“Jefe, no!” the gunner said. “It’s too dangerous. We you need you here.”
“He’s right,” José said, grabbing Diego’s arm. “I’ll take someone else. You stay and lead the men.”
Diego watched him pick a man, and the two officers ran off toward the courthouse. “I wish my brother were here,” he said plaintively.
“You’re the jefe,” the gunner said. “We stayed to fight with you.”
Diego nodded and said a silent prayer, asking for help — not from the Virgin, as he normally might have done, but from his brother: Juan, if you are watching, and if there is any help to send these men, now would be very a good time.
Then he made a separate pact with God.
José used his key, and both officers slipped unseen into the courthouse, dashing to the back of the building and up the staircase. José noticed the officer wheezing during the climb.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was hit crossing the park.”
José saw him holding his side in the dim light. “Can you continue? You can wait for me here.”
“There are many men on the roof,” the officer said. “I’ve seen them taking shots at us. You’re going to need me, but we’d better hurry. I’m losing a lot of blood.”
Putting from his mind the fact that the officer would be dead soon whether or not they were successful, José continued the climb to the third floor. There he found the door to the roof locked, as it should have been. He grabbed his key ring. “They must be using ladders,” he observed.
“I’m sure they’re accessing the annex roof in back — climbing up from there.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” José put the key into the lock. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, but what’s the plan?”
“Open the door and shoot everyone.”
The wounded officer couldn’t help laughing. José laughed with him. “Okay? Let’s go!”
He turned the key, pushing open the door, and they scrambled out onto the rooftop, where better than twenty narcotraficantes were crouched behind the parapet overlooking the park — four of them armed with RPGs for delivering a coup de grâce to the police forces below.
“Puta madre!” José hissed, having expected to find five or six men.
Both cops opened up on full automatic, moving low and fast, as the Americans had trained them. They mowed down six men apiece before the narcos even knew they were under attack, killing all four rocketeers, and ducking behind an air-conditioning unit to reload.
One of the narcos grabbed up an RPG and fired just as the wounded officer was raising up for another shot. The rocket hit him in the face and took off his head without detonating, exploding somewhere behind the courthouse as José raked his weapon along the parapet, knocking over a half dozen more narcos on the first pass. The remaining six men scattered, firing on José from all directions as he ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one.
He was hit multiple times as he rose up from behind the unit, determined to live long enough to clear the roof. Placing controlled bursts in what felt like slow motion, pivoting left to right in a tight corkscrew that carried him through an arc of better than 180 degrees, the sergeant killed or wounded the last of the narcos.
The carbine ran dry, and he landed on his tailbone with bone-jarring force, biting his tongue and falling over onto his back. In the moments before his death, José lay looking up at the stars and remembering — strangely he thought — that his worthless brother-in-law still owed him twenty-six hundred pesos.
83
An RPG tore through the steel security curtain of the shoe store display window, blasting fragments of molten steel and glass through the shop like a giant shotgun blast. One officer was killed outright, and Crosswhite was thrown across the floor. Shoes and wounded men caught fire, and Crosswhite jumped back up, running to the door and shooting at the shadows in the street.
The carbine shattered in his hands, followed by the instant boom! of Hancock’s .50 caliber.
He threw himself flat as the great rifle boomed again. The big bullet ricocheted off the concrete, sending hot pieces of spall into the wounded. The men screamed and tried to crawl deeper into the shop.
“We have to surrender!” one of the officers shouted.
Crosswhite grabbed his carbine away from him. “Surrender then, goddamnit. Let ’em cut your balls off! See to the wounded!” he ordered another, not knowing what else to say.
He could feel his lacerated hands bleeding as he mounted the staircase to the roof, finding it hard to keep a good grip on the weapon. “Motherfuckin’ sonofabitch!” he snarled. “Goddamn cocksucker, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out!”
He threw open the hatch and crawled out onto the roof, knowing exactly how naked he was but too pissed to care. Paolina and the baby were in the back of his mind, but he knew now that he would never see his young wife again — that some other man would raise his daughter.
“Fuckin’ Pope! Cocksucker!” he sneered, belly-crawling toward the parapet. “I’m gonna die on a goddamn shoe store, you motherfucker!” He glanced up at the sky on the off chance one of the CIA director’s stealth drones might be up there and gave it the finger.
Hancock’s rifle went off again, and he sprang into a crouch, firing at a pair of shadows on the far rooftop. Both shadows went down, and he dropped flat, rolling to the south side of the roof without taking any return fire.
The rocketeer beside Hancock was hit in the face and killed instantly. Hancock was hit in the shoulder. He swore a blue streak as he crawled closer to the parapet, pulling the Barrett after him by the strap, not knowing if the smartass on the far roof would have any grenades to pitch across.
“Shit just got real,” he told himself, knowing the bullet was still in him, possibly embedded in the bone, and feeling that the stitches in his leg were torn open.
“Hey!” he shouted, stuffing gauze into the shoulder wound. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Fuck you care?” Crosswhite called back.
“Got me pretty good, asshole!”
“Stand the fuck by! I’m about to do better!”
Hancock laughed, crawling south along the roof in the direction of the voice.
Crosswhite crawled quickly toward the north, keeping low behind the parapet. A few seconds later, Hancock’s rifle went off, and an armor-piercing round blasted a hole in the brick-and-mortar parapet, very close to where Crosswhite had been.
He sprang up and fired at Hancock’s silhouette just as the sniper was squeezing the trigger a second time, the carbine slippery in his bleeding hands.
Hancock fell over.
“How’d I do that time?” Crosswhite shouted across. When Hancock didn’t answer, he smiled. Crosswhite knew he hadn’t killed him — his aim had been off — but he’d hurt him.
“I’ll wait for him to come back up for air,” he said to himself, opening fire on the narcos below and shouting to his cops that the sniper was down.
The police downstairs began firing into the street, and Ruvalcaba’s men fell back.
Hancock’s shadow appeared once again over the parapet, but Crosswhite fired on him before he could raise the heavy rifle, driving the sniper back under cover.
“Come on, show me some more!” Crosswhite taunted. “Lemme air that shit out for ya!”
Hancock’s sluggish movement had told Crosswhite that the gringo sniper was badly hurt.