Ballistic(53)

Laura passed him now. She spoke to Gentry softly. “These are our friends. They have nothing to do with the narcos.”

“But they can’t protect you. If the sicarios come, or if the federales want to take you away, they can’t stop them. If the state police or the army—”

Just then a rumble up the street turned everyone’s heads. Three olive drab pickup trucks turned off the road from the plaza and onto Canalizo, the Gamboas’ street. Standing in the beds and leaning on the cab’s roof in each vehicle were two Mexican Army soldiers with bulky green flak jackets and large black G3 rifles. Behind them in the truck beds were two more armed soldiers facing the rear, their weapons trained on the street. Counting the driver and a passenger in each cab, Court realized eighteen guns and gunners had just arrived on the scene.

“Or the army,” Court repeated, more to himself than to Laura.

His three .357 Magnum bullets seemed so much worse than nothing now.

The army vehicles pulled to a stop, and the soldiers climbed out and jumped off, began speaking with the six San Blas cops, who now seemed ridiculously unprepared to protect anyone, outfitted as they were with Billy clubs and baby blue polo shirts.





TWENTY-THREE



Five minutes later nothing had been settled—in fact, the situation had turned even more precarious. Another pickup full of local cops had arrived, so now eleven. San Blas municipales now lined up against eighteen National Defense Army soldiers. The police sergeant and an army lieutenant argued in the middle of the street, politely at first, but now the discussion had become heated.

Behind them a scuffle broke out between the two sides. A soldier had leaned against one of the municipales’ pickups, and a young cop had shoved him off of it. The lieutenant shouted at his men, and they raised their weapons on the police.

There was enough testosterone and machismo on the street to ignite a fight as big as what went down in Puerto Vallarta earlier in the day.

Ignacio Gamboa, Eddie’s brother, had been leaning against the wall of his brother’s house, taking advantage of the slight shade there. When the guns came up, the big man raised his hands in surrender. When no one else followed suit, he lowered them slowly.

Court discerned from the army lieutenant’s arguing that he had been ordered by his superiors at their base in Puerto Vallarta to take the Gamboas back down to PV. And the San Blas cops made it clear that they had been told by their superiors to keep the family here until the Jalisco state police could make it up the coast to pick them up and then return the Gamboas to the Puerto Vallarta police for questioning about the shoot-out at the Parque Hidalgo.

The Gamboa family did not want to go with either group. Court saw that Ernesto and his family found it suspicious that both organizations represented here in the street claimed to be doing the bidding for the same organization down in PV, but their orders were, essentially, in direct opposition to each other.

Yeah, thought Court, this is bullshit. At the very minimum one of the two groups here fighting for control of Eddie’s family was lying. It was not hard for him to imagine that both groups were working for narcos or the corrupt elements in their organizations, either directly or unwittingly. As the standoff turned personal between the two sides, as the intractable argument turned to threats and more shoving and angrier glares between the opposing forces, Gentry felt more and more certain this power struggle playing out in the dusty afternoon street had nothing to do with jurisdictional authority—it had to do with a bounty de la Rocha had placed on the Gamboas’ heads, and both groups, or at least their masters, were determined to earn it.

The Gamboas and Gentry stood in the street in front of the house. The pickup was packed up and ready to go in the drive; Court even considered briefly trying to load up the family while the argument continued and simply driving away, but when the soldiers formed into squads on either side of the road, he nixed the idea. No, they would just sit here and wait to see who would win this argument, who would win the prize of the familia Gamboa.

The municipal police could not possibly win in a fight, but the big, angry Sergeant Martinez was nothing if not an alpha male, and he would not back down.

Then the distant drone of finely tuned engines rolled in from the north and filled the air. The sound continued, grew; the machines sounded like nothing else in this little town of old cars and beater trucks with slapdash motors and dirt bikes that spewed more gray smoke than a locomotive. The riflemen standing in the pickups turned their gun barrels towards the north in the direction of the approaching machines but looked to one another and their commanding officer for guidance.