The dance floor is still thronged and the traffic of couples to and from the second floor continues. Romero joins Chubasco’s table and says the storm is now officially a category one hurricane with winds of seventy-six miles an hour and expected to intensify.
Who cares? Puño says. This party’s stormproof.
Now the supervisor of the Finca’s telephone switchboard crew pushes through the crowd around the chief’s table. He leans down close to Chubasco and tells him of a call an operator received from one of the gate guards a few minutes ago to report that the two Sangrero gunrunners had driven up to the gate and demanded to be let out, and when a guard refused because they didn’t have a pass, one of them began to assault him. The operator then heard a gunshot and the guard on the phone went silent. The operator kept asking what was happening, but the guard made no reply and then the connection was broken. The operator tried a backup connection to another phone in the shack and it rang and rang, but there was no answer. He then told the supervisor about the call and the supervisor sent a runner to the gate. The runner called from the shack’s backup phone to report the gate was wide open and both guards dead.
Fucking whoresons! Chubasco howls, lunging to his feet. He tells Puño to dispatch replacement guards to the front gate and have pursuit crews with satellite phones ready to go right now. He directs Romero to the range room to fetch a pair of MP5s, two strap bags of extra magazines, and a set of earplugs. He tells someone else to bring him a waterproof jacket. Within minutes a pursuit party of three big-cab pickup trucks—three men in each cab, rack lights on each roof—roars out the front gate and past the replacement guards. The dead guards will be kept in the kitchen’s meat locker until the weather permits their burial in the graveyard behind the compound.
Cuervo—a crow-voiced little man and the Sinas’ best driver—is at the wheel of the lead vehicle and increasing its distance ahead of the other two trucks. He knows every foot of this trail, every bend and rise and rut and shoulder from one end to the other, and he guides the Ford F-150 through the curves like it’s on rails. Chubasco sits beside him, an MP5 propped against his leg, an ammo bag strapped across his chest. Puño’s in the rear, armed and equipped the same way
Via sat phone, Chubasco has contacted the Sina subchief in Loreto and told him to post a crew of gunmen at a point a little north of the Finca trail’s junction with the San Javier Road. The first vehicle to emerge on that trail will be their target, and because there’s nothing to the south except wilderness, it is almost certain to turn north on the road to town. If it should turn south, the ambushers are to notify him and go after it. In either case, they’re to disable it any way they can without killing the two men in it. If they abandon the vehicle and try to escape on foot, shoot them in the legs but don’t let them bleed out.
I don’t understand why they had to try to sneak away, Chubasco says to Puño. Why not just tell me they wanted to go back to town? Thanks for the offer of a bed but we gotta get back because blah-blah whatever. I have you call the gate and out they go. But no, they gotta sneak off like thieves. Were they stealing something? Afraid they might get searched and caught?
Puño shrugs. Stealing what? he says. They had no access to cash, to jewelry. There aren’t any drugs there. What could they steal that’s worth killing two of our guys and the punishment they’ll get for that?
Chubasco sighs. So why’d they run?
The phone trills. Puño answers, Yeah? He listens, then says, All right. Let me know if she turns up.
He cuts off the call and says, That was Romero. Said Griselda told him they left the Lupita girl tied up in a stairwell. The other girl who went upstairs with them, Gatita, she can’t be found. She’s not at the party, not at the dorm, not anywhere on the compound. Looks like they took her.
Gatita? Why take her?
A hostage to get past the guards? Open the gate or we’ll kill her.
No, Chubasco says. Open the gate or we’ll kill you is what they’d tell the guards. Hell, it’s what they did. Christ, who are these guys? I hope to hell the fools don’t kill themselves on this road before we catch them.
They go through a sharp curve that ends in a long, slow-winding series of descending curves and Cuervo cries, There!
Far ahead and through the glitter of the rain, the dark form of the Sangrero vehicle is visible against the forward cast of its headlights.
Busted their taillights like it was gonna make them invisible, the dumb shits, Cuervo says.
The Sangreros disappear into a sharper curve.