Gun Work

Erica’s mouth popped into an O-shape — as in oh, you’ve got to be kidding — and she actually racked the slide to verify the worst. Empty chamber, vacant clip. It was just enough time, measured in tachycardia, for Barney to swivel on the floor, swing the Bulldog around. The gun was tough black passivate with pancake grips. He pulled the trigger once.

The shot caught her in the cheekbone and the hair on the back of her head flew apart. The slug, a semi-wadcutter, made a ballpoint-pen hole going in. Coming out, it was more like the size of a salad plate. The left side of her face collapsed around the crush cavity and her gun hand flew sidewise, drunkenly jettisoning the SIG.

The Bulldog spent, Barney nonetheless scrambled on top of her to pin her down. Hemorrhage was already darkening her brow and her eye on the gunshot side had orbited to a slit of white. Her other eye, still open, leering green, was fixed on him, but could no longer see him. No parting bon mot, no quip. Just dead.

Feeling pretty dead himself, Barney crawled toward the bathroom.

The first people to enter the room, later, were Elpidia Marcos and Esperanza Guitierrez, two Hispanic maids working for the hotel. They found bodies, blood, guns and a great deal of folding American currency strewn around on the bed and floor. Inside the single suitcase in the bedroom, they found even more money.

By the time they alerted their employers, stories had been jerry-rigged. Management staff entered the room to discover bodies, blood, guns and a far smaller amount of cash strewn around. No suitcase.

By the time the police were summoned, alibis had been solidified. By the time detectives visited the by-now thoroughly polluted crime scene, they found bodies, blood, guns and a couple hundred bucks on the floor.

The solution that allowed the quickest clean-up was that the two people in the top-floor suite had murdered each other with weapons found on-site. This story was not released to the news media, as the hotel had a reputation to uphold, as well as a fast shuffle in order to erase all evidence of misdoing and make the room rentable again as soon as feasible. If someone had suggested a bit of bribery was involved, even in the form of comps and favors to the police, nobody would have laughed.

Barney had left the hotel wearing a dead man’s clothing and lugging two suitcases that threatened to pull his tendons out with every step. After patching his ripped ear and realizing there was far too much blood on him to pass without comment, he rifled the closet and found some duds of Tannenhauser’s that would pass peripheral scrutiny. He smeared some of Erica’s base makeup into his more lurid, visible wounds, then saw that he could not just leave his own bloodsoaked clothing behind, oozing with his DNA. He popped one of the money cases and threw cash in handfuls onto the floor, to make room for the incriminata he had to smuggle out. Fair trade, all things considered.

Down the elevator and through the lobby, the whole trick was not to weave like a drunk, or puke, or black out, or start leaking fresh geysers of the red stuff. Maintain a brisk and businesslike pace. Avoid eye contact. Refuse tip-hungry assistance. Get out, get clear, get free and stay that way.

He made it back to his car, but there was no place for him to go.

Over a thousand people attended the funeral services for the gem-cutter and cowboy geologist known as Mano due to his loss of one hand years before through circumstances shaded in antiquity. Many estimated his age as over a hundred, though in fact he was 95 years old when he died easily, with dignity, surrounded by his many friends and family members in his modest home on the outskirts of the Xochimilco district of Mexico City. It was a neighborhood bordering on the rural, with wide swaths of open land separating grain fields and the occasional small cemetery, all of it yet unspoiled by urban metastasis. The cemetery in which Mano had requested burial had some markers that were nearly double his age, and trees that were four centuries old.

Among the mourners and speakers eulogizing Mano were a contingent of big, brusque men rumored to be luchadors, masked wrestling superstars incognito. Many of them wept openly, yet endured manfully. Tigre Loco, maker of masks, attended in his own distinctive headgear, for no one had ever seen his face, not even his customers.