over his on the knob, and we yanked it open. One of the hinges ripped loose as we did it, and the door hung crazily inward. Everyone tried to go through it at once. Deleon turned and shoved his men aside. In a panic one of them tried to squeeze by him and Deleon shot him in the forehead. Then he turned and braced his back against the surging crowd and said 'Lisa,' and I shoved her past him, ahead of me out the front door and into the rain. Chollo was behind me and Deleon behind him. Somewhere in the darkness car headlights came on and the street was blinding bright, glistening in the suddenly silvery rain. Behind us more of Deleon's men poured out of the building, as more timbers tore with a wrenching splinter. The left corner, where Lisa had been a few moments ago, collapsed slowly, like an elephant dying, and as it broke up it fell faster until it came down with a roar. At the naked end of the building, one piece of plywood, hanging by a single nail, swayed back and forth above the rubble where plaster dust rose thickly in the wet air.
'When you spring someone,' Chollo said, 'you spring someone.'
The crowd of confused gunmen crowded around us, squinting into the bright headlights. The firing had stopped. Lisa stood pressed against me, and as Deleon came toward us, she pressed in hard behind me.
'Lisa,' Deleon said.
She moved behind me. I turned a little, keeping myself between him and her.
'Get away from her,' Deleon said.
He moved to go around me. I could feel Lisa's hands clutching at the back of my jacket. From the corner of my eye, I saw Chollo step a little away from us to improve his angle, the big automatic hanging loosely by his side. Deleon got the inhuman flicker in his eyes again. He put a hand on my left shoulder and tried to spin me out of the way. I didn't spin. He was startled. He pushed harder. Still I was in his way. He brought his right hand up with the short automatic in it.
Chollo said, 'Spenser.'
I slapped the gun aside with my left hand and hit him solidly on the beezer with a straight overhand right. Blood spurted from his nose, he stepped backwards and sat suddenly down on the glistening street, in the glare of the headlights. The gun fell from his hand and I kicked it out of sight toward the cars into the darkness. I had my Browning out and cocked by the time Chollo shot Ramon Gonzalez. Gonzalez spun full around, took three running steps toward the collapsing house, and fell face forward, his arms out ahead of him. His two pearl-handled pistols skittered along the wet asphalt and banged against the curb. For a moment there was no sound but the echoing silence that always comes after gunfire. The troops were confused. They didn't know what side we were on. Were we rescuing Lisa from the building or from them? Their fortress was collapsing, their chief pistolero had just been shot by a guy come to deal with the boss, and the boss had just got knocked on his keister by an Anglo who had come with the guy who was supposed to make the deal. Beyond the headlights their ritual enemy had gathered and they were exposed to his rifles with no cover. I was in front of Lisa, and Chollo, moving so lightly his feet seemed to reach down toward the ground, had moved behind us to face the crowd from that direction.
With his hands pressed against his nose and the blood running between his fingers, Deleon screamed 'No disparen. La mujer. No disparen.'
Behind me Chollo translated softly, 'Don't shoot the woman.'
Deleon felt around on the ground for his gun, didn't find it, and got to his feet, trying to stop the blood with his left hand.
'This is not your husband,' he said to Lisa.
Lisa pressed closer against my back.
'No,' she said, 'a friend.'
With a loud, wrenching crash another piece of the tenement collapsed in on itself, cascading mud and water down through the mounting rubble, damping the cloud of plaster dust that tried to rise.
'We're taking her out,' I said. 'No one wants her hurt.'
'You are not from Joseph Broz,' Deleon said slowly. Like his troops, it had all come to him too quickly. He was trying to sort it out.
'No.'
'And Mister del Rio?'
'Mister del Rio don't give a fuck about you, Luis,' Chollo said. 'Excuse me, ma'am.'
Deleon nodded slowly. He was now holding his left sleeve against his nose and having some luck slowing the blood. He looked at me as if he was starting to get it. Behind him I saw the women and children come out from one of the alleys beyond the next tenement. They crouched in the street, the children pressed in close to the women. Several of the men stood in front of them the way buffalo bulls circle the calves.
'It was a trick to get in.'
'Yes.'
'To get Lisa.'
'Yes. Now we're going to walk away from here, past those cars.'
'No.'
'Yeah. We got her. We got you if we want to. Freddie Santiago is out there with fifty men. You got no place to take cover, no place to run. You start and everyone dies. It'll be a bloodbath.'
'You would leave me?' he said to Lisa.
'You'll have to kill me to keep me.'
'And if I let you go?'
'We walk, you walk,' I said.
'And Freddie Santiago?'
