Jules stared past her, into a place she wasn’t even sure existed.
Fifi caught the hint. ‘Oh, yeah. Pete… Uh, sorry.’
‘Right,’ said Julianne, throwing up her hands. ‘Let’s just get them all on board before we draw another crowd, shall we?’
She could see cars had started to pull over to the side of the freeway on the hill up above them. Small groups of people were already picking their way down through the scrub, doubtless hoping to clamber onto the boat with them. To her west, across the confusion of the bay, the centre of Acapulco was a disaster movie. Fires blazed at so many locations that Jules couldn’t count them, but it was eerily quiet, like watching TV with the sound down. After a second she realised why: no sirens, anywhere. The absence was chilling.
‘Come on, move your arses!’ she called out to the dawdling travellers. Phoebe had actually stopped to take pictures with a small digital camera. ‘Excuse me, the fucking tour bus is leaving!’ cried Jules in frustration. ‘Move!’
Shah and Thapa started herding everyone towards the dock, occasionally glancing up towards the roadway behind them. A few more vehicles had pulled over. Pieraro spoke to an old man amongst his people, who nodded before firing off a scorching fusillade of native oaths and curses and clouting a teenaged boy, who’d stopped dead, transfixed by Fifi’s tee-shirt. The Mexicans, all hauling heavy sacks of food by the looks of them, began to run awkwardly down the pier. The Americans, dropping some of their luggage as they went, followed suit as Thapa chivvied them along. ‘If you would be so kind as to be hurrying your arses up now,’ he said with some urgency.
‘Mr Shah?’ Jules called out. ‘My gun, if you please.’
The Gurkha sergeant produced her shotgun from the cabin of the SUV, which they’d parked close to the start of the long pier. He racked a round into the chamber before handing it over to her.
‘Thank you,’ said Jules. She fired three shots into the air over the heads of the people swarming down the hillside towards them. It had a salutary effect on her own charges as well, speeding their passage down the jetty to a sprint.
‘Hell yeah,’ enthused Fifi. ‘Time for a little redneck persuasion.’ She let rip with a short, snarling burst from her heavy Russian machine-gun, firing into the windows of an abandoned building that overlooked the car park, shattering a dozen panes of glass. The sound was scarifying and the small horde descending the slopes stopped and dropped immediately.
‘Go, go!’ said Shah, waving the two women off towards the boat, where Thapa and Pieraro were hurriedly helping everyone aboard – in some cases by throwing them bodily over the side.
The girls didn’t wait to be told twice. They set off at a sprint. Moments later, Jules heard the vehicle start up again, and looking back over her shoulder, she saw the former soldier driving it onto the jetty. He followed them, stopping halfway down, before turning the wheel to create a barrier across the pier.
‘They’ll just crawl over it,’ said Fifi, levelling the PKM on the makeshift blockade.
‘They won’t,’ promised Jules.
Shah climbed out, tossed something into the cabin and ran as quickly as she’d ever seen a short, refrigerator- shaped man run. A few seconds later, as the first of their desperate pursuers made it to the start of the pier, the grenade exploded, lifting the vehicle a few inches off the deck, but not moving it far enough to topple it into the water. Everyone ducked. When Jules straightened up, access from the shore was blocked by the burning wreckage.
‘Nice work, buddy,’ Fifi said as Shah trotted up to them. ‘You like Nascar at all?’
Smiling like an imp, Shah lifted his shoulders. ‘Nascar? Never heard of it. But I never liked Toyotas much.’
Fifi wondered if anyone even drove a Toyota in Nascar.
Out on the water, it was worse. The sport fisher was big and powerful enough to speed around or muscle through the occasional logjams of smaller craft that blocked its way, and the sight of Pieraro, Thapa and Shah heavily tooled up and guarding against all attempts to contest a boarding precluded any such misadventures. But Jules still had a hell of a time clearing the bay, on which an unknowable number of vessels jostled for primacy. Where the hell most of them thought they were going, she couldn’t say. The little runabouts, motorboats and inflatables that numbered in their thousands would founder in even moderate seas, and word from Mr Lee back on the
Jules shook her head as she spun the wheel to dodge what looked like a garbage barge barely able to stay afloat under the weight of seven or eight hundred people, all tightly packed onto the mounds of rubbish. They were throwing as much of the rotting, malodorous ballast overboard as quickly as they could, but the wake from her sudden turn set the flat-bottomed scow wallowing dangerously, and at least a dozen men and women went over the side. She nudged the throttles forward and tried to ignore their flailing figures. They wouldn’t be the last people to drown today.
A cacophony of horns, whistles, sirens and klaxons overlay the constant screaming and calls for help. The further out into the bay she took them, the worse it grew. Bodies began to appear in the churning water, some floating near capsized boats, and some of them obviously killed by gunfire. At one point she cut their speed back to allow a small pod of surf-skiers to paddle by. They saluted her with their oars before resuming their rhythmic progress.
‘How did they get this far?’ she said to nobody in particular.
Fifi appeared at her elbow with a couple of chilled Coronas. She watched the surfers for a moment before shrugging. ‘Surf breaks get pretty crowded. They’re probably used to it. Wanna beer, Julesy?’
‘You have to be fucking kidding… Oh… what the hell. Could you open it for me?’
Fifi popped the tops and passed one of the bottles to Jules, who kept one hand on the wheel while draining half the
‘You coulda waited, you know,’ said Fifi. ‘I cut up some limes.’
