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.
Court knew that if he were an outsider, it would have been comical to watch thirty-six people, none of whom had any idea who was coming or what they would do when they got here, just stand around, trying to look resolute and tough, knowing that any new attendee to this party might just change everything.
Two motorcycles turned onto Canalizo Street from Sinaloa Street, the road in front of the Plaza Mayor. Even at one hundred yards Court recognized the uniforms, the helmets, the masks, and the dark goggles of the Policía Federal. Their bikes were white with green trim, and Gentry saw they were powerful Suzuki crotch rockets; the men rumbled quickly and confidently towards the crowd that had gathered there in the street in front of the Gamboa home.
It was obvious. Even though the two federales were vastly outnumbered, as far as these two dudes were concerned, they were in charge.
Gentry had little doubt these ninja-dressed bastards were from the same unit of men he’d shot up three and a half hours earlier in Vallarta. He wondered if these two were the very same sicarios who had stood on the top of the stairs gunning down the GOPES families trying to escape from the park.
He thought it a good bet that they were.
“Hooray, we’re saved.” He said it sarcastically under his breath. For a moment, a brief moment, he considered slipping away, backing into the Gamboas’ driveway, and then ducking out the gate of the rear garden. He could leave this all behind; he could get away.
He could run.
But he did not run.
The two men parked their vehicles in the middle of the road. They wore Colt 635 SMGs on their backs, muzzle down, and black pistols in drop-leg holsters. Their boots were black and shiny; they wore sunglasses and helmets and ski masks obscuring 100 percent of their faces. They lowered their kickstands as one, turned off their engines simultaneously, and stepped off their bikes in perfect unison. They moved into the scrum of pueblo police and regular army enlistees with a calm confidence and an undeniable air of authority.
First the federal cops walked right through the soldiers, right past the Gamboa family, and right up to the sergeant in charge of the municipal police. One of the new arrivals did the talking; he spoke softly to the heavyset cop. Martinez started to argue back, but the federale silenced him, placed a friendly gloved hand on the man’s shoulder, and continued speaking.
Martinez tried again, puffed his chest out this time, but the smaller federale just shook his head, continued speaking softly but authoritatively.
After no more than sixty seconds in conversation, the municipale sergeant nodded, turned back to the other men and women in the polo shirts and ball caps, and ordered everyone to return to their previous duties. This matter was settled.
The Feds were taking over.
It was no surprise to Gentry that the San Blas police were the first to back down. The sergeant seemed disappointed, either because he knew how angry his bosses would be with him or because he knew he would not be receiving the bounty he’d been promised by the Black Suits, but he appeared nonetheless thankful that a higher authority had come to relieve them from the standoff that had been brewing between themselves and the soldiers.
But the departure of the poorly motivated guys and girls with the sticks did not exactly fill Court Gentry with confidence. He kept his eyes on the heavy battle rifles waving in his direction.
The pickup trucks and the bicycles and the foot patrolmen melted away quickly, and the more loquacious federale now turned and began talking to the army lieutenant. There was arguing and shouting on the part of the soldier, but only a calm and assertive voice on the side of the law enforcement officer. Court could barely understand a word of either end of the conversation, but he could tell the ninja was saying that the Gamboa family and the gringo were to be taken back to PV, and he and his colleague would be escorting the family and the gringo there.
End of discussion.
Court had pressed his luck by sticking around, and now he was in the same boat as the rest of them. He leaned back against the whitewashed concrete wall around the Gamboas’ property, next to Laura. Ernesto and Diego had walked back into the house and gotten the bench from one of the backyard picnic tables, and this they put in the shade for Luz and Elena. The old woman and her pregnant daughter-in-law sat and fanned themselves with pieces of a newspaper they’d picked up from the gutter along the side of the road.
After a long speech by the black-clad cop, Laura, who had been standing at Court’s shoulder, leaned into the American’s ear. “Did you understand that?”
He hadn’t picked up a word of the men’s argument in the past minute. “No, what’s going on?”
“The federale says he is promising to tell La Araña that this army unit deserves a reward for detaining the family until he and his associate could come and take custody.”
Court thought for a moment. “La Araña? Who the hell is ‘the Spider’? ”
“Javier Cepeda.”
“Okay, who is Jav—”
“He is one of DLR’s top men. A Black Suit. They say he is the head of his sicarios. DLR’s assassins.”
“Perfect.”
“We are in danger, Joe.”
He wanted to say “no shit,” but he looked at the girl, down into her big brown eyes, and he caught himself. “We’ll be okay.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then how can you say we’ll be okay?”
“I have three bullets. There are two cops. We go with the cops and we’ll be okay.”
Laura’s eyes widened. “Joe… Please do not kill them. We can disarm them and—”
“I won’t kill them unless they make me,” Gentry said, but he had every expectation that they would make him.
The federales’ bargain with the soldiers seemed to be working. It was an interesting dynamic to a man like Court Gentry — two lightly armed cops against nearly twenty heavily armed soldiers. The cops didn’t finger their weapons; they didn’t bark into their radios to summon reinforcements; they didn’t scream or threaten. He suspected the cops were older, more sure of themselves, intimidating to the young army lieutenant, and they pressed their authority and selfassuredness against him with polite words, like a thin glove over a metal gauntlet, to enforce their will.
Court was certain they were bad men, but he was rooting for them in this little battle.
And their browbeating worked. The lieutenant told his men to stand down, to get back in the vehicles. Within sixty seconds the three loaded army pickups disappeared towards the south, turning left off of Canalizo, behind a cloud of afternoon road dust.
The two federales watched them leave then turned around to face the family.
Instead they found themselves staring down the gringo’s pistol at a range of five feet.