When the gunshots had stopped, more immigrants came outside. The ones who were curious and bold enough to follow trouble.
Shotgun was too big to come up the stairs. But we couldn’t separate. He maneuvered and squeezed, came up the twisty metal stairs anyway. The Latin people were short and sturdy, with the builds of laborers, tango dancers, and
fútbol
players. Some of the women were barely four feet tall. Not many of the locals reached six feet. None were as large as Shotgun.
The stairs were made for them, not for my friend.
But the giant kept coming, the stairs whining and vibrating under his weight, my weight adding to the stress, shaking the building like an intruder on a spiderweb.
It felt like the stairs were straining to stay connected to the building.
A chilling breeze rushed by my face and I smelled kerosene.
I made it to the door with the Daffy Duck poster on its front, then stepped to the side. Rusted security bars covered the windows. They had fired down on us from that window a few minutes ago. Now they had barricaded themselves inside. I leaned, frowned past the rusted bars, and spied through a window so dirty it was almost opaque.
What I saw beyond the puke green brick walls and clutter told me what I had suspected. It was a small kitchen used as a home-based cocaine den. A family business where the woman of the house cooked up the drugs while the guards stayed on lookout. The smell of kerosene and other chemicals was strong. That section of the building was as explosive as a meth lab.
As soon as I peeped, screams came from inside. At least two men and a woman.
There was also a small Peruvian boy who wore blue-and-yellow Boca Juniors soccer gear and held a goddamn AK-47, a weapon he aimed at the window, threatening to shoot if we didn’t get away. The weapon he had was older. Looked like a SAR-1, a Romanian AK-47.
In broken English, the kid scowled and yelled, “
Say hello to my little friend
.”
Then the pint-sized kid pulled the trigger and sprayed, sent bullets and broken glass flying in our direction. We had both jumped back, the brick walls inside the house making the shots ricochet. The woman and the man screamed for the kid to stop, and the shooting stopped as fast as it had started.
I took my gun, raised up, and aimed inside those cramped quarters, everything at point-blank range. The man ran toward the window, a long-bladed knife raised high, ready to chop my hand off. I pulled off two shots, both below the waist. The first shot caught his thigh. The second shot opened up his kneecap.
He went down, his momentum taking him into the broken window, glass stabbing his face. He collapsed, screaming that he’d never be able to play
fútbol
again.
I trained my weapon on the woman. Had no choice.
She was armed. No more than four foot two and holding a revolver half her height.
I fired once, hit the back wall near her.
The woman dropped her gun and ran back into a corner, hands over her head.
She unleashed a scream that must have sent a chill through every beating heart in the
villa
.
A fire erupted in the kitchen area. A fire that would kiss chemicals and cause an explosion. I yelled for her to stop the fire. Yelled for her to stop the fire now.
The downed man yelled for his son to shoot me.
My eyes went to the boy with the AK. The boy who thought he was Al Pacino in
Scarface
. His ancient weapon had jammed. The kid had no idea what to do now.
His eyes met mine.
He saw anger. Now he was afraid. But he refused to let that terrified expression stick to his skin. An older man was on a cell phone, in a corner, screaming that they were under attack by two Americans. Americans who had gunned down six guards like they were nothing.
They weren’t calling the Argentine police. Or the Buenos Aires fire department.
They were calling The Beast. They were calling The Four Horsemen.
That meant they weren’t here.
I had to get inside. I rammed the door a couple of times. It had been barricaded. I clenched my teeth, summoned all my strength, and yanked on the security bars covering the window. They gave a little. I yanked again. Again. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
Shotgun said, “Let me have a go at it.”
We changed positions.
Shotgun yanked the bars, almost pulled the wall off the building.
Down below, I saw more men running our way with guns.
I let off a few rounds and they stopped where they were.
The wind and rain made them all hard targets to hit.
I let off a few more rounds, sprayed left to right, and they ran back into the shadows.
Shotgun grunted, yanked on the bars twice.
I grabbed a clip out of my back pocket and reloaded, trained my gun on the roofs, fired twice when I thought I saw movement, then repositioned and aimed at the ground.
Shotgun grunted and yanked again. Sounded like he had ripped the side off the building.
The metal bars came out of the concrete walls into his rough, blue-collar hands.
He threw the bars and at least forty pounds of attached concrete over the railing, threw it into the rain and let it all crash on top of the dead men we had left down below.
I was inside that window before the last of the debris rained to the ground.
I picked up the knife the wounded man had tried to attack me with, then snatched the jammed AK from the hooligan kid, threw both weapons behind me, back near the window. Then I kicked behind me the revolver the woman had held, added that to the pile and trained my gun on the man who was the head of the household.
The kid came at me. A kid who knew an adult would never hit a kid.
He was wrong.
My punch put him on his ass with his face bloodied, narrow nose probably broken.
The diminutive mother screamed and ran to her injured son, wiped his bloodied face like he was five years old. She yelled and pointed, told the man to give them what we wanted.
The sound of rain rat-tat-tatting against tin was unnerving, each tap like a gunshot.
The man went to the brick wall, took down a worn poster of Che Guevara.
Behind the poster was a wall safe big enough to be inside a bank. He opened the safe and moved drugs to the sides. Then he pulled out a black briefcase that was identical to the one Arizona had kept at her side, the one I had seen at her feet at the Starbucks in Aventura. Where all of this began. The sensor told me that I had what we had come for.
What many had died for.
The drug makers had sat on more money than they could ever fathom and had no idea.
He told me I wouldn’t get away.
I said I know. Told him I knew The Four Horsemen were on the way.
But we would be gone.
And to give my regards to the one they called Medianoche.
The man shook his head no, and snapped,
“No van a venir. Ellos están aquí
.
