by Mark Greaney
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.
TWENTY-FOUR
It was after nine when they reached the hacienda. They’d made it on one tank of gas; Court hadn’t stopped at all, and the big 4×4 had proved invaluable on the rocky mountain roads. As Laura had promised, this hideaway of hers was secluded, wrapped in a tiny valley that sheltered it from all sides. The little convoy had rolled through the town of Tequila thirty minutes earlier, then had driven through miles and miles and miles of agave farms to get here, but the terrain around the property itself was overgrown forest and uncultivated fields. Court followed Laura’s directions, leading the way in Eddie’s truck as the two Suzuki bikes followed, and they turned off the one-lane road, onto a gravel track that ended at a rusted iron gate under an arch made of whitewashed stones. On both sides of the arch a white stucco wall ran off into the evening darkness. Court assumed that it encircled the property. Ramses stepped off his bike and cut off the chain lock with bolt cutters he found in the toolbox in the back of Eddie’s truck; he pushed open the gate, and Gentry could hear the protesting screech of the rusty hinges even though his windows were rolled up to ward off the cool mountain air.
The cops got back on their bikes and led the way now; the three-vehicle procession followed a long, hilly driveway whose cobblestones had been pushed up out of the undulating earth. Weeds grew in fat sprigs between the loose uneven stones, and the unkempt landscaping on either side of the drive brushed against both sides of the truck as they ascended towards the main building. The property looked as if no one had lived here in years; the view illuminated by their headlights showed nothing but wild flora, fallow hills overgrown with pine and cacti and cypress and lime and orange trees, flowing vines, and tall grasses.
Laura explained that all the property, both within the walls and for miles around outside of the walls, had once been a massive hacienda, an agave plantation built back in the 1820s. The walled compound was at the center of the farm, and she pointed out several ruined stone buildings back in the woods, overgrown mostly by vines and geranium and azaleas.
Soon they arrived at the casa grande, the main house in the hacienda complex. Gentry thought it looked haunted in the dark with its broken masonry and aged whitewash and pink walls. Moneda, a green ivy that grew fast and thick, wove up the structure, wrapped around columns along the long arcaded front porch, and made its way through the ironwork on the second-floor balcony, where it integrated itself into the architecture. The truck and the two bikes parked in a round gravel driveway that had an old fountain as its centerpiece. A stone angel, probably half the size of a woman, stood above the fountain; her wings were broken, and her white eyes stared Court down through the windshield of the car. He turned off the engine and the headlights. Below the angel the fountain, even in the moonlight, looked like it was full of algae and trash.
A single light appeared suddenly in a window on the second floor. It was faint and it flickered like a candle.
“Someone is here.” Court said it looking back to Laura, and her eyes widened in surprise.
“Impossible. That cannot be. No one has lived here in three years.”
Gentry stepped out of the truck and began crunching across the gravel drive. Laura climbed out as well, chased up behind him, and grabbed him by the arm. Her fingers felt tiny yet strong. Insistent. “We need to leave. We cannot put anyone else in danger.”
“Where are we going to go? Elena has been lying in the back of the truck for four hours on bad roads. She needs to rest. We have to stay here, at least for tonight.”
Laura winced in concern, but she did not continue to argue. She followed “Joe” and the two Mexican officers up crumbling steps to a huge oak and iron door. Gentry knocked, his right hand hovering over the butt of the pistol stuck in his pants.
Laura stepped up beside him. “It might be a caretaker or some farmer from the nearest pueblo who snuck in. Let me talk to them.”
“Go for it.”
A minute later the door opened slowly; a man stood back away from it in a dark tiled hallway, and the long double-barreled shotgun in his hand was pointed at Court Gentry’s chest. Moonlight reached into the building, illuminating the old man like a gray ghost.
Gentry did not draw his pistol. He understood the man’s suspicion; he just hoped like hell Eddie’s sister could quickly explain the situation to this old coot’s satisfaction.
Laura gasped in shock, put her small hand to her small mouth. She recovered, spoke softly, “Buenas noches, Señor Corrales. It’s me, Laura. Guillermo’s wife?”
“Guillermo?”
“Yes. Guillermo. Your son.”
This dude was ancient; this much Court could tell. Much older than Ernesto. He wore a white mustache that hung low on either side of his face. By the look of it, he’d been sleeping facedown, the bristly hair shot out in random directions.
“Sí, Señor Corrales. ¿Cómo está Usted?”
“Guillermo is here?” The old man asked.
Laura responded softly, “No, señor. Guillermo is not here.”
Just then another ghostly form appeared behind the old man in the shaft of moonlight let in by the open front door. The figure moved towards the doorway from the recesses of the house.
“Lorita?” The voice of an old woman.
“Inez. How are you?”
“I am fine, little one.” The old lady shot out into the moonlight and hugged Eddie’s sister tightly. “Luis, put down the gun and let them inside.”
The old man lowered the weapon, stepped forward, and embraced Court. He spoke in Spanish. “Guillermo, my son. I have missed you.”
