Chapter Twenty-Two

It's Not Paranoia If They Really Are Out To Get You

Delgado seemed to be leading him toward the ballroom, but before they reached it, they heard shouting ahead. Delgado veered toward the sound, calling the guards forward. Vasquez stayed close behind Delgado, leaving El alone at the back of the pack. He started calculating his chances of falling behind and escaping in whatever chaos was ahead of them.

Vasquez, however, kept a suspicious eye on him, and a handgun in his hand.

Men were still shouting, and leaping through the gardens. A shot was fired, but El thought it had been fired as a warning, or by accident. Considering how many firearms were around this place, there would have been a firefight going on had the guards felt they needed to shoot someone.

"I have him! Help me!" someone yelled. The running men began to converge in the bushes.

"Let go!" yelled a familiar, cranky voice, in English. "Get off me! Let me go, God damn it!"

Struggles and yells continued as Delgado's group neared. A pile of men, four or five, fought to stay on top of Sands, who was face down in the dirt and fighting as if his life depended on it. Impossibly, the agent could actually throw some of them from him in a Herculean display of strength and scrabble a small distance before his attackers had him again. Even pinned, he fought and screamed such that El wondered that his bones did not break.

Delgado strode into the melee. "Agent Sands!" he commanded. "Stop this immediately!"

It made no difference. Sands's screaming took on a hysterical note.

"Señor!" gasped one of the thugs. "I swear we did nothing to him. He went loco and bolted."

"Did you give him the stuff?" Delgado asked.

"Yes!"

"Get the doctor here, now!" Delgado ordered. There was no one free to obey his order, except Vasquez and El. All the other men were holding any part of Sands they could grasp, pinning him in the dirt, and the agent still struggled so successfully that no one dared let go.

With a glance around, Vasquez left.

"Mariachi! Help them," Delgado said.

With visions of Lorenzo's back still fresh in his memory, El reluctantly obeyed. He found a place holding one of Sands's legs, beside three other men.

Even Sands's English grew incoherent, to El's hearing, and the man's mouth was half in the dirt. But the tone was clear to El. Sands was not merely angry, he was terrified.

The young man who had coolly treated El's own injuries hurried in, accompanied by another man in a white coat, one of the men whom El had just left with Lorenzo. The doctor had a ready hypodermic in his hand and he shouldered into the crowd.

"Hold him," he said, which earned him some exasperated looks from the guards who had been struggling to do just that for the last five minutes.

The doctor found his target and injected his patient.

Sands howled, "What are you doing to me?!" and then slowly went limp.

Having no stake in whether Sands was faking or not, El released him immediately. He disliked being used to subdue a fellow prisoner, even Sands. The other guards were more cautious, but slowly they came off of him, wiping dirt and sweat from their clothes and faces. Vasquez returned, bringing a pair of handcuffs. He cuffed Sands's hands behind his back and rolled the agent onto his back. Sands's sunglasses were gone, and his red eye sockets looked up into a leafy bush. Dirt plastered one side of his bruised face, and was probably in one empty socket, too.

"You may return to your posts," Delgado said to the guards, without taking his frowning gaze from Sands. To the doctor, he said, "We tested the new powder on him. I must know; did the cocaine cause this? Is the merchandise defective?"

The doctor knelt down beside Sands and examined him with a stethoscope and with his hands.

"We should test the powder in the lab," the doctor finally answered, "but I don't think it is necessarily defective. This was bound to happen. Sands has been a heavy user for some time. He should begin to experience paranoia, possibly extreme paranoia and delusions. This man may burn out on you before long, Señor."

"I was okay," Sands spoke in a slurred voice. Everyone looked at him, startled. "Until someone dropped that house on my sister."

"I gave him enough tranquilizer to knock out a cow," the doctor protested.

El suppressed a grin.

"The flying cow," Sands muttered. "The last time someone stuck me with a needle. I really hate that."

"So," Delgado said, straightening, "we may have given him very pure stuff. He got too much?"

"It's possible. I'd give him smaller doses in the future, to be safe. And watch him. He may grow irrational."

How could you tell? El wondered, but he regarded the American with a sense of apprehension that felt strangely like worry. Delgado wouldn't bother with Sands if he thought the agent was no longer a dependable source of information and scheming. One way or the other, Sands was running out of time.