His watch told him all about the five more hours that passed before anyone came back, making him glad he'd taken that piss while he had the chance.
Four people coming towards him when he picked out the real from the building's echoes, and his target was front and left, because guys who mixed in polite society didn't stomp around like cheap hired thugs in size fifteens, and they didn't stalk like professionals. Guys who went to dinner parties with the state chief of police and half the local government walked steady and confident with regular taps, and Honaker hadn't changed his shoes from earlier.
No point risking leaving these things too late, so he fixed on a deliberate smile when Honaker was less than half way across the warehouse. "Hi again, Robert, I was hoping you'd decide to drop by sometime today. You know, I've been thinking this guns and gangsters drama lacks a little something as a way to end a pleasant acquaintanceship. How about you and I work ourselves some kind of arrangement?"
Footsteps splitting and fanning out across the concrete, goons to either side at a distance, and wood creaking again ahead and slightly right as Honaker settled back into his old position. "So what've you got in mind?" Honaker sounded somewhere between pleased and amused, because he would've been expecting him to try and talk his way out - Desperate Sheldon next up on the list of the day's entertainments. Which was caustic like a sulphuric suppository, but not a good enough reason to ditch the only functioning plan he had standing in line.
Always start with the easiest play and work up from there. "Whatever anyone else is offering, I'll double it. You know I'm good for the cash."
"You always were, but I'm thinking that might not be the way of it now." The answer sparked back too fast, that angle considered and cut off before Sands had even slipped it onto the table. "You've been running a long time, not to mention you don't have the backers you once did."
His muscles set round the smile, the sunglasses fixed still on Honaker. "I've been missing a long time, it's really not the same thing. Running sounds a lot less dignified than any word I'd use." He shrugged, as light as he could given the circumstances, and still feeling the tug in the plastic tight at his wrists. "Besides, neither of us will ever know if you won't give me a figure."
"Whatever I say, you'll tell me you can beat it. I don't see how I gain anything." Honaker was sounding bored already, and that came under the hard-line category of Not Good.
"Well, you gain twice the dough if I'm telling the truth, but I'm going to assume business is still going well for you." He dropped his voice, took the drawl out and ran it through as straight fact. "We both know you're not in need of the cash here, Robert, that's not what this is about. But you've got the full set of answers now, and when you're the man who caught El Mariachi, a blind ex-spook isn't going to make a big splash on your resumé."
"That's true, but you came as a two-for-one package. I don't get anything but an annoyance if I turn you loose."
"I'd say that depends what kind of arrangement we come to." He lifted his eyebrows slow and arching. "I'm sure I can dig up a little something that's worth more to you than the cash."
The offer put the tolerant amusement right back in Honaker's voice, which was one big leap of improvement over the boredom. "Your information's a bit behind the times now, isn't it?"
Sands tipped his head a little and quirked his lips at one corner. "Some of it's a little time-sensitive I'll admit, but enough of it comes canned for long-term storage."
"So make me an offer, and I'll let you know if it's good enough."
Sands curved his eyebrows up all the way, feeling the stretch in the scar tissue fixed and inelastic beneath. Shit, he'd be able to act this a whole lot slicker if his hands weren't strapped behind him to the fucking chair. "How should I know what's going to interest you, or what you already know? Give me a topic and I'll see what I've got."
"You want me to guess what's in your head? It's not worth my time to spend an afternoon playing Go Fish." Honaker was flattening out bored again and fuck, he always did have the attention span of a gnat missing its Prozac.
"So maybe you'd like to know what the Company has on you and your various dealings."
Honaker laughed then, genuine and loud, high metal echoes bouncing in the roof, smothering sound and movement, slashing the world disconnected in a blade of static. Seconds, only seconds, it wouldn't last, but tied and cut off and unknowing, and fuck –
Dying back, and everything unchanged, Honaker and the three other shifting breaths, nothing lost in the blank.
"My information on that's probably more up to date than yours," Honaker told him, humour swinging the words crane-high on a Sheldon-sighted wrecking ball. "They don't like me, but they know they can't come get me. And they won't be asking for extradition, not when I might start talking along the way." His voice dropped, flipping back to bare fact. "As long as I stick to business, it's a stand-off. They have no interest in tidying up the world, and if it wasn't me, it'd be somebody else."
Sands angled his head the extra inch and smiled slow, because Honaker's liking for chat just gave him another curling corner invite to a conveniently-sized chisel. "So you've got yourself a minimum security records clerk. You couldn't keep anybody big on a monthly retainer."
"They get me enough when I want it."
