Bound

by Tiggy Malvern

Sands has things arranged just how he likes them, but other people have different ideas. Sixth in the Wires series, with ongoing language and violence. Story now complete.

2. Chapter 2

Flying was a bitch.

It hadn't ever been on his list of fun things to do, not since he was a kid and leeching his kicks out of take-off, the rising whine of engines and the push back into his seat, and it wasn't getting any better when he couldn't watch the movies or read a book. Worse when the turbulence fucked with his stomach, made him spend most of the flight wanting to heave, and choking it down 'cos he wasn't gonna puke in a sick bag and he wasn't gonna go stumbling down the aisle tripping over feet while he groped for the bathroom either. Music only filled so many of the holes in his head, and the headphones gripped him in a reverberating pound that swelled through his skull if he wore them right through the flight.

He fucking hated explaining to the dicktards at security that no, he wouldn't be taking off his shades so they could check his face against the one in his passport, not unless they wanted to be held responsible for the nightmares of half the snot-sniffing, whining brats in line.

The taxi ride round the tourist pisshole that was Acapulco in the mid-fall heat was no improvement over the planes. The driver they'd gotten was the real chatty type, wanting to know who they were, how long they were staying, pushing a card at them for if they needed another ride. El fenced off most of his conversation in terse replies - they were staying with friends and no, they wouldn't need another cab - leaving Sands silent, his head pressed to the vinyl by its own weight. Vibrations through the metal from road and suspension prickled at his temple, the heat and noise of a city afternoon notching up the tightness settled behind his non-existent eyes. Advil held back the pain, the reaction to loss of sleep, but it couldn't switch off the racing feet tap-tap-tapping in his head, scampering like rats.

Once he caught a thought, set a trail, his mind tracked it down to the end, through every permutation, every split in the road, setting weight and chance to each possible route till he got it figured.

There'd been a while there after the Day of the Dead when Sands' own brain had done a kick-ass job of trying to fuck him over. He'd hear sounds, vague uncertain shuffles, and his mind would trip off in a fit of the crazies, invent all kinds of shit behind them - the quick snick outside that was the flick of a safety, the soft scraping in the quiet of the early hours that was someone picking at the window catches, Guevara coming for him with drugs, coming for him with drills to smile while he screamed and screamed, and he lay and shivered, trapped when he could barely stand and he couldn't see, the grip of an M-11 branded into his palm.

It had eased up some once he'd heard the beetle-licking bastard-fucker was well and truly dead. But the last of it hadn't faded for a long time after.

There were afternoons in summer when the rain hammered around the apartment for hours, the low sounds beneath lost entirely and the frequencies that came through all distorted like running paint. It was worse when he first moved to some new place, always the local oddities he needed to pin down and file. He counted himself fucking Olympic medal standard on the auditory perception scale - he'd heard the line about how the other senses heightened to compensate, and it was all so much cracked out camel shit. It was nothing but practice and concentration, and he figured he'd scored a little higher on the motivation front there than most people who found themselves suddenly blind one day. But it didn't matter how good he was, he was never gonna be able to catch and filter everything. And there was still that small place tucked up in the back of his brain at lizard-level, way out of reach of his logic, that insisted strange sounds in the dark had to be monsters, even if they were the human kind.

Nothing was ever gonna come even close to those moments of not being able to trust himself, to not knowing what he thought he knew. But he wasn't all cosied up with spending big chunks of his time second and third-guessing El by this stage of the play either.

He didn't need El - he'd proved that once, and he didn't feel inspired to do it again. Wanting - well, that was an entirely different proposition. Sands had made it a lifelong principle to get what he wanted, and keep it if he wanted, too.

The unfortunate downside to that was when the dice didn't roll with the plan, it went wrong in spectacularly bad ways.

Soft rustle from El, the creak of the seat under shifting weight, a quick brush of fingers at his sleeve, and Sands straightened, angled his head to the window for the sounds. Only a few cars passing now, low-murmuring engines buried in the rush of wind; nobody to hear on the streets, occasional high, excited squeals of kids that carried, a short series of barks before the mutt was quieted, fast. Residential neighbourhood, one of the better ones.

The cab pulled up, presumably at the address El had given in La Sabana, a suburb sprawling in the hills above the main squeeze of the city. Sands' hand went straight to the door, which he'd had plenty of time to surreptitiously explore, finding the handle and stretching out a leg slow, like it was stiff after the journey, till he touched sidewalk. The cane was packed away in his bag - he was stuck with being an American, but Mexico wasn't the place to go around advertising anything else about himself that might bring in added interest.

Sun slanted warm across one side of his face, the drone of the cab's engine fading back from his head in the wash of breeze. Only a slight salt hint beneath the hydrocarbon fumes, most of it stripped bare by the miles travelled over land, but fresh, unconfined, missing the stink of too many bodies cramped up in too small a space. He took a few steps along the sidewalk, his head tilting into the air, his mind running background checks on the voices further along the street, chattering about the mundanities of groceries, while El hung back to pay the driver. Sands felt he'd already been paid well enough with his turgid little life - if Sands had been left to deal with that irritating chatter alone, he would've shot him ten blocks back and walked.

Controlled thwumps as heavy bags met the sidewalk, the click-tap of the inflexible guitar case, and then the trunk slammed behind him, taxi pulling away seconds later in an elderly rattle.

El's steps moved his way, heavier, weighted, and Sands reached out to take the bag that brushed against his leg. The address they'd given was a few blocks over from the place they were headed for, and Sands' feet were drawn automatically after El's, the sidewalk smooth under his sole every time, unblemished by cracks or weeds. The breeze pushed through his nose as they walked, veering over his skin with every side street, bringing the sharp scents of greenery and flowers, the occasional heavier aromas of cooking. Low voices and music drifted from open windows as they passed, the rare too-loud screech of a TV, the heat pricking over his whole body in a way that lifted the wire from round his skull, no longer trapped in a metallic box with strangers and staring eyes.

"We're here." Fifty-four paces from the last intersection, and El turned right, Sands following up... nine steps and along a path that curved, pointless and annoying. He stopped when El did, waiting behind as he tapped on the door. The pattern was barely forced, not enough that anyone passing would recognise it as a signal.

The feet from inside came fast, close to running, the door flung back to smack and rattle against the inner wall. "El! Jesus, you're here!" It was Lorenzo who'd shown up, and he stepped out right in El's face, all cloth sounds, some kind of arm-clasping or hugging going on. "Shit, it's been too fucking long."

"I know," El said simply, but the words smiled wide. "How have you been?"

"Hey, you know me." The laughter was bubbling up behind his voice, Lorenzo the big eager Labrador, missing only the sound of his tail thumping the floor twice a second. "Quite the set-up we got here now, huh?"

"Well, it's an improvement on the last place, I suppose." El's dry humour bounced in his exaggerated inflection. "Where's Fideo?"

"Asleep right now, I guess." Some of the enthusiasm had dipped out of Lorenzo's voice.

Sands had never taken well to being ignored, especially when he was having a shitty day. "Why don't you just go right ahead and say he's drunk?" he drawled, pointedly sounding as bored by all this as he felt.

"What's he doing here?" Even when Lorenzo was forced to acknowledge Sands, he was still talking to El.

"He offered to come," El said evenly.

"El, you didn't tell your hosts I was tagging along for the ride? Surely that wife of yours must have taught you something about manners." Sands smiled through the following silence to show close on his full set of teeth over El's shoulder. "So good to see you again. Any friend of El's, isn't that how it goes?"

"Don't expect that to cut both ways, not when this shit we've got going on is all down to you."

"No." That was El pushing in through the pause before Sands could launch his offensive. "It wasn't his choice. The fault there is mine."

"Whatever. Looks to me like when he shows up, it all goes to hell, every time."

"Oh, I'm only ever the messenger." Sands held his smile wide open through the words. "What the people around me do, well, that's entirely their own choice."

"And somebody fishes the guys who made the choices you didn't like outta the river."

Sands dipped his head a little and lifted his eyebrows over the shades - his evening was shaping up to be considerably more entertaining than the rest of his day. "So what exactly happens to the people who do things that aren't to your personal taste?"

"Can we come in and talk about this with some food?" El had that quirky humour tinge back in his tones - Sands wondered how long it would hold out. "They didn't have much on the plane."

"Sure, just dump that crap of yours behind the door for now."

Sands decided the invite extended to him, even if reluctantly, and followed El up another small step through the doorway, the cool of shadow dropping over his skin as the foot-echoes closed in around him. Just ahead, the ringing tap as El set the guitar case down on tile, followed by the softer thud of the bag.

"You got much in that case?" Lorenzo asked.

"A very bad, cheap guitar," El said, and Sands could imagine the expression that went with the words. "They get suspicious about people who ship empty ones."

"You're clean?" Lorenzo sounded as appalled as Sands was by the situation. He wasn't exactly unarmed right now in a technical sense, since there were plenty of things he could pass through the scanners that had dual functionality and would dispose of people quite well with the right application, but none of them gave him the sense of security that went with several well-maintained guns and rounds in the chambers.

"Had to be," El said with a quick shrug. "We came straight from the airport."

"Fuck, well the food can wait, come on through and get kitted out. I've got some shit back here I know you'll like."

"We both need weapons," El pointed out.

The pause was there, but only brief, the rustle as the kid glanced Sands' way. "Yeah, we got enough for two," he said. He moved off deeper into the house, feet tapping light and even, El behind him. Sands left his bag by the door with El's, keeping the laptop case with him as he followed. Tile all through the length of the hallway, smooth and ringing under his heels; no change in footing as the walls and echoes fell back into the sensation of space around him, a stronger smell of cleaning fluid and something that lingered, spicy. Lorenzo jingled keys and rattled a door, heavy with silent hinges.

"You keep your weapons in the kitchen?" El asked, trademark desert-dry.

"Why not? Nobody's gonna look for them there." The kid got his sense of humour back fast, didn't stay pissed for long. Maybe he was just that happy to have El show up to help him out. "Handguns, take whatever sparks your burner, there's ammo and clips for the lot on the top two shelves."

Two more El-steps before the low metallic clicks started - he never could keep his fingers off of anything his eyes liked. "Thirty-eights - Glock G28, Walther PPK/S, Smith and Wesson 67." His voice was muffled by the enclosing doors as he ran through the list for Sands' benefit, altered more by the thickening of accent with the shift of his brain into unthinking assessment, the pure speed of thought encumbered by the necessity for words. "Nine millimetre - Sig P239, Tac-Five, Beretta 92FS, G17C, G34 -"

"Somebody likes their Glocks," Sands observed, resting the laptop on the floor against his leg and noting the dips as El slipped further into the shorthand.

"Many people do," El said evenly, and Sands wondered just which of the list was rattling through its action under his fingers, distinctive series of slide-snicks as he worked it. Smooth, efficient sounds under the faint oily tang of weapons, under El's continued listing of the nines moving into the .45s., and Sands' own hands were starting to quiver with the possibility of touch. Several nice weapons on the supermarket shelf, make a choice and he'd have them loaded and with him, everything right back in its place. "Desert Eagle .50 AS..."

