Look at him and you’d think of a stone carving in the museum at Mexico City, an Aztec god or something; a throat full of rock dust and clay. Maybe not the faded jeans and the beat-up cowboy boots, but the squat body and the dogged will—solid, undying—and that stare, determined and fixed straight ahead, that’d all be right. Since he was a kid in the streets of Colonia Centro, among the pickpockets, fruit vendors and stray dogs, they’ve called him El Güero on account of his bloodless complexion and reddish hair. El G: hard as petrified bone, but with violence flowing hot through his wire-veins like the blood that’s become his stock and trade. Even the cold clack of his Cuban heels on the polished terminal floor speaks of dead-set ruthlessness, counting down to a coming frenzy…
“What is the purpose of your visit,” they’d asked over the top of the fake US passport.
He thought of blood but he said, “Business.”
Blood is his business.
Thoughts of it occupied his mind at thirty-thousand feet, muscles trembling from the memory of violent acts. He learned it all, the important things like that, not from his father (though his father could have taught him a thing or two probably) but from a capo they called El Verdugo—The Executioner. They’ve all got their names, like comic book villains. What else could a man with a handle like that teach a punk street kid but the act of ruthless, creative murder? He’ll release all that brutal knowledge to run riot, these next few days, as he hunts the killers of the man who could have taught him but instead grew old far away, filed Category A; who died free in a different kind of prison…
It starts. He doesn’t need the cold blast of unwelcoming British weather that hits his face to remedy the jet lag, though the journey from Benito Juárez Airport was long. He is a statue made animate, colder than the north.
He is what they call a sicario by trade … a narco executioner. Plain English, he’s a cartel hitman. So, blood and fear are his business, and in Mexico at least it’s a lucrative business to be in right now. But he has a purpose that brings him far from home and, while even more the outsider here, he’s every inch the predator. Already he senses the death throes and the blood that will surely come, as if from many miles away, as a shark would. He breathes it in and enjoys the hollow hunger. Swooping forward through the streets, carried in a black taxi cab, his rage is controlled and simmering patiently.
His origins are a mystery to most, certainly those who supply him with work, with throats to sever, faces to peel back, fingers to snip, or skulls to crush. Creative stuff, again. He is almost mythical. None would assume, even from the freckled skin and emerald green eyes, that his father was an English fugitive. It’s strange even to him. His mother, Cristina, an Acapulco girl in cat eye sunglasses, looms larger in his past. He has her surname. She too is dead and it’s a fact that he knows more dead people than living. He has memories of his father, the rich Gringo… the Cockney… short-sleeved shirts, horn-rimmed spectacles, shiny shoes; a gangster transplanted from these South London streets, on the lam for robbery and murder, his time running out the day his money did. They wrote about him in the big newspapers, his obituary giving his bastard son more information than anything he’d ever learned in the past. He only knows he resents his father as he would any snitch or a thief (he was both), but that he must also avenge him.
The cab stops for him and departs, leaving him alone under the railway arches and among the wheelie bins and rats, smoking the last of his Boots con filtro cigarettes, a cowboy boot on the empty packet he crushes and discards. He collects the keys to his father’s flat on Elephant Road, behind the chain-link din of the busy train station, from the shipping freight office his father’s old drinking partner runs. He is a small man is Mick, as grey and moody as the skies under which his life has been scattered and he looks and smells like he has not stopped drinking, accompanied or solo.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he slurs and, as far as El G can tell, he shows genuine emotion. Not that El G would know. The old man tells him the funeral is in three days, but El G has not travelled five and a half thousand miles to attend a funeral, even that of his own flesh and blood.
Flesh.
Blood.
Senses it—
He asks after the goods he requested on the phone from Mexico City and the old man says, “Tonight, the Dog & Fox around the corner there, anytime from seven onwards.”
He tells him to ask for someone whose name El G instantly forgets. How many Mexicans dressed like crummy rodeo riders walk into the Dog & Fox on an average evening anyway?
Can a thirsty hombre even get good tequila round here?
“You have your father’s eyes,” Mick says, and El G blinks, mute and unfeeling.
He takes a concrete footbridge over New Kent Road and into the neo-brutalist grey boxes of a vast but near-derelict council housing estate. It seems he is invisible to people as he glides past them. The flat is empty, not just of life but of furniture and belongings, only a small pile of junk mail and local newspapers spreads across the threshold. He wonders if they wrote about his father’s murder in those pages. He looks out at the city through dirty net curtains then sleeps on the bare mattress in the small bedroom, not because he’s finally exhausted, only to bring the night closer. A distant car alarm is his lullaby.
His dreams are based only on what he knows of his father, from those obituaries: Frank Bright, professional crook, robbed an armoured car at Heathrow and fled to Spain. Captured, Frank serves two years in prison before he escapes; takes on a new name, even a new face thanks to plastic surgery.
Belgium, Canada, Mexico…
Frank hooks up with a mistress, impregnates her … has a son.
And sons follow their fathers.
When darkness falls over the estate, he’ll visit the pub and the old man’s contact will fix him up with the type of large black sports bag prisoners are given upon release. It will contain the items El G requested, most of them recently knocked off: a cheap digital camcorder with a two-inch LCD screen, a 9mm Browning Hi-Power with a full clip, a compact petrol chainsaw, and a roll of thick duct tape. Everything he needs to wage a one-man Mexican drug war.
