Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  Direct approach was impossible, due to the road jog and a dirt-surfaced side road that cut through the opposing block. The tunnel was meant to be turned into, not accessed head-on. The panel van lurched over the side-road, making about forty-five before it had to grab a sharp right and sail into the tunnel, like a trick-angle shot in billiards.

  Taped into the driver’s seat was Condorito, looking mildly insane, Barney’s gun barrel nestled in his occipital ditch. To external view Condorito was just another lunatic Mexican driver hopped up on goofballs and playing the road as a video game. The van went briefly airborne after clearing a rut, and two wheels left the ground on the turn. They were hammering a solid half-buck when they split the smoke in the tunnel and struck the gate.

  The stanchions securing the gate ripped out of concrete and eviscerated the van’s transmission on the way through. Iron trespass teeth gutted the tires and the van nosed down sharply, grinding through on rims. The left arm of the gate flew free of its hinges and landed in the courtyard, sliding, striking sparks. The right arm banged back to fan the billow of smoke disgorging from the tunnel. The van fishtailed to a stop and sat there steaming, quickly enveloped by the smoke.

  Inside the courtyard, men were yelling.

  Sirius had stepped aside to let the van juggernaut past about a foot away from him. When his side of the gate vanished with a metallic clang he eeled around the corner, hugged the wall, and began to peg smokers around the perimeter. Karlov came through right behind him, quick-drawing his .40 with his good hand and potting two rounds through the chest of a sentry who was just regaining his senses enough to raise a weapon at Sirius.

  On Armand’s side, the swinging gate had center-punched another guard, who was just getting to hands and knees and groping around for his Uzi on the ground. Armand’s Magnum blasted the guy into a surfer flip and he went down and stayed still.

  Barney kicked out through the rear of the van as men on the second floor of the atrium opened up, full auto, on the intruder vehicle. Condorito died an inglorious death at the hands of his co-workers, shredded by bullets that vaporized the windshield, destroyed the cabin and made both him and the upholstery into floating chaff. What several hundred incoming bullets will do to an automobile — not mention the hapless bastard inside — is a minor miracle of horror.

  An alarm klaxon began to bark, echoing in the courtyard, which was now fogged in with orange, then laced with green and blue as Sirius placed his smokers in what he called a “Dr. Pepper spread” — ten, two, and four o’clock.

  The enemy, surprised and lacking visual targets, concentrated on the van. Barney’s team had planned how to move, and did not necessarily need to see.

  Barney knew this place. His ears knew it. His memory confirmed it. The graveled pavement beneath his feet was a sense picture. He had been muscled along this very surface with his head bagged. There would come a door, a narrow hallway, an elevator. The secured rooms that served as cells. Tannenhauser’s office, brain central for the kidnapping ring. Barney remembered the toy soldiers grouped on one corner of Tannenhauser’s computer desk. He and his men were the soldiers now, coming home.

  Even with the best of intel, it had been impossible to plan textbook moves such as link-up points, limits of advance, areas of responsibility or fields of fire. Knowing they had to wing it, Barney’s team stayed tight if for no other reason than to avoid shooting each other in the smokescreen.

  Karlov tapped Armand on the arm and together they got a sight picture on Sirius. They married up and proceeded leftward, blasting the occasional running gunner back into the smoke. They found the east wall.

  A door opened and two gunners came ready to fight. They looked up into a fusillade of bullets that hoisted one of them completely back into the building. His partner simply vanished into a billow of red smoke.

  Barney materialized out of the riot of rainbow fog and pointed toward the door. None of them had uttered a syllable since the gate breach.

  Inside they encountered minimal resistance. Sirius caught a frag from the wall in the forehead and instinctively returned fire with the shotgun. The orange smoke canister caught the shooter square in the noggin, almost somersaulting him backward. His MP5 skittered across the floor. As Barney stepped over him, he put a round in the guy’s ear and the man stayed still.

  If this was another wrong building, at least it was full of motivated hostiles with heavy ordnance. Nobody chopped so far could be deemed an innocent.

  Barney located the elevator. They set it for the third floor, lobbed in a smoker, and moved for the stairs.

