Ballistic

The gray-bearded fifty-seven-year-old shrugged. “It wasn’t the Death Virgin who stopped the bullets racing to your heart. It was the one-hundred-twenty-thousand-peso Kevlar suit you are wearing, it was the tailor in Polanco who designed it, and it was my suggestion that everyone in the inner circle of the organization wear them every day.” He shrugged, bowed sarcastically. “Apologies to the holy virgin sitting on the side of the road back there with pigeon shit on her head.”

De la Rocha laughed aloud, a roar in the tight confines of the full SUV. Calvo was funny when he was frustrated, and Daniel knew that he frustrated the man to no end, which gave him great pleasure. The leader of Los Trajes Negros actually appreciated honesty and candor from his men, but the natural order of things had all but eliminated the personal opinions of his underlings from daily discourse. He’d killed employees and associates with whom he did not agree, many times, and although he’d found it necessary to do so, he recognized that this stifled outspokenness in his workforce.

But Nestor Calvo had been his father’s best friend, and Calvo was a genius when it came to the world of the cartels. As intelligence chief of Los Trajes Negros, he served as a go-between in DLR’s relationships between him and the government, the police, and the military, and Calvo, therefore, knew he was immune to violent retribution. De la Rocha loved the grumpy old goat like his father, may la Santa Muerte keep his eternal soul, and he’d listen to Nestor say anything he wanted. Even if it was blasphemous.

Daniel pointed to the bruise on his throat. “Do you see this, Nestor? Do you see where this second bullet hit me?”

“In the knot of your necktie?”

“?Si!”

“In the knot of your Kevlar necktie?”

“Dammit, Nestor, I know the tie was bulletproof, but the bullet came one inch from hitting above the tie, striking my throat.”

Nestor shrugged. “Therefore, your conclusion is that a resin skeleton in women’s clothing somehow controlled the trajectory of the bullet? If you had not insisted on coming to the rally in the first place, standing on top of a truck with a megaphone, thereby making yourself an easy target, I imagine you would not need the magic of your bony girl. Even without this attempt on your life, the hit teams Spider arranged to attack those on the dais created a dangerous environment to which you should not have exposed yourself.”

Spider Cepeda spoke up angrily. “My men knew where the trucks would be, and they knew to keep all fire towards the dais. The man who shot don Daniel was not one of my sicarios.”

De la Rocha started to enter the argument, but Nestor grabbed his vibrating mobile phone to answer a call. So Daniel turned to Emilio, the leader of his protection detail, who was seated to his right. “The man who shot me. Did you get him?”

“I think so, patron.”

“You think so?”

“I was on the other side of the truck, but one of my men swears he killed el chingado cabron.” The fucking asshole.

“Your job, don’t forget, is to kill los chingados cabrones before I get killed or hurt. If I was hurt, you would be dead now. You know that, don’t you?”

Emilio said, “La Virgen de Muerte has honored us both with a gift today.”

Daniel stared the man down for a long moment, then smiled broadly, reached out, and hugged him. “Indeed she has, amigo.”

Now de la Rocha’s mobile buzzed. He looked down at the screen and answered it. It was his wife. “Hola, Mami. No, no, I am fine, thanks be to God. Oh, some pendejo tried to shoot me but he failed. Emilio and his men took care of him. How are the kids? Excellente. Bueno, mi amor, give them each a kiss for me. I will be home soon.”

De la Rocha hung up the phone, took a sip of water that burned going down due to the bruising on his throat.

“?Jefe?” It was Nestor Calvo; he was putting his phone back into his pocket.

“What is it, nonbeliever?” he asked with a smile.

Calvo did not return the smile. “That was my contact with the local cops. There was a gringo there, at the Parque Hidalgo.”

“Yes, I saw him, the old man in the blue hat on the stage.”

“No, not him, another. A young hombre with a blue hat and a beard. He killed five of our federales and one of the Puerto Vallarta police working for us.”

De la Rocha just stared for a long moment. His face reddened slowly. Finally, he shouted back at him. “Six sicarios? I haven’t lost six men at one time in two years fighting Constantino Madrigal and the government. Who the fuck was this gringo?”

Spider hung up his own phone and addressed the question. “I’ve learned that he escaped with the Gamboa family. I don’t know who he is, but I will find out.”

Calvo called out from the rear seat. “I’m on it, too.”

“What about the families of the police assassins?”

“At least twenty dead.”

De la Rocha shook his head, still confused by the fact a foreigner had appeared from nowhere and taken down an entire squad of Spider’s federale hit men. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. The sicarios federales were supposed to shoot everyone on the stage and then disappear. Now there were dead police back there who could be identified. Some may even be tied to his organization. Still, he knew there would be no major investigation. The government here was in his pocket, as was the media and many officers of the military garrison at the northern end of town. This would be a mess, but it would blow over.

Anyway, he had Nestor to take care of the political fallout; that was not de la Rocha’s main concern. His role in the next day or two would center on public relations.

And appeasing la Santa Muerte by killing Major Gamboa’s unborn son and laying the body on her altar.

TWENTY

Court Gentry drove the church van north, out of Jalisco State and into Nayarit State. They had dropped the surviving members of other families off along the way, at the airport and the bus station and a rental car office. Everyone just wanted to get the hell away from Puerto Vallarta.

Left in the vehicle with him now were the survivors of the Gamboa family: Eddie’s wife, Elena; Eddie’s sister, Laura; his brother Ignacio; his nephew Diego; and his parents, Ernesto and Luz.

The van’s radio was tuned to a station that reported on nothing other than the shooting in Puerto Vallarta. The reports said first eleven, then twenty-two, and finally twenty-eight people had been killed, including prominent businessman and suspected drug lord Daniel Alonzo de la Rocha Alvarez, three Puerto Vallarta municipal police, five federales, a German citizen, and an American citizen. Another thirty-odd civilians and police had been wounded. The initial presumption had been that after de la Rocha had been shot by either government assassins or sicarios from the Madrigal Cartel, the assassins, police, and bodyguards in the crowd had all opened fire on one another, causing the largest bloodbath in the nation in nearly five months.

Laura Gamboa sat behind Court and fed him driving directions and periodic instructions. “Make a left here.” And “It will be dangerous in front of the army base; let’s take the beach road.” And “There will be a roadblock at Sayulita; we can get back on the highway after that.” She seemed peculiarly well acquainted with the roads and highways and traffic patterns of Puerto Vallarta, and oddly professional and in control, as opposed to the five others in the van, who did nothing but shout and cry. Court wondered if Laura was in shock or denial, or if she had just experienced enough turmoil and danger and loss in her life to where she could, more or less, take this in stride.

Elena was on her fourth phone call now. Gentry had let it go for a while, he knew her frenzy to find out who was alive and who was dead would be all consuming. But he couldn’t take this flagrant security violation any longer.