His mind jumped and caught on the glitch in El's recital.

"What the hell would these idiots want with the Eagle?" Sands drawled the words out long to carry across the room, giving the derision that little extra kick. "Thirty rounds and your arms are shaking too hard to shoot straight, if the fucker hasn't already jammed when you can't hold the recoil."

"Christ, we don't use that piece of shit. That one we keep around more as a souvenir." Sands let his head glide Lorenzo's way, following the words, the something there in the kid's voice that was actually interesting, something dark and viciously satisfied that warranted some future poking to test just how deep and wide it ran.

But that could stay stored away for later fun. "How many G17s?"

"Just one," El said. "There's a pair of the 34s."

Fuck. It was so much easier to keep track of one style of weapon, one size of magazine and calibre of round, instead of reaching to remember what the hell he had in his hand in the middle of a firefight. "Too big." Pity, he would have liked the higher mag capacity. "How about the Sigs?"

"We've got a full set of the 239s," Lorenzo offered. It was gone already, that licentious pleasure behind his words, a tendency Sands had grown very familiar with, spending the last couple of years around El. "Picked up four as a lot, new pieces."

"Here." Sands swung back, instant to El's voice, the quick movement, the something in the air, his hands moving out rib level to catch. Touch of solidity out of nothing, and his fingers closed down with only a barest fumble to drag it into his body, the ridged smoothness against his gloves hitting his brain with the flash of grease scent. He stripped off the gloves and tucked them deep into his pocket, metal cold and unbalanced within his palm as his fingers slid over to find safety and action and empty grip. He checked the chamber with a pinkie tip and cycled the action through a couple of times, fast and easy with no slickness or stickiness at the mechanism - somebody kept it ready to go. El threw him the clip, and it slapped into place with a satisfying double click, all awkwardness dropping away from the weapon as it slid into equilibrium and purpose. The weight of it curled perfect within his palm, the guard settled against his index, fluid and natural wrapped into his skin.

He stretched his other arm out behind him, closed fist to find a countertop - no prints, not here, not anywhere - and it was almost an effort to reach out and let go, to set the pistol away from him, back into the void.

And he was letting himself slip into complete fucking idiocy, because the gun wasn't going anywhere, it would still be right there when he wanted it. He snagged the second Sig from El and ran through the routine, checking and loading against the background of rattles and snicks as El did the same for his own choice of weapons.

"Holsters?" El asked.

"Hey, did you think this was an amateur set up you were walking into?" Lorenzo grinned as he rattled keys at another door and poked around, tossing something to El, caught with a slap and a low metallic ring. "Catch." That last was spoken in Sands' direction, and the kid didn't throw right, didn't have the quick, distinct tell in his motion, but the leather whistled and flapped across the gap, and Sands snapped his hand out right to feel it wrap onto his wrist. He traced the arrangements of straps and buckles - double shoulder holster for underarm carry - and stripped off his jacket to wriggle in and adjust, circling his shoulders to check the feel of it after he slid the Sigs into place along his ribs.

Now he felt in a marginally more reasonable position to be taking on the stinking open drain El called home.

"So what else are you hiding back there?" Sands' fingers worked the buckles, adjusting the straps into the right fit for the weight of the guns, his mind running ahead to other possibilities. "Compact autos?"

"We picked a few up along the way," Lorenzo said, light steps tapping across the room. "Couple of MAC-10s, Micro Uzis, an OTS-33 –"

"Any with silencers?"

The keys stopped, abrupt, the door still sealed. "What the fuck d'you want with a silencer? It screws the accuracy, and only cuts it back to loud three rooms away instead of three blocks."

Sands raised his head slow, angled to let the lenses stare straight on. He could almost feel the shiver-flash across the room, the instant when the kid actually thought instead of letting his mouth run.

The jingle returned, and the swish of air forced aside. "A couple came with silencers as part of the deal. Best of the lot's probably the Beretta."

"The 93R?" Only three round bursts, and he'd never used one, but the reputation said reliable and easy to strip. It was another nine mil too, which kept the ammo simple. He spread his lips, curved thin. "Pass it along."

Familiar boots his way across the tile, and the gun came from El, the dimpled touch of a grip to his fingertips; no tossing an unfamiliar weapon whose weight and configuration were only theory, with the option or not of a stock poking out six inches from the back. Not, it turned out, as he outlined the length of barrel into silencer, under to the folding fore-grip and guard, and back around to the gaping emptiness that waited for a magazine. He found safety and clip release in the obvious places as he explored, and the chamber was usefully designed to be checked for a round by touch without having to pull back the slide - the convenience of a weapon built for special forces and designed with night work in mind. He also found what had to be the selection lever for single shot to burst fire, but he didn't have a fucking clue which setting was which. He'd check that with El later when the kid wasn't around. The middle of a fight would be a bad time to be experimenting, with no idea how much of a kick to expect.

El passed him the clip, the size and weight of it consistent with the twenty capacity his head dredged up from the vaults, and he smacked it home but didn't chamber the round. Unfolded the fore-grip, turned and swung the gun up towards the door behind him - inevitably nose-heavy with the silencer, probably a nicely balanced weapon without. One of the smallest auto-burst pistols around, easy to conceal even with the little something extra screwed on the front. He smiled along its length, feeling the call of it through his finger, the burn to find a reason and test it out.

"Nice, huh?"

He kept the smile in place as he turned Lorenzo's way. "I think it might do."

"There's another if you want the pair."

"Even better." He clicked the round through to the chamber and laid it aside on the counter, taking and setting up the second Beretta.

"You said you had something I might like?" El prompted.

"Hell, yeah." There was a grin in Lorenzo's voice, and a slap as El caught something heavy. "Remington twelve gauge over/under, all shaved down ready to go."

It always came back to the shotguns with El Mariachi - Sands could never get why he fetishised the damn things so much. If he had to use one, he should at least go pump-action. "That's an expensive piece of kit, El. Better pick one of the pistols next time you want something to whack a guy over the head with."

"I think prices are higher for the ones that still have the shoulder stock and most of the barrel," El said, over the distinctive click-snap of a break-open action.

"It's shorter than a side-by-side, easier to hide," Lorenzo said. "Just the one sighting plane, so it's more accurate."

"Only the lateral accuracy," El pointed out. "It pays for it in the elevation."

"El, the last time I checked, you didn't point those things at too many ducks." Sands slapped the Beretta's mag to check it was fully seated. "Elevation's not your issue."

"It is when I'm aiming at a man on a roof."

"The difference doesn't exactly come into the calculation when you're waving it around in your hand instead of using the sights. I think you're still going to hit him."

"If you can miss with that, it's way past time to take the pension," Lorenzo agreed. "Quit being stubborn, El, you only do it for the hell of it."

"Set in his ways," Sands agreed. "It's a symptom of age."

"I'm not so much older than you," El said. "And it is a good gun."

"Just not the one you're used to, right, we got it." Lorenzo sounded about sixteen when he laughed and teased that way. It was going to be interesting, unravelling the triggers, the differences between this version of the kid and the one who kept weapons as tasteful mementos.

"Shells?" El's attempt to divert the chit-chat away from his idiosyncracies was obvious, but it worked on Lorenzo well enough.

"We've got a few hundred rounds of tactical buckshot laid in."

"Ah, yes, tight patterning and low recoil - the optimal choice for home defence," Sands drawled.

"I don't remember you objecting too much to my choice of protection when they were needed," El said.

"I objected all the goddamn time, you just didn't listen."

"What is it you Americans say about fixing things that aren't broken?"

"Just because you mostly get away with that crap you pull doesn't stop it being stupid."

"You would have done so much better, I suppose."

Sands tipped his head and grinned. "Most of the time, I wouldn't have been there at all. I'd have found someone else to do the job for me."

"That only works when there are people like me around." El was running the shotgun through its action beneath the words. "If everyone was like you, nobody would do anything."

"But everyone isn't like me, and I adapt to the circumstances. You inherited a guitar case full of guns, I found myself with some small skill in persuasion - we both learned to make good use of what we got." Sands swivelled on the ball of one foot to face the last he'd heard of Lorenzo - the kid had stayed quiet all through the exchange, there only in the light movement through the room before El snicked the cartridges into place and snapped the Remington closed. Sands had never been all that fond of a silent observer, and he liked them even less now, with nothing in the spaces for him to read. "I'm sure Lorenzo here will agree that you tend to become a little over-enthusiastic at times."

Lorenzo rustled briefly, and he spoke fast and relaxed. "El, Fideo – they're both nuts. I gave up on saying it years back."

It would have been entirely sensible if it had been true, but Sands didn't believe the kid had given up on anything at all. All the detail Sands had gathered when El had hooked up with Lorenzo in Culiacán, everything he'd heard when he met him at Honaker's warehouse - it all said there wasn't much of an idealist left in the kid, but those last, lingering remnants of optimism were tied to his friends.

"If I'm so crazy, what does that make you for coming along?" El smiled. Leather creaked and brushed as he pulled it tight around him and slid the shotgun away.

"A sucker, yeah, you think I don't know? Somebody's got to look after the idiots." The grin was back, oozing through Lorenzo's words. "Now that's got the personal protection angle covered, we can start on that case of yours. You wanna take a guess where we keep the real offensive stash?"

El shook his head, the irregular brush of hair along his shoulders. "Later. We won't need more till we've got a plan, and I still want to eat."

Quick rustle and squeak of shoe on tile from Lorenzo. "Sure thing." He moved past Sands to the door, El following behind; Sands grabbed the laptop from the floor and trailed after. "I'll order in, it's easier. You can drag all that crap of yours out of my hallway and up to your room. Get the basics unpacked, take a shower if you want, and the food'll be here when you're done." Twelve steps from the kitchen doorway, and Sands swung his foot out right to brush against his bag as a double check before he bent to pick it up.

"You can take the room first right, top of the stairs," Lorenzo said in El's direction. "I'll get more sheets for him." Heavy emphasis giving the last word a kick, and it was interesting how fast the open hostility had come right back. The whole conversation held an amusing echo of El's slips early on, forgetting just how much he was supposed to hate Sands for the duration of any chat about the weapons. The kid suffered the same enthusiast's weakness for his subject, for someone else with the knowledge to share the love. "We only keep the one room ready, don't wanna encourage too many visitors."

"We only need one." El spoke up fast, before Sands could count in his own slow-drawled response to the kid's bitching, but he kept it neutral and light.

Sands wasn't surprised that El would push the point. It could be read the platonic way easy enough by two guys who knew what it was to fight and run, and Lorenzo's voice held no stresses when he answered. "Fine by me - less cleaning to fight with. I got rid of the maid when we heard we were being checked out."

"You didn't trust her?" El's voice instantly harder, built solid by layers of suspicion and threat.

"I'm pretty sure she was straight, but she could have been threatened. Pity - she was nice to have around, not just good at the cleaning." Sands amended his earlier speculations - obviously the sidekicks weren't running low on cash yet if the pretty boy was levelling his talents at the help.