”
He frowned, told me that they weren’t coming.
They were here.
He had called The Beast as soon as he heard the gunshots.
The Four Horsemen were here and I would regret this moment.
I yelled out my panic, told Shotgun to start making his way down the stairs, told him to move as fast as he could because it was about to get ugly. Real ugly. I kept my eyes on the people in front of me while I picked up their weapons, threw them out the window, let them fall down into the mud. I made them all get down on the floor with their backs to me and their faces turned away. Otherwise I’d get shot or stabbed in the back as I tried to escape. Had to keep my eyes on them as I crawled out the window. On the one-foot-wide landing, the stairway wobbling underneath me, I saw that Shotgun had made it halfway down.
I didn’t move. My weight and his weight might rip the stairs from the wall.
Had to wait for him to clear the winding and weakened stairs.
Heart racing, briefcase in hand, I listened. The rain. The storm.
Somewhere behind those clamors were the echoes of hooves.
Not horses, but frantic Horsemen charging through the slums, racing this way.
My breathing shortened from taking in so much damp and cold air. My heartbeat was fast. I looked out over the disarrayed shantytown, the beauty of the richest area in South America glittering in the distance. We had to get through the rain and mud to those bright lights.
The muzzle flashes came first.
The flashes were the harbingers of hard bullets in search of soft targets.
My feet struggled to move as fast as my racing heart.
Then came the explosions.
One hit the side of the building and shook me hard.
The stairwell started to give, fasteners popping out as metal whined, as the winding stairs came loose. It came detached from the fucking wall as gunshots peppered the building.
The world around me exploded and I fell like I was being thrown out of an airplane.
Chapter 41
battleground
Muzzle flashes.
Bullets. Explosions.
Surrounded by a promised death, I hit the ground hard, the wind knocked out of my body, tangled up in the stairway, a prisoner struggling to breathe in air so thick it felt poisonous.
Shotgun held his ground and fired back, his shots fast and nonstop.
Shotgun yelled, “You hurt?”
I wiped mud from my face and mouth. “Don’t think so.”
“They’re crazy, blowing up everything in their way.”
“Yeah. They’re crazy.”
“Well, guess I’ll have to get crazy too.”
Shotgun had changed weapons. He had an M16. He let out a magazine and a half of rounds, shot like he was John Rambo. His shots were swift but controlled. He tried to make every round count, and he tried to throw more shots at them than they threw at us. It was like two fighters in the ring trying to outpunch each other, only these punches were deadly.
I wrestled my way out of the debris of the metal stairway; had landed in a sewage-tainted area littered with dead bodies, mud, and a dislocated window. The package was near me. Before I could pull it from the mud, the boy and his father had raced to their destroyed window.
The people who had stepped outside to watch ran away, fled through the muddy streets. Some ducked down narrow passageways while others hid in crevices.
Hundreds of innocent people, mothers with babies, fathers and their children, they all ran.
And we saw at least two shadows running up the center of the muddy road.
I saw two, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t more.
They brought their assault toward us, the weapons in their hands unmistakable.
The mud that slowed our retreat did them no special favors.
We fired shots that slowed their ravenous charge, like rapacious wolves hunting prey.
Then we did what the smartest men in the world would do.
We dumped most of our gear, lightened our load by one duffel bag. Couldn’t chance dumping it all, no matter how much our gear weighed. Shotgun kept one of the duffels, hiked the strap over his left shoulder, kept a weapon in his right hand, and ran hard.
We slipped and slid for a moment. The mud-covered ground didn’t let our pace match the energy we expended. We found our feet and ran hard but couldn’t run fast.
Mud added what felt like fifty pounds to my pants.
I led the retreat, fearful, cold, and shirtless, muddied briefcase in one hand, a dirty gun in my waistband, another muddied gun in my hand. We bolted through acres of vertical, disorganized clusters of warped shacks and abandoned buildings, scrap-wood walls held up by cardboard, tattered bedsheets used as curtains.
Behind us was an explosion. Sounded like the bang from an M79 grenade. Wasn’t sure.
What I knew was that the drug den we’d just left was going up in flames.
I heard that boy, his father, and his mother screaming that they were on fire.
They had no stairs to exit. They were trapped.
There was a second direct hit, definitely not an accident.
The Horsemen had rewarded them, the price of failure.
We fled into a decrepit section that ran between wrecked buildings, escaped the direct line of fire, cut through another section that was nothing more than a primitive congregation of shacks. We ran by people who looked like they were dying. Some had roofs that had leaks that let rivers run through their dwellings. Some had no roofs at all. The storm was killing them. They weren’t on raised ground, and sewage had flooded their tents. They stood outside, huddled around their belongings, drowning on dry land. We ran past them.
The Four Horsemen had a sensor to the package in my hand. It would lead them to wherever we ran. We’d become mice in a maze of cockroaches and rats.
We came out on another muddy road and we slid, battled the terrain.
A flare went up into the night, vandalized the darkness we needed.
And showed our enemy was behind us.
We were sprayed with automatic weapon fire, bullets hitting concrete and tin, ricocheting and pinging, every shot trying to find its mark. We battled rain, mud, and gunfire. Then my heart triple-timed when I heard Shotgun let out a sound of deep agony. He went down but never let go of his weapon, kept shooting as he tried to scoot across mud and get to safety. I fired away to protect Shotgun. Fired until my clip was empty, reloaded, fired again, shots going off as a barrage of bullets kept coming at us as fast as the raindrops.
By then, Shotgun was back on his feet, blasting away, giving as good as we were getting.
The flare faded, and darkness returned.
Then everything around us started exploding.
The explosion was sudden and deafening, made my body tense while my heart galloped and my ears rang like church bells, its power stealing most of my senses.