Fernando didn’t have long to wait. He was out smoking on the crumbling, graffitied overlook, surveying the motley sprawl of Cortez old and new, when Pedro’s crew-cab truck drew up beside him. Pablo sat in the backseat. Their looks were sober, grim.
“Primo,” Pedro said.
Fernando nodded to him.
Crushing out his cigarette beneath his bootheel, Fernando walked over to the passenger side of the truck and got in. Pedro ferried him away to a part of Saguero he’d never been. A graveyard place of abandoned warehouses and moldering old mining equipment going steadily to rust.
Fernando entered one of these empty warehouses. Baleful presences materialized from the shadows behind him. A few fraying ropes and flaking chains hung from the vaulted ceiling. They creaked and groaned as the heavy metal sliding door clanged shut.
In the middle of the gloom, Mondragón stood, waiting. Lilac smoke furled from the end of his long cigar.
Fernando looked him dead in the eye. Mondragón glanced past him and nodded.
A pipe blow to the back took Fernando down. It took the breath right out of him. He fell to his knees, gasping mutely. A relentless hail of flogging ensued. It sent him to his stomach. It knocked whatever breath was still in him out in a strangled spray of red.
Fernando didn’t even try to fight back. He just lay there hunched in on himself as it happened. Silver sparks flew before his eyes. Bright blazes so sharp he grew numb to all other perception, even to the blows still raining down on him. He fully accepted that he was going to die here. He’d accepted this from the moment he’d passed through the warehouse door. Maybe even from the moment he’d seen Felicia sitting sobbing in the dirt.
He was only dimly surprised when the blows stopped falling. Then resigned all over again when he saw blearily the white flash of a patent leather shoe—a split-second before it drove into his ribs.
“You disappoint me, Fernando,” Mondragón said, kicking him again. Fernando cringed, curling in on himself. “I had high hopes for you. I was generous to you. I treated you like a favored son, and this is how you repay me.”
Fernando spit blood. Mondragón hauled him up by the collar. The mule driver’s cigar was gone. Mondragón’s tawny eyes bore into his, bloodshot and blazing. Fernando registered the dull gleam of a pistol being drawn on him, as if in slow motion.
“What do you have to say for yourself, eh?” A barrel of cold steel jammed up against Fernando’s pounding temple. “What the fuck do you have to say to me, cabrón?”
Through the fog of his anguish, Fernando met Mondragón’s blazing eye dead-on. “I never touched her,” he rasped out. “You should know.”
Despite all Fernando’s heated encounters with Felicia, this was astoundingly true. But the truth didn’t matter. Not even what Mondragón believed mattered. Only what he felt mattered. This they both knew. Mondragón’s eyes pierced Fernando’s, through to whatever soul lay beyond. The barrel withdrew from Fernando’s temple only to come slashing back down, as Mondragón pistol-whipped him across the face and left him there, lying bloody and dazed on the pitted warehouse floor.
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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy