Gun Work

A lot of grunts in the unit have heard of RICO statutes, but few of them know what the acronym stands for: Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization, which handily defines most of Iraq’s assorted Ministries — the Ministry of Health, of the Interior, Education, Water Resources, Oil, Labor and Social Affairs. The list goes on unto boredom, with each ministry more corrupt than the last. Untouchable by investigators and immune to prosecution thanks to militia support from Shia leaders, each formerly legal enterprise has been overrun by criminals and there is no operative difference between the terms “militia” and “gang.” It is like Chicago during the Roaring Twenties, but without the charm, the music, or the tuxedos.

(At least you had the security of knowing everyone around you was the enemy, said a small voice in Barney’s head.)

The majority of casualties to Barney’s unit have been the result of Improvised Explosive Devices — IEDs — which are left lying around with the frequency of litter, waiting for some stupid American in body armor to disturb them. Boom, and the guy who gave you a cigarette and lit it for you while sitting across from you in the Humvee ships home with no legs and half his eyesight.

Paranoia is not only rampant in the Sunni Triangle, it is wholly justified. You essentially cannot even go to the head without a buddy watching your six. Patrols are wired tight and your areas of safe movement are strictly limited by arbitrary (and sometimes illusory) boundaries. You shoot hoops with your crew, you have to designate one of them to watch for snipers because you’ve dared to be outdoors.

Sometimes guys just disappear. No record, no rescue, just sucked off the face of the earth as though they had never existed. The fear level acts as a practical version of the boogeyman.

You are either bored to within an inch of self-mutilation because of no action, or scared to death from too much. No middle ground.

The heat is a living, malignant thing. Even the climate seeks to destroy and demoralize you. You do your job while trying to ignore the sound of your eyeballs pan-frying in your skull, wait for your DEROS, and hope you do not lose any vital parts in between.

Virtually every long stretch of road is nicknamed a “highway of death.” The US forces in Iraq face the same problem the Soviets had in Afghanistan — lack of adequate security forces for travel or any kind of troop movement. Whenever a vehicle hits a land mine, eats an IED, or is taken out by an RPG, there is usually an insurgent with a video camera to record the flaming vehicles and dead or dying Americans and deliver it via the Arab TV networks to show the enemy is vulnerable. You need a whole armored division to adequately protect a road, and as long as the troops are there, nothing ever happens.

Until something does.

(Who ordered you to take a nap? said the voice in Barney’s head. Snap to.)

The mine blows both the starboard wheels off the Humvee in which Barney is riding, and flips it. The driver had tacked to avoid what turned out to be a decoy in the road, a suspicious irregularity designed to make you swerve into a real, better-concealed trap. This happens in the middle of a hellacious sandstorm that has reduced visibility to about three feet. No warning; just the eardrum-imploding crack of a bomb going off beneath your vehicle’s chassis armor (which did not function worth a damn because there was not enough of it); you go gravity-less like shorts in a dryer in total silence because you are temporarily deaf, and when you can refocus your eyes, everything is on fire.

Your body armor becomes an impediment, its bulk preventing you from jumping out of the vehicle and getting back to a place where the ground is down and the sky is up, and as you scramble you notice your feet are aflame.

Later you find your boots partially melted; your feet are burned badly enough to prevent you from humping out on your own power.

No glorious mission, no taking that essential hill, just panic and terror as your team scatters into the merciless, sandblasting wind. Nobody knows who is dead and who is alive. What you first think to be enemy gunfire is the rounds in Sgt. Tewks’ magazine exploding from the heat. Tewks takes one in the calf from his own weapon.

Everybody gets immediately lost in the sandstorm and no one can hear anything. Barney scrambles like a mad crab to get distance, and flops on his back from a sudden jolt of pain in his side. A piece of the Humvee is jutting out of him, having breached a seam in the constrictive oven of his body armor. He tries to sleeve sweat from his vision and sees his own blood.

Nothing on earth sounds like an AK-47 on full auto. It makes a kind of chopping racket, hence “chopper,” before the slang got updated to mean Hueys. They sound similar to the old Thompsons, but not exactly the same, and Barney knows the difference from experience. Most of the gunfire is Kalishnikovs; very little return fire from the Belgian M249 Minimi SAW his unit is packing, even less of the pop-and-crackle of M4s or M16A4s, the standard field issue. The enemy is pot-shotting them where they lie.

He tries to claw out his sidearm, his carbine already swallowed by blowing sand, which is covering him up like snowfall. All of a sudden it hurts to move. Anything. Any second now a renegade with an AK-47 will spot him, helpless as a turtle, and add a bunch of holes to his life. Time slows to grains of sand, trickling.

A buddy grabs his arm and hauls him to a kneeling position, pointing and shouting the path to rally, to comparative safety.

It is their passenger, their observer for the day, their guest journalist from the States.

It is Carl Ledbetter.

Barney woke up.

They starved Barney for a week to tenderize him, then began messing with him, because they could.

He was not much of a fighter on one Styrofoam cup of water per day.

His pacing circle was eight feet from the thin futon pad on the floor. They had taken his boots. The cuff on his leg was eight inches long, impossible to slip, custom-fabricated, attached to a case-hardened steel chain through a special double-eyelet. The chain fed back to a wall inset and looped through a metal U-bolt secured inside its own little grated cage. Somebody had done a lot of thinking about prisoners and the ways they escaped, when given oodles of time and nothing to do. At either end, the chain bore no lock — thus, no lock to pick.

His pants had been slit to accommodate the big shackle. Same pants he had worn before, just grimier.

There was not a single sharp object, potential bludgeon or metal edge in the entire room. No lamps to be shattered for parts or glass. Screw and bolt heads had been welded or sheared smooth. No bathroom except for a squat toilet in the Thai style, within reach of the chain radius. Therefore no tank lid, no toilet parts to adapt as weapons or picks. No daylight, although there was a barred and locked-down window behind steel mesh, out of reach of the chain. No night, because the inset ceiling lights (unreachable and unbreakable) burned 24/7.

When they gave him food, it was usually something wrapped in a tortilla. No utensils. No plates. No paper towels or napkins. No dessert.

No clocks.

Trapped, sweltering, occasionally delusional from no time-sense and no diurnal/nocturnal shift, it was easy for Barney to hallucinate, then nightmare. The parallels to Iraq were too abundant. He had to try to remember things: Where he was, how he had gotten here, what had gone wrong, what could be done.

He arbitrarily benchmarked the first day he got beaten up as Day One, although it could have been Day Five or Week One; Barney had no idea how long he had been unconscious after Sucio had smashed in the back of his head.

On Day One, Sucio and some of the thugs who had taken Barney at the Pantera Roja formed a circle and pounded the crap out of him, playing keep-away with his head. Barney swallowed a lot of his own blood. They abandoned him when he could not stand up to even make a pretense of defense.

Barney was down in a dark hole for a long time after that, and by Day Two, he apprehensively guessed that he might already have been in this place as long as a month. It was impossible to tell. His brief sessions of sleep were frighteningly deep, like coma.

He had to use his noodle, or plummet into insanity, or worse, despair.

His first breakthrough was the discovery of some reading matter — a copy of the Mexican tabloid ¡Alarma! from which the staples had been removed. It was all in Spanish and was at least five years old. Yellow journalism at its finest. Some of the lurid photos — auto wrecks, murders, kidnappings, assorted decapitations — at least gave Barney visual images on which to center his attention. That the staples had been extracted from the fold-over newsprint suggested that the tabloid might have been left here on purpose, the better for prisoners to fantasize their most extravagant fates, and thus foment less trouble.

Barney’s second breakthrough was noticing the guy apparently named Mojica. Barney remembered Mojica, the little ferret-like sonofabitch with the mirrorshades. Mojica with the obsessively manicured beard that ran like a gray penciled line delineating his jaw. From Mojica’s hair and beard growth, Barney calculated that he had been prisoner no longer than a week.

Mojica, of course, was a cousin of the late Jesús, hired thug and bible student. Mojica got his nasty little punches and kicks in generally after the giant Sucio had done the prep work, the major softening up of the subject — the assaultee.

More unconsciousness.

They roughhoused Barney about once every three meals after they started feeding him; mostly brown mystery paste in a tortilla. Diarrhea rollicked his GI tract. His tormentors never spoke except to laugh or exchange insults with one another, so Barney decided to speak to them:

“Hey, maricón, ¿donde está mi television?”

A fat guy named Zefir kicked Barney in the gut and Barney vomited on him.

Past a certain point — pretty quickly, if you have learned how to take a bruising — actual pain becomes a vague true north. Barney knew what he had provoked and had prepared mentally for the onslaught.

For the first time, his jailors regarded him queerly, as though they suddenly did not have the upper hand. That was all the victory Barney sought from that little gambit.

Next up: “Hey, Sucio: ¡Oye, tu madre!”

