Ramses laughed and translated for Martin, who chuckled as well. Court knew they were all near delirious from stress and exhaustion.
Court put down the optics and rubbed his eyes. Sipped the last dregs of coffee that Luz had brought him earlier.
A few minutes later the light improved as the sun rose and morning glowed over the peaks of the Sierra Madres to the east. Court took the binoculars again, squinted, cocked his head, willed the daylight to grow and show him what was there. There was no question the sicarios wanted him to see it. They’d called out so that someone would be looking right there when the object came over the wall.
Suddenly, his delirium-induced humor was gone; he had a deep sense of foreboding about this… thing, out there in the grass.
Whatever it was, he knew only that it could not be good.
Wait… A little more light shone on the left side of the object. It became clearer slowly. “It’s… it’s a soccer ball.” He blew a slow sigh of relief. Held some of the exhalation. Could it just be a soccer ball kicked over the wall at six in the morning?
“Is there a note on it?” asked Martin.
Court kept looking; he just needed a bit more light on the righthand side.
Laura appeared out on the back balcony. Court had no idea if she recognized the threat of distant snipers, but she mimicked the three men, dropping to her hands and knees as she crawled in from the bedroom. Her hands and knees made no sound on the stone tile as she shouldered up to the American and lay down flat. “What are you looking at?”
Martin explained that someone had kicked a ball over the back wall. He and Ramses and Laura speculated about this, but Court was not involved in the conversation. His eyes were in the binoculars.
“What the hell is that?”
A little more light shone in the valley. He forced his eyes open wider to take in more light. Yes, that helped.
It was a…
No… not that.
Oh my God.
Gentry shut his eyes tightly.
Now he knew. He whispered to himself in English. “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”
“¿Qué?” asked Laura.
Court lowered his optics and looked back towards Eddie’s sister. “Laura. I need you to find me a large plastic bag, a towel, a water bottle, and I need your cell phone.”
“The phone doesn’t work.”
“Does it have a camera?”
“Sí.”
“Bring it to me.”
“¿Por qué?”
“Just do it!” he snapped at her. He was tense and angry, but he then caught himself. “Please.” She turned and crawled off the balcony.
Ramses asked, “What is it? What did you see?”
“I… I’m not sure.”
Martin said, “It’s just a soccer ball, right?”
Court climbed up to his knees, took the double-barreled shotgun in his hand, and began crawling back through the door to the second floor of the house. “I wish.”
Five minutes later he was out on the patio, crouching low behind a planter full of azaleas. He used the overgrown landscaping and stayed as low to the ground as humanly possible to make his way back to the swimming pool, stopping every few feet to listen for the presence of human noises and the absence of animal noises. He heard chirping birds and even the croaking of frogs at the pool, and this relaxed him a little. He was reasonably certain he was the only person in the back garden of the hacienda, and he used this confidence to propel himself onwards. If the sicarios came over the wall, still forty yards away from him, he was well aware he would be fucked. They’d be able to see him lying there in the grass. He only had a weapon that fired two shots without reloading, and reloading from a pocket full of shotgun shells would not be terribly efficient.
He carried the gun as a last resort, but he knew, the last thing he wanted to get involved with right now was a gunfight. Ramses and Martin were up on the mirador, covering him with the MP5s taken from fallen marines, but otherwise, he was on his own.
He passed several bodies from de la Rocha’s first two waves of killers. Court, Martin, and Ramses had already picked the corpses clean of any useful equipment or intelligence, so he only used them now for concealment as he crawled across the patio, alongside the smelly pool full of mosquitoes and frogs, the pool he’d swam in five hours earlier.
He heard voices again on the other side of the wall. A loud shout, a cackle, like a laugh from an insane person, and he halted his low crawl. It did not take him more than a few seconds to recognize that they would not attack — who would divulge their location only to then come over the wall, exposed to the defenders that they had just alerted? No, Court understood, they were trying to get the attention of the defenders of the hacienda so that they would notice the thing they’d slung over the wall fifteen minutes earlier.
This worried Gentry almost as much as a direct attack.
He started moving again, covered the cold tile a little more quickly now, though he did not actually want to arrive at his destination. He had seen enough through the lenses of the binoculars to understand what he would find. He’d brought along the bag sticking out of the waistband of his pants and the water bottle rolling around inside it as well as the camera in his back pocket for a reason.
He’d brought the binoculars with him as well. Not because he would need them here, crawling along the patio on his belly like a grass snake. No… he took them because he did not want those back at the casa to see the soccer ball. To see what he was doing. He’d do this alone, make the best of a terrible situation, and then explain the terrible situation to those back at the house as best he could.
Morale was crucial for a population under siege, morale had become terrible in this house of death, and now, Gentry was pretty sure, morale was about to go straight down the goddamned motherfucking toilet.
He entered the tall grass, passed more bodies of corrupt policemen and low-rent civilian killers, and went on towards the object lying in the grass ahead.
Due to literally hundreds of experiences in his life and the things he had seen during those experiences, Court Gentry was a man who, simply put, was almost impossible to gross out. But his face tightened as he reached the ball in the grass, his body recoiled slightly as he noticed the blood smeared on the ground next to it, and his hand did not want to reach out and roll it closer to him. But he did; he extended his arm and put his fingertips on the ball and pulled it to him. His hand felt something cold and soft as he did this, and he almost vomited there in the grass. He steeled himself as he brought the ball in close and looked at it.
The loose and slack face of a human being, a young man, had been sewn with thick black leather thread onto the ball, which was smeared with blood, scuffed with grass stains. There was a tuft of turf lodged into one of the hollow eye sockets. He had no idea who the face was, but he was certain that someone back at the house would know.
This would not be some random local chopped up and made into a grisly toy.
No, this would be someone’s loved one.
Someone’s family.
This was a message. Give up, come out, or everyone you love will die.
Court put the ball in the bag, rose to his knees, and sprinted low back towards a dilapidated stone garden shed. Inside it was moldy and dark; he left the door open to give him enough light to work with, and he took the ball with the face sewn to it, and washed it with the water from the plastic bottle. He then took the towel and blotted the face as clean and dry as possible. Doing this nearly sickened him, but he saw no other alternative to his plan. When the face was as clean as he could make it, one could not possibly call it “presentable”; he looked it over a long time. It was only semi-recognizable as being part of a human; the sewing had torn off along the forehead and a flap of skin hung down; Court pressed it back where it belonged. The chin was extended down a little too tightly, pulling the face out of normal proportion like the opposite of a bad facelift.