Sands woke in a nasty mood, which improved only a little after he dosed himself with the pills. El chose to ignore him and his acid-blade comments; that might have actively made Sands worse, but silence was his best defence.
Being drawn into argument with this man was too likely to release the resentment that circled in deep river pools inside him, send him spinning in flash-flood.
The nearest Sands became to civilised was his taut demand, "I'm assuming I can rely on you to have bandages."
He did, of course. He'd restocked all those supplies when he'd realised he was going to accept Sands' deal to kill Marquez.
He brought the medical kit from the car, wondered briefly whether to offer his help, and decided against it. He pushed the box against Sands' hand until he gripped it, and then left him to it. He was in the bathroom far too long, but he made a reasonable effort of redressing himself, the bandages over his eyes only a little uneven. El had certainly done worse on himself in the past.
The journey was a repeat of the previous day, with Sands mostly sleeping. El fiddled with the radio, seeking out the changing stations as he drove, keeping it low. He preferred Sands asleep. When he woke, he sometimes talked.
They arrived in Lázaro Cárdenas in the late afternoon, and he drove through to the tourist areas north of the city nearer the beaches. It was harder finding a room here at short notice, but he booked them into a place near the edge of the district, leaving Sands in the car again while he dealt with the desk staff.
He went back out to the car without bothering to check on the room, and pulled the door closed after him with a heavy thunk. "Now are you going to tell me why we're here?"
Sands' lip curved, faint, a comfortable tilt at the edge. He'd been waiting all along for him to ask, El knew, but he was tired of that simplistic game. "Barillo had a vacation house here, out towards Playa Azul. It's officially owned by his cousin, so there's no legal grounds for the police to come poking around it. With all the activity in Culiacán from various branches of the authorities right now, I've a feeling at least part of his operation will have opted to decamp down this way."
El considered that. It was plausible, but not what he'd been hoping for. "That's a poor chance to drive a thousand kilometres for."
Sands reached forward to fish through the glove compartment, bored words and rattling fingertips. "You wanted what I've got. This is it."
He lit another cigarette, and El wound down his window, since Sands didn't.
End of their conversation.
He wondered just how much Sands was holding back, but decided he had little choice other than to go along for now. He had nothing else to work from, and they were already here.
Sands gave him an address, and he called at a bookstore for maps.
"It should be an orange house set back at the apex of a hill," Sands told him as they neared the area. "High wall and gates."
The detail was unexpected, didn't quite fit. "You've been here before?"
"Fuck, no. I saw some surveillance pictures of the place."
"So you know the layout?"
"Only of the buildings, no interiors."
That was better than nothing. He braked a little, checking for numbers and names by the gates of the driveways they passed. They weren't in the town itself, but one of the roads outside it, more space and larger houses.
"Don't slow too much. I don't know what we're driving, but it sounds like the serious heap of shit line of automotive development rather than precision engineering."
"It is." An old Ford was functional enough for him, but it wouldn't meet his passenger's standards.
"I suspected we wouldn't be blending right in with the nice neighbourhood. It's a pity we couldn't pick up my car." Sands rubbed his fingers along the length of his nose below the bandages. "Hell, it was probably stripped out inside a day. Unless Ajedrez made someone a present of it, and it's being driven round Culiacán by some drugged-up greasy turdfucker." His lips thinned right down, and he turned away, towards the window. "Christ, I'd rather it was fucking stripped," he muttered.
El watched, his interest in Sands more than what he said. "It was only a car," he said.
His head jerked, as if to turn back, then stilled. "It was my car," he said, as if that made all the difference, and possibly, to Sands, it did.
It seemed odd to El that Sands could hold so much bitterness over the fate of a car when so much else had been lost.
But then he thought maybe that was the point.
"We're here," he said.
It lay where the road crested, as Sands had described. The house was just visible over the wall, low-sloping roof tilted at various angles, an irregular building with wings. The gate was set mid-way along the length of wall, two ornate metal halves the same height as the stone and watched by cameras. El drove on past, taking in as much as he could in the one sweep, but there was little to note. One quick glimpse of the house through the gates showed a square, two-storey frontage with open gardens lacking in cover.
He turned his attention to the surrounding roads, and the slope of the hills that rose up on the other side of the highway. Somewhere there would be a vantage point that overlooked this house; hopefully it wouldn't be too distant, or too obvious.