No complex insult was needed. Mexican invective was extremely touchy on the subject of anyone’s mother, and the blackest curse was always assumed. You did not have to call her a whore or suggest a dirty coupling; all you had to do was say “madre” instead of “mama” to get your target to blow like a volcano.

Sucio actually punched one of the other guys to get up close and personal with Barney that time. He shoved, then struck, a smaller fellow apparently nicknamed Condorito, who had an unfortunately prevalent Mexican body type: low-slung, bow-legged, no ass to speak of. Condorito went submissive, then beat Barney up third in line.

While he was bludgeoning Barney, Sucio unleashed his idea of a poisonous stream of rancid insult. He went crimson and saliva sprayed. What he failed to realize was that he had violated the hitherto-uncrossed line, and was yelling at Barney directly, thus acknowledging his existence.

When his compatriots pulled Sucio off Barney, Barney recognized another important watershed: They did not want to kill him yet, either right away or accidentally.

Between meals and punching-bag sessions, Barney gathered other useful intelligence.

One of the guys — Zefir — made reference to other rooms with other prisoners, some of which did have television sets. Which made the building an operative concern as a hostage hotel, thereby helping Barney define where he was. Some of the legitimate or high-ticket captives apparently interested Zefir, a porcine man fond of making fornicatory gestures with his hands. ¿Chicas, retozonas, panochas, papayas muy bonitas, eh?

Another had said something about a courtyard inside the building, which implied that while fortressed from the street, an area within the structure was open to sky like an atrium.

A further slip of Condorito’s tongue had clarified other “guests” as actual hostages (rehéns).

Sucio had appropriated Barney’s Army .45 and had waved it in his face on several occasions. Since he kept it shoved into his waistband, the bore smelled like his crotch, which was no treat at all.

Several days passed and while the casual beatings continued, they came with no actual threat or grisly detail of what Barney’s eventual fate might be. No ransom, no payoff, nothing. Also no change of clothing, no bath, and no room service. Barney began to feel like a moldering corpse that lacked the sense to know it was dead.

It was important for him to remember the name Felix Rainer, although most days, Barney could not recover enough short-term memory to know why. He repeated the name to himself while bunched into a corner on his filthy sleeping pad, rocking back and forth. Felix Rainer. Carl Ledbetter. And Carl’s wife, Erica. Every body-blow was another entry on a past-due bill that was slowly, excruciatingly becoming more expensive.

It was generally a bad sign when one of Barney’s jailors showed up alone. Today it was Mojica.

Usually, a solo entrance was the cue for some off-the-books sadism, or at the very least, a harsh kick in the balls laced with tons of spittled obscenities about Barney’s madre.

“Hey, you. Guy. You awake?”

Barney did not know Mojica could speak, let alone speak passable English. He rolled up from his fetal curl on the floor. Something about his attitude threw out defense warnings on a subdermal level; he could not help that, or prevent or disguise it. It did nothing to dispel the flies intent on eating every drop of his sweat, or the gnats (what he’d heard called “see-nots” in the American South) they kept trying to set up housekeeping in his eyes. He didn’t even want to think about what was living in his hair by now. Or infesting his groin, or tape-worming up his anus while he tried to sleep.

“Listen, man, I’m not here to hurt you.”

Oh, great, I feel so much more cuddly now.

“Seriously.” Mojica chanced a couple of steps nearer. Not quite within grabbing distance, given the chain on Barney’s leg.

“Listen. You don’t gotta say nothing if you don’t want to.”

If Barney was sketching an insulting caricature, he would have written that dialogue down as joo don’ godda say notheeng if jew dun wanna. But that shit had never worked in books, never worked in movies, and rarely worked when you were trying to dehumanize your opponent in order to justify killing him without compunction. Barney decided to respond, to indicate that he still had two dendrites of intelligence not rolling around loose on the floor.

“What do you want, Mojica?”

Mojica smiled as though finding out an injured pet was still alive. “Oh, you awake, eh?”

“Let’s get this over with. Your primo was an accident. I was going to let him go.”

“Nah, it ain’t that.” He came closer, confidentially. “El Chingon is keeping you here; I don’t know why ‘cos you’re not a hostage, man, you understand what I’m saying?”

“Entiendo,” said Barney. “Claro. Who’s El Chingon?” It was a slang term for the bossman, El Mero-Mero, big dealski — literally, as in el gran chingon: the head fucker. That would be Mr. Lazy-Eye-Doesn’t-Talk-Like-A-Mexican, but his drones probably called him el jefe, at least to his face.

“Don’t ask me shit I can’t tell you.”

“Fair enough. So what do you want?”

“I want to show you something.” Mojica moved forward with his body, cautiously, looking for a sign that Barney would not attack.

“Mojica, I’m too fucking tired to get into it with you...”

“Here.” Mojica popped a can of America’s second most popular soft drink and handed it over. “You like this, right?”

Barney regarded the chilled can in his grasp with befuddlement and briefly wondered if it was drugged, then decided it did not matter. The first swig burned all the way down, fizzy and caffeinated and shot through with sugar, beautiful carbonated nirvana. In times like these, simple, small things could freight tons of meaning. If you had asked Barney what he wanted most of all the things in the world, in that moment, he might have answered that he already held in his hand all good things, and could die happy.

“Look at this,” said Mojica, removing his ever-present mirrorshades. He pointed at a small skidmark of scar tissue on his right temple. “See this?” When he pressed the scar, it went concave, then boinked back as though made of rubber. He turned his head to show the lower portion of his right occipital. A similar scar, similarly gelid.

“I got shot in the head once,” he said. “Brains came out, so maybe I’m not the smartest vato in the world. But I tell you this — they killed my ass. I was dead once. And I’m still here.”

Barney’s hand loved that soft drink can; would not give it up. Nor use it to hit Mojica in the side of the skull so hard that what was left of his brains would come flying out his ear. Not until he finished the drink, anyway, because it was too good. Mojica had bought himself an audience for whatever confessional he cared to stage.

“This ain’t right, them keeping you,” Mojica said. “We grab people, we got all this set-up, we don’t torture hostages, and anyway you ain’t a hostage.”

“You kicked my ass with the others.”

“Because I ain’t stupid, man. But keeping you here... I mean, for what? So Sucio can whale on you until you’re a retard? There ain’t no ransom on you. No pickups, no negotiation, nada por nadie. So... so...”

“So what did I do?” said Barney.

“Yeah, that’s it. What the hell did you do, man?”

“I tried to help a man I thought was my friend.”

“Some friend.” The incredulous expression on Mojica’s face almost made Barney laugh, but he could not actually laugh, not in this place.

“Yeah, that about sums it up,” said Barney. He reasoned that Mojica was not here to help him. Draw him out, maybe; play good cop and get him to say something that would rationalize a quick kill.

“Nobody who’s a friend would leave you in this kinda mess. It’s bad, it’s like...” Mojica’s hand sought a small metal crucifix around his neck. “You know?”

“Like, spiritually bad.”

“Yeah. And bad for business. Not profesional. Not the way El Chingon does it. You see?”

Barney nodded.

“What do you think is gonna happen to you?”

“Honestly, de veras, I think I’ve been abandoned and I get to stay in this charming place until I die.”

Mojica frowned as he puzzled the word “abandoned.”

“Abandonado,” said Barney.

“Ah, sí. You are... you are...” Mojica fought for the phrase. “You are el hombre de las armas — you know what that means?”

“Gunman.”

“Sí, exactamente. You know the weapons. You hit Jesús twice in the dark while he was running. Like, expert. El Chingon could use him an expert like you.”

“You bring me a job application?”

“Es imposible. No chance, Vance. Not while Sucio is around.”

“Then, what?”

Mojica spot-checked the door several times, wrestling whether to divulge more. “Then-what, I don’t know. But maybe... maybe I can find a way to get you out of here.”

“Why?”

“Like I said.”

“What’s in it for you?”

Mojica shrugged. “I don’t know that yet, neither. I think of something, I let you know.”

“What about Jesús?”

Mojica performed the internationally understood comme ci, comme ca gesture. “Comes with the job, eh? Dame.” He indicated that Barney should return the empty can.

Barney handed it back with live-grenade gentleness.

“Thanks,” said Barney.

“De nada.”

Exit Mojica.

If this was a game, it was more sophisticated than the schoolyard crap that had so far constituted Barney’s incarceration. It could be one of those despair-of-hope things; something to make his torment cut more deeply, bleed more fulsomely, when the time came for killing.

The drink sure had been heaven on earth, though.

Flush-rinse-repeat.

On the days no one visited to hit him until he blacked out, Barney did not exist. Therefore, he was no one those days. Alternate days were defined by the ebb and flow of assorted pains, the occasional meal (Barney had learned to distrust feeding times as a significator of a day’s passage), or a thin mock of sleep quickly ruined by the pounding heat and inadequate ventilation.

Some of those prisoners who had television sets also had air conditioning, apparently. The A-list kidnap victims. The ones with some value.

