III.
He crumpled up the empty wrapper, a hearty crackle that was more satisfying than the meal it had contained, and dropped it over the side of the bed. It made a muffled landing on the rug. Beef was definitely better than pork, he'd decided. Fortunately, dinner hadn't been pork, but too bad it hadn't been beef, either. His best guess was that it had been chicken, but when it was ground up and stuck into a floury wrap and drowned in something mushy and peppery there was no way to know for sure. And he was too tired to investigate further.
"You missed," El said, from the chair.
"I missed…what?"
"The wastebasket."
He sighed. "One can only miss something if one aims for it in the first place. As a gunfighter, I should think you'd know that."
There was the tick of a fingernail being flicked against a pistol that El had just finished cleaning (sounds of careful friction, aroma of solvent and oil). "As a gunfighter," El said slowly, "I know I would not miss your head from here."
He stretched lazily, forcing himself not to wince at the half-healed wounds in legs and arm. "Oh, now is that really the wisest course of action? You know you'd lose your room deposit."
The chair creaked as El rose. "I paid for a room," he said, and Sands could hear him approaching, his pace deliberate (always was), "with no cockroaches and no rats." He (three steps) stopped beside the bed. The small metal wastebasket in front of the bedside table made a low whanng as it met with the toe of the mariachi's boot.
"And I expect the décor's very tasteful, too. Though of course that's only speculation on my part."
El said nothing.
"Oh, fine. Since you ask so nicely." He rolled over and reached an arm down, immediately finding the wrapper where he'd left it, and (it had come from a little to his right) pitched it accurately into the container. "There. Better?"
El returned to his seat. "Better."
He lay there, idly keeping an ear on the smooth glide of metal against metal as the mariachi reassembled his stripped gun, barrel and slide and magazine. In the vast majority of situations, Sands reflected, what made for more interesting listening was the sounds made by things falling apart. Things being deconstructed, being torn down, being pulled into their component parts. But sometimes…well, there were always exceptions. This was almost soothing.
El cleared his throat warningly, then came the sharp noise of the action being cycled several times in an unloaded gun. Sands' hand was already slipping beneath his pillow for his own weapon, and though he knew what El was doing was just standard procedure, he kept his fingers on the grip until the noises stopped.
Yep, sounded like a working firearm to him. Evidently El thought so, too, because that was definitely him slamming a clip home. Sands relaxed a little.
And then caught himself, because another man's gun being reloaded was never an occasion to be relaxed.
Well, fuck.
Time to go.
If the ceiling was anything worth staring at, not likely in this joint, he probably would have wanted to stare at it. He'd made this same mental catalogue countless times over the past few days, although now it was evident he hadn't been thinking about it often enough.
("Tell me…El, or The, or whatever the hell you've styled yourself…why are you here at all?"
There had been a long silence. He'd thought he wouldn't be getting an answer, in which case, adios mariachi to the accompaniment of a .357 to the head. He'd track him by chains or by breath or by fucking thought all night if he had to.
And then, just as he was calculating how much time he'd have before gunshots brought motel employees running, "Because the boy said you were going to need the money back."
He had not asked again.)
What he had on him: Three bullet holes. He was probably sufficiently healed. Oh, not as much as he would have preferred, but such were circumstances. Those wounds twinged, but by now he could lift objects and walk and chew gum and do all sorts of things. He couldn't see worth piss, of course, but he'd gotten around once, and he could do it again, boys on clattering bicycles or no. His guns were still with him—one on the bedside table, one under his pillow, two under the mattress edges (one per side).
No money, though. The last of what little he'd carried in his wallet had gone to the boy (he'd asked the kid to find him a taxi, and look what he brought back instead. Had he slept through training the day they taught that the Spanish words for "taxi" and "big lug of a humorless mariachi" sounded exactly the same?) and then apparently not to the boy after all and eventually to the doctor. El obviously had some cash, as evidenced by their luxurious digs and cuisine, although then again not so much, because he was sure whatever character quirks the other man had, a fetish for sleeping on rugs probably wasn't one of them. The rest of El's money had allegedly been spirited off to his village.
Newer information: There hadn't been anything useful in the mariachi's case. No spare guns, just lots of ammo he couldn't use. A rifle was handy to have, but there was no way he could drag that thing around all of Mexico without attracting fifty-seven varieties of unwanted attention. Even those who'd forgotten about El Mariachi in the intervening dormant years sure as hell knew all about him, now. And what they didn't know, they made up.
There were the throwing knives, waiting with their blades staggered up-and-down, like fangs. But he wasn't touching those.
Under him, the bedsprings squeaked, just a little.
