He was more like his brother Rodrigo. Weak, scared, looking out for himself and taking what others would give to him.
He’d seen Rodrigo shot through the forehead yesterday morning in the Parque Hidalgo, watched his brains blow apart. Ignacio was like his brother Rodrigo in many respects, but he did not want to be so much like his brother that he ended up dead.
No, Ignacio told himself. He would not die. He would run, and he would live!
Ignacio hadn’t mentioned it to the others, but he knew a place to go where Los Trajes Negros would not get them. He had friends who lived up in Durango, in Madrigal country. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of villages there where DLR and his Italian-suit-clad soldier boys would not dare go. Yes, if Ignacio made it up into the Sierra Madres of Durango, he’d have to work for los Vaqueros, he’d have to grow pot or coke or opium, or traffic pot or coke or heroin or meth, or kill others over pot or coke or heroin or meth, but what was the big deal? Better that than ending up like Rodrigo or Eduardo.
He did not tell his family before, because they would not go with him. And he did not tell them now, because they would not go with him.
He’d go alone.
He wiped tears from his eyes with his hairy, sweaty, meaty forearm, and he shoved the vehicle into gear.
He’d planned on just smashing through the closed double doors at the front of the barn, but they creaked open in front of him. Two men appeared in his headlights.
They raised weapons towards him.
“No!” Ignacio Gamboa stomped on the gas.
The two sicarios opened fire with MP5s, blasting the windshield and the hood and perforating the heavy man behind the wheel, riddling his spasming, convulsing body with brass-jacketed lead as the truck rolled forwards and past them, veered to the left as his face slammed down on the steering wheel, slowed as his dead foot slid off the gas pedal, and came to rest gently against the stone fountain in the center of the driveway’s roundabout.
The sicarios reloaded their rifles and fired again into the fat man’s twitching body.
Inez Corrales was not where she was supposed to be. Thirty minutes earlier she and Elena and Luz had been in the cellar, as directed by the gringo, lying on bedding, and by the light of a single veladora, they had prayed and talked of their lost loved ones. But after an hour there she told the other ladies that she needed to use the bathroom, so she walked down the hallway, past Ernesto Gamboa, who was dozing on the stone steps. At the top of the stairs she passed young Diego, lying on the kitchen floor but awake, and she told him she would be right back. But she entered the living room, crossed it to a long hallway that led to the western wing of the casa grande.
She passed through a small open-air courtyard, walked down a colonnade of cool stone walls, entered a dusty storeroom on the far side, and made her way in the dark towards a doorway leading to the outside.
The night was still save for a gentle cool breeze; she followed a stone footpath overgrown with weeds and moneda vines, took this disused trail to the old chapel. She opened the rotten wooden door slowly; she dared not make a sound that would alert the American or the policemen that she had left the casa, lest they come and take her back to the cellar. When she stepped inside, she closed the door tight so that it would block out any candlelight.
She’d brought a lighter, and she used it to light a veladora, which she took to the little altar there on the far wall, and she knelt, slowly so that the knee rest did not creak or even snap from her weight.
She lit a few more veladoras, just enough to illuminate the brass crucifix in front of her. Slowly the scent of candle wax and burning wick blended with the mold and dust in the air, and seventy-nine-year-old Inez Corrales Jimenez began to pray.
Gunfire erupted outside soon after. She turned back towards the door, eyes wide in the low light, but she calmed herself.
Turned back to her duty.
She had come alone to the chapel, to pray for her husband, dead now just three hours. She would pray for him here, in the chapel where he had been christened as a boy, where they had come to light candles right after their wedding in 1957, where their own boy, Guillermo, had learned to love Jesus.
The guns outside did not change the beauty and importance of this place in her life, to her family.
She turned back to the crucifix, began praying aloud, a tall glass veladora clutched in her hand.
The door flew open behind her; the draft of air whipped the candlelight in the small chapel, sending long shadows across the walls in a back-and-forth jolt.
She stiffened in surprise and fear, but she did not turn back to look. Only lowered her head and quickly made the sign of the cross over her body.
A marine sicario shot her once in the base of the skull with a Colt .45 pistol. Her tiny, aged, frail body lurched forward across the altar, came to rest at the foot of the crucifix, the candle in her hand spun through the air and extinguished with the movement.
Diego and his grandfather lay at the top of the staircase into the kitchen, and they fired their carbines at a figure in the living room. The man had shot at them first; Diego knew with certainty neither tía Laura, the bearded gringo, nor the two federales who’d worked for tío Eduardo would do that, so he determined this man in the dark behind the sporadic muzzle flashes to be their enemy.
The sixteen-year-old boy and the seventy-year-old man did not have any training in such things, so they did not space themselves apart properly. Their shoulders literally touched as they fought, affording their attacker the luxury of a single target at which to shoot. Also, they did not know to cover for each other as they reloaded; instead they just fired when they saw fit, stopped when they saw fit, and reloaded when they needed to do so. This created long, dangerous lulls in the fight, during which their enemy could creep closer to find a better angle of fire.
Ernesto rose to a knee to pull a third M1 carbine magazine out of his hip pocket, he leaned to shout something into Diego’s ear, and then he spun ninety degrees, dropped the rifle, and clutched high on his right shoulder. He slid halfway down the stairs on his old back, shouted from the shock of the impact, which felt as if he’d been kicked in the shoulder by a mule.
At the bottom of the stairs his wife appeared, a candle in her hand; she began climbing up to him, shrieking and crying; he yelled at her, ordered her back to the cellar, told her that he was fine.
Through the numbness in his arm and a fresh cold chill that now sloshed across his body like a high, cool wave over his little fishing boat, he began climbing the stairs again to fight alongside his grandson, reaching for the wooden rifle on his way.
Ramses Cienfuegos had fought off two men on the second-floor south mirador. At first he’d been alongside Colonel Gamboa’s sister, Laura, but a flash-bang grenade had been tossed into the upstairs parlor from the mirador itself and exploded between them. Laura had stumbled back into the hallway, out of sight, but Ramses had recovered quickly enough to charge forward instead of back. He saw two men on the mirador, they were preparing to attack, but Ramses surprised them with his aggressive tactics. The men escaped from him by leaping over the balcony towards the patio below, and when he arrived at the railing and looked down, he saw the marines disappear into the night around the west side of the casa grande. He was certain the assassins would regroup and try to breach from the ground floor, so he sprinted to the staircase, ran down it, and turned into the hallway towards the west wing.