Sands was still smiling, no backing down now. "And what about outside the CIA? What about information on your business rivals and their sources? You think I didn't check them out too before I came to you that first time?" He slouched a little lower in his chair, ignoring the burn notching up through his shoulders, and angled his head deliberately, casual." I had access to just about everything I wanted even loosely connected with Mexico for two years, and that meant some interesting little chats with people from various other friendly governments, not just Langley."
Honaker was quiet just a half second too long.
He had him. Had him pinned right there, and that was his door, his way out of the box, and now he knew where his fingers needed to be, loosening the lock with a last squirt of WD-40 was the easy slide home for the key.
"So who do you think might convince me?" Honaker recovered it smooth enough - his voice hadn't changed at all, that same casual near-disinterest he'd been dangling in front of Sands through most of the verbals, but too late now to toss a blanket over the leaked oil when the grease was already streaked in a line all down his ass. "Like you said, business is good, and mouse bait isn't going to interest me."
"Ardelle, Doering, Morel. If you can muscle in on their operations a little, you'll have a very nice monopoly running for a year or two before someone else cuts in. I think that should be worth a bit more to you than my trade-in value."
Another gap of breath and the stir of trees outside, and Honaker wasn't even trying to hide it this time, the thought, the sale. "I'd need a sample I can verify before you go anywhere, obviously."
"That's fine with me," Sands said instantly. "I expected you would."
The only delicate question was just what to serve up for him. Whatever he laid out, Honaker would want to dig around it personally after Sands had baked him up horseshit on a bed of rice with 'Fermin Guajardo'.
There was still a chance all this could go unfortunate kinds of wrong. His information was definitely showing some fingerprints where the dust had settled in by now, but most of it should still be valid. Of course, if he happened to luck onto one of the few places things had changed, he was screwed harder than the prison bitch.
Better if Honaker or his lackeys took a longish trip for their investigations, leave El a bit more time to get things together just in case.
A long trip from wherever-the-hell here was, which unfortunately he didn't know.
He didn't have any soreness over his veins like he'd been stuck, and gas was both nasty to use and a miserably unreliable way to keep someone asleep any length of time. Assume he'd lost an hour or two, not days. Somewhere south would be ideal then, close to the tip of Mexico as he could get while avoiding border issues, and he didn't know anything interesting in the Yucatán, but he could manage Chiapas.
"Morel has an arrangement with a Mexican general called Covas, who cuts him into the military supply line and sources close on half his stock." No play now, just facts, listing them fast and flat. "The weapons go through the various army bases in Chiapas, and then Morel ships them out to South America from Tapachula."
Faint creak just ahead, the stresses changing again on Honaker's wooden support. "Why do I get the feeling that isn't a random piece of information you just gave me?"
"Well, you know how it is," Sands said lightly. "I can't give you too little, and I can't give you too much or you might decide you don't need the rest and shoot me anyway."
"If it takes too long to double check this, Sheldon, I might get bored waiting and shoot you."
Sands half-tried to shrug again, experimentally, but all it really did after the extra strain was make his fucking shoulders scream like a pig stuck with a knife. Honaker was probably watching close enough to get the idea, though. "It shouldn't be a problem. There's got to be enough army goons on those bases taking their sliver of a cut not to see. Pay them a bit more, and they'll start remembering a few rumours."
"Not the sort of thing that's easy to check from a distance, you'd say, then?"
Sands tilted his head, held the pause, and too long would be counter-productive now, just over a second. "It could be done, but not as fast. People talk more when the cash is right there in a box for them to see."
"Chiapas sounds a bit hot and wet for a visit this time of year," Honaker said with mild distaste. "You couldn't have picked somewhere less tropical?"
"I can lend you an umbrella for the trip," Sands told him cheerfully. "Or probably not, on second thoughts, I think I left it in the car. Sorry."
Honaker's smile was suddenly a really big thing. "You don't have quite the right idea on this, Sheldon. I'm not inclined to split my men and leave you sitting around here, just in case." His voice was bouncing up and down the scale like an ever-cycling arpeggio - and fuck, Sands figured he must've spent too much time in that mule-piss village listening to El talk to himself if that was the direction his analogies were running. "And besides," Honaker added, "I'd like to have you where I can shoot you if it turns out you're bullshitting me."
Travel wasn't any part of Sands' plan. His plan was very much about being here whenever El chose to show up. "Isn't that going to be a bit inconvenient? Dragging me round Mexico at gunpoint might bring some attention your way."
"You know, one of the benefits of the right resources and connections is that nobody gets to watch you too closely." Christ, Honaker's face must be splitting like a Cheshire cat on ecstasy by now. "I think I can manage to keep you tucked away out of sight."