It was immediately apparent, by Señor Corrales’s words and actions, that Laura’s father-in-law suffered from some form of dementia.
Five minutes later all eleven residents and guests sat in a massive candlelit sitting room. A stairwell led to a second-floor landing that wrapped around the dim room, but it was too dark for Gentry to see past the banisters. Inez, Laura’s mother-in-law, brought a bottle of fresh but lukewarm orange juice and poured it into broken cups and plastic tumblers, laid the offering out on a long wooden coffee table. A bottle of tequila was placed next to it, there for the taking, but only sullen and silent Ignacio spiked his OJ.
This casa grande was huge, but it seemed quite literally to be falling down on top of the elderly couple. Thick cobwebs hung in the darkened corners of the sitting room, the floors were caked in dust, and the old furniture, though sturdily built from big oak and cedar logs, creaked under pressure.
The ceilings were high, the floors were stone tile, the smell of candle wax, dust, and mold was prevalent in the dim air. Voices echoed when raised above a whisper. There was a monastic feel to the interior of the big home; Gentry could not imagine living in a creepy place like this.
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Thin black and green lizards streaked along the walls and ceilings, appeared and disappeared in and out of the long shadows cast by the candlelight.
Court did not want to ask, but he had the distinct impression that there was no electricity in the home other than a small gas generator that rumbled outside the kitchen. Inez had a little flashlight that she used to make her way to the sconces in the blackened corners of the large room. These she lit with wooden matches, giving a little more light and a spookier glow to the scene.
Luis Corrales sat in a large wingback chair, his eyes darted around the room, watching his late-night guests. Gentry could tell his mind was clearly someplace else. It didn’t take Court long to realize the old woman seemed slightly off as well. Nevertheless, as Laura carefully and honestly explained the reason for their appearance, Inez seemed lucid enough to understand the predicament her daughter-in-law had put her in.
Inez Corrales invited everyone to stay for as long as they wanted, proclaiming everyone present to be in “God’s hands,” and then she led the entourage into a dim hallway, asked the group to join hands around a nicho, a niche built into the wall where a Cristo, a small wooden statue of Jesus, had been placed between a circle of votive candles. She took a few minutes to light them, a red glow illuminated the miniature shrine as well as everyone’s faces, and then she asked Laura to lead the group in prayer. Court didn’t understand much of it, probably wouldn’t have been familiar with a lot of the words even if the prayer had been in English, but everyone else seemed to know the tune. He heard varying levels of conviction in the voices around him.
After the prayer Luz went with Inez to help her find a comfortable place for Elena to lie down. The bumpy drive must have been difficult for the pregnant woman, but Court noticed appreciatively that she had not complained once. She hadn’t even argued with her sister-in-law during the trip.
Gentry took Laura aside while they were unloading the backpacks from the car. Softly, he asked, “What’s wrong with them?”
“Who?”
“The old couple.”
She shrugged. “They are a little bit loco.”
“A little bit?”
“This hacienda has been in the Corrales family for over two hundred years. Luis has lived here his entire life; he was a Jimador, an agave farmer. But he has Alzheimer’s. Inez… well, I think she is losing her mind, too. After Guillermo died they just fell apart. He was everything to them.”
“Why did you think they wouldn’t be here?”
“They moved to Guadalajara, to a home for old people. But Inez tells me they did not have money to stay, so they returned here. I never would have brought us here if I knew they were—”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. It’s not safe for them to stay here.”
“Maybe they can go someplace while we’re here.”
Laura shook her head. “Look at them, Joe. Where are they going to go? We have to protect them.”
“I’m not promising that we can protect ourselves. If DLR finds out where we are, he’s going to hit this place hard. His sicarios will kill everyone to get to Elena.”
Laura looked like she was about to cry. Instead she just gazed off into the distance, out into the forest at the front of the property. “This is their home; if anyone needs to leave, it is us.”
“Yeah, but we’re the ones the drug lord is trying to murder, so we’ll just hang out here till we figure out where we’re heading next.”
Laura’s expression remained unchanged. Finally, she turned to Court. Said, “It’s all in God’s hands, anyway.”
“Maybe so, but if it’s all the same to you and Him, I’m going to make sure all the doors are locked.”
* * *
Shortly before ten Court walked the property inside the walls with Martin and Ramses. The three of them agreed; this big, lonely hacienda in the mountains was a great place to hide, but it would be an absolutely shitty place to defend if it came down to it. The walls around the property were ten feet high, but they were covered in vines and could be surmounted with little trouble; the massive back patio and garden could be watched over from the veranda on the second level, but there were so many wild-growing plants and trees and statues on the property, along with a four-hundred-year-old stone aqueduct and a long terra-cotta trellis, that enemies advancing on the casa grande would have plenty of both cover and concealment from most any direction.
There were many buildings inside the walls. A simple stone chapel with a tile roof, a garden shed the size of many Mexican homes, and a broken-down wooden barn and stables all made this hacienda less like a walled castle and more like a tiny walled village.
