Blood of Paradise (48 page)

“What's going on?”

“No more questions. Just do as I say and shoot anything coming over that wall.”

He put his shoulder to the sofa and pushed it over to the sliding door for Eileen to use as a barricade. When Axel reappeared, Jude tossed him his last two spare clips and told him to stay on the stair. He could provide cover fire for Eileen from there or come down to help Jude if need be.

Jude redialed Carlos's number, whispering, “Pick up, come on, pick up.” No answer. Crawling to the front window, he lifted the edge of the curtain to peek out. The Mercedes's tinted windshield was shattered, three shots, and the car was coasting slowly backward up the cul-de-sac, aiming crooked. Carlos was hurt or dead. Then four guys in white coveralls boiled out of the van near the old gossip's house, charging forward. They were armed.

As Malvasio watched the magnified images scrambling through his crosshairs, he felt an odd psychological bond with the weapon in his grip and suffered a fleeting impulse to shoot all four
mareros
dead: Sleeper, Chucho, Magui, Toto. The way he'd told Strock it would go. End this thing. It would be quixotic, strange, inexplicable, fun. A sudden lightness of spirit came over him, a sense that all things were possible.

Then gravity returned. Do that, he thought, what was the point of killing Phil? The question evoked an odd discomfort, which he decided was regret. Besides, he told himself, you cross the likes of Hector Torres, Wenceslao Sola, the judge, the colonel, you better have a safe haven. He'd been slack in that regard, an unwise oversight, but the plan had been constantly in flux. More to the point, where did he honestly think he could run?

All of which was academic now, the thing was in motion, the trajectory set by laws as old as time. There is no freedom of action, he thought. Choice is an illusion. We are who we are.

Jude pressed his pistol barrel up against the picture window and fired once to shatter the glass. The report made his eardrums throb, his hearing went muddy. He ducked against the shower of jagged shards, then regained position, braced his firing hand, and took aim at the closest of the four attackers. He fired a two-shot hammer—waiting out the split-second arc of recoil before letting the second shot go—then swung to the next nearest man and repeated, ducking as return fire shattered more glass. He screamed out to Eileen, “Down! Against the wall!” his voice sounding dull, miles off, even inside his own skull.

An even odder, more distant sound broke through the hum in his ears. A choking cry. It came from outside—he'd hit one of the men. Jude dove under the window to the other corner, rose up, spotted the man he'd apparently missed, ten yards away, and got off another two shots. The man took both rounds in his chest and promptly reached out an arm to break his fall as he sat down in the street, a dazed expression on his face as though he'd just been interrupted in the middle of a thought.

Peering over the window ledge, Jude saw the remaining two men regroup and scurry back the way they'd come. They left their two
chamacos
behind, the first—a huge guy, skinhead, tats on his face—on all fours, retching up blood, the other still sitting there with that stunned look in his eyes, trying to breathe but patting around blindly for his weapon. The two who'd run reached the van and one scrambled up behind the wheel, the other hopped in back. Jude pulled a backup clip from his pocket, ready for reload, as the van lurched into reverse, backing up into the street.

It turned sharp in his direction.

Moving backward, the van slammed the Mercedes aside, tagging it on the rear right corner, spinning it out of the way as the taillights shattered, the van's back doors banging open and closed from the impact. The driver was aiming straight for the house now, the transmission keening as he gained speed, the van tottering as it barreled closer. He meant to ram the house, break down the whole front wall.

Malvasio felt oddly detached from the events below—the depersonalizing distance, the crosshatched magnification. Things would jump at the merest twitch and he'd have to settle in again, let his breath out evenly as his world narrowed down once more to its small tight circle.

He watched Magui—trailing blood, a head wound, first to go down outside the house—scramble on his knees, trying to reach safety. Why do the big ones always prove so worthless? Toto—also bloody, stunned, sitting where he'd fallen—was at least trying, however hopelessly, to shoulder his gun. It made him strangely oblivious to what was happening behind him. The van's back bumper knocked him flat, then the left rear tire crushed him as Sleeper barreled on in reverse, steering a collision course with the house.

Malvasio felt an odd pride in how gutsy the kid was proving. Chucho, too. Too bad no one would ever know.

