Sands tilted his head. "No. Barrillo did."
"But you gave him the order. She was an agent. She was going to expose your drug money pipeline."
For six years, he had been hunting General Emilio Barrillo, the man who murdered his lover, Carolina, and crushed his fret hand under the heel of a boot. The general had since traded his uniform for a drug lord's silk suit, controlling the Yucatan peninsula with an iron fist wrapped in a rosary.
The song was "Adiós, Carolina." It was a requiem so beautiful that Marquez's lieutenants paused mid-laugh. Even the guards softened their grips on their rifles. Barrillo leaned forward, enchanted. Erase una Vez en Mexico
"You didn't think the CIA would let a loose end walk away, did you?" Sands said, his voice stripped of charm. "You were the distraction. My real target was Marquez's laptop—the one under the table. Thank you for your service."
The Mariachi's fingers slid not to the strings but to a hidden latch inside the guitar's neck. With a soft click, the neck detached, revealing the pearl-handled revolver. He fired three times.
The sun over the Mexican state of Jalisco was a white-hot bullet. In the dusty plaza of Santa Cecilia, a blind man tuned a guitar that wasn't there. Tourists threw coins into his empty case, mistaking him for a beggar. He was neither. He was a ghost waiting for a war. Sands tilted his head
Barrillo's smile vanished. "Many women, musician."
Years later, in a cantina in Chihuahua, a new legend was born. Travelers spoke of a blind man who played a seven-string guitar (he had replaced the broken one with a string made of piano wire—the same wire he once used to garrote a cartel lieutenant). They said he never spoke, never smiled, and never missed a shot.
"I remember now," Barrillo chuckled, but his eyes were wild. "The crying guitarist. You're more pathetic in person." She was an agent
The shootout that followed lasted eleven seconds. Sands got off two shots—one took a chunk out of the Mariachi's shoulder, the other shattered his guitar. But Ajedrez was faster. Her first bullet blew Sands's sunglasses off his face. The second went through his knee. He collapsed, screaming.
The hacienda was a fortress of white stucco and bougainvillea. General Barrillo sat at the head of a table long enough to land a plane on. To his right was Marquez, a man whose neck was thicker than a bull's and whose eyes had the warmth of a shark.