She’d shot the man in the head.
“Okay,” Court said as he slowly crawled back to his feet. “Why don’t you just hold onto that for now?” She nodded blankly. She was clearly in shock, as bad as Elena. But she sure as hell could shoot.
“Everybody, listen up!” Gentry said in English, then again caught himself and switched to Spanish. “Where are your cars?”
Ernesto Gamboa, Eddie’s father, spoke for the group.
“They are in the garage below the Parque Hidalgo.”
Court cussed aloud. They might as well be on the dark side of the moon. They were not going back down there. And there was no way he could transport everyone in Chuck’s little two-door parked behind the church, even if he had the keys for it, which he did not.
He stepped up to the priest, who stood as still as Jesus on the crucifix behind him. “We are going to have to borrow your car, Padre.”
The elderly man shook his head emphatically. “Out of the question! The church van belongs to my parishioners, and they need their van!”
Without hesitation Court pulled the hammer back on the revolver, still held at his side. The metallic click echoed in the dark sanctuary. “Your parishioners can have a van, or they can have a priest. It’s your call.”
The priest stared at the weapon. Slowly, he reached into his robes, pulled out his keys. Handed them over.
Gentry nodded. “Good call, Padre.”
Out of the corner of his eye Court caught a vicious look from Laura Gamboa. He assumed her Catholicism was clouding her pragmatism at the moment. But he did not have time for niceties. Ignoring her disgust, he lowered the hammer on the gun and shoved it into his waistband, and he led the civilians out the back of the church and into the van. He thought about running back for the Colt Shorty dropped by the dead cop at the door, but he did not know how long it would be before another team of assassins entered the church to finish off the survivors.
The van filled with passengers. Court climbed behind the wheel, with Elena in the front passenger seat, and they took off to the north.
NINETEEN
Three miles east of downtown Puerto Vallarta five white Suburban Half-Ton SUVs idled in an orderly row on a hilly gravel road. Their five drivers stood outside the open driver-side doors, each wore a button-down shirt, loose tan tactical vest, and khaki cargo pants. Each held a black Mexican Army–issued Mendoza HM-3 submachine gun in his hand. Five more men, bodyguards in identical black Italian-cut suits, knelt or stood alongside the vehicles. They wielded AK-47s, referred to as cuernos de chivos, “goat’s horns,” so named because of their long, curved magazines. The men’s eyes and the barrels of their AKs were pointed back down the hill towards the town.
In a clearing some twenty yards off the side of the road, Daniel de la Rocha knelt in the grass, his head bowed in supplication and a tight, intense expression on his handsome face. His left hand clutched the right hand of the man kneeling beside him, Emilio Lopez Lopez, de la Rocha’s personal bodyguard and the leader of his protection detail. And his right hand squeezed the hand of the leader of the assassination and kidnapping wing of Los Trajes Negros, Javier “the Spider” Cepeda Duarte.
Around these three kneeling men, seventeen more knelt or stood close. Everyone wore matching black three-piece Italian-cut business suits, and they all carried handguns on their hips or in shoulder holsters or, in the case of the Spider and a few others, Micro Uzi submachine guns.
The twenty men were packed so tightly together they were able to hold hands, wrap arms around shoulders, or simply press their bodies close. A tight knot of brotherhood, all with heads bowed in front of a garish roadside shrine.
Daniel de la Rocha was closest to the shrine, and he took his hand away from the Spider’s clutches just long enough to lift a white rose from the grass at his knees and place it at the feet of a six-foot-tall skeleton made of plaster that sat on a throne made of plywood. The skeleton’s head wore a long black wig and was covered with a sheer veil. Its torso and extremities were enshrouded in a full-length purple bridal dress that shimmered in the sun even though it was partially protected from the elements by the small tin roof erected over it. The right hand of the female skeleton held a scythe of wood and iron, and her left hand clutched a lit votive candle.
De la Rocha tucked his single white rose between dozens of varied flowers and several candles, many of which had burned down to leave nothing but colorful wax smears on the cement slab below this throne of bones. Amidst the flowers and candles were dozens of other offerings for the icon: cigarettes and cash and bottles of tequila and bullets and DVDs and apples.