Jude was unable to get a clear shot at the van's driver. He dove away from the front window a second before the wall exploded. The whole house rocked on its moorings amid the crash of steel against concrete and the final shattering of the window glass. He heard what he assumed were screams from upstairs and both Eileen's and Axel's voices shouted at him too, but the sounds barely registered, his hearing still mucked up from the gunfire. Looking back through the choking haze of dust and black exhaust, he saw the van's chugging tailpipe, its mangled bumper, its two rear doors—one ripped back and open, the other shut tight—where the wall used to be. The van sat crooked in the mauled gap of jagged cinder block. He wondered if the wall would hold as, through the one open door, one of the two remaining attackers resumed fire.

Jude scrambled back to the stair, took cover beyond the wall, firing around the corner till the hammer clicked. He hit the magazine release, let the spent clip drop as he pulled another from his hip pocket, and slammed the reload home.

Malvasio watched Chucho dive from the passenger side of the van and run to the front door of the neighboring house, wielding a sledge to batter down the door. By now there'd be calls to the local police from everywhere in the neighborhood, but no one ventured outside. The Salvadorans were battle-savvy, they knew the price of getting too curious. Even the guards at the gate were staying put. Given the level of violence, the PNC would call for support from the local military garrison, and that would delay any response. There was time to finish this.

Chucho managed to get through the door finally and he tossed the sledge aside, pointing his rifle ahead of him as he disappeared inside the house. Meanwhile, Sleeper grabbed his weapon and took up position at the edge of the van, aiming straight at Consuela's front door, as a billowing cloud of black smoke began to emerge from inside her house.

The first Molotov cocktail, a fruit jar stuffed with a flaming rag, had hit the dining room table with a crash, spraying kerosene everywhere, which lit instantly. It wasn't the fire, though, or even the heat, that caused the problem. It was the smoke. The second firebomb just made that worse.

The only way out was through the front, but they'd be waiting.

Jude turned to Axel: “Grab Consuela, get the boy and his mother, haul them downstairs fast and out into the garden. If the smoke's too bad, break out the window in the bedroom and jump from there.” He called to Eileen: “We're coming your way. Stay put.”

But he wasn't coming her way, not yet. He scurried up the stairs and into the front bedroom, hugging the wall until he got to the window, which was cranked open. He eased up along the side, peeking out at the edge of the curtain. Down below, one of the gunmen crouched behind the van's front tire, using it for cover as he trained his rifle on the door.

Where was the other guy?

Take care of this first, Jude thought. The angle was bad. He braced himself with the wall, aiming carefully, getting the crown of the gunman's head squarely in his sight. He whistled. Sure enough, the guy looked up—a kid, actually, twenty years old tops. Jude fired and hit him square in the face. The kid toppled like he'd been punched, arms flailing as his back hit the ground. Jude fired three times more, into the kid's chest, insurance rounds, just as he heard gunfire from the back of the house, followed by a blistering scream.

Malvasio watched Sleeper get hit and realized it was up to Chucho now. Dirty Dog. The roof lines prevented him from seeing the garden behind the house, so he wouldn't know till later how the nervy little
chavo
fared.

Meanwhile, he thought, work to do.

Sighting the weapon felt natural, thanks to Strock's tutoring. He had nowhere near the skill to be able to hit something pinballing around, but given Strock's scope adjustment, fixing the proper zero point, as long as he could have a moment to relax into the shot, he could hit his target.

He trained his sight on Magui shuffling woozily up the cul-de-sac, one hand clutching his bloody head wound. Guy thinks he can simply walk away. Malvasio aimed for the high left side of his back, the heart zone, then eased his breath out, squeezing the trigger. The big man flinched, like he'd been stung, then toppled, losing his balance but not quite falling over. He put out his free hand, dropped to a knee. Malvasio fired again and once more for good measure, at which point Magui collapsed onto his side in the street.

The smoke boiled up from the dining room in dense, noxious clouds. Jude couldn't make it back downstairs or even see more than a few feet into the living room, and so he scrambled back up to the second floor, ran to the rear bedroom. Looking out, he saw through the trails of smoke curling up from the doorway below that Oscar, wearing the bulky vest, lay twisted on his back in the garden, one eye pulpy with blood, another wound on the side of his face. He was convulsing. His mother screamed from inside the house, held back by Eileen and Axel and Consuela because the fourth gunman—he looked even younger than the one out front—had found a perch in the corner of the garden wall the next yard over. He stood on a table, aiming, waiting for the smoke to drive everyone out.