In Honaker's place, he'd take him with him too, and he just didn't have a good argument to counter it.
So now he was going to Chiapas. Fuck. This could take days.
And okay, that was overall scoring a few touchdowns better than dead.
His head still had a mule kicking around in there, but his stomach was slowly settling into something more agreeably millpond. He didn't have any solid idea how long it had been since he last drank anything, but his mouth was sucked unpleasantly raisin-wrinkled, and so far nobody was offering up refreshments. And though liquid was the priority, he may as well negotiate the full terms while he was putting in requests.
"Well, since we're all going to be taking the grand tour together, I hope you've allowed for lunch before we leave. I find my memory for the finer details starts to turn unreliable when I get too hungry." He remembered sprawling over a cheap hotel bed and saying something similar to El the day of their second abortive agreement. The difference was, he'd known perfectly well the Mariachi would feed him if the obsessive bastard was kicked out of his stuck groove, and Honaker was just enough of a prick not to bother.
The other difference was that El had only sat and glared at him from across the room, not strapped him to a cheap-ass and consequently ass-numbing metal and plastic chair with no useful sharp edges.
"Getting thirsty, are you?" Honaker asked. "You're not sounding quite at your best." Some movement, some signal Sands couldn't catch, and one of those sets of lungs at a distance turned into feet thumping off across the warehouse - a squeak of a bad washer, then water, running water. And maybe it was hearing it, or maybe it was knowing he wasn't going to die for another forty-eight hours, but the gritty itch in his throat was suddenly scraping deep and raw, some bitch's tapered fingernails clawing and scratching way back of his tongue.
The feet came back his way, and someone pushed a mug into his face under his nose, none too gentle so his lip squashed up tight and painful against his teeth.
He wondered if this was the same casual fucker who'd had his hand down inside his pants.
Either way, he could keep his fingers this time, just for a day or two longer, and Sands rearranged his lips round the edge of the mug instead of ripping sideways with slashing teeth. Water dribbled down his chin and onto his T-shirt as Pre-Fingerless tipped the mug, and he swallowed careful, measured mouthfuls, stopping before it was quite empty, because while he didn't want his brain dehydrating, he was in no hurry to take another piss either.
"That's all I've got for you right now, sorry," Honaker said, about as apologetic as a hooker cuffed in a raid. "But don't worry, I'll fix you up with a little something more along the way."
"I'm always willing to wait a while for a good restaurant," Sands told him. He'd almost changed his mind about eating, knowing he'd end up being fed from some greasy turdfucker's filthy hands.
Fingerless was suddenly grabbing at his wrists with that quick and nasty knife-snap, and Sands couldn't hold the twitch, felt the flat of the blade slide cold against the skin tight over his tendons before it was snatched away.
Fucking Christ, he'd almost gotten himself sliced, and he really needed to keep on top of this shit, because he'd missed Honaker's signal completely.
His wrists were freed first from the chair, and then from each other, but his legs were still tied to the chair he was sitting on, so it was no real advantage except to his joints. He wasn't inclined to give Honaker the amusement of seeing him go sprawling, dragging some tasteless plastic piece of shit from the Home Depot over on top of himself.
He started to stretch out his arms, his shoulders, his hands, but they were seized and retied in front of him.
Oh well, it was a change, and a lot less of the inquisition on his joints.
His legs were cut loose, and his arm was grabbed, hauling up and forwards and tugging him to his feet with a wrench all through his shoulder, and that fucking hurt. Someone else was at his other side as he staggered, both arms gripped now with vicious-tight fingers, dragging him towards the door before his legs ever had a hope of getting it together, his boot-tips catching on concrete every step till they were over half way across the warehouse and he caught the fast rhythm of their feet through his stiffness.
Honaker hadn't followed, talking low, intermittent behind them - cellphone, maybe a satellite link from here? - words shivering quiet that he couldn't catch beneath all the footsteps and echoes.
Out into the open, the dirt underfoot, the trees and birds, no sun, an atmosphere that hung close and heavy like rain. And he was walking just fine now, thank you very much, but that Fingerless fuck on his left was still yanking on his arm, a blunt paper knife stab through the muscles round his shoulder with every second step.
He could take him out, a two second move at most, all done before Anonymous there on the right stopped marching to time and woke up. Highly tempting, just on the basic principle of the thing, but it would earn him a hell of a lot of pain and maybe that bullet in the head he was looking to avoid.
He'd stick with the deal angle while it was running for him, and he let them shove him forward and up into some kind of maybe SUV, catching his boot as he felt for the step. Back seat, of course, with a goon squeezing in either side of him.
