Ballistic

TWENTY-THREE

Five minutes later nothing had been settled — in fact, the situation had turned even more precarious. Another pickup full of local cops had arrived, so now eleven. San Blas municipales now lined up against eighteen National Defense Army soldiers. The police sergeant and an army lieutenant argued in the middle of the street, politely at first, but now the discussion had become heated.

Behind them a scuffle broke out between the two sides. A soldier had leaned against one of the municipales’ pickups, and a young cop had shoved him off of it. The lieutenant shouted at his men, and they raised their weapons on the police.

There was enough testosterone and machismo on the street to ignite a fight as big as what went down in Puerto Vallarta earlier in the day.

Ignacio Gamboa, Eddie’s brother, had been leaning against the wall of his brother’s house, taking advantage of the slight shade there. When the guns came up, the big man raised his hands in surrender. When no one else followed suit, he lowered them slowly.

Court discerned from the army lieutenant’s arguing that he had been ordered by his superiors at their base in Puerto Vallarta to take the Gamboas back down to PV. And the San Blas cops made it clear that they had been told by their superiors to keep the family here until the Jalisco state police could make it up the coast to pick them up and then return the Gamboas to the Puerto Vallarta police for questioning about the shoot-out at the Parque Hidalgo.

The Gamboa family did not want to go with either group. Court saw that Ernesto and his family found it suspicious that both organizations represented here in the street claimed to be doing the bidding for the same organization down in PV, but their orders were, essentially, in direct opposition to each other.

Yeah, thought Court, this is bullshit. At the very minimum one of the two groups here fighting for control of Eddie’s family was lying. It was not hard for him to imagine that both groups were working for narcos or the corrupt elements in their organizations, either directly or unwittingly. As the standoff turned personal between the two sides, as the intractable argument turned to threats and more shoving and angrier glares between the opposing forces, Gentry felt more and more certain this power struggle playing out in the dusty afternoon street had nothing to do with jurisdictional authority — it had to do with a bounty de la Rocha had placed on the Gamboas’ heads, and both groups, or at least their masters, were determined to earn it.

The Gamboas and Gentry stood in the street in front of the house. The pickup was packed up and ready to go in the drive; Court even considered briefly trying to load up the family while the argument continued and simply driving away, but when the soldiers formed into squads on either side of the road, he nixed the idea. No, they would just sit here and wait to see who would win this argument, who would win the prize of the familia Gamboa.

The municipal police could not possibly win in a fight, but the big, angry Sergeant Martinez was nothing if not an alpha male, and he would not back down.

Then the distant drone of finely tuned engines rolled in from the north and filled the air. The sound continued, grew; the machines sounded like nothing else in this little town of old cars and beater trucks with slapdash motors and dirt bikes that spewed more gray smoke than a locomotive. The riflemen standing in the pickups turned their gun barrels towards the north in the direction of the approaching machines but looked to one another and their commanding officer for guidance.

Court knew that if he were an outsider, it would have been comical to watch thirty-six people, none of whom had any idea who was coming or what they would do when they got here, just stand around, trying to look resolute and tough, knowing that any new attendee to this party might just change everything.

Two motorcycles turned onto Canalizo Street from Sinaloa Street, the road in front of the Plaza Mayor. Even at one hundred yards Court recognized the uniforms, the helmets, the masks, and the dark goggles of the Policía Federal. Their bikes were white with green trim, and Gentry saw they were powerful Suzuki crotch rockets; the men rumbled quickly and confidently towards the crowd that had gathered there in the street in front of the Gamboa home.

It was obvious. Even though the two federales were vastly outnumbered, as far as these two dudes were concerned, they were in charge.

Gentry had little doubt these ninja-dressed bastards were from the same unit of men he’d shot up three and a half hours earlier in Vallarta. He wondered if these two were the very same sicarios who had stood on the top of the stairs gunning down the GOPES families trying to escape from the park.

He thought it a good bet that they were.

“Hooray, we’re saved.” He said it sarcastically under his breath. For a moment, a brief moment, he considered slipping away, backing into the Gamboas’ driveway, and then ducking out the gate of the rear garden. He could leave this all behind; he could get away.

He could run.

But he did not run.

The two men parked their vehicles in the middle of the road. They wore Colt 635 SMGs on their backs, muzzle down, and black pistols in drop-leg holsters. Their boots were black and shiny; they wore sunglasses and helmets and ski masks obscuring 100 percent of their faces. They lowered their kickstands as one, turned off their engines simultaneously, and stepped off their bikes in perfect unison. They moved into the scrum of pueblo police and regular army enlistees with a calm confidence and an undeniable air of authority.