"Didn't that maid of yours ever get just a little bit curious about all the locked cupboards full of guns?" he asked.

"We told her they were stuffed with paperwork, old records for the taxes. She was easy on the eye, not Einstein."

Sands smiled in the kid's direction, thin and tight. "You know, there's a wide body of evidence that people tend to aim for those at their own intellectual level when it comes to sex. How nice to see it holding true."

A single footstep, fast and heavy Sands' way before the movement froze. "You're in my house, you'd better watch what the fuck you say."

Sands angled his head, stayed with the smile. "And where is she now, this obliging maid of yours?"

"How the hell should I know? Home, most likely, with her two hot sisters and her hag of a mother."

El was rustling just behind Sands, bending, picking up his bag and the guitar case from the floor. "So there's a woman out there who knows everything there is to know about the inside of this place, gossiping her way through the local markets with no idea she could be a target." Sands dragged his lips back in shrunken and small, just a hint of twist at one edge. "She could have spilled her guts and be chilling on ice already, and you fuckmooks wouldn't know it because you're not keeping tabs."

"Yeah, and if we watched, we'd be dragging somebody's attention her way for sure."

"Which is why you were an idiot for having her here in the first place. Your foresight was even shorter than her skirts."

Lorenzo's voice dropped and hardened. "You don't know a fucking thing about her, or me."

Sands let the smile grow, slowly. "You just keep right on thinking that."

"Screw you, I think what I know."

El's feet were already on the first couple of stairs, so Sands lifted his eyebrows and turned to follow instead of answering, to count, to learn. How many stairs to the bend, how many above it, distance to the door of that first room on the right, all filed away and ordered almost unthinking now, the details of stair width and height and composition taking a little more concentration. It was always good to know in advance if stairs were solid, or if someone could shoot through from underneath.

El gave him the fast run-down of the room - enough furniture to be useful, not so much it was fucking annoying to avoid it all, just the way he liked it. They rearranged some to make it a closer fit to Sands' usual patterns, shifting a small table to the bedside as a nightstand. Sands unpacked his laptop and wound out the charger cord, soft drawn-out creak beside him as El sat on the edge of the nearest bed.

"Don't push too far," El said. "He's young, he will snap."

Sands smiled slightly as he re-zipped the case. "If he wants to kill me, he might find it trickier than he thought."

"It's not you I'm worried about."

This time he turned El's way as his smile stretched wider. "Nice to know you have faith in me."

"He wouldn't be trying to kill you," El said. "I'd have to beat you down before you got to him."

El wasn't wrong about that angle of it. If somebody came for Sands, he wasn't going to be swatting them off, or defending himself, he was going to be killing that bastard motherfucker before they got anywhere goddamn near. He wasn't ever going to find himself strapped to any fucking tables ever again.

Not that his reaction would have been any different two years ago; he just wasn't inclined to put the brakes on that way. If the kid was stupid enough to use violence without genuine intent, well, one day it really was going to be his funeral.

"And you'd do that," Sands said, flat.

"I'd hit you both and tie you up and sit on you if I had to." Another soft creak from the mattress under the shift of weight. "I'd prefer not to."

"Well, I hope you plan to have this same conversation with him, because I won't be taking any of your shit over something he starts." Sands held his face El's way for another second, before he crouched with outstretched hand, walls textured beneath his gloves as he felt for the socket.

"He knows how things stand," El said, and that deliberately wasn't answering what Sands had asked. "Three right."

Sands' fingers swerved, hard edge of plastic instantly there, flawless smooth contrast to the dry roughness of the wall that caught at the leather. He plugged in the cable, quick low bleep from the computer as the charge fired up. "Good. Then he won't be starting anything, and you don't need to lecture me."

"No lecture," El said. "Just the truth."

A truth that already had El threatening him when they'd been here maybe an hour. Sands twisted back to level El with the non-stare, expressionless and set. "Well, while we've got Honesty and Bluntly Forthright standing here in the middle of the room, let me tell you just how much you don't want to take that line of truth any further."

"I just don't want any of my friends to get hurt." El's fingers touched light at his cheek, and Sands pulled back and up onto his feet.

"Then you can tell your 'friends' that if anyone does, it won't be me." He turned, orienting himself for the doorway, and walked easily from the room.

So much for the shower option, but after his explorations of the room and the furniture-dragging session, they'd lost close on half an hour and the food would be showing up soon anyway. He counted his way down the stairs, and leaned against a wall in the hallway at the bottom. The only room he knew from here was the kitchen, and that would be a pointless trip, since nobody was cooking.

It was only a minute before boots tapped on the stairs behind him. El passed him, unspeaking, and Sands fell in a few steps behind, shadowing the uneven motion as El paused to check doorways.

"Hey, El." Lorenzo's voice came from along a ways, and muffled by wall. The kid had good ears, then; nice to know if he was gonna have to work with him. "Get your ass in here, I'm just gonna go grab us some plates, food should be right up." It was notable, that singular ass, but Sands decided to consider himself invited along too.

He let El take the lead, moving towards the words – Sands could have tracked it himself, but El would avoid any crap that got in the way of the direct route.

El turned into the obvious doorway and slowed, a smooth stop so Sands didn't run into him. "You should have warned me your tastes had changed, I'd have dressed for dinner," he said.

"You think I like this shit?" Sands supposed there'd be a face to go with the distaste in Lorenzo's voice. "I mostly eat in the kitchen, this is just a place to bring somebody I'd want to impress."

"You don't want to impress me?" El laid on the mock-hurt with the kid a bit thicker than his usual style.

"If I did, I wouldn't try it with furniture," Lorenzo grinned. "You said you were hungry so I ordered half the menu and figured we could use the table space."

"That sounds good, as long as the menu wasn't pizza."

"Nah, there's a restaurant down the hill - great place, they don't normally deliver, but the owner likes me."

"This owner, she would be female and forty?" El asked.

"Closer to fifty," Lorenzo said, the missing wink bright in his tone, "but damn, she can cook." His feet came for the doorway, pushing past Sands like he wasn't there to head off down the corridor, presumably hunting down the plates.

El pulled back a chair with an unmistakeable scrape, and Sands moved over to his left, reaching for the chair that would be there and finding the back at hip height. El was just as useful with a pistol with either hand, but he had better control of the shotgun kick with his right, and he liked that side clear.

Sands lifted his fingers to the table in front of him, finding its edges, its depth and weight, a solid carved wood that slid polished beneath his gloves. The cutlery and a glass were set out unevenly, tossed into an approximate place setting in a hurry, and he straightened them into his two hands' width square.

Footsteps from the hallway behind, tapping different, not the kid, and El was already moving, pushing back and up from the chair - but he was loose and easy, and the kid's steps were there too now, casual rhythm unbroken over the tiles.

"Fideo!" El laughed as the feet met the doorway. "I was starting to think you might be avoiding me."

A shuffle of shoe from Fideo, and he called back towards Lorenzo in the hallway, "Is he here or is that me?" Still not exactly sober then, and it wasn't just the half-joked words that said it; something too subtle to be called a slur, but there.

El-motion, fast, the two strides to cover the ground then the slap of body barrelling into body. "So does that prove to you I'm here?" El's grin was thousand-watt bright even to a blind man.

"Okay, okay, I believe you! Now get off of me." More sounds of cloth and feet as the two men untangled, then "Him too, huh?" It wasn't said with malice, or any kind of interest at all either way, just an observation made and filed. So the sidekicks hadn't reached a consensus of feeling on the subject of Sands after their last little meeting – that might be something fun to work with.

"El says he offered to come." Lorenzo's quote held enough hostility for the both of them, but Fideo didn't bother with an answer, just grabbed a chair across the table.

Oh, yes, definitely fun for the future.

"El also says you didn't go into a whole lot of detail when you put out the call." Sands was growing rapidly bored with the whole male bonding chit-chat deal. "So in the absence of food, how about you fill us in on what exactly we're walking into here?"

Silence of a few seconds, a couple of low rustles, enough for an exchange of looks and some agreement. Seemed like Lorenzo was elected spokesman, and as ever he aimed his voice at El. "That guy you offed the end of last year, he had fingers poking into just about every pie baking in Mexico, and some of his business friends weren't happy to find their arrangements fucked over. They've got prints from you that tell them El Mariachi, but that part they'd already figured. And they've got prints from him that go right along with a face and a name."

It wasn't any kind of surprise. Sands had briefly considered torching Honaker's storage before they left, but they'd still have lifted his prints from the plane or the dump they'd dragged him to in Chiapas, and even that much was only the back-up confirmation for the chit-chat of Honaker's surviving thugs who'd run out early on the party.

Christ, he was starting to feel like El. Kill one guy to get them sliced out of your hair like so much sticky bubblegum, and it only made ten more show up gunning for you. "Would you tell me again just why the fuck we should be back in this cesspit you call a country, El?"

Nobody answered him, not that he'd expected one.

"Far as we can figure, they've still got shit on you, El," Lorenzo said. "Too many rumours to get close to the truth. But some of the questions they asked got answers, and those answers brought them here, on to us. We're just a sideline interest right now, one of a half a dozen tracks they're headed down, but that's gonna change."

"Which makes it first order idiocy for us to walk in the front door," Sands pointed out. "So why exactly are we here?"

There was a pause then, quick, not enough to be a blip on the radar with most people, but there was something in it Sands knew he'd missed. El had interactions with these dicktards that weren't in his repertoire with Sands, a completely different code of wordless signals that didn't involve any kind of sound.

"We can't get to the fuckers," Lorenzo said, the words too fast, a pathetic attempt to cover the gap. "None of us can." He threw in the emphasis hard on that second part when Sands smiled. "We could take a few of them with the right plan, but not all of them, not fast enough before the others could move on us."

Sands was still smiling; he didn't see a reason to stop. "You're making it all a lot more complicated than it needs to be. There'll be an instigator, one behind the group of sheep, whipping up the enthusiasm and prodding the others along with his inspired-sounding plans. Take out the activist with enough of a dramatic flourish, and the rest will get the idea and go home."

"And how do we know who it is?"

"I'll find him for you," Sands said simply. "I take it you already know who some of these people are?"

"We've got a list of names, yeah," Lorenzo said.

"Then it's easy. You just need to know the right people to ask."

"He can do it," El said when Lorenzo didn't answer. "If they're there, he will find them."

"You've got a lot of confidence there, El. Hope you've got something to back it up."

"He found me," El said.

"Yeah." Sands could hear in the bitterness just how far that fact crawled down the kid's throat to get stuck. "Back when he had the whole fucking CIA behind him. Right now he's been in this country maybe two weeks outta the last year and a half."

High, two-toned jangle of a doorbell, classic noir movie style, and that had to be another pretension, like the furniture. No way this house would be older than thirty years or so, built some while after Acapulco had sprawled into the hip place to be.

"That'll be the food." Footsteps as Lorenzo was gone back down the hall, Fideo scraping to his feet and wandering after him. Sands wouldn't be offering to do any fetching and carrying, and El was more than smart enough to stay clear of visitors.

