The next days were just a dose of the same shitty song cycling through on repeat. Something way too bouncy by one of those PR-manufactured teenage wannabe-hookers that made him want to fucking choke every last one of the bitches.
They wound their way south along Baja, dodging the Drug and Firearms checkpoints. This really was a lousy part of Mexico for them to be running and hiding in. Christ, right now they wouldn't even technically pass the drugs half, which was fucking funny given whose car he was riding in.
They only drove a few hours each day. Keeping off the biggest highways when the choices were there, the roads were pretty shitty and Sands' knee filed its complaints with the rest of him in an intermittent but regular series of reports, a bureaucrat who really loved his work. When they did use the highways, the world's most melodramatic take on speed bumps were laying in wait for them every time they came near a town, jolting vicious all through him no matter how slow El took it. And when the pain died back, he itched instead, sweat soaking into the layers of bandage and rubbing over skin and stitches.
It didn't matter much where they went, only that they kept moving, and some days they ended up doubling back a ways to avoid the military. El Presidente might just make some quiet arrangements on the Mariachi's behalf if they got themselves carelessly tangled up in one of his bear traps, but Sands considered it a short odds bet he'd end up somewhere he wouldn't much like.
They stayed in hotels with no air-con and small multi-legged scurryings in the night, while he limped obediently everywhere after El, knowing next to fuck all about anything.
The only good thing about it was his leg seemed to be healing faster this time. Maybe he'd gotten lucky with the bullet, maybe it was because he still had one working leg to take his weight, or maybe it was just because he didn't have multiple other bleeding holes in him all demanding their share of the attention, but he figured another week should see him back close to functional.
And meantime he worked to keep his seething frustration at the entire motherfucking situation from lashing out its full viciousness at El. It wouldn't do to piss the Mariachi off too badly at this point and fuck over his own longer term plans.
El picked up on the vibes quick enough, and kept conversation locked down to basics, minimising the provocation. Sands got him to buy papers and read the news to him - all of it. Listening to El ramble on got old inside a day, because he was really only interested in the details of what was going on through a few countries, catching up on some nine months of politicking. Things could change fast, and he didn't plan on going anywhere uninformed.
Mostly they drove, ate and sat around hotel rooms in silences that revved fast beyond comfortable, barrelling downhill straight through awkward till they hit positively tense, Sands constantly roping back the comments and retorts that would have lashed out automatically, and doing it only pissed him off more.
But all the while that loop line train would be rattling its rounds in El's skull, covering possibilities, likelihoods, outcomes, over and over. And he wouldn't be liking the tracks it covered, because he'd seen them all before, and there were no new ones.
Not yet.
Not till Sands laid them out for him.
He definitely had El's attention now, fixed and waiting for the change; stillness through the Mariachi that oozed his tension far faster than the drip, drip of all his shifting and tapping. Focus swinging inwards from the world, hard onto Sands with the knowledge that this wasn't even close to a steady state - and part of that would be his awareness, the very real need to see what Sands might do, but the rest of it was pure El. The killer's own instinct for violence and its potential, the draw of it through him, his body's responses automatic and inflexible. Seeking.
It was always intriguing to provoke that, to control it; to slowly stretch it tighter and feel it there quivering alongside him.
It gave him a little something extra now to play with through the mosquito-bite monotony of the days as he let El run his paths.
And felt El fight it.
The Mariachi knew his own stillness, his own leanings, the zinging hum of the voltage collecting within him. Sands limped a little heavier than he might have done, and shared cheap, cramped beds with El without the obvious and much too easy release of sex. It meant he lost out as well, of course, because after a couple of days he would have been good with a blow job from either end, and he spent too many hours lying awake and rigid, listening to El breathe clipped alongside him; but he knew how to play it patient, and he'd be gaining more than enough to compensate him for a few missed chances for a good fuck.
El, predictably, sought out music.
He shattered his stillness, deliberately, movements sharp with no hint of natural El smoothness as he reached for the radio controls. Fiddling through the hissing frequencies every song, or part of song, hunting down the soft, the slow; breaking mid-song more and more often as his mood refused to bend to the ballad, seeking on futile for another more effective.
Sands was perfectly content to let him try.
El plucked at a guitar through the silent hours in hotel rooms, drawn away from Sands in some furthest corner, wrapped round a perpetual prop that did no more to halt the progression than the radio did.
And he smoked as he drove, in quick, repeated breaths that burned from lighter flare to rushing window flick in about a minute.
Sands poked around in the glove compartment for yet another new pack of cigarettes, shift in El as soon as he moved and no shift back. Slow, awkward peel of the plastic, pushed down into his pocket as he fished out his lighter, quick check to the end for position, click and drag; the movement in the air that was El's breath constant all through it, eyes on him the whole time.
