There wasn’t a mark on them.

‘Jesus fuck,’ said the Colt crossly, ‘what are you waiting for?’

Pietro realised seconds ahead of the others that the gun wasn’t just talking, it was speaking to him.

‘You want to get killed, you little fuck?’

Pietro didn’t. He scooped the Colt off the floor and settled his fingers round the handle. Enough diodes lit to decorate a Christmas tree and then died away, leaving only a tiny red light flashing slowly on the left side of the handle, next to the boy’s thumb. It meant the Colt was ready to fire, not that Pietro knew that.

‘Take him out,’ demanded the Colt. ‘That’s lesson one, for fucking free. When the time comes to do something, get it done.’

Pietro looked at the pimp who was staring at his own frozen fingers. Every nerve had been burnt out in a single pulse without any visible sign of damage to the epidermal surface.

Slowly Pietro raised the gun until he saw the small red dot appear on the pimp’s chest but still he didn’t pull the trigger, just stood there clutching the heavy hiPower. All he wanted was for life to get back to how it was before this started. Getting shouted at, even slapped, that he could handle. But killing someone like Don Sanchez was beyond his reason-and beyond his expectations.

Anyone who had thought the club was quiet before revised their opinions now.

‘Put down that gun…’

Pietro glanced over his shoulder to find Spanish Phillipe behind him, slate-grey eyes flicking between the boy and Sanchez.

Decision taken. Inside Pietro’s skull dendritic nerves fired, creating a new matrix that flared and died into a new path that would make it easier to take the same decision next time. Only Pietro didn’t see it like that and wouldn’t have understood the implications even if someone had been there to explain them.

He just pulled the trigger.

Bits of Sanchez hit the white-tiled wall behind the pimp, painting it red. But most of the pimp just ignited from inside. It smelt like someone was cooking a roast.

‘Roll; said the Colt.

Pietro didn’t. Instead he stood slack-mouthed looking at what had once been Sanchez and was now a length of rapidly-burning meat. Phospex did that, instantly. Guaranteed.

‘Fucking roll’

Pietro did what the gun demanded, hitting the tiled floor of the pool and rolling between the legs of a shocked bystander.

‘In there,’ said the Colt and Pietro went scrabbling into the gap behind the bar. No tiles, just a skim of flaking polycrete that was wet with beer slops and sticky with spilt food. But what mattered was the soft armour plating that ran along the back of the counter. Alternate layers of boron-fibre and kevlar mesh, from ground zero to above waist-height on an adult. Something Pietro didn’t begin to appreciate until Spanish Phillipe’s first hollow-point slammed into the bar and flattened out into a worthless chunk of lead, velocity already spent.

‘Not bad,’ admitted the Colt. ‘Now fire the fuck back…

‘No,’ it added loudly when Pietro started to stand up. ‘Hit the fucking ceiling.’

Pietro aimed the hiPower at the roof of the bar and pulled its trigger, sending shards of concrete falling onto the shocked crowd below.

‘You want to run on manual or automatic?’ the hiPower asked him.

Pietro shrugged. He hadn’t the faintest idea what the Colt was talking about and figured it wouldn’t make any difference if he did… Sooner or later they were going to slaughter him…

‘Okay then,’ said the Colt, ‘you want automatic?’ It paused, sighed… ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ The gun bucked in Pietro’s hand and another slug exploded into the ceiling, dropping chunks of the floor above into the club below. And it kept firing until Pietro could see straight into the room overhead and then into the room above that. ‘Okay,’ said the gun. ‘Now open that door and fast…’

The boy looked around but couldn’t see a door. Behind and to both sides were white-tiled walls. In front was the counter. There was no door.

‘In the fucking floor.’

Pietro looked down and saw a square hatch set under the bar. It was edged with steel. ‘That’s not a door, it’s a hatch,’ he told the Colt.

There was a moment’s silence. And when the hiPower spoke again its voice was quiet, infinitely patient. ‘I suggest you open it. Whatever it is. Before someone else decides to kill you.’

Colonel Emilio smoothed his already-neat moustache and then pinched the broad bridge of his nose, hard…

He had a headache. It wasn’t the Saturday morning warmth that bled in from the great square of the Zocalo outside or the familiar stink of the cellar. Or the sight of the bloody wreck of a suspect sitting in front of him. A man apparently given to talking to himself as he committed murder.

No, what was giving the neatly-dressed, thickset cavalry officer problems was that he had one dead ex-Guerrilla leader-plus boyfriend-murdered on the Paeso and the man tied to the chair was refusing to take the situation seriously. And unfortunately no amount of expensive tailor-made nanetic artery-widening in the Colonel’s brain could do a thing about it.

Colonel Emilio got headaches, always had done ever since he was a child. He just wished he hadn’t got one today. But then what could you expect with a suspect who gave his name as Black Jack d’Essiarto.

‘Who ordered the hit on Isabella Rosa?’

‘I’ve already told you,’ Axl said as lightly as anyone could with three teeth missing. ‘I’ve never heard of Isabella Rosa. And I killed Kachowsky for Don Alonzo d’Estevez.’

There was no significance in the fact that Axl was being questioned in a small cell off a cellar that had once, centuries before, been used as a prison by the Inquisition in Mexico. It was just that upstairs at La Medicina the cells were all in use and this was where the police dumped the overspill, which is what he was.

Just another late arrival in the hell that was the morning after the night before at DFPD headquarters.

The Colonel walked slowly around the chair to which the man was tied with self-knotting ropes. The slow click of his heels on the granite floor wasn’t meant to intimidate the prisoner or make him fear that he was about to be attacked by the Colonel from behind-the Colonel had a sergeant to do that for him if he wanted, but he didn’t.

No, the Colonel was walking in circles because he was bored, like a dog trapped in a too-small courtyard, and he was beginning to think the piece of human wreckage in front of him was telling the truth.

Everyone at La Medicina always did in the end. Tell the truth, that was. Though it was usually DSP or sodium pentathol that brought them to it. Violence was as inefficient as it was unnecessary, though from the state of the man’s face the Colonel could tell that his troopers still hadn’t quite grasped that.

‘Alonzo d’Estevez died six weeks ago,’ said the Colonel slowly, not for the first time. His heels continued to click on the stone flags as he kept circling the small cell, thinking about what the man had said. What kind of idiot would kill someone on the instructions of a man already in his grave?

But what else was there? You only had to look at the prisoner to know that he didn’t move in the same world as Leon Kachowsky. And what about all that talking to himself while the murder was happening… Spirit voices?

Was it Voudun?

The prisoner didn’t look like a candidate for hardcore/Vou. Colonel Emilio stopped pacing and checked the edge of the man’s shirt, rubbing it between his fingers. Old but soft and finely woven, not smartcloth but some kind of lightweight silk all the same, Italian possibly or Spanish.

The boots were scuffed from where the man had been dragged face-down across the floor, and both the heels and soles were badly worn but the stitching was hand done.