Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  They circled wide and caught up with the bag where it had been dumped, about five miles from the bridge. At least it proved Barney’s little GPS trick could work, and gave them a general direction they could employ to strike some good, clean Catholic fear into Jesús.

  “Nobody has called,” said Carl.

  “They’re going to sweat you,” said Barney.

  “Sí, es verdad,” said Jesús. “They make you wait.”

  “So what do we do?” said Carl.

  “We clear out of the hotel,” said Barney, “because we’re all the way made. If Jesús’ homing skills don’t improve, we’re going to have to kill him all the way dead. ¿Comprende?”

  “Claro,” said Jesús.

  Somebody had already visited the hotel room. Barney had expected that. What came as a shock was what their nocturnal visitors had left behind.

  Estrella was completely naked, duct-taped to a tubular metal chair, her neck opened ear-to-ear with a razor. About a gallon of blood saturated the note that had been left nailed into her chest.

  Rescate = $2M ahora

  We Do This to Bitch

  Estrella’s eyes were wide-open, unseeing. She had gotten her party, all the way, with no pestersome hangover.

  “Hustle,” said Barney. “Cops are probably on their way.”

  The limo was riddled with dents where bullets had hit but they had no time for anything fancier. Once they were back on the road, they looked for someplace they could base themselves with a simple cash payment and no annoying questions. Their gear was piled in the back of the limo since Jesús occupied the trunk. Barney had estimated Jesús was in no danger of bleeding to death; in fact, the wounded bagman told them freely that he had been shot before, that they shouldn’t worry about that.

  What they found was a downscale sex motel called La Pantera Roja, complete with a gated courtyard (to discourage private investigations), individual garages with roll-down doors (so your spouse could not spy your car in the lot), and even a bizarre kind of room service — microwaved pizza or a limited beverage menu could be discreetly delivered to your room via a little revolving airlock-style compartment, like the door on a darkroom. In case the occupants were naked, identifiable, or otherwise tied up.

  The headboard of the whorehouse bed was screwed to the wall. The lamps were bolted to the tables. Everything was garishly overpainted. The TV was coin-fed and locked down. A metal band secured the top of the toilet to the tank so nobody would steal it. A payphone was mounted to the brick wall. It was perfect. They were able to drag Jesús inside under complete cover.

  “We’ve got to get some more shirts,” Barney said as he rustled the gun cleaning kit in his rucksack to one side to retrieve a roll of duct tape, for Jesús, from whom Carl had also liberated an extra mag of ammo for the MP5.

  Jesús was glazed, eyes dilated and breathing shallowly.

  Carl could do little apart from watchdogging the damned cellphone, trying to will it to ring.

  So Barney was stuck trying to obtain some fresh clothes, minimal food, and another terrific plan. When he returned, the bloodless expression on Carl’s face told him that he’d been on the phone.

  “Thirty seconds, maybe less,” he said, frittering with his hands. “Erica talking, again. Telling me what they told her to. She’s alive. At least she was —” he checked his watch “— eight minutes ago.”

  “They’re not going to kill her,” said Barney, handing Carl a beer. “What did they say?”

  “The usual gangster movie crap about paying the penalty for violating their goddamned rules. Estrella was to demonstrate they are serious. They don’t give a damn about ole Jesús, over there. All they want is for me to call them when I get the money. The extra money.” Carl killed the beer in a swallow.

  Barney quickly checked to see if Jesús had overheard. Nobody home. He was almost snoring, palate clicking, not so much asleep as unconscious.

  “You should have heard her, man,” said Carl, voice cracking. “Repeating that crap. ‘Tardiness in any form will result in additional damage to your merchandise.’ Christ.”

  “I bet they said come unarmed, come alone?”

  Carl made a little thumb-and-forefinger gun. “You got it.”

  “Carl, this guy you know in New York, the money guy. Would you call him a friend?”

  “Sure, I guess so. I mean, a million bucks...”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about a friend — do you trust him?”

  “He’s the only person I called before I called you. When I realized this was too deep for me to do by myself. Yeah, he’s into all kinds of shady crap, but he’s a friend.”