Now was good.
He slipped the lighter back in his pocket, settled down further into his seat, letting the words out almost casual with the smoke. "We need ourselves some kind of bolthole, El. Somewhere to go if we're injured, if they're getting too close and we need to catch a break."
Softest jingle-shiver, trapped short. "Where are you thinking of?" El's curiosity right there, flowing to him almost hopeful, and Sands tightened his lips down over the smile creeping round his cigarette.
He tipped his head back to the rest, kept the words slow and thoughtful. "You told me a while back the only place to go is out of Mexico, and I won't disagree."
He'd expected the pause, but it was hanging on too long, and too quiet, something in the low breathing less than natural. Squeak of skin rubbing sweat over plastic, and he might be blinder than a mole rat, but he could still see El's knuckles whiten on the wheel.
"You're lying."
Spoken slow and misleadingly mild, and well, there was an interesting answer. Interesting in an old Chinese proverb-y kind of way that was giving him the impression this could turn out a little trickier than he'd anticipated.
He angled his head El's way, took the cigarette from his mouth to hang from his fingers at shoulder level. "What's there to lie about? You think I like being dragged between cockroach heaps in a rolling scrapyard with fuck all suspension when there's a bullet hole in my leg? Given that or a long siesta with a tequila every day, take a guess which is getting the hole punched."
No pause this time, and no light-glinting chinks to break the certainty. "You will have to tell me why you're lying. I only know that you are."
That really wasn't a good tone in El's voice. El had a whole Rockies range of variations on angry, and while 'pissed at Sands' was still common enough, it had been a while since he'd given him the full drug dealer jizzball attitude, complete with missing contractions.
Sands pulled on his cigarette, words hardening as he let the smoke out. "So what's your grand plan for the future? Keep right on killing people till you die? Because I've got to tell you, El, if you don't have an alternative set by to cover for the fuck-ups, that's the way it's going to go down."
"There are always people who will hide me." Brushing shift from El, dismissive, words spoken to the windshield, not even looking at him any more, and Christ, but this was slipping away from him too fucking fast.
"Fans of the legend, right." Flat tones, fact, no quiver allowed in the absolute, not now, because he was right about this, and even El had to see it. "There are always people who'll sell you out too, and you can't tell one from the other, never know who to trust or we wouldn't have spent the last week scuttling miserably from hole to hole."
Quick sound from El that was almost laughter, and touching close on ninety percent cocoa. "I can't trust the man I am with now, so where is the difference?"
And that just stuck fucking big spines in his throat all the way down.
He'd practically been a paragon of the god-pissing Virgin Mary, he'd been so cautious about treading all over El's frankly fucking inconvenient moralistic sensibilities. So many cheap rat sell-outs they'd been dealing with, and safer to see them dead than leave them loose to move onto the next highest bidder, cranking the handle on the rumour gears all the way. But a good half were still kicking up mile-high dust trails somewhere so far as he knew, and the half that weren't had drawn their own straws.
He stretched himself out across his seat, arm settling over the back, lounging part across the car door to face El head on. "Perhaps you'd care to enlighten me on how you reached that particular conclusion. I've found you whatever information you wanted, I've covered your ass, and that includes following you into some pretty fucked-up situations when you weren't inclined to play it too logical, if you don't mind me mentioning it. I don't recall giving you one single reason not to trust me since we started this arrangement."
"Not until now," El admitted, though his dramatic, swooping tones weren't exactly saying agreement. "But I can't trust a man who will lie to me."
"I haven't told you any lies."
"Maybe not." El's voice clicked back down a notch, slower, but not enough, nowhere close to enough. "But there's more you're not saying."
Sands tipped his head just one degree off and raised an eyebrow at him. "El, much as you may be hankering after the good old joys of married life, the day you and I have ourselves a real open heart to heart with true confessions will be the same day the aliens land and blow up the White House."
"This time you're hiding something important."
Every answer coming back faster, and Sands deliberately drawled each sentence out longer. "Are you planning on hearing me out any time in the next hour, or should I save this conversation for a day when you're in a more reasonable mood?"
"It doesn't matter. I'm not going anywhere with a man who's lying to me."
And that was it.
He'd lost it. Argument going circular, El with that spur of his dug right down to bedrock, and there'd be no lever long enough to shift him, not now.
Christ, this was going to take fucking weeks to fix, and that just blew Bolivia all to hell, because he wasn't even considering going without El.
He wasn't going anywhere without El, except maybe down a hole in the ground with dirt thrown on top, and he planned on skipping that one a while longer yet.
