Chapter Twenty-Six
One, Two, Five!
As they ran, they shot anyone they saw. A simple system that only required seeing the other guys first. They picked off men from doors, corners, and rooftops. But El was extremely uneasy to be running in when they should have been running out.
Still, the number of guards they encountered dwindled. Perhaps they were all defending the walls.
There were no guards on Lorenzo's room, nor was the door locked. No Maria. Lorenzo gave El a panicked look.
"Lorenzo, she's with them," El said. "They won't hurt her."
"Bullshit," said Lorenzo.
El hadn't had time to explain it to him. And he didn't have time now. Lorenzo might not even care.
"We'll never find her. We've got to get out of here."
"Maria!" Lorenzo yelled.
A door across the courtyard opened, but since the man who appeared wasn't Maria, Lorenzo shot him, still with a brooding expression on his face.
The sound of the helicopter neared, and their courtyard was brightly lit.
"Lorrie, maybe we'll come across her," El said, eyeing the sky.
"All right," Lorenzo gave in. "Which way?"
El decided against the front gate, after all. He imagined a pitched firefight happening there.
"The back. We'll go over the wall."
The helicopter moved into view and hovered at barely roof height. A shooter appeared in an open door of the chopper and a red laser sight appeared on El's jacket.
As El tensed to dive away, Lorenzo tackled him with explosive force, throwing them both well away from the shot. El hit concrete, painfully. The rifle shot threw concrete chips high in the air.
"Hey!" yelled Lorenzo, and, with that casual manner he had of shooting, he raised his gun and shot the man in the helicopter in the head. Lorenzo had hardly even looked.
They both scrambled to their feet as the chopper pilot gave the engine more power and lifted higher. "This way," El gasped, hauling Lorenzo with him.
As they ran through the lighted corridors, El noticed that at every running step he took puffy white clouds spilled out of his boots. Good. That should help deal with the dogs. El didn't want to shoot dogs. As for the other security measures Sands had described - motion detectors and trip wires - they would be rigged to sound alarms. No one would notice another alarm in the din. That left a high wall and razor wire. Shouldn't be too hard.
El thought of Sands, and genuinely wished for a moment that there'd been a way to get him out, too. Not that he would have come.
They found a service corridor that led them into the industrial equipment for the compound. Generators hummed loudly, and a strong smell of septic treated waste permeated this back side of the estate. There were also large propane tanks. Beyond these things was darkness. The wall had to be out there somewhere, but El couldn't see it.
Then he could see the wall. As they crested the slight rise above the utility area, they must have tripped something, for spotlights on the wall burned into life and lit the entire area.
"There they are," called a woman's voice. "That's them!"
Still somewhat blinded by the light, El instinctively dropped to the ground.
"You bastards!" screamed the voice of Julio Delgado. "You killed my brother!"
"Maria?" called Lorenzo.
"Get down!" El said, pulling the younger man down as machine gun fire whistled over their heads.
El pulled his own automatic into position as his eyes adjusted. Below and behind them, back at the area with all the industrial machinery, he saw Delgado, his silk suit crimson with blood, firing into their hillside. With him were Maria, Tomas the torturer, Vasquez, and Sands. They all stood in front of a small utility building, all but Sands blinking up at them. Neither Sands nor Maria appeared to be prisoners, though Tomas stood near to Sands, and, by his body language, El guessed he was the agent's current watchdog.
His clip exhausted, Delgado ranted on, fumbling for a second clip. "And Pablo! You motherfuckers!"
El opened fire with his own automatic, though he didn't accomplish much before Lorenzo landed on him and pushed his gun off-line.
"You'll hit Maria!" Lorenzo hissed.
El fought his friend for control of the gun. "She's with them, Lorrie. You saw!"
"I don't care! You can't shoot her!"
El wrested the gun from Lorenzo's grip, and looked down the hill. Vasquez, he saw with satisfaction, lay dead on the ground. The others, though, had scampered inside the brick utility building, and were now completely under cover. El cursed. He could have had Delgado.
He scrambled to his feet and so did Lorenzo. The bright lights showed Lorenzo's stricken expression as he gazed at where his sister had been. Another day El might feel sorry for him, but right now he was only irritated.
"Let's get to the wall," El said.
"Mariachis!" came Delgado's booming voice.
Both men crouched, as much out of view as they could manage, guns ready.
There was movement at the open-corner corridor which served as a door to the building, like the labyrinthine walls leading into public restrooms. El held his fire when he saw it was Maria.
She was held around the chest by Agent Sands, whose other hand had a gun to her head. Both El and Lorenzo tensed.
"Romero!" called Delgado. "I will count to five. Come out in the open with your hands in the air or she dies. One."
"Lorenzo, no," said El. "He only wants you dead, now, for revenge. You're of no use to him."
"I can't watch him kill her," Lorenzo cried. "Even if we could hit Sands, Delgado can just shoot her from inside."
"You know my good little agent will do it, Romero!" Delgado called. "Two. Both of you. Hands in the air!"
Once before El had allowed himself to be taken because of this girl and his own love for her brother. He had been surprised, then, to be left alive. He had no illusions that it would happen again.
"Lorrie, I'm not going, so she's dead anyway. Don't throw your own life away, my friend."
Lorenzo's brown eyes glittered with tears. He raised his arm and pointed his gun at El's chest.
"You are going," he choked. "I'm sorry."
"Three," called Delgado.
El and Lorenzo stared at each other, El in shock, and a gunshot went off. They both looked down the hill.
Agent Sands, smoke trailing from his gun, stood over Maria's body, head down as if he could look at her.
"Idiot!" screamed Delgado.
"Oops," Sands shrugged. "Most people only go to three."