“Sí.”
“Bring it to me.”
“¿Por qué?”
“Just do it!” he snapped at her. He was tense and angry, but he then caught himself. “Please.” She turned and crawled off the balcony.
Ramses asked, “What is it? What did you see?”
“I . . . I’m not sure.”
Martin said, “It’s just a soccer ball, right?”
Court climbed up to his knees, took the double-barreled shotgun in his hand, and began crawling back through the door to the second floor of the house. “I wish.”
Five minutes later he was out on the patio, crouching low behind a planter full of azaleas. He used the overgrown landscaping and stayed as low to the ground as humanly possible to make his way back to the swimming pool, stopping every few feet to listen for the presence of human noises and the absence of animal noises. He heard chirping birds and even the croaking of frogs at the pool, and this relaxed him a little. He was reasonably certain he was the only person in the back garden of the hacienda, and he used this confidence to propel himself onwards. If the sicarios came over the wall, still forty yards away from him, he was well aware he would be fucked. They’d be able to see him lying there in the grass. He only had a weapon that fired two shots without reloading, and reloading from a pocket full of shotgun shells would not be terribly efficient.
He carried the gun as a last resort, but he knew, the last thing he wanted to get involved with right now was a gunfight. Ramses and Martin were up on the mirador, covering him with the MP5s taken from fallen marines, but otherwise, he was on his own.
He passed several bodies from de la Rocha’s first two waves of killers. Court, Martin, and Ramses had already picked the corpses clean of any useful equipment or intelligence, so he only used them now for concealment as he crawled across the patio, alongside the smelly pool full of mosquitoes and frogs, the pool he’d swam in five hours earlier.
He heard voices again on the other side of the wall. A loud shout, a cackle, like a laugh from an insane person, and he halted his low crawl. It did not take him more than a few seconds to recognize that they would not attack—who would divulge their location only to then come over the wall, exposed to the defenders that they had just alerted? No, Court understood, they were trying to get the attention of the defenders of the hacienda so that they would notice the thing they’d slung over the wall fifteen minutes earlier.
This worried Gentry almost as much as a direct attack.
He started moving again, covered the cold tile a little more quickly now, though he did not actually want to arrive at his destination. He had seen enough through the lenses of the binoculars to understand what he would find. He’d brought along the bag sticking out of the waistband of his pants and the water bottle rolling around inside it as well as the camera in his back pocket for a reason.
He’d brought the binoculars with him as well. Not because he would need them here, crawling along the patio on his belly like a grass snake. No . . . he took them because he did not want those back at the casa to see the soccer ball. To see what he was doing. He’d do this alone, make the best of a terrible situation, and then explain the terrible situation to those back at the house as best he could.
Morale was crucial for a population under siege, morale had become terrible in this house of death, and now, Gentry was pretty sure, morale was about to go straight down the goddamned motherfucking toilet.
He entered the tall grass, passed more bodies of corrupt policemen and low-rent civilian killers, and went on towards the object lying in the grass ahead.
Due to literally hundreds of experiences in his life and the things he had seen during those experiences, Court Gentry was a man who, simply put, was almost impossible to gross out. But his face tightened as he reached the ball in the grass, his body recoiled slightly as he noticed the blood smeared on the ground next to it, and his hand did not want to reach out and roll it closer to him. But he did; he extended his arm and put his fingertips on the ball and pulled it to him. His hand felt something cold and soft as he did this, and he almost vomited there in the grass. He steeled himself as he brought the ball in close and looked at it.
The loose and slack face of a human being, a young man, had been sewn with thick black leather thread onto the ball, which was smeared with blood, scuffed with grass stains. There was a tuft of turf lodged into one of the hollow eye sockets. He had no idea who the face was, but he was certain that someone back at the house would know.
This would not be some random local chopped up and made into a grisly toy.
No, this would be someone’s loved one.