"I get the feeling your friends don't like me much, El," Sands said with a quirked smile.

"That would only matter if you wanted them to." Instant clipped answer, all the tension in the flat speed of the words. So El was already starting to tire of playing mediator for this little game – well, he should have thought about that part before he decided they were coming to stay. Sands lounged into the back of his chair, into the high solidity of the wood along his spine, let his gloved fingers slide slow along the carved contours of the table, a curve still at the edges of his lips.

Lorenzo didn't have anything more to add when he came back to the table, losing himself in the rattle of bags and aluminum scrapes. The hot scents flash-flowed across the table, drowning out wood and furniture polish and El in a wave of tomatoes and garlic with lower undertones of herbs and chilli. At least the smell of it lived up to the kid's advertising.

A slight glitch in the pattern of El's breath, air flowing out a little longer before he drew it back in. Not enough to be real tension, just... a moment.

Sands swung his neck around slow, but he didn't hear anything that broke the mould of the last couple of hours, not from the door and not from where the windows had to be in the external walls. Nothing from the sidekicks, either, not that he'd know their subtle tells, but Lorenzo was scratching at a container casually enough, and the drunk was breathing low and slouched like the bum he was.

Sands uncrossed his ankles, feet flat to the floor, slid his ass nearer the edge of the chair.

"Here, grab this." The kid passed plates down the table via El, and Sands set his dead centre of his square of cutlery, checking with a quick outward sweep of his pinkies. Motion from El's right hand, his left arm unmoving alongside Sands, then the quick, high screech of tines on a plate, so different from the ringing clatter of knife or spoon.

Sands reached for his own fork, sliding it in from the edge of his plate till he hit food; push against the pressure half a fork length, lift against the weight, but the sense of resistance, of something dragging was out of place, the tug on his fork oozing away slow and uneven like something –

Something that fell into place with the mix of smells.

Fucking fideos. The bastard-fucking, beetle-licking Mexican had given him a plate full of fucking noodle 'soup'.

He lifted and angled his head to give Lorenzo the full effect of the glasses and hinted smile for just a second, challenge accepted, donkey-sucker, before he shifted his interest obviously back to his food.

Noodles, right. Some food types were trickier than others, but it wasn't so tough. There was a consistent pattern to it, same as there was to everything - lift the fork against the drag, wait for it to come loose as some of the strands fell away. Twist the fork, three, four times was usually good, tilt and shake a little if it still felt too heavy; he didn't want to be opening wide like a goddamn whale every mouthful, but he didn't want to smear tomato gloop all round his face either. Small amounts worked best.

So much concentration and effort just to goddamn eat without looking like a six year old.

Every fork was assessed slow and careful, measured and balanced against the last. No way was he gonna screw up in front of an interested audience, and the spectators were obvious enough – El would be watching, sure, because El watched everything and Sands liked him that way, but the real giveaway was the absence of any bland hilarity. The kid hadn't managed to keep quiet longer than a minute around El since they'd walked in the door, and now the dinner table was all scratching forks and clinking glasses and eyes.

Sands would have liked an update on some of those eyes. El to Lorenzo, vaguely reproachful probably, nothing too sharp, all too predictable. The real interesting one would be the dipsomariachi – clued up enough to pick up on the issues, obviously, since he was keeping it shut too, but was he taking a side in the table rounds of eyeballing or was he still playing the neutral observer?

Sands lifted and twirled his fork, listening for Fideo, for the liquid slosh that came from that seat more often than the others between the scrapes of metal on plate; feeling for the slide and tug through his fingers, raising the fork higher as the weight dropped back, and El's hand was at his thigh below the table, the quick, deep pressure of two fingertips through his jeans. The signal that said, 'Wait, not yet' when they were close to ambush, and the meaning hadn't changed, only the context.

He wondered if there was anything at all left wrapped round his fork, or just a single lonely strand hanging on by a twisted quirk of gravity.

He tipped and angled the fork back down to the plate to be sure before he pushed back into the pile and this time El's fingers eased away as he rolled it.

The noodles oozed soft over his teeth when he chewed, sliding down his throat in thick, soggy balls at each swallow. He supposed it was good, spices combining into a slow-heated kick at the back of his tongue, but it was a little tough to be fully appreciative of quality when the mechanics of eating sucked all his concentration and he'd been designated the meal's main entertainment.

It didn't matter whether it was good or not - that camel-cunted kid could've laced it with gunpowder and Sands would've been sure to gag down every last greasy strand. Or at least as much of it as was practical, because even people who had eyes looked like idiots chasing the last stunted pasta strands round in circles.

The strained silence with himself as the central attraction was more than irksome; it wasn't going to tell him anything he needed to know. He set his fork down on his finally empty plate and turned to Lorenzo with a faint smile. "Well, that was a truly unexpected treat. So what's next?"

He'd figured for more sniping from Lorenzo, but he got Fideo's input instead, too loud, laced with the supply of spirits. "Yeah, Lori, what else has your sugar mommy cooked up for us this time?"

"Hey, you got that one all fucked up." Lorenzo was just a bit too quick to jump in and defend his reputation for a guy with his back-story. "I figure I pretty much keep her in tips, right along with half her staff."

"The young and pretty half?" El was smiling again, his words rising and falling exaggerated. "Or do their services include cooking too?"

And that was the mariachis off into what seemed to be their usual rhythm, pointed banter fired back and forth like the studied silence of the fideos had never been there. Somewhere through it, Lorenzo unpacked the next course, which turned out to be a perfectly simple, though something above average, chalupa. None of the rest of the food came deliberately booby-trapped, and either eating or El seemed to improve Lorenzo's mood, as the chatter and the joking ran constant and circular around.

Sands stayed back from it while he ate, tracking the back-and-forth conversation of the mariachis - lots of reminiscing, old stories he didn't give a shit about, but he needed to find the nuances, the patterns in the interactions, the way the influences ran between the three. It mattered on a tactical level, who would question plans and who would sign right on the line without eyeing all the small print, but it was also about the threat, the pressure from all the angles, and what might give.

Sands finished eating while the others were still scraping irregularly with forks between all the chatter, and pushed his plate aside to clear the space in front of him. He peeled off his gloves, unholstered one of the Sigs and ejected the mag, pulling back the slide to kick the round from the chamber before he eased it forward off the frame. None of these guns needed cleaning, but it had been a while since he'd handled a Sig, and he wanted to remind his fingers of the habit of the basic strip. Plus, he'd like to demonstrate some degree of competence to these bozos before he started fumbling with the unfamiliar Beretta and made himself look an idiot.

"How d'you know you're not sitting there in full view of the neighbours?" Lorenzo demanded.

Sands tipped the glasses a little his way, and smiled. "I didn't, but you weren't too concerned in the kitchen earlier. I figured you guys might have paid the extra for a little privacy when it was needed, and if not, well, you'd be up on your feet right now and grabbing for the blinds."

"Why should I do shit like that for you? I'm not your fucking servant."

Sands shrugged and turned back to the pistol. "They're not my neighbours." He ran his fingertip over the mechanism and along the barrel, every metal surface flawlessly smooth with the lightest hint of oil. Only what he would have expected when El respected these people's dealings with weapons, but he reassembled it and then checked the second Sig anyway, because it was just good practice.

The oil left a faint grease over his fingertips and the hint of old gunpowder to go with it. Okay, he knew where the kitchen was and there'd be a sink to wash his hands in there somewhere. He was fine with groping just as long as the sidekicks stayed out of his way.

He tucked the gloves under his arm and lifted his chair back to stand in a practiced single motion.

"Bathroom's second right back along the hall." The kid's voice coiled as grudging as ever even when he was being helpful, and Sands smiled tight.

"That will be nice to know, when I decide I need it."

He went to the kitchen, picking up the count of steps from where he'd left off at the dining room door. Knuckles light against the doorframe setting a measure to start from, he walked across the tiles to find the countertop he'd set the pistols on earlier, trailing the back of his hand along it as he walked the room until he hit metal. Easy.

Finding the soap was a little harder, but he tracked it down in a dispensing bottle, something with a lavender scent that lingered on his hands and washed out everything else from his nose. It figured the maid had done the shopping too.

He didn't bother trying to hunt down a towel, just shook his hands off and left them to drip.

Counting back to the dining room was faster, more accurate this time, aided by the conversation and laughter, and he shifted his weight off-centre to lounge against the doorway, deliberately casual and confident. He reached into his jacket for a new pack of smokes, stripping the plastic free and peeling back the foil.

"Don't smoke in my house," Lorenzo snapped. "Go outside."

Sands tapped the end of a cigarette lightly on the carton, then threw the pack over to El, quick rustle and slap as it was caught. "What about El? Can he smoke in your house?"

"He gets kicked out too."

El slipped the pack away in a pocket, and Sands smiled slow. "What's this we've got here? Another reformed addict living in fear of corruption?"

Lorenzo sniffed out air sharp down his nose. "Never touched the fucking things. And neither should he." That last was spoken pointedly in El's direction.

"I'm not going to be earning a living with my voice anymore," El said. His tones could almost have passed as neutral, just a little too much care behind the choice of words.

"Well, I still do."

"I didn't think you earned a living by anything now." Sands waved a hand slow across his body to take in the expanse of the room, the house.

"It's what I do," the kid said. "I like it. So piss off if you're gonna light that thing."

'Don't push too far.' El hadn't had the opportunity to have that particular chat with his sidekicks yet.

He'd let it slide, for tonight.

Sands could retrace his steps to the front door by the route he came in, even if it wasn't the most direct, but what was outside the door beyond the path they'd walked up was all a wonderful shiny mystery. He hadn't used his cane since he got here, and he wasn't starting now, not for standing outside in a Mexican street in full view of fuck knew who. He stuck the smoke between his lips but didn't reach for the lighter, let his smile shape round the filter. "And here I forgot to pack the bug spray. I find mosquitoes strip all the fun out of nicotine." Familiar changing pressure as he spoke, the length of the cigarette wriggling and angling from his mouth almost as good as the drug.

He pushed away from the doorframe, point made. "Well, much as I'd just love to spend an evening kicking back for a pleasant chat with you guys, I believe I have a job to do." He pressed his lips together and curled them towards Lorenzo. "I'll need some basic information to work from. Please tell me this place has some form of internet access."

There was a pause, just long enough for Lorenzo to look to El and get the okay, which was severely fucking irritating. Sands wouldn't get anything done if these people were gonna be double-checking every basic demand before they granted their 'permission'. "Wireless networked, secure, the whole place," Lorenzo told him. "Set yourself up and I'll give you the password."

"I'm already set up."

"Fine." Lorenzo's tone was distinctly piqued, but he coughed up the relevant info, and Sands shifted his attention to direction and distance, to the appearance of effortless as he counted through the doorway and to the stairs. He didn't let himself reach fingers for the banister, for the double-check, till he was damn sure he was out of everybody's line of sight.

At the top, he angled and headed for that first room on the right, slowing as he approached the door, a little wary. He hadn't closed it, and El knew better, but who the fuck knew what those other two morons wandered round their house doing?

