Court looked back at the man’s face, and the eyes had rolled back. A last breath drained from his lungs.
Quickly, Gentry knelt over him, spoke into his ear. “I’ll take care of them. I’ll get them someplace safe. All of them.”
Then he stood and spun back into the house as the stucco walls turned to dust around him.
The family coughed and choked on the CS gas as Gentry shepherded them into the back of the truck. He’d retrieved the Hawk that held the tear gas grenades, and he fired the remaining rounds into the driveway and the trees beyond it, hoping like hell he was shooting in the general direction of the bad guys. When the weapon clicked on an empty cylinder, he let it fall to the tile of the entryway. He climbed into the back of the mobile command vehicle behind the family; Luz was right in front of him, and she looked past him, over his shoulder and back into the dark smoky house.
“Ernesto? Ernesto?”
There was no panic at all in her voice, even with everything happening around her. Court just pushed her deeper into the bus, dropped the high-explosive grenade launcher onto the padded bench next to Elena, and shut and locked the door behind him.
“I’m sorry, I have to—”
Court said the word drive as he was launched back against the door. Luz fell into his arms as he realized that the MCV was moving forward, its rear tires bouncing down the steps of the casa grande, and that whoever was driving was sure as hell stepping on the gas.
He crawled forward up the aisle, the bouncing and the buffeting of the truck’s chassis tossing him about; gunfire raked the walls of armor on both sides, a constant tinging sound like a downpour in hell.
In the front cab he found Laura behind the wheel; she knelt down low, desperately trying to get some sort of a view out of a windshield that was, while still intact, completely white from bullet strikes and cracked from one end to the other.
“I can’t see!” she yelled.
Court reached across her body and buckled her into her seat. He shouted into her ear as he did so. “Don’t worry! Just drive! Anywhere is better than here!”
They sideswiped one of the armored cars, ran completely off the driveway and into a pasture, and then Laura jacked the wheel so hard to correct for her mistake that the truck went up on two wheels for an instant before bottoming out and bouncing back onto the rocky drive.
Behind them in the long truck, police gear bounced and slammed around, knocking into Elena, Luz, and Diego.
Laura hit a small tree, knocking the MCV hard to the left and sending Gentry flinging into the dashboard.
“You suck worse than me!” Court screamed as he crawled across the front passenger seat, opened the heavy armored door, and leaned outside. They needed some sort of idea of their direction, even if it meant Gentry exposing himself to enemy fire.
“Right! To the right!” he shouted in English, and Laura turned the wheel to the left.
“¡Derecha! ¡A la derecha!” Court shouted.
She fixed her mistake, did not overcorrect this time. “Sorry! Sorry!”
Court spotted for her, though he heard bullets whizzing past him. They clanged off the rear door and the side panel; Gentry brought his body back inside the truck for an instant then darted his head out again quickly to help Laura find her way through the forest on the long, winding driveway.
They were in the woods twenty seconds later, safe from the sicarios at the casa grande, but Court knew good and well that they were not out of the woods, figuratively. The men up at the house had radios, which meant the trucks and the armored vehicle parked near the front gate would now be scrambling into position to block the exit.
Court bobbed his head back into the vehicle. Laura had found a small corner of the windshield that had not been turned smoke white with the impact of bullets. She leaned up and into it, straining against her seat belt, desperately trying to see out of the tiny viewing hole.
Court shouted to the back. “Diego, give me the grenade launcher!” He said the last part in English; he did not know the words in Spanish.
“The what?” shouted Diego from the dark rear of the vehicle.
Laura shouted back the translation, and within a few seconds young Diego appeared with the big gray cylindrical device. Court snatched it and positioned his entire body outside the MCV now, his feet on a small running board below the passenger door, his right hand holding the open door, his left hand holding the Hawk MM-1 and balancing it on the front door. As the truck bounced and weaved on the bumpy driveway, Gentry found it next to impossible to aim.
They approached the front gate now; Laura concentrated on it. But Court shouted to her from outside the passenger seat.
“I’m going to make us another exit.”