He didn't sleep that night either.
Sands had nightmares. El sat, listening to the shifting of body and sheets, the soft, hunted sounds, and did nothing. There were better reasons to get shot.
Sands was as trusting as he was, sleeping clothed with guns beneath the pillows. He had no illusions Sands would be sleeping at all, if it wasn't for the drugs and the demands on the body of blood loss and healing.
He was better off asleep anyway. Awake, the dreams would be remembered, and real; if he slept through, they would be gone. Though he suspected Sands always remembered these particular nightmares far too well.
The hours shuddered through unevenly; pieces of sprawling time spent just studying the man, his breathing, his movements, seeking the clues that would tell him whether the image of sleep was a lie; fragments of hours that slipped away from him, chasing his own thoughts, his own doubts.
He found no more answers.
Sands revealed himself officially awake just after seven-thirty, taking the medical box into the bathroom and running the shower. El used the opportunity to slip out and fetch coffee and breakfast, the sleepy-eyed man at the desk directing him to a place along the street.
Sands was still in the bathroom when he returned, and for some considerable time after. He came out surrounded by steam and that unshakeable antiseptic stink. He had shaved, removing the last two days' growth down to uniform smoothness, and El could see no marks of error on his skin.
That explained what took so long.
"I brought you breakfast," he said. "It's on the table."
Sands felt his way over the surface and found the coffee cup there, tasting it cautiously. "It's cold."
"So next time you want me to wait on you, you will let me know when."
Twitch of muscle before the reply in the inevitable provoking drawl. "I don't remember asking to be waited on, but I doubt you'd go for my suggestions of a good restaurant."
El watched, with narrowed eyes. "And you are so eager to be seen? You were hiding very well on your own before I came."
He smiled, a quick, even curve of lips. "Different city, different rules. No-one's looking for me here."
Sands didn't believe it was that easy. He wasn't so stupid, or at least not any more. He was disagreeing only to annoy him - it fitted with the way he'd acted ever since he'd met him.
Or maybe that consistency was really the point - maybe he was trying to cling to the bitter-sharp fragments of that untouchable mirror he'd believed in.
Maybe he was desperate enough to lie to himself, as well as to El.
He let his head drop, his hair swinging forwards to blinker his vision. So many thoughts, so many speculations, and he had no real idea how close he was to the truth with any of them.
It was confining, claustrophobic, Sands' ever-presence a choking strain after less than two days. The man poisoned the very air around him, and he drew the taste of it over his tongue with every breath, until it strangled him in his own misgivings.
Leaving the room for the car and Playa Azul felt less like a purpose than escape.
He had a fairly good idea of where he wanted to be, after his observations the day before. The first road he tried was a failure - too many trees breaking line of sight before it curled around the edge of a hill. The second gave him his spot. Not quite ideal, his angle on the house leaving one corner of courtyard out of view, but he was unlikely to find better.
He parked the car under trees a few hundred metres away. It would be seen only by people using this road up into the foothills, and it would stay a little cooler, which he was going to appreciate later. He took the guitar case, binoculars and water from the trunk, and settled in to watch, resting his forearm along the guitar case as he scanned around with the other hand. Binoculars were more comfortable for long use than a scope, and a lot easier to explain if he was seen.
The day was heavily clouded, but already the temperatures climbed towards the predicted twenty-nine. That suited him - little sunlight to reflect and reveal, more than warm enough to bring these people out into his view.
The wall encircled the house as Sands had described, just over two metres in height and unchanging. He found cameras like the ones at the gate as he worked along it, some just as large and obvious; but there were others too, smaller and partially obscured by vegetation. He found more of that second kind when he checked the house beneath the eaves and the plant that had been trained over sections of its walls.
It made him wonder how many more he was missing.
Everything about the house was perfect - no crumbling stucco along the wall, heavy shutters hinged straight, solid panelled doors either new or kept to look that way. The courtyard was stone paved with no weeds straggling between, the pool blue-tiled and leafless despite the climbing plants around it. He could see little of the house interior, dark against even the clouded light, the rooms deep beyond the windows. What he did see fit with the wealth of the house and its neighbours - good furniture, large flat-screen TV, all of it pristine like the outside.
He half-sprawled across the earth and watched, barely aware of the heat, of the sweat already starting to cling.
This was the one time he found ease in stillness, no impatience in inactivity when it was so much a part of what he did, no boredom in restraint while his attention scanned the house and his mind ran through scenarios, approaches, possibilities. It absorbed every sense of him, a strange kind of peace with no place for his near-constant doubts.
