Cartel

by Chuck Hustmyre

  Victoria stared at the trapdoor, her eyes wide with fear. "Where does that go?"

  Scott looked at Rodrigo. He hoped the tunnel at least went somewhere and wasn't a dead end.

  "A hundred years ago there was a farm behind this church," Rodrigo said. "The tunnel used to lead to a barn about two hundred meters away."

  "And now?" Scott asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Is there a way out?"

  Rodrigo shrugged.

  Something heavy banged against the front door.

  Chapter 81

  Rodrigo stared at the trapdoor. It had been almost twenty years since the last time he was down there. Since Benetta was a little girl. He didn't even store wine there anymore and had forgotten about it until she mentioned it last night.

  The trapdoor had a narrow slot cut into its center, just big enough for a man to slip his fingers into. Rodrigo reached into the slot and pulled the trapdoor up. It wasn't hinged and he lifted it straight out and leaned it against the pantry wall. Beneath the floor, an old wooden ladder led down into a dark hole.

  Another heavy bang sounded against the front door.

  "Is there a light?" the American woman asked.

  There had been no time for introductions, but Rodrigo assumed the American woman was Scott Greene's wife and the two children were his also. Rodrigo reached up and found an aluminum flashlight on one of the shelves. He flipped the switch. Nothing happened. He banged it against the palm of his hand a couple of times. The light came on, but it was weak. He handed the flashlight to the gringa.

  She took the light from him but shook her head. "I'm not going first."

  "Yes, you are," Greene said. "You, Jake, then the girls. Then Benny and Father Rodrigo. I'll go last."

  Whatever was slamming against the front door did it again.

  "I...can't," the woman whispered, pleading with her husband. "You know how I am with tight-"

  There was a burst of gunfire outside and the sound of splintering wood in the den. The American woman screamed. All three children started crying. Whoever was outside was trying to shoot through the door and shatter the lock. But the "lock" was, in fact, an old iron bar. It would hold them off for a few more minutes.

  "Go!" the American shouted at his wife, and this time she did as she was told. Holding the flashlight in one hand, she squeezed through the opening in the tile floor and climbed down the old ladder.

  The hole was eight feet deep. She reached the bottom and looked up. In the dim glow of the flashlight, Rodrigo could see the fear on her face but also the determination. "It's not so bad," she said, holding up a hand. "Come on, Jake. Show your sister and...Show them how to do it."

  The boy glanced at his father. "Her name is Rosalita," Green said. "And your mom is right. Show the girls how good a climber you are."

  With that, the boy scampered down the ladder just as more blows hammered the front door. Greene then held his daughter by her wrists and lowered her down as far as he could before dropping her into her mother's arms. Rosalita didn't wait to be lowered. She scuttled down just as fast as the boy had. Rodrigo smiled. His niece was a tomboy, just like her mother.

  He looked at Benetta. "Vete," he said. Go. "Vete de aqui." Get out of here.

  "Usted primero," she said. You first.

  "Estare detras de ti." I'll be right behind you.

  More gunshots at the front door.

  Rodrigo jabbed a finger at the hole. "Vete," Go. "Vete ya!" Go now.

  Benetta climbed down the ladder.

  More banging against the front door. Then it crashed open.

  Rodrigo turned to the DEA agent. "You go. I'll hold them."

  The American shook his head. "I can't do that."

  "We can't all make it."

  More gunshots echoed through the rectory. Whoever had broken down the door wasn't taking any chances. They were shooting first.

  "Save your family," Rodrigo said. "And my niece and grandniece."

  The American hesitated.

  "Go," Rodrigo said. "I've made my peace with God."

  Scott Greene opened his mouth to say something. But he didn't. He just nodded. Then he climbed down the lad-der.

  Rodrigo pushed the trapdoor back into place and cov-ered it with the rug. He heard footsteps in the den. He stood in the narrow pantry doorway and waited.

  * * * *

  To Scott, the sound of the trapdoor dropping back into place overhead was like that of a coffin lid closing.

