Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  Mano tended the hand and let him hang onto the “gonn.” He obviously did not want to look at it, and would probably dispose of it after today.

  Another ritual that divided the calendar was the twice-weekly trip to the clinic to check in with Dr. Mendez, accomplished by Mano choreographing his assorted relatives. Nothing awaited them this time but bad news.

  Dr. Mendez was dead.

  The account, which unfurled in Barney’s mind much like the telling of another myth, went that Dr. Mendez had left the clinic two evenings earlier, stopped his car for reasons unknown (or was carjacked), suffered a gunshot wound, was abandoned or somehow managed to drive his vehicle three miles closer to his home before crashing into a tree and bleeding to death. He was not found until the following morning.

  Another physician, clearly upset at the violent end to the much-loved Dr. Mendez’s life, examined Barney, drew blood, and mortared up his injuries with shaking hands. One of Sucio’s bullets had nicked his right scapula; another had sundered a rib, this latter being one of the slugs still inside him. Due to its proximity to Barney’s heart and the lingering hazard of bone splinters, a big-city surgery was advised. Bone hits were a fifty-fifty shot; pound for pound, most bone in the human body is as strong as steel. They could protect your internal organs, or bounce incoming bullets straight into them.

  Barney kept asking the doctor, whose name was Hector Quisneros, “What kind of gun was Dr. Mendez attacked with? What kind of bullet was he shot with?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure I can find out. Why — is it relevant? It won’t matter.” Dr. Quisneros removed his square-rimmed steel glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “The police will not follow up reliably even for a citizen of Dr. Mendez’s status. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”

  The killer came for Barney the following night.

  Dr. Quisneros had recommended a one-night maintenance stay at the clinic, perhaps longer, but Barney could already smell death on the breeze. He quickly counseled Mano to get away from his home, and keep his family clear as well. Mano stuck.

  Barney lay in wait, unable to sleep, with nothing for company but the metronome ticking of the clock and the Saturday Night Special with two shots left. He feebly grasped the .32 in his unwrapped gun hand, hoping to achieve a single shot before the remaining tatters and strings of that hand fell apart. The pistol was a real piece of shit; a whore’s gun. It barely mattered which side of the muzzle you were on.

  Mano maddeningly deflected Barney’s worry and warnings. He puttered around his home, fixed an indifferent meal, refused to entertain the crazy notion of asesinos in the night, and finally went to bed with no further comment.

  First thought: Mano has told somebody, and is in on it.

  Second thought: Sucio is being thorough.

  Third, and most damning thought: What if Barney’s senses had completely forsaken him? His combat smarts, his night vision, his skin alarms, his preternatural sense of the shape and threat potential of the unknown up-ahead — what if he had lost them all in the river, what if they had drained out through the many holes in his body? What if his web of plots, connections, coincidences, motives and murderers was just his fear talking out loud, or the medicine amplifying his paranoia?

  To hell with all that. There was a single reality here: The bad guys knew he was alive, and sought to correct that oversight.

  The stranger came just past midnight, after Mano had gone to bed. Barney felt the air shift subtly in the small house, and waited for a cautious silhouette to fill up the doorway to his little room. It was a large man — not Sucio — stinking of recently bought safari clothing and wearing a black ski mask.

  The pistol he had smelled new, too. Factory lubricant still on it. The bore, almost invisible in the dim light, was a black hole waiting to suck in Barney’s life first, followed by the rest of the universe.

  Not a hallucination; not a fever dream.

  Barney’s eardrums nearly imploded from the blinding roar of discharge.

  The intruder became visible in a flashbulb corona of hot yellow light, then seemed to unhinge as portions of the doorway became visible through his midsection, which disintegrated, raining blood and most of his internal organs all over Barney, who was still snapping the useless .32 with his wrecked hand, the trigger falling over and over on empty chambers and the two dud cartridges. Something in his wrist seemed to thrum, then snap like a rubber band, giving out. His own blood was already coursing down his arm.