The kid had set the perimeter sensor off, and the alarm sounded with a throbbing shriek. Except for the smoke, he presented an easy target, but just as Jude was drawing a bead, a shotgun blast erupted from downstairs and the kid ducked down, taking cover behind the wall. Jude knew he didn't have time to wait—the smoke. He could hear through the pealing alarm the sound of choking coughs downstairs, he was starting to gag himself. But the kid with the rifle looked willing to wait till he knew he had everybody outside, gasping for air, before popping up again to take his next shot.

Meanwhile, the mother wailed:
“¡Oscar, mi pobrecito, es Mamá, es Mamá!”

Jude shouted as loud as he could, “Eileen! Can you cover me?”

“She's hurt!” It was Axel, shouting over the wailing alarm and the mother's screams.

“I'm okay.” Eileen's voice was labored, clenched. “It's not bad.”

Jude fired off a round into the corner, to keep the kid with the rifle down. To Axel, he shouted, “Can you cover me?”

“Not for long.”

Jude glanced down, saw the tip of the shotgun's barrel poke out through the punctured screen and then fire. Jude tucked his pistol into the waist of his trousers, cranked the window open as far as he could, and crawled out as a second blast came from below. He gripped the window ledge, let go with his feet, hanging, dropping to the ground, rolling with the fall, then running as soon as he had his legs beneath him, darting past Oscar who lay there, blind, trembling from shock. Jude couldn't take time to help him. With the alarm providing cover for the sound of his movements, he reached the corner of the small garden and pressed himself against the
veranera
vines torn ragged by the buckshot. Ignoring the thorns, he crouched below where he guessed the gunman would pop up to shoot once he decided to take his chance.

That was when Axel decided to improvise. Jude watched in disbelief as the older man crawled out from behind the sofa barricade, slid open what remained of the screen door, and walked out into the garden.

“I'm coming for the boy,” he shouted, using Spanish—it was for the gunman's benefit, not Jude's. “I need to make sure he's okay. Whatever you want, you can have, just let me get to the boy. He's young, he means no one any harm …”

Watching him, Jude thought to himself in an eerie moment of calm: He gave his vest to the boy's mother.

Axel just kept jabbering, switching to English just in case, coming closer to the wall. His eyes looked spent but there was fury in them too. Jude edged up slowly, careful not to rustle the
veranera
leaves. Finally he saw the barrel of the AR-15 pop over the top of the garden wall. He rose to full height, grabbed the weapon and pulled down, lodged his pistol into the throat of the kid, then fired. The boy's jaw exploded in a hurl of blood. He toppled down into the neighboring yard. The rifle came free in Jude's hand and only then did he realize how hot the barrel was, scalding his fingers.

Jude turned off the perimeter sensor, and suddenly there was only the sound of the fire and Oscar's sobbing mother.

The side of Eileen's white shift was soaked with blood, her skin grimed from the smoke. She whispered between coughs, “I tried to catch him … Oscar … but I couldn't see when—”

“Hush. Come on.”

Jude lifted her to her feet, wrapped her arm around his neck, and led her out from behind the couch. Greasy black clouds billowed around them as he guided her haltingly into the small garden, thick with the stench of cordite and burning kerosene. Both of them hacked, and Eileen's spittle came up dark. Consuela tried to comfort Oscar's mother, who gripped her son to her chest and rocked back and forth, mewling in grief. Axel stood dazed amid the others, unsure who needed comfort, who needed help.

Jude took a running start to scale the wall, the
veranera
thorns snagging his shirt and hands, but he got up and over in one quick move and landed in the neighboring yard, primed to take on the kid if he flashed a backup weapon. But the boy was down for good, one side of his face a gory mask, blood bubbling from his neck, the other side of his face frozen in a wide-eyed grimace. Jude patted him down, found a knife, took it away. He thought of Oscar and had to fight an impulse to shoot this kid dead, then elected to opt for triage, help the others first. By the time he got back, the thing would be decided.