by Mark Greaney
Court sucked in cool night air, his first deep breath since getting the wind knocked out of him.
He looked to his left. DLR’s all but headless body hung to the side. Blood dripped down his bare chest.
Laura was still seated behind him. “You said you could not fly a helicopter,” she said it with a smile.
“Listen, I think it would be best if we try to land on the water.”
“When is landing in the water better than on the land?”
Court hesitated. “When the pilot sucks.”
Laura looked at him. “You are not joking, are you?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“All right,” she said. And she returned to her prayers.
Five minutes later a Eurocopter EC135 came to an awkward hover ten feet above the water in the Marina Vallarta, just north of the city. Those few on the decks of their yachts at this time of the night saw the spectacle of the hesitant aircraft: it hung low to the right for a moment, then low to the left; then it dipped forward, found itself straight and level about five feet above the water; and then, inexplicably, the main engines sounded like they were manually switched off. The craft dropped straight down into the water, the propellers disintegrated on impact, and the chopper began sinking rapidly.
Within seconds of the Eurocopter disappearing under the black water of the marina, a pair of heads emerged. Soon a man and a woman could be seen swimming ashore. The figures disappeared into the black, just as the siren’s wail of a harbor police boat filled the air.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Nestor Calvo Macias lay hog-tied on his side in the mine shaft. He shook and shivered, both from the cold and from fear. All night long big rats had scurried around and even over him. They were not afraid of him, and why should they be? He could do nothing to fight them off, bound as he was, and with the hemp gag in his mouth he could not even scream out to scare them away.
So he’d spent the night in the dark, in the cold, being walked on, pissed on, and even shit on by pinches ratones.
He assumed he would die here. He would starve or die of thirst or succumb to some other ailment in the next day. And if the Gray Man did return, what then? A bullet in the head?
Nestor lay and shook and thought of the rats and the disease, and of starving or dying slowly of dehydration.
He shivered and hoped that the Gray Man would just come back and put a bullet in his head.
A light up the shaft. The sound of an engine. Soon the Mazda truck appeared in the mine shaft and stopped. The Gray Man stepped out. From the truck’s lights Nestor could see that the American looked like hell. His clothes were torn; his face showed pain in each step. He limped over to him, knelt down next to him, and then drew his pistol.
Here it comes, thought Calvo. He cinched his eyes tight.
The cold barrel of the pistol pressed into his temple.
And then the hemp gag was removed from his mouth.
The Gray Man said, “De la Rocha is dead. Spider is dead. So where does that put you?”
Calvo did not open his eyes. “I… I do not know.”
“I think it ought to put you in charge of the Black Suits. Don’t you?”
Now his eyes opened, but they stared ahead, at the far wall. “I… I don’t know.”
“I’m willing to make a deal with the leader of the Black Suits.”
“Yes?” Calvo’s voice cracked. He looked up to the Gray Man now.
“If you call off the hunt for Elena Gamboa, I will let you go.”
“Of course! Of course I will! I never had any interest in—”
“If anything happens to any of the Gamboas, either here or in the States, then I come back.”
“I… I understand.”
The Gray Man cut Calvo free, then he climbed back into his Mazda truck and drove away without saying another word.
Nestor Calvo Macias stood in shock, slowly brushed dirt off of his black suit, smoothed his gray hair back on his head, and began walking slowly forward towards the exit of the mine shaft.
* * *
Court sat on a wooden a pew in the sanctuary in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Puerto Vallarta. His feet shifted nervously while he looked around.
Waiting. Worrying.
Laura appeared through a side door of the sanctuary, scanned the cool bright room, and smiled when she saw him. She approached and they hugged, then she took him by the hand through a narrow archway that led into the small sacristy. Here they sat alone together on a wooden bench.
For a few minutes they talked about the various aches and pains they’d received the week before in Puerto Vallarta. They both looked a lot better now than the last time they’d seen each other: her crying at a roadside bus stop and he pulling away in his Mazda pickup. They’d had time since to clean up and tend to their wounds and figure out where they would go from here.
Court was worried about this conversation. He could not enter into a relationship with this girl, as much as he entertained that fantasy each and every night. He knew his life was in jeopardy, and he knew that, unlike her situation for the past few weeks, his problems would not be solved any time soon. He did not know how to tell her that he would have to leave her behind for her own good. It sounded like bullshit.