He glanced down at the map, open across his knees, mentally marking the location.
He drove around the area a few more times, avoiding passing the house itself again and retracing no routes, learning the local roads and areas of visibility. Most of his attention was outside the car, but the buzzing awareness of Sands seared constant, of his minimal, delicate movements as he smoked and flicked ash through the open window.
The Sands he had met before had used dramatic, expansive gestures, aimed to fill far more space than he did physically. He wondered if what he saw now was the result of pain, or another change forced on the man by his own mental faltering.
The movements of his hands and eyes were automatic as he drove back to the hotel, everything honed to his passenger. But Sands sat still and slightly hunched, giving him little to work from.
The room here was larger than the last one. It was costing him more - only because of what was vacant, not his own choice. He described its basics to Sands, remembering to include the floor, and then called for food, settling onto one of the beds while Sands methodically checked over the room.
Sands told him what he knew of the house as they ate; a roughly U-shaped building with a swimming pool in the courtyard between the arms and a few small outbuildings. He tried to sketch it out, but his words were mismatched with what he drew as he lost track of the lines on the paper. It was a frustrating exercise for both of them that resulted in more ill-temper, a sniping spiral that threatened to curl down into true viciousness. But Sands gathered himself, his head back, drawing in slow air through widened nostrils, and went on with his detailed descriptions.
He had lost the mirror-smooth, reflective surface that El had seen on him before, the flaws that had always lain beneath it exposed now, and brittle. But it seemed he would force the edges back into a ragged semblance for as long as it took to get what he wanted.
By the time the food was gone, El knew as much about the house as Sands did, and too many hours of evening spun out restless ahead of him.
He had discovered long ago that he could be at the same time very tense and very bored. Travelling with Sands, he was finding further extremes of both, still coexisting.
He reached beneath his bed for the guitar case; Sands twitched at the scrape of it over the tiles, his head shifting as El flicked the catches and lifted the false lid.
He sat cross-legged on the bed, with the case open in front of him, and began the long routine of stripping, cleaning, checking. He didn't need to do this - all his guns had been fully prepared before he began tracking Sands - but it was simply habit to run through them before he might use them.
Distinctive snicks and clicks as he unloaded and separated slide and barrel, sharp solvent stink as he prepared a swab, and Sands breathed lighter again across the room.
"So what are you keeping in there anyway?" Sands asked.
He circled the patch in the chamber, ran it along the bore. "Why do you want to know?"
"You're always so suspicious, El. Maybe I'm just curious."
Curious or bored - it was likely Sands was finding this experience just as enthralling as he was himself.
It didn't matter if he told him. Sands wouldn't ever be getting near the case. "For now, two Glock 30s, two P14-45s, and some custom weapons of my own." He liked to get to know the guns he used, their characteristics, their limitations, but he wasn't rigid, and the contents of the case adapted with time and circumstance.
"Why not the G21? Three extra rounds, and you don't have the muzzle velocity loss."
"Sometimes it's better to have a gun you can hide."
"Subtlety, El?" Sands' voice rose in amusement. "Not something I'd have expected from you."
"That's because you know nothing about me." It wasn't as true as he would have liked it to be. But Sands only knew one part of his life, only saw the killer and the vengeance-seeker.
He was still more than that, even now.
"I remember certain sources who turned out to be quite reliable describing you as a 'real nut'. Me, well, I'd say that choice of wording was a little mild, and you deserve an upgrade to at least 'batshit crazy'."
El looked up from the gun in his lap, his fingers still twisting the brush. "Because 'batshit crazy' would be so very different from a wounded blind man who seeks out gunfights in a war zone?"
The pause was there, not quite too long. "You can believe me when I say it wasn't a topping the list kind of choice. I'd have taken another way if anyone had thought to leave me one."
Something beneath the humour felt like an honest response, and he gave his own in return, soft. "And so would I."
The flicker of truth was gone, acid-licked sarcasm back in full drawl. "I don't think the two quite compare."
He worked the brush along the bore, fingers moving by habit and resisting the urge to scrub over the metal. "You know nothing, like I said." Sands had lost his eyes, and effectively his life, in both senses, yes. But he had seen every dream he had torn away in the bullets of one day, so much younger and hopelessly idealistic then, and no-one could say it had shattered him less.
He didn't want to have this conversation; not with Sands, and not with himself.
"Your own choice of guns isn't so subtle," he said. "There were all kinds that day for you to take, and you picked simple force."
