There was no animosity with the morning, but their words were held to neutral basics - "I'm done with the bathroom, it's all yours." "There's coffee on the table."
El was once again too aware of Sands, his tiniest movements wrenching at him, unable to look away for long, watching his impassive face for... something.
Sands today should have been natural flowing acid, telling him to get his head out of his ass, get over it, and quit acting like a broody chicken, or some more Sands-laced angle on the same idea. When he didn't act as predicted, when he didn't follow his own patterns, it left El faintly disturbed.
He was too careful, too controlled.
El's only positive reading from it was that he hadn't been that way when he shot Ramírez.
He needed to ask where he should go, but Sands had stripped back every cue El had learned from him, and he could find no clear place to start in the not-quite-stilted gaps between their words.
By the time they were ready to leave - not that there was ever much to pack - he still hadn't spoken to Sands.
His fingers strummed lightly over the dashboard as Sands dropped his bag onto the back seat beside the guitar case. "Getting impatient, El?"
It was the first living sentence Sands had said to him, that barely prickling rise through just three words. He stopped the tapping, and found his thumb and forefinger rubbing along the ridged metal of the key instead while Sands got in and closed the door.
He pushed the key into the ignition, rattle sharp through the enclosing air, but he didn't turn it.
"What do you want to do now?" he asked.
Sands wore that relaxed stillness, head tipped back and hair flattened to the cloth of his seat. "Well, we're both sitting here in the car, so I was thinking along the lines of me being a passenger while you drove."
"I'm going home," El said.
Sands only looked bored, his voice stretching the sarcasm a level further. "Maybe you'll really make an effort and surprise me sometime, El, but I'm guessing it's not going to be today."
It was something so close to normal. He just couldn't decide if 'close' was because it was false, or if remnants of that earlier rigidity lingered to corrupt some level of truth.
He reached out his fingers to the wheel, tracing the indented edge by touch, even as he still watched Sands. The chains at his wrist shivered faintly, selling out his restlessness.
Sands wouldn't ever expect him to be still anyway.
"You have helped me, like you said," he tried again. "You have no obligations to me now."
Sands turned his head towards him slowly, whip-tight mouth and staring black lenses. "I never did, you brainless fuck."
El breathed slowly, resisting the urge for it to flow as a sigh. That had been a stupid choice of words with this man, and he wondered how much of the mistake was his own reluctance to have this conversation at all. "We had a deal, and now it is done. So now the deal is I will take you where you want to go."
"Still making deals without me? That didn't work out so well the first time." Immediate, fast words that would have been a snap except for the quiet of them, and El's own frustration pitched sharp into response. "I could kick you from the car right here instead."
Sands' face ran empty of all expression, along with his words. "You really don't want to try that, El."
His hands tightened around the wheel, plastic pressing deep against the pads of his fingers. No, because if he'd wanted to do that, he wouldn't have offered him a choice.
He started the car and pulled away into the clinging morning traffic. He saw no point in saying more, with Sands like this. He would head towards home for now, and eventually Sands would tell him where he wanted to go.
He picked up the 40 just outside the city, and went east.
The terrain changed rapidly as he drove, climbing fast through the foothills and into the true mountains, leaving Sinaloa. He dialled between radio stations, seeking through the static as they dissolved one by one into spikes of notes and hiss, until Sands swore at him and told him to turn the fucking thing off.
In truth, it had annoyed him too.
Sands smoked with the window cracked open, head tipped back into the seat, hair whipping around the sides of his face in the turbulence, ash ripped from his cigarette as it formed.
El wondered how dull it must become, a passenger on a long drive, unable even to look out, just the noise of engine, tyres on road, and wind. He opened his own window a little, feeling the rush of air cool past his ear, the brush of his hair over his cheek, the scent of the mountains damp and green distinctive beneath the fumes from the cars.
It was something, but it wasn't much.
The landscape shifted again, with an abruptness that never failed to startle, the mountains turned barren and then gone, leaving the road to plunge on bullet-straight between the grass and low scrub of the plains.
He stopped for fuel and food, Sands communicating in the same economical near-silence he'd used earlier in the hotel. He said nothing about any kind of destination.
If Sands still had any yearning for living by the sea, El thought, he'd better choose a place on the east coast, because he was in no mood now to simply turn around and go back.
The road pulled him on deeper into the interior. He turned off the highway, leaving pavement for the dusty, endless tracks that were more Mexico to him now than the cities and towns he had once tried to earn a living in. The noise of the tyres jumped from firm rumbling to a deader sound, a hint of a scrape beneath the wheels as they started to slide before El adjusted the tail-heavy characteristics to the loose roads.
Sands wound the window closed to keep out the dust.
It was then that El believed he wasn't going to say anything.
He didn't say anything either.
He pulled up outside his house in the angled light of late afternoon, and he still had an ex-CIA killer with him.
He was a little relieved, and almost as appalled.
Sands peeled off those black gloves that had lived on his hands since they left, tucking them inside his door compartment. He waited to follow El to the house, no starting reference without knowing exactly where El had parked. Once El unlocked the door, his markers in place, Sands walked unspeaking through the house to the bathroom, still with his bag of weapons, closed the door and started the shower.
El thought it was a good thing he'd taken a piss when they stopped.
He took the guitar case to his room and stored it away in the bottom of a cupboard he rarely used. There was too much space around for the belongings of just one person.