But he’d have to do it.
She came to the point quickly, forcing him to prepare himself to let her down as easily as possible. “Six. I have been thinking and praying about my future.”
“Right.” He said, “I want you to know—”
“My heart is certain. I know what I want. What I need. I know what will make me happy in my life.”
Holy shit, thought Court. Here we go.
A slight pause. Then she said, “I will enter the convent. I will become a nun. It is a long process, but my heart knows it is right for me. I feel the calling. I will begin immediately.”
“Holy shit,” said Court aloud.
“I would love for you to come and visit me. I will not be able to see you. I will have to remain cloistered. But it would be nice to hear about you from time to time.”
Court fought to compose himself. He certainly did not envision this course of events. “Yeah. Sure. I’d like that.”
“And I would also like to pray for you.”
Still reeling, he said, “Knock yourself out.”
She cocked her head. “What does that mean?”
“It means, yes, you have permission to pray for me. I would like that very much.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways. You, Six, are the most mysterious ‘way’ I have ever encountered.”
Court found himself wanting to believe God was working through him and not Satan himself. But he did not know. He did not understand.
But he did not lament the killing he had done, the measures he had taken here. He did not lament for one second one drop of the blood he had shed to save the woman in front of him.
She was beautiful. She was good. She was perfect.
And she was alive.
“Go with God, my friend,” she said, and she hugged him, looked into his eyes, stood, then disappeared back through the sacristy and into the sanctuary.
And she was gone.
Court sat for a few minutes alone, then stood and returned to the sanctuary himself for a moment more. The room felt big and empty, but welcoming somehow. He’d spent time in churches around the world but only for operational reasons, and his mind never drifted beyond the details of his work. Now he looked around, perhaps for the first time in his life, and he wondered about this place. Was there a point to all this?
His eyes turned to the crucifix. He stared at it a long time before whispering, “Thanks.”
His mobile phone rang. It was the number he’d given Hector Serna.
He walked out of the side entrance to the sanctuary, into a cool sunny afternoon. “Yeah?”
It was not Serna. It was Madrigal. He spoke in his mountain Spanish, and Court struggled to understand.
“You left Calvo a
live?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think you need some competition.”
A long pause. “I should have killed you when you gave me that gun!”
“Yes,” Court admitted. “You should have.”
“I will kill you!”
“Take a number, Cowboy.”
“You are a worthless, piece of shit, motherfucking son of a whore!”
“I am an outlaw.”
Another long pause. “If men ever get to live on other planets, you should be the first man off of this one. Everyone wants you dead.”
“Yep.”
“Someone soon will get you. You must know that.”
“I know that. I find comfort in the fact that so many people will be sad that it wasn’t them.” Court hung up the phone, and then tossed it into a municipal garbage can a few blocks away.
EPILOGUE
San Blas felt different to Gentry now. He arrived at eight in the morning, found the weather cooler and an ocean wind off the Pacific swirling garbage in the streets as the locals went on their way to work or school.
By now Court looked positively Latin. He stepped off the bus in his denim jacket and blue jeans, a single cheap backpack over his shoulder; his dark skin and sunglasses and trim hair, beard, and goatee blended nicely with other men his age. He wore earbud headphones in his ears, plugged into his phone, but he was not listening to music.
No, the headphones were just part of the costume, the only rhythms the Gray Man listened to were the footsteps behind him and the soft conversations of those around him. He was on guard here in San Blas, more so now than two weeks earlier on his first visit to the fishing village.
He knew they were after him, and he knew they were close.
He’d given up concentrating on who they were… it didn’t really matter anymore.
He walked the road to the hill, past the lobster shacks and the little churches and truckloads of armed marines on patrol, and he took another steep road up a steep hill. He’d taken this same road the last time he was in town, heading up to look for Eddie’s grave, and then heading down with Eddie’s pregnant wife. So much had changed in that time, but to Court everything felt like it had before. He’d acquired cuts and bruises and scrapes and burns, but his quest now was the same as then.
Mexico was just a bump in the road for him.
