Chapter Twenty-Nine
Inferno
Relief flooded El, forcing him to take a moment to just breathe. Then he moved to gather the weapons Sands had thrown down the slight slope behind the septic pool, alert to any sounds or movement. The huge bonfires from the propane tanks, sparks leaping to catch in the scrub brush, were bound to attract the attention of anyone left to notice.
Abruptly the floodlights went out, plunging this back area of the estate into a darkness lit only by the leaping flames. Instinctively, El dived for the ground, which saved his life as automatic fire peppered the air where he had been. Rolling, El fired back into the shadows beyond the utility building, up onto the hillside where he and Lorenzo had crouched before. He ceased firing but continued rolling, so as not to be where he had fired from.
El raised his head to look, but the sudden darkness still had him almost blind. Sands he could make out as a dark form against the lighter bricks of the back of the building. The agent had taken cover around the corner, on El's side, but the gunfire had not been aimed at Sands.
Stillness, but for the roaring flames.
El didn't know where to shoot, but neither did his attacker. Sands's position made El uneasy, too. If Sands believed their assailant to be Delgado, would he be able to resist acting on Delgado's behalf in hopes of a reward? Sands knew where El was, El had no doubt, and could easily shoot him.
El's anxiety climbed as their attacker confirmed his identity with a shout.
"Mariachi!" Delgado yelled from somewhere on the hill.
El considered shooting Sands himself, as a precaution against betrayal, but having asked the man to trust him, he couldn't do it.
"You'll never . . ." Delgado began an imperious speech.
Sands reached around the corner, exposing nothing more than his gun hand, and fired two shots into the darkness. Delgado said nothing more.
It could be a trick. It was hard to believe Sands's shooting could be so accurate, though El had not forgotten how Sands had targeted Lorenzo from only the young mariachi's yell. And the sudden darkness made no difference to the agent.
El lay unmoving, but Sands showed no such caution. The agent leaped out of cover, bent over low, and vanished into the darkness, toward Delgado. El cursed and followed.
His eyes adjusted as he crossed the concrete between the utility building and the septic pit, and the nearness of the flaming tanks also helped him spy Sands and a prone form up in the brush.
"God damn it!" Sands yelled.
The lights came on again, as someone tripped a motion sensor. El muttered another oath as his eyes struggled yet again to adjust. He reached Sands and Delgado still squinting.
Sands, swearing curses in English El had never heard before, tore feverishly at Delgado's clothing, searching.
"I can't believe you shot him," El said, truly impressed that Sands could turn on the man who had owned him, body and soul.
"Of course I shot him; he has my dope," Sands said, his voice gaining a hysterical edge. "Except he didn't fucking bring it! It's not here!"
El's skin crawled as he remembered Sands's loyalty was not to a person, but to one overriding goal. And now El had the only source of it.
Of course I shot him . . .
Delgado was gut-shot, and it hadn't yet killed him. He opened his eyes.
"He brought the fucking jewels!" Sands pulled a black velvet drawstring bag out of Delgado's pocket and threw it angrily aside. "He brought the key to the fucking tunnel!" He pulled out a key-card and shoved it in his own jeans pocket. "But he didn't bring my dope!" This last he almost screamed.
Tunnel? Jewels? El picked up the little bag. "Sands," he said, "he's not dead."
"Good!" the agent yelled, getting to his feet. "Help me with him." With strength born of his fury, Sands hauled Delgado down the hill, toward the building.
"Wait! The fire!" El called after him. Unburned fuel was spreading from the propane tanks over the concrete walkways, luring greedy flames with it.
"Fuck the fire!" answered Sands. He avoided the licking tongues himself, but dragged Delgado right through them.
El followed, not helping. Sands didn't seem to need it, and he wasn't sure what the man was doing. Delgado left a trail of blood where he passed.
Panting and perspiring, Sands hauled the terrified looking drug lord to the still-charged septic pit. He stopped at its edge - how the blind man kept such accurate track of the terrain, El couldn't guess.
"I just wish," Sands snarled in a voice that made El's hair stand up, "that I could see you fry." With a last gasp of effort, Sands kicked Delgado into the pit, falling backwards onto the concrete as his strength gave out.
The electricity combined with the chemicals made an eerie greenish effect over Delgado's body that hadn't been there for Tomas. Delgado rolled slowly in the sewage, his face and mouth frozen in a grimace of agony. Finally he stopped rolling and floated, face down, just below the surface of the liquid.
Flames of burning fuel licked ever closer to El and Sands, but El ignored them, caught in the dark beauty of the moment. This could be how Satan felt as he witnessed the agonies of the wicked.
El looked at the exhausted devil collapsed at his feet. "I bet that felt good," El said.
Sands gasped an indeterminate sound. "I forgot . . . to strip him . . . naked," he said.
Smiling felt foreign to El's face as he reached down and removed the gun Sands had stuck in his waistband. "I can't let you keep this," he said gently.
Sands grabbed his arm, and El tensed for a struggle over the weapon. But Sands merely held on. Firelight made hellish shadows flicker over the man's deathly-pale face and dark glasses. "Fuck . . . God, El," he said, sounding more vulnerable than El had heard him sound, even when he had moaned in their cell over his lost nightcap. And, in fact, he probably was more afraid now, El realized. Then he had had a known source he could still bargain with. "Please tell me . . . you weren't lying."
"Let me have the gun," El said.
Trembling, Sands released his arm.
"I wasn't lying."