  Mano clicked on the light before the interloper’s body finished hitting the floor in a macerated sprawl, his weapon spinning into a corner. Gunsmoke clogged the room and the stink of cordite made it hard to breathe — such a huge, devastating blast in such a tiny space. Mano became visible through a haze of purple spots in Barney’s vision. He stood in the doorway holding about half a mile of double-barreled shotgun that looked like an old Savage/Stevens model 311 side-by-side, with twin triggers. He had held low and given the night caller both chambers at less than four feet. The 12-gauge double-aught rounds, coming in like a hornet-swarm of eighteen .32 caliber bullets fired all at once, had blown him apart at the base of the spine. He was not going to get up.

  It was a miracle Barney was not taken out, too, by the spread pattern or the velocity of pellets that have been known to punch through an adobe wall after bisecting a human target.

  “Esta bueno?”

  Barney was shaking. Never before had he been rattled by gunfire. Nervous, yes, from tempting fate or being boxed in; apprehensive at bad strategy, hopeless from dire situations, but never aquiver at gunfire, which he thought to be his element.

  “Amigo,” Mano repeated, leaning the shotgun against the wall and stepping over the shredded corpse on the floor. “Esta bueno?”

  “Yeah,” Barney managed, his voice running away to a husky whisper. His eyes indicated the gun with which Mano had saved him. “Mano... what the hell?”

  “Oh, that.” Mano shrugged, smiled. “Now that, my friend, is a gonn.”

  This one was easier to figure out, now.

  The killer, regardless of his muffed job status, had been a professional. An American, a stranger, a blond man with a rubescent complexion and bulletproof fake ID. Therefore, not sent by El Chingon, who probably would have sent Sucio.

  Therefore, the kidnapping crew down here apparently did not yet know that Barney was still drawing breathable air.

  So: the killer had been sent by Carl Ledbetter, or one of his satellites.

  Why: Barney had been alive, though in dire circumstances, when Carl exited Mexico. He had probably gotten the news on Barney’s disposition and decided to check hospital and clinic emergency admissions; most likely he did his entire investigation on the Internet, with the right passwords. It would be simple to take some of his share of the million bucks and invest in a guarantor, who had found the clinic in Xochimilco and sweated poor Dr. Mendez until he spilled Barney’s whereabouts and died. Game, set, and match... except he had not factored in the possibility of the apparently harmless Mano packing some unsuspected heirloom firepower.

  It held water as much as anything his scattered brain could conceive.

  Result: Barney’s security had been compromised, and everyone around him was no longer safe. Their location was now, in the parlance, “hot.” Muy caliente.

  “Mano, I have to leave this place.”

  Mano countered that this was not a good idea, given Barney’s handicapped status.

  “Mano, you and your family are in danger because of me.”

  Mano returned that he had been in danger before, many times, and it was not good to live in fear.

  “Mano, I have to get back to the States, somehow.”

  Mano suggested that phoning up the American embassy in Mexico City was probably not the most efficacious course to take.

  Barney’s existence as a visiting foreigner was gray at best; in-country on forged documents, involved in local criminal activity, responsible, at least in theory
, for several deaths. He could claim to have been mugged, attacked, or kidnapped, all documents lost, but that might surface connections to the bad guys or the wobbly architecture of his paperwork — any slip could invite unwanted scrutiny, and seal his fate. Regional law enforcement, corrupt as they were, might just dump him back into the hands of El Chingon’s crew, or detain him in yet another locked room. No good.

  Mano told Barney to wait, since he might have a solution. He was distressingly cryptic on what that might be.

  Meanwhile, Barney had won himself a brand-new firearm.

  The assassin’s piece of choice turned out to be a tactical SIG P229 with a threaded barrel, probably for a silencer he never got to try — this brand of pistol, firing beefier cartridges, was known to be loud. SIGs came with decocking levers, not safeties, so they were always ready to use. With Mano’s help, Barney field-stripped it and found the original .357 barrel had been swapped out to accept the Smith & Wesson .40 cartridge, a popular conversion. A Sprinco recoil reducer had been added to improve the control of rapid-fire shots — less muzzle climb, better sight recovery. That little piece of frosting could reduce the kick by half, not inconsiderable when your gun could muster over a thousand foot-pounds at impact. The single-stack hi-cap mag jutted from the butt of the gun, containing fifteen deadly bees, plus one in the pipe. Not exactly a race gun, but the owner had added a match trigger. The whole package had been refinished to be absolutely glare-proof and non-reflecting. The action was smooth as glass.

