‘Fuck it,’ Axl said. The Colt was right. He should have chosen phosphex, cremated both Shitheads where they sat. Axl slotted his second shot cleanly through Leon Kachowsky’s right eye as he did what he should have done first time round and liquidised fat boy’s brain faster than dropping it in a MagiMix.

And then, while the woman was still drawing bead on him, Axl put his third flechette through her throat. The nastiest shot he knew. From start to finish was three seconds, which was two seconds too long.

Leon Kachowsky’s bodyguard was still shuddering in her leather seat - lungs spasming as her own blood began to drown her-when Kachowsky’s out-of-control coupe finally slammed into the Honda in front and put her through the windscreen, shards of glass finishing off what Axl had started.

‘Out of here,’ said the Colt. ‘Out of here now. You fucking hear me?’

‘Not yet.’ Axl stopped his bike beside the wrecked convertible and reached into his jacket pocket. The driver in the Honda truck ahead was watching him in a wing mirror but made no effort to get out. In fact, no one got out of that vehicle or any other. Wise move, Axl decided. Start involving yourself in one Mexican street hit and you’d never stop. Until the police or one of the militias decided you were getting too involved… And then they’d do the stopping for you, with boron-fibre baseball bats if you got lucky, with Brownings if you didn’t.

‘Fucking move,’ the Colt demanded. But Axl ignored it.

Firing up the Fuji, Axl grabbed three shots. One of Kachowsky, one of the dead woman and one of the wrecked Fiat. Punching upload Axl bounced the files off a low-orbit commSat and threaded the packets through a replicator in Montana. Give or take a power outage, those pics would be spreading over the web in under thirty seconds. A bot waiting at the Montana site would automatically notify all relevant news groups ahead of their receiving the files, each message tailored for the group in question. The last thing Axl wanted was to be accused of spamming.

‘Jesus fuck. What is wrong with you?’

Axl couldn’t answer. The silence in his head was too loud.

‘Cops,’ warned the Colt. ‘Get us the fuck out of here.’ It was almost screaming with rage.

There were too. Roaring down the police lane, speed bumps obediently laying flat, came a vast DFPD Cadillac, the noise of its turbocharged V-12 engine buried beneath the suffocating wail of a siren.

‘And above us,’ announced the Colt and Axl looked up. Black against the evening sky like a wingless bat and hovering directly overhead was a Sikorski gunship, ex-US marine model. Someone had taken out its two linkless Brownings, but the gun mountings were still in place and the helmeted cop leaning out of the perspex bubble was clutching, a loudspeaker under one arm. A very loudspeaker, the kind that stunned you into submission.

‘Put your gun on the ground.’ The demand was simple, unmistakeable.

Axl started to raise his Colt.

‘No fucking way,’ announced the gun. ‘You think I’m going down for trying to take out a police ‘copter?’

‘I think you do what the fuck you’re told,’ said Axl, but he lowered the Colt all the same and turned his back to the ‘copter. Then, without giving himself time to think it through, Axl dropped the gun to the tarmac and kicked it viciously towards a group of hookers working the inside edge of the road.

Leaning over from his bike, Axl grabbed the tiny H&K from the bloodstained lap of the blonde girl, then quickly checked Kachowsky’s jacket for good measure. Another Colt, but a cold one, inanimate and lifeless.

Holding that gun close to his body, Axl rapidly jacked out the first clip and emptied it into his shaking hand, thrusting the simple ceramics into his chino pockets. Back still to the Sikorski, he grabbed a handful of flechettes from inside his jacket and loaded the clip, slamming it back into place. It took about two seconds. Long enough for the cop in the Sikorski to scream at him to drop any weapon, turn round and move his hands away from his body. Now.

Axl dropped the dumb Colt, hearing it thud on the heat-softened blacktop, then realised he was still gripping the buterfly H&K, which now appeared to be pointed straight at the occupants of a nearby Saab. Inside the car, some trophy wife was going green under her immaculate Shu Uemura makeup. The small boy behind her was howling, but mostly because he wanted a better view.

‘Drop it,’ insisted the voice from above. ‘Drop it now…’

Axl did. Slowly raising both hands above his head as he kept the vast Yamaha upright and stable with his knees.

‘Get off the bike.’

Axl did that too, turning off the engine and putting his hands down long enough to run the bike back onto its stand. He left the tiny ignition chip where it was. Somehow he didn’t think they were going to let him keep the machine. Come to that, he was pretty certain they weren’t going to let him keep anything much, probably not even his life.

He was kind of glad the Colt was getting a chance to branch out on its own.

‘Yo! Rulacho. Shit for brains.’

Sanchez froze in the seat of his parked car.

‘Yeah, you.’

The cholo with the light-swallowing black jacket tugged one python-skin lapel and turned slowly, his already thin mouth pulled into a tighter line, hooded eyes narrowing as he glared round for the person he was going to have to kill.

There was no one. No one that is, except for ten lanes of locked-solid, Friday-night traffic and five hookers on tiptoe, leaning in through car windows with their G-stringed arses stuck up in the air as their heads bobbed up and down. 20,000 people in a traffic jam. 19,995 hot, fucked-off and miserable and five of them happy.

The hookers belonged to Sanchez. He paid $75 a month for them, indentured labour from an orphanage out at Zampango. They were clones mostly, ghost girls. Uneducated, unwanted, running .22 calibre intellects in a .45 Magnum world: but the ones he employed had tits that bounced like baby kangaroos and that was what the punters paid for.

‘Hey,’ the voice said loudly, ‘You blind or something-or do you always dress like that? And what’s with that beard?’

Before he could stop himself, Sanchez put one hand to his chin, touching the fine, neatly-razored streak of dark hair that dropped from beneath his bottom lip to the centre of his pointed chin. An equally fine line edged his upper lip, pimp style.

Sanchez tried to made it look as if he was thinking, like he’d always been planning to stroke his moustache and adjust the collar of his black shirt.

The shirt was silk, the kind with filigree-silver points to the collar. Expensive, but not as expensive as Sanchez told everybody it was. Not that people usually argued. People didn’t where Sanchez was concerned. The pimp smiled, showing a row of gleaming teeth inlaid with diamonds and fine gold circuitry.

‘Jesus fuck!’ The voice was back, rougher than ever. ‘Get out of that fucking rust bucket.’

Sanchez looked round again, lazily. As if checking out his working girls, but a small tic was pulling at the side of his jaw and his lips had thinned to nothing. A bad sign, as any one of his girls could have told the Colt, not that the gun would have cared.

‘God, finally. Down here. Okay?’

The pimp stopped eyeballing the nearest drivers, all of whom were nervously looking everywhere but at Sanchez, and at last did what he was told. Bloodshot eyes skimmed along the edge of the paseo, where the blacktop met a builder’s chainlink fence. The voice was coming from down there, amid the buckled wheel trims, dead Marlboro butts and a riot of crumpled wetwipes that covered the dirt like fallen blossoms.