Ballistic

ascended, pushed through the pain in his back and arms caused by bumping down the steps. He shifted his ascent to the left, doing his best to keep other civilians between him and the gunmen below.

To his left, men, women, and children fell; from the corner of his eye he saw both of Eddie’s uncles and one aunt in a pile of dead and wounded flowing down the stairs, smearing long splatters of fresh blood across the steps as they tumbled and slid.

He kept climbing with Elena in his arms. He put his foot on the revolver he’d dropped and took a moment to kneel and pick it up; his thighs quivered with the effort of raising back up while holding Eddie’s pregnant wife. Soon the sheer number of civilians, an unrelenting stampede of humanity, shoved forward from behind Court, and those with nowhere to run but straight through the killers pushed the hit men at the top of the staircase back, knocked them down, and by the time Gentry arrived at the sidewalk above, the cops had abandoned their cycles and had begun retreating north, reloading their depleted weapons again as they did so.

Court looked down at Chuck Cullen’s body. He lay facedown and violently contorted, splayed along on the top three steps; his USS Buchanan cap had fallen off his head and lay beside him. Gentry put Elena down gently, looked for the loose weapon dropped by the man he’d shot in the collarbone, but he could not find it.

“Fuck!” he shouted, surrounded by the dead and the wounded and the terrified, and now more bursts of gunfire cracked at the bottom of the staircase.

EIGHTEEN

At the road above the Parque Hidalgo, just in front of the church, Gentry held Elena Gamboa’s hand, his head swiveled back and forth, searching for anyone in her dead husband’s family left alive. Screaming civilians ran off in the distance, but he did not see any of Eddie’s loved ones among them.

Finally, a voice called to him from the front door of la Iglesia de la Virgen de Talpa. “Joe! ?Estamos aqui!” It was Diego, Eddie’s sixteen-year-old nephew, beckoning the American into the church. He and Elena crossed the one-lane street and ran together inside.

The sanctuary was big and dark, and the cries and shrieks of those who’d sought shelter there echoed like church bells. There were twenty or so people inside the old building, many of them GOPES relatives, standing and shaking together near the altar. They cried and hugged and comforted one another. A priest stood above them in his white robes, his hands on his hips and his face a mask of confusion, uncertainty, and fear. Gentry took a moment just inside the doorway to check Elena out. Understandably, she suffered from shock. There was no color in her face; this he could tell even in the candlelight and the meager sunlight that filtered through the stained glass windows. But she did not seem wounded. He held her hand, began moving through the pews with her; Diego was speaking to him but too fast and frantic for him to understand.

“Are we safe?” Asked Elena softly. “Is it over?”

“I seriously doubt it,” Court answered honestly, and kept moving with her towards the altar.

There was no time for a head count; Court would help whoever was here to get out of here, but there was no way in hell he was going back out front where the snapping gunfire continued. He was certain most of the Gamboas were dead, but Luz and Ernesto were standing at the altar unhurt, as was Eddie’s younger sister, Laura. Court blew a quick sigh of relief when he saw her.

“They killed my parents!” Diego shouted, and this Court understood.

He did not know how to respond. What came out was cold and efficient Spanish. “We’ll worry about that later.”

When he looked back up, he saw many of the survivors at the altar knelt in prayer. The elderly frocked padre stood above them still. He did not participate.

Idiots! Court thought to himself.

“Hey!” He interrupted their prayers. “What the hell? We’ve got to get the fuck out of . . .” He switched to Spanish. “?No hay tiempo para eso!” There is no time for that! Those kneeling turned back to him, eyes still wide with the shock of the event.

He began running up the center aisle towards them.

Laura rose from her knees and turned; Court realized she had a Beretta pistol in her right hand, likely the weapon he had not been able to find by the cop he’d shot at the top of the stairs. She raised it quickly towards him, and he stopped dead in his tracks. He lifted his arms slowly.

“Laura. It’s okay. Put it on the ground. It’s going to be okay.” Instead he saw her sinewy forearm flex as she pulled the trigger, Court dropped flat on the floor of the center aisle as two shots rang out, right over his head. Through the echo in the sanctuary and the ringing in his ears, he heard a body hit the floor behind him at the entrance to the church. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a federale fall flat on his face in the open doorway forty feet behind, a Colt SMG skittering along the tiles next to him.

She’d shot the man in the head.

“Okay,” Court said as he slowly crawled back to his feet. “Why don’t you just hold onto that for now?” She nodded blankly. She was clearly in shock, as bad as Elena. But she sure as hell could shoot.

“Everybody, listen up!” Gentry said in English, then again caught himself and switched to Spanish. “Where are your cars?”

Ernesto Gamboa, Eddie’s father, spoke for the group.

“They are in the garage below the Parque Hidalgo.”

Court cussed aloud. They might as well be on the dark side of the moon. They were not going back down there. And there was no way he could transport everyone in Chuck’s little two-door parked behind the church, even if he had the keys for it, which he did not.

He stepped up to the priest, who stood as still as Jesus on the crucifix behind him. “We are going to have to borrow your car, Padre.”

The elderly man shook his head emphatically. “Out of the question! The church van belongs to my parishioners, and they need their van!”

Without hesitation Court pulled the hammer back on the revolver, still held at his side. The metallic click echoed in the dark sanctuary. “Your parishioners can have a van, or they can have a priest. It’s your call.”

The priest stared at the weapon. Slowly, he reached into his robes, pulled out his keys. Handed them over.

Gentry nodded. “Good call, Padre.”

Out of the corner of his eye Court caught a vicious look from Laura Gamboa. He assumed her Catholicism was clouding her pragmatism at the moment. But he did not have time for niceties. Ignoring her disgust, he lowered the hammer on the gun and shoved it into his waistband, and he led the civilians out the back of the church and into the van. He thought about running back for the Colt Shorty dropped by the dead cop at the door, but he did not know how long it would be before another team of assassins entered the church to finish off the survivors.

The van filled with passengers. Court climbed behind the wheel, with Elena in the front passenger seat, and they took off to the north.

NINETEEN

Three miles east of downtown Puerto Vallarta five white Suburban Half-Ton SUVs idled in an orderly row on a hilly gravel road. Their five drivers stood outside the open driver-side doors, each wore a button-down shirt, loose tan tactical vest, and khaki cargo pants. Each held a black Mexican Army–issued Mendoza HM-3 submachine gun in his hand. Five more men, bodyguards in identical black Italian-cut suits, knelt or stood alongside the vehicles. They wielded AK-47s, referred to as cuernos de chivos, “goat’s horns,” so named because of their long, curved magazines. The men’s eyes and the barrels of their AKs were pointed back down the hill towards the town.

In a clearing some twenty yards off the side of the road, Daniel de la Rocha knelt in the grass, his head bowed in supplication and a tight, intense expression on his handsome face. His left hand clutched the right hand of the man kneeling beside him, Emilio Lopez Lopez, de la Rocha’s personal bodyguard and the leader of his protection