Ballistic(40)

A long blast from an automatic rifle below him focused Gentry’s efforts on stopping his slide, getting back on his feet, and pushing back upwards. He lifted Elena into his arms, cradled her, struggled with her weight as he 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 aquí!” 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.