  When they kicked through the stairway door on the second floor and deployed right-left-up-down, muzzles everywhere, a consternated sentry flung his pistol toward them and rabbitted away.

  Long corridor, five rooms, max lock.

  Barney held up his pinky finger, indicating flechettes for the shotguns. Spiked brass rods instead of shot, heavy powder, used by Feds to blow door hinges from the outside. Sirius smoked the far end of the corridor while Armand turned the first door to confetti. It was a heavy wooden door, cross-barred, but once it lost its hinges it sagged like an old prom queen. Inside a child was screaming, balled into a wad in a far corner. No leg shackle. Television. It was a little girl about eight, her long hair beautiful but filthy, her coal-brown eyes dilated in terror. Barney had to slap her lightly to get her attention. “Cuidado,” he said. “Quedarse aqui, nina. Regresamos inmediatamente; vamanos ahora. ¿Entiendes?”

  He had tried to say watch out, stay here little girl, we’ll be right back, we’re leaving today. No doubt it sounded like me-Tarzan you-Jane to the panicked girl, but he did not want her running out into gunfire. She seemed to grasp most of it and nodded, her eyes shining with tears. He held her face with his mutilated hand and made sure she registered the reassurance in his own gaze. Then he pointed for her to stay right where she was. “¡Permaneces!”

  The alarm on his wristwatch peeped. Simultaneously, El Atrocidad’s watch would be signaling, too.

  It rains a great deal in Mexico City and its outback, generally short bursts during midday in the wet season — May through October on the tierra fria. It had rained during Barney’s first visit and no doubt had rained a lot during his incarceration, although he had no memory of hearing or smelling rainfall while he was shackled. The rain, then, had not mattered or affected operations. Outside the Palacio, now, it had begun to rain...

  ... which would not only cleanse the air for a scant moment, it would also sabotage Barney’s smokescreen.

  They worked the corridor, smashing open the bolted doorways which held the latest crop of hostages. Another child, not Almirante. A beautiful, bedraggled woman in a miniskirt, no doubt snatched outside a club. A man who had lost a finger already and demanded a firearm so he could get involved. A woman who remained in her corner seat when the door flew down, and smiled when Barney looked at her, as though she had known all along he would arrive, perhaps in answer to a prayer.

  Barney pointed. Up. Next floor.

  Shooters on the third floor were ready to rumble, but ill-prepared for the smoke delivered by Sirius, squinting to see through the blood clogging his eye from his head wound. Armand took a rolling dive and managed to bracket the corridor, firing and reloading his .44. His hands were no longer shaking. Barney saw Karlov holster one firearm and execute a one-handed clip-change on another, smacking the fresh load against his knee and grimacing mostly for show. Sirius had his shotgun bowslung and was lopping the opposition apart a limb at a time shooting his twin Para-Ordnance semi-autos two-handed, walking and firing alternately, left-right-left-right. The slugs carved vapor trails through the thick green smoke, found targets, inflicted destruction.

  Barney was slammed to the floor by two wild hits in the back, their killing penetration dispersed by the body armor, but their motive force burly enough to knock him on his face. He crawled to a locked door across the hall, grabbed the knob and fought to hoist himself upright. The breath had been punched
out of his lungs and he needed to draw new air.

  Sirius and Armand walked point, giving the hall maximum coverage, expecting Barney and Karlov to follow in their wake to mop up by freeing the hostages on this floor.

  Good god, how many people were held captive here? There were three more entire wings to the building.

  Karlov handed over a shotgun and Barney blew the next door.

  Instantly, gunfire erupted from within. Karlov snapped backward and fell down.

  Through the dust and smoke as Barney ducked out of aimed sight, he glimpsed a naked man inside the room, emptying a big revolver at the intruders.

  It was Zefir, the fat tormentor upon whom Barney had once puked, in another life. He had been interrupted in mid-rape by the invasion of the Palacio, but determined to achieve his wretched little squirt before his own special love-nest door wrenched apart into fiery splinters. Now he stood firing wild into the clouded green hallway, his pathetic erection barely visible in the shadow of his substantial belly. His victim was tied to a four-poster bed by athletic bandages and there was a game show blurring across the TV screen.

