by Mark Greaney
Slowly, the cop raised his weapon; Gentry recognized it as a Colt 635, called a Shorty, a 9 mm submachine gun. The federale lifted the barrel over the cinderblocks and pointed it down towards the crowd. Gentry still did not move, did not know what the hell was going on. Was the policeman there to protect those on the stage, and did he see some threat? Or was he planning on killing Elena Gamboa? The Colt was no sniper rifle, but a long burst from the gun could send thirty rounds of 9 mm bullets streaking one hundred and fifty feet to the podium, knocking everyone standing there dead to the ground.
Shit, thought Court. He did not know what to do. If this man was a good guy, he sure didn’t want to kill him, but if he was a bad guy, he didn’t want to sit by and watch while he blasted innocents.
He did not know, but instinct told him that the situation before him smelled bad, and his instinct had been honed and refined through years and years of danger. In a moment of semi-resolution, Gentry stood in the dark room, walked across the cement on the balls of his stocking feet towards the black-clad man. Fifteen feet, ten feet, five feet behind him. His footfalls were quiet, and what sound they did emit was drowned out by the noise from the street and the park.
Court knelt down, out of view of the open window, directly behind the crouching cop.
“Hi.”
The Mexican federal officer spun on the balls of his feet, his head whipped around only to meet a vicious left jab from the American assassin. With a pop and a crack, fist met face. The cop’s dark glasses flew off, the wide eyes of the policeman quivered, and the man went limp, a one-hundred-forty-pound sack of flour dropping towards the cement. Court caught him, more or less, and laid the unconscious man down on his back. Quickly, Gentry took his weapon.
Court looked down through the spaghetti-like mass of electric wires and telephone cables strung from his high perch here, across the street to poles down at street level by the park. Below these wires, directly under his position, he saw a fresh group of black-clad figures pushing through the crowd in the street. They were Policía Federal as well, and they’d come from the alleyway with the armored truck. They were dressed exactly as the policeman lying at Gentry’s knees.
Below Court and to his right, de la Rocha continued rambling on into the bullhorn. Twice more Elena Gamboa tried to speak, but both times the immaculately dressed man standing in the sun on the hood of the white SUV continued talking, forcing her to give up and just stand there at the podium. He said something about the lack of an indictment, something about the corruption of the special operations group of the federal police, something about how songs and action movies are merely entertainment and are no basis for judging a man guilty. He waved folded sheets in his hand, his “list” of conspirators against him, and he railed against Constantino Madrigal and los Vaqueros, “the Cowboys.”
Court peered down at the Feds pushing through the crowd. The crowd itself had begun pushing and shoving to get away from them. Five cops at least, maybe more; it was hard to count their numbers the way they moved into the pulsing and recoiling mass of civilians around them, everyone burning under the hot noon sun.
“Señor!” shouted Elena now towards de la Rocha. “I speak for my dead husband! You will allow me to finish!”
Court spoke in his cell phone’s mike. “You’ve got five plus suspicious-looking fuckers working their way towards the podium in the crowd. Federal officers.”
“Shit.” Court heard Cullen relay this information to Laura, and he saw her step behind the lectern to talk to Elena. Elena pushed her sister-in-law away gently as she continued addressing de la Rocha.
Court looked back to the federales. Civilians literally scrambled out of their way now, but the masked men moved aggressively through the citizenry, shoving with hands and arms, and then . . . yes. Guns! Where their hands before had been empty, he now saw black metal. They had drawn weapons: Colt submachine guns for some and black semiautomatic pistols for others.
Every sight and sound and sixth sense Gentry had seen or heard or felt since arriving in the plaza suddenly made sense; it all formed together into a solid mass of certainty in his gut.
He understood now.
There would be no riot.
This was going to be a massacre, and he had a bird’s-eye view of it all.
“Yank her ass off the stage, Chuck! It’s about to go loud!”
