El Rey is the Promised Land that Carlos painted it to be: lazy and sun-soaked, completely and lawlessly out of the way, a town where the air smells like rosemary and the cacti bleed 100-proof. But the old adage proves true – once a rogue, always a rogue – and it’s not long before Seth gets restless again.

So they pack up the house and set off through La Culiacán in Seth’s Porsche – a string of roadtrips through the desert countryside, just him and Kate with the backseat stuffed full of ammo and tequila, a boxful of Jimmie Vaughan tapes and Seth’s guitar. Back to the old life of crime.

 

Kate is an excellent apprentice. She learns as fast as Richie did, and is twice as reliable because she doesn’t have Richie’s moodswings and unpredictable fetishes. It’s not long before she can draw faster than a rattlesnake striking, shoot straighter than North Dakota Highway 46 and drink as hard as any tough in town. Seth still misses Richie – there are days when the loss of him is an ache that goes bone-deep – but Kate goes some way to filling that loss.

 

Seth has to admit that it’s good to have Kate around the place; she brings to their life the fabled woman’s touch, which Seth hasn’t seen hide or hair of since his last wife turned him in to the LAPD. It’s always Kate who takes out the laundry, who buys the groceries and makes sure the first-aid kit is fully stocked. Granted, there’s that one time every month when Seth is faced with a violently PMS-ing teenage girl, but he’s dealt with far worse when Richie was in one of his psychotic moods.

 

He can’t seem to pinpoint the exact definition of what Kate is to him: daughter, sister, disciple. What he is sure of is that he feels responsible for her. The request was implicit in the last look that he and Jacob exchanged before they burst out into the bar, guns and holy water blazing: look after my children. Seth’s already failed on that count with Scott, and every time he looks at Kate he sees Jacob’s last wish. He also can’t shake off the knowledge that he and Richie indirectly caused her family’s deaths, however hard he tried to prevent them.

 

So Seth thinks father, and when Kate comes home with a new tattoo sprawling over her arm and shoulder, he gets ready to chastise her. But then she looks mutinously at his own shoulder, where they both know the fire tattoo lies beneath the leather jacket, and Seth backs off. He gives up on the father business after that; Lord knows he’s no upstanding example himself.

 

“Who is she to you?” asks El one day, when he and Seth are sitting on the porch of the house in Puerta Vallarta, strumming at their guitars. El doesn’t live in Puerta Vallarta; like Seth and Kate, he doesn’t live anywhere, and to even meet him here is an extraordinary coincidence. They aren’t very close, Seth and El Mariachi, but Seth has immense respect for the man.Sometimes Seth wishes that he were famous enough for people to call him The, as in The Gecko, but then again he’d have to be a national hero first.

 

Seth looks out to where Kate is practicing her sniping, picking empty whiskey bottles off a battered wall. “I’m her guardian,” he says, choosing the safer option. “Her father entrusted her to my care before he passed on.”

 

El says nothing to that, merely nods and plucks a melancholy chord on the guitar. Seth knows that El had a daughter once, a little girl no more than five when she was gunned down in the street by a man hungry for revenge. He wonders if El would have taught his daughter the way Seth is teaching Kate now, Kate busting bottles with her .45. He thinks not. El would have been a good father.

 

“You watch her carefully,” is all El says. Then he picks up his guitar and goes back inside, chains jangling in the dusk.

 

*

 

 

A different house, this time in sunny Acapulco, only it’s past midnight when Kate comes home crying with bruises all over her bare arms and one shoe gone. Seth remembers El’s words as he dabs iodine onto the cuts on her legs, the sheer number of them turning something inside of him cold and hard, like a pebble of glass.

 

Kate’s hands are shivering so that the ice in her brandy glass rattle like a can of teeth. Seth knows he has to keep her talking, take her mind off the pain and trauma. “So he got you in the car. And then what did you do?”

 

“Fought…fought back…” Kate grits out. “He…he was too strong, though…started choking me. Stuck my p-p-pocketnife in his shoulder. Slashed the…slashed his tyres and ran for it.” She drinks, shuddering deeply. “F…f…fucking bastard.”

 

“That’s my girl,” Seth tells her, forcing a grin. “Now, you just drink that up and go to bed, kiddo. Everything’ll be cool in the morning, okay?”

 

He makes sure that she’s safely in bed before he gets the shotgun from the trunk of the Porsche and sets off in the direction that she came from.

 

It’s just about the break of day when he comes back, the stock of the shotgun coated with blood and smashed bone. Kate is waiting for him on the porch with two cups of coffee, knees drawn up and one of his old shirts wrapped around her. “Thank you,” she says as he clumps up the steps and leans the shotgun against the railing; it’s all she says and it’s everything. He takes the coffee from her and they sit, drinking slowly in silence, as the sun comes up.

 

*

 

Another night in Veracruz after a successful raid, and they are especially smashed. Seth is sitting on the table, playing the guitar and singing Morena de Mi Corazon while Kate knocks back another tequila shot. The song ends, and Seth lets the strings trail off into silence. He bows his head, drumming his fingers softly on the soundboard.

 

“What you thinkin’ about?” queries Kate drowsily.

 

Seth puts the guitar away with a sigh. “I’m getting old, Kate.”

 

“The hell you are.” Kate abandons the sofa and her empty glass and climbs up beside him, swinging her legs.

 

Seth laughs, shakes his head. “I’m as old as your dad was, sweetheart, before he got sent to his maker.”

 

“Nah,” protests Kate indulgently, “you can’t be as old as Dad. Nobody’s old as that.”

 

“You’re right there, darlin’,” agrees Seth without humour. “I’ll never get to be as old as Jacob. Probably get shot up in some ratfuck town first.”

 

“Seth,” says Kate, looking at him worriedly, “Seth, no-one’s going to get shot up. Remember?” She leans in and repeats in his ear the old line: “Everybody goes home.”

 

“Ain’t got no home – ” Seth starts to say, and then Kate kisses him.

 

Seth is not amused. Seth is, in fact, terrified. It’s all very well to question his morality, but the way things are going he’s not going to have any morality left to question.

 

“Stop it, Kate – ” he gasps out as he attempts to wrestles her off, “Kate, I said no – ” But Kate is slippery as a mongoose and he can’t seem to get a grip. “I may be a bastard,” Seth says – tries to say – “but I am – not – a – fucking – bastard – oh shit.” He’s always been fairly sure that he’s destined for hell, but Kate’s just handed him the entry ticket and seat number.

 

Kate’s breath is hot on his neck, gusting over the fire tattoo, and yes, Seth is a bastard, and yes, he is a fucking bastard, and he is going to hell, where Jacob is no doubt already waiting for him with a sledgehammer and an ice pick, not that Seth blames him any.

 

Damn it all, thinks Seth, sinking further into his own personal Avici. If they’re going to hell they might as well go in a fast car.

 

*

 

“So whaddya think?” demands Kate.

 

Seth thinks. “I think I ought to be the one who shoots the cameras,” he points out, “since they know what I look like. Your pretty face ain’t never graced the surface of a mugshot, sugar, and let’s look to keeping it that way.”

 

“True,” Kate admits. “Right. You take the cameras and crowd control, I do the transaction. You ready?”

 

Seth gives his partner the once-over. He notes with irony that now they even dress alike – the same shades, the same leather jackets, even the same inky flames curling out of their collars and up their necks. “The hell I’m ready.”

 

Kate tosses a grin his way, cocks her gun. She’s twenty-three, officially a woman, so young that she makes him feel like Methuselah every breath she takes. “Watch my back!” she calls over her shoulder as she gets out of the car.

 

Seth smiles, does the same. “Anytime.”