His hand found only air and frame, and he circled his arm out wide as he stepped through to make sure the door was still pushed right back against the wall.

The laptop was on the table where he'd set it, the chair undisturbed from its position a hand's breadth out, the checks fast and automatic. He started the machine, background thoughts tracking as it bleeped through its initial routines.

He hoped Lorenzo knew what he was talking about when he said the connection was secure. These guys were shooters, not techs, but they'd got the cash to pay the right man to set them up. Which meant at least one person out there had a way into the system. Hopefully their porn-viewing habits had bored him enough that he'd given up on taking a peek. Sands couldn't imagine Fideo and his tequila-brain finding anyone willing to fuck him the conventional way too often.

He settled in and lit himself that cigarette - he was in his own room, and he'd opened the window a few inches for the cooler evening air. The kid had no excuse to bitch.

He entered the log-in details Lorenzo had given him, dragging in smoke through the seconds of the connection.

The lilting, exaggerated tones rose up from the floor below, carrying easily through the open door; enthusiastic chatter, rushing sentences cutting in over the end of the last, breaking down into massed laughter.

The computer announced itself logged in, and Sands let the smoke slide from between his lips as he considered the subtleties he'd gained on El.

He laughed a little more, the smile in his voice flowing easier than the dry, fire-blackened humour he most often showed to Sands; but he still walked with his feet sliding the barest hint of air above the floor for low impact on singing tile, still reacted and tracked every new hint of sound from outside for that half second before experience wrote it off as harmless. Sands had figured it that way, but it was always nice to have it confirmed. Even here, relaxed with people he entirely trusted, people he read as both safe and competent, El was a killer. He was too much the Mariachi to ever be able to dial it back to plain old peasant Pedro or whoever the fuck it was he'd started out as.

Sands didn't give a shit about the name. El had been aware of Sands' full range of options for a while now, but he stuck with 'Sands' for all uses and occasions, when he bothered to use a name at all, and Sands didn't see any other tag displacing 'El' in his own repertoire. El was El, and anything else was just so much gold plated curlicue drawn across the grenade.

He fired up a search engine, slid in an earphone and started working his way through the list of names Lorenzo had given him. The information he had available through public channels was never going to be interesting enough, but it gave him a place to start. Let him put together a picture of people, left hints of where the dirt was likely to be and what kind suited their palate - the neat, tidy, white-collar financial discrepancies, quick to slide down the throat without gagging, or something a little more hands in the potting clay. Clues on who he should be looking at for the impetus, the power-seeking climber behind it all. The guy who was snapping to take Honaker's place at the top of the pile wouldn't be a shy and retiring type.

It was slow, tedious, and fucking frustrating work. He'd long since learned the internet wasn't quite the friend it had been before (because 'before' never needed qualifying, oh no, even without a capital B, it was the alternative befores that were in need of a tagline), but he still got seriously pissed about the number of sites that weren't even close to compatible with his software - links based in images not words, totally fucked up layouts with overlapping text the voice synth couldn't read when he cut the images out. Local rags in the Spanish-speaking world weren't all on board with the latest disability access guidelines.

Christ, he could use El around for this.

His nose itched where the sweat gathered under the frame, the dampness lying sticky and trapped all along his cheekbones. It had always been like that, from the minute he got off the United jet in Mexico City four years ago, but it had never irritated him like this when he wore the shades by choice, as part of the game. He reached up to rub beneath, pressing with fingertips through the damp, then snatched the glasses away and set them on the table by the laptop.

He could have stripped them off the second he walked through the fucking front door - he'd got no investment hanging on what El's mariachi band thought of him. It was just so much habit now that they lived clinging to his skin like a goddamn Alien face-hugger everywhere outside of the shower and bed.

He pulled up the pages that gave him hits on the next name down the list, settling back while the synth read haltingly through the articles. Boring shit mostly about charity donations, business mergers and share prices, and the pattern of underlying voices from the floor below him was changing - Fideo's deeper foreign tones had died out a while back, probably passed out slumped in his chair, and what was left ran softer, delays between words instead of all scrambled together overlapping. Nobody had laughed during the last couple of minutes.

He'd left it long enough now for the conversation to have turned interesting, and he needed to piss anyway. Nobody had gotten around to telling him where the bathroom was on this floor, so he'd open every door he came across and tap on the walls till he found the small space with the tiles.

The bathroom turned out to be just a couple of doors down the hall, and he left the door open so the voices stayed with him. No words from here, just the sounds and patterns, the broken rhythm of exchanges between El and the kid.

He flushed and washed his hands, walked obviously back along the hallway to his room, then altered his steps to creep onto the stairs as the sounds came into focus, Lorenzo's voice rising with more than just proximity. "Sure, you got bored of wearing the scorpions so now you drag one about with you instead."

"He guards my back."

"That's the best you got?" The bitterness almost burned through the kid's words. "Fuck, El, you don't need a pet psycho for that, we'd do it any time you asked."

"I know." El's voice was low, serious, only Sands' familiarity with the man letting him catch the words.

"But you're trusting your life to a snake, one that strikes blind."

One of those long pauses, the ones that meant El might get around to an answer or he might not. Sometimes the mariachi took a while to make up his own mind which, and when he did talk now it was slow and careful, still figuring out the words. "When Sands dies, it will be because of the choices he made for himself, not because of mine."

"That's it? You'll hand yourself over to a vicious, self-absorbed crazy instead of your friends because you don't want to feel guilty?"

"Don't you think I've done that enough?" Hard note creeping through into El's voice, defensive in most people, more like a warning in him.

"Screw that, I'm starting to think you like it." Lorenzo didn't seem to take warnings too well, from anybody. "This is just another line on the guilt thing you're eating yourself up with right now. If the guy had his eyes, you'd have ditched him the second you took out those fuckers who knew where you lived."

"Maybe." Maybe? Nice to know El was right on deck with lying to his friends - he'd tried kicking Sands out goddamn hard enough the morning after, not giving a shit he was blind. "That might have been part of it once. Not so much now."

Little Lori was definitely pissing on the wrong tree with that angle. When Sands had been at his most pathetic, El had treated him with a determined loathing suitable for a particularly large and iridescent beetle wriggling in the soup, and that didn't leave room for a whole lot else. El's attitude had actually been kind of refreshing after the bubblegum kid's constant, irritating attempts to be helpful, though Sands might have enjoyed provoking him more if he hadn't been spending so much of his time wondering just when the mariachi was finally gonna snap and kill him. By the time El had worked his way around to respecting him, Sands had damn well earned it - there was no space for pity at the Sands-El party.

No, El was keeping him around as the companion without consequence, so he could pass on the whole sackcloth and ashes deal that had headlined so often in his life. But the sidekicks had skipped a lot further down that particular road than any of them probably realised, and it wouldn't take El's actual presence now to have the Mariachi curse swinging the Death-scythe at them.

"So if you don't feel sorry for him, what the hell is it?" Lorenzo demanded. "He's too much of a shit to like and he makes a lousy choice of back-up."

"He's better than you'd think." Something of a smile in El's voice, that almost-buried humour seeping through. "You can't know without seeing him. He's... inventive. And he's fast."

"Fast, huh?" The kid sounded genuinely curious.

"Fast enough." El switched out to steel tones and unshakeable fact. "He's fast, and he's also blind. Don't ever forget that. He acts like he isn't, but you should not."

That quick huff of air from the kid's nose again. "Yeah, the more you talk, the more it just keeps on getting so much fucking better."

"You should be grateful his reactions are good. It's only because of them I was able to stop him from shooting you when you ran into that warehouse."

Oh, yes, the moment when it would all have been so easy. Sands had stilled his finger at El's shout instinctively, before his brain had reconsidered, but El would have felt that extra half second gap and known what it meant.

Right now, the decision was looking like it might have been worth the risk.

Lorenzo sighed. "Fuck it, like it matters, he's here now." His voice dropped and softened, losing the edge. "Just do me one favour, okay?"

"Apart from being here?" El teased.

The kid ignored the baited switch to humour. "Watch your back. Don't trust him."

"You're a bit too late for that," El said, simple fact.

Short pause, and Sands could imagine the kid giving El the Stare. "You're a fucking idiot, you know that?"

"I told myself that sometimes." El was smiling again, the quick humour that flashed twisted through his words. "It didn't seem to help."

"You really trust him? All the way, no doubts?"

"With me, yes." El's answer was immediate, and certain, all the amusement stripped back. Seemed like he flashed though the moods with everyone, not just because Sands pissed him off. "With anybody else...."

"Right, gotcha. That probably works out better when he's staying at your place, not mine."

"He won't harm you." El's degree of confidence on that point was actually kind of irksome, since it was a decision Sands hadn't quite finalised yet.

"Not with a gun, no. He'll just yank on the strings in our heads like he did with yours." Nice to know the kid wasn't buying into it either.

"He couldn't have made me do what I didn't already want," El said.

"Wanted and decided not to, yeah," the kid pointed out.

"You don't ever change your mind?"

El changed his mind all the goddamn time, that was the problem. It was never easy, but he'd sway to the right pressure, and fucking Christ knew all his decisions were driven by some pretty chewed up thinking.

"It wasn't a mistake," El went on, softer now. "Marquez needed to die, in spite of my promise. Carolina would have understood, for our daughter's sake, if not for her own."

"Shit, yeah, she would've flipped and iced the fucker a year before you did," Lorenzo said, affection and humour a neon flash through his voice. "Fine, you had to take the bastard out, I get that. But the rest of it, later, you had to do all that too?"

Another of those El-pauses that stuttered with the careful thought. "Maybe not. But I had to do something."

That was it, right there, the chink, the flaw for the chisel, and now would be a really good time for the kid to ease off. Stop the pressure before El got genuinely pissed, leave him to tick along with that one admission that maybe not every choice he'd made around Sands had been the ideal.

"Okay, you win, I'll take that for now." So the kid knew El more than well enough to catch on too. Sands would have had to admire the skill, if it wasn't set up to deliberately undermine everything he had in mind for himself. "But just... make sure you think around him, okay? Don't let him go poking you into anything."

"That's advice you should probably be giving to yourself."

"I'll work on it if you will," Lorenzo said, the grin laser-bright through the words.

"Deal," El said instantly. "So why don't we prod Fideo awake and get back to the game?"

"Sounds good to me, he'll be an easy mark," Lorenzo smirked. "Hey, droopy, wake up and play the round before we finish off that bottle for you."

That seemed to be the interesting part of the conversation over, and Sands eased his way slow back up to the top of the stairs. It gave him a little something extra to work with, and he wondered how much useful detail he might have missed out on before he tuned in.

It was intriguing that El had opted not to include the tequila-head in the conversation.

He walked into the bedroom, and this time he wrapped leather-clad fingers round the edge of the door, swinging it back behind him to close with a soft click. He stripped off his jacket, letting the cooling air to his body through his shirt - this room had the same aspect as the dining room, so no curious neighbours peering in at the guy with all the holsters - and tossed it onto the nearest bed. Settled himself into the chair and lit another cigarette, trickling the smoke slow and burning through his throat and back into his lungs.

