40

A seam of whitish haze rimmed the horizon as Malvasio pulled up to the little church, El Niño de Atoche, above the center of town. The four mareros waited beneath the spectral amate trees—Sleeper, Chucho, Magui, and Toto—all of them blistered from crank, but Malvasio had expected that. Despite his admonition, he’d figured they’d spend the night horning rails, pumping each other up with feverish talk or sitting off by themselves, blasting around inside their own skulls, rehearsing the killing ahead.

They scrambled into the van, Sleeper up front, the others hunched in back. No one spoke. Malvasio drove them to the isolated strip of country road sheltered by giant conacastes where another van sat waiting, this one white with black lettering across the side:

Pintor Contratista—Paintering

Joaquín Mojica

289-9674

Señor Mojica would report the van stolen this morning, but not before it could be put to use. Malvasio had seen to that. Everyone climbed out, and Sleeper strolled to the white van with a hammer and smashed the driver-side window to perfect the ruse. Working by flashlight, he swept away the shatters then pried at the ignition cap with a screwdriver while Malvasio introduced the others to their weapons, conducting his tutorial in the spray of his headlights, to make sure no one missed anything.

He showed them how to load the AR-15 magazines—they held twenty rounds but he told them to stop at nineteen, otherwise they tended to jam—showed them the safeties, and disabused them of the notion that the selector switches, suggesting triple-shot burst and fully automatic firing options, were functional. “But these will shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger,” he said, and let them all try their hand through a magazine to practice not just their aim but load and reload. Birds scattered from the tree branches with the gunfire. Sleeper, after hot-wiring the painter’s van and transferring to it the odds and ends they’d need—kerosene, rags, a sledge—came and joined the lesson in time for the last of the shooting. By now morning had seeped its whitish blue into the sky and everybody seemed happy, weapons in hand, the burnt, sulfurous tang of cordite in the air. They got three spare magazines per man and loaded them there, then picked up the spent cartridges in the dirt. Finally, the four mareros donned the white coveralls Malvasio had brought along and climbed into the idling painter’s van. Malvasio took out his cell phone, recalled from memory the number he needed, and thumbed it in while Sleeper turned the van around, came abreast, and stopped. Only he rode up front; the others sat hidden in back.

“The old man know we’re coming?” He meant Osorio, Consuela’s neighbor.

“I’m taking care of that now,” Malvasio said, putting the cell to his ear. “Don’t go in before seven. That’s almost too early as it is. But don’t wait longer than that, either.”

Osorio picked up before the second full ring. Old folks, they sleep like they’re afraid they won’t wake up, Malvasio thought, watching as the other vehicle, trailing dust, disappeared. He explained things to the old oreja, told him the van he’d said might be needed for surveillance was on the way. He was sorry he hadn’t been able to provide better forewarning but events had taken a sudden turn. Osorio hacked, sniffed, then said he’d be ready.

“Of course, this is all very sensitive,” Malvasio said. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. No one can know.”

“I did my part during the war,” Osorio snapped. Malvasio could picture him, wispy hair a mess, blinking without his bifocals, sitting straight as a flagpole in his underwear. “I’m not some little dog, yip yip yip.”

Malvasio stopped at a panaderÍa on his way back through town to buy coffee and pan dulce, then drove out to the old construction yard, letting himself in at the gate and pulling into the parking area beneath the sniper hide. From the glove compartment he first removed his Beretta 92, screwing on the silencer, tucking the weapon into his pants and covering the butt with his shirt, then he pulled out a pair of vinyl gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket. Finally, he collected the bag with breakfast inside and climbed up to join the Candyman.

“Hope you slept better than I did,” Strock said, his eyes rheumy and bloodshot. “I just kept thinking about all the ways this can go wrong.”

“Don’t talk like that, it’s a cinch. Listen.” Malvasio handed a coffee to Strock and a chunk of pan dulce, wrapped in wax paper. “Come seven o’clock they drive in. It’s a painter’s van. There’s four guys, they’ll be inside, one at the wheel, the others in back—zero in on the van’s back door. They’re gonna wait till the car shows up and Jude brings his guy out. Once everybody’s inside the car, the van moves to cut off the street and the three in the back tumble out. Plan is they take out the driver first then fire away at the car till Jude and his guy are dead too.” Malvasio peeled off the lid to his own coffee and sipped. “That’s how it’s supposed to happen, anyway. You take down the three spilling out the back as soon as you see them. All that’s left is the driver. Thing’s done before it even starts.”