  The tunnel wasn't quite six feet tall. Scott had to stoop. And it was narrow, only about two feet wide. His shoulders touched both sides. With the trapdoor closed, the darkness was almost total. It pressed in on them from all sides, and the old flashlight Rodrigo had given Victoria didn't do much to beat it back.

  "Where's tío?" Benny said.

  Scott looked at her in the dim light. "He stayed be-hind."

  "No." Benny tried to push past him to get to the ladder.

  Scott held her back. "It's what he wanted."

  Struggling against him, she said, "He can't stay."

  "He's trying to buy us time. And we're wasting it."

  She stopped struggling.

  As he released her, Scott said, "We need to go."

  Benny closed her eyes and a tear ran down her cheek.

  Victoria laid a hand on Benny's arm and held out the flashlight to her. "Can you lead us to the other end?"

  Benny took the flashlight and nodded. Still holding the pistol in her other hand, she wiped her face on her sleeve, then squeezed past the children and took the lead. Rosalita followed her, but Jake and Samantha stood still. Both looked at Scott. "Go," he said. "And stay close."

  Chapter 82

  Rodrigo saw two Los Zetas gunmen step into the kitchen, both carrying M-16s. The second one through the door was limping. The right leg of his tracksuit was torn and stained with blood. The other one seemed unhurt. Then Humberto Larios walked in behind them. He was dirty. His left ear was bleeding, and the blood had run down his neck and stained the collar and shoulder of his tan guayabera shirt. In his hand he clutched a pistol.

  For a moment the Los Zetas didn't see Rodrigo, dressed in black and standing in the darkened pantry. He aimed the big revolver at the three men and cocked the hammer slowly, so they could hear it, so that each click of the cocking mech-anism echoed across the tile floor. The Colt was a double-action revolver and didn't need the hammer cocked to fire, but the sound it made, the steady clicks of smoothly ratchet-ing steel on steel, especially in the silence of the rectory, was unmistakable.

  It sounded like death.

  The men stopped.

  "Drop your weapons and leave," Rodrigo said. "And you may go in peace."

  "Where are they?" Larios said. "Where did you hide them? If you tell me now, I might let them live. But if I have to find them myself, I'm going to fuck that little girl right in front of you and then make you watch while I feed her and her whore of a mother to my pigs."

  "No, you're not."

  "How are you going to stop me, priest?"

  Rodrigo switched the revolver to his left hand but kept it aimed at the cartel leader. "I wasn't always a priest."

  Larios smiled. "What were you, an altar boy? Some old priest's play toy?"

  Rodrigo didn't answer. Instead, he reached out with his right hand and made the sign of the cross. As he did so, he spoke in Latin, "Requiescant in pace." May they rest in peace. Then in Spanish, he said, "Vaya con Dios." Go with God. His left hand was steady as he pulled the trigger.

  His first shot hit Larios in the center of his chest. The feared Los Zetas leader crumpled to the floor with a hole the size of an American quarter punched straight through his heart. The two gunmen swung their rifles up and opened fire, but their weapons were set on full-automatic and their first bursts went wide.

  Rodrigo squeezed the trigger again. The man with the injured leg went down next, after a .45-caliber bullet ripped through his neck and blew out a piece of his spine. Then seve
ral bullets from the last gunman's M-16 cut across Ro-drigo's belly, hitting him low and punching into his pelvis. Rodrigo sat down hard on the tile floor.

  It didn't hurt much. Almost like he'd been hit with a big stick. Then he felt a flood of warm liquid, as if he'd urinated on himself. Maybe he had. He reached down with his right hand and felt. His pants were wet. But when he raised his hand it was dark red and dripping.

  The third man stood in the middle of the small kitchen, pointing his rifle at Rodrigo. Pointing it, not aiming it. The plastic stock was tucked under his arm. He was smiling.

  The pain was getting worse now. Rodrigo took a deep breath. Something gurgled inside him. Then he was surprised to see the old Colt revolver that had belonged to his grandfather-his abuelo-still in his left hand and pointed at the gunman.