Barney had become worse off than the Old Assassin — he had ceased to exist even though he had a mission: escape before his captors tired of him and flushed him permanently, no rinse, no repeat. He had to withdraw, cocoon and marshal his remaining energies before he wasted away to his own shadow.

He would not be missed in a world full of non-people, of unlife, of zombie rote and casual strife.

Flush-rinse-repeat.

She was abducted, Carl had told him. Lie Number One.

There’s nobody else I can trust in a shitstorm like this, Carl had told him. Sucker play.

Carl had done an excellent job of appearing weak and lacking in practical resources; another brilliant performance. Barney should have tipped when he noticed Carl was more conversant in Spanish than he ought to have been, particularly when he was yelling at Jesús.

Carl was deliberately vague about this so-called “Felix Rainer” guy — probably a pseudo — because he knew Barney would automatically accept the clandestine. Carl had counted on Barney underestimating him. Further, he had depended upon Barney overestimating his own cleanup capabilities in the daddy role.

Carl had played the Erica ace, showing a photo and relying upon Barney’s perception of her to further make Carl appear to be the vulnerable gringo, at which point Barney had thought nobody would ever fox him like that.

Carl had been far too casual with the amputated finger that was presented as Erica’s. He had whipped it out for dramatic effect like a bauble from a vending machine, choking up and artfully misdirecting Barney’s scrutiny.

Carl had provided an armored limousine, acting like it was no biggie. The wildness of Mexico had neatly masked that magic trick.

Carl and Estrella were a conduit of intel back to El Chingon and his crew. They weren’t having sex in their cheap hotel; they were comparing notes on Barney, and Estrella had reported their conclusions via cellphone like a good little spy. Some random factor or unscheduled mishap had altered Estrella’s profile so that she could be sacrificed. It was what she was for. So the woman actually named Salvación had been lied to as well. Big surprise, there.

Carl should have been a lot more shocked to find his bar-bunny gutted and bled out. Instead, he let Barney direct the immediate action.

When they went to make the money drop, Carl had asked do you really need to have that gun? Uh-huh.

Despite his training in Basic, despite target practice in Iraq, Carl had handled Barney’s .45 like an amateur to reinforce Barney’s view of him as someone who needed saving.

And Barney, fool to the end, had asked to see the picture of Erica.

You remember how I used to be, Carl had told him. I was a world-class fuckup. Still am. But he was good enough at play-acting to win Barney a stay-over in the hole, so who was the real fuckup, here?

At least... wing ‘em or something. By god, Carl had actually instructed Barney to shoot — and Barney had.

Carl’s check was growing bigger, line by line.

The speech about how marrying Erica was the only good thing Carl had ever done — all made up.

The instructions on the phone — not coaching. Erica talking. Her script all along.

Flush-rinse-repeat.

Barney’s status as a non-person was confirmed when the man Mojica had called El Chingon, the boss, showed up in person to describe the ways in which Barney had become a null quantity in the universe.

He entered Barney’s room with Sucio poised behind him at respectful, subordinate distance like a giant sumo attack dog.

“That big sonofabitch comes near me again,” said Barney, “and you bet I’ll bite his goddamned nose off this time.”

“Sucio is understandably upset at the pointless death of his brother — not his cousin, as erroneously reported. Family means a lot to him. To us all.”

“Spare me the platitudes. You’re sitting on hostages for money and calling it business. At least Sucio is honestly criminal.”

Sucio smiled with misplaced pride. It was not a pleasant sight. He lacked the equipment to appreciate oxymorons.

“Indeed, that is the crux of your situation, sir. Whatever your real name is. You have no familia. No connections of any kind. No traceable history. I have checked; wasted my time. I was misled by your good friend Carl to believe you might have some value to your government as a covert agent, some sort of subterranean asset better kept secret. It turns out you have no such worth. No one I have contacted has ever heard of you, even under the list of alleged aliases I had compiled. It is a situation I don’t find myself in very often: You have no value to us.”

It was impossible and pointless to explain to this man with the lazy eye that Barney’s assumed reputation was more a matter of attitude, of a persona he preferred to project in order to insulate himself from the mundane. It was an air others imposed upon him, and rather than actively cultivate it, he merely did little to countermand it. His current status was backhanded proof that he wasn’t such a badass after all, right?

“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 surreal: 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.

At least, that was what Barney thought he saw. Funny, he could smell burning flesh, but he couldn’t feel his hands at all.

The next thing Barney saw were the maggots, busily feeding on his hands, where his index fingers used to live. That was all right. The little buggers would eat the necrotic tissue. They were nasty, but they were protein. He might eat them himself, if he ever woke up again.

Surely this was less traumatic than being shot in the head.

Maybe that came next.

Of all his freedom scenarios, Barney had not anticipated leaving the place he had come to call the Bleeding Room on his face, being dragged by one foot.

A foot that was no longer encased in the unforgiving leg shackle.

Assorted parasites had been at work on the rawed flesh of his leg. Where the cuff had secured him now felt like a third degree burn.

He was experiencing pain, and was therefore alive, perhaps delirious. One of his eyes was swollen shut and crusted. His skeleton felt disconnected. Wounds everywhere. Teeth rocking in their gum beds. Brain hammering. Heart still pumping, blood still moving, even if a lot of it was vacating the premises. Dizziness, disorientation. He felt he had puked and shat so much that if you looked down his throat, you’d see light.

They — someone — dragged his dead ass out, down steps. Sacked his head. Stinky bag, probably the same one from his earlier trip. He was in the van again, the one in which he and Carl had been taken. Carl’s past few pay periods, by comparison, had probably been less debilitating. This time, he was not around to grab Barney’s hand and drag him up out of the smothering sand.

The unseen road trip that followed was not measurable in units of time. The only clock Barney possessed was his own heartbeat. It could have been a week. He had to remain inside of himself, sequestered. He thought of his organs, stubbornly churning away in spite of the memo that came down saying just die. Maybe they were taking him to a clínica. Maybe they were driving him home. Maybe Sucio had slipped up, gone overboard, and now they had to doctor him.

Yeah, right.

More bumpy roads and more roughhouse dragging. When the bag was yanked off his head Barney was staring bleary-eyed at the Rio Satanas, from the top of the bridge. Sucio was sporting a bandage beneath a patch on one eye. The glowering orb of the setting sun made everything shade crimson and blurred Barney’s own light-sensitive vision, but he recognized Mojica, standing back a pace, politic. He did not feel the usual waves of animal hatred broiling off Sucio; the big man seemed to have clamped down and toughened up, all business, curses shelved, silent again.

Sucio grabbed Barney by the scruff and the crotch and heaved him over the edge. No parting insult, no quip. Barney hit the oil-sheened surface of the mulchy water inelegantly and headfirst, sinking to brush the tar-like aggregate bottom, sucking a lungful of turbid liquid with floating chunks in it, then slowly ascending from his own buoyancy toward filtered light. He had a flash thought of his goldfish, under Armand’s stewardship, back in another world called Los Angeles. If you didn’t clean the aquarium for a couple of months and allowed the mold and algae to build up, shut off the filtration system so the fish were swimming in ammoniac piss and liquefied gray shit, then dunked your entire head into the tank, it would probably be a lot like this.

Back on the bridge a brief discourse ensued in Spanish between Mojica and Sucio concerning the number of minutes left to Barney’s life. Barney caught bits of it as he bobbed, water draining from one ear while it filled the other. One said Barney was dead, the other said Barney wasn’t, and it went back and forth, in the manner of gang taunts, no matter either way, a kind of yes-he-is, no-he’s-not time-passer.

Barney could imagine the sizzling fire-coal deep in Sucio’s good eye. He’d had hurt the huge enforcer, hurt him visibly and humiliatingly, and nobody hurt Sucio, that was clearly a rule in their world.

Barney floated on the surface, face-down, no bubbles.

“Mira,” said Mojica. “Muerte, carnal.”

Sucio unlimbered his revolver, aimed down at the floating body, and spent all six rounds.

Barney rotated in the water, surrounded by a corona of freshly freed blood.

“Now he is,” said Sucio, turning back to the van.

A disembodied woman’s voice seemed to ask Barney, Where are my children?

He had holes in him; that much he knew. He was hit. He had been hit a few times before, in his previous life.

Shock trauma took over once he ran dry of endorphins; he could not feel a thing. Bullet impact had flipped him over in the water, and instead of drowning, he was more or less afloat and still drawing air along with the occasional mouthful of sewage. He rejected the bilge. Autonomic functions had taken over and he did not think about willfully breathing. He worried in the abstract about taking on water — holes in a rowboat could sink it — but for the most part he was far away from his physical body, occasionally observing it from the distant place to which his mind had been exiled. But all he could see was the sky at dusk. The world seemed aflame.

The Rio Satanas was devilish in its commitment to seek the sea, or other, fresher tributaries. Sunrise, sunset and the tidal pull of the moon exerted their influence to provide a kind of current. He revolved, in the manner of a lazy sunbather in a hotel pool. He saw the ransom bridge receding, only once, before it became too dark to gauge distance.