He waited almost two hours before he saw people. A man and a woman, both perhaps mid-thirties came to sit in the chairs by the pool, clothes light for the heat, casual, but styled in a way that spoke of expense. The door they left the house through was wide, and the way it moved meant solidity, weight. He was too distant to see clearly, even with the binoculars, but there was a suggestion of a lot of metal, of heavy locks.
They read through several different newspapers while they sat, the woman moving on to a book when they were done, the man simply resting. He went back inside for drinks a while later, and for food some time after that, no sign at any point of staff to do those things for them. They stayed by the pool, alternately lazing and swimming, just the two of them until the early afternoon when the visitors came.
There must have been some sort of signal from the gate, and a remote way of opening it, because they walked through from the front of the house, obviously known and expected. Two men this time, one noticeably older. They stayed for half an hour, talking with drinks, civilised and overtly friendly.
He tracked the car as it left the house, coming into sight from beyond the walls at the front; a sedan with dark glass, expensive but not flashily distinctive. He followed it a short way, but lost it among the houses and trees as it descended towards the coast.
He turned his attention back to the house just in time to see the door closing as they went back inside, and he lowered his binoculars thoughtfully.
There was money here, and all the trappings of people with time and the need to be entertained through their boredom. There was security, the kind used by people with something to hide, but there were no bodyguards lurking just in sight, no men in suits with poorly-hidden weapons. And maybe that would be the case with a broken cartel who had split and run to hide, who wanted to attract no attention to a distant bolthole, but...
Something was wrong. Whoever these people were, they didn't smell like cartel.
He took his binoculars and his guitar case back to the car, and drove away from Playa Azul.
He turned off the 200 well before the city, and headed further out into the hills.
He stopped the car some distance along a mining road, taking out his shotgun and firing off rounds, methodically reloading and emptying the barrels into the earth until he stank of gunpowder. He collected the spent cartridges and kicked dirt over the marked soil. Then he drove back to the hotel.
Sands was sitting in the chair, facing the door when he opened it. El didn't see the gun, but he knew it had been there a moment before.
"Welcome back," Sands said. His tone and his body language read casual indifference, but there was tension seeping beneath. "Interesting day?"
"Not particularly." He let his voice drop and flatten, easy to find the hatred. "They died very easily."
Sands curled his lips into one of his slow, tight smiles, already becoming familiar. "Well, that does sound successful, if a little low in entertainment value."
Sands had thought he would be so stupidly fooled, that he would do as he was told like a dog. He watched Sands smile, and the anger thickened inside him as it waited.
"I'm going to take a shower," he said, and walked away into the bathroom, shutting the door carefully.
He could shoot Sands any time he wanted, or simply beat the man unconscious. Neither approach would get him his answers. But nor would Sands alert and armed.
So he would change that.
El had too much experience of gunshot wounds. He knew the drugs, the amount that would take the edge off his pain and still leave him functional, the amount that would turn the world into a haze of uncertain impressions and vanishing time.
He washed away the sweat and gunpowder stink in soap and water and heat, but his tension only condensed into something harder.
He collected the opiates later, while Sands was in the bathroom, taking four from the bottle on the table. He broke open the capsules, pouring the powder into an emptied pill bottle from his medical supplies in the car.
He went out for food, and he ordered the coffee strong, bitter to hide the taste of the drug.
He squashed the quick pang of guilt at tricking a blind man, stamping it down, sodden, into the currents of anger to fragment. Sands deserved far more than what El was doing to him.
He drank his own coffee, fast, equally bitter, as he walked back to the hotel; he was missing sleep, and needed to stay sharp, alert. The ocean prickled at his nose with each breath, salt bite between the spikes of coffee.
He put the cup on the table beside Sands, letting it scrape across the wood, and Sands' fingers crept towards it, a little cautiously.
Sands sipped at his coffee and his face twisted in distaste. "Christ, El, you may be taking the sleep deprivation trip, but that's no reason to poison the both of us. You can just order mine regular next time, thanks."
He had an unpleasant moment when he thought he had misjudged, that Sands would refuse to drink it - but he poured three sugars into the cup, stirring idly, and drank again, and he was able to let the tension simmer low, and stretch along his bed to wait.