He walked up towards the entrance to the cemetery, saw the cheap mausoleums of tin and plastic sheeting and cement block off to his left. An iguana raced by on the road ahead of him. Chickens clucked in the last house up the hill before the beginning of the cemetery and the entrance to an old church and a counting office that dated back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
But he passed the cemetery, kept walking up. It was a normal security sweep for him, more automatic than brought on by any sense of danger or threat. It was second nature to make wide, lazy turns, to stop and retrace steps, to wait in the shadows for someone following, to move through the landscape like a wraith.
He finally turned left well past the cemetery, much higher on the hill, and he entered a grove of low grass surrounded by wild-growing banana trees two stories high. He moved deeper into the woods, turned towards the cemetery. He’d come all this way, a three-hour bus ride, just to see Eddie’s resting place one more time. Court thought about leaving something there, under the dirt, as a remembrance for his friend.
But he did not have much with him.
Court was not a sentimental man; perhaps his mind-set was as close to the opposite end of the spectrum as one could come from sentimentality without being diagnosed as a sociopath. But he felt he had to come here, had to take the time and to spend the money and to make the effort to return to the place where this all started for him.
He pushed through some brush.
Coming back was the right thing to do, though he could not articulate why.
He climbed over a whitewashed rock that had once been part of a Spanish fortress.
He would not forget Eddie or Laura or Elena or Daniel de la Rocha, but he needed to put this behind him to move on.
He climbed off the rock and fought through some tight vines, came out just above the cemetery; it began just a few yards down the steep hill.
He’d have to leave his thoughts of Laura, his fantasy of love, and his visions of lust behind him so that he could continue on in his fight against Gregor Sidorenko.
Court stopped dead in his tracks. Lowered slowly to the grass.
Fuck. He did not say it aloud.
When he was certain he was concealed, he crawled backwards on his elbows and his knees, back into the brush and vine and banana, and then he shifted ten yards to his right, still on his belly. It took him nearly ten minutes to do so, but then he sat behind a carved white stone, pulled a tiny set of binoculars from his pack, checked the angle of the sun, and then rolled around the white stone and raised the glasses to his eyes.
Where? Where are you?
He’d sensed movement below him, on the row of crypts south of where Eddie’s cross lay. There were iguanas everywhere, but this movement was not natural to the surroundings. It was accompanied by a flash of light, the reflection of glass in the morning sun. That was all he’d been able to discern before his interior warning system had alighted and he had dropped to cover. Now he scanned with his glasses in the area of the movement, looking for whatever had aroused his alarm just a few minutes ago—
There.
Shit.
A figure, a man, prone, eighty yards from Eddie’s grave. He wore a fully camouflaged suit, and he looked like the brush around him and in front of him; from under a blanket of twigs and leaves indigenous to the area, a rifle’s barrel and the front of a sniper scope protruded.
Behind this man, not far away, was his partner. He was better concealed, he had no barrel to expose or scope that could catch the sunlight, but Court saw him when he turned his head.
Shit. Court scanned the hillside cemetery now. There would not just be two of them. No organization in the world would send just two men on a mission to kill the Gray Man. Court could not find the others, but he knew they were there. Perhaps here with him in the brush above the cemetery. It would be a wise place to hide a follow-on force.
For just a moment he wondered who they were. Sidorenko’s men? SAD hunter/killers? Delta Force? Vaqueros? Black Suits?
Did it even matter? He decided it did not.
He turned his optics to Eddie’s simple cross.
Court could only see the back side of it down on the hill; he had no idea if more curses had been painted on it. In his pack he’d brought white paint and a brush. He’d planned on doing the work that Elena had been doing when he met her, to restore Eddie’s reputation once more before he left this place forever.
But the fuckers below had ruined everything for Court.
Fifty yards away from him sat Eddie’s lonely cross, and no one in this town would protect it, no one in this town would visit it. Sooner, not later, Court knew, no one in this town would remember Eduardo Gamboa as anything more than another cartelero, another narco assassin, another nameless, faceless killer of men.
And Court could not do anything about it at all. He could not even say good-bye.
He lay there in the brush for an hour, watching the sniper, a man as still and as patient as Court himself, and then he backed up through the brush, into the wild banana, out to the road. He went back down the hill, then back past the lobster shacks, and then he caught a bus out of town.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 35990554-d48c-4370-a191-abd163a435c2
Document version: 1.1
Document creation date: 4.12.2012
Created using: calibre 0.9.8, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Mark Greaney
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