They went via Mazatlán. They had to do so anyway, to pick up the main coastal road to Culiacán.
El was content enough with the guitar case in the back seat. "There are different ways of fighting," he said. "Lorenzo would die if he tried to fight like me, nor could I fight like Lorenzo."
"Right," Sands said. "And my way involves making sure I've got some big surprises ready when I need them. Which is why I brought along a shopping list."
He handed El a piece of paper with irregularly-sized writing that didn't follow the lines. It looked too much like a child's letters, the wrench of them entirely unexpected and deep.
He breathed once, long, and pushed it aside, skimming over the list. "You're going to stand out a little with an M203."
"I'd prefer the MK19, but it's not quite portable enough," Sands grinned. "The point is they're not going to see me. Just the grenades."
El felt the pressure sliding at his jaw, but he'd never tried to place his own restriction on those he fought alongside. On Lorenzo's flames, or Fideo's love of explosives. "Fine. What you do is on your own conscience."
"Well, that's something of a debatable point." And then the levity dropped from his words. "But it certainly isn't on yours."
He didn't answer that.
They were parked in the south of the city, overlooking a warehouse just outside the official confines of the port. It was a very ordinary-looking warehouse, scratched metal doors and a scattering of graffiti. According to Sands, it was the base of trading operations for his arms contact.
They'd driven around the area while El investigated routes of approach and traffic, and checked for possible observation points. There weren't any good locations for that, which was probably deliberate. Any car watching for too long would be noticed.
"All we need now is a hotel and then a street phone, so you can call him," Sands said.
El instantly disliked this plan, staring at Sands through the thin cigarette haze swirling between them. "Me? Why?"
"Because you'll be making the pick-up." Sands spoke as if it were obvious, as if it were already decided.
"No. You're the one he knows."
"Exactly." Sands showed his teeth in a way that was entirely unfriendly. "It wouldn't be healthy for me to see him."
That was easy enough to understand. El had the urge to roll his eyes, and made sure his voice carried that over. "Oh, yes, of course. I had forgotten for a minute that everyone you meet hates you."
"Actually, the few dealings we had were mutually agreeable and entirely without rancour," Sands answered mildly.
"Then why?"
"The man sells weapons for cash with no questions asked." There were lines marked around his mouth when he spoke again. "I'm fairly sure he'd be just as happy to sell me."
"Or me," El pointed out. He hadn't liked this from the beginning, and now he liked it less.
"Probably, but he doesn't know who you are. Keep it that way and you'll be fine." Sands turned his head to him now, his face expressionless and still managing to give the impression of being entirely disparaging. "Of course, we'll have to get you some different clothes first."
"I won't wear a suit." He looked enough of a killer already, without looking like a drug dealer too.
"I don't much care what you wear, El, just as long as it's a little lighter on the chains and scorpions. Whatever you choose, I can guarantee you won't be offending my sense of aesthetics."
"He's going to ask questions," El insisted. "He won't meet without knowing who I am, without a guarantee that I'm not AFN."
"You'll tell him your name is Fermin Guajardo. After that, he won't want to know any more."
"That's it?" It sounded too easy, and it made him suspicious. "Who is this man?"
"I dropped Honaker a few names a while back, as associates who may want to contact him at some point. I provided them with backgrounds, you'll stand up to an initial check."
"You gave him a Mexican name?"
"And another name I mentioned was American, and one was even female," Sands answered, unusually patient. "I was allowing for future problems and I covered the possibilities."
El smiled. "You were allowing for him hating you."
"Well, there's always that chance of something going wrong, so effectively, among other things, yes."
Sands seemed to have planned this out a long way in advance, and El didn't like that. He particularly didn't like the way he was being cornered into doing this, Sands with an answer already prepared for every objection he raised. "Maybe associates of yours aren't so welcome any more."
"He's a businessman, El, above anything else." Sands let smoke trail from between slightly parted lips. "Whatever the situation with me is, he can't come the heavy on his paying clients just because they happen to know me. Word like that gets around, and half his customers would suddenly be filling their orders with alternative suppliers." He tossed him a quick, cheerful grin. "Don't worry, he'll play nice with you."
This idea seemed to involve an awful lot of trouble - on El's part anyway; it was only too obvious that the plan didn't inconvenience Sands - and all for weapons that they would do just fine without.
