Gun Work

Barney’s gun thumped to the floor at Sucio’s feet. Barney’s legs kicked and thrashed. No good.

Sucio increased the pressure with his weightlifter muscle. Hydrostatics would blast Barney’s eyes from his head like pimentos from olives. The world washed scarlet. Sucio was going to tweeze his head completely free of his body with the sound of a popped pimple.

Air was a memory as Barney struggled to breathe. Drowning, again.

Sucio flinched but kept Barney in his deathgrip. Flinched twice more. In delayed molasses-time, Barney vaguely registered the sound of gunshots. Twice more. Gradually the hammerlock on his esophagus eased back, just a notch.

Again. Again.

Karlov was sitting on the floor of the hostage room, legs out in front of him, wavering but accurately delivering the payload of his unholstered .357 into Sucio’s back one round at a time. Sucio dropped to one knee, still clutching Barney’s neck. Still twitching from hits. Barney’s swimming vision made dim sense of Armand, standing in the hallway, calmly aiming, firing, and walking closer with each round. Beside him, Sirius took alternate shots, adding more lead to Sucio’s body fat index. When the giant killer finally released Barney and slumped, Barney saw the heel of the Army .45 sticking out of his waistband — the old Colt 1911-A Barney had picked up cheap for the original ransom run, the one Sucio had taken from him.

Barney sprawled on his side, gasping, his eyes staying on the gun even though his vision was hazed and occluded. Or had Sirius let off another grenade? Didn’t matter. Put your hand on that pistol.

Still sucking draughts of oxygen laced with green smoke, Barney pulled the .45 free of Sucio’s pants. Sucio was trying to crabwalk himself toward the far wall, his metabolism blowing fuses, his blood flooding out to soak the floor.

Barney snapped the action of the semi-auto to chamber his first thank you to the man who had meant so much to him.

After steadying himself against the wall, Barney pushed off like a swimmer and emptied the magazine into Sucio’s chest at point blank range.

Contrary to entrenched cliché and what nitwits repeatedly say on the evening news, shots do not “ring out,” and anybody who tells you they do has never heard gunfire. Report is more akin to the startlement of a heavy door slammed by a gust of wind; you know how that makes you jump, and no matter how prepared you think you are, the sound always comes as a surprise. It stops time for a millisecond and obliterates all other sound. Ignition and launch of a bullet evacuates the air from around your head in a phenomenon called blowback. If you’re not ready for it, the noise jump-starts the human fight-or-flight reflex in some small primitive corner of the brain. You freeze momentarily until the gunshot allows the rest of the world to come back. Once you’ve gotten past that first shot, subsequent shots are easy — you can even make them without blinking because your mind has processed that initial speed-stop, which no way, nohow, never in history, “rings out.”

Pink, frothy lung-blood was slobbering from Sucio’s mouth. Barney could see the tiny lights in the man’s eyes, fading to black.

Blood was coursing from both of Barney’s hands, oozing past the snugs on the shooting gloves. His new hands would always be limited in certain ways. But they could still give Sucio the finger, which was the last thing he saw before he died.

Then the corridor filled up with shouting men in Mexican wrestling masks, and Barney knew the cavalry had arrived.

Karlov was dead.

He had breathed his last after pumping the final rounds of his .357 into Sucio, from where he had slumped on the floor of the room with the naked lady in it. His body armor had shielded him from all the hits in the hallway except for the one wild, heavy-caliber shot from Zefir, which angled in by sheer chance to slam his femoral artery so hard that it ruptured beneath the skin. All the time he was calming the rape victim, helping Barney, and holding up his end of the assault, he was hemorrhaging, and he finally ran dry. Internal bleeding left his leg completely black.

Their guns were literally too hot to holster.