The opposition: All manner of drug cartels had to be salivating all over their expensive designer shirtfronts at the thought of getting their hands on him. If Barillo hadn't bought it, it would have been Barillo, for his men and for his daughter (she who'd oozed more addictive poison than any merchandise her father ever had wet dreams of dealing in; she who'd oozed her guts out through a hole so big he was sorry he hadn't stayed upright long enough to put a fist through it). But Barillo was dead dead dead, which meant that now it was everybody else. Some of them big dogs, others not so much. But even a pack of chihuahuas made a lot of racket.
The CIA had hung him out to dry. That was the one absolute certainty he had. Someone higher up the food chain had obviously decided that he, Agent Sheldon Jeffrey Sands, was expendable. That the effort to not replace a compromised line was worth more than keeping him whole. An acceptable loss. They'd thrown him, when the chihuahuas hadn't even been in the picture, to the wolves. Going back to them now only meant feeding the hand that stabbed you.
And in conclusion: So. Four guns, limited ammo, no money, cartels howling at his heels and an Agency which at best thought he'd been torn to pieces and at worst were taking action to reassure themselves they'd thought right.
He had some painkillers left. That cheered him, a little. If he hoarded them carefully (not starting right now, though; he could feel headache number Some Big Number creeping in already), he could sell off whatever he didn't use. It wouldn't be fun but, he supposed, you made your own fun. The sporadic bustle of traffic that drifted up from below told him they were near a crossroads, albeit not a large one. Why, he had simply multitudes of places he could go.
Whenever the next opportunity arose. Whenever he was next left alone. Day or night didn't matter much, at least not from his point of view.
The snapping of catches drew his attention. The chair creaked again as its occupant straightened up, and there was the hollow sound of the guitar being settled gently on El's leg.
By now, the ritual of tuning was familiar to Sands, as the guitar was never out of El's hands for very long. He could mentally armchair-quarterback this in his sleep. (Too sharp…still too sharp…ohh, too flat now. What? You're not going to leave it like that, you tone-deaf—oh there you go, good mariachi, have a biscuit.) Too bad he hadn't actually gotten around to de-tuning El's strings this morning—he would've liked to have seen (well, be in the same room with) the look on El's face.
El started playing something he didn't recognize, something slow and leisurely, with an intricate minor-key melody that glided its way down and up the scale.
Before, he'd only given the strumming half an ear. Now that he knew what lay inside, he found himself wondering if all the hardware affected the tone. If you listened carefully enough, could you tell this was not just an instrument of music, but also an instrument of death? Maybe the cartridges chattered among themselves in their holders. Maybe the hidden rifle rumbled to itself in anticipation of its next kill. Maybe the knives, nestled in their bed of velvet, sang their own songs of loss.
And maybe he was just going fucking nuts, trapped too long in a small room with a mariachi (shut that bloody bazouki off!).
The strings brushed their rippling, mellow sounds over the furniture and walls. He'd touched those same strings himself earlier that day, testing their give, charting their variations, feeling their strength. But he'd left them to their silence, taken pains not to play them. That was not, he somehow felt, for him to do.
It was for El to do. El's fingers knew what they were doing, as they pulled living music from dead wood and cold steel and scattered it effortlessly around the room, like gently-released doves. He remembered, with sudden surprise at the clarity of it, how those fingers (guitar-callused, gun-callused) had also touched him. They had changed dressings, washed away blood, replaced cold compresses, pulled up blankets. Held him up, in those first pain-wracked days, to help him choke down tepid bottled water. Supported him when he almost inevitably threw it up again. Had possibly woken him, though he couldn't be entirely sure, from a screaming fever-smothered nightmare or two.
Those occasions had dwindled as he recovered. Now, there was hardly any need for that, and that was just swell by him.
Except.
El's hands coaxed harmonies and chords from the guitar, and the sound shivered through Sands because it had nowhere else to go in this confined space, and neither did he. The piece had altered a little now, the notes ringing deeper. Each one fell, heavy with longing, bass notes hovering near the floor as though they could not lift themselves free. He gritted his teeth against it, but they dragged him down with them, and it was like sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
They murmured of all the endless nights that had been, and all the endless nights to follow. They did not sob or wail their grief; they simply continued to fill the room, liquid spheres of music brimming with time and unshed tears.
Sorrow and regret and desolation rolled over him in waves. They were not his own, and he only peripherally understood their source, but that did not matter. They weighed down his limbs, tides closing over his head. He reached for air against that undertow of awful, raw emptiness, and in the back of his mind wondered, does he even know what he's doing? How does he survive it, or is it like being in the eye of a hurricane?
El stroked the strings tenderly, one last time, and let the lingering notes die away.
Sands took a breath.
El put down his guitar, and said, "This is the last night."