Gun Work

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?”