Gun Work

“I’ll just go get some cigarettes,” Barney said. He didn’t smoke. The gun was beneath his shirt, against his spine, as he exited.

There are little mercados and bodegas all over the city, but if you are smart you don’t pop out to pick up drinks and a snack after nightfall, at least without bodyguards or armored support. Fearful eyes will watch you from behind curtains as you pass. Buildings are locked, bolted, barred. Surly glares from darkened portals await you, sizing you up. The air is thick with feral pheromones and incipient hazard. Teen punks, drug casualties, bangers and outright sociopaths are eager to test your machismo. They always mock but never kid. They are coyotes on the lookout for the next domestic pet-snack. As Barney stepped out, the sun was on the wane. About an hour before the vampires came out to enjoy their time.

Trouble would come later. For now, Barney knew he had nine little ballistic friends with him. Plus one in the pipe, already chambered.

He purchased some El Sol to cut the dust, Cokes, and a couple of American protein bars. He avoided the “chocolate-flavored” snacks because the dye and seaweed used to color them tended to turn your poop green. Real Mexican chocolate was pretty wonderful, but this packaged stuff was mass-market and of questionable origin.

He wondered if Carl’s cellphone would ring while he was with Estrella. Now that would be a French farce come to life.

He squandered about twenty minutes, stopping to watch a cart vendor expertly spatulate some simmering chorizo tacos. The aroma was hypnotic. The grinning brown entrepreneur had evenly spaced two-millimeter gaps between each of his teeth and the next, but his cart was scrupulously clean and his ingredients looked fresh. Some of the best food in Mexico comes from these little wheeled stands, the kind of thing that would make turistas grimace. Barney was tempted but decided not to weigh himself down with chow, in case he and Carl had to move nimbly later. He bought a Manzana in a glass bottle from the vendor’s bin of refrescos; the apple-flavored soft drink was very popular down here.

Mexico was its own set of contradictions, overpopulated with Catholics mired in poverty who nonetheless gave to the church. Friendly people who would open your throat at a wrong word. Helpless people who might help you; trapped people who might free you. Rare beauty in the midst of ugliness; atrocities framed in Spanish gold. A frontier sense of liberty and advantage butted against the lowering specter of threat. Barney’s image of Mexico City was summed up by the Basilica de Guadalupe — not the new, adjacent Astrodome version, but the original shrine where Juan Diego supposedly first saw the image of the Virgin in a blue mantle in 1531. Second only to the Vatican as a holy place and destination of pilgrimage, the grand old building has been sinking into the earth since the late 1960s due to faulty foundations. It was Mexico in a nutshell: most revered, gothically ornate, culturally omnipresent, sinking into the dirt in the middle of a vast city center only slightly smaller than Red Square in Moscow.

Estrella was brushing her teeth when Barney returned. She grabbed an El Sol without asking and swigged half of it. Her scent filled the room, not unpleasant, a vague waft of spice that hit you when she passed; maybe it came from all her burnished mahogany hair.

“You dinna hafta take a vacation, baby,” she said to Barney. “We can party if you want.”

“Later we will,” said Barney, ever the courtly gentleman, feeling the way a nine-year-old feels when he inadvertently catches his parents in the act of making younger siblings.

She kept glancing at the door. Gotta go. They all fumbled through the usual air-filling small talk, and presently she breezed away, leaving her scent to pleasure the room.

“Half mast,” Barney said, indicating Carl’s zipper.

Carl secured his cargo, already anticipating Barney’s actual concerns. He gulped most of an El Sol as though he had just crawled off the Gobi desert. Cleared his throat a couple of times. “It’s a little... uh, complicated.”

“No doubt.”

Carl wiped down his face. His hand came away oily. The world was still the same. It would not erase like one of those Magic Slates.

“See... Erica had this thing when she was in New York. This affair. Right about the time she got promoted at Curve, the magazine. It was just one of those things, like, y’know, those trap-reactions.”

“You mean she was looking down the gun barrel at marriage, which means settling, which makes everything boring, and soon you feel your youth passed you by, so you’ve got to bust out? One last fling?”

“It’s not like she loved the guy or anything. She came clean; she was up-front about it.”

“So you brought her down here either to try to zip up your relationship in a foreign port or keep an eye on her, and it’s not going as well as you hoped?”

“She got kidnapped, man!”