It was apparent to Court that they could not stay here long. If the Black Suits found them here, then they could be surrounded, the walls could be penetrated, and the building could be overrun.
As they walked through the dark, checking the perimeter wall to make sure the gates were locked tight and there were no gaping holes, they tripped over sharp, spindly agave plants. As they did their best to find their way, Court asked Ramses, “How did you guys make it off DLR’s yacht?”
The Mexican answered softly, his voice almost lost in the darkness. “Our role was to cut off de la Rocha’s escape via the helicopter and to kill the guards on the upper deck. The major was below with a team assaulting the bedroom. All I know is that he came over the radio and said to get off the boat, that it was a trap. We were on the helipad, we both dove off into the water, and the yacht exploded. It took us ten hours to get back to shore.”
“So you guys definitely did not bring the bomb.”
Ramses shook his head emphatically. “No. That is a mentira… a lie? Yes, we were going in to kill de la Rocha. We had no plans on leaving anyone on the boat alive. This is a difficult war; our enemies do not take prisoners, why should we? But no… we didn’t swim to La Sirena to put a bomb on it. If that were true, we would have attached the bomb to the hull and swam away; there would have been no need to go on board.”
Court believed him, it was the only thing that made sense. Somehow de la Rocha was tipped off about the assassination attempt. “Who knew of the attack on La Sirena?”
Ramses shrugged. They’d reached a large pond that came almost to the edge of the property; they moved under weeping willow trees along its far side, putting their right hands on the estate’s vine-covered wall for balance on the narrow bank. “Only Major Gamboa and the two of us, the other five on our team, plus those higher than us, not in the GOPES but in the federal government.”
“And who would that be?”
“Only the attorney general, and the special prosecutor assigned to the project.”
“So one of those two men?”
Ramses chuckled a bit while they walked. “I can narrow it down further. Major Gamboa felt that the attorney general was working all this time for Constantino Madrigal.”
Court stopped in the dark for a moment. “Eddie knew his boss was ordering him to do the bidding of the Madrigal Cartel?”
Ramses shrugged, but it was clear he wanted Court to understand their position. “Major Gamboa always said, ‘we will never get to the last guy, because the last guy is the one who is setting all this up.’ He was… what is the word? Fatal, about this.”
“Fatalistic,” corrected Gentry.
“Sí. The intelligence was so good, he knew the carteleros were using us as a proxy force. He knew that Madrigal and his Cowboys were to be last on the list of cartels, so he assumed Madrigal was pulling our strings. But we never expected to be double-crossed on the de la Rocha hit. The only thing I can think is that, maybe, the special prosecutor was in the pocket of Daniel de la Rocha.”
“So what you are saying is, the attorney general is working for Madrigal. And the special prosecutor is working for de la Rocha.”
“And we’re stuck in the middle,” confirmed Ramses.
“Exactamente,” muttered Martin through his swollen jaw. He’d picked up enough o
f the English to give his take on the matter.
“You can’t trust anyone in power, can you?” Court said it aloud but to himself.
Ramses chuckled without mirth. “You just figured this out? Well, my friend, now I can say it. Welcome to Mexico.”
Damn, thought Court. He had worked some dicey ops in his life, had dealt with some shady motherfuckers waving the flag of freedom or justice or honor or anything else to conceal their own nefarious objectives, but he had never encountered corruption so completely ingrained into a society. If all of what Chuck Cullen and Ramses said was true, which seemed pretty damn likely considering what he had witnessed and experienced in his thirty hours in western Mexico, the Gamboas had no one they could trust.
Court thought it cynical of Eddie to knowingly work under these conditions, to take intelligence from corrupt bosses with their own agendas in order to execute his assassinations. But Court understood. Those were the rules around here.
The rules sucked, but those were the rules.
Eddie had known all along that he was in peril, that he was in too deep. Court wondered if his old friend had even expected to live long enough to meet his son. There was no way to know, but it depressed Court greatly to think about that heavy weight on the mind of his lighthearted friend.
A new resolve grew inside of Court. A resolve to… to salvage something for Eddie Gamble. And for Chuck Cullen. Some tiny victory, some simple bit of retribution, some finger in the eye of those who took everything from these two good men.
TWENTY-FIVE
When Court and the GOPES men returned to the casa grande, they checked the building to find the best places to position sentries to look out over the property. Old Spanish architecture, like that built in Mexico in the 1770s, borrowed much from the Moorish buildings dotting the landscape of Ottoman Spain. One common feature was the mirador, or “overlook,” a balcony or atrium usually covered and usually adorned with an archway, that gave a vista of the property. This building was built in a horseshoe shape, with the concave portion facing south and surrounding the expansive patio and rectangular pool. There were three miradores on the second story of the casa grande, giving view to the front drive, the patio and back wall, and the overgrown fruit tree orchard that ended at the wall by the pond.