Sands laughed, bitter-lined with sounds harsher than his pure mockery. "That wasn't even down to me. That was the kid. Never touched a gun in his life, and he stood there while I killed a guy, and then got right to work stripping the corpse of weapons and just handed them over. I honestly couldn't have asked for a better assistant." He turned his head towards El then, bandages staring white on his skin and his hair. "You won't mind, will you, El, if I tell you this Mexico you're so fond of is one seriously fucked-up hellhole."
The boy at the house - sweet and generous and quick to trust, and completely desensitised to blood and violence. "It isn't the place," he said. "It's a good country. It is only some of the people who make it that way."
"And so you're going to kill them."
"Yes." That wasn't close to all of it, but... children like that were a good reason.
Maybe the family had gone south, to a part of their country that wasn't so controlled by the drugs.
Maybe.
They talked about the guns again as El stripped and cleaned his way through the case, the models they had used, the advantages and the compromises involved in each. It was a safe enough subject to hold back the splintered silences, at least while confined to theory and principles, and El avoided thinking about what he knew of Sands' experience with guns outside a shooting range.
Sands was interested in his customised pieces, and he described the modifications and the reasoning for them, but he wasn't about to put any weapon directly into Sands' hands. Even unloaded. There was a principle to it.
Sands was obviously interested in his slide-arm pistol assembly too, his head angling to catch the sounds when he disengaged the ratchets, but he kept the details of that to himself. Sands could listen all he liked, it wouldn't be enough.
It was finished then, his fingers emptied of all the distractions he could find for them.
His mind balked at the renewed nothing, crawling and itching for something else.
He looked over at Sands, and considered. "Here," he said, and threw the cleaning kit over onto his bed near his hand.
Sands' fingers found it instantly, opened and identified it within seconds. "Thanks," he said, a flat, meaningless use of the word, but El thought he might also be surprised. He doubted Sands would have had the chance to clean them since the Day of the Dead.
He watched with interest as Sands worked through the guns in the bag and from his holsters. For weapons not his own, Sands was remarkably fast and familiar with the pistols, identifying solvent and degreaser and gun oil by smell. He felt a little for the pin on the first M11, and had a couple of false starts before he found the right size of bore brush, but his experience with a range of guns obviously went much further than theory, and El found himself wondering again how long he might survive.
He ran through the process with the second M11, surer this time, standard sequence of wet patches and brushes, more wet patches and then a dry one.
The final patch was still smeared as Sands reached for the oil.
"It's not clean yet," he said.
Sands stilled, his head dipping towards the gun in his lap.
Seconds passed with Sands just sitting as if trying to stare into the gun in his hands, and he realised Sands didn't know whether to believe him. Whether he might be lying, amused by the idea of watching the blind man struggle to clean a gun that didn't need it.
It irritated him that Sands would think that of him.
Sands moved, reaching for another swab and the solvent. "Christ, I'd at least have hoped it was clean to start with. How is it I have to get a gun from the only one of Barillo's bugfuckers who didn't sit around all day rubbing at it like it was his goddamn cock?"
It didn't mean that Sands believed him; only that it was safer to assume he was telling the truth.
He began the routine from the start again, spending longer with the brush this time, twisting it through the barrel over and over. The swabs were clean now after the first two, but Sands continued, mechanically running them through, his face set, and El began to wonder if he would go through his whole supply before he stopped.
"It's fine now." He tried to keep his words to the minimum, to the least intrusive choice of phrase.
This struck him as something so much more basic to have to be told than simply where things were in a room. The furniture Sands would find for himself if he had to, but some things he would only ever be able to guess at.
Sands gave him no direct response, but he put the solvent back in the kit and ran the final dry swab, moving on through the rest of the treatment and reassembly. With all the guns in their original places, he pushed the bag back under the bed, double-checking the handles were tucked away. He took his bottles of pills from the table beside him, and stood, walking unhesitatingly to the bathroom.
Ten minutes later he was back, stripping off his shoes and sliding into his bed, lying with his back to him.
"You should think about sleeping tonight, El. Take it from me, it's not the best of ideas to walk out into a gunfight when your brain's skipping along a track or two behind you."
So Sands had been listening last night, feeling for him through both kinds of darkness, and noting each time he woke that El was too.
He wasn't surprised. It only troubled him that he couldn't say when Sands had been awake.