Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  “I didn’t know you wore jewelry,” said Armand, pointing at the polished agate nestled tight to Barney’s collarbone by a leather thong.

  “Not jewelry,” returned Barney, his hand moving reflexively to touch the stone Mano had given him.

  Karlov tossed Barney a pair of gloves — Blackwater Armor Skins tacticals with Kevlar, re-sewn to Barney’s hand dimensions and modified to keep his trigger fingers free.

  “Just in case you start leaking again,” Karlov said.

  They all wore ATAC Storm SWAT boots, nightshade cargo pants and zippered “511”-style response jackets. Each was kitted out with a fixed-blade knife and MagLite in addition to their chosen weaponry. The guns had been cleaned and checked, then checked again, then field stripped and checked, before being re-checked. Four to five mags maximum for the semi-autos — an overload of weight made it impossible to sustain an aggressive operational tempo, by encumbering maneuverability and causing fatigue.

  Sirius had suggested handcuffs in case they needed to incapacitate anyone in transit; these were snug in scabbards and would bounce no light. Sirius was also the man who carefully polished each cartridge and loaded each mag wearing surgical gloves to prevent ejected brass from providing fingerprints.

  Any item not mission-essential was dumped. You don’t carry spare change into a hot zone because the jingle might give you away. Ditto keys and what the pros called “mental comfort items.” They had Nomex watch caps which could be pulled down into ski-masks if needed.

  Barney had driven the route in his stolen BMW more than a year ago, but nothing had changed. They hit the building at two in the morning...

  ... not that the atmosphere of deadly carnival was any different at that time of day in this hellhole, which defied the lockstep concept of business hours.

  “That’s where Carl went in,” Barney said, indicating the iron speakeasy door recessed into a dark entryway.

  “How about the roof?” said Sirius.

  “No idea.”

  “Give me the case.”

  Armand handed over a Halliburton knock-off they had doctored back at the Pantera Roja — stacks of trimmed rag paper with bona fide $100 bands, and a genuine bill on top of each. Barney thumb-checked his SIG .40, his batter-up gun, to ensure chambered brass.

  They scattered from the van so as not to cross the street in a group. There was a small traffic island to get past, not to mention assorted panhandlers, hucksters and prostitutes eager to triangulate on a non-Hispanic face. Barney was first in, all business as he rapped on the metal-sheeted door.

  A glowering monster peeked out with cloudy, mud-colored lizard eyes. Barney said nothing and exhibited the case.

  “Mostramé,” said a clotted voice.

  Barney displayed the money in the case, careful not to expose it to street view. “¡Apúrate!” he said. Hurry up.

  Five deadbolts threw back and a squeaky latch was undogged.

  At the first crack of dim light from within, several things happened simultaneously. Barney hit the door full force, wedging the briefcase into the crack and prying a foot of open space. Karlov and Armand were already behind him, guns up. Sirius barreled through last, making Barney’s impact with the door and his own into one sustained breach. The bandana-wearing creep inside the door was propelled against the far wall in a narrow corridor, and was already bringing a nasty-looking .45 revolver into play. Sirius was quicker with his own .45, a Para-Ordnance Tac-Five LDA from which Karlov had removed the grip safety. He had two of them. Sirius dealt the slide to the guy’s skull, a left-right combo that rocked him like a bobble-head doll and rolled his eyeballs up into nighty-night.

  They were bulling right into a range instructor’s nightmare: Unknown space in hallways always constituted a kill zone, and this one went in two directions, making a linear entry per the designates of close-quarter combat impossible. The goal is always to “collapse” the space — that is, mass your fire and visually pick up threats as fast as possible.

  Barney had gone low to cover right while Armand slipped behind Sirius to cover left. Karlov backed through last, covering their backsides, stepping over the unconscious mug on the floor, as both ends of the hallway began to fill with armed men shouting alarm.