He looked again at the warehouse, set in a buffer zone of light industrial buildings between the docks and the residential areas. It was away from the main thoroughfares to the port, the roads travelled mostly by commercial traffic, and externally it was no different from the others of its type along the street.
"Don't," Sands said. "I know what you're thinking, and just don't."
El glared over his shoulder, a useless gesture, but one he was unable to break. Sands probably got the idea anyway, from his movement and the changing angle of his voice. "You don't know what I'm thinking."
"You're completely still, and your breathing's changed, a little longer and slower. Whatever this place looks like, it isn't, and whatever you think Honaker looks like when you meet him, he isn't. There's no way to go in there and just take what we want."
"I don't remember wanting anything from here," he pointed out.
"What we want, what I want, it's still a very bad idea." Sands opened his door a crack to throw his cigarette out into the street. "There are only three kinds of arms dealers, El. They're either mob, ex-mercs or ex-firm."
He could guess which one Sands was likely to have an arrangement with, but none of them were people he wanted to meet.
He was going to do it anyway. He had demanded Sands' help in this, and if this was the way Sands was comfortable doing it, he would go along. "You introduce me to the nicest of people," he said, wanting to keep the sullen resignation from his words and failing badly.
Sands grinned, wide and bright. "I introduced you to the President, El. Now I'm just evening things out a little."
They found a hotel in the tourist district to the north - a deliberately average place, instead of one of the cheapest dives, since Sands no longer looked like a classic idiot - and El hesitated, then booked them two rooms. He'd long since stopped lying awake at night with an obsessive need to know what Sands was doing, and it seemed sensible to keep to the arrangement they had at the house, one which allowed them to share a limited space without too much animosity.
The payphone they chose was some distance away. El dialled the number Sands gave him, which wasn't local, and a man asked his name, then told him to call again in two hours and hung up.
They went shopping. It was the first time they'd been near a large town since Sands recovered, and he demanded some more clothes, ones that actually fit. El found doing something so oddly normal as exploring a department store with Sands entirely surreal, despite the fact that he'd been living and eating with the man for almost three months. Hiding and healing was a very different level of experience from taking a murderer out shopping.
Sands stuck to jeans and basic black with white shirts and T-shirts, so he couldn't 'fuck up and look like a grade A asshole'. El smiled with the brief temptation to point him at turquoise and orange - he saw no reason for Sands not to look like an asshole, since he was - but the fact that he would have to live with the results stopped him. That, and he really didn't know if Sands might shoot an assistant or a waitress who didn't whisper quietly enough.
Probably he wouldn't; he could no longer afford to be so casual about the attention he attracted as he had been when he thought himself untouchable. But a joke would be a poor reason to find out.
They used a different phone for the second call, in case the first was being watched. It was the same voice, and just as short. He was given a location to meet that evening to hand over his list.
El found all this secrecy irritating. Dealing with his own people, he would have been clear and hunting by now, but Mazatlán wasn't his city.
They went back to the hotel first, since Sands wouldn't be taking this particular trip. El described the layout of his room to him, then retreated to his own.
He had no idea what people wore to meet with a professional arms dealer. Sands had told him that Fermin Guajardo was a mercenary, mostly working in South America, in whichever revolution or coup someone would pay him for. He didn't care much for his borrowed role, but he thought that everyone wore jeans, and they would pass for a mercenary too.
He found the bar he'd been told to wait in, and ordered the food he'd been told to order. He poked the bland calavacita around his plate in disinterest - obviously the dish was used to identify contacts because no-one else would ever ask for it.
He twisted the fork in his hand as he waited, rolling it over and over with short flicks of thumb on fingers.
This was exactly the kind of ridiculous assignation Sands would have found it amusing to set up. He could imagine Sands back at the hotel, knowing just how much of a run-around Honaker would be giving him, and laughing.
He hoped he choked on whatever he was eating.
A number of people came and went - the bar was busy enough that the people entering wouldn't stand out, but not so busy that someone inside was hard to find.
"Señor Guajardo?" The voice and the man were Mexican, and not the man from the phone. He had at least two guns that El knew of.
"Sí," he answered, sharp pitch of relief that this wasn't Honaker twisting after the annoying realisation that he hadn't asked Sands if his 'background' included speaking English.