  Barney fired with the shotgun from a distance of eight feet and the flechette round tore Zefir to ragged single-serve pieces. He actually glimpsed parts of his own body raining down around him before he dropped.

  Karlov was attempting to sit up.

  Barney saw this and watched long enough to see his comrade give a thumbs-up. I’m okay, don’t worry, move it!

  What was left of Zefir lay in a widening scarlet puddle on the wooden floor, his cognizance purely reptilian. Barney slapped him to a semblance of awareness, then hissed, “Sucio. ¿Donde está Sucio?”

  “Gahhh,” said Zefir. He died.

  Karlov limped into the breached room, favoring his left leg. The woman on the bed had gone tharn while being rompered by Zefir, and naturally reacted to his intrusion as a preamble to further abuse. He had to calm her down but could not muster much Spanish.

  More gunfire, from the hallway. Mostly Armand and Sirius, sweeping and clearing.

  Barney handed the shotgun across, the message in his eyes clear. I’m going to follow them and open the remaining rooms. Karlov nodded just as the woman, arms freed, grabbed him like a lost daughter and started sobbing.

  Other hostages were probably most secure in their locked rooms until the floors could be flushed of gunners. Armand and Sirius knew they had to find the room with the computers, the office of El Chingon. They had zipped open enough rooms to verify they were in the right place, doing the right thing.

  Opposition began to wane noticeably. Gunners were either dead or hightailing it.

  Barney stepped out into the hallway to reload, and that’s when the enormous Sucio smashed into him like a runaway bulldozer, grabbed him by the throat and hefted him clear of the ground.

  Thirty or more big-ticket hostages at $500 U.S. per day was a rake of $15,000 every twenty-four hours — not bad when you considered it was above and beyond the ransom demands, which corkscrewed up into the millions more often than you would assume possible, given Mexico’s reputation as one of the world’s great sinkholes of poverty. Tannenhauser had a wonderful little slot machine going at the Palacio; it nearly always paid off. Tannenhauser was the man Barney wanted. Sucio was the man he got.

  Sucio, the stone-idol sonofabitch who had snipped off Barney’s fingers, then forced them down Barney’s throat. Sucio, who had the blood-rage for the death of his brother Jesús at the hands of a pair of pinche gringos. Sucio, of the daily beatings and humiliation, head pervert of the guard branch of this madhouse. The man who had shot Barney four times and dumped his carcass into the sewer, albeit not in that order.

  He was a year older, a year more aromatic, and his gouged eye had healed into a droop that mocked Tannenhauser’s lazy left orb. He emerged from the green fog like the legendary chupacabra, neckless, fulminating with anger, the size of a small bear. That make-believe bloodsucking cryptid, brother to Sasquatch and the Abominable Snowman, was said to possess the power to give mortals nausea with its glowing red eyes. Sucio pretty much fit the profile.

  Barney had rehearsed this moment a half-million times in his mind. He would track Sucio down, cripple him, make sure he knew who was killing him, and then finish him off, maybe after making him eat all of his own fingers. Or Barney would shoot him in the legs with his .22 until Sucio would gladly chop off his own penis to escape the pain. Something that was the ultimate in degradation. Barney would taunt the bigger man, spitting his venom back at him, trying for some humiliation that could compensate for what Barney had lost. But no matter what he did to Sucio, the only thing it would change was whether or not Sucio still occupied the world of the living. Payback ran deeper than that.

  It was all an indulgent joke, anyway, with Barney as the butt. Because Sucio had appeared out of nowhere instead of being tracked and run to ground. He now had Barney’s neck in a vise-grip and was crushing his larynx. And in the big man’s face was no sign of recognition at all. None.

  And now Barney was going to die by Sucio’s hand not far from the first Bleeding Room; joke squared.

  Barney’s gun thumped to the floor at Sucio’s feet. Barney’s legs kicked and thrashed. No good.

  Sucio increased the pressure with his weightlifter muscle. Hydrostatics would blast Barney’s eyes from his head like pimentos from olives. The world washed scarlet. Sucio was going to tweeze his head completely free of his body with the sound of a popped pimple.