Well, fuck, wasn't that just the sweetest thing to know?
He didn't do relationships. He didn't do friends, and he didn't do long term fucks. He'd done the witchbitch far enough to factor her into Brazil, but he'd never considered it 'till death do us part' on either side, which just made those all-around murderous intentions all the funnier in hindsight. But now, apparently, he did mariachis.
El was just too fucking convenient to have around.
He could do it all as well on his own - okay, almost as well, it was always useful to check he'd wiped that last spot of blood off before he put himself on public show - but it already took enough time and concentration just to get through every single fucking day. When cutting his nails had turned into a ten minute adventure of double-or-quits, he was taking all the easy outs he could get.
Fucking Christ in the desert, too many reasons to glue himself to El, and he just couldn't see himself as another clinging Mariachi sidekick and fucktoy. He really should cut loose before his hair got any longer and he started answering to Carolina.
Leave.
Right.
The feeling rolled all through his gut and hacked up cyanide fast and smothering into his throat, and he almost wanted to throw up just to get rid of it, burn it out with the acid, except right now he'd probably goddamn choke on it.
Well, fuck all of that.
The decision was right there, spitting out the words with the draining smoke. "Your choice, dickbrain. I'm heading out."
That got El's attention right back on him, real fast. "Heading out?"
"Done. Leaving. Getting the fuck out of this goddamn country where too many people are keen to fill me up with the latest in fine lead-copper composite and setting up someplace I don't have to share with the roaches."
And that actually got El laughing, finally, sawing up from his lungs with broken teeth dragging tangled through old growth. "Oh, that's great, just great. You wanted this. You made this happen, and now you say you're leaving, just like that."
"You can cut the horse shit dramatics, El. You made yourself, years before I met you." Cigarette twitching as the corner of his lip curled around it. "You were always going to crack. All I did was poke around at the weak points here and there so I didn't get too bored waiting."
Another long nicotine drag, heat flare over his fingers as the smoke ran deep, and he dropped the window a couple of inches to flick out the butt.
"So when exactly do you plan on leaving?" Slow, stressed words, accent lead-dense, and yeah, El was really laying it on for him.
"Any time you care to stop, since I'm not so inclined to jump from moving vehicles as some people might be. Though I'd prefer a town to the desert," he added, because it never really paid to be ambiguous on these points. "Just pick an intersection the bus runs through more than once a week."
The world lurched under and around him in a stressed, rubber-clutching squeal, goddamn near cracking his skull apart wide and bright as he met the side window, hard. He grabbed for dashboard and seat back to stop his slide over the vinyl until everything settled and straightened up again.
El stomped his foot across once more, engine revving high, car accelerating in full slug on greased glass style.
Sands pressed his shades back down straight over his nose before he turned to El with tight jaw and flat words. "What the fuck was that?"
"You want a town, we passed one ten minutes ago."
That wasn't entirely what he'd had in mind either, but El always had been a guy for direct action. "Don't forget the part about the bus."
"It's big enough." Voice strapped down with steel cable, and not a lot of wriggle room left between the coils to work with.
One town, another town, what the hell, it wouldn't make such a difference. Every place around here was just some pit in the ground trying to work its way up to the exalted status of toilet.
Air sucked past his ear through the gapped window, hot and grasping, tugging at his hair, whipping it damp round his neck. He wound it lower, and pavement rumbled dull and only mildly Mexico-bumpy beneath the wheels; the breeze past him was grit-heavy and no hint of salt.
Baja central strip. Lovely.
There were cars passing, headed the other way - not so many, maybe one a minute, enough to make the route decently-travelled. A mix of types, some trucks, some sedan-sized, and not all of them sounding as beat-up as El's high-rattling wheels. Wherever El planned on ditching him, it obviously counted as civilisation by the local standards.
He could manage to relax a little more for the rest of the ride.
Which was less than ten minutes as he judged it before the car slowed and the sounds changed, tightening up with the buildings. More traffic edging closer, first snatches of conversation.
They passed a couple of intersections, slowing, stopping, cars and some people crossing ahead, before El hit the brakes the final time and took the car out of gear.
"This is your stop, I think." Pancake syllables, cartoon man emerging crêpe-flat from under the steamroller.
Sands turned towards El and smiled, wide and cheerful. "Well, thanks for the ride."
He fished through the glove compartment, helping himself to an unopened pack of smokes. People walked close past the window, sidewalk right alongside, so he pocketed a couple of his spare magazines a bit faster.
He opened the door wide in the gap between passing feet, reached into his jeans for a few notes and dropped them over El's lap. "I hope the tip's good enough, it's kind of hard for me to tell."