This is how life ends.

Life ends not in triumph and fulfillment, but depletion and ignominy. Barney was used up, tapped out, leaking sentience from holes in his body, run dry of humanity, reduced to a kind of absurd chattel for the amusement of psychopaths. Alive or dead, he no longer existed; perhaps never existed before, except as a shade of himself, a suggestion of a person, a conglomeration of tics and traits and moot statistics, none quite diverting. It is easy to blow large holes in a tissue-thin simulacrum of life.

His murderers had not only denied his humanity, but contravened his existence. He was not important enough to keep, nor unimportant enough to cut free. He was nothing, and the universe at large did not care about teaching him spurious moral lessons. Given a fresh, whole body and a set of guns, he could destroy everyone who ever did him wrong, but what would that change? Nothing. Because he was nothing; he mattered not, on the big scale.

There was no balance to restore. Nobody would care. He was not a religious man; pie in the sky by and by when you die. He had structured his life so that he was never owed anything by anyone, so by what right would he claim recompense?

Again his fractured perception registered the distant sound of a woman in tears. A local: “¡O hijos mios!” Perhaps Barney was a lost child, floating home.

I have no one, the Old Assassin had told him. I care for no one. And I’m cared for by no one. So all I have is what I can do.

Barney could not do anything except bob along in the disgusting mulch of the river. Perceptions ebbing. The quick hallucination, dream, or flashback. Not like the legend — no clip reel of your life’s deeds and misdeeds unspooling before your semi-conscious mind; no tunnel of light; zero choir. The dull pulse of biologically blocked pain, radiating like a distant, dying sun.

This is how life ends.

Life ends when you are totally free.

Something was chewing on his foot. Maybe a sump rat the size of a terrier; maybe one of those monster catfish from the Amazon, a nine-foot-long killer mutated by the toxic waste in the river.

It nibbled on Barney’s bare heel and he feebly kicked it away, splashing black water.

Deep inside his mind, Barney was startled — a sign of life? What?! Something as simple as don’t eat me, you monster?

Another nibble and he lashed out again, completely without thinking. His lungs were still stubbornly drawing air in clotted rasps.

A bolt of pain scissored up his leg and somehow located nerve receptors long since shut down.

Oww, fucker, I need that toe for a tag; leave me alone.

Barney recalled the kids he had seen huffing paint, glazed and otherdimensional, casually homicidal. His strange hallucinations and prolapsed volition could be attributed to the poisonous bouillabaisse of the river-that-was-not-a-river, his new home. The toxic waste had recombined into luxurious new forms, folding its plasmas, infiltrating his metabolism through every bullet hole, gash and wound. It backed up in his liver and kidneys to percolate and birth new concentrated cocktails of bio-active excreta. All human activity generated some form of waste; Barney came to see himself, during his few lucid episodes, as just one more form of hazardous leftover, dumped in with all the others.

His new world was very cosmopolitan. There was a little bit of everything in it: corrosives, explosives, solvents, mercury, lead, petroleum, ashes, antifreeze, propane, caustics, pesticide, acetone, benzene, ammonia, lye, alkalies and alkalines, formaldehyde, xylene... the whole encyclopedia of wanton chemical hazard, all of it blenderized with megatons of unprocessed human sewage.

This was Mexico’s version of the Love Canal.

Along the way, Barney had contributed his own throw-off: perspiration, blood, Numbers One and Two, mucus, saliva, skin flakes, but not a single tear, or so he believed.

The sky floating above him assumed alien hues.

He still could not feel his hands.

He dreamt of a party.

No, fiesta, down here it would be a fiesta.

Piñatas, refrescos. Helado — ice cream.

Gaily attired people. Music.

Someone’s wedding, or birthday, or anniversary. Boda, cumpleaños, aniversario.

Unless it was his party.

A loose-limbed puppet carved of dark wood, with a baked-apple face, spoke to him in a language he did not understand.

The puppet was wearing a battered straw hat; a neckerchief.

Its voice sounded a billion years old.

Barney began to levitate toward the sun, which spiked in through his slitted eyes like firebrands.

The sun was all he could see, as Icarus saw it when his wax wings melted.

Muy caliente. Very hot.

If he closed his eyes, they would weld shut and he would never see anything again. His pupils dilated to microdots, overwhelmed.

The puppet droned away, unseen now. Whatever it was talking about sounded very bad.

Stupid puppet.

Barney was inside the Bleeding Room again.

Not the same as before; this was a madhouse where he was restrained, sliced up, tortured with needles. Bound down, hurling up his own guts. Beaten and stretched and bound again. Force-fed vile fluids and tormented by an army of imps who poked and prodded, cut away his flesh and seeded it with salt.

In his mind, he retreated even deeper, hauling ass down a cobwebbed corridor — man, he had never been in this room! — and slamming a door, then finding another artery, moving swiftly, slamming another door until he was lost in the catacomb-pit of his own brain.

Outside, they continued to raze his flesh. Whatever they wanted, Barney did not have it.

Down deep in the catacombs, Barney confronted one of his worst personal fears — that he was really in an asylum, irretrievably insane, violent and bound down in max-lock, trapped and screaming inside his own ruptured head, unable to get a message to the outside world.

Lunacy, coma.

The second Bleeding Room made the first seem like a high-roller suite in Vegas, the kind you get comped when the hotel wants to clean out your bank.

Not food, but cuisine; hookers on-call, all the amenities. No Sucio. No betrayers at all, in fact.

In the second Bleeding Room all the inquisitioners were completely faceless. There was no crime, no clue as to your sin, and zero appeal. It was pretty much an atheist’s perfect picture of Hell.

Barney fled, slammed another door, locked it, went deeper.

Found another door, leading downward.

It was very dark at the end of the corridor.

The dead thing was clad in a moldering priest’s outfit, and had patches of moss on its head instead of hair. Its head was a skull glistening with gelid rot. It hectored Barney in a voice that had the sound of withered dry reeds, clicking. It extended skeletal fingers over his supine form and tried to touch him. Unable to move, Barney tried to will away physical contact. A squirming grub fell out of the creature’s eye socket and landed on Barney’s chest, where it vanished in a corkscrew twist down one of the bullet holes there. The holy-collared gravewalker tried to smear stale blood on Barney’s head and its reach broke the mantilla of cobwebs in which it was shrouded.

Get away from me. Take your superstitions and get away. Sell your lies somewhere else.

Like a pestersome insect, the damned thing continued to hover and natter, its off-center jawbone waggling nonsense and dislodging tomb dust, which sifted down through baleful light to coat Barney’s open eyes. Apparently this annoying specter was going to yammer on until its script was done, and Barney briefly wondered if he could grab the tarnished bone crucifix that depended from its jackstraw neck and turn it to use as a stabbing weapon; anything to stem the tide of gibberish.

Oh, for a firearm to blast this apparition into crypt dirt.

The third Bleeding Room came as a total surprise.

Barney saw low beamed ceilings and roof of thatch. The predominant odors were cooking food, incense, and something akin to ground stone. An unseen clock ticked ponderously.

He tried to sit up on the narrow bed and was slammed down by nausea and his body’s inability to do what he told it. His muscles did not obey.

The clock became maddening — an actual, undeniable measure of time, unless he was merely making all this up in his shell-shocked mind.

“I see you dream,” said a voice. “Las pesdillas. The movement of the eyes.”

“REM,” Barney said. His voice had been taken. All that was left was a dry tumbleweed whisper.

His consciousness was a treacherous ascent over booby-trapped ice with a thousand hidden traps. One foothold wrong, and he would tumble. Funny that he saw an ice field; he had expected sand dunes to the horizon.

“Ariem?” echoed the brittle voice. “That is not your name; how you are called — ¿como se llama?”

The horrible puppet from the nightmare fiesta hovered over him, and Barney blacked out.

When he awoke again, he was still in the third Bleeding Room, with the infernal clock ticking away.

The puppet moved toward him with a disjointed gait, as though inexpertly manipulated, its feet several inches from the ground.

“Ah, amigo,” it said.

It was not a marionette, but a man. A small, wizened man whose face was a map of desert sun-wrinkles, who smiled with gapped teeth that nonetheless lit up his mahogany countenance. An older man in the back third of a life that looked as if it had been equally rich in regret and joy.

“You are back with us,” the man said. “The saints, if there are such things, love you.”

Yeah, that idea was a laff riot.

Barney struggled to say who, to ask where.

“Shh, tranquilo,” said the man. “I am Jorge Estrada Gutierrez Maria Conejo Juan Sanchez Valasquez de los Piedras. I am called Mano.” He held up his hand, of which he possessed only one. “Solamente un mano,” he said by way of illumination.

“‘Of the stones?’” said Barney.

“Si, ‘de los piedras,’” he said. “My calling. I find the rocks. Agates, much opal... what do you call them, geodes? All kinds of rocks.”

“Rockhound.”