One of them reached down and tied his ankles again, but only to each other instead of anything else. He was left with a lot more mobility, joints and muscles not locked into one strained position. His unpleasantly close companions aside, it was quite an improvement in comfort level from the arrangement five minutes ago.
He didn't bother digging into the goons, because they wouldn't talk back. Honaker was his only possible source of information - not the easiest target to get at, but he could be made to leak a little round the edges when he was squeezed in just the right places.
Honaker's shoes came tapping along a few minutes later with another (three? no four) lackeys all clambering on board with him. Big SUV or minivan then. Big engine to go with it when it fired up, and noisy, but catching fast and running smooth, and they swung around in a wide one-eighty before straightening out.
The car bounced and jolted down a typical unpaved Mexican back road. Sands hoped like hell that wasn't gonna go on too long. It really wasn't doing anything to settle that irritated mule in his skull, and he was starting to wonder if the hangover from whatever the fuck Honaker had gassed them with was ever gonna wear off. Christ.
"This truck of yours has some suspension issues, Robert, my old friend. I would have thought you'd be willing to indulge in your own comfort for these long drives instead of renting from U-Haul."
"Ah, did I forget to fill you in on the itinerary?" Honaker drawled out the faux-apologetics, smug enough to make Sands wish he was closer to puking just to make a point. "This one's the local runabout, since we're only going as far as the airstrip. I hope you'll find that method of transport more to your liking."
That piece of information wove a little lycra through the schedule, shrank it back down into something tighter.
Sands wrinkled his nose up, plastic frame resettling over his skin. "Just as long as you're not putting me on a fucking boat."
"Not a sailor, Sheldon?"
"Only if you've got the right drugs." The bitch of it was, he'd always been okay with boats. Not great, but okay. But right along with that little inconvenience with his eyes and his thoroughly fucked-over sense of balance, it seemed he'd flipped to dramamine-mandatory.
He was never going on another boat if he could avoid it. He couldn't keep his steps regular when the floor moved, making it a real hell to judge distance, and when it got rougher, things didn't even stay where he fucking put them. That whole trip had been one of the more miserable experiences of his life, beyond the kind of obvious.
"And here I was thinking you'd joined the grand anti-pharmaceutical crusade," Honaker commented, that smile stretching through his voice again.
"Crusade?" Fuck, but if he wasn't being subjected to a little non-con bondage with associated circulatory and pain hassles, he'd have to laugh. "Not really my scene. I just like to make a point of getting people before they get me."
"I wonder, though," Honaker mused theatrically, "how easy it is to stay uncontaminated, once you've got your fingers stuck in the drains of other people's obsessions."
"I was doing just fine in Venezuela," Sands reminded him. "You might have heard." Not that El was any kind of crusader either - he killed people because it was personal, all the way. Sands would have bet his trigger fingers El had never had a single thought stray off to drugs or drug dealers his whole life till they started shooting at him. The Mariachi raised self-involvement in his own particular slice of world to tropical thunderhead heights.
All of which was information Honaker was less problematic without, as far as Sands was concerned. He could believe the saviour of the people idiocies if he liked the romantic version better. He might find it turned out to be a bit over-salted for his tastes.
Ten minutes after they set out, everything changed as the car made a left, a smoother ride and the high rumble of tyres constant - so Honaker's warehouse of choice wasn't so very far from some kind of civilisation. Good to know, just in case he ended up orienteering through some alternative options. And it would be easier and quicker for El to find his way back here too.
Things were polishing up shinier by the minute.
Though he was starting to feel almost sickly hungry, in a way that dented the chrome a little.
Honaker had implied he'd get some food at some point, and that wasn't something he'd bother to lie about.
Sands liked being right, particularly in this case when the car stopped after some twenty minutes and one of the goons disappeared briefly, then passed rattling plastic around, and someone pushed a sandwich at his mouth.
He kept the bites small, nibbling cautiously forward with lips pulled in close to his teeth, because he didn't want to find himself licking some greasy asshole's fingers.
He stopped when he judged he'd be close to the end. He wasn't hungry enough to eat the last part where those fingers had definitely been. Not without knowing if the guy on the other end of them ever cleaned his nails. But he'd eaten enough to convince himself he definitely wasn't going to throw up.
Someone poured some more water into him too, before he was steered from the car and up into something else, presumably the plane. He kept his head bent low in case - he didn't need any more layers adding to his bedrock-established skull pain - and he hoped he was right and didn't look some shrinking, terrified fucking jackrabbit. He was tied to the chair with his hands behind him again, already on an unfortunate downslope from the situation in the car.
