T. Parker - The Jaguar

Armenta lifted his wineglass to her and she took up her glass but did not acknowledge his gesture. “I am worried about Saturnino. He is never to leave here without telling me.”

“He’ll probably show up.”

“You never saw him on the trail to the cenote?”

“I told you I never saw him at all.”

“Then maybe he was not acting loco. Maybe he truly is loco and he has taken off for Merida or Veracruz or…who can know?”

She said nothing and watched his face crinkle into a scowl. He set down the wineglass and lifted a phone to his head again.

When he stood and cursed into it Erin heard the gunfire erupt outside, short urgent bursts in the darkness. She saw a ragged flash of orange from the jungle, then came the answering shots from somewhere down in the courtyard. A round whinnied through the night, then another.

Armenta stashed the phone and slid a large holstered pistol around his belt until it hung in front. Then he came around the table toward her and when she stood he put both hands on her shoulders not roughly and he guided her to the floor and under the big table.

“Stay down and the bullets will go over your head.”

“Who are they?”

“The same as they will always be.”

He went to the armoire that sat along one wall and pulled out an assault rifle and swung the strap over his shoulder and chest. Next came what looked like a shotgun, short-barreled and pregnant with a drum of shells. He looked back at her once then marched from the dining room and Erin could see the silent bodyguard leading the way from the suite. He was an older man like Armenta but they moved lightly and spoke to each other though she couldn’t hear the words.

Then the generators went silent and Erin heard gunshots replace their insistent drone and these came from inside the Castle, below her, nasty little rattles that seemed to be arguing with each other. The darkness was sudden and deep. She lay in it with her back to the floor and lifted her knee and worked the Cowboy Defender loose from her calf. When the gun was free she looked to the window and saw below the rim of the tabletop the quarter moon high in the east and the lights of what might have been a commercial jet blipping up and away from what city she couldn’t say.

She rolled over and crawled out and peeked over the window frame. The drive below was lined with solar lights set in decorative concrete frogs, turtles, fish, and crocodiles, and in their modest light she saw two men sprawled on the drive and two more moving slowly toward the Castle from the trees. Two heavy booms and a fusillade of lighter reports erupted from downstairs. Where in the Castle? she wondered. Had Armenta made it outside? Were all those sicarios trying to protect him, or kill him? A flare was launched from the foliage and flew into the courtyard out of her sight. She could see the bright red light of it washing the pavers and the columns of the portico and when the two men ran from the jungle onto the drive they were cut down by fire she could not trace. One of them lay still and the other moaned and rolled back up onto his hands and knees but a furious chatter of fire pocked the sand around him and sent him down absolutely and he did not move again.

The glass above her blasted apart. She slumped down against the wall and felt the shards raining down on her. The main battle seemed to be taking place on the drive right below the dining room but she heard other shots and shouts farther down the driveway and from the nearby jungle where Saturnino had attacked her and from the far side of the building. She crawled back to the table with the glass pricking her hands and knees and the derringer held absurdly in her teeth. She stood and tried to tip over the table but bullets whizzed past her and smacked into the wall and she fell to the tile and rolled flat to the floor under the table. Outside she heard the sound of boots on the crunchy sand of the driveway and men shouting and a scream ended by a volley of fire. The flare light burned into the night from the courtyard and she saw the gun smoke rising into it, then felt the concussive explosion downstairs within the Castle. A grenade, she thought, or a bomb of some kind.

Then she heard vehicles on the drive and more shouting and automatic weapons, and the roar of engines. The bullets twanged against the vehicles and she wondered if they were bouncing off or going in. Then an abrupt silence fell. She lay curled in a ball in the dark hugging herself and talking to the baby inside her about some of the beautiful things he would get to see in his life, beginning in just a few short months. In fact, you will open your eyes to the sky and the moon and stars and Daddy’s and Mommy’s faces and the faces of toy bears and lions, and there will be music too, beautiful music, and even though you can’t see the music it will make you imagine things that you will see whenever the music plays and sometimes even when it doesn’t. She felt her heart thumping and the cool of the tile against her flank and she could smell the festive smell of gun smoke wafting in through the broken window. She put a stinging finger into her mouth and sucked at the blood.

Men shouted. Then another shot, just one shot, somehow forlorn and final, followed by a silence that to Erin seemed to go on for hours.

She heard muffled sounds downstairs, voices and doors slamming. This took her back nine days to the invasion of her home and she wondered if she had entered some new dimension where violence was the beginning, middle, and end of everything. And she thought if the safe room in Valley Center wasn’t enough to keep her safe then this table sure wasn’t. She battled against a flood of terrible ideas: that Bradley had been caught and executed just a few miles from here, that Hood was being manipulated and useless, that Armenta was dead and the men who would soon find her here would be a thousand times worse than he was. She told herself and the baby to ignore such thoughts. She heard the voices again downstairs and more from outside on the drive and through the window she could still see the light of the flare thinly red against the dark. She closed her eyes and listened to the strange disturbing melodies emerging from the voices and the sounds and she made up words to be carried by those melodies. The tunes merged and changed and returned but the one constant in them was the dependable beat of her heart.

A few minutes later the generators groaned to life and the lights came on. She took the derringer and crawled out trying to avoid the glass and when she was away from the window she stood. Voices came from within the Castle and from the driveway and she didn’t recognize them, though she thought she might have heard Heriberto down by the courtyard.

She stole out of the dining room and across a softly lit living room with old-looking area rugs and paintings on the walls and a fireplace where a gas flame flickered between artificial logs. She stood in a foyer and opened the door and looked up and down the hallway.

She heard the elevator approach and bump to a stop, then the release of voices from around the corner. She backed into the foyer and trotted across the living area and went back to the dining room.

At the window she stood in the broken glass and looked down toward the courtyard. The flare light was gone but the floods were working again. It looked like a forty foot drop from here, plenty enough to break her bones and kill her baby, she judged. Through the French doors was a balcony heavy with vessels and flowers and two monkeys that sat on the wrought-iron railing as if they’d been watching the shootout, cracking seeds and dropping the hulls to the driveway. Down on the sandy drive lay four bodies on four blankets of blood. Two black SUVs waited, doors and liftgates open, engines off and headlights on. Four men she did not recognize emerged from somewhere below her and when they came to one of the dead they took his feet and hands and dragged him to the rear end of the closest SUV. There they swung the body four times, each time higher, and on the fifth heave they let go and she heard the thump of him hitting the cargo space and the waddle of the SUV on its struts.