First the federal cops walked right through the soldiers, right past the Gamboa family, and right up to the sergeant in charge of the municipal police. One of the new arrivals did the talking; he spoke softly to the heavyset cop. Martinez started to argue back, but the federale silenced him, placed a friendly gloved hand on the man’s shoulder, and continued speaking.

Martinez tried again, puffed his chest out this time, but the smaller federale just shook his head, continued speaking softly but authoritatively.

After no more than sixty seconds in conversation, the municipale sergeant nodded, turned back to the other men and women in the polo shirts and ball caps, and ordered everyone to return to their previous duties. This matter was settled.

The Feds were taking over.

It was no surprise to Gentry that the San Blas police were the first to back down. The sergeant seemed disappointed, either because he knew how angry his bosses would be with him or because he knew he would not be receiving the bounty he’d been promised by the Black Suits, but he appeared nonetheless thankful that a higher authority had come to relieve them from the standoff that had been brewing between themselves and the soldiers.

But the departure of the poorly motivated guys and girls with the sticks did not exactly fill Court Gentry with confidence. He kept his eyes on the heavy battle rifles waving in his direction.

The pickup trucks and the bicycles and the foot patrolmen melted away quickly, and the more loquacious federale now turned and began talking to the army lieutenant. There was arguing and shouting on the part of the soldier, but only a calm and assertive voice on the side of the law enforcement officer. Court could barely understand a word of either end of the conversation, but he could tell the ninja was saying that the Gamboa family and the gringo were to be taken back to PV, and he and his colleague would be escorting the family and the gringo there.

End of discussion.

Court had pressed his luck by sticking around, and now he was in the same boat as the rest of them. He leaned back against the whitewashed concrete wall around the Gamboas’ property, next to Laura. Ernesto and Diego had walked back into the house and gotten the bench from one of the backyard picnic tables, and this they put in the shade for Luz and Elena. The old woman and her pregnant daughter-in-law sat and fanned themselves with pieces of a newspaper they’d picked up from the gutter along the side of the road.

After a long speech by the black-clad cop, Laura, who had been standing at Court’s shoulder, leaned into the American’s ear. “Did you understand that?”

He hadn’t picked up a word of the men’s argument in the past minute. “No, what’s going on?”

“The federale says he is promising to tell La Araña that this army unit deserves a reward for detaining the family until he and his associate could come and take custody.”

Court thought for a moment. “La Araña? Who the hell is ‘the Spider’? ”

“Javier Cepeda.”

“Okay, who is Jav—”

“He is one of DLR’s top men. A Black Suit. They say he is the head of his sicarios. DLR’s assassins.”

“Perfect.”

“We are in danger, Joe.”

He wanted to say “no shit,” but he looked at the girl, down into her big brown eyes, and he caught himself. “We’ll be okay.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then how can you say we’ll be okay?”

“I have three bullets. There are two cops. We go with the cops and we’ll be okay.”

Laura’s eyes widened. “Joe… Please do not kill them. We can disarm them and—”

“I won’t kill them unless they make me,” Gentry said, but he had every expectation that they would make him.

The federales’ bargain with the soldiers seemed to be working. It was an interesting dynamic to a man like Court Gentry — two lightly armed cops against nearly twenty heavily armed soldiers. The cops didn’t finger their weapons; they didn’t bark into their radios to summon reinforcements; they didn’t scream or threaten. He suspected the cops were older, more sure of themselves, intimidating to the young army lieutenant, and they pressed their authority and selfassuredness against him with polite words, like a thin glove over a metal gauntlet, to enforce their will.

Court was certain they were bad men, but he was rooting for them in this little battle.

And their browbeating worked. The lieutenant told his men to stand down, to get back in the vehicles. Within sixty seconds the three loaded army pickups disappeared towards the south, turning left off of Canalizo, behind a cloud of afternoon road dust.

The two federales watched them leave then turned around to face the family.

Instead they found themselves staring down the gringo’s pistol at a range of five feet.

The cop who had been doing all the talking spoke slowly as his arms rose in surrender. His English was excellent. “Get your gun out of my face, amigo.”

“If I was your amigo, I wouldn’t have my gun in your face, would I? Down on the street! Both of you! Facedown, arms out.”

“You need to listen to me very carefully, señor.”

“You don’t eat some dirt right now, señor, and I’m going to blow off your fucking head. Comprende?”

Both men went slowly to their kneepads and then down onto the hot, dusty street.

“You don’t understand. We are not regular federales like the men who killed the Gamboas.”

Court’s eyes furrowed. “Oh, sweet. You guys are just regular ole hit men. That makes killing you even less complicated.”

“No. We are el Grupo de Operaciones Especiales. GOPES. We worked under Major Gamboa. We came here to protect his familia from the Black Suits.”

Court held his revolver steady at the men on the street in front of him. “Bullshit. Everyone in Eddie’s team was killed on the yacht.”