  This was what Barney’s team had come for. Hitting a paper target is one thing. Winning a combat competition on a freestyle range against plywood jump-up assailants is another. Stalking and shooting a game animal, same-same. Hitting a moving target in gunfire and chaos, a target that is shooting back at you, is quite a different thing altogether, a biochemical state of mind/body fusion that cannot be simulated, at least not in the ways that count.

  Each man was fit enough to recover solid shooting positions multiple times during an engagement, therefore healthy enough to affect quicker healing if hit. You don’t rely on the weapon to solve all your problems; you need strength, stamina, endurance, speed and the ability to “see before shooting” — that is, process threat information faster than your opponent — as well as the golden rule of servicing a bad guy: Shoot until they drop. This was the difference between live-fire training and real life; between a shooting and a gunfight. A shooting is unidirectional. A gunfight happens when the thing you are shooting at has the ability to shoot back.

  A slug from a pocket pistol zinged off the wall near Sirius’ head as Karlov slammed and latched the door. Barney already had the shooter so framed he did not need his sights, put two in his chest from the SIG, and watched the man’s flung pistol bounce off the ceiling as his buddies hared back to cover. Armand did not wait to be shot at, and emptied the cylinder of his behemoth Ruger at the far end of his zone in a circular pattern that convinced a lot of people to be somewhere else. Through the gunsmoke Barney picked out an arm hit, a leg hit, and another uncertain — three down from the destructive power of a full-charge .44 Magnum cartridge meant three that would not come back into gunplay.

  They moved as a group toward the Barney side of the hall with hard practical cover in all directions. Armand ejected his spent brass and nearly fumbled his speedloader. His hands were shaking, not with fear or incompetence, but excitement.

  The initial response group, ragged and disorganized, was mostly retreating across a large interior atrium, just the sort of open space Barney had predicted the building would have. Sporadic gunfire came back at them, but it was unaimed, over-the-shoulder stuff. Barney popped one guy’s hogleg right out of his hand, then looked up to witness the spectacle of Karlov, arms extended, firing in two directions at once with his twin nine-millimeters — back the way they came and ahead of them, and scoring crippling hits both ways. A bouncing piece of hot brass jabbed Barney’s cheek.

  Then somebody opened up on them from the second floor with more serious artillery, a full-sized Uzi carbine from the sound and delivery. Apparently the shooter did not care that Uzis tend to pull up and to the right on full-auto fire, and a double tap from Sirius’ .45 put the man away before he could correct his aim.

  Karlov took two more stragglers from a kneeling position as Sirius fired over his head. Barney indicated a stairway to the second floor, and Sirius moved on it, Armand second. Incoming fire was light and undisciplined. Somehow Barney had expected these guys to be better shots, but then he remembered how they had handled machine guns at the bridge.

  At the second-floor landing a pair of dazed women screamed and dropped flat, probably unintentionally, but it was the best cover they could have hoped for. A gunless guy with matted hair and no shoes did a spin-around in the hall, trying to figure out which way to run.

  People were screaming and pell-melling to get out of the way, and very few of them had guns.

  Barney kicked in the nearest door — no lock. He was afforded excellent cover by his men on the stairs and landing as he proceeded down a row of doors, coming through each one gun-first and then backing off without firing.

  A hotshot young gunslinger with something to prove tried to nail Karlov on the stairs, and Karlov took some splinter
s in the face from the balustrade as bullets bit into the lumber. Sirius sent him packing with hazing fire that destroyed all the masonry around the man’s head. Sirius, too, had already sensed something was awry.

  Barney double-timed it back to the group. “It’s an abort!” he shouted. “Everybody bail!”

  They encountered only three more men with guns as they escaped through the rear of the building.

  One man saw them coming, dropped his peashooter, and ran.

  One man managed to hit Armand in the shoulder, and Sirius kneecapped him from a distance of twenty yards, firing one-handed — five shots for one hit.

  The third man brought a shotgun to bear, a double-barreled howitzer loaded with 12-gauge buck, and they all felt the pellets. Then Armand, Barney and Karlov raised and fired as one, and separated the guy from his piece.

  It had all seemed far too easy.

