Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  Armand had discovered Flecha’s son Almirante locked in a third floor room, west wing. The boy’s fingers were all intact. One more day and the merch might have devalued enough for the kidnappers to begin lopping parts.

  Some bad guy stragglers caught the worst of it, getting flung two stories down, hammered until they were raw meat, or centered in a kicking contest by two or three luchadors. No way this fighting was fake, and the blood was more real than ever.

  All the masked men thought Barney was el campeon de justicia, and Atrocidad told him so.

  “But that is not the reason you do this.” El Atrocidad winked at Barney from the depths of his green, vinyl-flamed mask, his grin like a grille, his face like the front end of a Chevy low-rider. “The champion of justice, that is part of the lucha libre leyendo, the legend. You do this thing and want no one to know it is you, except those you punish.”

  “I’m no hero,” said Barney. His throat was still scoured and aching. Breathing hurt. “I’ve killed unarmed men. I’ve lied and bushwhacked them for no other reason than revenge.”

  “You might think that,” said Atrocidad. “You might even talk yourself into believing it. But I know better. You came back to Mexico for a right reason, correcto, ¿no?”

  There would never be any way to explain it to the big goateed man.

  If El Atrocidad was exuberant, Flecha de Jalisco was gushing, effusive, verging on tears, and who was Barney to say the man’s gratitude was not deep and genuine? He had reclaimed his son from the forces of evil men. But Barney could not take much more gruff good cheer in the name of justice.

  What now? During the mop-up, everybody looked to Barney as though he was some kind of leader, and all Barney could look at was the lifeless form of his good friend Karlov, lost thanks to his vendetta.

  “Now?” said Barney. “What now? We get the hell outta Dodge before the news trucks show up. But first we have to give them a show. Once El Atrocidad and his men get the hostages clear, we burn this fucking place to the ground, to ashes. If Tannenhauser isn’t here, then there’s nothing left. His scumbag army are all dead or fled. One thing — I want to find the room. The room. The burning starts there.”

  “Yeah, well before you go all pyromaniacal on us,” said Sirius, “I’ve got a guy handcuffed to a water pipe up on Three you might want to have a word with. Over next to the computer room.”

  Barney just wanted to sleep. Post-combat metabolic flush, when your adrenalin has cooked away, is opiate in its draining effect. Sirius told him more, but it washed over Barney, who clumped along, unhearing.

  Seeing the guy Sirius had detained woke Barney up doublequick.

  “Saaay, amigo!” said the battered man braceleted to the immovable pipework. “It’s you! They kill you and you don’t die, eh? Or are you el espectro, a ghost come to visit his havoc on earth? Amigo! What a pleasure to see you!”

  “Mojica,” said Barney. “You’re Mojica.”

  “Aha, see?!” The shaved dome of the too-fervent, murine man was leaking nervous sweat. His trademark mirrorshades were trampled on the floor. “Remember I told you I help you get out? And you got out! You remember me, eh? You remember that I help you so this maricon don’t shoot me?” His introduction to Sirius had not been amicable.

  “I’ll shoot you myself,” said Barney, “if you don’t tell me where El Chingon is. Tannenhauser. Whatever that stick-up-the-ass animal calls himself.”

  The entire front of Sirius’ face crumpled together in a frown. “You know this dude?”

  “Just an acquaintance,” said Barney.

  “O-ha, you kid, you kid!” said Mojica with false bluster. “That is the big joke, my friend, the biggest joke of all: El Chingon had to go to America. Come on, you can laugh, guy, it’s funny! He had some bigshot El Chingon business in Los Estados Unidos. He’s not even fucking here, ese! And I tell you sure as shit he’s not coming back now, not after you —” he searched for the right words “— redecorated this place, eh?”

  “This little rodent pulled a nine on me,” said Sirius.

  “You look okay,” said Barney.

  “No worries.”

  Mojica looked despondent. His chances sucked and he knew it. “So... you gonna kill me now?” He tried for a hopeful-puppy expression that was vomitous.