“No. We survived. We went into hiding to protect our families.”

Court knelt over the talker. “So where did that blood on your pants come from?” Court had noticed a speckled splatter of red on the federale’s thigh.

The officer made to climb back up, but Gentry pressed the barrel of the revolver into the back of his head, made the man talk with his face in the dirt; his words blew a circle clean of dust and sand on the black pavement. “We were coming here in my car, but we heard a broadcast on the radio channel that the Black Suits use. Two sicarios federales were coming here to kill Elena. We killed them fifteen kilometers south of here, and then we took their bikes.”

Court did not know what to believe, but the man’s tone was extremely convincing. Even though their conversation was in a mixture of two languages, Gentry detected a tone of truthfulness. But he wanted to get an impression from the other man. He knelt next to the other masked federale, the one who had not yet spoken. He placed the revolver’s barrel on the back of his neck. “Do you speak English?” The man shook his head. Court switched to Spanish. “Bueno, so what do you have to say for yourself, cabrón?”

The man did not answer, but he looked up towards Court, turned his head slowly to do so. His right hand scooted along the hot asphalt to his face, and he pulled off his helmet, his sunglasses, and then his mask.

His right cheek and jaw were black and blue, an ugly fist-sized contusion. Court thought about the man in the building under construction across the street from the Parque Hidalgo. The masked man he’d knocked out with a punch to the jaw.

“Did I do that?”

“Sí,” said the officer; with the swelling his voice sounded like a tennis ball was lodged in his mouth.

“Huh…” Court thought it over. Could the man have really been there to provide protection for the family? There was no way for him to know; he had knocked him out cold before the fighting had begun.

Court just said, “Sorry.”

“No hay problema.” No problem, responded the man, but Gentry imagined the man’s jaw would be a problem for him for a few days.

“What’s your name?”

“Martin. Sergeant Martin Orozco Fernandez.”

Looking back to the first officer, Court asked, “How ’bout you?”

“I am Sergeant Ramses Cienfuegos Cortillo.”

“Where did you learn to speak English so well, Ramses?”

“As a boy I lived for six years in El Paso, Texas.”

“You are American?”

“No.”

“Got it. You were an illegal alien?”

Ramses looked up at the American kneeling over him. “I prefer the term ‘undocumented immigrant.’”

“I bet you do.”

The Mexican smiled behind his mask. Said, “And what about you? I saw what you did today. You are an assassin.”

“I prefer the term ‘undocumented executioner.’ ”

Ramses nodded. “You are with the American government?”

“No. I’m just an old friend of Eddie’s who stumbled into the middle of all this bullshit.”

“And you stayed to help?” Ramses spoke in Spanish to Martin for a moment, then directed his attention back to the gringo with the gun. “Do you mind if we get up?”

“Slowly.” This time Court let them both rise to their feet, but he kept the pistol on them. They brushed the grit and dust from their black uniforms. “What were you doing at the memorial?”

Ramses explained. “We suspected there would be trouble. We just came to watch over the families of our colleagues. Martin took overwatch; I stayed down in the crowd. I saw the gunmen standing around, known operatives for the Black Suits. Then de la Rocha himself appeared.”

“And?” asked Court. He thought he knew the answer.

“And… I shot him. Twice.” Then he added, an unmistakable tone of confusion in his voice. “I did not miss. I don’t know how he survived. Then the massacre began.”

Court believed him. This dude’s eyes, his voice, his body language, it all indicated that he was as confused about what happened as Gentry. Court slid his revolver back in his pants and told the federales to follow him back inside Eddie’s house. Everyone else had already moved back inside the gate; the Gamboas were finished loading the F-350 now, and once again, Laura was leading her family in prayer, thanking the Lord for the end to the standoff outside.

Court asked the cops, “So you guys are just playing dead, hanging out? Doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”

“We can’t go to our homes; we don’t want it revealed we survived. If it were known… our families would end up just like the others today. We are dead men — we know that — but our families are safe. And if we can help protect Major Gamboa’s family, that is a death we will be honored to die. If you all are leaving now, we’ll go with you on the bikes to clear the way ahead. We’ll have to dump the motorcycles at some point, but for now I think we are safer using them.”

Court nodded. For a moment he considered using this as an excuse to leave again. Now Elena had friends, capable men who would protect her and her family. But no, Court recognized he was only trying to help himself with this line of thinking; these guys were probably better than any half dozen regular dirty cops or cartel assassins, but there were a shitload of dirty cops and cartel assassins running around. Court could not just wash his hands of this entire situation because the Gamboas had a couple more guns on their side.

No, he’d stay alongside them as long as they needed him, and he’d work with these men.

But, he told himself, he’d keep an eye on them. Trust was not on the table.