  Rodrigo pulled the trigger again and the man's smile disappeared, wiped clean by the 250-grain chunk of lead that exploded from the end of his grandfather's revolver. The bullet struck the gunman square in the teeth and snapped his head back.

  For an instant, Rodrigo thought he saw a halo encircle the man's head. But it was bright red. He didn't think halos were red. Red was the devil's color. Halos were bright, that was true, but they weren't red. They were white or gold or maybe silver. Not red. Then the halo or whatever it was dis-appeared. And the man collapsed.

  The revolver slipped out of Rodrigo's hand and fell to the floor, clattering as it landed in a thick, dark pool that was spreading across the tiles. He was tired. He looked at the three men lying on the floor of his kitchen, of God's kitchen. It was God's house, after all. He felt something crawling up the back of his throat. He coughed to try to get it out. Then he spat up blood.

  Rodrigo was so tired. And the pain was bad now. He focused on the three dead men. If God had not called to him all those years ago, if God had not shown him that he was on the wrong path, he would have ended up just like them. But maybe it wasn't too late for them. Just as it had not been too late for him.

  So Rodrigo gathered his strength and again extended his right hand to the men and made the sign of the cross. He prayed aloud for them. "Rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let your perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in your eternal peace and in your everlasting glory. Forever and ever. Amen."

  Then the earthy light faded and Father Rodrigo felt his chin slump to his chest. He felt nothing else. Saw nothing else. Except a single point of pure white light moving toward him.

  Chapter 83

  The tunnel was a decent piece of engineering, Scott thought, braced every fifty feet with a pair of stout wooden posts and a thick cross beam. Its quality attested to by the fact that it was still here after a hundred years.

  They traveled in single file, Benny leading the way with the flashlight, then Rosalita, Jake, Samantha, and Victoria. Scott was last in line and still carried the empty Beretta, alt-hough he wasn't sure why.

  They had traveled maybe a hundred yards, when they heard gunshots behind them. There were no flashes inside the tunnel, and from the muffled quality of the sound, Scott could tell they had been fired inside the rectory. He could distinguish both the high-pitched crack of .223 rounds and the lower-pitched boom of the .45 revolver.

  As soon as she heard the shots, Benny stopped and turned around. "Tío," she said. The line stopped behind her. Scott bumped into Victoria. He looked past her and saw Benny's face in the beam of the flashlight. She was crying. Rosalita hugged her.

  "We have to keep going," Scott said.

  Victoria glanced over her shoulder at Scott. "Are you sure there's a way out?"

  "Yes," he said. But, of course, he wasn't. He wasn't sure of anything. Looking at Benny, he said, "There's nothing we can do for him. But we can save these kids."

  She nodded, then wiped her face and turned around.

  They kept walking.

  Scott tried to pick up counting his steps where he had left off when they heard the gunshots, but he couldn't re-member what number he was on. So he gave up. The tunnel would end when it ended, and it really didn't matter how far that was. They had no choice but to keep moving forward.

  Then they were there. The tunnel stopped at a dirt wall that was buttressed by a couple of oil-soaked railroad ties standing upright and countersunk into the wall. There was no vertical shaft like at the other end. Just the wall and the low ceiling.

  Scott squeezed past Victoria and the kids and stood as straight as he could beside Benny. The top of his head brushed the trapdoor, which, like the one at the other end of the tunnel, consisted of a two-foot by two-foot square of rough-cut wood. The remnants of a wooden ladder were nailed to the railroad ties, but the years had eaten away most of it and left only a couple of disintegrating rungs. Scott tilt-ed his ear up toward the trapdoor. The buzzing in his head had mostly faded away, but he still couldn't hear anything above them. "Do you hear anything?" he whispered to Ben-ny.

  She shook her head.

  He pointed to the pistol in her hand. "How many rounds do you have left?"

  She tucked the flashlight under her arm, then thumbed the button on the side of the grip and dropped the magazine into her hand. In the glow from the flashlight, Scott could see there was only one round left in the magazine.

  "How about you?" Benny asked.

  Scott shook his head.

  Two shots. That was all they had. And no idea what they would be facing on the other side.