The laptop hummed its low existence from the table, the rush of the fan against the evening's warmth, and he set his earphone in and restarted the last article he'd abandoned. He rolled the cigarette back and forth between thumb and index finger, twirling regular with the run of his thoughts when it wasn't settled at his lips. Words and sentences stuttered heavy and slow into his brain, jagged contrast to the talk and laughter rising smooth from below. Muffled now by the extra door, but the voices still there, the mariachis relapsed into the base pattern of flashing speech that rose and fell with protest and counter-accusation. Fideo a little off-pace, a whole gravel trap of drag against the excitable over-dramatics of the kid, El pouring commentary flowing and even-paced over the both of them, and the computer was reading words into his head that he was tracking only as sounds, not as meaning.

He'd been awake too fucking long.

He wanted El around for this, wanted the words that would keep up with his mind, thoughts and opinions to bounce his own from and balance them. Wanted El leaning in behind with a rush of breath past Sands' ear as he peered at the screen, arms folded across the back of the chair and pressing along Sands' shoulder blades, the close brush of old smoke and fresh gun oil wrapped around the physical presence that flared in his head from across a room.

What he wanted was to fuck El's ass, and hard, hold El's body settled and heaving beneath him, beneath his hands, but he wasn't so sure how El would react to that suggestion right now. He'd run the confrontational route over the sleeping arrangements, but he might just turn head-shy at taking it that way with mariachis two and three on the other side of the walls.

If he had to, Sands would put in the effort to soften him up a little first. He could do a lot with El's cock in his mouth, and once he had his fingers in El's ass, the guy was sold. But it would be better without it, because he really wasn't feeling too patient right now.

His cock was shifting and stretching at the sensation-flashes in his head, and he reached down to rearrange because an erection trapped pointing south wasn't a comfortable thing.

They didn't fuck now as often as they used to. Oh, they still fucked enough, because hey, they were guys and they liked it, but it hadn't been the automatic ending to a day for a while now. Part of that would be the novelty wearing off, because everything got old in the end, even fucking a legend as the finale to a Sahara-style dry season. Some of it was the change of lifestyle that meant they weren't always in bed and awake at the same time, Sands' schedule fixing round the flow of information and ideas as much as the clock. And the rest of it was the change from the lifestyle, because there was just something about being shot at nearly every single goddamn day that made Sands want to fuck his own brains out.

The laptop beeped at him, querying the inactivity, a prelude to sinking into sleep mode, and he reached to tap a random key to keep it awake. So far, he only had one name that supported further investigation, an implausibly smooth character whose questionable business developments got the go-ahead rather too easily from the local planning departments, and whose acquaintances covered an expanded range of social respectability, but he still had a few more on the list to check. The faster he got this shit squeezed through the wringer, the sooner he and El could get the fuck out of this miserable camel spit country and back to a more comfortable lifestyle.

He set the search engine running on the next name down the list, discarding the first entries after half a summary and cursing everybody who'd give their son a name as stupifyingly uninspired as 'Jose Sanchez'. The tenth sounded more promising, and he settled back and let it run. The breeze rippled past him from the window, shifting and rising with the change in temperature, playing over the sweat gathered beneath his arms and along the holster straps.

El's voice carried through from below, and with it the instant jump-and-catch in Sands' head, the mind-shift as his brain adjusted priorities, his ears reaching to separate that one sound from everything beyond it, for words, for mood, for meaning.

The process was so automatic, he only registered it when he stopped to think, to consider how things worked, and right now El was taking up a lot of his thought-time that should be sticking with the business at hand. He wondered if he'd even be able to change it now, if he wanted to. He'd trained himself so deliberately into that awareness of El, where he was, what he thought, what he sensed, and he had no idea if the process was reversible.

He killed the synth voice that droned through the 'phone into his head. He always worked better fixing on one angle at a time; anything else just got in the way of those all-important fine details, and his brain was inclined to centre on a different one for tonight.

He tugged the plastic from his ear, dropping it to the desk with a clatter, and pushed with his feet, rocking his chair onto two legs, his head hanging back over the rest.

The wood caught at the leather of his shoulder holsters as he slouched against it, and he pulled at the straps till the Sigs' weight settled telling and comfortable against his ribs.

Another break in the chatter from below, the soft low noises of town, of distant people and traffic forming his background from the open window. The breeze ruffled beneath his hanging hair to touch cooling at his neck.

Footsteps, base of the stairs, moving his way - El.

The fingers of his left hand were on his shades, gone there instant and unthinking in the half-moment between sound and recognition. He started to lift away, then stopped, the curve of the plastic warm, still damp against his palm.

He curled his fingers round the frame and pushed them in place across his nose, spun the chair to face the door as it opened.

"I was wondering when you'd finally be through with the reunion chit-chat," he said. "You know, you could have been making yourself useful in here instead." Technically it was true, though if El had come earlier it would only have meant Sands getting laid that much sooner.

El hadn't moved from the doorway, even before Sands drawled out the first word - the Mariachi's instincts that had kept him alive over ten years didn't dial down to 'off', not even with a long term lay, just a low simmer setting that kicked into full flame at the first whisper-lick of tension.

El took those extra couple of steps into the room now, neutral and even with his voice. "If you want my help, you only have to say."

Sands didn't ever say. He didn't have to. El just did.

He propped his elbow on the arm of the chair, circled his hand and fingers slow from the wrist. "They're your friends. I don't care what happens to them either way, I'm not going to be begging on their behalf if you don't volunteer."

"I'm not asking you to beg," El said, the words clipped sharper this time, distinct with the gaps between.

Sands gave a twitched half-smile. "Well, that's good. Because you really wouldn't like the results." He uncurled himself onto his feet, took the two strides between them to plant his hands on El's chest, leaning in with weight and momentum. His palms met steel, tension through muscle and body, the moment of instinctive resistance to force before El's brain kicked in and allowed it, his body flowing with the pressure to slam back against that section of wall Sands had found right by the door with no furniture and no annoying pictures hanging in the way. Low grunt of air lost from El's lungs with the impact, and Sands used the sound to steer his lips in, because there were a whole lot of things in Sands' world that got a whole lot better when he had his tongue in El's mouth and El's body pushed up against his own.

El stretched out an arm, hooking the door closed in a swish of air and a harsh slam.

El was the lingering spice of onion and tequila with the heat around Sands' tongue, and the pressure of skin rough and scratching because neither of them had shaved since before they'd left the apartment two flights and twenty hours ago, and that was just fine because Sands was giving it as good as he was taking it, and he wasn't looking for soft or delicate. El's hands were on him, firm through his shirt, pressing him back, the lips under his own moving slower, looser to force a change of pace, and that was predictable, El's attempt to strip the edge off him, ease this down a level, and it wasn't gonna happen, not this time. Sands hooked his fingers deep into muscle, sucked that pouting lip in between his teeth and bit down - not hard enough for blood, because that just tasted lousy, hard enough to pinch and bruise. Hard enough that El's grip on Sands' arms tightened into a burn as he dragged his flesh away, that he sucked in breath fast over Sands' cheek.

There was a moment of only the breathing, heavy, loud from both of them through open mouths. Panting silence, close, and then El's mouth was back on his and entirely with the game-plan, a fast, slick pressure and his fingers still ringing flame above Sands' elbows. Sands leaned in with more of his weight, El trapped against the wall behind, the lines of El's teeth and his own running against his lips under the kiss. Pushed his knee into the gap between El's, rubbing thighs and dicks together through their clothes, and El let the wall hold him, hooked an ankle round Sands' to drag his leg forward and out till Sands was forced to shift his weight or fall.

El wouldn't back off. He knew how it was, the kick of it, unleashing all the bitter anger and tension through the sex. El had fucked Sands that way often enough, and Sands had taken it because it was El, who was as efficient and casual a killer as Sands, and because even through the drive and the bruising fingers, El could be relied on to hold back enough not to cross a line. And mostly because it felt pretty fucking fantastic, and somebody who could push him far and hard enough to make him want it that way was an unusual find.

El lived in the flicker-flash of violence exactly where Sands did, and Sands was willing to let that work for him whichever way. Not the actuality of it aimed in his direction - he knew more than enough about real pain not to go eroticising that shit. But the dark, vicious potential twisting right there on the surface, all reined in check because of the control Sands held tight in his own hands, the control over that other person, that worked his buttons just fine.

El knew it all, knew exactly how this was ending, and he wouldn't back off yet because he knew too how much more satisfying it was to have that someone else push back. All that knowledge and possibility spread against Sands, the stretch of muscle over heaving ribs beneath the shirt, the drive of teeth and tongue under his lips, under his cock as the press of hips returned against him, near-flawless violence and chaos wound through the body of a man who wanted him every way he could take him, and Sands wanted in.

His hand curled at El's neck, holding him while he drew back to leave space between their bodies, the edge of teeth against him, the brush of skin over his nose, fabric crumpling into his palm as he dragged at El's layers keeping him out. Never casually physical any more, not the feeling good and getting off that sex had always been before; the world was sucked into his head through his skin now, flashing through his brain starved and desperate for every scrap of detail, no off-switch outside the dampener of cloth, of gloves. Round, warm, metallic imprint of studs sharp and heavy under his thumb now as he fought open El's jeans, denim rough over the cock stretching and changing for him, moving into his hand as he pressed in and down past snagging, coiling hair and belt-line ring of sweat, damp, warm, sliding.

El's hands pulled at his own clothes in turn, stripping guns and shirt from him with the easy, relentless efficiency El applied to everything, and naked would prove useful later so Sands moved with him while his own fingers hooked and fumbled at the buckle of the holster for that goddamn shotgun. El's touch met his on the leather, reaching to help, and Sands slapped him away, dragging his other hand from El's cock to get the fucking straps off and the clothes with it, pressing his body back to El's, to hair and sweat and heat. El was movement under his hands where everything else was static and safe and dull, once-touched-always-known while the world shifted through its thousand changes around him, and Sands claimed its movement through El, dragged the world's physicality into his own with the rise and stretch of ribs at his palm, the bunch and slide of muscle against his thigh.

One hand at El's jeans pushing down, the other back on his cock, on skin gliding smooth within the curve of his grip, jerking him all the way hard and then some, fast. El's fingers wrapped around Sands', dry and rough over his knuckles, slowing the movement to draw it out, and Sands flicked off the restraint and grabbed El's arm to turn him, pushing him face flat against the wall, hand between his shoulder blades.

El stilled beneath his palm, all easy tension against the wall, and Sands leaned in to scrape teeth down the length of his neck, because El was just a bit too comfortable with this.