He watched Sands eat, quietly for once, and he wondered what evil he was plotting now, to keep him so silent and distracted. He ate some of his own food, but it sat in his stomach, greasy and sickening, and he pushed it aside.
Sands smoked his way lazily through a cigarette, ground it into the ashtray by his elbow and lit another.
El didn't mind the tug and tempt of the smoke - it was another edge to add to the ones he harboured, another focus through the scratching non-patience.
Sands began to curl more into the shape of the chair, his head angling, his ear sliding down towards his shoulder. El kept a close watch on the cigarette that hung from his fingers in a slender coil of grey.
He switched on the television, flipping through the channels until he found an action movie, unpredictably noisy and disorientating.
Sands abruptly stiffened, and raised his head.
There was a moment when El could see the thoughts flicker around him, when it was oh so very clear that it was all about to fall apart, and then Sands had a silenced .38 in his hand and put four rounds whisper-fast into El's bed, where he'd just been.
Where he wasn't any more, because he was across the room and grabbing Sands' wrist, twisting it away from him until his fingers spasmed and he dropped the gun, retching gasp low under the hollow clatter. Sands was reaching to his other holster and finding it empty, because that gun was already in El's hand. "Bastardfucker!" His fist and his foot shot out at the same time, El sidestepping both and arcing on behind the chair, still gripping his wrist and jerking it around with him.
"Stop," he said, pressing the barrel of Sands' own pistol up tight under his jaw, and Sands stilled instantly.
El breathed out slowly. He wouldn't have liked to try that sequence of moves without some assistance from the drugs, not with someone as paranoid and reactive as Sands. As it was, he hadn't been slowed as much as he'd hoped, and El watched and felt every inch of him.
He didn't believe this was where it ended.
Normally he would look in the eyes, to see if a man was going to move.
He tugged Sands' arm up behind the chair a little further. "Now you are going to tell me what today was all about," he said, low and slow, letting Sands' shocked and dizzied mind absorb the threat.
Sands took a single long, careful breath. The crazed, furious man who had yelled and lashed out moments before was gone so fast, leaving one who appeared quiet, calm, but El felt the movement in his throat as he swallowed, carried through the barrel of the gun.
"So did you figure it out before or after you killed them?" Sands asked.
"Before, or you would be dead now." Stripped, raw truth.
El didn't like this position, twisting around to catch Sands' profile, shadowed by the lamps behind. He wanted to see more of Sands' face, to gauge some idea of reaction, of what was truth and what wasn't. Even with the drugs dulling his thoughts, he had no illusions Sands would lean towards honesty.
"I'm going to release your arm now," he said. "I'm going to walk around in front of this chair, and you are not going to move, because if you do, I will shoot you. Do you understand that?"
"Sure do, El," Sands answered instantly, "and I'm happy to play along, because I'd really like to have my arm back while I've still got one that works."
El wondered how much effort it was taking to keep himself focussed for this, or if the opiates had slowed his mind as sparingly as they had his body. Either way, he wouldn't be making any assumptions about Sands' compliance.
Sands would have done better to act drugged. He was surprised that he hadn't.
Or maybe he was too close to that edge of control to fake being without it.
He let go of Sands' wrist and stepped in closer, half-expecting Sands to push himself and the chair over backwards at him - but he stayed completely still, his right arm hanging loose by his side.
He circled around the chair, always keeping the silencer right there under Sands' chin. In some ways, it wasn't a good position; a man with a gun up against him could attack and make a grab for it. But he didn't know how much Sands' drugged mind was being concentrated by that circle of pressure on his skin, suspected Sands would be more likely to fight him if he couldn't feel the gun was there.
"The house does not belong to Barillo. So who are those people?"
"Old friends of mine." No hesitation, no proof of drugs slowing his thinking.
"What did you think would happen? Did you hope they would kill me, and help you out?"
"No, you braindead fucker, I hoped you'd kill them and save me the trouble."
The way Sands spoke, the irritation seeping through his words, El had no doubt that this much at least was the truth; and the anger that had been deepening and twisting through the hours as it waited was right there. Not the sharp temper that flared and subsided, but the coiled, slow-smoulder compulsion that drove him on through weeks and months, needful and wanted.
He bent lower, closer to the man in the chair. "You think you can point me at your enemies, make me your assassin?" The hate spoke quiet and low, familiar. "You think you can give orders and have me kill on command?"
Sands didn't react to the change, still holding himself carefully, but no overt fear. "You were perfectly happy to use me when I was running low on options, El. I felt a little quid pro quo was pretty much in with the deal."