  Back in the van they were panting, sweat-drenched and pawing at their collateral damage. Finally, Sirius said, “Okay — what the hell just happened?”

  “Sorry, guys,” Barney said. “Wrong building.” His hands were bloody in more ways than one.

  They all just looked at him, waiting for a punchline.

  Barney told them what he had seen when he kicked in the first second-floor door, the door that, not to put too fine a point on it, had no lock. Inside were candles sputtering in wine bottles and an assortment of junkies sprawled like sniper victims, barely able to register the entrance of a man with a gun. They flopped about on dirty mattresses or stared at infinity points in space. Next room, same deal — freebasing crackheads and a mamacita on the nod who was trying to coax milk out of one flaccid tit to feed an infant who was either comatose or dying.

  Wrong building. These were all victims of a different kind of kidnapping, with none of the administrative smell that would have told Barney he was in the right place. It featured the correct ratio of coke-addled meatheads with guns for a drug den, with the primary shooters being security and management. They were also the first to run, clearing out and marooning their ex-customers to find their own way.

  Carl Ledbetter and Mister El Chingon Tannenhauser must have used this place as a meeting point, meaning the real hostage hotel could be anywhere within a radius of miles. The courtyard fit, but dozens of structures in this neck of the woods had them.

  Wrong building.

  Worse, Barney’s bad guess had just dropped Flecha de Jalisco’s son Almirante into the hot pot with the real kidnappers. The phone call confirming the money Flecha had not raised had already been made, on El Atrocidad’s advice, on Barney’s word.

  The impact bruise on Armand’s shoulder was a blue-black starburst that grated his bones, but the liquid body armor had worked like a magic shield in a fairy tale. Karlov’s facial wounds were superficial.

  “Yeah,” Sirius said when they were back at the Pantera Roja, “Except that we just shot seventeen or eighteen of the wrong guys.”

  “No,” said Karlov, dipping witch hazel and antiseptic cream. “When you said you were in, that meant you were in even for this.”

  “I didn’t shoot at anyone who didn’t shoot at me first, and that was the deal,” said Armand, nursing his shoulder.

  “It’s on me,” said Barney. “I was sure that was the place. I was dead wrong. And now they’re going to slice off Almirante’s fingers one by one unless we find out where they really are.”

  “Owww, damned shotgun got me right in the neck,” Armand complained when he saw the pellet track an inch from his carotid artery. They all had dimpled bruises from the shot, as though a finger had been dipped in ink and pressed to the skin. They were painful but the body armor had done its task and rendered them down from lethal.

  Barney sight-profiled all of them and the chatter dropped to nil. The question before them was clear: We have weathered an accident and come out whole. It gets worse. Anybody wants to bail, raise a hand. The moment held for a few beats, then dissipated as though it never existed. Nobody left. Each man took turns at the mirror checking their wear and tear.

  “So what do we do?” said Sirius, who found three dark dots delineating his waist on the left.

  “We take the ransom drop. It’s a bluff, and we’re stuck with it, so let’s play it all the way. The difference is, now we have to snag one of the bad guys and not waste any time sweating him.” He cracked a crooked half-smile and stared at the floor. “I’ve done it before.”

  Bulling in full-strength and unidirectionally was not the way to approach the Rio Satanas bridge drop. They had one day left on the ransom clock and Barney took them to the target twelve hours ahead of schedule, for best placement based on what he remembered from the first ransom delivery.

  “The minute there’s gunfire, the secuestradores will know the deal has curdled,” said Barney. “It’ll take about two seconds for somebody to spread the news on a cellphone, and thanks to me, Almirante will probably lose a finger before they double their demands, but better a finger than a life.”

  “No need to keep blaming yourself,” said Karlov. His face was dotted with little circular Band-Aids he had smeared to neutral with camo paint.