“Okay!” the old man shouted back.
Court heard the captain yell at Elena. “¡ Vamanos!” Let’s go! Court looked above and across the two-thousand-strong crowd in time to see the white-haired American with the blue ball cap take Elena by the arm.
And then a gunshot rang out.
Court looked back to the federales, but immediately his head followed the source of the noise, below and to his right. His mouth opened in shock. Daniel de la Rocha dropped his bullhorn, his hands wide from his body; a second shot sent him tumbling backwards, stumbling off the hood of the huge white Chevy Suburban Half-Ton and down into the arms of his black-suited bodyguards.
Pistol smoke rose from the crowd in front of the SUV.
“I’ll be damned,” Gentry muttered to himself.
He sure hadn’t seen that coming.
SIXTEEN
“Somebody just whacked de la Rocha.” Court said it into his mike, but a burst of gunfire ahead to his left turned his head again. The black-clad federales fired into the crowd as they pushed towards the podium, shooting at the civilians in their way.
The white SUVs were honking and screeching their tires, doing their utmost to back out of the crowd.
Court had to do something; he could not just sit up here and witness mass murder.
The Gray Man rose to his feet, stood in front of the open fourthstory window. He lifted a two-foot rebar hinge from a stack of fastenings next to him and took the bent iron rod in his right hand, slung the sling of the Colt Shorty over his neck with his left, and in his silent stocking feet he stepped onto the cinderblock window ledge. With only a quick glance down he leapt out over the crowd, over the screams and the honking horns and the crackle of gunfire, and dropped towards the street, four stories below.
As he fell he heard a submachine gun go cyclic off to his left, draining its magazine of bullets.
Gentry caught the rebar hook around a mass of telephone wires just three feet below the window, got his right hand under the wires, and took the bar on the other side as he fell, squeezing as tight as he could with both hands. With a violent wrenching in his shoulders, the wires caught him, and he managed to hold on. His legs and torso shot out to the right, spinning him almost horizontally before gravity caught up with him and he began sliding down at a forty-five degree angle towards the Parque Hidalgo, the metal rebar stripping rubber from the phone lines as he slid down.
He hurtled down over the street now, above the bedlam of the packed audience desperately trying to break the gridlock and get away from the men with the guns.
At thirty feet in the air he was skidding down at top speed; he fought to maintain his grip. His cell phone and his wired earpiece flew away from his body and tumbled to the street below. The crowd in front of the cement steps between the sidewalk and the park scattered with the flying lead coming from both their north and south; a fresh crack up near the staircase to the Talpa Church sent some of them in the opposite direction from the masses and caused a virtual mosh pit of flailing and falling bodies on the sidewalk near where Court’s telephone wire terminated at a metal pole.
He chose these unlucky people as his landing zone. As he shot down the wire, he let go of the rebar while his feet were still eight feet off the ground and he was halfway over the three-lane street. He flew through the air, tucked his knees in tight, saw a big man in civilian dress with a radio in one hand and a silver revolver in the other. Court slammed into his back, and he and the fat man tumbled hard, crashing down into those who’d already fallen on the sidewalk.
Court struggled back to his feet, faster than anyone else taken down by his dive-bomb at
tack from four stories high. He ran across the back of a young man who was facedown on the concrete, and then he leapt onto a small wall running along the sidewalk and began heading for the stairs Cullen planned to use to get the Gamboas away from the park.
More gunfire barked from ahead, and the crowd shrieked. Men, women, children all running and fighting and screaming to get away from the bloodbath. Court searched for the origin of the fire as he ran, blading his body and using his free hand as a spear to knock the shocked and stunned out of his way as he advanced on the threats ahead. He arrived at the first of the victims now: bullet-riddled dead bodies and writhing injured civilians whose misery continued as others tripped over them trying to escape the pandemonium. Court pushed his way with the crowd towards the long staircase leading up to the road and the church above; in front of him an utter logjam of panicked and shrieking humanity fought its way up the steps towards safety.