Sharp crinkling of paper with a fast jingle his way, and he figured his cash had itself a meeting with the sidewalk. "Fuck you."
He angled his eyebrows high a half second. "Not any more."
He stuck his leg from the car, feeling for the kerb with his boot. It was right there, so he climbed out onto the sidewalk, found the rear door handle and ran his hand over the seat to his bag. It had been sliding about some with El's less than delicate driving. Lucky it hadn't taken a dive to the floor, and El really should know better than to treat weapons that way.
He couldn't be quite sure when El's temper would depart entirely and he'd just hit the gas, so he shut the door and eased the bag down to the sidewalk, leaning over it carefully, left leg loudly yelling its unhappiness about the whole bending part.
He opened the zipper barely enough to get his hand in - no points for displaying the contents to the passers-by on a public street - slithered fingers through metal till the wood of the cane was smooth against his palm and he eased it out and stood upright again.
The engine revved up beside him and the car pulled away, drowned in the flow of other traffic around him in seconds.
He was facing along the road, reaching after the sound, breathing too deep, too fast, sucking in the Mexican perma-dust dry and gritty on his tongue with every lungful, so he stopped. Lit himself a cigarette; inhaled careful, controlled.
Well, that had gone well. He had no idea where he was, couldn't even drag up the name of the goddamn town. And he had a half-healed leg and a stick.
So he'd just have to work it all through from the basics.
Christ, it felt like he'd been doing it forever. Same old shit.
He swept the cane out in front of him, using it more like a walking stick, moving away from the kerb a few steps till he found the wall of a building. Sun-hot and not too gritty-feeling on his palm, so he settled back against it, bag tucked close between his feet and the wall, warmth bleeding through jacket and shirt to his skin.
Better, yeah. Now he only had the one-eighty to work through, and a foot thick guarantee no fucker was gonna be creeping up on him from behind.
He took another drag on his smoke, held it back, let it go, slow. Perfectly valid reason to be propping up a wall, relaxed, no hassles, nothing for anyone to see or remember more than ten seconds after they passed him.
Intersection, right. A crossroads, and a fairly busy one. Traffic way too fucking close and loud, constant rise and fall of cars buzzing through his head, and too often the drilling rattle and harsh diesel stink of bus or truck that screwed him for just about everything else.
He held the cane tucked in alongside his leg, waiting for the world to come back. It pressed tight against his palm, slick under his fingers.
Some kind of restaurant along the block, food smells stronger when the breeze gusted from his right. At least he could fix being hungry when he hit that. Fruit somewhere too - he'd need to keep part of his brain watching out for the half-assed maggot-ridden home-grown stall set up sprawled across the sidewalk. Mid afternoon and more heat on the right side of his face, so he had directions.
People drifted past him, most alone or in silent couples, irregular stream of footsteps approaching and passing, no hesitation, no shift in the patterns, nobody paying any attention to the lounging gringo, though somebody stopped to pick up his cash El had tossed into the street. He listened in on the chatter of the groups who talked, fragments of mind-curdling gossip and bitching, nobody giving him anything useful like information on where the fuck he was, and he gave that up after a few minutes, flicking the last of his smoke out into the street during a break in the feet.
He shifted his weight, then shifted it right back because fuck, his leg ached when he did that.
Okay, so first up was papers - that part was easy once he got himself and some of his dough to Mexico City.
Shit. He wasn't exactly looking forward to experiencing the Mexican long distance transit system. He didn't have to be intimate with that form of travel to know he wasn't going to like it, but taking a taxi half the length of Mexico would make him stick out in the mind of some cabbie like a goddamn freak.
It'd be a hell of a lot easier to stop a car down a side street, pull a gun and get himself another driver. He still had enough sense of direction and clues from the sun and traffic to tell him if they were stiffing him, taking him to the local cop hangout instead of the highway. But he'd have to kill the dumb fuck and any annoying passengers when he got there so they didn't run squealing to the police with his description. Hey, no big problems on the principle, but the execution - so to speak - just got messy. He'd have to do it someplace quiet, which still left him stuck outside city limits trying to grab another ride or pick up the bus, only this time wondering vaguely if he'd cleaned all the blood off.
Christ, being blind dug fucking big holes in more than just his head.
At least sitting on buses all day would rest his leg up some more.
Cab to the bus station, right. After the money. So he needed a phone and a bank.
He didn't have a goddamn motherfucking clue.
There were a dozen cities in Mexico he could've just grabbed a cab, given an address and tapped his way to the phone. Why the fuck did the goddamn shit-sucking Mexican have to dump him in some random pisspot in Baja?
Time to practice smiling sweetly, Sheldon, you're gonna put it to good use.