"You have a message for me?"
He handed over the list, copied onto hotel paper with the header ripped off. He'd added extra supplies of his own ammunition to the bottom. Sands owed him some repayment for the food over the last months.
"Call in the morning, and we'll let you know."
Everyone who worked for Honaker seemed to learn the same conversational style. The man left again immediately, through the kitchen - it was almost a pity the cook would survive it.
He ate the calavacita before he left, because he'd eaten worse in the past, and he had to pay for it anyway.
It was a little after nine when he got back to the hotel. He stretched out along his bed, but his body remained taut, unwilling.
He didn't like all this waiting around. He wanted to go to Sands' 'friend' and find out what they needed to know, before any more gunmen turned up in his village. He wanted to be doing something - he'd never been good at playing things the patient way, and these delays crawled through him, left his fingers twitching restless over the sheets.
He could bring himself off and that would help, a little. If he touched himself he would think of Carolina, and he wanted that, but... A vow already broken was gone for good, but he didn't want to use Carolina's memory, not like this.
He flipped himself upright, his back against the headboard, twirling a pistol on the trigger finger of each hand. Round and round, repetitive, constant, mind-numbing absence of concentration, but while it stopped his thoughts, it didn't stop the feeling, the utter wrongness of just sitting here. He could have wished for his guitar, but he only carried the one case - he knew how it was when he tried to play like this, how his fingers tensed on the strings and strangled the notes.
Music couldn't take this edge from him. Only the guns could.
But not this way, the clicking of them loud as they spun, the hotel so still around them, watching the clock flick through the minutes.
He realised he hadn't spent so much as an hour truly alone in months now. Even when Sands wasn't right there with him, he'd been watching Sands, thinking about Sands.
They had separate rooms at the house, but that was where they slept. In the evenings, after eating, they most often just stayed by the table. Usually he played. Sometimes they talked; sometimes they ignored one another, because it happened often enough that one had deliberately annoyed the other a step too far. But there was obviously someone there, an awareness of breathing and life that stayed with him.
He was thinking about Sands again now.
He straightened from the bed, made his way along the corridor to knock on his door.
"Come on in." Sands' voice was drawn-out, bored. He lay on his back, smoking next to a half-full ashtray, holding the cigarette awkwardly with those black leather gloves. He'd pulled them on in the car before they reached Mazatlán, and El hadn't seen him without them since.
He waited until the door closed with a low snick. "No gun?" he asked, mildly amused.
Sands drew hard on his cigarette. "I think I can rely on you not to be knocking on my door because someone has a barrel pressed up tight against your neck."
El smiled briefly. Maybe Sands no longer thought of him as an idiot, but he still didn't believe there wasn't a gun.
He leaned back against the door, feeling it creak and settle with his weight. "How long are we going to be here?"
Sands rolled up onto his elbow to face him, instant switch to brisk words, pure business. "We'll have everything we need by tomorrow, and then we can be on our way. I really don't want to be left hanging around here any more than you do."
He didn't trust that utter confidence of Sands'. He was too sure of too much to be genuine; the difficulty lay in spotting the bluff. "How do you know?"
"Honaker deals in big weapons and big numbers." Sands dropped the end of his cigarette into the ashtray and left it to burn. "What we're asking him for is chump change, not special order."
"So why use him at all? We could have bought what you needed elsewhere, from someone less dangerous."
"Because he's a professional, and he gives a professional service," Sands said. "You can guarantee you'll get what you ask for, and he won't supply any cheap Chinese copies you might just be unlucky enough to lose your hand to."
El could see the value to that. Wherever he bought guns, he stripped and checked them, tested them, and then stripped them again before he agreed to pay.
"You may as well take a seat, if you're staying," Sands said, his tone flat.
Was he staying?
Sands had told him what he wanted to know.
The room was thick with the stink of burning fibre, the cigarette smouldering down in the ashtray against the other discarded ends.
He turned and put his fingers to the door handle. "I don't think so."
The mattress creaked lightly behind him as Sands rearranged himself. "You know, just before you go, El, I was wondering vaguely how the state of your cash-flow is these days. Because I only have useful access to around a third of my bank accounts right now, and, well, I have to admit they're not quite the retirement plan I was hoping for."