As the engines fired up, he separated them into twin sounds, one per wing, with propellers. Definitely a small-ish plane.
He was glad he'd ducked.
The plane bumped along over rough ground for the take-off - dirt strip, not a real airfield. It might even be for Honaker's private use for his shipments, and so intrinsically of no use to any of Sands' plans.
They left the earth and glided smooth into the air, Honaker's pilot as practiced and competent as the rest of his employees.
The flight was dull. Sands kept track of the passing hours till they landed, guessing at likely distances from Chiapas from the flight time. It kept him distracted a little from the stiffness creeping all through his body. The answers fit reasonably with his earlier supposition that they hadn't been moved too far while they were unconscious, improving his mood some.
The airfield they landed at was bigger - still dirt, but there was the engine of another plane off to one side, and a couple of cars passing close. One car pulled around beside the stopped plane, and they were off on another short road ride.
Honaker didn't have any of his convenient hide-aways in this part of the country that Sands knew of, so he was unsurprised to find himself hauled into some kind of apartment complex - not a conventional hotel, more open with courtyards still and breezeless, and echoes from the concrete on all sides. Much closer to real civilisation than being holed up in that cheap metal warehouse, and just as useless to him since he was strapped back into a chair sixty seconds after he made it through the door.
"I'm going to trust you not to make a noise, Sheldon," Honaker warned him. "I can assure you, my people will shut you up fast."
"They'll shoot me, yeah, I get it," Sands interrupted, drawling it out, bored.
Even if they wouldn't, he'd have to be really fucking desperate before he'd sit here yelling for help.
Honaker moved off into another room, smaller with more echoes - kitchen, bathroom? - and shut the door. Brief snatches of speech too muffled to decipher, with some longer gaps. Three, maybe four phone calls, quick and decisive, and then he left without another word to Sands, most of the goons following after him in a herd, as subtle as wildebeest.
Sands was getting a distinct ache from his knees, and twinges through the muscle just above them where he'd previously been introduced to bullet lead. The metal rim of the chair back was nestled half way up his spine, pulled in tight and trapped by his elbows where his hands were tied behind.
This was going to be the long downside to preserving his skin.
The goons came and went in some kind of four-hourly shift pattern, always two of them with him. He couldn't tell most of them apart, not yet, since they all thumped around in boots and none of them could be entrapped or provoked into a single word. He hadn't expected anything of it, but digging at them helped to pass some of the time.
He got to know Fingerless when he was around - that fucker was always quick to grab at him and drag him about when he had to be moved, so he learned to quit asking on those shifts - and someone else showed up every third rotation and spent the whole time with a coffee and a hardback book, turning pages so regularly Sands could tell where the chapters ended with the text cut short.
He got what he asked for immediately and silently, provided he stuck to asking for food, water and the bathroom. Anything else was ignored. They wouldn't untie him, so he didn't even ask to shower or shave - it was bad enough when he had to take a piss. He never got Fingerless holding him for that part - that bastard would probably yank his dick off - it was someone (or maybe someones) else he couldn't pin down, someone who didn't grip and twist at his arm like he was revving up a Hayabusa on the drag start, but Sands didn't want anybody's hands down his fucking pants. And not somebody who was practical all through, and even trying to be 'nice' about it, like there could be anything nice about being groped by some unknown and unwanted fucktard.
Mostly, he was bored.
It was easier to be bored when there was a good chance he was waiting around for something more positive and interesting than dying.
And okay, maybe he wouldn't have minded El's hand inside his pants, because that was as good a way to cure boredom as any other he'd found. Not that he'd had many chances to get thoroughly bored since he'd persuaded El to fuck - there'd always been something to plan, some scent to follow, a game to roll for.
He spent a bit of time thinking on contingencies - not plans exactly, because plans suggested some detailed knowledge or expectations of what was coming, and all he had was a few thousand variations on possibilities. He could cover a basic outline or four, but guys like El and Honaker were unlikely to stick within the pages of any pre-written script.
He didn't sleep. Not that it would have been easy, strapped to a chair except for his much-delayed trips to the bathroom, and every joint aching through him in a serial circuit, but he wouldn't anyway; not when a sound could become a hint that would change everything, when something missed could be the reason he ate an unanticipated bullet.
He slumped in his chair like he was sleeping, neck twisted onto his shoulder, and that was another dose of pain to add to the list.
The thumping in his head slowed, ebbed, eased into a dull buzz that let his other body parts share their voices equally instead of yelling everything else down. He wasn't sure it was an improvement.
He waited, because he had no choice.
And he listened, because he did.