  But Barney felt the bite of irony; it had him captured like a narcotic. His negligence would cause Almirante to lose fingers. He did his best to refocus his embarrassment into aggression, then froze fast in wonder at the fact he was concerned at all. Dormant feelings had roused deep inside him. He was not the reincarnation of the Old Assassin after all, or if he was, the sage old killer had been resurrected with a vulnerability, a soft spot. Emotion, however primal, had entered his target’s sight picture, and at that, Barney should have quit and withdrawn. You could not permit an objective to become polluted. His gratitude to the people who had saved his life had just been shoved into hot focus by the fact he was no longer acting solely on behalf of his vendetta, but to save the skin of one of their own.

  The best course was to hop-to and not fuck it up, this time. He could psychoanalyze himself later, because right now there was brutal work to do.

  Barney indicated the primary shooter slots, the directions from which the late Jesús and his runner buddies had hared forth to collect the cash, and the most likely strategic positions for cover and observation. Tannenhauser, the Mexican with the unlikely name and principal architect of the art of abduction, had been nearby when Carl and Barney had showed up the first time. Not only had he watched, probably through binoculars (which could put him a thousand yards away, or better), but he had gloated to Carl over the hostage cellphone in such a way as to indicate he was indeed seeing the whole exchange live.

  But the boss would probably not attend tonight. In business, one learns from experience.

  There was no way not to tell El Atrocidad.

  “I and three of my friends will be waiting,” Barney said into the phone. “We don’t want to have to deal with friendly fire. Our objective is to capture one of the pickup men. Repeat, capture — not kill.”

  “So you cannot locate the hotel of the rehéns?”

  “No, my information was unreliable. I know Almirante is at risk, but we must take that risk.” Barney could not quite bring himself to admit out loud that he had screwed the pooch once already.

  “You risk not only yourself, but your men,” returned Atrocidad gruffly. “For one of ours. We shall not bring las armas if you tell me that you will.”

  “Consider your ass covered, big man.”

  If anything, the meltdown district where the oddly fanciful bridge was located smelled even worse than Barney remembered. No memory puckers the pores like decomposing sewage and toxic spill. Karlov wore his shooting glasses with flip-down tinted lenses — he was a bit nearsighted — and within moments they all had mufflered themselves in bandanas in a futile attempt to filter the stench. You wanted to cover as much of your skin as possible in a place like this; even taking a sip of bottled water seemed hazardous, because the water made the briefest contact with the air before it got inside you. Nothing had any
color here, beyond iron-gray and mud-brown. Nothing grew on the eroded banks of the river where La Llorona was said to call out in the night, at the full moon.

  As the sun descended, the evil, poisoned ground gave up more odor in thick waves of released heat. The men were already sweltering in their gear, but to inhale a double lungful of this aroma was to induce vomiting.

  Barney unsheathed one of the Benelli shotguns. He was positioned so as to neutralize the bridge shooter who had surprised him the first time. Different cast, same movie, only now Barney was the screen, looking at the audience. Two hours before the appointed meet, two full-size, flat-black SUVs with nonreflective rims showed up to disgorge about fifteen men. Barney’s team was secreted around the perimeter, concealed beneath reeking garbage and industrial litter, their faces eliminated by camouflage paint.

  They all went hot on their conferenced cellphones, another tweak of Karlov’s.

  “I can see the vehicles,” came Armand’s voice in a crackle. He was invisible somewhere off to Barney’s left. “They pulled back about forty yards, by the oil pumpers, whatever you call those things that look like dunk-birds. Two and two.”

  Correction: nineteen men, all armed.

  “Armand, take the cars,” said Barney.

  “Copy, take cars and men. Done.”

  “I’ve got five on my side of the river,” said Karlov. “Flanking out from the cars. They look to be cover fire or surprise backup. I can take these five but I’ve got to move closer for the rest.”

  A phalanx of the men crossed the bridge and scattered, leaving a solitary shooter up top. No way there had been this many guys when Carl and Barney had first visited. Tannenhauser’s idea of security had gone practically American — more equals better.

  “I’ve got men heading under the bridge,” said Sirius, slightly further back in a crow’s nest position with the Nitefinder binoculars.

  “Can you get them all?” said Barney.