“I think I have heard that word...” His brows knit, pondering the meaning.

“Miner?”

“No.” Mano worked his tongue over his teeth, searching for a descriptive in the way one might speak to a child. “Pretty rocks.”

“Gems, jewelry?” Forming words seemed a new challenge to Barney. They tasted rather good.

“Yes, al veces. I dug up the diamond my son gave his esposa for their wedding. Some silver, some onyx, some... how is it called? Apache tear. El ojo de tigre. Yes. Here. Bebes. You must drink.”

He offered a tin cup containing tea, strong, bitter, laced with herbs. Later he would alternate this with fruit juice and plenty of water. Swallowing, for Barney, had become a newly learned behavior. Mano patiently guided him through it.

“My second son’s second wedding anniversary,” said Mano. “That is where we found you, on the bank of the Arroyo de la Llorona, where there used to be very good fishing. The fish, they have since died or gone elsewhere; the water is veneno, tosigo...”

“Poison.”

“The Arroyo feeds from many sources before it changes —” Mano dovetailed his hands, or hand and stump “— to the Rio Bramante, and seeks the sea. You were put in the Arroyo somewhere to the north, and — buena suerte — found your way to us.”

“El accidente,” said Barney.

“But for your wounds I would believe you,” Mano said sternly, like a parent. “Four bullets in you. Two remain. Los dedos...” Mano held up his only index finger and wiggled it.

It was pointless to lie. “A very bad man took them.”

Mano nodded. “Took them, then gave them back to you. I would not wish to meet such a man.”

“What do you mean, he gave them back?”

Mano seemed to be having trouble, chewing on how to properly express what he knew. “In your body,” he finally said. “You passed them en clínica.”

Sucio had forced Barney to swallow his own severed fingers.

Barney lost his grip on reality, and sailed down to embrace the blackness once more.

Broth, now, stronger. Barney felt it flow into him.

“When was I in the hospital? The clínica?”

Night, now, cooler, with cicadas razzing outside.

“Doctor Mendez says you are dead, then you are alive, then dead, and alive again. He wishes for city doctors, big equipamiento, but he is a very good and kind man. He fix your cuts, help your hands.”

Barney’s mutilations were anonymous in a fat swaddle of bandages.

“How long?”

Mano calculated. “Dos semanas, minimo.” Two weeks at least. “My son’s wife, she prays for you every night.”

No doubt to choke off the morbid idea that Barney’s appearance, floating right into the middle of her anniversary celebration, might be a bad omen. Los Catolicos were superstitious that way.

“It was her, Soleil, who insisted the priest give you last rites. I said no, you are not yet a dead man. But she insisted.”

So much for the grim specter in the clerical collar.

Mano held several vials of pills. “These, says the doctor, are for infection. These, for fever. These, for... something else. They say when to take them. You must take some now, yes?”

“Yes. More water, please — mas agua, por favor.”

“You speak the Spanish.”

Barney would have held thumb and forefinger an inch apart; would have said un poquito, muy mal, but he no longer had forefingers. Sucio had jammed them down his gullet and probably suffocated him until he gulped. What was left eventually emerged from his colon. Mano had seen them, perhaps salvaged them. Barney did not want to see them (at least not right this moment) and did not know if he even had the heart left to ask after their fate, just in case some nurse had flushed them down a toilet.

One of the pills was obviously for pain, which Barney determined by squinting at the labels. His guts felt bulldozed and his body felt hotly gravid with infection. He knew he was in the midst of biologically processing an unknown smorgasbord of organic contaminants. His neck and throat burned, his injuries restricted his movements, and it felt like a toothache had nested in his right eye.

“Why are you doing all this?” he asked Mano.

Mano just smiled as Barney drifted away.

Projectile vomiting in the middle of the next night. The soles of his feet felt aflame or peeled by acid. Blurred vision. Phantom pain from his hands. The bullet wounds radiating heat, swollen, growing ripe.

Mano held the puke bucket, wrapped Barney’s feet in aloe, administered eyedrops from Dr. Mendez, re-bandaged his ruined hands, drained and dressed the gunshot wounds.

It took Barney more than a week to work his stamina up to handling solid food.

I was dead once, Mojica had said. They killed my ass. And I’m still here.

The unseen clock kept ticking. Barney was always aware of it, but the passage of linear time remained a befuddlement, clouded by shifting tempo and sudden reversals. He imagined (or dreamt he could see through his closed eyelids) the second Bleeding Room, obviously a minimalist ward in some rural medical facility. No beeping machines, very basic — IV stands, worn but clean linens, and a broad toadlike man (Dr. Mendez?) leaning close, his wide, thick-lipped face speaking with no audio. He looked stern but kind. He gingerly lifted one of Barney’s mangled hands. Barney saw in great detail what would later be described as a crude transverse cut of the proximal phalange above the metacarpophalangeal joint, or halfway between the base knuckle and first finger knuckle.

His trigger finger, gone. He had swallowed it.

Barney could not feel a thing as Dr. Mendez disinfected a small row of sutures on the finger stump, where dying flesh had been trimmed and closed over the protruding stub of bone.

Sucio could have taken his thumbs, or both his hands, to incapacitate Barney more hideously. There was a sinister motive in his choice, a perverse editorialization. He could have applied his cutters to the penis or testicles, the eyelids, the tongue. Instead, he had unmanned Barney in a way that would do the most damage on the inside; obliterating Barney’s carefully guarded sense of self, the identity that even Mojica had perceived — Barney was el hombre de las armas no more.

Mano was the proprietor of a modest gem and mineral shop in the district of Xochimilco, once on the outskirts of Mexico City but now incorporated into its urban sprawl. Many of his repeat customers were Mexican wrestlers of considerable fame and standing in the Lucha Libre community, patrons of an adjacent shop where a retired grappler named Tigre Loco designed and manufactured masks, costumes and a few props for the wildly popular bouts held at Arena Coliseo and other venues. The luchadors spread the word, and their more well-heeled friends sought out Mano for handcrafted jewelry, hammered silver and uniquely designed mounts for his meticulously cut and polished stones.

For most of the years of his life, Mano had grimly watched the fashion of kidnapping wax and corrupt Mexico like a metastasizing cancer. He had been robbed at gunpoint seventeen separate times (successfully and unsuccessfully), mugged on the street, and randomly assaulted by the cocky, the desperate and the drug-addicted. But these miscreants were few when balanced against the average Mexican citizen, so Mano remained in business, conceding to grated windows, iron doors, alarms.

One abortive robbery attempt was rendered almost hilarious when three punks entered Mano’s emporium with one malfunctioning Saturday Night Special among them, and proceeded to yell threats because they’d seen too many movies. Next door in Tigre’s were no fewer than seven wrestlers who heard the commotion, bracketed Mano’s store from front and rear, and proceeded to pummel the fluid out of the trio of would-be highwaymen. This was neither fake brawl nor stunt show, and the kids were all hospitalized with a wealth of broken noses, lost teeth, splintered bones, concussions and dislocations. Typically, the wrestlers were hailed as local superheroes and no lawsuits materialized. This was not the United States.

Mano settled into his role as Barney’s caretaker, relating such stories as these in a calm monotone as though telling tales around a campfire. The kind of stories a friend tells a friend as a matter of course. His daughter-in-law continued her prayers and vigils for Barney’s recovery.

When Barney mentioned the ghostly woman’s voice he had heard while in the river, Mano told him three different versions of the La Llorona myth, after which the tributary had been named.

It was a fundamental parable in Mexican culture, percolating through many iterations throughout all of Latin America and the southwestern United States. The Weeping Woman, the Crying Woman, or the Woman in White was the ghost of a mother forced to murder her children, nearly always by drowning them in a waterway. The stories varied as to her motivation, but her curse was to haunt riverbanks, calling out in a mournful voice in an attempt to re-locate her lost little ones.

In one version of the story, Mano said that La Llorona was a woman named María, the “secret wife” of a man who jilts her for his higher-profile legitimate spouse. Enraged, she drowns their children and later kills herself in grief. In Heaven, God asks her where her children are. She does not know. In typical punitive pique, God condemns her to walk the earth in search of them, making the legend a cautionary boogeyman fable, since La Llorona might drown your wandering kids to replenish her family.

In a more tragic vein, La Llorona is said to have drowned her children to spare them from starving to death, or to preempt their death in an oncoming flood sure to kill them. In sorrow, she searches eternally to get them back.

More lurid versions of the legend have La Llorona stabbing her children to death and confronting their father in a blood-soaked nightgown; drowning bastards she bore as a prostitute, or killing her husband, then committing suicide out of remorse. Her manifestations — for anyone unfortunate enough to actually see her, sufficient grounds to mark the witness for death — included her in a flowing all-white or all-black gown, sometimes skeletal or with swirling black pits for eyes. One version has an ever-tetchy God sending her back to Earth with the head of a horse. Her signature wailing cry is sometimes said to be heard only by those about to die themselves.