El sucked in a tight breath, and stilled. He'd intended to do whatever it took to manipulate Sands into helping him, yes. He had only disregarded, in his eagerness to get out and do something, that Sands out-classed him in the game.
He pressed the gun barrel harder beneath his chin, forcing his head to tilt. "You're no use to me if I can't trust your information. Give me a reason why I shouldn't shoot you."
Sands smiled up at him, lazy and confident. "I don't have to. You're a man who needs a reason to shoot people, El. I'm the one who needs a reason not to."
El said nothing. He wasn't going to shoot a man who was blind and drugged, and he had no leverage when Sands knew it too.
But he would enjoy hitting him. Not just for today, but for all of it; for all the remarks Sands had stabbed him with, for dragging his life back down to this, for the other lives Sands had used and ruined and murdered.
He uncurled his finger from the trigger, the silencer still held taut against skin. His other hand drew back, and he lashed his fist forward below Sands' cheekbone.
Sands' head snapped sideways, unable to brace for a blow he couldn't see coming, and he went wild.
His left hand seized El by the wrist, and he kicked out with both feet, one heel catching him hard on the knee, pained hiss sucking his lungs of oxygen. He kicked again, aiming for the same spot, El barely managing to dodge it while his wrist was still held, and Sands' right hand was up and grabbing for the gun beneath his chin. El punched him again, harder, skin parting over his knuckles, and took the second of Sands' instinctive flinch back to flick his wrist and send the gun skittering across the room out of reach.
If he hadn't taken his finger from the trigger, Sands would have had his brains blown out with that first crazy lunge.
Sands still clung to his wrist, dragging and twisting now as El slid sideways to avoid the boot coming at his gut, and El hit him again, throwing his whole body weight forward behind it, ignoring the heel that smashed sharp edges into his thigh. The chair went over backwards taking both of them with it, El using his momentum to dive over the top as they fell, jagged, wrenching pain at his shoulder before Sands finally let go of his wrist when wood and bone met tiles with a vicious crack.
He swung around, crouched on his feet, and found Sands rolling clear of the chair onto his back, blood streaking all across his cheek from his mouth. El threw himself over him, grabbing and pinning his right arm to the floor, cold and sharp on bruised knuckles. Sands' knee came up hard, and he shifted to take it on his hip instead of his groin. He dropped down onto Sands, holding him with his bodyweight so it didn't happen again, and Sands slithered and jerked beneath him in an effort to dislodge, all of it silent except for their panting breaths and the constant harsh rattle of TV gunfire, neither wasting energy on words or threats.
Sands' injuries should have been screaming at him by now; he should have been incapable of prolonging an attack like this, and El began to appreciate the drawbacks to drugging him with opiates as he waited for him to give up.
But Sands had his left hand forced between them, wriggling fingers just below waist level as they struggled, snag of adrenaline vivid-bright all through him and he knew there had to be something else, something he hadn't allowed for; something there, something hard, familiar, and fuck, he had a gun, and El had known he wasn't unarmed when he walked into that room at the boy's house, and the M11 beneath the chair hadn't been it, because Sands would always have a weapon on him and fuck it, he should have guessed. But while the gun was jammed close between their bodies, Sands couldn't turn it to fire, and he hooked his feet around Sands', pressing his weight down tighter against him, praying that Sands wasn't crazy enough to just shoot and let them both take their chances.
Sands locked his upper body taut beneath him, and El jerked his head aside barely in time to catch Sands' forehead vicious along his jaw instead of having his nose shattered, and he had really fucking had enough of this shit. He drew his arm back tight behind him, ignoring the flare rammed through his shoulder, and brought the heel of his palm down hard above Sands' left elbow, all the force he had from that angle direct onto that healing gunshot wound. Sands choked out air past teeth that shivered and clenched, and the fingers between them twitched; he hit him again just the same, and the muscles shuddered all through his arm; a third time, and El flexed his body, pushed off with the hand that held Sands' right wrist to the floor and rolled them through a complete circle.
The smallest .38 he had ever seen slid and clattered over the floor, spinning to a lazy halt by the nearest bed.
"So what now, eh, Agent Sands?" El yelled down at him, still holding him pinned, tiles pressing harsh against his fingers and knees. "What're you going to do now, fucker?"