The reaction was flawlessly fast, El twisting down, out from under his grip; Sands grabbed low, finding shoulder instead of biceps, pushed his knee to the wall to stop El's predictable sideways slide and hooked his arm around, hauling El upwards by the armpit. El back against the wall but facing outwards again, hands gripping Sands above the elbows to drag him close, breath harsher, its warmth driving heavy on the curve of Sands' cheek below the lens before El pulled him the rest of the way. Lips on his, dry, pushing, scratch of stubble over his skin, and Sands had his hand free to wrap round El's dick again, picking up right where he left off, and his tongue pressed into El's mouth as a bonus to the deal. Flash of tequila snapping across his tastebuds, and fuck, he'd missed that, the rush of it burned into his nose with El's breath, El's body fluid along the length of his own as both of them manoeuvred and slid for the angles, a shifting coil of strength and instinct. Pressure met with its counter, teeth met with teeth, every application of force drawing the equal response before El ultimately tired of the game, of pushing back against this thing he wanted, let his body flow loose and compliant beneath Sands.

El Mariachi stretched bare against the wall, all slack, restless muscle and hard, even breaths, willing for anything Sands chose to do to him.

It was an illusion that would fragment into violence if Sands persisted in anything El didn't want. But Sands knew how to make him want.

He drew El from the wall, guiding him round and back till El's legs met solidity, pushed steady against his chest so El took the hint and dropped onto the bed, thud and creak of mattress under the weight. Sands stepped forward to find that edge and slid himself up the bed alongside, fingers stroking the length of El's body as he moved, hair and skin and scars uneven beneath his calluses from guns and cane.

Sometimes Sands wanted to press El down onto the sheets and fuck him till he stopped ever fighting him. But El wouldn't ever submit completely, and if he would, he'd be boring.

He reached out to sweep the hair back from El's ear, scratch of stubble at his palm as El turned into it. Ran a hand slow along El's ribs and down, leaned over him close, the press of the shades shifting lighter from his nose with the angle. "Not this time," he said, slow, quiet, and curled his fingers into a grip at El's waist and pulled.

El rolled fast with the pressure, easing much of his own weight, curling his legs up as he twisted. His body lifted beneath Sands' hand to settle on all fours, and Sands arched across him, pressed against the length of bone and tight flesh and sweat. "Better," he smiled, stretching to shape the sound of it to El's ear as breath, warmth, felt the bare shiver along the spine beneath him.

He reached for the tube placed earlier on the nightstand between the beds, squeezing gel out cool onto his fingers and smearing it down. One hand settled itself at El's cock again, working him steady and deliberate as other fingers pressed in to lube El's ass ready for him. Not stretching, not loosening, only the basic practical matter of pushing past resistance to get the slick in, because a dry fuck just wasn't any fun.

El hunched slightly beneath him, muscles bunching along spine and thighs where Sands leaned into them, quick, clenching spasm onto his fingers, but he didn't pull away.

Sands supplied El's cock with a little extra flick, rolling fingers damp with lube across the head at the tip of each stroke to keep him hard before he pulled back to add more. One last wet press of nails and knuckles into barely-accepting flesh, then slicking up his own cock, his breath shifting deeper at the quick taste of contact.

El was still and waiting, no twitch through the mattress beneath Sands' knees while he smeared the oily film along himself.

Tube back capped and neat on the nightstand, and he shifted closer into El, more pressure against the inside of hair-curled thighs till El obligingly spread himself wider. Reached out fingertips to rest light between El's shoulder blades. "Lower," he said, tones flat and empty, his hand following the ridge of spine as El flexed down onto his elbows.

He eased forward, resting his weight slow along El's body, one hand dropping to the bed to steady him. "More." Almost a whisper this time, breathed cool onto El's neck between the parted strands of hair, fabric slippery under his palm, the lining of his jacket he'd thrown there earlier, crushed now beneath El as he pushed him down.

El slid his arms up beneath his head, flattened his chest to the sheets and stilled again.

Sands' lips curved soft at the edges as he dropped back onto his knees, freeing his hands to spread El and position his cock. Holding himself against the tightness of it, easing hips forwards, pressing in slow through the long outward rush of El's breath.

They didn't do this often enough for El to find it easy, and Sands liked it that way. His deals were a whole lot more entertaining when the guys on the other end hated him, feared him, and swallowed the baited hooks he offered anyway, the conflict bitter in their voice, stiff in every twitch of muscle. And here, now, El wanted Sands, had wanted it from the second he'd opened that door and known it was going to happen, but the biggest kick was feeling El fight his body to take it. The tension through the shoulders beneath his hands, along the spine arched up against the length of him, the resistance he pushed against, Sands' pressure held steady, not sharp, but uneasing till El forced his flesh to submit, to relax and accept him.

The grip around his cock, the barrier he pushed against, impenetrable and then abruptly gone, his body dropping forward the last inch.

It hit him again, every time, never quite remembering just how fucking amazing this was, hard-on full length into moist and willing flesh.

He trailed a hand up the inside of El's thigh to double-check, his nose not good enough to tell El's horniness from his own, running his fingers over skin still stretched tight around his balls and onto his cock. There were definite advantages to fucking a guy with near-flawless control over his body, used to ignoring and working with pain at a level that made anything Sands gave him a gnat bite.

He slid his hand along El's cock, curling it into his grip when it pressed at his palm, working El as he began to move, jerking him light and fast, because Sands wasn't gonna hold back any and drag this out, but if he was investing his efforts in making El want to stick around, he was at least gonna make sure he got off.

His other hand strayed over El's body while he fucked him, tracing the lines of muscle across his belly, the shifting tensions at his neck with Sands' rhythm on his cock, following the altered planes as El eased and settled slow and moved into him, Sands leaning in to breathe heat across the path of his fingers. El always seemed to be hot for that kind of thing, but more to the point, Sands liked it too – liked the quick shiver of flesh over El's ribs, liked the sweat in his nose and beneath the slide of his fingers, the proof wherever he touched of El's response to him, his influence over each inch of this body.

And goddamn whore-loving Christ, he really liked fucking him, the natural-rising rhythm in his hips with the flare of nerves through his balls, and finally, Jesus, finally, El shuddered and lost it, heaving with broken breaths beneath him, and Sands could let go. Distilled sensation, pure input, no analysis or question, pushing himself into the heat and pressure of another body that moved with him and for him, reaching with him, this one instant when there wasn't anything fucked up in his world, every sense natural and unforced in the driving rush of the need to come.

It lasted till the shakes quit his body and his balls hung soft, and once he would have opened his eyes.

It wasn't the shock it used to be, his mind falling back into a body that was blind. He was long past forgetting; hell, he was past even dreaming it. It was only good to have something left unchanged, the fractional pinpoints of time uncorrupted by the desire to see.

He was sprawled along the sticky arch of El's back, his fingers still clamped round El's left shoulder. He loosened his grip, the curved indent of a nail in El's skin sweeping beneath his fingertip as he straightened, and he wondered if he'd left other marks too, curling red and bruised down to El's collarbone.

He still had his socks on, his feet sliding without resistance over the sheets.

When he pulled out, there was a faint sour smell clinging beneath the lube and come, and Sands wrinkled his nose. "You might have said you weren't clean."

"It wouldn't have stopped you," El said, "and I didn't want you to think I was saying no."

Anything that looked like El was backing out on him would only have pissed him off more.

Sands stripped off his socks, hung a towel from his waist and went to the bathroom to wash his cock.

El followed behind him to clean up too, and Sands brushed his teeth and left him there. He picked out the Sig holsters from the pile on the floor and dropped into the other bed, the one that didn't have sheets smeared with lube and come. And thinking about it, his jacket too – fuck, he'd need to get that cleaned.

El didn't seem so keen on the soiled bed either when he returned, snatching up the other pillow and squeezing in alongside him, though Sands wasn't exactly making an effort to move over and make room. El's head pushed in beside his ear, stray hair draping forwards onto his shoulder.

El had too much hair for sleeping with, or for fucking - it hung limp round his neck and slid forward over his face, and Sands never knew exactly where till it was catching on his fingernails or getting between his lips and the particular piece of skin he was aiming to suck or bite on. But its length added detail to his world-picture too, the low-rustling brush of it over collar as El turned, the swish of an automatic denial he chose not to speak, and Sands would easily trade a minor inconvenience for information, for the knowledge he craved, needed to make his choices.

El wriggled closer into him, pushing a little for more of the bed, light itch of chest hair rubbing against Sands' arm, the angle of a hip pressing into his skin.

There were times when he missed curves and softness. Not that there was anything much wrong with El's general physique, but women were different, and Sands liked them too.

He didn't plan on doing anything about it - even if thinking it didn't give him the creeping twitches all down his spine, a casual fuck wasn't worth risking his life on, no matter how tight the ass or well curved the tits filling his palm, and it probably wasn't worth annoying El over either. Sands wouldn't expect El to pitch him a jealous fit - the arrangement they had going here wasn't exactly steeped in romance - but it would be a potentially literal pain in the ass to kick off the Latin macho trip. He could live without the pissing contest of proving who could outclass who for horniness.

He liked it well enough, the way El's body worked against his, the changing textures of planes and muscles and scars under his fingers, the scratch of hair brushing with the sweat over his skin. He could unleash the sex when it was El in a way he was pretty sure wouldn't work now with a stray fuck, when he'd be just a bit too distracted wondering if he was gonna get stiffed by a knife or a needle instead of fingers or a cock.

It had been a good screw tonight, one of the more inspiring sessions, and Sands had snatched only a few raw hours of sleep hanging around airports over the last day and a half, and he really could be out of it by now. Unfortunately, his day wasn't done with yet, not for either of them, because El should have been right on the edge of sleep, curling into him with slowed breath, arm draping over Sands' stomach. Sands had long since given up on pushing it away. Instead, El lay pressed along him with the hint of tension through his body, the regular, controlled rise and fall of his chest that went with thought.

The air stirred slow over Sands' arms, the sultry remnants of breeze from the still-open window.

El rolled up onto an elbow, one broad finger drifting slow along Sands' shoulder, following the waving path of a strand of hair across his skin. Silent and watching.

So now it was time for all the tedious probing as El tried to figure what had triggered this little session. Sands didn't get off that way so often himself - all that sealed in anger and frustration was more of an El specialty. The Mariachi had obviously never gotten much training in the exercise of patience.

Easier to deflect before El actually made it around to talking.

"You told me he asked." Sands drew the words out slow and flat, and nothing like post-coital. It made a little too much sense when looked at from a certain angle; the lack of a pick-up at the airport, Lorenzo's reaction at the door, the precise phrasing of his words, the silent something that had gone between when Sands asked Lorenzo why they were here.

The finger stopped its trace, sitting still and heavy over his collarbone. "I said he would come and help me if I asked. He would still come even if I didn't."

Well, that was interesting. And pretty much all Sands needed to fuck this fuck-up even more was El deciding to start making clever with words.

"I seem to recall you getting pretty pissy with me one time over the things I wasn't saying. Something about me getting kicked out on my ass on the nearest street corner."

A twitch through the hand at his shoulder and the touch curled a little deeper. "I'm sorry."

"For then or for now? Either way, you're really not."

"I.... This is important. I got them involved in this. Now I have to fix it."

"So the little lies of omission are just fine when you think it's important. Well, I'm glad we got that all cleared up."

"You couldn't have talked me out of coming," El said, the words low and almost reluctant.

