Gun Work

“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.