In an astonishingly short period of time, less than a day, he had gone from being marooned in the middle of Mexico to dictating fill-out forms for hospital check-in. Tuntun did all the writing. Bed, board, doctors, nurses, beeping machines, and best of all, brand-name sedatives.
The crew dispensed their hearty goodbyes and begged off — they had work to do and matches to fight.
Barney drifted off to uncomplicated sleep on a real bed, clean linens, the clamor of demons inside his skull gradually receding.
Nobody was more surprised than him when he awoke and found himself staring at his old buddy, Armand, in a bed in the same ward.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
First the hostage hotel, then Mano’s home, then the clinica, and now a modern hospital in an American city. The fourth Bleeding Room in which Barney found himself washed ashore was arguably the most painful, as they continually drugged him and hauled his ass to and fro to remove bullets, drain infections, resocket his shoulder, bind his ribs, flush his metabolism, and otherwise get him back to zero.
A wadcutter is a flat-nosed bullet about as aerodynamic as a clinker brick, which tumbles to inflict maximum carnage on delivery. Sucio had shot Barney with four of them. But his aim had been totally bandido, more for show than efficiency, and Barney had miraculously slipped by on the curve.
He had picked up an intestinal parasite in the Rio Satanas; no surprise there.
He had been fast asleep the first time his friend Karlov had visited, to deliver a new Ruger .44 to Armand for his inspection and approval. Armand was packing heat in a hospital; you had to laugh.
Armand looked starved and shrunken in a humid hospital jonnie. Normally swarthy and piratical of eye, his glint was diminished and he seemed pale. He didn’t rise from his bed.
“What the hell happened to you?” Barney croaked. His throat was arid, his vision blurry. He felt doped and bulky, as though inflated to twice his rated capacity.
“My appendix,” Armand said. “Bastard up and quit on me.”
Armand had nothing but recovery time to listen to Barney’s story. He was stuck in the hospital for at least another four days, under observation to see that he did not blow a major hose in the aftermath of the unanticipated appendectomy that had landed him, by purest chance, in the bed next to Barney’s.
Something Armand told him in response to his story stuck in the filter of Barney’s mind:
“What happened to you... that was pure gringo.”
There was a truth in there, and Barney could see it now. His distress had not issued from Mexican sadists, rough-riding a displaced gabacho. It had come as a result of respectable Americans acting less than respectable, as many do when your back is turned.
“They took something of mine, Armand. And I want to get it back.”
When Barney said that, he was not talking about his amputated fingers. He showed Armand the mutilations merely to slam the point home.
Armand laughed. “Look at us, man.” It was pretty silly. Then he let out a long, contemplative sigh, and said, “So what do you want to do?”
Barney stretched his neck back against the pillows and felt a vertebra pop with relief. “I’m working on that. But first I want to find out who the best sports surgeon is in this place.”
That turned out to be Dr. Matthew Brandywine, an orthopedist who specialized in hand surgery. When Barney told him what he wanted, the doctor immediately expressed doubts, but it was already too late — Barney had put the glint of a challenge in the good doctor’s eye. In that moment, it was all over except for a ton of releases and indemnifications.
Karlov broke the news that Barney’s apartment had been cleaned out and re-rented. It was no palace anyway, just a way station, a sleeping berth for the little time Barney did not spend at the shooting range, which is where most of his valuables were secure under lock and key — firearms, cash, assorted ID. He did not keep photographs. His quarters had always been rather Spartan and he was disinterested in television, popular music, the Internet. Politics, religion and mass culture held no appeal. What he enjoyed was keeping his profile below the radar of the ordinary world. After Iraq he had done a few gigs for subterranean figures who offered good money, which is how he had come to meet the Old Assassin. There were no relatives, no encumbrances. He had enjoyed the company of women from time to time, but only until he could feel the cement hardening around his ankles. He possessed very few legitimate documents of any relevance. Not one to horde his past, Barney found the past had a nasty habit of finding you when it wanted to complicate your current life.
As it had with Carl, for painful example.
Karlov had rescued Barney’s fish, of course, because Armand had been charged with its care. That was how unspoken duty worked. People like Karlov and Armand were part of the reason Barney had never needed contractually obligated friends.
Christoph Ivan Karlov had come to America after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having functioned at various times as weapons master for KGB cells and the former Soviet military, Karlov found in America a vast new horizon of firearms to modify, tinker with, improve or restore, particularly for gun collectors obsessed by the pristine or victimized by wily forgers. The tides of shifting jobs in a free market economy had deposited him on the shores of Los Angeles, where he had become the beneficiary of a large number of serious firearms enthusiasts with a lot of discretionary income. His lush hair had been white since his twenty-third birthday. He personally installed his corrective lenses into stainless steel shooter’s frames, and since he was a bit chipmunk-cheeked, the specs always appeared to be squeezing his head at the temples. If he was your audience, he tended to stare for long periods of time without blinking, less rudeness than a measure of the concentration he accorded you. Generally he was silent, contemplative, almost scary in his focus, infinitely patient, and knew more information about more guns than any ten other people Barney could name.
Armand Arnott, by contrast, was hale and jokey. He occasionally got loud when he drank too much; he could be over-reactive when provoked, a steamroller who would not quit and would not back down, and absolutely the kind of man you would want at your back in a crisis. Loyalty was an almost Sicilian thing with him, and he cursed under his breath a great deal when Barney related, in fits and starts, the tale of what had befallen him in Mexico. Armand practiced regularly at the range where Barney worked, and routinely captured gold at shooting competitions, where he favored handguns he could wield with sniper precision — Barney had once seen him shoot the eye out of a jack of spades at nearly sixty yards with no optics.
“How’s the fish?” said Barney.
“Swimming. Pooping. Doing fish things.” Karlov folded his hands and sat down after ruffling his snow-white hair, the cleanest hair Barney had ever seen. “I think the fish, he likes watching my television.”
Barney thanked him unnecessarily, for taking care of things in his absence, and picking up the ball after Armand’s incapacitation.
“Well now, this here looks like a meeting of some kind of terrorist organization for sure,” came a booming voice from the corridor as Sirius Johnson made his entrance. Ex-LAPD, currently diversified into public relations, Sirius was the guy who most often organized shooting excursions for this quartet, or the occasional poker night, bowling, dinner, or other diversions to space out their serious trigger time. He was also the man who could help you finesse a concealed carry permit, if you needed such a thing in the state of California. His heavy eyelids lent him a sleepy aspect, but beyond was a gaze of pure espresso that missed very little. He had recently started getting artful with his razor, sculpting a complicated beard-moustache-sideburn frame for his round face that looked like it took a lot of maintenance. Not quite vain enough to shave his head against encroaching pattern baldness, Sirius had compromised at a quarter-inch trimmer chop.