“Slipping away?” Elena asked, angry.
“Yes.” Court admitted. “But I will be back.”
Elena and Diego clearly did not believe him. He looked into Laura’s big brown eyes, saw kindness and understanding and compassion, but he had no idea what she was thinking.
Court ripped a camouflaged T-shirt off of one of the dead marines at the back door. The man had been shot in the head, so dried blood had crusted around the crewneck, but Gentry ignored it, took off the denim jacket he’d been wearing, and replaced it with the dead man’s shirt.
It was just past two in the afternoon when Court began heading through the house to the west wing. The sun was high over the mountains; the afternoon light was broken by scattered clouds. Elena had returned to the cellar without saying good-bye, but Laura and Diego started to follow him into the hallway.
“You guys stay here. Keep the guard up, but if the sicarios hit, don’t even try to defend the home. Go into the cellar, and fight them from there. You can do a lot of damage to an attacking force coming up that little hallway.”
Court did not mention the flip side of this truth: an attacking force could do a hell of a lot of damage to a defending force pinned into a little hole with no escape.
“You aren’t taking a gun?” asked Diego. He’d noticed Joe was unarmed.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You need every gun and every bullet. And it won’t do me any good. If I start shooting out there on the other side of the wall, there will be fifty guys on top of me in no time.”
Diego shook his head in frustration, “No. That is not why. I think it is because you feel bad. You are running away, and you feel better by telling yourself: well, I gave them all the guns, what more could I do?”
Court wanted to tell the boy that he needed to learn how to trust people, but he stopped himself. No, actually, Diego did not need to learn to trust. Here, he didn’t need that kind of advice. Court did not trust, for reasons that were no better than Diego’s.
Both of the Mexicans in front of him had been fucked over before, lied to and double-crossed. How could he tell them he was any different?
He couldn’t tell them. He’d have to show them he was different.
He turned and left them there in the hallway.
Court’s low crawl took most of the afternoon. As he pulled his body through the grass, he listened to the cracks of gunfire that emanated from the casa grande every ten minutes or so.
He expected DLR’s men to wait until nightfall before attacking, but he knew he could not discount the possibility they would send in individual spotters or sappers during the day to get a better idea of what they were up against. The only way he could think to prevent this, or at least slow down the deployment of these daylight teams, was to instruct Laura and Diego to fire their guns every few minutes throughout the day in different directions. If they did this sporadically and in random patterns, any federale infiltrators might think that they had been detected and stay hunkered down, or even retreat back over the hacienda wall.
Court wished that he could move faster, he knew he did not have time to waste, but with the undulating hills and mountains in the distance, he could not just break out into a run across the property. There would be snipers, he would be spotted, and the snipers would shoot him dead.
His low crawl was a worthwhile tradeoff to avoid this eventuality.
It was after five thirty when he arrived at the wall. He scooted under the weeping willows, pulled out a small bottle of water, and drank it down. He was exhausted and sunbaked; his knees and forearms and hands were scratched and bloody, his shoulders and lower back exhausted. The scar tissue in his left scapula, where an arrow had entered seven months earlier, felt knotted and tight; he reached back and rubbed the area while he sat and rested. After just a couple of minutes in the shade he stood and walked along the narrow bank, stepped into mud once or twice as he moved deeper under the foliage of the trees. He saw a water snake floating towards him in the murky pond; he ignored it, moved on a bit further, and then climbed up into a tree whose limbs reached above and over the wall.
Up high enough to look out into the rest of the valley now, he saw the dirt road that ran just on the other side of the hacienda wall. From where he sat he could swing out and drop down onto it, then run to the other side, move low, and dive into the tall, spindly blue agave plants that grew there amidst the high weeds.
He was just about to do that when a red pickup truck drove past from his right. It was loaded full with men with rifles, eight in all, and they passed by just under his position, rumbled and bounced along the track, and disappeared around the wall to his left a hundred yards on.