter after today anyway.

Sands stopped by the door, one arm up supporting him against the frame, in full view of El and of anyone in the street who cared to look.

He could see the faint lines of bruising on his throat, fading into the shadow of his hair, remembered Sands stretching into the graze of his teeth. It made him want to touch again, follow him to the shower and run hands and mouth over his skin.

That would be one of those lines, and he wouldn't push those yet.

Sands didn't move. He stood naked in the doorway, head tilted towards El's silence, towel slung over his shoulder and gunbelts spilling heavy from his fingers.

"So, we're going."

It hadn't really been a hope, because he had known better, but whatever it had been was gone now.

"Yes. We're going."

He stopped the car by the cemetery, dew heavy in the morning chill, drops clinging and merging on his boots as he pushed through the grass along the wall.

He stood before the two crosses, sunlight edging them in water-glow and shadows stretching out towards his feet.

He wouldn't be back here again.

He listened to the birds glittering from the trees, untangling all the separate strands of song from the mass of notes, and he didn't know what to say.

He didn't know if he had the right to talk to her any more.

Carolina had walked this path with him briefly, but then she had called him back from it, and he had been so willing to go. Now he returned to it, just as willingly.

He wanted her to know why. He thought she would, because she was the one who had changed him the most, both in her life and in her death. She was the reason he had met Sands, and she was the reason he had seen Sands in Lázaro Cárdenas.

Loída wouldn't ever know. She was too young to know anything of who he was, who he had been, of the world that made him. And mostly it destroyed him that she would never know, but there were bitter flashes in time when he could almost be grateful, because some of the things he had seen were things that no-one should. What hope had he ever had of protecting his daughter from his world?

He placed a flower on each grave, taken from those that still grew around the hacienda, the hardy ones almost reverted to weeds that survived all that this country could do to them.

Father Ríos would tend to them. He would give Loída her toys on the Day of the Little Angels, as he had last year.

This time he wouldn't stop.

Sands wouldn't let him stop. He'd known he would break his vow to Carolina within minutes of meeting him, and if ever he started to question, to falter, Sands would do whatever it took to reach through him and drag out the rage.

It would be there to find, because it always was.

Before all this had started, before he ever killed a man, he used to believe he would die with his guitar in his hands. He had thought he understood years ago that it wouldn't be that way, but it had taken him until now to fully accept it.

"Goodbye, Carolina. I hope you understand."

He turned, walking back to the car, and the man and the guns waiting there.

Author's notes:

I'm sorry about Ramírez! I really like Ramírez. I had to have him in here, and I was planning on keeping him around. And then I had this horrified moment when I realised Sands was going to kill him, and I just didn't have an argument good enough to stop him....

Everything I know about the real Mexico comes from the internet. I've tried to make it fit with Rodriguez' Mexico where possible - where the two conflict, I've gone with the films XD. I've put the Guitar Town in Durango, because it doesn't seem to obviously contradict what little's on screen, and it works for distance and timing.

The end

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