“A firearm. Sidearm. Pistol. La pistola.”
Mano produced the rickety shooting iron used during the spectacularly misconceived attempt to rob his store. Barney examined it gently with one unbandaged, three-fingered hand.
It was a short-barreled, seven-shot .32 caliber Omega revolver with two bullets still asleep in the cylinder and nodes of rust on the trigger. The top left side featured a stamp of Mercury or some other Roman god. It was a fifty-buck junk gun, a real Ring of Fire special, as likely to explode in your hand as drop the hammer shy of the primer. A lot of crap similar to it had floated through the shooting range’s repair and sales department even though such safety-last weapons had been illegal in California since the Gun Control Act of 1968, a misfired piece of legislation that provided a handy loophole by which the parts for such guns could still be shipped into the state. It was the kind of randy hot-pocket pistol a junkie would steal and try to pawn; inaccurate, cheap, easily concealed and totally dangerous. It had probably never been cleaned.
Good .32s were still classic ankle guns for law enforcement, who used the revolvers to backstop the semi-autos that were now pretty standard sidearms. Barney recalled reading that in the early 1920s, police officers in the deep South switched to .38 caliber carry guns from .32s because they believed cocaine made Negroes impervious to the smaller rounds.
Barney dumped the shells — pirate loads of disreputable manufacture — and carefully threaded his right middle finger through the trigger guard, grasped, and tried to cycle the hammer. It stuttered back about three millimeters, then relaxed as his hand gave out and began to bleed. It stung and throbbed like hell. Forty trigger pulls in thirty seconds, dry-firing... and Barney could not manage a single one, with his stronger hand.
“Who you wish to shoot?” said Mano.
“Nobody,” said Barney, omitting the yet. “This used to be...is... my specialty. Like you with rocks.”
“Estas un malhechor?” Mano asked this with an utter lack of guile; his inflection made it clear that what he was really asking was: Are you a criminal, an evil man, or are you misunderstood?
Barney almost smiled. “Depends on who you ask. I was once a soldier. I know a lot about guns. But no, not in the way you mean.”
“A great wrong has been done to you that might cause you to become a bad man.”
“A criminal, perhaps, but not a bad man. I would not harm a man such as yourself, for instance. Yes, I wish to do harm to those who harmed me. But it’s bigger than that. Mas grande. Besides, look at me, Mano. Mirame. The only person I can harm is myself, if I sit up too fast.”
Blood was trickling down his wrist.
Mano tended the hand and let him hang onto the “gonn.” He obviously did not want to look at it, and would probably dispose of it after today.
Another ritual that divided the calendar was the twice-weekly trip to the clinic to check in with Dr. Mendez, accomplished by Mano choreographing his assorted relatives. Nothing awaited them this time but bad news.
Dr. Mendez was dead.
The account, which unfurled in Barney’s mind much like the telling of another myth, went that Dr. Mendez had left the clinic two evenings earlier, stopped his car for reasons unknown (or was carjacked), suffered a gunshot wound, was abandoned or somehow managed to drive his vehicle three miles closer to his home before crashing into a tree and bleeding to death. He was not found until the following morning.
Another physician, clearly upset at the violent end to the much-loved Dr. Mendez’s life, examined Barney, drew blood, and mortared up his injuries with shaking hands. One of Sucio’s bullets had nicked his right scapula; another had sundered a rib, this latter being one of the slugs still inside him. Due to its proximity to Barney’s heart and the lingering hazard of bone splinters, a big-city surgery was advised. Bone hits were a fifty-fifty shot; pound for pound, most bone in the human body is as strong as steel. They could protect your internal organs, or bounce incoming bullets straight into them.
Barney kept asking the doctor, whose name was Hector Quisneros, “What kind of gun was Dr. Mendez attacked with? What kind of bullet was he shot with?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure I can find out. Why — is it relevant? It won’t matter.” Dr. Quisneros removed his square-rimmed steel glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “The police will not follow up reliably even for a citizen of Dr. Mendez’s status. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”
The killer came for Barney the following night.
Dr. Quisneros had recommended a one-night maintenance stay at the clinic, perhaps longer, but Barney could already smell death on the breeze. He quickly counseled Mano to get away from his home, and keep his family clear as well. Mano stuck.
Barney lay in wait, unable to sleep, with nothing for company but the metronome ticking of the clock and the Saturday Night Special with two shots left. He feebly grasped the .32 in his unwrapped gun hand, hoping to achieve a single shot before the remaining tatters and strings of that hand fell apart. The pistol was a real piece of shit; a whore’s gun. It barely mattered which side of the muzzle you were on.
Mano maddeningly deflected Barney’s worry and warnings. He puttered around his home, fixed an indifferent meal, refused to entertain the crazy notion of asesinos in the night, and finally went to bed with no further comment.
First thought: Mano has told somebody, and is in on it.
Second thought: Sucio is being thorough.
Third, and most damning thought: What if Barney’s senses had completely forsaken him? His combat smarts, his night vision, his skin alarms, his preternatural sense of the shape and threat potential of the unknown up-ahead — what if he had lost them all in the river, what if they had drained out through the many holes in his body? What if his web of plots, connections, coincidences, motives and murderers was just his fear talking out loud, or the medicine amplifying his paranoia?
To hell with all that. There was a single reality here: The bad guys knew he was alive, and sought to correct that oversight.
The stranger came just past midnight, after Mano had gone to bed. Barney felt the air shift subtly in the small house, and waited for a cautious silhouette to fill up the doorway to his little room. It was a large man — not Sucio — stinking of recently bought safari clothing and wearing a black ski mask.
The pistol he had smelled new, too. Factory lubricant still on it. The bore, almost invisible in the dim light, was a black hole waiting to suck in Barney’s life first, followed by the rest of the universe.
Not a hallucination; not a fever dream.
Barney’s eardrums nearly imploded from the blinding roar of discharge.
The intruder became visible in a flashbulb corona of hot yellow light, then seemed to unhinge as portions of the doorway became visible through his midsection, which disintegrated, raining blood and most of his internal organs all over Barney, who was still snapping the useless .32 with his wrecked hand, the trigger falling over and over on empty chambers and the two dud cartridges. Something in his wrist seemed to thrum, then snap like a rubber band, giving out. His own blood was already coursing down his arm.
Mano clicked on the light before the interloper’s body finished hitting the floor in a macerated sprawl, his weapon spinning into a corner. Gunsmoke clogged the room and the stink of cordite made it hard to breathe — such a huge, devastating blast in such a tiny space. Mano became visible through a haze of purple spots in Barney’s vision. He stood in the doorway holding about half a mile of double-barreled shotgun that looked like an old Savage/Stevens model 311 side-by-side, with twin triggers. He had held low and given the night caller both chambers at less than four feet. The 12-gauge double-aught rounds, coming in like a hornet-swarm of eighteen .32 caliber bullets fired all at once, had blown him apart at the base of the spine. He was not going to get up.