  Waylaid as he was, Barney felt better just having the gun nearby.

  He dozed off thinking of stimulants versus sedatives. He had to get up and moving, no matter how many leaks he sprang.

  He woke up with an enormous man in a gray sharkskin business suit staring down at him. The suit barely contained him, its seams heroically restraining a cinderblock physique. His silk necktie was knotted stranglehold-tight. From the neck up his head was encased in a skin-tight lace-up mask in metallic kelly green, adorned with red vinyl flames rocketing backward. The eyeholes were teardrop-shaped and edged with more crimson, as though blood-enraged. Only the man’s mouth and chin were visible; the mask was cut away and molded for that small freedom. He had a dark goatee. He stood with oaken-stout arms folded, as imposing as a Mayan statue, looking down upon Barney, godlike, with eyes the color of strong Colombian coffee.

  “This,” said Mano, “is El Atrocidad.”

  The Mexican wrestling superstar known as “The Atrocity” already held Barney in his debt. He had helped Mano dispose of the assassin’s body by dumping it in the Arroyo de La Llorona. Where else?

  In guttural but very serviceable English, Atrocidad told Barney that his own wife’s brother, Carlos Fuentes, had been kidnapped in Mexico City by men who sacked his head, stuffed him into a van, and drove him to an unknown location where he was held in a hostage hotel until a hefty ransom had been forked over. Carlos, too, had suffered the loss of two fingers, and an ear, but could still play the guitar, and, presumably, hear music. As Atrocidad gestured, Barney saw that his massive, knotty hands lacked fingernails.

  Atrocidad had also been present at the donnybrook inside Mano’s shop. A single stiff-armed blow to the forehead had taken the punk with the .32, breaking his nose, freeing four of his teeth, and landing him in the emergency ward with a skull fracture. There was the roughhouse ballet of lucha libre — beer-bellied athletes in elaborate, bone-crunching choreography — and then there was actual combat; it was impossible to be adept at one without being able to perform the other. As Atrocidad said, the first rule is knowing how to fall down without getting killed or landing yourself in a wheelchair — that is, if you wanted a career as a wrestler that lasted beyond your first bout.

  Barney had actually seen El Atrocidad wrestle a few years back at the Vatican of Mexican wrestling, Arena Coliseo, as part of a tag team with Tiburon Negro and Doctor Hate, a.k.a. the Black Shark and Medico Odio. As rudos, bad guys, their job was to foul constantly, pillory or distract the referee (unless the ref was a rudo, too), kick the good-guy técnicos in the balls at every opportunity to cheat, and otherwise represent evil triumphant in the squared circle.

  “Ah,” said Atrocidad, pleasured by the memory. “That was when we took the belt from La Aureola, Flecha de Jalisco, and Caballero del Espacio.” La Aureola — Golden Halo — was a religious-themed good guy whose big gimmick was to kneel in the center of the ring when things looked blackest, asking God to intervene with divine righteousness. Usually that was when he got stomped down, at which point the audience would go berserk, lofting garbage and plastic cups of piss into the ring at the injustice of it all, permitting the Halo to bounce back with his own special brand of retributive resurrection. There is no more perfect example of the passion play than lucha libre wrestling, and the masked strongmen, good or bad, were the closest thing the culture had to actual heroes who could been seen striding the streets. Anyone mocking the sport as precious fakery would not last twenty seconds in a ring with one of these grapplers, who knew the difference between reality and theatre and did everything they could to erase the line.

  Half-hour bouts featuring constant acrobatic movement quickly taught you a lot about your own personal energies, and luchadors did it every week, risking their lumbar support for peanuts.

  El Atrocidad had wrestled championships all over the globe, including California, from Orange County swap meets to big-ticket bouts at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, nearly all them as an illegal alien.

