Gun Work

Now, rate your friends, your acquaintances and your intimates. Among that group you already know which person you’d ask for help when shady badstuff rears up in your life. Yeah, that one — the person you always suspected was a bit illicit, a hair violent, two baby steps beyond the law. After-hours help, a less-than-kosher midnight run, some muscle, maybe some payback, and you know the person you’d call when quiet society says you should be calling a cop.

“From the top, Carl,” Barney said into his phone in the dark. “Deep breaths. Simple sentences. Subject, object.”

“This goddamned phone card,” Carl’s voice crackled back at him from one country to another. “You’ve got to get a phone card to use the payphones and half of them don’t work. The time on the cards runs out faster than—”

“You said that already. You said they grabbed Erica. Who-they?”

In Mexico, kidnapping constituted the country’s third biggest industry, after dope and religion.

“They didn’t leave a business card,” Carl said.

“But she was abducted.”

“Kidnapped, right.”

“What do they want?”

“They said a million.”

“Dollars?”

“Yeah.”

Barney wiped down his face. Squeezed the bridge of his nose. He didn’t need to click on the nightstand lamp and become a squinting mole. “Why you?”

“Because they think I’m a rich gringo.” Carl started breathing more shallowly and rapidly on the other end of the line. “My god, bro, how can I—”

“Don’t start that,” Barney overrode. “You were doing just fine. Calm. Calm.” A beat, for sanity. “So... are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Rich. Can you cough up seven figures?”

Another beat. Barney frowned. His long-lost friend was wondering whether to lie.

Finally, Carl said, “Yeah. Don’t ask how.”

“And you want what from me, exactly? They’ve got the hostage and you’ve got the ransom. So, trade.”

“It stinks, amigo. It stinks like underbrush when you probe by fire.” He was playing the war-buddy card again. “Probing by fire” was when you cut loose a few rounds into unknown territory. If return fire erupted, you knew the hide was enemy-occupied. It helped to be fast-footed in such circumstances. The suspense was gut-wrenching, and you could smell your courage leaching out in your sweat.

“You want backup,” Barney said, dreading it.

“There’s nobody else I can trust in a shitstorm like this. No good faces. I’ll wind up nose-down in a ditch with my money and Erica gone. I need your help. The kind of help you can’t just buy.” Another telltale beat of quiet. “Will you help me?”

Barney got Armand to feed his goldfish during what looked to be a weekend absence. He flew into Mexico City — gunless — on an ironclad passport that did not have the name “Barney” anywhere on it. Carl Ledbetter would not meet him at the airport. They had arranged a rendez in a hole-in-the-wall tapas joint that served surprisingly good carne, as long as you didn’t question the source animal for the meat too stringently. Carl’s shirt and jacket were already ringed with perspiration.

Carl looked like a victim.

A victim of the Zone diet, among other things. Too much turkey in controlled portions, therefore too much tryptophan, sedating him as his life softened, knocking his guard down into comfy semi-coma. If you had to hit the gym to keep fit, you weren’t moving around enough in the first place.

Carl looked like an American tourist — sideswiped by sunburn (already peeling), at sea with a non-native tongue, confused by the currency, lost without a guide. Pattern baldness, prescription spectacles and a general mien that said mug me. Sweating, nervous, jumpy now, ill at ease in clothing the wrong fabric for the climate; clothing which announced his outsider status to locals who grossed ten bucks a week if they were lucky.

Carl looked like a neutered tomcat. He had put on thirty pounds since hooking up with Erica. He ignored his tapas and swigged from a glass bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola loaded with real sugar, not fructose or corn syrup.

Part of the explanation he offered involved tapping the cash-flow of a rich guy on Wall Street, a broker who had learned to stash the pennies that constituted the fallout from the cups-and-balls shuffle of big money accounts. Rounded-up or down half-cents and quarter-cents from millions of dollars in invisible transfers. The crimes of which the broker was guilty already constituted more than a single-spaced page of malpractice, but it explained where Carl had been able to score his million on short notice and without suffering a credit check. The story smelled flimsy but Barney knew that was all the exposition he was going to get on that front, at least for now.

What Barney wanted was a drop plan, or shadowy faces he could track. Instrumentality, not cryptography.