“¡Ayy! ¡Alocate y haste mia! ¡Chupame la cola! ¡Ayy! ¡Ayy!”
El Atrocidad lit up the room with his grin as the others tried to match it.
Barney rolled his eyes and turned back to Condorito, gun in hand. “Nobody’s going to hear the gun, not in this place, and for sure nobody’s going to hear you squawking.”
Not a particularly brave man when it came to saving his life, Condorito spilled everything he could think of. Area, street, security, size of opposing force. Layout. Anything that would keep him from getting married to another tiny wasp-like bullet. El Atrocidad nodded at Barney through some of it. Barney made Condorito repeat everything several times, faster and faster, so no a la carte lies could slip through. By the time he was finished, Condorito’s palate was very familiar with the taste of the gun barrel.
“All right,” said Barney. “Tape him up and get him into the van.” The rest of their gear had been loaded by Armand and Sirius. “Don’t forget the grenades this time.”
Sirius winced. “Hey, I was all excited and shit, okay? Let it go.” In his rush to first blood at the crack den he had forgotten the grenade bag; fortunately they hadn’t needed it.
There was a more important reason for clearing out of the Pantera Roja: Once the kidnappers twigged to the massacre at the bridge, one of them might be smart enough to remember that the Pantera Roja was where they had re-acquired Jesús, and come calling with maximum warpower. It was safer to consider this base blown. Whatever came in the aftermath — food, showers, rest — would come at some other place, utterly unpredictable and totally anonymous.
“Amigo,” said Atrocidad. “Pardon me for saying so, but—”
Barney whirled on him. “What?” This man was going to tell him what he was doing was sadistic and unfair, despite helping him do it. This man was going to lecture him on the differences between right and wrong, good and evil, and what was righteous and what was low.
El Atrocidad spoke measuredly, to insure he was not misunderstood. “I was just going to say, amigo, that you... ehh, stink. Smell really bad, you know?”
Barney had mopped off his camo but his eyes were still raccooned and black sweat tracks grooved his face. They all smelled like the septic tank of an abortion clinic at high tide.
“We haven’t got time for a group shower,” Barney said, collecting his refreshed clips from Armand. The motel room was thick with a humid inversion layer of butchershop blood and locker room secretions.
“That’s what we do,” said Sirius, holstering his Magnum. “We all stink together, baby.”
Karlov rose from his cot to prove he was far from out of the game. “Or we most assuredly shall stink separately.”
They had time for one swig from one beer Sirius had left in the fridge. They passed it around and it came to Barney last. He drained it, taking a unique pleasure in seeing Condorito eye the bottle as though it was the closest the little man would ever get to his version of Heaven.
El Atrocidad did his damnedest to tag along but Barney prohibited it. His mission was to assemble a group of Flecha’s friends, luchadors all, and await a cue via cellphone. Barney stressed this. It was important to have the wrestlers involved, particularly since Flecha de Jalisco had himself been wounded in battle over his own son, but Barney convinced Atrocidad that it was even more important to wait for the cue. Timing was paramount, and if a ring superstar could not acknowledge that, he or she had no business waxing mythic.
Condorito, his gunshot feet padded in rags wrapped outside his sneakers, proved to be an adroit navigator once the right stimulus was applied. He even suggested shortcuts and alternate routes to avoid the worst of the traffic. From Barney’s dim memory of road-bumps, halts and sudden turns taken while he was hooded and blind, they seemed to be on the right track. If they deviated due to trickery, he would smell it and gift Condorito with another bullet.
Karlov was in the back of the van drawing and holstering, trying to coax his injured arm up to specs. He had adopted one of the neck slings he had designed for Barney’s aim and stayed busy adjusting it.
Armand was riding shotgun, and Sirius was next back, propping Condorito up between the seats to plot the course.
The Iztapalapa district west of Mexico City is a working class barrio ringed with shantytowns competing with monolithic, cinderblock industry, a fast lane in the superhighway of narcotrafico and crime, double-stuffed to bursting with overpopulation and violence-by-the-minute. Razed to the ground in the 16th Century by Hernan Cortez in a genocidal war against the Aztecs memorialized as the Sad Night, Iztapalapa was also the locale of Mexico’s first school shooting spree by a student, in 2001. It is not found on the usual checklists of things to see and do in Mexico, yet paradoxically it becomes the locus for hundreds of thousands of visitors on Good Friday, when the populace goes mad reliving Golgotha — a reenactment of the Passion that has been going on since the 1830s, when the area was decimated by cholera. Fake Christs lug crosses; others tart up in a kind of Busby Berkley approximation of Roman centurions, and amid religious chants and simulated flagellation the crucifixion is dramatized on a southern hill that later turned out to be a lost pre-Columbian pyramid covered in dirt, with squatters encamped at its base.
Good Friday was months distant, though, and today Iztapalapa was just another urban war zone into which Condorito, wounded emissary, led warriors.
The building he called the palacio was a half-block-sized brick rectangle with — as Barney had correctly guessed a year earlier — a large interior courtyard accessed through armored doors. It was an old factory fortressed up similarly to the crackhouse they had invaded: bars, metal plating, no window entry, razorwire ringing the roof. The north wall was a gigantic, faded beer advertisement that was decades old and buried in graffiti.
They circled the building for a look-see, and half the circumference was on dirt roads with no names.
“That’s where they go in,” said Condorito, pointing to a gated archway in the south wall. It was well back from the street inside its own stone tunnel.
“Can we drive through that gate?” said Barney.
Condorito mulled this over. “You hit it at about forty, you probably knock it down, sí, but then a lot of guys be shooting at you.”
“Sirius, how’re those smoke grenades?”
“They’ll do the job, like I said. But what I didn’t get to say is that they’re LZ markers.”
Karlov said, “What is he talking about?”
“It’s colored smoke,” said Barney.
Armand lifted one out of the pouch and examined it. “Look, we’ve got flavors: red, orange, green, violet, blue, yellow.”
“They’re fine,” protested Sirius. “Five vents, 50- to 90-second discharge, one-point-five second fuse.”
“But they’re in colors,” Barney said with a slightly pained expression.
“Oh, climb outta my butt,” Sirius said, his dander riled. “Look, we can even launch these out of the shotguns. See? Adapter. Click, bang, just like a TL-1.”
“Okay, all right, as long as we’ve got coverage.”
“In color,” Armand said, refusing to turn loose of the joke.
“Well, this oughta be festive,” said Barney. He turned to Condorito, who looked strung-out, but maintaining. “You positive this van can crash through that gate?”
“Yesss,” he said, drawing the consonant out, which meant pretty sure. “It swings open.” He demonstrated with his hands.