Sands knew that. And he would have come anyway, which was the only reason he wasn't considerably more pissed about it, because El's choice of conversational shortcut hadn't changed a thing. But it was useful to steal some of the moral high ground out from under El every now and then; it was a good time to go poking for information. "Well, now that we're in this cosy shithole together, why don't you tell me, El, just how close are you to friend Lori?"

"What do you mean?"

El always could be a little slow to catch a shift in direction. "Well, I don't mean did you fuck him in the ass, because I know you didn't do that kind of thing before you got your hands on mine, so what I mean is exactly what I asked."

"Like you said, he's a friend." El's voice was coloured by puzzlement still, and the inevitable tint of curiosity. "He knows how to handle a gun and how to handle himself, and he can be trusted completely." A pause, before his words softened and dropped. "I don't have so many of those left now."

Every word of it truth on the nail, and none of it telling what Sands was asking. "Such a good friend, yeah, and one you only bother to keep in touch with when there's trouble. Whatever happened to all those calls just to say 'Hi'?"

El shrugged the shoulder he wasn't leaning on, weight shifting beside Sands. "We're busy men, we have our lives." Faint brush of sound and altered angle of the words as El tipped his head. "He sends messages sometimes."

Sands smiled, deliberate. "That's telling phrasing, El - he does, you don't."

"What are you trying to say?"

"I'm thinking maybe there's a reason you don't stick around with your friends, and maybe it's more than you not wanting to take turns playing babysitter for the alco-drain."

The mattress creaked and shivered under him as El settled back onto it, his arm matching up alongside Sands' in layers of muscle and bone.

When he spoke, his voice was pitched to the ceiling, not at Sands. "I promised myself once that I'd keep them out of my life, and then I broke that promise."

Flash of El whispering as he waited in a church confessional, thinking no-one was there to listen, and Sands smiled. "You seem to do that a lot."

"Not a lot, but... it always seems to be the important ones."

"So, our hosts here are good enough friends for you to want to protect them from the curse of El Mariachi," Sands summarised. "Not so good that you actually put what's best for them before what's best for yourself in the end, but good enough that you're still half-trying to keep that promise." He turned his head on the pillow for El's benefit, let the edges of his lips curl upwards, tight. "Sounds to me like you've got some confusion going on in there, El."

"No confusion," El said. "Things change, and sometimes none of the choices are good ones."

"So it's a basic policy of steer clear that alters with the whim of the moment? You run too much of your life that way, El, you're supposed to get past it as you age."

Soft pillow sounds, and El was talking to Sands again, the humour back. "I change my mind too much, I've been told that once already tonight."

Sands gave him a wide, lazy grin. "I didn't think you'd miss me. Clearly Lorenzo did, or he'd have yelled the roof off."

"You weren't so obvious," El said, light. "I don't know how long you were there – I only knew at all because I know you."

"And you didn't stop to tip off your little friend? I'm proud of you, El, that almost counts as deceitful and underhand."

"Like you say, he would have yelled the roof off, and I wasn't in the mood." The humour was still there, but something darker, more like warning, beneath it. "Neither of us had anything to say that you didn't already know."

Well, that was debatable. Oh, most of it he'd guessed or assumed, but sometimes the phrasing of the confirmation added quite a lot. "The brat got the same crap from you I did, that's all I'm interested in," he said, flat. "If he doesn't hold back in his little games after tonight, I certainly won't."

Dip-creak of mattress, transmitted shiver of movement and El's hand touching light at his elbow. "I know you didn't want to come here," he said, words sober and low. "Thank you."

That kind of statement of the obvious didn't need a response, and Sands rolled over onto his side, a more comfortable position squashed into a small space with someone else.

El's hand moved with him, resting still on his arm, but he didn't push closer.

Sands kicked the sheets loose from the corner of the bed. He hated feeling pinned down, enclosed.

The neighbourhood was quiet; no cars, no voices through the drifting minutes, just the air and the cicadas. Always the freaking goddamn cicadas. The town felt un-lived in, but for the bugs. And his pillow was too thin. He pushed at the edges, so it fluffed into more of a hump in the middle.

The way his schedule had been all screwed up the last twenty-four hours, his brain didn't have a fucking clue whether it was night or day out there. He needed to train his melatonin levels to cue into cicadas.

The sleep-anywhere mariachi, of course, was already lapsing into the slower, even breaths of sleep, and Sands resisted the urge to kick him awake. El would only want to talk more, poke through the shit that was bugging at him.

If he had to be awake, his brain ran better without fending off El's curiosities and concerns along the way. Especially when it was El he needed to get the full detail topographic chart on; El and just exactly how the links between him and the sidekicks ran.

Sands had picked up real early in life that he wasn't the same as the people around him, that everyone else he saw was interacting on a level he didn't even have a concept of. He'd watched and studied, and he'd learned that certain behaviours consistently got certain reactions, and that giving the expected responses to the cues allowed him to fit in, to pass as their defined 'normal'. He knew there was a starter path required by society to get what he wanted out of life, so he went through school and snagged his degree with no more than a couple of minor glitches in his record, the kind any smart, bored teenager could rack up.

By then, the act had started to wear kind of frayed-to-threadbare on him - he'd long ago figured out most everyone was a hypocritical jerk when he dug deep enough. If people would be so quick to turn on him if they knew, why the fuck should he even bother with them?

He was the way he was, and if the world didn't like it, well, screw them all.

Through the years of watching, of insinuating himself, of deliberately tuning his own reactions to get the right ones from others, he'd learned exactly how to hook people in, which was enough to keep them around for the couple of weeks or months he might need them. He'd never bothered to learn how to keep someone's attention for longer.

He'd never imagined wanting to.

That was okay, he'd always been a quick study, and like any problem it would be resolved by the application of logic. He only had to work out what it was El wanted, and then give it to him.

Starting from the top of the pile, El wanted his wife and daughter back, but that was somewhat outside Sands' scope and likely to be counterproductive anyway - he didn't see himself fitting in too well with the family reunion. Even if he discovered the secret to godly miracles, he'd probably skip that one. Not that it was relevant either way, because godly miracles would give him back his fucking eyes and then it'd be sayonara Mariachi - though El had turned out to be useful in a number of ways, beyond having eyes, and it might be better to keep him around, just in case.

El had wanted revenge, but the mariachi had scratched that one from the list himself. He could be enticed back into it, as effortlessly as Sands had done before, but El would know exactly what he was doing, and that wasn't the kind of interaction Sands was looking for. And nor was the lifestyle.

El wanted music and books, but he had those perfectly well without Sands. Sands talked with him about them sometimes when the conversations ran that way. Attempts at anything more would look as instantly artificial as they were.

El wanted contact. He'd pushed that all along, right from the time they first screwed, slowly, constantly demanding that extra boot tip beyond where Sands had drawn the line. And Sands had let it keep on sliding because there was no particular downside to it, and he'd found that, blind, he slept better that way. Because touch gave him knowledge from El and about El that he couldn't get any other way, and it was better if all that shit looked like El's plan. But Sands already touched El, in bed and out - it wasn't something that needed thought, it was there, a result of living and interacting so closely and the sensory requirements of Sands' shrunken, restricted world, bounded now by the limits of his hearing instead of the distance given by sight.

He could take those everyday touches and change them, make them less casual, leave them lingering to speak more about El and the physical association between them. But Sands had already discounted sex as a plausible hook to keep the mariachi in the longer term. Sex was something the guy could get anywhere, after all, and with someone who had a nice rack of tits up front and looked just as good without shades. If El was feeling out of practice, Lorenzo could easily give him the run-down on the latest pick-up lines.

Sands couldn't imagine it now; or actually he could, and it made his flesh want to crawl away and tuck itself deep inside his bones. The idea of some stranger's hands moving disconnected and anonymous on his skin, people now the disembodied impressions of words and breath, footsteps and the reaching movements of their arms. Fingers sliding over him with the rest no more than shifting rustles, and no cues to read on where those hands would stray next, without their eyes to tell him what they were thinking and planning....

Not that he'd been able to tell when he could see, that had been proven in a definitively pointed way, and it only made the thought of walking into a bar and choosing someone blind kick-start his gag reflex like a ten inch cock shoved up against his palate.

Of course, paying for sex got you anything you wanted, including no touching, but no point in paying if he could keep better for free.

If.

Sands didn't know what El wanted.

Sands hadn't been a whole lot older when he'd figured out the things he considered exceptional about himself weren't often the qualities other people found appealing, though on balance it was likely El would appreciate one or two of them more than most. El was with him now because fighting back with Sands was better than a miserable existence moping around a pile of dust and graves, and because the slow business tour of foreign climes with Sands, where people actively trying to kill them were an intermittent inconvenience instead of a constant hazard, was a big improvement on both.

El had to be worked on slow, took his time coming round to a change of plan, and that had been an irritation that occasionally made Sands just want to shoot the bastard back when he'd been wasting months of his life sitting around all day in the grit and the sun, but now the inertia was playing entirely in his favour. So long as nothing disturbed the status quo and Sands deflected any better offers that might look like coming El's way, he had some time to work on figuring out the 'want' part.

It had been easy enough to hook El when Sands decided he wanted him around, to draw the man to him in the absence of anyone else. He hadn't even needed to engineer the isolation; El had already done all the hard part for him. But it wasn't enough to hold him indefinitely, not when El had other friends who'd keep in touch, the little sidekicks who hadn't even needed to click their fingers; one cryptic warning call and El had dropped his life and come running. Christ, El's scope was wider even than that, if he ever considered it - he could fit himself in with people anywhere. Clear of Mexico, and anonymous in the life Sands had handed him, he didn't need a killer for a companion.

With most of the women Sands had screwed, it would have been easy. Keep buying them flowers, dinner, jewellery, and they'd stick around to keep taking. But El was no closer to the average sap-mook than Sands was himself, and he didn't have much in the way of reference points from which to interpret a guy who sailed so far out of the shipping lanes. The man he'd first met had been laughably simple, all that rage glittering through so many tight layers of repression, just ready and waiting to be peeled. But El reinvented himself time after time, shifting his whole life right along whenever the currents changed, and it wasn't always easy to follow the flux and know which facet of the man he was dealing with.

Mostly, he liked the fact that El could still sometimes puzzle and intrigue him. Right now, it was proving to be something of a bitch.

The whir of the laptop fan had disappeared a while back as it dropped into sleep mode, and Sands reached out to push the lid closed, tidy and no risk of accidents. Alongside El, that machine was the most vital link he had to his own survival.

The layers of sweat had cooled with the touch of the air, and he was sticky and cramped, his head starting to ache with tiredness while his brain circled restless, his body trapped by the conflicting urges.

He wriggled himself out from El to sit on the edge of the bed, finding the towel he'd folded alongside. Breeze shifted and tickled soft over his reaching fingers, bringing little sound from the night, only the insects in the trees or bushes rustling too close to the house; no people, no activity, no innocent activity that wasn't deliberately trying to lose itself in the background.

He pulled the window shut, locked it with a definitive click, and went to take that shower.