Ballistic

SEVENTEEN

Chuck Cullen was eighty feet above and ahead of Court, just more than halfway up the stairs with the Gamboas and the other GOPES family members right behind him. The crowd ahead thinned suddenly on his right, so the retired captain decided to shift his entourage in that direction. He led Elena forward and past him so that he could take Luz by the hand to pull her through the surging riot of screaming people all around.

At the top of the stairs, another thirty feet away, three federal policemen on Suzuki motorcycles drove through the mob and dismounted; they drew pistols from their drop-leg holsters and looked down the stairs towards the gunfire. They waved the escaping memorial attendees past, encouraging them to run for their lives, and they seemed to cover them with their guns, scanning for threats down in the plaza.

More gunfire. More honking horns. More screaming and shouting.

More cries of agony.

Elena Gamboa led her family up the stairs now. She slowed when she noticed the federales, but she saw their motorcycles, just like Eduardo’s; their uniforms, just like Eduardo’s; their ski masks and sunglasses, just like Eduardo’s. She ascended the crowded stairs just as fast as her pregnant body would allow.

The policeman directly above her at the top of the stairs beckoned her forward with his free hand as he furiously searched the crowd for threats.

More gunshots from behind Elena as she hurried towards the safety of Eduardo’s colleagues.

Chuck Cullen got Luz moving again, checked quickly to see that Laura held Ernesto around the waist and kept him pressing forward behind his wife. The aunt and uncles and nephew and brothers had pushed on ahead; they passed Cullen on the left-hand side of the staircase. The seventy-two-year-old retired American naval officer turned to see Elena advancing quickly up on the right; she’d gotten ahead of him while he helped Eddie’s mother. He rushed to arrive at the top of the stairs at the same time as she so he could protect her from any danger there as well as direct her up the alley behind the church where his car was parked.

He was still a few feet behind her and to her left when he saw the policeman, at the top of the stairs and seven steps above Elena.

The two other federales stood to his left. They all held automatic pistols out in front of them. As one their weapons’ muzzles left the threats at the bottom of the stairs and leveled instead on the families of the dead GOPES men rushing up towards them.

These men weren’t protecting anyone. They were assassins.

Chuck watched in utter horror as a handgun’s barrel pointed directly at Eddie Gamboa’s pregnant wife.

Captain Cullen moved faster than he’d moved in forty years, hurtling himself upwards, throwing himself up the four steps, and jamming his body between the weapon and the woman.

The pistol barked, pain tore into the old man’s gut, still he grabbed at the cop, pulled him tight in a bear hug.

The other masked police began firing as well, pouring lead down the stairs into the Gamboa family as they approached the top of the staircase.

Captain Cullen was shot again in the ribcage by the man in his grasp, his arms relaxed the hug, and he slid slowly down the cop’s body, onto his knees at the top of the stone staircase. Slower still he slumped forward onto his chest as Elena screamed.

To avoid the crowd on the staircase Gentry leapt high in his stocking feet onto the wide and steep stone railing that ran up the right side of the steps; he began running upwards with his arms out for balance and the revolver he’d taken from the plainclothes gunman jutting out from his right hand. He looked away from his feet for an instant and up towards a new commotion in the thick crowd at the logjam at the top of the stairs. Before his eyes could fix on the action a pistol round cracked and Court saw Elena. In front of her was the captain, and in front of him stood a black-clad federale.

Court understood everything in an instant. The cop had been gunning for Eddie’s wife and unborn child, and old Chuck Cullen had thrown his body over the gun.

More gunshots, rapid-fire pistols blazing, and Court saw the other two officers murdering the families of the special operation’s group as they ascended towards them.

Gentry sprinted upwards on the stone railing. He raised the silver Smith and Wesson revolver and put the weapon’s front site on the back of Elena Gamboa’s head, shifted aim a fraction to the right, and fired a single.357 Magnum round.

The bullet left the weapon, tracked up and over the crowd on the stairs, passed two inches to the right of Elena Gamboa’s ear, and struck the killer of Chuck Cullen on the left collarbone above his Kevlar vest, blasting bone and blood and muscle out of the man’s shoulder and spinning him away and down to the ground as his pistol flew out of his hand and twirled in the air above him like a whirligig.

Court was still thirty feet from the top of the stairs. Gunfire continued, and the crowd behind the Gamboas turned as one and began running down now, away from this new danger above them. Some of the younger and more ambulatory on the steps jumped over the railing, falling fifteen to twenty-five feet to the concrete Parque Hidalgo below just to escape the flying lead. Some of these people crossed Gentry’s line of fire, kept him from getting clean shots on the two remaining police assassins.

Court was near the top now; finally, he got a sight line on a target ahead. Both cops were kneeling behind their motorcycles, reloading their pistols. Court aimed at the first man, began pressing the trigger as he leapt off the railing and onto the steps, but again someone got in his way. In half a heartbeat he took his finger from the trigger.

It was Elena, she was falling backwards; the crowd had cleared the top portion of the steps and behind her nothing but hard concrete for ten feet awaited her.

Gentry threw himself at her, dropping the revolver to free both hands. He landed behind her and caught her; he slid his arms around her head and belly, and the two of them slid with the other bodies cascading down the stairs.

Court took the brunt of the impact as they fell; he kept Eddie’s wife safe and her head and belly protected as they slid.

A long blast from an automatic rifle below him focused Gentry’s efforts on stopping his slide, getting back on his feet, and pushing back upwards. He lifted Elena into his arms, cradled her, struggled with her weight as he ascended, pushed through the pain in his back and arms caused by bumping down the steps. He shifted his ascent to the left, doing his best to keep other civilians between him and the gunmen below.

To his left, men, women, and children fell; from the corner of his eye he saw both of Eddie’s uncles and one aunt in a pile of dead and wounded flowing down the stairs, smearing long splatters of fresh blood across the steps as they tumbled and slid.

He kept climbing with Elena in his arms. He put his foot on the revolver he’d dropped and took a moment to kneel and pick it up; his thighs quivered with the effort of raising back up while holding Eddie’s pregnant wife. Soon the sheer number of civilians, an unrelenting stampede of humanity, shoved forward from behind Court, and those with nowhere to run but straight through the killers pushed the hit men at the top of the staircase back, knocked them down, and by the time Gentry arrived at the sidewalk above, the cops had abandoned their cycles and had begun retreating north, reloading their depleted weapons again as they did so.

Court looked down at Chuck Cullen’s body. He lay facedown and violently contorted, splayed along on the top three steps; his USS Buchanan cap had fallen off his head and lay beside him. Gentry put Elena down gently, looked for the loose weapon dropped by the man he’d shot in the collarbone, but he could not find it.

“Fuck!” he shouted, surrounded by the dead and the wounded and the terrified, and now more bursts of gunfire cracked at the bottom of the staircase.