Gun Work

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.