You can't rub Sands out of Mexico, and you can't rub America out of Sands. The mariachi rolled the words around in two languages, watching red dust pillow up as the jeep rumbled into the yard.

The driver's skin glowed golden in the sun, and his eyes were shaded by his hat. Sands stood up from the other seat and stepped down, leaning on a heavy ornate cane. That was a new addition. His hair and skin were matted with dust and his eyes hid by large sunglasses. He still didn't look remotely Mexican.

The mariachi let his feet down from where they'd been resting against the rotting porch, and walked to the edge of the shade offered by this run-down, deserted farmhouse. He leaned on the porch as Sands whispered a conversation with his driver, then approached slowly.

'Come to tie loose ends?' asked the mariachi. He had brought a gun, of course, no bigger then needed, tucked under his belt against his back. Now he thought he wouldn't need that, either. Sands and the driver seemed to have come alone. From the farmhouse point of view, dust clouds showed up against the sky long ahead of the sound of motors or feet.

Sands smiled his dry, miniscule smile. 'Now why would I attempt that? No, I have another little job if you're interested.'

'No more,' said the mariachi, disappointed, though he wouldn't admit it to himself, couldn't, or he'd have to accept the implications. 'Marquez was personal.'

'Oh, personal is as easy to make as friends, or lovers,' said Sands, digging out a packet of cigarettes and lighting up. 'Easy as a bullet in the head of the person standing next to you. I know your type.' He took a long drag from the cigarette. 'There's always a good enough reason. If not, we'll make one.'

'Are you threatening my friends?' He didn't think he was. A man who wouldn't come after him to shut him up would also not risk a thing like that.

The mariachi noticed that Sands had not looked at him directly even once. He wondered about the sunglasses.

'Not me, boy-o. Let's talk.'

---

It was true. There was always a reason.

The next week passed in a blur, and afterwards the strongest memories were images. Pain was dull and old, the ache of strained muscles or the sharp crippling agony of bullet wounds; the throbbing of a slash wound that started only later, only after the flesh had begun to realise it had been rended. Some sights and images were new, and burned on the back of his retina, always to return vividly at the slightest touch of thought. Lorenzo grabbing the stub of his arm – the mariachi had never seen that look in his eyes before, not that lost, helpless look, where disbelief melts into horrified belief. The blood of the man who took his hand splattered, in the end, over the ancient Sophia Loren poster at Fideo's apartment. It would never be the same again.

And then it was over, and all that was left were the wounds, healing slowly, the sights on the insides of his eyes, and the thrumming of blood in his veins. Libertad! Libertad. Whatever else the word meant, this feeling was a part of it.

---

The mariachi winced at the pain as Sands carelessly spilled whisky on his thigh. For that he was awarded another one of those dry smiles. 'Come now, you're a big boy,' said Sands. 'Can't be the first bullet that's been dug out of you.'

'No.' Ever since that first time, bullets in his flesh always reminded him of Carolina. That first time – and the many times after. In the end she was so good at this particular nursing that she could even administer it in the few seconds of reprieve an overturned table could afford in a gunfight. 'But it might be the first dug out by a blind man,' he added, and winced again as Sands groped for the bullet.

'Yeah, well, such is life. Your woman used to do this, didn't she?'

The mariachi remained silent. He did not like to have his mind read.

'Well, my woman made sure I'm never going to be very good at this. Ah, there we go.' He had finally managed to wiggle the bullet out. The mariachi pressed the bandages hard against the wound and groaned. He tied it himself, not trusting Sands to find the wound again in his perpetual darkness.

Right now, it seemed like that darkness was spreading into the external world, dancing around the agent, effacing the world. Sands sat in the shadow, just missing the beam of light from the high window. This was an old building, old and beautiful, and abandoned. Abandoned places where the right kind of refuges for their sort of people.

'What happened to her?' the mariachi asked at last. The whisky that hadn't been spilled on the wound he was now drinking, and the pain was receding slightly. He was in the mood for a story, anything to take his mind off it. 'The woman who took your eyes.'

'I killed her.'

There was silence.

'You killed the woman you loved?'

Sands leaned back, and let out a little laugh. 'Loved?'

'So you didn't love her?'

Sands sat silent. His face, always inscrutable, was now nothing more than a few lines in the shadow. His hand flew up to his mouth, then in his hair, then laid restlessly on his knee, touching the sunlight.

After a while, he said, 'She never backed down an inch. Agents and policewomen are like that. If I somehow managed to trump her, she'd never let me off the hook. She'd do something so she'd be on top again.'

'Some guys like their women on top,' said the mariachi with a smile.

