“Not that I’ll be a problem. I won’t cause you any trouble, I want to leave this bloody town anyway. Yeah, we’ll go to New York and then Ireland,” I said hastily.

But the atmosphere in the room had changed. The seismic shift had happened and Shotgun was thinking along different lines now.

“No, no, you are right, Forsythe. We will have too much trouble with you. The pay is the same either way,” he said. “Step back, Rique.”

Rique saw that Shotgun was going to kill me.

“What are you going to tell her?” Rique asked.

“We had to kill him. He tried to escape. It was him or us,” Shotgun said.

Rique nodded.

“Now wait a minute. This isn’t what Bridget wants, this isn’t what she’s paying you for. She wants you to take me to Ireland,” I said desperately.

Rique lifted the 9mm.

It was typical of me to let my big mouth get me into trouble. Bloody typical. And where was that eejit Hector? Halfway home? God save us, there was only one way out now.

I fell to my knees and started to beg for mercy in evangelical Spanish. I invoked the mother of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe (who I think are the same person but I’m no expert).

“Please, please, please, don’t kill me, you’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to, in the name of the Father and the Son and the…”

And as I begged, I leaned forward, let my hand run down my trousers, and removed the tiny three-shot.22 pistol that I kept there for just such an emergency. My ace in the hole. In South America it was considered cowardly to strap a gun around your ankle. That was something a puta would do.

Better a live puta than a dead hero.

“You are going to die, Irish pig,” Shotgun said.

“Yeah, you’re right, tough guy, but not today,” I said, tumbling from my kneeling posture into a forward roll that carried me over the hard-wood floor, while at the same time grabbing the gun from my ankle holster and shooting the chatty bastard in the neck. He fell forward, frothy, arterial blood spewing from a mortal wound.