“Great,” he said, sullenly. There was no hope to be found here. “Then let’s just wrap this up; I’ll grab my bindle and hit the road.” Again, Barney suffered the problem of which of El Chingon’s eyes to track when actually looking at him.
“Not possible. Unlike most of our clients and guests, it is not wise to release you, and doing so would gain us nothing. Keeping you gains us nothing, except in the modest sense of payback where Sucio’s late brother is concerned.”
“Then end this,” Barney said. “You know you’re going to, anyway.”
El Chingon shook his head. He was already perspiring from the humid closeness of the room. “That’s just it. For someone to be as resilient to the tactics of interrogation as you indicates that perhaps we do not know the entire story yet. Maybe there are other options.”
“I thought you were a smart businessman,” said Barney. “You aren’t offering me anything one way or the other, except maybe a quick death versus more of this bullshit.”
“And you appear to have nothing to offer either. That’s tragic. Under different circumstances I might have been able to make use of your abilities. But you no doubt see my dilemma, there. I have to be able to trust my functionaries or the system breaks down.”
“Oh, I completely sympathize,” said Barney, rolling his eyes, signaling you can go any time, now.
The Boss made an invisible decision and departed the room with no social amenities. He was an executive in stalemate, a condition to which executives are particularly allergic. He’d be stuck there... unless things changed, or got worse.
Flush-rinse-repeat.
Things got worse.
The next time Sucio showed up in Barney’s quarters, he was alone, he was drunk, and he had brought along a pair of duck-billed tin snips.
All of Barney’s fingers and toes went on high alert. His penis tried to retreat up into his chest cavity.
The tin snips were rusty, and had dried blood on them.
Sucio’s alcohol-glazed eyes were dilated with some more potent form of chemical pick-me-up.
Once the door was closed and locked, Sucio began muttering chinga tu puta madre hijo de puta mierda capullo gilipollas imbecil cacho cabron... and so on, unending. He was steam-pressurizing toward critical mass.
Barney backed into his corner. If he could stand on his head, he might have a chance of looping the chain around the thick folds of Sucio’s pack-of-franks neck. Or he could vapor-lock like a trapped cat awaiting an inevitable and unavoidable beating. Maybe he could run his own forehead into the wall fast enough to kill himself before Sucio got to take his pleasure. But Sucio was a skilled torturer, knew the moves, and most crucially, knew how to play the anticipation of extreme pain and life-thieving damage.
Sucio paused in his dress-down of Barney’s lineage, sexuality and potty habits to sample an amyl nitrate popper, which snapped his focus clear with cardiac paddle speed.
Jesús was mentioned several times by name, alongside the word venganza. Alongside other words indicating rage, vendetta, payback time.
Then he did something exceptionally surreaclass="underline" He checked his watch, a Cartier tank chronograph inlaid with mother-of-pearl that no doubt came as a free prize from a previous victim.
“Diez minutos, joto,” he said.
Barney did not care whether he meant ten minutes to live, or that ten minutes of torture were coming. All of Barney’s attention was focused on making his own adrenals squirt.
When Sucio came in like a bullet train Barney was able to stop him short by saying, “Hey, Sucio — that’s a woman’s watch, man.”
Confusion clouded Sucio’s anger, then redoubled it.
Sucio roared in for the kill, and Barney nailed him in the left eye with the long-forgotten copy of ¡Alarma!
A lot of things had to fall into place for that one desperate bet to work. But he had to chance it.
Drunk, overconfident from the past beatings he had administered, Sucio would be easy to provoke, and probably never more vulnerable than he was now, alone, almost completely out of control.
El Chingon had explained to Barney his lack of barter value. If Barney did not strike right-goddamn-now, even restrained and at such a major disadvantage, he might not get another opportunity.
The ¡Alarma! was about thirty pages of blackly thumbed newsprint — limp pages, no staples. The word “tabloid” originated in the pharmaceutical industry to denote proper dosages in smaller tablets; it was quickly hijacked by newspapers to mean more info, smaller package, and came to refer to the size of the paper itself, or half-broadsheet size. ¡Alarma! was the next step down — “compact” size, or about an inch smaller than tabloid.
Barney’d taken this furred and gray copy of a paper about the heft of a thin Sunday supplement and rolled it up into a tube, as tightly as he could compress it, in the hope that this object might make a good weapon. It was all he had.
He jammed it into Sucio’s eye now and twisted, the paper edges cutting Sucio’s eyelid. The big man howled. Before he could fall back, Barney rapped him sharply across the bridge of the nose, breaking it, bringing a glurt of nasal blood.
Barney’s plan was to bring his improvised stick up, hard, under Sucio’s jaw for a possible kill, or use it as a ram to drive Sucio’s Adam’s apple through the back of his neck. But Sucio’s skin was like rhinoceros hide or leather toughened by salt. This guy was used to having his nose broken, and the sight of his own blood was no deterrent, as it would have been with a normal human, thus losing Barney that critical split second.
Sucio hoisted Barney into a brutal chokehold and held him aloft. The tendons in Barney’s neck snapped audibly, like misfired popcorn. No use in whacking Sucio’s bald, corrugated head; that would be like trying to knock down the wall.
Plus, Barney was notably weakened, his response zone eroded, his countermove time all used up.
After nearly a minute of asphyxiation and a possible crushed esophagus, most of the starch drained out of Barney’s brilliant plan, and he belonged to Sucio, who worked him over the way a chef pounds a cut of beef.
Barney regained enough sense to realize his own gun, his stolen .45, was jammed up against his front teeth, which recorded the vibration of the hammer cocking.
“You like this gun, eh?” Sucio growled. “You kiss it goodbye, because you ain’t never gonna shoot it again, pinche gringo.”
That seemed a bizarre threat for Sucio to make; perhaps he had intended something a bit more acidic?
Barney did not have the chance to inquire. Sucio pistol-whipped him with his own gun for nearly a quarter of an hour, mangling Barney’s face to raw burger.
Barney never felt Sucio amputate his right index finger with the tin snips. His trigger finger.
By the time Sucio repeated the procedure on Barney’s left index finger, Barney had passed beyond feeling simple pain. He did hear the liquid cellophane sound of the blades meeting through his flesh, though, and the more arid sound of them dividing bone like brittle chalk.
Some time after that, Mojica entered Barney’s room long enough to cauterize the damage of amputation using a propane torch. Barney’s fingers were nowhere to be found. Mojica considered his own fingers — he still had a full set — and scuttled out as fast as possible, making sure he was not observed.