Ballistic

“Take a number, Cowboy.”

“You are a worthless, piece of shit, motherfucking son of a whore!”

“I am an outlaw.”

Another long pause. “If men ever get to live on other planets, you should be the first man off of this one. Everyone wants you dead.”

“Yep.”

“Someone soon will get you. You must know that.”

“I know that. I find comfort in the fact that so many people will be sad that it wasn’t them.” Court hung up the phone, and then tossed it into a municipal garbage can a few blocks away.

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EPILOGUE

San Blas felt different to Gentry now. He arrived at eight in the morning, found the weather cooler and an ocean wind off the Pacific swirling garbage in the streets as the locals went on their way to work or school.

By now Court looked positively Latin. He stepped off the bus in his denim jacket and blue jeans, a single cheap backpack over his shoulder; his dark skin and sunglasses and trim hair, beard, and goatee blended nicely with other men his age. He wore earbud headphones in his ears, plugged into his phone, but he was not listening to music.

No, the headphones were just part of the costume, the only rhythms the Gray Man listened to were the footsteps behind him and the soft conversations of those around him. He was on guard here in San Blas, more so now than two weeks earlier on his first visit to the fishing village.

He knew they were after him, and he knew they were close.

He’d given up concentrating on who they were . . . it didn’t really matter anymore.

He walked the road to the hill, past the lobster shacks and the little churches and truckloads of armed marines on patrol, and he took another steep road up a steep hill. He’d taken this same road the last time he was in town, heading up to look for Eddie’s grave, and then heading down with Eddie’s pregnant wife. So much had changed in that time, but to Court everything felt like it had before. He’d acquired cuts and bruises and scrapes and burns, but his quest now was the same as then.

Mexico was just a bump in the road for him.

He walked up towards the entrance to the cemetery, saw the cheap mausoleums of tin and plastic sheeting and cement block off to his left. An iguana raced by on the road ahead of him. Chickens clucked in the last house up the hill before the beginning of the cemetery and the entrance to an old church and a counting office that dated back to the middle of the nineteenth century.

But he passed the cemetery, kept walking up. It was a normal security sweep for him, more automatic than brought on by any sense of danger or threat. It was second nature to make wide, lazy turns, to stop and retrace steps, to wait in the shadows for someone following, to move through the landscape like a wraith.

He finally turned left well past the cemetery, much higher on the hill, and he entered a grove of low grass surrounded by wild-growing banana trees two stories high. He moved deeper into the woods, turned towards the cemetery. He’d come all this way, a three-hour bus ride, just to see Eddie’s resting place one more time. Court thought about leaving something there, under the dirt, as a remembrance for his friend.

But he did not have much with him.

Court was not a sentimental man; perhaps his mind-set was as close to the opposite end of the spectrum as one could come from sentimentality without being diagnosed as a sociopath. But he felt he had to come here, had to take the time and to spend the money and to make the effort to return to the place where this all started for him.

He pushed through some brush.

Coming back was the right thing to do, though he could not articulate why.

He climbed over a whitewashed rock that had once been part of a Spanish fortress.

He would not forget Eddie or Laura or Elena or Daniel de la Rocha, but he needed to put this behind him to move on.

He climbed off the rock and fought through some tight vines, came out just above the cemetery; it began just a few yards down the steep hill.

He’d have to leave his thoughts of Laura, his fantasy of love, and his visions of lust behind him so that he could continue on in his fight against Gregor Sidorenko.

Court stopped dead in his tracks. Lowered slowly to the grass.

Fuck. He did not say it aloud.

When he was certain he was concealed, he crawled backwards on his elbows and his knees, back into the brush and vine and banana, and then he shifted ten yards to his right, still on his belly. It took him nearly ten minutes to do so, but then he sat behind a carved white stone, pulled a tiny set of binoculars from his pack, checked the angle of the sun, and then rolled around the white stone and raised the glasses to his eyes.

Where? Where are you?

He’d sensed movement below him, on the row of crypts south of where Eddie’s cross lay. There were iguanas everywhere, but this movement was not natural to the surroundings. It was accompanied by a flash of light, the reflection of glass in the morning sun. That was all he’d been able to discern before his interior warning system had alighted and he had dropped to cover. Now he scanned with his glasses in the area of the movement, looking for whatever had aroused his alarm just a few minutes ago—

There.

Shit.

A figure, a man, prone, eighty yards from Eddie’s grave. He wore a fully camouflaged suit, and he looked like the brush around him and in front of him; from under a blanket of twigs and leaves indigenous to the area, a rifle’s barrel and the front of a sniper scope protruded.

Behind this man, not far away, was his partner. He was better concealed, he had no barrel to expose or scope that could catch the sunlight, but Court saw him when he turned his head.

Shit. Court scanned the hillside cemetery now. There would not just be two of them. No organization in the world would send just two men on a mission to kill the Gray Man. Court could not find the others, but he knew they were there. Perhaps here with him in the brush above the cemetery. It would be a wise place to hide a follow-on force.

For just a moment he wondered who they were. Sidorenko’s men? SAD hunter/killers? Delta Force? Vaqueros? Black Suits?

Did it even matter? He decided it did not.

He turned his optics to Eddie’s simple cross.

Court could only see the back side of it down on the hill; he had no idea if more curses had been painted on it. In his pack he’d brought white paint and a brush. He’d planned on doing the work that Elena had been doing when he met her, to restore Eddie’s reputation once more before he left this place forever.

But the fuckers below had ruined everything for Court.

Fifty yards away from him sat Eddie’s lonely cross, and no one in this town would protect it, no one in this town would visit it. Sooner, not later, Court knew, no one in this town would remember Eduardo Gamboa as anything more than another cartelero, another narco assassin, another nameless, faceless killer of men.

And Court could not do anything about it at all. He could not even say good-bye.

He lay there in the brush for an hour, watching the sniper, a man as still and as patient as Court himself, and then he backed up through the brush, into the wild banana, out to the road. He went back down the hill, then back past the lobster shacks, and then he caught a bus out of town.