“I heard her speak,” Barney said. “She said, ‘Drink from my breast, for I am your mother.’ “

“Impossible,” said Mano, his weathered visage dispensing an avuncular tolerance. “It is a myth, a legend. Not a real thing. You rest, now.”

“Mano,” Barney said some days later. “Do you have a gun?”

But Mano was not in the room. Barney realized he had been rehearsing aloud, trying to keep the question in his mind so he could sound less like a lunatic when the little man reappeared. He said it over and over, so he would not lose track.

The extent of Barney’s exercise in the better part of a month was limited to a half-situp in bed, which generally cramped his stomach something awful, and trips to the bathroom, reliant on Mano for mobility. Today Barney was alone in the house while Mano tended his business, or had possibly gone on an expedition to dig up new stones for cutting and polishing. Until recently, one of his sons or their wives drew babysitting duty, but none of them spoke a lick of English, and when Barney tried to communicate in his pidgin Spanish, it was usually hopeless, reducing them all to grunts, gestures and grade-school monosyllables.

He got the feeling that Mano’s family (none of whom lived with him, and that in itself was unusual for Mexico) did not approve of this half-dead gringo guest. They were all kind, but saw to Barney’s needs with a palpable air of burden. Barney guessed that the La Llorona anecdote had leaked. Being Catholic, they would race to distance themselves from the marked man; get thee behind me, Barney! Being Mano’s children, they would diddle rosaries and perhaps even go as far as to light a votive in church for the stranger, but as far as they were concerned, he was an agent of darkness sideswiping the familia. Barney noticed for the first time the absence of dogma-specific rickrack in Mano’s home. It could be that the vague rift he sensed between Mano and the rest of his brood had to do with his indifference to their faith. The few things Mano had mentioned about his late wife indicated that her death coincided with the point at which he and God had parted company.

Mano was a much rarer commodity, a religious man unencumbered by religious beliefs. What he cherished was abundantly on display: his stones, rescued from riverbeds and caliche, lovingly turned and polished, doing quiet honor to the very planet from which they all had sprung.

Barney’s first attempt to navigate toward the door of his little sickroom was either a catastrophe or a comedy skit.

It took him nearly ten minutes to upright himself in the bed. Every muscle in his arms felt sprung and dysfunctional, corroded by toxins into rusty obsolescence. His inner ear’s balance system fouled him up when he tried to stand. He managed two clomping, Frankensteinian steps and then took a header as the room swam out of focus around him. He destroyed a spool table he tried to clutch on the way down to the floor, and lay boneless in the debris like an infant awaiting a diaper change. With a drunken sense of mission he used his teeth to shred the bandages from one hand and stared blankly at his truncated forefinger. The stump was lumpy and awkward; not a human tool any more. It would offend anyone who saw it.

Worse, the big, bloody Q-Tips at the ends of his arms made it futile when it came to cleaning or feeding himself. He was entirely dependent on Mano’s good graces, and he hated himself for feeling beholden.

Worse still, when Mano returned, the old man acted like it was all no big deal, calmly righting Barney and cleaning up the mess. Mano actually liked this lost soul, for absolutely no reason Barney could see. Perhaps Barney had become a project. Perhaps Mano got some unspecified satisfaction he could not reap from his many relatives. Perhaps he was a genuine samaritan, although Barney’s experience admitted no such largesse, dismissing it as a weakness. Barney’s life had largely coalesced around compensating for the weaknesses of others; doing the jobs others could not bring themselves to do. Being taken care of was new to him, and slightly scary. Uncharted terrain. It disrupted all Barney thought he knew about human nature.

He wondered what he could do for the old man in return, if he regained the capability to do anything, ever again.

“Mano, do you have a gun?”

“A gonn?” He said it like cone.

“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.

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.

Half-hour bouts featuring constant acrobatic movement quickly taught you a lot about your own personal energies, and luchadors did it every week, risking their lumbar support for peanuts.

El Atrocidad had wrestled championships all over the globe, including California, from Orange County swap meets to big-ticket bouts at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, nearly all them as an illegal alien.

“We know this promoter in Orange County,” he said. “We fly or drive to Tijuana, usually three or four of us, and his wife picks us up. She’s totally white, hot, a blonde, Irish, I think. The border guards see her in a car with a bunch of Mexicans in suits, and they always wave her through. We go up to O.C., do some bouts, make a few hundred, have dinner, get laid a lot, then come back, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group, but that part is easy — nobody smuggles anything into Mexico.”

“I think they can help you,” said Mano. “I think they can help you get to where you need to go.”

“This bullshit...” Atrocidad indicated the empty doorway to Barney’s room, meaning the killer that had filled it less than twelve hours earlier, and in a larger sense, disgust at the pervasive all-around injustice. “Mano is in danger too. We have to get you out of here. I respect Mano, and I trust you because I trust him.” He shrugged. Easy. “Do you think you can make it?”

“I have to,” Barney said. “Don’t I?”

“I once watched El Cholo wrestle with the flu in Guadalajara. He had a 103-degree fever and we practically had to carry him to the ring. The fight starts, tres caidas, something like twenty minutes nonstop, and he jumps into the ring off the rope, doesn’t miss a hold or fall, gets his ass kicked but he was supposed to that night, and before he steps out of the ring he does this little victory jump on each side, making sure he doesn’t miss anybody in the audience, and they love him, because he’s like defeated, right, but never broken. Then he steps out of the ring and boom, all at once, he’s half-dead again.”

“But he made it,” said Barney.

“Exactamente.”

“He’s very strong,” said Mano of Barney. “They cut him, they shot him, he was in the Rio Satanas and did not die.”

“We get him one of those big hoodie coats,” said Atrocidad. “Put him in the back of the van, he keeps his hands in his pockets... it should be okay.”

“If I don’t bust open and start leaking at the border crossing,” said Barney.

“You can walk, right?”

“Just barely. Enough to fake it.”

“You have to be a pretty good liar, basically,” said the wrestler, indicating that this was not only a deep virtue, but often a matter of sheer survival.

“He can walk,” said Mano. “Not run, but walk, sí.”

“You come down here to see us fight at Arena Coliseo, eh?” said Atrocidad, with just a microscopic preen.

“Yeah, I used to.” Then, ruefully: “I love Mexico.”

“But you have not come for a while, and when you return, it was for the wrong reason, correcto?”

“Yeah.”

“Come back to Mexico for the right reason,” said Atrocidad. “You will always have family here. But first, let us deal with the things that threaten that family. You have family, back up north?”

“No.”

“Sometimes the people to whom you are bound by blood are less important than those to whom you are bound by éticas, by honor, yes? But sometimes, you give up your blood, you are bound to a new familia, maybe one you are worthy of, or one that is worthy of your honor and respect.” He recited this as though it was his personal gospel. “You understand?”

“Sí, claro,” said Barney. “Painfully.”

“Con mucho dolor, eh?” El Atrocidad laughed raucously, his trademark evil badguy chuckle, exposing gold-rimmed teeth. He would have slapped Barney on the shoulder had he not been afraid of breaking him. “It’s good for you, pain, sometimes, eh?”

“God, don’t say that.”

“It’s true. Es verdad. Sometimes it is the only truth there is.”

In a world of lies, Barney had to admit that the big guy was right.

There were no words with which Barney could take leave of Mano; the little puppet-like man had saved his life, risked his own.

Mano held up a highly-polished piece of river agate in a pewter setting, scarlet, alabaster, deep green, with an eyelet for a leather thong. It caught the sunlight.

“This has no value,” he said. “It is a common stone. But es muy bonita, yes?”

“Very beautiful,” said Barney, reluctant to accept it because he could not hold it in his bandaged hands. The gauze had been modified to free his working fingers, but every movement brought stabbing agony to his hands as a whole.

Mano draped the totem around Barney’s neck.

“Remember me, my friend,” he said.

It sufficed, for what Barney could not articulate. Finally, he said, “I’ll see you again.” It was all he could offer, but it was enough.

El Atrocidad’s chariot was a yacht-sized Cadillac in patchy, oxidizing gold, with enfeebled rocker panels and no air conditioning. Barney was packed into the back seat between two very wide luchadors, with a third riding shotgun as Atrocidad drove them to the airport, at dismaying speed, as though piloting a Jeep through a minefield during an air raid.

Offstage, rudos and técnicos frequently hung together, or wolfed down heart-attack-sized tortas at the Café Cuadrilatero, a wrestling-themed eatery in Mexico City run by another legend, Super Astro. Bitter enemies in the ring dined together after bouts; trophies and captured masks adorned the walls. In the mythology of lucha libre, a good guy could become a bad guy in an instant, or the reverse; lose his dignity in a hair match, regain it with a “turn” or switch in loyalties. The cosmic balances of the universe had determined that Barney would be ferried north by an entourage of two good guys, two bad.

No time to stop for a Super Gladiador at Astro’s, unfortunately. One of those monstrous sandwiches could feed about eight people... or two luchadors.