By now Chuck Cullen had moved Elena and her family off the stage; the Captain quickly ushered her, Laura, Ernesto, and Luz towards the staircase leading away from Parque Hidalgo. Moving with them, either behind, alongside, or in front, depending on the chaotic flotsam and jetsam of the crowd, were the other eight members of the Gamboa family: Eddie’s two uncles, two aunts, his two older brothers, a sister-in-law, and his sixteen-year-old nephew. Along with them, family members of other PF officers killed on La Sirena fled the stage to the stairs. But the crowd was thick, and Cullen’s hasty escape plan bogged down immediately. The steady rhythmic gunfire seemed right on top of them, but they could barely breathe, much less move away. After what seemed to him to be an eternity of shoving, Cullen finally got the Gamboa family to the wall alongside the staircase. He began pushing and fighting his way along it to make the turn to go up, but the swarm of horrified protestors moving in the opposite direction pushed back at his scheme.
Finally, he turned at the base of the stairs, and he led the way, held Elena by the hand, and alternated between looking back to make sure the rest of the family had not been left behind and scanning forward up the stairs towards more pandemonium, searching to avoid threats or discover opportunities to hasten their flight from the danger.
More gunshots from behind, from different areas of the park and the street, and from different types of weapons. Laura trailed her parents, pushed at her father who, along with his wife, was suffocating at the bottom of the stairs, packed like cordwood amongst the others.
From just above them, “Go! Go! Move! Move!” Cullen spoke excellent Spanish, but he shouted in English, certain his meaning was obvious to all.
For much of his slow and arduous progression through the gridlocked park, Court could not see more than a few feet in front of him. He fought against the masses, punching and pushing and scratching to make his way. “¡Muevate! ¡Muevate! ¡Muevate!” Move! Move! Move! Nearing the staircase, stepping and leaping over dead and wounded along the way, he caught up to three sicarios federales, their backs to him. These men pushed forward, reloading their smoking submachine guns, completely unaware that an armed enemy was behind them.
The men wore big bulletproof vests, so with cruel determination the American assassin knelt to the hot pavement, thereby creating a flight path for his bullets that would not send them through his targets and then into innocents. He carefully fired a short burst into the back of each man’s head below the helmet. They pitched and tumbled forward into fleeing civilians; their Colt sub guns and Beretta pistols flew from their hands and fell silent. Court held his rifle in his right hand and fired again at the men on the ground, double-tapping the forehead of each man as he pushed past them.
He came to a group of terrified civilians frozen in fear; they were obviously a family, a father nearly hysterical as he tried to shelter his wife and three children from the flying lead and thrashing and kicking bodies as he attempted to get out of the way of it all. Just as Court caught the terrified eyes of the man, the Mexican’s head lurched to the side, and blood erupted from his jaw. Gentry spun his head to find one of the plainclothes agitators in the crowd re-aiming his big silver revolver, having missed Court with his first shot. Court ducked and rolled on the ground, crashed into others around him like a bowling ball, but he successfully dodged another pistol shot that no doubt struck an innocent person behind him.
The Gray Man emptied his Colt 9 mm into the fat man’s gut at twelve feet, sending him into spasms before he tumbled back dead.
Court dropped the spent submachine gun, crawled forward on his hands and knees, and hefted the dead man’s smoking pistol.
He rose, sprinted forward towards the stairs; his new weapon dripped blood, and he shoved and pushed and even pointed the gun at innocents so they would get the fuck out of his way. He did everything within his power to catch up to Cullen and the fleeing Gamboa family, obscured still by the hundreds pushing in both directions on the wide steps running up to the street in front of the Talpa Church. At one point he found himself climbing onto a bench, jumping high onto the backs and heads of the crowd, literally bodysurfing over a particularly tight gathering of Puerto Vallartans too terrified to move.
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.