Sands went slack then, loose and still beneath his hands, the fight gone from his face as much as from his body. "You go right ahead, El." He smiled, odd with barely-parted lips, blood fresh and bright around his teeth. "Whatever you have in mind, I'll have had worse days."
The words wrenched him, flashing heave of nausea, and he sat back fast, releasing Sands.
He was a killer, but he was no torturer.
He scrambled backwards until he felt the wall up against him, watching Sands the whole way, wondering if he would take this chance to attack again.
Sands sat up slowly, stiff with obvious pain. He felt around him, his hands sweeping a circle over the floor, tilting his head when he found nothing.
El realised he'd lost his bearings during the fight, all his meticulously acquired knowledge of the room useless now because he didn't know where he was.
He started to push himself upwards, face twisting hard as he brought his left leg beneath him. He settled back to sitting and shifted across the floor instead, away from El, one hand groping carefully behind him. He missed that tiny silver pistol he'd been hiding by less than half a metre, finally stopping his crawl when he found himself against a bed.
El sat, listening to Sands' short, panting breaths, watching him tug the corner of a sheet free and use it to wipe the worst of the blood from his mouth so that he no longer dripped frothy red saliva onto the tiles.
He groped for and lit one of his cigarettes, swearing when his left arm wouldn't hold steady and his fingers dipped into the flame.
The smoke drifted towards El with the breeze from the open window, acrid and bitter, and wholly tempting.
Something big exploded in slow-motion from the TV speakers, morphing into the sustained roar of fire.
At least no-one would be wondering about the noise.
"Why do you hate those people so much?" he asked finally.
Sands' lips twisted, brief half-familiar smirk collapsing into a wince. "Have you ever thought your focus may be a little too narrow, El? There are bad guys out there who have nothing to do with drugs."
"I know." El made no attempt to hide the bitterness. "I'm sitting here with one."
Sands laughed, short and still wheezy. "Regretting your deal with the devil already? You're the one who came looking for me, remember. You can cut and run any time, find yourself another date, I won't mind. Just leave me in what passes for a decent-sized town in this shithole, and we'll call it sayonara."
El said nothing because it was true. He'd known it when he had knocked on the door. When he considered doing exactly that in Tepic, and rejected it.
Sands smiled, that deceptively normal way that made him look almost reasonable. "But if you're still in for the long game, I do actually plan on giving you what you want. I have a certain interest of my own in removing some of these people." He squashed his cigarette into the floor beside him. "Though if I'm going to take the grand tour of merry Me-hee-co with you, and have every drug-happy goon with a gun inside a hundred miles up our asses, it'll be when I'm ready to do it and not when you put your lips together and blow like Lauren Bacall, El, my friend."
He looked at Sands then, and they slid together in his head, the patterns he had glimpsed and chased.
If he had thought it through, if he had thought like Sands, he would have known it. It should have been obvious Sands wouldn't want to face cartel as he was now, not only blind, but with other injuries that disadvantaged him still further. And that in not wanting it, he would find a way to make sure it didn't happen. His agreement had been too easy; he'd known that at the time, and he'd chosen to ignore it.
El wasn't used to waiting once he made a decision. His marriage to Carolina had been that way, still chained together with dust on his clothes, the ceremony attended only by the priest and a few local people.
His determination to take this fight to his persecutors now had made him as blind as the man beside him.
Sands was a killer, a man he despised, but he wasn't at the level of the most evil men El had known. He was a living person, injured and in pain, and he had been fully prepared to drag him around Mexico as only a source of information, something to use.
Carolina would have been disappointed in him, that it took him so long to see it. That he didn't see it until it was smashed into his face as retaliation. "I'm sorry," he breathed softly. "I will do better."
Sands tipped his head to one side, reminding El oddly of the dogs around the town. "What d'you say?"
"I'm still 'in'," he said. "And we will wait."
"Good." Sands curled his hands in his lap, fingers exploring around his wrist, prodding and flexing with no hiss of pain. "Oh, there's just one more little thing, El. If you ever try and dope me again, I'll kill you the first chance I get." Sands spoke in the same perfectly relaxed, factual tones in which he'd described shooting the cook, and El took the warning.
He nodded, then remembered to speak. "Okay."
Sands' hand slid along the floor to the leg of the table, and he used it to haul himself upright, staggering slightly as he transferred his weight. "Well, now that's all settled, where are we headed off to?"
El looked up, taking in a limping man with bandaged eyes and fresh marks dark on his face and wrists.
"I don't know," he said.