The handle stopped, a quarter turned.
There was a note in Sands' tone that was almost revealing, and he was suddenly sure that he knew about the money. He had no idea how Sands would have found out. No-one in the town would have told him anything. But he knew. Somehow.
'You get to overhear the most interesting things from children.'
Oh.
Sands most likely knew every raw hint of village gossip, every half-sentence he overheard filed and waiting somewhere in his head for the pieces that would complete it. His memory must have been good before, and he would have trained it ruthlessly now, anything around him used as an exercise in a world without written words.
He would have been interested to hear how El Mariachi had returned in a storm of pesos.
He would have been interested to hear any number of other things too. He'd half-joked about having few secrets from Sands, but he wondered now just how much Sands really knew of him.
He turned back into the room. "If you know, then you also know what I did with it." His words were unstressed, but there'd been too much delay for Sands to believe it.
Sands gave a flickering smile, vanishing before he spoke. "All of it? I don't think so."
"No. My friends took most of it." He hadn't felt the need of it. His life in the village cost almost nothing, and he hadn't known then that he would be leaving again.
"Oh, that's right, your interesting little team." He sounded genuinely amused. "I do hope they're entertaining a better class of joint these days."
"I don't know where they are," he said. They weren't going to be sending him postcards. He could find them with a single phone call, but Sands didn't need to know that, and they definitely didn't need any kind of connection with Sands.
Sands only smiled at his defensiveness. "You can relax, El, I'm not coming begging any time soon. Honaker wouldn't want your pesos anyway, he only trades in international currencies."
He was curious now to know exactly what Sands' situation was. He'd shown no concern for money in Culiacán, but he'd probably thought of little then beyond pain and immediate survival. El had booked and paid for the hotel rooms they'd stayed in, and in the months in the town, Sands had bought almost nothing except his cigarettes.
He wandered away from the door and dropped into the chair against the far wall of the room. "So how will you pay him?" he asked, choosing the flat, business-like tones Sands had used earlier when discussing Honaker.
"Wire transfer," Sands said simply. Quick twitch of eyebrows over black lens as he added, "From an account he doesn't associate with me, of course."
"You make it sound like he associates a lot of accounts with you." One of the more useful ways to get Sands to give up information, he'd discovered over the months, was to lean a question more towards accusation.
"No, just the one. I really wouldn't want him knowing any more about my finances than he had to." His jaw shifted, lines appearing tight around his mouth. "Not that I could use that account now, anyway."
"An American account," he guessed.
"Close enough." El wondered what that meant, but he knew nothing of banking legislation and jurisdiction. "It's a pity I had to leave that money, but they get nervous when you start moving funds around. It makes them watch."
It was obvious enough who 'they' were, and he suspected from Sands' flat expression that they'd been watching anyway.
His eyes were wandering over the room as they talked, noting idly how Sands had arranged all his things as they were at the house, as far as the limitations of furnishings would allow. His jacket hung over the back of a chair set alongside the bed; his shoes carefully tucked under the foot of it, right by the leg; the locations of glass and toothbrush and toothpaste by the washbasin, which he could see because Sands hated doors to be closed without a good reason.
The one thing out of place was the cane standing in the corner.
Sands didn't need it around the village, or anywhere while he was with El. But wherever he had gone to eat tonight, in a strange hotel in a strange city, he would have been forced to use it.
He couldn't even pick up the phone and just call out for food, because he couldn't read.
The idea of Sands groping cautiously around the hotel and acting blind hit him as something like shock.
He hadn't seen anything like that from him in almost two months now. He never forgot, but sometimes the fact that Sands was blind began to seem like a minor thing, because he was so very good at making it look that way.
But it wasn't. He would have tapped his way along the corridors and the streets while people watched him and pitied him.
The image was glass in his mind, crystal sharp and cracked, everything about it entirely wrong.
He wasn't sure if it was the people or Sands who made him more angry.
It was easier to twist the pricking frustration onto Sands, accusation flowing naturally now. "So you have money," he said. "Enough to spend with Honaker, to buy these weapons nobody needs. But still you planned all that you did just to steal more."
"Oh, I've got enough for now," Sands said, "but not enough to keep me for as long as I'm hoping to stick around."
