Gun Work

At the second-floor landing a pair of dazed women screamed and dropped flat, probably unintentionally, but it was the best cover they could have hoped for. A gunless guy with matted hair and no shoes did a spin-around in the hall, trying to figure out which way to run.

People were screaming and pell-melling to get out of the way, and very few of them had guns.

Barney kicked in the nearest door — no lock. He was afforded excellent cover by his men on the stairs and landing as he proceeded down a row of doors, coming through each one gun-first and then backing off without firing.

A hotshot young gunslinger with something to prove tried to nail Karlov on the stairs, and Karlov took some splinters in the face from the balustrade as bullets bit into the lumber. Sirius sent him packing with hazing fire that destroyed all the masonry around the man’s head. Sirius, too, had already sensed something was awry.

Barney double-timed it back to the group. “It’s an abort!” he shouted. “Everybody bail!”

They encountered only three more men with guns as they escaped through the rear of the building.

One man saw them coming, dropped his peashooter, and ran.

One man managed to hit Armand in the shoulder, and Sirius kneecapped him from a distance of twenty yards, firing one-handed — five shots for one hit.

The third man brought a shotgun to bear, a double-barreled howitzer loaded with 12-gauge buck, and they all felt the pellets. Then Armand, Barney and Karlov raised and fired as one, and separated the guy from his piece.

It had all seemed far too easy.

Back in the van they were panting, sweat-drenched and pawing at their collateral damage. Finally, Sirius said, “Okay — what the hell just happened?”

“Sorry, guys,” Barney said. “Wrong building.” His hands were bloody in more ways than one.

They all just looked at him, waiting for a punchline.

Barney told them what he had seen when he kicked in the first second-floor door, the door that, not to put too fine a point on it, had no lock. Inside were candles sputtering in wine bottles and an assortment of junkies sprawled like sniper victims, barely able to register the entrance of a man with a gun. They flopped about on dirty mattresses or stared at infinity points in space. Next room, same deal — freebasing crackheads and a mamacita on the nod who was trying to coax milk out of one flaccid tit to feed an infant who was either comatose or dying.

Wrong building. These were all victims of a different kind of kidnapping, with none of the administrative smell that would have told Barney he was in the right place. It featured the correct ratio of coke-addled meatheads with guns for a drug den, with the primary shooters being security and management. They were also the first to run, clearing out and marooning their ex-customers to find their own way.

Carl Ledbetter and Mister El Chingon Tannenhauser must have used this place as a meeting point, meaning the real hostage hotel could be anywhere within a radius of miles. The courtyard fit, but dozens of structures in this neck of the woods had them.

Wrong building.

Worse, Barney’s bad guess had just dropped Flecha de Jalisco’s son Almirante into the hot pot with the real kidnappers. The phone call confirming the money Flecha had not raised had already been made, on El Atrocidad’s advice, on Barney’s word.

The impact bruise on Armand’s shoulder was a blue-black starburst that grated his bones, but the liquid body armor had worked like a magic shield in a fairy tale. Karlov’s facial wounds were superficial.

“Yeah,” Sirius said when they were back at the Pantera Roja, “Except that we just shot seventeen or eighteen of the wrong guys.”

“No,” said Karlov, dipping witch hazel and antiseptic cream. “When you said you were in, that meant you were in even for this.”

“I didn’t shoot at anyone who didn’t shoot at me first, and that was the deal,” said Armand, nursing his shoulder.

“It’s on me,” said Barney. “I was sure that was the place. I was dead wrong. And now they’re going to slice off Almirante’s fingers one by one unless we find out where they really are.”

“Owww, damned shotgun got me right in the neck,” Armand complained when he saw the pellet track an inch from his carotid artery. They all had dimpled bruises from the shot, as though a finger had been dipped in ink and pressed to the skin. They were painful but the body armor had done its task and rendered them down from lethal.

Barney sight-profiled all of them and the chatter dropped to nil. The question before them was clear: We have weathered an accident and come out whole. It gets worse. Anybody wants to bail, raise a hand. The moment held for a few beats, then dissipated as though it never existed. Nobody left. Each man took turns at the mirror checking their wear and tear.

“So what do we do?” said Sirius, who found three dark dots delineating his waist on the left.