Paz and Fierro ducked, crouching, looking around in all directions for the shooter. More gunfire followed, coming from above, ripping up the pavement a few feet away from them.
Fierro spotted the shooter first. It was a rifleman on the roof, the one who hadn't fallen to the ground. Mortally wounded by the grenade, he still had enough left to try and take out the enemy before they made their getaway.
Fierro tagged him with a shotgun blast in the chest and head, knocking him backward out of sight.
Carrancha lay on the ground, bleeding from several bullet holes in the back, arms and legs thrashing, gasping for gurgling breath.
Fierro said, 'Of all the filthy luck… '
Paz said, 'We can't leave any wounded behind. He would do the same for me; I would expect no less.'
Carrancha saw what was coming and raised a hand, pawing empty air, pleading, 'No — no, don't!'
Paz shot him, putting a bullet in the back of his head.
Paz and Fierro hopped into the Explorer. Vasco drove off almost before they were entirely inside, putting distance between them and what was left of the Supremo Hat Company.
Paz reached inside his shirt, squeezing the talisman of Saint Barbara. Breathing a silent prayer of thanks to the dark spirit that was his guardian angel.
15. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 P.M. AND 8 P.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME
The site of the swap was a footbridge spanning the Long Canal in Sad Hill, a forlorn patch of lowlands south of East New Orleans. East New Orleans was one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city. Sad Hill was a few notches below that.
Named for Governor Huey Long, who'd had it dug in the early 1930s, the canal was part of an intricate system of waterways and pumping stations designed to prevent flooding. It ran roughly north-south through Sad Hill.
Its east bank was a weedy field sloping to a low rise. Its sole distinguishing feature was a knoll on which was sited an ancient cemetery, Our Lady of Sorrows, which had given the area the name of Sad Hill. The graveyard had been abandoned close to a century ago.
Beyond it, farther east, the rise topped out into a ridgeline running parallel to the canal. It had been cleared and flattened and now served as a power trail, along which ran a row of steel pylons carrying high-tension electric wires. The towers were placed high enough to avoid being swept away by floodwaters.
Linking the east and west banks was a footbridge with a cast-iron framework and a wooden plank bed. It was old, but its antique construction had survived Katrina better than other newer, more modern spans.
On the west side of the bridge was a deserted neighborhood, a tract of ramshackle huts and burned-out ruins. The few paved roads were veined with cracks, out of which grew waist-high weeds. Most of the cross streets were dirt tracks.
The canal, like so many others, had failed under Katrina, leaving Sad Hill part of the eighty percent of New Orleans that had been flooded by the storm. The residents who'd evacuated it had never returned.
Since then, a number of houses had been burned down by vandals; the charred remains stood in place, no effort having been made by the city to clear them away. Many standing houses bore spray-painted Xs and other symbols left by searchers in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, signs indicating whether any dead bodies were left in the houses, and if so, how many. The dead had been carted away then, only to be replaced more recently by others, victims of gang killings and random murders.
The site was so blighted that even the teen gangs who haunted New Orleans's phantom zones had forsaken it, except as a body dump.
Such was Sad Hill. Blighted, blasted, and abandoned, an ideal spot for shady dealings best conducted beyond the eyes of the law, or for that matter, those of any other witnesses.
Not long ago, within the last hour, the kidnap gang chief had resumed contact with Mylon Sears, naming Sad Hill as the site where the ransom swap would be made. He didn't give Sears much time to get there, either. Fast- fast-fast, that was how the deal had to go down.
Sears had told him, 'We'll get there as quick as we can without breaking any speed laws that might attract police attention.'
The abductor said, 'No police, or Garros dies.'
'I get the message.'
'Hirelings like you need things repeated to drive them home into your pea brains,' the abductor said, breaking off communication.
The EXECPROTEK crew waiting at the day care center hopped into their vehicles and drove cross-town for some miles before arriving at Sad Hill.
Now, Susan Keehan and her Sears-led security squad were on the west bank of the canal, where they'd been told to wait for final word on swapping a million dollars in ransom money for Raoul Garros.
The hour of exchange was at hand. The convoy of a half-dozen SUVs and outrider cars was parked in the middle of a cross-street in the tract of abandoned houses. Not as many reinforcements as Sears would have liked, but enough to repel any possible attack.
Susan had insisted on coming along. There was no way around it; it was easier for Sears to give in than to try and fight it. Otherwise she'd have tried to fire him and replace him with someone more amenable to taking her orders, requiring Sears to invoke the authority of Wilmont Keehan to back him up; a diversion that would have eaten up precious time and created a dangerous distraction.
Better to have her along where he knew where she was and could exert some control over her contacts with the outside world, preventing her from throwing a wild glitch into the situation by going outside the closed circle of in-house channels.
Susan was allowed to be present under strict conditions; she was to remain in a bulletproof, armored SUV surrounded by a cordon of armed guards. They were in the midst of the tract houses, which served as a barrier screening them from potential snipers on the far side of the bank. In case the kidnap plot turned out to be an elaborate ruse to make Susan herself the target for abduction or even assassination.
Stranger things had happened in the world of the ultrarich; Sears recalled the chain of mysterious deaths in the Niarchos/Onassis feud of the great Greek shipping tycoons.
Sears refused to let Susan leave the protective cocoon of the armored SUV. To keep her company (and to keep an eye on her), he had Gene Jasper beside her, figuratively and by now literally holding her hand.
She seemed to take comfort in the presence of the big, good-looking security specialist; Jasper was feeling no pain from the assignment, either. He knew the score: not Susan but Wilmont Keehan was their boss; no harm must come to a single hair of her head. With Jasper covering Susan, Sears had one less distraction to worry about.
To be on the safe side, though, Sears had put a guard on the guard, also posting Ernie Bannerman in the Keehan limo as a precaution in case Jasper proved unable to resist Susan's blandishments, financial or otherwise. Bannerman was a middle-aged, hard-nosed, old ex-cop with a one-track mind who knew how to follow Sears's orders.
Sears sent out a detail of several men to search the vacant houses in the immediate vicinity, to make sure that no ambushers or spotters lurked in hiding. None of them much liked having to poke around in the garbage- strewn ratfraps, but they did what they had to do. The buildings came up clean — of potential threats, that is.
Sears posted a sentry to keep an eye out for cops, too. All he needed was for some zealous NOPD officers to come snooping around to investigate suspicious doings in Sad Hill. Luckily, storm-related duties kept the city police far from the locale.