  “I’ll do it,” said Sirius, unsleeving his .45.

  “Wait,” said Barney.

  That was all Mojica needed to recharge his battery, and during the next few seconds he was as obsequious as it is possible for a human being to be without actually devolving into a lower life form. Barney had to smack him to shut him up.

  “Listen very carefully,” Barney said. “Escuchame bien. You tell me where he is. Where he has gone; where I can find him, not later, not maybe, not eventually, but right now. You tell me that, Mojica, and you’ll not only live, but you’ll go free, right now, tonight. And if you’re lying to me in any way, I will come back here just for the pleasure of taking your life in the most painful and drawn-out way I can conceive. Think about that, before you answer.”

  “You remembered my name,” the little man said, quietly.

  “I try to remember everybody who kicks the piss out of me. Helps at Christmas card time.” Mojica had sterilized his amputated fingers — his face floated up out of the dim cesspool of pain-memory. Mojica had done him one small kindness during his days of torment. That bought him some wiggle room, but did not forgive his other sins.

  Maybe Mojica had helped Barney escape, if by no other way than not shooting him when Sucio did following Barney’s bridge dive, headfirst and with no form at all.

  It was so easy to be seduced by the thought. Conned, tricked, made a stupid mark, yet again.

  Sirius centered Barney in his gaze: We can’t let this guy go. Not after —

  Barney imagined what Karlov might have said: For a man on the revenge trail you sure are sparing a lot of warm bodies.

  And Armand: You cut him loose now, he’ll be a problem later. Not professional.

  Against all this stood Mojica’s one little favor he had not had to do, but had done anyway.

  “Los Angeles,” Mojica said. “He’s with that guy’s, your friend’s, you know, that redheaded puta. Your guy’s wife.”

  There was much more detail and Barney ran Mojica through the repetition wringer to ensure the tale was not cobbled on the spot. In the end, Mojica sang like a crested warbler just for being uncuffed before Barney’s crew set the Palacio to the torch.

  Barney stood in the empty room where he had once been held prisoner.

  It was apparently the only room outfitted for problematical detainees. Real hostages got amenities — locked in, not chained up. Beds and television, though the beds were probably lice-infested, and if you need a quick way to go gibberingly crazy there was no quicker method than watching a lot of foreign TV.

  Barney wished he could feel some surge of latent emotion, but the room had given up its haunts. It was just a depressing, empty space.

  El Atrocidad appeared behind him, moving lightly with his big athlete’s grace. “Not all people in Mexico are like this, amigo,” he said softly.

  “You’ve done far too much for me, for far too little return,” said Barney. “I’m in your debt. I always will be. There’s no way to repay... This is unusual for me.”

  El Atrocidad made a chaa sound of dismissal. It ain’t no thing. “Look at what you have accomplished. Look at the people you have saved.”

  “I didn’t do it to save them.”

  “Evil men dealt with.”

  “It won’t make any difference tomorrow.”

  “You even give all the credito to us.”

  “Take it. I don’t want it.”

  “Then what do you want from this?”

  “My friend back in the hall. His name is Christoph Ivan Karlov. I need you to take him out of here. He needs to be buried. I don’t think he would mind being buried in Mexico.”

  He imagined Karlov’s response: I don’t car
e, youngster — I’m dead. You gave me the challenge of showing a man with crippled hands how to shoot again. You put my weapons in the hands of true gunmen. You gave me plenty. You don’t owe me nothing. Just get on with the mission, damn it.

  “El Murcielago Sangriento tells me the news people are on their way,” someone said.

  Armand brought up a gallon of gasoline from somewhere in the compound, and Barney splashed it around the Bleeding Room. Ignited it. Walked away. Within minutes the entire third floor was ablaze.

  The Palacio burned for five hours, due to difficulties with firefighting response and a lack of local water pressure. News cameras loved fire, and only later got around to the poignant report of rescued hostages. The wrestlers got a lot of face time, explaining they were en route to a match as a group and spotted the flames. Their next bout at Arena Coliseo would be packed and they would he hailed as superheroes, some of the best Mexico had to offer.