To Barney’s right was Medico Odio, Dr. Hate, who without his máscara resembled a burly nightclub comic — acres of grin, big square head tattooed with scar tissue from all the times he had bladed in the ring, abundant mustachio, like Central Casting’s idea of Pancho Villa, fifty percent bigger and louder. All of the OC-bound crew were traveling incognito, maskless. To let Barney see them and know who they were in civilian life was in itself a trust not to be breached, and its name was kayfabe — not a Mexican word, pronounced K-fayb.

You never outed a luchador; either by exposing his true identity or yakking about the rehearsed drama and cooperative elements of the sport. Breaking kayfabe was the worst kind of gaffe, and grounds for total ostracization and pariah status. The term itself was never uttered outside of the wrestling or carny industries until the 1990s, when it was hijacked by hip know-nothings to connote insider status, and grossly flaunted by Americans tone-deaf to mythic power.

The gold standard of Mexican wrestlers, the world famous Hijo del Santo, scion of the legendary Enmáscarada de Plata, was so devoted to maintaining kayfabe that he was known to travel separately from his crew and peers, especially inside of Mexico, in order to avoid the chance that anyone might glimpse his real face when he had to do things like clear passport scrutiny.

To Barney’s left was Flecha de Jalisco, a tapatío from Guadalajara, capital city of the state for which many wrestlers had named themselves, the most famous being Rayo de Jalisco and all his sub-named hijos and juniors, a whole multigenerational wrestling dynasty. His real name was Cristobal Campos Soriano; the flecha meant “arrow.” He was the oldest fighter in the car at fifty-five and, barring a crippling accident, would be doing suicide moonsaults for another ten years. Repeated hits in the throat and a lifetime smoking habit had given him a resonant radio announcer’s voice. He could speak almost sub-audibly and still be heard over the din of a crowd, without a microphone.

Up front on the right, working his way through the third of many cans of Tecate stashed in a ice cooler, was Mega Poseidon, who had gotten his gimmick, trident and all, from watching Jason & the Argonauts as a child, but usually worked in a fish-man monster mask of green and gold, with costume to match. He had dyed blond hair black at the roots and shorn to a military-style brush cut. His almost Brazilian eyes were that mesmerizing aqua color, very calm but somehow alien in his swarthy face.

Poseidon handed Barney’s newest passport back to him. It was a first-rate job of speed forgery and would pass muster in any American scanner.

“Wow,” said Barney. He was learning the clumsy dance using his remaining fingers and thumb as a kind of grasping tool, an unsubtle crab-claw, and was able to dunk the passport into his coat pocket on the first try. “Who do we owe for tickets?”

“We all got e-tickets,” said Flecha. “Taken care of by Tuntun, our homeboy in Orange County. The passport gets you through the computer, no problemo.”

Dr. Hate made a joke about Barney’s stealth status being the grandest kayfabe of them all.

“Yeah, you need a luchador identity,” said El Atrocidad with a half-smirk. “In case somebody asks us who the hell you are.”

Thus ensued a long exploration into Barney’s attributes — if any could be said to apply to lucha libre — resulting in handles mostly cut from whole cloth anyway: first the dirty one (Chupacabrón), then the ridiculous one (Cangrejo Tres Mil, due to the crab-claw joke), then one that perversely fit: El Destructor Blanco, the White Destroyer.

Insofar as he could grip anything, Barney gripped the pill vials in his pockets and tried not to sweat the rest of his life out through his pores. These hale and belligerent men were doing their best to keep his spirits up, to infuse him with their infectious energy. He hoped he would not have to hang between two of them and pretend to walk, like a marionette on downers. When they debarked at the airport, he saw how farcical this would be: El Atrocidad and Flecha towered over him, while Dr. Hate and Mega-Poseidon were each a foot shorter.

Barney tried to remember how recently he had arrived at Benito Juárez International, Mexico’s largest air hub. Weeks or months? He had no baggage but with the number of gear trollies the luchadors were pulling, that really didn’t matter. He’d had to leave the assassin’s pistol with Mano and felt naked without it, even if he was incapable of bringing it into play. The usual security, cops and soldiers were toting auto machine guns everywhere, but the ’port had remained unrattled in the post-9/11 world. Besides, they were just jumping up to Tijuana, and luchadors have a quiet way of exuding a forcefield of celebrity even when they are traveling as civilians. It is okay to sense they are wrestlers because nobody knows which wrestlers they might or might not be, and strangers defer to the most tempting choice. They got smiles of acknowledgement even from the guards as they passed, and Barney was just another one of them. Hurt in the ring, no doubt.

The hoodie coat Barney was wearing concealed a multitude of sins, but ventilation was not one of its virtues. Mummified in bandages beneath, he was starting to bake. Soon he would smell delicious.

On the plane, Dr. Hate had to help him sip a soft drink through a straw. Barney had never felt more completely helpless. He knew the air trip was partially due to his condition, since the 800-mile drive to Tijuana from Mexico City would have wrecked him. More unknown benefactors to thank.

The Tijuana airport was commonly referred to as “Rodriguez”; it had been named after some military general. The wrestlers helped Barney navigate through a tediously long bathroom stopover, got more medication inside of him, then dragged him forth to meet Valry Ayala, their blonde-headed Trojan Horse-mistress.

Valry was a lean six feet tall in flats, and even dressed down to denim and sweatshirt she looked like a zillion bucks in bullion. Everybody hugged her as they took turns holding Barney up. Her smile was a little horsy — big teeth and a little too much exposed gumline — but her hair and eyes were classic, curly ash-blonde and penetrating green, like a Heineken bottle with a light behind it. Nice back porch and healthy natural breasts, yearning to run free. She switched her hips when she walked. It was no accident.

“So you’re our special guest star,” she said to Barney, jamming out a hand.

Barney held up one of his bandaged mitts. “Sorry.”

“No worries,” she said cheerfully, touching his damaged face with long, lacquered nails. “We’ll fix ya up.”

Tuntun Ayala was a fixture in the low-budget Orange County wrestling circuit, catering to Southern California’s bustling Latino populace. At various times he had wrestled as Jayson xXx, Ice Dragon, Sirial Killer, High Voltage and Deathmaster 2, and had at least twelve other rotating identities on his resume. He and his tribe organized the shows, carting a portable ring setup all over L.A. County, and he worked in Mexico as often as he “unofficially imported” the talent that locals wanted to see. Through several previous wives he had begotten his own generation of future ring workers and then met Valry during a televised match, right before the collapse of Canal Vente-Dos, Los Angeles’ Channel 22, which lost most of its analog-broadcast Hispanic programming to cable. Once Tuntun zeroed his sights on Valry and went blonde-blind, his then-current marriage was swiftly and completely doomed.

Marrying a beautiful white chick had definite sociopolitical advantages, and she was the best den mother Tuntun could have wished for. The trip back across the border went exactly as El Atrocidad had said it would.

Barney was back in the U.S.A.

But the largesse did not stop there. Tuntun, who turned out to be a blustery, dark-skinned giant with cornrowed black hair, insisted on seeing to Barney’s comfort and taking him the extra hour or so north on the 101 to Los Angeles personally.

Typically, Barney had to promise to see everyone again — unwanted connective tissue that was not in his nature. He had no idea how to even begin paying these people back, or what to pay them with. He was stony. Moreover, he got the idea that to fob them off with money would constitute an insult. Mostly, he kept quiet and grateful.

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.

Like Barney, these men moved between the spaces of the ordinary world of people. It would be useless to call them by race, profile, or statistics, because you walk past them every day and don’t notice them. Who was taller, shorter, older or younger, it didn’t matter. Their names, like Barney’s, were fluid things, adaptable at a moment’s notice to new identities, stealth personae.

Appraising the wreckage that used to be Barney, Sirius arched a brow and said, “So... enjoy your trip?”

“I lost my apartment,” Barney said. “Karlov collected my stuff, but if I ever get out of here, I’m officially homeless.”

It seemed as though America did not want Barney back, either. His home, such as it was, had been assimilated. He assured everyone present that he could stay at the range, had done so many times. There was room, comfort and familiarity there. He had not really lost anything. Except.

“I’m glad you guys are all here, so I only have to tell the story once. I’ve told Armand a little bit of it, but I’ll give you the definitive version, gory details and all. There’s a reason I’m doing this, and I’ll tell you up-front that I am in full possession of my senses, so don’t blame my meds. When I get done telling the story, I have a proposition for you, but it’s not really something I can ask of any of you. I think I know you all well enough to risk putting these ideas out into the air, and if I’m full of shit, tell me. As far as you’re concerned, this is just a made-up story about an imaginary guy named Barney, and what happened to him. Armand’s been asking me what I think I want to do after this, and I’ve been mulling it over — asleep, not asleep, coming at it from every angle I can think of. Here’s what I want to do: I want to tell you the story. And if, at the end of the story, what I have to say sounds insane to any of you, don’t say yes, don’t say no, no buts or maybes... just get up and walk out of the room if you’re not down. Fair enough?”