The guns he was wearing stayed with him. He had learned too well that he couldn't be without them any more, not even here.
He pulled the door shut quietly when he left the house, not wanting to alarm Sands with a sudden bang over the noise of the water - showering made him jumpy, and he kept them short.
The easiest way to deal with this Sands was not to, to give him his isolation. He hadn't been planning to stay anyway.
He crossed the square, waving greetings to people as he passed, to the guitar sellers who called out to him as they packed up their stalls for the evening.
One or two looked at him differently than they had before, following with more wary eyes.
It was one thing to know who he was, and another to watch from the windows as he slaughtered people in the town where their children lived, to see the blood and to bury the bodies.
Friends, good friends who had taken risks for him, had turned from him in the past after they'd seen. He felt too much gratitude for the ones who seemed able to treat him as normal to hold any bitterness.
Once again, the door opened to him as he arrived. He glared hard at the priest. "Don't say anything."
Father Ríos smiled, gap-toothed and completely uncomplicated. "How about, 'Come in and have a drink?'"
The priest chattered on as he rattled around in his kitchen, finding cups and milk and boiling water to his own easy monologue of gossip, used to El's silences, and to filling them. El lounged against an unused countertop, strung somewhere between listening and his own hounding thoughts.
Thinking hadn't helped him over the last twenty-four hours, but that made it no easier to stop.
He was sitting at the table with the bitter-strong coffee scent rough in his throat when he noticed that his companion had paused, left the quiet to settle.
The priest was watching him with obvious concern. "You look tired."
"A little." He wasn't, not physically. It was the uncertainty that wore at him, dragging all through the previous night and on.
He liked his life easily defined and contained, but Sands didn't fit well in boxes.
Father Ríos wouldn't ask what had gone on while he was away, not unless he first offered to tell. It was an old arrangement between them. The priest had long since given up on persuading him to make confession, losing each time to El's truth that there was no point to confession, no absolution where there was no repentance of the sin.
"I see he came back with you."
"Yes." Even that much was stating the obvious. He slid his finger along the grain of the table, no point to saying more.
Father Ríos let the pause linger for a while, before he spoke again, quietly. "So what happens now?"
El shrugged. "I don't know," he said. He traced the wood to the edge of his mug, wrapped his fingers around it, still. "I couldn't just tell him to leave."
The priest rubbed at his moustache and smiled a little. "I should hope not."
El looked up with the jagged realisation that his warnings were worthless, the truth of them eroded and scattered by the months. This good man across the table didn't believe what Sands was really like, and that was probably true of others in the town too. And nothing he could say was going to convince them, not while Sands remained here, distant but basically polite, and their only point of reference for a killer was a man they accepted and liked.
"He hates this place, and everyone here." The acid futility burned pits into the words.
He breathed, shattering the column of steam, the mug tight and barrel-hot between his hands. "He needs time, I think, Father. To consider some choices."
He had never been able to plan beyond the revenge he sought, never focussed on what happened after. Whenever his mind had drifted that way, he'd dragged it back, because 'after' reached out hollow, spanning years.
For all Sands' long constructions and scheming, maybe in this he was the same.
"I take it he's hunted, like you," the priest said.
El considered that, turning the realities slow through his mind, flaws gaping through all of them. "Perhaps worse than me." He had no idea what the CIA's plans would be, how those people worked. Sands was the only one he knew, and the CIA didn't seem to like him either.
Even if they stayed within laws, if they would take him back to America and imprison him for the things he'd done, it wasn't an existence Sands would ever accept.
His own freedom now consisted only of choosing where to hide, but the thought of losing what little was left made every part of him cramp and heave in revolt. He didn't know where Sands could belong, but it wasn't in a cell.
The priest was still watching, patient with the knowledge of a man who had spent many years listening. "I didn't know that part when I brought him before, or I wouldn't have done it," El said. "I'm sorry."
Father Ríos smiled and waved a hand out over his coffee mug. "That's not an issue. The drugs men have come, the army have come, and no-one has ever asked you to leave. The people here will stand up to whoever else comes just the same."
El thought of the ones who had stared across the square. "You can't speak for all of them, Father." He wondered why he'd never heard any hints to be rid of him, why the family of the murdered guitar-seller expressed no disquiet - whether it was the last ties of loyalty to someone as entirely beautiful as Carolina, or whether they might just be scared of his reaction.
"Not all of them, perhaps, but more than enough." His eyes crinkled further into the lines around them, his moustache twitching along with his lips. "We're a democracy now, remember?"
El was smiling back, inevitable in the face of this gentle, open humour. "I remember." It would be twenty years, more, before anything could really start to change, but he remembered. Some people would have their freedom, even if he never would.
"Good. Now drink your coffee, I don't make it for you to stare at."
"Okay, okay, don't waste what you have, I know." He lifted his mug, blowing on it hard before he took a swallow, though it really wasn't that hot. "See?" He held the cup there, in front of his smile. A little money really wouldn't change some people.
"Looks like even you can be taught eventually," the priest grinned.
'Maybe you can learn after all.'
Sometimes he wondered if he would ever get Sands' voice out of his head.
"So, now we've got your guest half sorted out, what about you?" Father Ríos was still smiling, but his eyes were watching again.
El stared, sipping coffee, but his friend gave him no further clues.
He put the mug back to the table, curled within his hands. "How do you mean?"
"If he's here to think, to make decisions about his life," he said, "what about your own?"
He didn't have an answer for that either.