  When the conflagration embered down, even the brickwork had fallen, sundered by the collapsing interior of the building. By dawn the next day the site resembled the aftermath of a bombing, or just another run-down Mexican firetrap gone to its reward. The news of a fire in a shithole like Iztapalapa was not important enough to make the papers in the United States, and besides, nobody would believe that stuff about strongmen in circus-colored costumes giving a crowd of people their lives back.

  For all intents and purposes, Barney and his men had never been there.

  Part Four

  Felt Recoil

  What the desperate Mojica had been able to provide was a key phone number, a last resort backup, emergencies only. Which number, when properly traced, could serve as a homing beacon for a stakeout location in Los Angeles. Barney already knew what his targets looked like. He had Tannenhauser’s dictatorial mien imprinted on his memory. As for Erica — whatever she was calling herself these days — he had Carl Ledbetter’s wallet photo.

  It was enough.

  Armand and Sirius were spoiling for more, especially since the loss of Karlov, whose burial had been private, in an undisclosed location. Barney, stung by this post facto price on his mission, was reluctant to place his remaining allies in the path of harm. Progress choked, once they had returned home to lives and existences that seemed even more pointless after the blood-fever of battle. Barney told them he had to be very careful, time would be needed to make extremely discreet inquiry and follow-up, and that he would flag them the moment he had his final two targets.

  Barney was, of course, lying.

  Based on a bit of sublegal cellular tracking, it was necessary to isolate Tannenhauser’s signal as soon as possible, since the man would be on the move as soon as the import of the disaster in Mexico resonated. Since you could never lop off every head of a Hydra, Barney assumed Tannenhauser would be apprised immediately — so he had to fob off Sirius and Armand and land on this man’s tail mega-quick.

  He had staked out the Sheraton Miramar in Santa Monica for a whole day, tracking comings and goings. He had spotted Tannenhauser once, and seen a woman who might have been the former Erica Ledbetter three times, depending on how she could have changed her look over the past two years.

  They appeared to be together, as Mojica had said.

  Just today, outside, waiting for a car, they had appeared to be arguing.

  Now all Barney had to do was time them out, and tag them inside the building. Figuring out what code names they were registered under was a waste of time. He had them and they did not appear to be anxious to relocate just yet. There was probably a lot of longdistance spin control going on, the kind that was safer to do from another country.

  He would scoop them alone, and his men might be spared a stray bullet.

  Armand ruined all of Barney’s quiet strategy with a single cellphone call.

  “You’ve got to get down here now.”

  Bad news, incoming, take cover...

  “Somebody nailed Sirius. Right outside the gun range. Wherever you go, don’t go back there because I’m pretty sure it’s hot. Meet me at the morgue, four o’clock.”

  The downtown Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner — the county morgue, due west of the University of Southern California Medical Center — has a gift shop on its second floor called Skeletons in the Closet, where one can buy “ghoulish gifts” such as toe tag keyrings, coffee mugs featuring a body outline in chalk, or toy miniatures of the 1938 Black Mariah hearse. Profits from the shop go to stout causes such as the Youthful Drunk Driving Visitation Program, which, among other incentives to reform, compels offenders to watch an actual autopsy-in-progress. Founded in 1993, the shop pulls down between $15,000 and $20,000 in sales every month (excepting, of course, Halloween season, when it does double that) and has an international clientele.

  People who visit the morgue for the purposes of putting a name to a corpse usually don’t stop at the gift shop for a souvenir.

  The late Sirius had a small-caliber bullet hole straight through his head. You could actually see through it; blow frigid condensed breath through it, if you had the guts to lift it from the confines of the body bag on refrigerated drawer-tray Number 38.

  “They’re hunting us,” said Armand. “We’re not as smart or cool as we thought we were. We destroyed their operation in Mexico and now the sonofabitch is going to pick us off locally. The only reason he missed you is because you’ve spent so much time staking out the hotel. Me, I can’t figure. We might walk out of here and right into a gunsight.”