  Air was a memory as Barney struggled to breathe. Drowning, again.

  Sucio flinched but kept Barney in his deathgrip. Flinched twice more. In delayed molasses-time, Barney vaguely registered the sound of gunshots. Twice more. Gradually the hammerlock on his esophagus eased back, just a notch.

  Again. Again.

  Karlov was sitting on the floor of the hostage room, legs out in front of him, wavering but accurately delivering the payload of his unholstered .357 into Sucio’s back one round at a time. Sucio dropped to one knee, still clutching Barney’s neck. Still twitching from hits. Barney’s swimming vision made dim sense of Armand, standing in the hallway, calmly aiming, firing, and walking closer with each round. Beside him, Sirius took alternate shots, adding more lead to Sucio’s body fat index. When the giant killer finally released Barney and slumped, Barney saw the heel of the Army .45 sticking out of his waistband — the old Colt 1911-A Barney had picked up cheap for the original ransom run, the one Sucio had taken from him.

  Barney sprawled on his side, gasping, his eyes staying on the gun even though his vision was hazed and occluded. Or had Sirius let off another grenade? Didn’t matter. Put your hand on that pistol.

  Still sucking draughts of oxygen laced with green smoke, Barney pulled the .45 free of Sucio’s pants. Sucio was trying to crabwalk himself toward the far wall, his metabolism blowing fuses, his blood flooding out to soak the floor.

  Barney snapped the action of the semi-auto to chamber his first thank you to the man who had meant so much to him.

  After steadying himself against the wall, Barney pushed off like a swimmer and emptied the magazine into Sucio’s chest at point blank range.

  Contrary to entrenched cliché and what nitwits repeatedly say on the evening news, shots do not “ring out,” and anybody who tells you they do has never heard gunfire. Report is more akin to the startlement of a heavy door slammed by a gust of wind; you know how that makes you jump, and no matter how prepared you think you are, the sound always comes as a surprise. It stops time for a millisecond and obliterates all other sound. Ignition and launch of a bullet evacuates the air from around your head in a phenomenon called blowback. If you’re not ready for it, the noise jump-starts the human fight-or-flight reflex in some small primitive corner of the brain. You freeze momentarily until the gunshot allows the rest of the world to come back. Once you’ve gotten past that first shot, subsequent shots are easy — you can even make them without blinking because your mind has processed that initial speed-
stop, which no way, nohow, never in history, “rings out.”

  Pink, frothy lung-blood was slobbering from Sucio’s mouth. Barney could see the tiny lights in the man’s eyes, fading to black.

  Blood was coursing from both of Barney’s hands, oozing past the snugs on the shooting gloves. His new hands would always be limited in certain ways. But they could still give Sucio the finger, which was the last thing he saw before he died.

  Then the corridor filled up with shouting men in Mexican wrestling masks, and Barney knew the cavalry had arrived.

  Karlov was dead.

  He had breathed his last after pumping the final rounds of his .357 into Sucio, from where he had slumped on the floor of the room with the naked lady in it. His body armor had shielded him from all the hits in the hallway except for the one wild, heavy-caliber shot from Zefir, which angled in by sheer chance to slam his femoral artery so hard that it ruptured beneath the skin. All the time he was calming the rape victim, helping Barney, and holding up his end of the assault, he was hemorrhaging, and he finally ran dry. Internal bleeding left his leg completely black.

  Their guns were literally too hot to holster.

  Barney’s plan was to alert El Atrocidad and his men as soon as the assault commenced. By the time they could rally and storm the Palacio, the shooting would be done... and the masked superstars of lucha libre could take credit for rescuing thirty or more hostages. It should have come as no surprise that the wrestlers were standing by and eager to jump; they showed up early by Barney’s wristwatch, and got to pound a few criminal heads in the deal. The most astonishing part was that they showed up in costume — flamboyant spandex, filigreed masks and boots for stomping. A couple had sequined capes. Flecha de Jalisco was wearing a gray business suit and tie, but with the sleeves ripped off due to his gunshot wound. These men were accustomed to fighting in their sacred masks, and barreled into the Palacio practically foaming to take on all comers with a hysterical bravery that would make you think it was a pay-per-view event.