He’ll kill them all if he has to, every last one of the gang known as the Original Klick Bang Boyz, but he only needs two heads: what he calls the capo and his favourite foot soldier. The drug lord is named Cromarty, and the young man who pushed the blade into El G’s father’s guts is named Hatch, or B-Shank. The B stands for Busy. The young man is about the same age El G was when he started to kill, barely out of his teens. These days in Mexico, he marvels, they start much younger—boy assassins. That information was in the letter Mick had sent him—sent his dead mother more precisely; the letter which triggered this. To be certain of it all, he had read it over again in the flat before he left, beside the window in the dim orange light.
Pretty much anyone on this estate will know where to find the men he’s looking for. He settles on a group huddled together, half in the yellow disc of a streetlight’s beam, half in the shadows, kicking at the ground with hoods covering their faces; some are on bicycles, one has a bull terrier on a leash, pure steroid-enhanced muscle. Their predictable heckles and threats begin and El G flashes the 9mm, making them scatter. The big black bag thumps to the ground. The lookout with the weapon—the dog—stands firm and lets the animal tug at the chain on its collar and flash back its slaver-covered fangs. It barks in a rhythm that is only broken when El G puts a single round into its prosternum, destroying it. The lookout stands still, smirk gone, with the dead dog on the end of the taut leash. El G will move up the chain of command, just as the dog’s chain leads up to the low-level criminal’s clammy and trembling hand. The speechless lookout will tell him where to find Hatch, and in turn Hatch will lead him to Cromarty.
Cut off the snake’s head to kill the body, all that stuff.
The gunshot didn’t get anyone’s attention, but the scattering lookouts will raise the alarm right away, the ones that don’t go home to hide. The estate will go into siege lock-down. Right enough, Hatch has heard about the cowboy by the time El G gets to him. He pulls a knife on El G, not the one he used on the old man, but similar. It’s an uneven match, by about nine millimetres.
El G roughhouses the foot soldier back down the stairwell and into the lock-up and when the door crashes down he brings the pistol grip of the 9mm down too, hard on his collar. The black shiny duct tape secures his wrists and ankles to the chair and the young man’s dazed fury on waking turns to sobs, great heaving ‘what the fuck?’ howls into the lens of the camcorder with a flood of tears, sweat and mucus. The red recording light blinks at him from the shadows. Eventually a defeated silence washes over Hatch punctuated by just a few little whimpers. It’s always the same, El G thinks, they give up the ghost or they take it like a man. Either way they’re scared/shocked pretty much silent. He strips off his black leather jacket and plaid shirt and he can see Hatch’s blurred eyes dart fearfully across the gang artwork the muscular torso is adorned with: a snake in the beak of an eagle, a Mesoamerican pyramid, a large letter ‘M’. The black ink comes alive and seems to swirl around his body like smoke. El G postures with the 9mm, teasing the information out of his prisoner. ‘Where do I find Cromarty?’ and ‘Why did he have you kill the old man?’
He talks only when the chainsaw comes out of the bag—El G’s own steroid-pumped terrier—and its spluttering growl drowns out the handler’s questions.
Cromarty drives a big black motor with rims and under-car neon. You can’t miss it. El G leaves the camera on its roof where he knows no one will dare steal it, and goes back to Mick’s to wait for the message to be delivered. Every killing is a message—in this context, a narcomensaje of sorts. The old man is drunk and stares at him admiringly with half-closed, glassy eyes. Every man and woman El G has ever killed watches him that way too.
“The old days are gone,” says Mick, and he’s right. His father’s killers didn’t know his rep, didn’t know who he was or didn’t care.
He waits, in the company of the dead, and he imagines Cromarty watching the video and thinks of something Hatch might have said before his head was removed:
“You get me?”
* * *
On the top level of the tower block the O.K.B. Boyz scurry, arming themselves with machine pistols and converted replicas, bats, cleavers, whatever they can get. They wait for the cowboy and his showdown. He works his way through the gang, turning the estate into a battlefield; eating up their fire like fuel, his eyes glowing molten lava.
Only Cromarty remains, in a furniture-free room just like the old man’s. El G doesn’t need to say anything (“What is the purpose of your visit?”), Cromarty knows who he is. For his part, Cromarty doesn’t bother to explain that the old man’s murder was just a mugging gone bad, or that Hatch, with all his chat of respeck, never knew its meaning. He’s too blazed in any case. The man whose face looks to be carved from pitted stone in the street-light is Death, Cromarty knows it through his trance-like high.
Klick.
Bang.
Business concluded, a flight to catch. El G would grasp there ought to be a part where he puts a wreath on his father’s grave, all that shit, but he won’t. Cromarty will be alone when the police find him. Their sirens wail louder and louder until electric patches of bright blue dapple the concrete outside and turn the fresh blood on the wall into large shifting crystals of amethyst.
The blood part is important.
Sons follow their fathers.
by 
Scott Dingley
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I really REALLY enjoyed this; written in a concise, poetic kind of gritty style and with such an eye for character and place. This would make a cool novel, man. Briliant stuff
Thanks Gareth, glad you enjoyed it (as I did American Tan btw!). Reading it back I think I should have ended it with the added words “Sons follow their fathers, even the fugitives” – I guess we never stop rewriting! Thanks again.