  “I know where he is,” said Barney.

  “Then we take him. Sudden death overtime.” Armand nailed his friend eye-to-eye. “I know what you’re going to try to sell me. You’re going to say the hunt is over, that this isn’t Mexico, that it’s your problem. Then, when I don’t believe that, you’re going to say it’s not worth it. They hired a guy to kill you in Mexico when you were slightly less mobile than a rutabaga, and they’re going to keep hiring soldiers until we are dust. You and me are the same, now — our dead friend in the drawer there is proof positive.”

  “I was going to suggest you go hole up with your brother in Cincinnati until the gunsmoke clears.”

  “Let history pass me by? Fuck that.”

  Sirius’ dead, closed eyes offered them no counsel. No one else was present to waste time by suggesting maybe it was all an accident, random, unrelated, a tragedy, sure, but nothing more.

  “You’ve got the bloodlust, partner,” Armand said. “Keep it boiling and don’t let it blind you to tactical reality.”

  “Armand,” Barney said. “I let one go in New York City. I shouldn’t have. I let one go in Mexico and I shouldn’t have. But each one was a negotiative play for a bigger target. It’s me that Tannenhauser wants; let me take the risk. I don’t want you getting waxed now that Karlov and Sirius are gone.”

  “I’m a big boy,” said Armand. “Practically a grownup.” He waited a beat. Barney was not smiling. “All or nothing.”

  They left the morgue. No place was safe. The person who had killed Sirius had walked right up to him, put a pistol to his temple, and fired.

  Barney flexed his hands, trying to remember what they had looked like when they were whole.

  “You’re right. This isn’t over until they’re all gone.” Grimly he thought, Or we are.

  Their entire arsenal — what they had not disposed of in Mexico — was trapped at the gun range, inaccessible. It was tainted ground until they were clear. Barney had his Super .40 and Armand had his Ruger, end of story. It would be so easy to hit the freeway and keep on driving. This was not home anymore.

  “See, now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” said Armand, slapping his friend on the shoulder.

  “We just jump in the car, drive to the hotel, kill some people and then have a steak dinner?”

  Armand remote-fobbed the doors on his ride, a low, gorgeous Cadillac DTS V-8 in pewter. “No. We jump in the car, drive to the hotel, smoke the snake-in-the-grass motherfuckers that subtracted Sirius from
our lives, and then go have a steak dinner. Chez Jay’s. I’ll buy. Our dead buddy in there needs one toast at least.”

  Yes. At least. At least in a couple of hours it would all be done...

  Barney was nearly at peace with that brutal truth when Armand grinned at him over the roof of the car. Then everything behind Armand’s ears burst toward Barney in a macerated mist of red blood, white bone, gray brains.

  Barney walloped his chin on the car roof in his hurry to hit the deck, saturated in the remains of the back of Armand’s head. Armand collapsed in a boneless tumble. Two seconds ago, this had not happened yet.

  Another .338 Lapua round pierced the door on Armand’s side and exited through Barney’s door three inches from his head. It was a flat trajectory. The shooter was so far away that the echo of distant report came after the bullet had struck. These were boat-tailed, full metal jacketed military rounds, Super Magnums with a muzzle energy of nearly five thousand foot-pounds. This was the sort of death you got at the hands of an expert with a four thousand-dollar rifle and painfully precise optics. The guy could be 1500 meters away. Anywhere.

  Barney had about two feet of clearance he was pretty sure the shooter could not aim below. Clawing his own gun out would have been pointless. This was surgical, dispassionate, the slaughter of farm animals.

  He crawled on his belly toward a palm tree planter made out of UltraCal while several more rounds chopped and channeled Armand’s car. It was absurdly quiet. There was a good chance the sniper had not seen him move.

  Barney actually heard the whine of the incoming slug cutting air. A cloud of gasified fiber turned the air yellow and the palm tree fell over like a British butler, bowing.