Sirius hauled in an extra chair. Barney recounted everything he could remember. And then he told the three men what he wanted to do.

Nobody left.

Barney barely saw the fifth Bleeding Room thanks to the benefits of modern anesthesia. His body first had to be strong and adjudged fit enough to withstand the rigors of induced unconsciousness, and there was no way the dual procedure could be performed by Dr. Brandywine with a local.

More forms. More time.

Barney’s hands were butterflied like lamb shanks so Dr. Brandywine could get at the interstitial bones — the ones no longer required due to the missing-inaction index fingers — and remove them. Resectioning to close up the gaps. Nerves and blood vessels were reconnected with microfilament too small to see with the naked eye. Bones never meant to be neighbors were brazed together. The remaining healthy skin now gave enough surplus to fold closed and suture. They would leave very interesting scar patterns. The shortest of these multiple surgeries was a ten-hour stretch.

Add plasma, antibiotics, painkillers. Mix well and let set.

Serves one.

The result was an adequately proportioned, though decidedly bizarre-looking three fingered hand so natural in shape that your eye was deceived into wondering what was amiss at first view. It was something you had to devote time to noticing. Freakish, maybe; odd, yes. Barney was re-evolving from near-useless flippers to a tri-taloned Martian hand from War of the Worlds, or what Mickey Mouse actually hid beneath that three-fingered glove.

But no bump, no stub, no disproportion.

Now all he had to do was learn to work with these new tools.

A finger stump would have necessitated special handgrip grooving for stabilization. The stretch of hand minus a finger would have to be accommodated by an extended handgrip, and the trigger, modified for a middle finger wrap — the middle finger was almost a whole knuckle too much for a proper pull. Gross gun weight, and therefore felt recoil, would have to be factored into the smaller overall palm area.

Karlov was working out that problem right now, somewhere else, leaning over a gun bench, probably wearing his double-magnifying specs for close work. Concocting new mutant forms of firearm. Making them evolve.

Armand was dealing with ballistics — what kind of rounds, how many grains of powder per cartridge, range, kick, bullet type. The swage die was his alchemical furnace. He had always manufactured his own ammo.

Sirius commenced a round of interviews with Barney that led to a pile of pencil sketches in slow layers of accumulation. It was all about strategy. Penetration routes, exit schema, logistics. Drills on backups, backstops, Plan Bs, contingencies. Who, what, and how many. Room plans. Terrain. Things that could not be recalled or anticipated had to be imagined. Best guesses. Smartest options.

Barney commenced therapy on both hands as soon as the seams set and they were sure not to burst under stress like wet piñatas. Squeezing, lifting, isometrics in an agonizingly slow but progress-oriented crawl.

The first red-letter day came when Barney could cycle the trigger on Armand’s Magnum through one complete double-action pull. Snap.

Thirty-nine to go.

For nearly a month and a half both his hands were imprisoned in nylon cross-lace braces with metal supports, like corsets for his wrists.

Red-letter day Number Two saw Barney feeding himself without a drop of spillage. His fingers and thumbs were beginning to get to know each other again.

Karlov brought him a rebalanced SIG Super .40 with a whisper trigger; Barney managed five pulls.

Which hung him up for another week when his hands started to bleed.

Barney’s goldfish croaked eight days after he set up housekeeping at the gun range, with the benediction of owner/manager Neil Takami, who secretly appreciated the extra nighttime security. Barney awoke to find the fish floating sideways, dead as roadkill, nobody’s fault, these things just happen sometimes. Following a brief unspoken encomium, Barney gave his late fish a burial at sea with honors, if you stop to consider that every sewer pipe and outflow system in Los Angeles eventually empties into the Pacific Ocean.

Barney had never watched television while on his own. He had watched the fish. From what he had gleaned of television while immobilized in the hospital — at least, the noisy and idiotic programs Armand subjected him to during their mutual convalescence — he wasn’t missing a thing of worth. Mano had not had a TV, either, and Barney didn’t have one here.

This left Barney with nothing much to do when he was by himself, surrounded by armament he was incapable of utilizing professionally, and amateurism grated his psyche. He hung with his crew: Karlov, refining his modifications to a variety of firearms; Armand, checking in to test his latest cartridges; Sirius, to pursue an overall mission objective. It was Barney that was the albatross here, his slow healing, crippled movement and nearly insurmountable pain deftly yoking an anvil to any concept of forward motion.

These were the classic ingredients for genuine despair.

He could head-butt the pain. He had to; there were three more operations on his hands after the first one, and each of those came with mandated recovery periods with too much time spent awake and luridly aware of the pulsing of blood through throbbing fingers, even the ghost fingers.

He could rationalize the slow-motion of healing. At least it was goal-oriented.

He could become a fast-food zombie, staring glassy-eyed at a TV until his brains dribbled out his ear. No, scratch that.

He could discover or innovate adapted forms of movement to replace outmoded or restricted ones. That was forward-thinking and resourceful.

But he could not beat the sulfurous ebony cloud that swaddled his emotions, because that was the area in which Barney was least prepared for combat. He had kissed the despair in Mexico — sideswiped it — then had head-butted the emotion while imprisoned, but it had never loomed as skin-crawlingly imminent as it did now, when he was supposedly free. He saw himself as a drained vessel of exhausted resources, no surplus tanks, running on the memory of fumes. His bodily energies had been sunk into tissue regeneration and the mass production of antibodies and white cells. His brain felt as if it had been dry-cleaned, sandblasted and re-shelved, empty.

Even as mundane an activity as going to the market — once he could locomote — seemed off-kilter to Barney, as though he had rematerialized in a parallel world and was faking his way through the most ordinary moves so the natives wouldn’t notice and lynch him for being an outsider. He developed a fondness for an energy drink called Primer Pop, but apart from that and the booze in his miniature fridge at the gun range, he had seemingly lost the ability to discern foodstuffs. He generally ate with his crew, or ate something they bagged along. He found himself standing in an overlit aisle, his ears assaulted by Beatles muzak, unable to determine exactly which flavor of Ape-Os cereal to buy. Orangutan flavor? Gorilla Granola? It was as though some essential program in his head had been deleted.

He had to fill himself back up with something, and all he had was a dormant vein of raw hatred.

They took Erica; they got her, man, grabbed her ass right out from under me, I haven’t got a pot to piss in... there’s nobody else I can trust in a shitstorm like this... will you help me?

It was an art, that kind of simulated feeling. Hysteria helped sell the mark. The best users always advantaged a ticking clock and ego — help is needed now; you are the only candidate, and a yes vote means they’ve just hooked their latest sucker. Your utility was the outer limit of friendship.

In Iraq, Carl had performed a long spiel about who might live and who might die and who might keep in touch, after. About the kind of friends you don’t see for years, then pick up right where you left off. That had sounded warm and inviting, all right, an ideal to wish for in the face of daily death. But — all cards down — it was about using people.

Carl was usable, so Felix Rainer had used him. Erica had probably played them both. Wasn’t that how the food chain worked? The big ones got eaten by the bigger ones, who got gobbled up by the biggest ones, and it didn’t matter how big or bad you were, there was always some carnivore bigger or badder. If they couldn’t make you chum, then they made you a chump. True predators could whiff this vulnerability with a surety that gilded their genes all the way back to caveman days. The ground rule of predation: eat instead of being eaten.

The theory of the mark was that you invited usury by being too eager, greedy, gullible, or all three. Barney’s ego image of himself as fixer for the halt and clueless had doomed him.

You had to not care about anything. Sacrifice anyone. Scoot with no baggage. And keep breathing — that was the end that justified any means.

One trick of psychology was to disempower your tormentors. That mate of yours who fucked you over? Think of them as decayed, diseased, repulsive. Stop tacitly forgiving them and go on the offensive. Barney realized with an acidic jolt that he was still cutting slack for Carl Ledbetter based on events of years past. Carl was not that guy now. He had to be a new guy, somebody Barney could despise enough to kill.

As for the repulsive part, well, Barney had worn that suit already. It wasn’t his, didn’t fit him, and wasn’t it time to pass it on to somebody who really deserved it?

He could be like the Old Assassin, immune to feeling, his emotions shut down and turned off, all human sympathy on mute. Or he could be like he was now, a victim, a mark, a schmuck. There had to be another option, a middle ground, and Barney found its boundaries when he allowed himself the luxury of pure hate, unadulterated by self-pity or misplaced notions of fairness.

It took ten months before he felt as whole again as he was going to be for the rest of his life. By that time he had reconnected with the art of the true gunman. He had re-learned everything, traveling back beyond novice to start as virgin. The grip, the stance, targeting accurately, knowing your loads, sensing how many rounds remained from the weight of the firearm in your hand, it was all an uphill climb on a mountain of shit, hoping that when you found the single rose at the summit, you hadn’t lost the sense of smell.

It was a rebirth.

Newly born, Barney found that only the hatred had endured, and now it was purer than ever.