  “Sort of like me, then,” Barney said. “Call when cornered?”

  “I guess,” Carl repeated, not sure of where this was going.

  “But... after you get your wife back, and you go back to your nice, safe American way of living, you still have to find some way to get this guy his money back, right?”

  “Sure, I mean... of course.” He still looked puzzled.

  “How you going to do that, Carl? How’re you going to pay the guy back a million bucks? Or two million?”

  “I don’t know. Barter counts for a lot. He needs people to run straw accounts, dummy corporation drops, money laundering, that sort of thing. He wants me to do something like that, well, I owe him, don’t I?”

  Barney wondered just how far Carl’s ethics permitted the notion of debt. Not money, but actual obligation.

  “What’s his name?”

  Carl looked at Barney as though he had just sprouted eyes on stalks. “I can’t tell you that, man.”

  “Sure you can. These dinks just tried to frame us for a murder, just to make a point. We haven’t actually killed anyone yet, but not for lack of trying, plus we kidnapped Jesús there. We’re driving around Mexico in a bullet-riddled car with Federales looking for us. You can damned well tell me who your sugar daddy is, your friend, or we are less than friends and I quit — do you copy?”

  “For god’s sake, it’s Felix, all right? Felix Rainer, in New York. Okay? Happy now? God, what’s with you?”

  Carl would have to phone New York like a deadbeat college kid begging more cash, and Barney hated his reflex desire to listen in on that call, because it meant that Carl’s fidelity was sliding into a gray zone. To distract himself from the relentless logic chain forming in his mind, he said, “Want to hear our Plan B?”

  “Shoot.”

  He lowered his voice. “We tag our pal Jesús with the GPS chip and dump him at the nearest clinic. With luck...”

  “He’ll burn ass back to his bosses.” Carl smiled.

  “But,” said Barney. “You’re going to call Felix and get the cash. Because we cannot afford to fake it, not now. Not after gunfire.”

  Carl’s brow furrowed. “We might not even need the cash.”

  Barney forced a smile and it felt like his face was cracking. “What’s the matter, Carl? Don’t you trust me?” He’d meant it to play as a joke, but it just wasn’t very funny.

  Why did you come down here? Barney thought to himself as he jacked the car. It was a five-year old BMW M3 with a manual shift, thoroughly alarmed but nothing a Swiss Army knife could not neutralize. Tacking on plates boosted from a junker felt strangely nostalgic, a flashback of bandit thrill from high school, before Iraq, before Carl. No problem: Over a hundred cars were stolen in Mexico City every day. Even the jackers had quotas.

  Why did you come down here, really?

  It went beyond his talent for fixing problems, being the guy who knew the how of things. Scoping the worst possible scenario, then whupping it anyway. The gunfire had brought his adrenaline back, restored the beat to his heart. But what had he gained?

  Doubts about Carl Ledbetter, for one thing. Slowly coalescing suspicions about the man presenting himself as a friend.

  Like the suspicion that Carl knew the kidnappers, maybe.

  Like the premonition that things were about to go rotten if
Barney did not stay sharp.

  And you know how that nag works, like a toothache, a cold sore, a hangnail that commands far more attention than it merits.

  The BMW gave up all its secrets to Barney’s touch.

  The phone call had been almost comical, like one guy asking another to borrow a DVD. Another mil? Sure thing, Carl old yeoman, anything for a buddy. Hope it all works out, dude. Later!

  So before Carl embarked to a bank to collect wired funds, Barney had tagged him, not Jesús, with the GPS chip. He had amputated the receiver from what was left of the rental limousine and had it with him as he boosted the BMW, his “job” while Carl was presumably working high finance and Jesús was cooling his wheels and deliriously considering his severely limited options back at the Pantera Roja.

  In fractured Spanglish Jesús had requested the bible from the bedside drawer. Barney left the book in his lap so he could thumb the tissue-thin pages with his wrists permanently duct-taped to the metal. Jesús said gracias señor to the man who had shot him, squirming uncomfortably on the bullet still lodged deep in his beefy ass. It had to feel like sitting on a flaming poker.