He almost asked what he would do when his money ran out, but it was obvious enough. Sands had always traded in information, digging out the facts and making sure the right pieces made their way to the right people, and he could continue to do that for payment.
He didn't ask the other obvious question either. Would you sell me? Would you sell my home after I've done all this to protect it? Sands would only be amused, sarcastic. He would gain no reassurances, and certainly none he believed.
"You're awfully quiet over there, El. Something on your mind?"
Sands was just as amused that he wouldn't ask.
That was fine. He could pretend ignorance equally well. "Should there be? I think you'll find some way to avoid begging on the streets."
Sands gave a low snort, not quite humour. "I'd have the cartel shoot me in the head first." He cocked his head a degree more, considering. "No, I'd do it myself. Someplace nice and quiet so they'd keep looking for me, running all over Mexico for years chasing down rumours."
"Not the most satisfying form of revenge," El commented.
"Well, it's one I'll keep for the bottom of the list," he said. "Somewhere below exhuming Barillo's corpse to piss on it."
He thought about Moco, the way the man stalked him through the nights still a decade later, corrupting even dreams of Carolina, though he'd been long dead before El ever met her. "Probably not worth it," he agreed. "He wouldn't smell too good."
Sands raised his eyebrows. "Ah, the Mariachi voice of experience."
"Not really. I don't usually wait around quite that long."
He was intrigued, discovering a few things in the last fifteen minutes that nearly three months had failed to tell him. Leaving Sands alone to become truly bored seemed to be a useful tactic.
"How do you know this Honaker, anyway?"
Sands tipped his head towards him, letting him see the smile slanting through the pause. "Well, obviously, we met on a fishing trip."
El shrugged, unsurprised to find himself called. "I just want to know who I'm meeting."
"Actually, I don't think you do," Sands said, the curl of his lips dying back part way. "But there's a good chance he won't show anyway, just leave the lackeys to meet with you. Minor level deals don't usually merit the personal touch."
He thought of the 'lackey' from the bar earlier, that moment of hanging uncertainty. "So what about 'Fermin Guajardo' then? Do I speak English?"
"Well, of course you do." Sands spoke now with that exaggerated patience. "You're a mercenary, you'll work for anyone. And the people who hire you really don't like using interpreters, it can allow certain," he lifted his arm and circled his hand through the air, "shall we call them 'miscommunications', to happen."
"How very trusting."
Sands grinned, quick, crooked. "Aren't we all?"
El took the point. "If Honaker's people might feel the same, I should know all of this 'background' you made. I don't want them asking me questions and not liking the answers."
"Caution and forethought, El?" His eyebrows twitched, his grin sliding wider. "Maybe you can learn after all." But he began to list the details about the identity, from birth information in Jalisco through streams of dates and countries and wars and outcomes. He spoke steadily and confidently, never seeming to reach for the information or lose track, everything chronological and ordered.
El sat quietly through it all, watching him as he talked, wondering if he could gain any further glimpses of Sands through this persona he'd created. The amoral killer who would do anything for money had elements of Sands in itself, but there would be a limited range of backgrounds useful to pass on to an arms dealer.
Sands' information was only the stripped facts, empty of anything on why the man would have become a mercenary, no details of his life between 'contracts', or his family beyond his parents being conveniently dead. El supposed that was the most practical approach. Filling in too many spaces would make things harder if the man who took the role didn't fit them, and the reasoning there was perfect Sands - nobody would care about the man's private life while there was money to be made from his line of work.
With the information he had, the only inconsistency was him having to look five years younger. He knew he'd aged after the loss of his family, and spent too much time sitting with his guitar beneath the Mexican sun, but he supposed he would pass - a mercenary's life was unlikely to have been so much easier than his own.
Sands had fallen quiet after his dates reached midway through the previous year, waiting until El shifted in the chair before he spoke again. "You got all that?"
"Most of it," he admitted. His memory worked better from written notes, and a list would have been much easier for him than this steady recital of facts. But he wasn't going to ask Sands to write it down.
"Good." Sands killed his latest cigarette into the ashtray and sat up, swinging his feet down to the floor. "Well, as entertaining as your company can be, I'm sure you understand that I'd prefer you to get out of my room while I sleep, so that makes it time for you to fuck off around now."
He remembered then that he hadn't intended to stay.