  Scott considered hunkering down in the tunnel until morning. They were safe for now, but how long could that last? If anyone discovered the trapdoor in the rectory and came after them, two bullets weren't much of a defense and there was no cover inside the tunnel. They were fish in a bar-rel. Soon a dark barrel, because the flashlight couldn't have more than a few minutes of juice left, and once it gave out, they would be in pitch blackness. The kids would panic. Vic-toria would panic. Maybe Benny too. Hell, he would panic.

  So he tucked the empty pistol into his waistband and pushed both hands against the wooden hatch. Nothing hap-pened. It didn't budge. He pushed again, really getting his legs into it this time. Still nothing happened. He pushed once more, this time getting everything into it, arms, legs, shoul-ders, and back. The trapdoor rose an inch. Then dropped back down.

  "Why won't it open?" Victoria said.

  As Scott took a moment to catch his breath, he looked at his wife and saw the growing fear on her face. Since he had known her, she had been terrified of tight spaces. An elevator was her limit, but even then she got nervous if the doors didn't open fast enough, and she would have a fit if the lights flickered. "Something is on top of it," he said.

  "Can you get it open?" Victoria asked.

  "Yeah," Scott said. "I just need a little more leverage."

  "I'll help you," Benny said. She handed the flashlight to Victoria and tucked her pistol into the back of her pants. She stood face to face with Scott and pressed her hands against the trapdoor.

  "Me too," Victoria said. Then she handed the light to Jake and squeezed in between Scott and Benny and got ready to push.

  Scott counted to three and they all pushed together.

  The trapdoor again rose an inch. Then stopped. The three of them kept straining and pushing. Jake tried to help but he wasn't tall enough. "All right, all right," Scott said. "That's enough." They relaxed and the trapdoor snapped back down.

  "What do you think's holding it down?" Victoria said.

  Scott shook his head. "Something heavy."

  "What are we going to do, dad?" Jake said.

  Looking at his son, Scott said, "We're going to open it."

  "How?" Samantha asked. She was really scared, Scott could tell, but she was trying to hold it in, to be brave for her parents and in front of her big brother, who frequently called her a chicken when she refused to go along with some of his dumber schemes.

  Scott dropped down to one knee beside his daughter. "We're going to try harder."

  "But how are you-"

  A loud scraping noise came from a
bove them as some-thing heavy was dragged across the top of the trapdoor. Jake dropped the flashlight. It hit the hard-packed dirt floor and went out.

  Total darkness.

  Chapter 84

  Samantha screamed but Victoria got a quick hand over her mouth. Still, anyone above them had heard it.

  "Victoria," Scott whispered, "get all three kids back down the tunnel at least twenty feet."

  Benny whispered to Rosalita in Spanish. Then Scott felt his wife pulling all three children deeper into the tunnel. "Benny?" Scott whispered.

  "I know," she whispered back. "I only have two bul-lets."

  "Then I guess you better make them count."

  Another loud scraping sound came from the top of the trapdoor. Then a man's voice spoke in Spanish. Scott took a step back into the tunnel and pulled Benny with him, just in case someone fired straight down at them. Then he saw a thin line of light on one side of the trapdoor.

  The man spoke again.

  "What's he saying?" Scott whispered to Benny.

  "He's asking who's down here?"

  The man said something else.

  "He says he has a gun," Benny whispered.

  "Tell him we're trapped," Scott said. "And we need help."

  "Scott?" Victoria's voice came from behind him. "What if he's...one of them?"

  "We don't have a choice," Scott said.

  The man repeated what he'd first said, only this time he shouted. Scott could tell by the tone that the man was scared. It gave him hope. "Tell him," Scott said to Benny.

  Benny shouted in Spanish. There was a long silence. Then the man said something back. Benny responded, her tone sharp.

  "What did he say?" Scott asked.

  "He said he was going to call the police. I told him not to."

  "Why not?" Victoria asked. "We need the police de-partment or the fire department or somebody to help us get out of this hole. Tell him to go ahead and call the police."

  Scott and Benny each said an emphatic "No" at the same time.