Ballistic

by Mark Greaney

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Court caught up with Laura at the top of a staircase. It was dark here and quiet save for a raging battle going on around the villa’s grounds. Police sirens wailed along with civilian car sirens, and the nonstop pop, pop, pop of rifles punctuated the madness below them. Smoke from the sala followed along at the ankles of Gentry and Laura as they headed up a dark hallway. Laura whispered that she’d been kept in the wine cellar since her arrival and admitted she had no idea where they were going.

  Fully automatic fire came from inside the house now; it sounded like Madrigal’s men had pushed DLR’s men into the main sala. Laura found another stairwell, and Court noticed a blood trail; he wondered if he’d hit Daniel in the back with his blind shot through the curtains. They moved slowly and carefully at first, but when they heard a helicopter’s rotors spooling up above them, they ran upwards through the dark.

  As they opened the door to the roof, both Court and Laura raised their weapons and opened fire. A man in a pilot’s uniform stood outside the black helicopter with a gun in his hand. Laura missed with her weapon, but Gentry brought the man down with four single shots from his Glock. As his body crumpled to the ground, the Eurocopter’s propellers sped up and the craft rose a few inches into the air, spinning on its axis, turning its nose out to the bay.

  “It’s de la Rocha!” Laura screamed, running for the helicopter.

  “He’s gone!” Court answered back over the wail of the propellers.

  But Laura ignored him and sprinted across the roof, towards the lifting chopper.

  Court cussed loudly and then raced after her again.

  Daniel de la Rocha had been shot in the upper left shoulder by that pinche Gray Man gringo, but he’d be okay, if only he could get away. He was a well-trained helo pilot with over one hundred hours in this model of Eurocopter, and all he needed now was to put some distance between himself and the attack by los Vaqueros. He knew the Gray Man and the girl were chasing after him up the stairs, so he’d kicked the pilot out of his chopper, handed him one of his .45s, and gave him orders to shoot anyone on the roof until DLR could get the fuck out of here.

  As he rolled the sleek chopper to the left and began gaining lift, the back door opened up behind him. It was too loud to be heard without screaming at the top of his lungs, but as he lifted off, he did just that. “I told you to wait on the roof for—”

  He felt the hot barrel of a submachine gun press into the back of his head. “Land!” It was the girl, screaming into his right ear.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  He looked back over his shoulder, saw the girl, and then, behind her, the Gray Man himself climbed up through the open door. DLR increased the throttle and pushed the cyclic stick forward, almost throwing the American back out the door. Finally, the American fell in for good, rolling all the way across the floor and grabbing onto a cargo tie against the wall. Laura had a good hold on DLR’s seat, and though the gun wavered from his head for a moment, she jammed it back seconds later. “Land! Land, or I shoot!”

  “You gonna shoot the pilot, you dumb bitch?” he asked, screaming and laughing at the same time. He had no idea if the Gray Man could fly a helicopter; it was a fair bet he could, so de la Rocha increased speed and jacked the chopper violently to the left and right, desperate to keep the aircraft on the verge of falling out of the sky. This way, even if the gringo assassin could pilot the bird, he wouldn’t be able to take the controls in time to avoid a crash.

  He planned on heading into downtown Puerto Vallarta. He owned the cops there, and they would protect him from these two pendejos locos.

  The chopper shot to the north, zigzagging and shooting just feet above the ocean waves. Though concentrating most of his faculties on flying, DLR did take his left hand off the collective for a moment to pull the .45 pistol on his left hip. He kept it hidden from view of Gamboa and the Gray Man, and placed it under his left thigh where he could access it in an instant.

  Laura kept the gun on DLR’s head as she looked at Gentry. “Can you fly this?”

  Court was still trying to get his bearings. Climbing into the helicopter while DLR tried to shake him out had kicked his ass. He felt bruised or broken ribs and an incredible pain in his right knee where it made hard contact with the metal floor as he slammed down inside the cabin.

