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.
The skeleton sat passively amidst all this booty, stared ahead vacantly with an icy grin.
Finished with the presentation of his flower, Daniel put his hand back in the hand of the leader of his sicarios; he clenched his eyes tight and said a prayer to la Santa Muerte.
The Saint of Holy Death. There were hundreds of roadside shrines just like this for la Santa Muerte positioned all over the country. The icon had been adopted by the poor and helpless, and by many in the drug trade.
Daniel spoke, his voice low and reverential. “Glorious and powerful Death; thank you for saving me today, for stopping the bullets that raced to my heart and to my throat, for protecting me from those who would do harm to my brothers and myself.
“Death Saint, you saved me today. You are my great treasure; never leave me at any time: you ate bread and gave me bread, and as you are the powerful owner of the dark mansion of life and the empress of darkness, I want you to grant me the favor that my enemies are at my feet, humiliated and repentant.”
He continued to pray aloud, with the rest of the Black Suits clutched close alongside him, while the ten men by the SUVs surveilled the road down the hill towards the city and glanced nervously at their watches.
Nestor Calvo, at fifty-seven the oldest man in Los Trajes Negros’s inner circle by over a dozen years, was tight in the scrum of prayer by the shrine, but he himself could not help but crack open an eye and steal a glance at his Rolex. He heard the sirens down in Vallarta, the helicopters circling just to the west of their location, and he knew that there were hundreds of police and military desperate to secure the bloodbath that had just taken place. Soon enough they would branch out, look for evidence or gunmen in the hills, and they would come to this place. Calvo wanted to be long gone by then. He wished he knew exactly when “then” would be.
It was the not knowing that got to him. As director of intelligence, his job was to know things, all things, before his boss asked him a question. Since leaving the Parque Hidalgo not fifteen minutes earlier, he’d received a few quick updates from his sources there on the scene. He’d learned that many of the GOPES families had been wiped out, according to plan. But the biggest prize of all, the immediate loved ones of Major Eduardo Gamboa, had managed to escape. Surely, there was more information available at present; his mobile phone had been vibrating nonstop since de la Rocha ordered the escaping convoy to pull over at the first shrine of la Santa Muerte that they passed as they raced away from danger. But Calvo had business to attend to, and this ridiculous pit stop for the joke of a cult that his leader and the majority of his colleagues worshipped was beyond asinine.
But there was nothing he could do but stand there and wait. His patrón was a believer, an idolater, and separating an idolater from his idol was never a good idea, especially when the idolater signed your paychecks and carried a gun.
Daniel de la Rocha had asked the Death Saint for a sign; he knew she did nothing for free, and she had given him a great gift today. He wanted to repay her, needed to repay her, and he knew the white rose was nothing. What did she want from him? How could he settle up with her? He waited quietly there on his knees for three minutes. His men around him were silent; they would give him all the time he required here at the shrine. Even old Nestor Calvo, who was probably shitting in his pants right now due to the delay, knew better than to disturb de la Rocha.
It was quiet. He heard only the birds in the trees and an occasional crackle from a radio in the SUVs behind him on the road, and of course he heard the choppers and the sirens down near the ocean. But nothing else. It was so quiet he could hear the beating of his heart, and this self-awareness finally caused him to focus on the bruising on his chest and on his throat where the bullets had struck him but had not penetrated.
Sí!
His eyes opened slowly, and they opened wide. He looked down to his chest, saw the hole in the left lapel of his jacket, and in an instant he knew he had his sign. He took off his tie quickly, opened his coat and pulled it off, slipped off his vest and, under it, his hand-tailored white shirt, which barely contained the muscles in his shoulders and arms. He began to unbutton the shirt but found his hands trembling too hard to continue, so excited was he by what he knew he would find. Giving up on this dexterous task, he instead tore open the shirt; ivory buttons fired into the air in all directions like shot from a scattergun. The men clutching him in prayer stepped back so that he could get his shirt off, baring his ripped chest and back, and the holsters and grips of the twin silver .45-caliber pistols on his hips.