  And now Carl was on the move. Not at the bank, not at the motel. In a cab, most likely, and his trajectory was eating up new ground, northeast, into the thick of the city.

  Barney hated what he was doing, and did it anyway. That was his special talent, his social mutation, if you will. He recalled more words of the Old Assassin: “I have no one, I care for no one, and I am cared for by no one. So all I have is what I can do.” Barney disliked feeling beholden, and appreciated that throughout his existence he had taken pains and occasionally made grand, operatic gestures to ensure he never belonged to anyone. He never had.

  Except his veneration of the Old Assassin’s counsel had obligated him to the memory of the Old Assassin. Great — he kept the guy alive in his head, like one of those shoulder-perching angel-or-devil advisors of conscience, and thus Barney was obligated, dammit to hell, connected to someone who had long since chewed that mouthful of grave dirt that awaits us all.

  This is not to say Barney did not form liaisons or forge friendships, but there was always a clear demarcation, an unspoken line of hazard tape that could never be crossed, that kept his plus-minus columns internally ordered. He had acquaintances. He had connections. He had friends, but no intimates. He enjoyed the company of women, but no intimacy. He had sex; he had never made love. “Making love” denoted the manufacture of something that would need to be maintained. Barney’s golden rule was to always be ready to jump out of the chopper and start shooting at a millisecond’s notice. He had never cohabitated with anyone. The closest he ever came was stuff like sharing bedsprung motel rooms with guys like Carl.

  Carl, who had now birthed a goblin of doubt in Barney’s calm.

  There were other people Barney trusted in his limited fashion. Armand, for example, back in the States, feeding Barney’s goldfish, which did not have a name other than “the fish.” Armand was a champion target shooter fond of the customized assemblies known as “race guns” in the trade. Their relationship was one of mutual gunslinger respect, and they did not pry into each other’s biz. There were a few others: Karlov, an old-school gunsmith; Sirius, a jolly ex-cop who was fun to drink with. Most everybody else was take-or-leave as needed; sketches, not people. Background extras. To shut out the noise of their lives was to assist Barney’s lifelong quest for a kind of technical purity.

  The women he remembered as shades, reduced to one-liners: Jessica, long burnished hair and long of leg, a coffeehouse songstress. Kyrie, another ex-cop, tough as a cement nail. Brianne, his bombshell, too perceptive and destined to be damaged by the world, thus fostering dangerous notions of protection. Geneva, sharp and too smart for him, with centuries of turbulence in her mixed mocha bloodlines. Kate, who pulled him out of his shell long enough to teach him how to dress and otherwise fake human function in public. The Other Kate, who had fooled herself into believing she loved him. Whenever he felt the tendrils of another human being’s needs begin to form a chrysalis around him, Barney reversed polarity and repelled them, concentrating on how to simplify his life. Whatever was supposed to emerge from that chrysalis would never be. Barney contented himself with becoming the best possible caterpillar, because it was hard, not convenient, not easy, and therefore not a path most ordinary people would willingly choose. The most rewarding personal effort is always the most difficult.

  Such mandarin focus might constrict most lives, which was perhaps another reason Barney had taken on Carl’s wild-card proposition. Or maybe it was the arrogance of ego — Barney to the rescue. Maybe it was because he had wired his body for momentum, and stasis could drive him buggy, stir-crazy inside the safe walls of his world.

  Whatever the reason or rationalization, Barney would not quit. He was committed to the tactical clarity of eradicating mystery — perfectly in character, for him — and answering these new and unbidden questions, especially the ones he was now asking himself.

  Cocooned in his stolen, air-conditioned car, in the company of his guns and jerry-rigged equipment, Barney tailed Carl into an even worse part of town.

  Driving in Mexico City is not recommended for the inexperienced (or for that matter, anyone without a death wish), but for Barney it was no worse than, say, Beirut.