  She repeated her question, screaming over the noise. “Can you fly a helicopter?”

  Court crawled over to the door, careful to hold on to a handle behind the copilot’s seat so that he couldn’t be pitched out, and then he pulled the door shut. It was quiet in the craft suddenly; the three could now speak in near normal voices.

  “Six! Tell me, can I kill this cabrón? Can you fly the helicopter?” She pressed the barrel of the Uzi hard into the narco’s short hair. He screamed and cussed at her while he kept flying north, jacking the collective left and right.

  Gentry had been trained on rotary wing craft, yes, but that was a long time ago, and the few craft he’d flown had not been nearly so complicated as this big machine. Now, as he looked around at computer screens and dials and switches and levers and lights, he knew the answer to her question. “No! Don’t shoot him!”

  De la Rocha laughed loudly, pulled back on the cyclic stick, and the chopper quickly began gaining altitude. “You hear that, bitch? If I die, then you die!” De la Rocha smiled with open eyes and flared teeth.

  Laura held the Micro Uzi against DLR’s head. He flew the helicopter higher and higher, feeling safer by the second. He headed north out into the bay and closer to the lights of downtown Puerto Vallarta. “You can’t shoot me, Laura!” he repeated, as if he wanted to be certain she understood the stakes. “If I die, then you die!”

  They were five hundred feet in the air now.

  Laura looked to Court with her big brown eyes.

  Gentry saw the eyes turn to narrow slits.

  Fuck.

  She turned back towards Daniel de la Rocha. Shrugged. “Then I guess I die, pendejo.”

  “No!” screamed Daniel de la Rocha.

  “No!” screamed Court Gentry.

  Their shouts were drowned out by a short but loud burping burst of the Uzi. The back of de la Rocha’s head exploded and sprayed across the lighted instruments and screens and the large glass windscreen. The remainder of DLR’s lifeless body sagged forward in its harness. A .45-caliber pistol dropped out of his left hand.

  The helicopter’s forward momentum slowed and ceased, and then it twisted slowly to the right until the lights of the Malecon were in full view. It tipped forward, nose down. The bloody windscreen left the bright lights of the resort city and went dark as the black ocean rushed up to meet it.

  Laura crossed herself and began to pray.

  Like a wild animal Court scrambled and crawled over Laura Gamboa on his way to the copilot’s seat. He used his hands and knees and elbows; he felt weightless for a moment, clenched the seat back with his right hand to hold steady just as he grabbed hold of the cyclic control in the center of the console in front of the seat. He pulled this back hard—too hard, in fact—and the craft righted itself quickly, sending Gentry chest first into the radio controls between the seats. The breath was knocked out of him, but he kept crawling forward, twisting his body and diving now to get his hand on the collective on the far side of the seat. He turned it, increased the pitch and the throttle, and he felt the helicopter surge forward again, arresting its downward spiral.

  But now he found himself facedown on the seat of the helicopter he was piloting, and the hard turn to the right was keeping him pinned there by centrifugal force. He let go of the cyclic for an instant, just long enough to reach down to push the left antitorque pedal to the floor. This brutal movement caused the high-tech aircraft to stop spinning suddenly, and Gentry rolled forward in the seat, finding himself all but upside down now as his feet were in the air, hanging over the headrest.

  “What are you doing?” Laura asked. She had stopped praying enough to watch the American�
��s odd actions.

  “Help me!” he screamed frantically. She took his feet and pushed them over to DLR’s lap, again the helicopter lost momentum and lift while Court struggled into the seat, but he finally got both hands and both feet where they belonged and brought the Eurocopter to straight and level flight with no more than twenty-five feet between the belly of the helo and the ocean’s surface.

  They streaked north over Bandaras Bay; one hundred yards off their right side the lights of the Malecon disappeared and the hotel district of Puerto Vallarta came into view.

  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. N
ow 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 alive?”

  “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.

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  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.