  “We know this promoter in Orange County,” he said. “We fly or drive to Tijuana, usually three or four of us, and his wife picks us up. She’s totally white, hot, a blonde, Irish, I think. The border guards see her in a car with a bunch of Mexicans in suits, and they always wave her through. We go up to O.C., do some bouts, make a few hundred, have dinner, get laid a lot, then come back, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group, but that part is easy — nobody smuggles anything into Mexico.”

  “I think they can help you,” said Mano. “I think they can help you get to where you need to go.”

  “This bullshit...” Atrocidad indicated the empty doorway to Barney’s room, meaning the killer that had filled it less than twelve hours earlier, and in a larger sense, disgust at the pervasive all-around injustice. “Mano is in danger too. We have to get you out of here. I respect Mano, and I trust you because I trust him.” He shrugged. Easy. “Do you think you can make it?”

  “I have to,” Barney said. “Don’t I?”

  “I once watched El Cholo wrestle with the flu in Guadalajara. He had a 103-degree fever and we practically had to carry him to the ring. The fight starts, tres caidas, something like twenty minutes nonstop, and he jumps into the ring off the rope, doesn’t miss a hold or fall, gets his ass kicked but he was supposed to that night, and before he steps out of the ring he does this little victory jump on each side, making sure he doesn’t miss anybody in the audience, and they love him, because he’s like defeated, right, but never broken. Then he steps out of the ring and boom, all at once, he’s half-dead again.”

  “But he made it,” said Barney.

  “Exactamente.”

  “He’s very strong,” said Mano of Barney. “They cut him, they shot him, he was in the Rio Satanas and did not die.”

  “We get him one of those big hoodie coats,” said Atrocidad. “Put him in the back of the van, he keeps his hands in his pockets... it should be okay.”

  “If I don’t bust open and start leaking at the border crossing,” said Barney.

  “You can walk, right?”

  “Just barely. Enough to fake it.”

  “You have to be a pretty good liar, basically,” said the wrestler, indicating that this was not only a deep virtue, but often a matter of sheer survival.

  “He can walk,” said Mano. “Not run, but walk, sí.”

  “You come down here to see us fight at Arena Coliseo, eh?” said Atrocidad, with just a microscopic preen.

  “Yeah, I used to.” Then,
ruefully: “I love Mexico.”

  “But you have not come for a while, and when you return, it was for the wrong reason, correcto?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come back to Mexico for the right reason,” said Atrocidad. “You will always have family here. But first, let us deal with the things that threaten that family. You have family, back up north?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes the people to whom you are bound by blood are less important than those to whom you are bound by éticas, by honor, yes? But sometimes, you give up your blood, you are bound to a new familia, maybe one you are worthy of, or one that is worthy of your honor and respect.” He recited this as though it was his personal gospel. “You understand?”

  “Sí, claro,” said Barney. “Painfully.”

  “Con mucho dolor, eh?” El Atrocidad laughed raucously, his trademark evil badguy chuckle, exposing gold-rimmed teeth. He would have slapped Barney on the shoulder had he not been afraid of breaking him. “It’s good for you, pain, sometimes, eh?”

  “God, don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. Es verdad. Sometimes it is the only truth there is.”

  In a world of lies, Barney had to admit that the big guy was right.

  There were no words with which Barney could take leave of Mano; the little puppet-like man had saved his life, risked his own.

  Mano held up a highly-polished piece of river agate in a pewter setting, scarlet, alabaster, deep green, with an eyelet for a leather thong. It caught the sunlight.

  “This has no value,” he said. “It is a common stone. But es muy bonita, yes?”

  “Very beautiful,” said Barney, reluctant to accept it because he could not hold it in his bandaged hands. The gauze had been modified to free his working fingers, but every movement brought stabbing agony to his hands as a whole.

  Mano draped the totem around Barney’s neck.

  “Remember me, my friend,” he said.

  It sufficed, for what Barney could not articulate. Finally, he said, “I’ll see you again.” It was all he could offer, but it was enough.