'I'm one of them,' said Sands drily. 'But there's a point where you can't back down. You can't get emotional about them. The moment the bitch finds out she's got you by the heart she squeezes. She has to. It's in their nature.' Sands inclined his hand jerkily, a movement between a shrug and a shake of the head.

The mariachi regarded the shadow that was Sands. He thought of Carolina and his mother and the woman whose bed he'd shared last week, and couldn't imagine what it would be like to think like Sands. 'She must have been afraid, too,' he said.

'She was kissing me when I fired the gun,' said Sands quietly. 'I suppose that's a victory.'

'What were her last words?'

Sands smiled again. The mariachi wondered if he was even capable of one that would show his teeth. 'She said... "You fucking little monkey."'

'And then she kissed you.'

Sands's smile disappeared.

---

They slept that night in the abandoned chapel. Sands had said it was a recon spot, and that someone would be along tomorrow with a fresh med kit, food and transportation. The mariachi would almost have preferred to be on his way by foot, but a few steps were enough to convince him he might want to let the wound heal a bit more first. I must be getting old.

The day was hot and dreary, but the night grew cool, and wind blew in through the broken arched windows.

The mariachi was woken from a light sleep by arms wound around him, and a head rested against his shoulder. Sands's fingertips dug into his chest. He turned his head enough to see the agent's face and the shadows where his eyes should be.

'Are you awake?'

Sands's grip on him tightened. 'The answer to your question is yes,' he said. 'I did love her.'

The mariachi turned and clutched Sands in an embrace. They lay on the floor in the crossing moonbeams like some exotic spider with too many legs and heads, tangled like a sigil nobody knew how to read. Sands's chest was heaving.

'Can't even cry,' he was saying, syllables breathed out fast, insistently clear. 'That bitch. That fucking bitch!'

'Such is life,' whispered the mariachi. 'Your woman took your eyes. My woman took my heart. It's buried right between her and my daughter.'

'Never, never, never again.'

The mariachi felt it then – the heartbeat beneath the earth, in a distant cemetary. 'Yes,' he said. 'You must.' And he kissed Sands in the dark, on the mouth, like he used to kiss Carolina, like Sands must have kissed his woman some days, perhaps on lazy afternoons when the sun was hot on their skin, when the flesh was sated and the walls were down, even if it was only for very short moments, when neither was pushing, when the touch could be light and sweet, and the violence could wait.

And he breathed in as they parted, and for a moment he could feel her in the breath between their mouths, the other lost woman, the one who knew so little rest.

'What was her name?' he asked.

Sands had stopped shaking. He lay calm in the circle of his arms; only his fingers were still sharply buried in the mariachi's shoulders. He breathed out another sigh, another ghost in the dusty air.

'Ajedrez.'

---

The morning spread white and blue from the east, melting the night into heat. They sat in the shadow of the chapel's doorway and watched the clouds of dust in the horizon. Two jeeps.

'I saw a donkey earlier in the morning,' said the mariachi. 'It must have run away.'

Sands laughed a short mirthless laugh. 'We're not going to capture you, shoot you or hoist you into a secret lab. We're just going to give you a lift. That's what you wanted, right?'

'Right.' The mariachi gave Sands a look, studying the expressionless face beneath the large sunglasses. He knew they weren't going to talk about what was said in the night, ever again. He looked away. 'You'll keep an eye on Fideo and Lorenzo for me?'

'And any other handy excuse. Oh yes.'

The jeeps pulled up, American and Mexican officers filing out. Sands focused on the middle-aged woman in a wifebeater who called his name, answered her few questions and instructed her to get somebody to fetch the boxes they'd stoved in the back of the chapel. She gave the mariachi a questioning look, but soon lost interest.

The boxes were lifted into the jeeps. They had a military look.

'I think I'll take the donkey,' said the mariachi.

Sands inclined his head towards him, the blind man's version of looking. His hand waved through the air until it found the mariachi's shoulder. 'I thought you might,' he said. 'Anyway, thanks. My hero.'

Sands's hands found the back of the mariachi's head and pulled him in for a kiss, on the lips, a thorough if quick contact. Then he patted his shoulder.

'Let's get a move on, shall we?' Sands said, turning to his people, hopping down the steps of the chapel.

The mariachi brushed a hand across his lips. From anyone else, that would have been a show of affection. With Sands, he was beginning to understand, it was another way of keeping distance. To show he didn't, in fact, care. Of what anyone thought, how anyone might construe his actions. Irony and violence.

But underneath there, the mariachi knew, there was a heartbeat, a stubborn one that couldn't accept a 'never again'.

He smiled to himself as the jeeps pulled away, turning the air yellow.