Martin Orozco opened fire into the bedroom, spraying the doorway just above Laura’s head with 9 mm rounds. As he fired, he stepped to the right to cover his fallen partner.
His weapon emptied in three seconds, and he knelt to reload it.
But there was no more shooting from the room ahead.
Martin sprinted past Laura now, and with the light attached to his rifle he saw two dead state policemen by the open window, a wall pocked and broken and chipped from all the gunfire, and then, on the floor on the other side of the bed, the slumped form of Luis Corrales.
Laura had stepped in behind him, and she cried out as she ran past and huddled over her father-in-law.
Martin left her, returned to his partner up the hallway. He was relieved to see Ramses up on his elbows; the gringo was there, too, kneeling over Ramses in the dark. The American was soaking wet. Ramses had taken a round directly into the ceramic ballistic plate on his chest. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, but he was uninjured. The three men looked at one another and breathed a sigh of relief.
The battle was over — for now.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Court sat with Martin and Ramses on the southern mirador, all eyes were trained on the rear of the property. Court had removed his soaked shirt and replaced it with a denim jacket taken from Luis’s closet, but there were no dry pants anywhere in the house that fit him. The acrid smell of gun smoke hung in the air still, soon to be replaced by the smell of the dead bodies on the patio. Court had already decided that he’d tie stone planters to the bodies and roll them all into the pool if it looked like he and the Gamboas would still be here after dawn. The sight and stench of dead adult humans no longer bothered him in the least, but morale would soon suffer amongst the uninitiated civilians here in the casa grande if they had to operate around sun-bloated cadavers crawling with bugs and iguana.
Back in the house he could hear the women crying, then praying aloud, then crying some more. Laura had fallen to pieces when she found Luis’s dead body. She was obviously blaming herself for his death. Inez and Luz and Elena had covered the man with a blanket where he died, and as far as Court knew, he was still right there.
Court knew the old man’s body would begin to smell by noon.
As soon as the shoot-out was over and the surviving sicarios disappeared again into the darkness out towards the southern wall of the hacienda, Court checked on Eddie’s truck. His hopes for a quick escape were dashed when he found three of the four tires flat from the barrage of gunfire the vehicle endured after he’d turned on the lights. There were holes in the hood and grille and left front quarter panel, but the engine still ran, for the time being at least.
But that hardly mattered on a truck with only one inflated tire.
Between her sobs and prayers and moments of catatonic staring into space, Inez Corrales had told Court that the barn to the east of the casa grande held an old farm truck. The engine of the truck had not been turned over in years, but as far as she knew, the pickup was operational. Ignacio, while shit-faced drunk, was also an auto mechanic, so Ernesto sent his son out to the barn to check on the potential of the vehicle to help the ten of them escape.
Court positioned young Diego on the north mirador to watch the front of the property; he’d outfitted the boy with a carbine retrieved from one of the dead cops, told him to hold it to his shoulder, point it at the target, and just pull the trigger over and over until one of the professionals showed up at his side to take over.
Ramses spoke softly to the American. “We did good. We lost one out of eleven. They lost eight out of, I don’t know, fifteen or twenty maybe. Plus we got rifles and ammo.”
Court didn’t see the glass quite so half full. “Yeah, but the survivors got all the intelligence they need. They know there are just a few of us; they know we can’t cover all the points of entry; they know the general layout of the house. These dudes would have been the guys DLR could get here in a couple of hours. This wasn’t their A-team by any stretch of the imagination.” He sighed. “We need to get the hell out of here. We aren’t going to make it through another attack.”
“Where do we go?”
“I’m open to suggestions,” admitted Court.
Neither of the federales spoke.
Court was tired, frustrated beyond belief, and completely without a plan, and his frustration manifested itself in his next comment. “So, other than yourselves, you are saying there is not one motherfucking trustworthy Mexican in Mexico?”
The accusation hung in the air for a moment.
Ramses Cienfuegos answered back finally, with the unmistakable tinge of anger in his voice. “I know lots of trustworthy people. Soldiers, cops, civilians, government employees. There are many of my fellow countrymen who can and do die fighting against the narcotraficantes. But involving them in this will put them at risk. Corruption exists in all levels of every institution in this country, thanks to the sixty billion dollars you gringos spend each year to fuel that corruption.”
Court shrugged. “Don’t blame us for your civil war.”
“Like you Americans would never have a civil war yourselves, right?”
Court ignored the comment, but Ramses was not finished.
“If there was no demand, amigo, de la Rocha and men like him would have to become wheat farmers or some shit. Talk to your fucking drug addicts in the United States; they bear much of the responsibility for all this death and murder. More of my countrymen would be trustworthy if only more of your countrymen weren’t worthless sons of bitches who break your own laws and, by doing so, destabilize our nation!”
Court nodded in the dark. He got the message, and the message was that he was being a dick. “Sorry, dude. I’m just pissed off.”
After a moment, Ramses said, “It’s okay. We all are.”
The three men fingered their weapons and looked into the night.
They heard the sounds of Ignacio trying to crank the engine of the truck in the barn, fifty yards off to their left. Eddie’s alcoholic brother had the starter spinning up, but so far the machine would not turn over.
Court sighed. If they couldn’t get the truck running, they were fucked. Even if they could, he had no idea where they could escape to here in Mexico. He wasn’t from around—
Wait. An idea entered his head. “That’s it.”
“What’s it?” asked Ramses.
“You said the U.S. needed to take some responsibility. What if we could get Elena and her family into the U.S.? De la Rocha doesn’t own the institutions up there.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“It can’t be that hard to get into the USA. Your countrymen manage to do it all day long.”
Ramses nodded. “Last year I was in Mexico City, attached to the AFI, the federal detective force. It’s like the FBI in los Estados Unidos. We discovered a gringo who worked in the U.S. Embassy’s consular office who was selling papers to get into the States. We had everything we needed to arrest this gringo and stop it, but the operation was shut down. We didn’t even tell the Americans what we learned.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you think? Mexico makes a ton of money from people going over the border. There was no reason to stop this guy. I figured we would probably try to help him.”
“Okay. So, you guys are shitty neighbors. How does that help us in our—”
“I know who this guy is. You can buy visas for the Gamboas, get them up into the USA.”
Court thought it over for a moment. “What if we don’t have any money?”
“I have money.” It was Laura. She’d entered the mirador from the second-floor hallway, sat down behind them, listening to three men she did not know forty-eight hours earlier now discuss the fate of her family.