  The brown brick building had no title. No address. Heavily barred windows; sepia shades drawn. Welded plate steel over the ground-floor ingresses. It looked vaguely industrial, like a sweatshop or piece-goods mill, or the self-contained microcosmic hives where indentured laborers fabricated merchandise for American deep-discount chains. It was three stories tall and Barney noted that fire escapes had been removed from the exterior. It was a lost structure amid the chaos surrounding it — obvious whorehouses, night spots with glowering security thugs, rave space and drinking dens, the traffic mortared to gridlock by sidewalk commerce, tented night-market stalls hawking everything from bootleg DVDs to brown heroin (abundant and cheap), assorted losers unconscious or dead in gutters and door archways, viper-mean street denizens cruising for meat, disenfranchised lunatics pinballing about, religious pamphleteers, more bored cops, everybody jostling everybody else in that cultural denial of personal space that is peculiarly Mexican. The people here seethed. Here you could smell the food, the flavors, the populace, the perfume of the city. It was nasty, exhilarating and more than a little bit lethal.

  Carl unfolded himself from the back of one of the city’s omnipresent green-and-white classic VW Beetle cabs called vochos — the kind not advised for tourists due to the ebb-and-flow trend of robbery, yet cheaper than hotel-assigned taxis and perfect for anonymity on the go. He had a big satchel with him, the type of briefcase used to carry bulky files, with a fold-over latched top. If that satchel contained money, then Carl had to be packing at least one firearm, meaning he had stepped out of character as soon as he thought himself unobserved. He moved to an iron door, was eyeballed via a peephole, and was admitted to the murk of the nameless brown building.

  Dusty street brats banged on Barney’s window, trying to sell him chewing gum — known brand names with slightly modified ingredients best left unspecified. The BMW was an advantage in this ‘hood; locals would assume it was just another drug exec making rounds or extorting protection, but it would also attract urchins and beggars, first the Artful Dodgers, then the kids huffing paint or zoned out on crystal meth. Barney kept his window up and his focus on the building. Some of the kids thumped the car but it was just a show of bravado, a test to get a rise out of the gringo. No sale.

  Some people were worth a million bucks. Some were not worth spare change, like Estrella, who had probably been plucked from a stable of a dozen just like her and aimed at Carl with the surety of a cruise missile. She had been butchered for no more than dramatic impact. Point: If Carl only had some back-alley deal cooking, nobody would have bothered to lay Estrella out in a bloody-rare buffet back at their first lodging house. If nothing else, it pro
ved the opposite side was deadly serious.

  On the hit list of Mexico’s most profligate crimes, kidnapping came third after theft and homicide, and was considered more serious than drug trafficking. In theory the act carried a 30- to 50-year prison sentence. Mexico City accounted for more than half the abductions in the entire country, with the death ratio of victims actually murdered about one in ten. It became so dire that in 2004 a quarter-million citizens protested in Zocalo Square, where the sinking Basilica was located. They called for political reform, they decried police corruption, they called out for implementation of the death penalty. The following year, Mexico City was reported to have the highest kidnapping rate in the world... and the highest percentage of money paid to kidnappers.

  So much for Rudy Giuliani and zero tolerance, thought Barney. Giuliani had collected over four million dollars for his consultancy on how to clean up Ciudad Mexico, a place one does not, cannot, “clean up.”

  In the interests of public service, someone conducted a study that reached the prim conclusion that four percent of the kidnappers down here were cops. The real percentage they did not dare suspect out loud.

  It was a growth industry in more ways than one. Five thousand separate personal security firms in Mexico City easily billed over a billion dollars per year.

  The middle class had imprisoned itself inside walled compounds, requiring bars, latches, locks, codes, dogs, cameras, and beefy enforcers to run it all. It was not unfair, and certainly not gratuitous, to call Mexico City a completely paranoid freefire zone most of the time.

  But the contradictions waited to hard-slap you at every turn. You could encounter the kind of aching beauty only noticeable when contrasted with eye-watering squalor. Small kindnesses loomed much larger here. Love was amplified as much as hate, and could broadside unsuspecting outsiders just as completely. There was more dignity in a wizened old man plying a watchmaker’s trade in a hole-in-the-wall shop than in all the ostentatious skyscrapers in the richer districts. Folks living in borderline poverty were more honestly generous than their supposed betters. More honor among common people, because to them the lessons had come gruelingly hard. Heads you live and tails you die, and Mexico City was the edge of the coin.