It was a miracle Barney was not taken out, too, by the spread pattern or the velocity of pellets that have been known to punch through an adobe wall after bisecting a human target.
“Esta bueno?”
Barney was shaking. Never before had he been rattled by gunfire. Nervous, yes, from tempting fate or being boxed in; apprehensive at bad strategy, hopeless from dire situations, but never aquiver at gunfire, which he thought to be his element.
“Amigo,” Mano repeated, leaning the shotgun against the wall and stepping over the shredded corpse on the floor. “Esta bueno?”
“Yeah,” Barney managed, his voice running away to a husky whisper. His eyes indicated the gun with which Mano had saved him. “Mano... what the hell?”
“Oh, that.” Mano shrugged, smiled. “Now that, my friend, is a gonn.”
This one was easier to figure out, now.
The killer, regardless of his muffed job status, had been a professional. An American, a stranger, a blond man with a rubescent complexion and bulletproof fake ID. Therefore, not sent by El Chingon, who probably would have sent Sucio.
Therefore, the kidnapping crew down here apparently did not yet know that Barney was still drawing breathable air.
So: the killer had been sent by Carl Ledbetter, or one of his satellites.
Why: Barney had been alive, though in dire circumstances, when Carl exited Mexico. He had probably gotten the news on Barney’s disposition and decided to check hospital and clinic emergency admissions; most likely he did his entire investigation on the Internet, with the right passwords. It would be simple to take some of his share of the million bucks and invest in a guarantor, who had found the clinic in Xochimilco and sweated poor Dr. Mendez until he spilled Barney’s whereabouts and died. Game, set, and match... except he had not factored in the possibility of the apparently harmless Mano packing some unsuspected heirloom firepower.
It held water as much as anything his scattered brain could conceive.
Result: Barney’s security had been compromised, and everyone around him was no longer safe. Their location was now, in the parlance, “hot.” Muy caliente.
“Mano, I have to leave this place.”
Mano countered that this was not a good idea, given Barney’s handicapped status.
“Mano, you and your family are in danger because of me.”
Mano returned that he had been in danger before, many times, and it was not good to live in fear.
“Mano, I have to get back to the States, somehow.”
Mano suggested that phoning up the American embassy in Mexico City was probably not the most efficacious course to take.
Barney’s existence as a visiting foreigner was gray at best; in-country on forged documents, involved in local criminal activity, responsible, at least in theory, for several deaths. He could claim to have been mugged, attacked, or kidnapped, all documents lost, but that might surface connections to the bad guys or the wobbly architecture of his paperwork — any slip could invite unwanted scrutiny, and seal his fate. Regional law enforcement, corrupt as they were, might just dump him back into the hands of El Chingon’s crew, or detain him in yet another locked room. No good.
Mano told Barney to wait, since he might have a solution. He was distressingly cryptic on what that might be.
Meanwhile, Barney had won himself a brand-new firearm.
The assassin’s piece of choice turned out to be a tactical SIG P229 with a threaded barrel, probably for a silencer he never got to try — this brand of pistol, firing beefier cartridges, was known to be loud. SIGs came with decocking levers, not safeties, so they were always ready to use. With Mano’s help, Barney field-stripped it and found the original .357 barrel had been swapped out to accept the Smith & Wesson .40 cartridge, a popular conversion. A Sprinco recoil reducer had been added to improve the control of rapid-fire shots — less muzzle climb, better sight recovery. That little piece of frosting could reduce the kick by half, not inconsiderable when your gun could muster over a thousand foot-pounds at impact. The single-stack hi-cap mag jutted from the butt of the gun, containing fifteen deadly bees, plus one in the pipe. Not exactly a race gun, but the owner had added a match trigger. The whole package had been refinished to be absolutely glare-proof and non-reflecting. The action was smooth as glass.
Waylaid as he was, Barney felt better just having the gun nearby.
He dozed off thinking of stimulants versus sedatives. He had to get up and moving, no matter how many leaks he sprang.
He woke up with an enormous man in a gray sharkskin business suit staring down at him. The suit barely contained him, its seams heroically restraining a cinderblock physique. His silk necktie was knotted stranglehold-tight. From the neck up his head was encased in a skin-tight lace-up mask in metallic kelly green, adorned with red vinyl flames rocketing backward. The eyeholes were teardrop-shaped and edged with more crimson, as though blood-enraged. Only the man’s mouth and chin were visible; the mask was cut away and molded for that small freedom. He had a dark goatee. He stood with oaken-stout arms folded, as imposing as a Mayan statue, looking down upon Barney, godlike, with eyes the color of strong Colombian coffee.
“This,” said Mano, “is El Atrocidad.”
The Mexican wrestling superstar known as “The Atrocity” already held Barney in his debt. He had helped Mano dispose of the assassin’s body by dumping it in the Arroyo de La Llorona. Where else?
In guttural but very serviceable English, Atrocidad told Barney that his own wife’s brother, Carlos Fuentes, had been kidnapped in Mexico City by men who sacked his head, stuffed him into a van, and drove him to an unknown location where he was held in a hostage hotel until a hefty ransom had been forked over. Carlos, too, had suffered the loss of two fingers, and an ear, but could still play the guitar, and, presumably, hear music. As Atrocidad gestured, Barney saw that his massive, knotty hands lacked fingernails.
Atrocidad had also been present at the donnybrook inside Mano’s shop. A single stiff-armed blow to the forehead had taken the punk with the .32, breaking his nose, freeing four of his teeth, and landing him in the emergency ward with a skull fracture. There was the roughhouse ballet of lucha libre — beer-bellied athletes in elaborate, bone-crunching choreography — and then there was actual combat; it was impossible to be adept at one without being able to perform the other. As Atrocidad said, the first rule is knowing how to fall down without getting killed or landing yourself in a wheelchair — that is, if you wanted a career as a wrestler that lasted beyond your first bout.
Barney had actually seen El Atrocidad wrestle a few years back at the Vatican of Mexican wrestling, Arena Coliseo, as part of a tag team with Tiburon Negro and Doctor Hate, a.k.a. the Black Shark and Medico Odio. As rudos, bad guys, their job was to foul constantly, pillory or distract the referee (unless the ref was a rudo, too), kick the good-guy técnicos in the balls at every opportunity to cheat, and otherwise represent evil triumphant in the squared circle.
“Ah,” said Atrocidad, pleasured by the memory. “That was when we took the belt from La Aureola, Flecha de Jalisco, and Caballero del Espacio.” La Aureola — Golden Halo — was a religious-themed good guy whose big gimmick was to kneel in the center of the ring when things looked blackest, asking God to intervene with divine righteousness. Usually that was when he got stomped down, at which point the audience would go berserk, lofting garbage and plastic cups of piss into the ring at the injustice of it all, permitting the Halo to bounce back with his own special brand of retributive resurrection. There is no more perfect example of the passion play than lucha libre wrestling, and the masked strongmen, good or bad, were the closest thing the culture had to actual heroes who could been seen striding the streets. Anyone mocking the sport as precious fakery would not last twenty seconds in a ring with one of these grapplers, who knew the difference between reality and theatre and did everything they could to erase the line.