“They’re gonna shoot the car—it’s not armored?”

“You’ve got Humvees and APCs tooling around without armor in Iraq—think anybody’s gonna pay the freight to plate up a Mercedes down here?”

Strock shook his head, tore off a chunk of pan dulce, and dunked it in his coffee. “The world is illusion.”

“To live is to suffer. Pass the pie.”

“What’s the backup plan? If I don’t get all four guys in time, what then?”

“There is no backup plan. You’re it, buddy.”

Strock grimaced, chewing, chasing his swallow with a sip of coffee. He thought for a moment, then said, “Not to sound like a broken record, but have you checked in at all with Clara and the little girl?”

Malvasio thought better of remarking on Strock’s odd obsession, remembering the tiff from the day before. “As a matter of fact, I did. Kid was hopping around like a monkey, Clara tickled to beat Jesus. We should all be so happy.”

“I dreamed about them last night,” Strock said.

My God, Malvasio thought. He checked his watch, five till seven. “I thought you said you had trouble sleeping.”

“I did. It wasn’t a fun night. Except this one dream, which was, I dunno, very vivid.” Strock rubbed at his flaming eyes. “Not that I can make sense of it. You know dreams. We were at the little house on the beach except it wasn’t that house, it was different, bigger. Not the one the hurricane ripped to shreds, either, but kinda like that, I suppose. Houses mean something in dreams, I heard that somewhere. Constancia was bigger, too, almost a teenager. She was like a little Clara, same face and body, different hair. Sorta blondish, like my girl. Anyway, they showed me a part of the house where the roof was gone, and we looked up at the sky and the clouds were amazing, so close you could touch them. Then Clara said—she spoke English, that’s another weird thing—she said the fish would be plentiful now. Something about the weather, I dunno, and then it was night and there was this moonlit river like a Hallmark card and another house and I can’t remember anything else. Except the way it felt. You said they were happy? My dream, it felt that way too.” He shrugged. “Bitch of a night, but I woke up happy.”

Malvasio resisted the impulse to glance at his watch again. “Anybody who says they can make sense of dreams is lying.”

“Yeah. But like I said, it was almost more a feeling than a dream.” Strock licked his fingers and turned to look out through the hole in the wall toward Villas de Miramonte. “Ah, Christ. Already?”

Malvasio crouched to look over Strock’s shoulder and saw the white van moving slowly up the cul-de-sac. It pulled in front of Osorio’s and parked.

Strock lay down, fit the weapon to his shoulder, and peered through the scope. The bag of kitty litter rested under his left arm like a pillow and it rustled as he settled in. “Not to quibble with your plan, but it’d be easier to take out the driver first, given how he’s parked. That way there’s no cutoff, the car gets away. I deal with the other three as they appear.”

Malvasio leaned closer, hovering over Strock’s back. “Yeah, but if the van doesn’t move into position, there’s no guarantee the other three come out.” He reached for the pistol in his waistband. When he had the weapon clear, he placed the silencer flush with the base of Strock’s skull and fired twice.

Strock’s head and shoulders slumped forward, his body went limp. As quick as that, Malvasio thought. Thing’s done before it even starts.

He shoved the gun back in his pants, pulled the gloves from his pocket, and tugged them on. Only got yourself to blame, Phil. Said it was your way or no way, you’d call it in if you didn’t like the smell of things. Well, I don’t like it any better than you, but who says we had a choice? If it means anything, of all the ways I saw this going down, I wanted this one least.

The day before, as he’d racked his brain trying to figure out how to do this, he’d realized that the gremlin in the machine was the timing of it. To make it all work, he would’ve had to devise a way for the little girl to show up as though he hadn’t known where she was all along. If he’d had a week or even a few days to mock up a search, pretend he’d hunted high and low—then bingo, looky here—he could’ve wrapped this up beautifully for all concerned. Well, Clara would’ve suffered. She’d bonded with the kid to the point it was almost eerie, but he could’ve found her an orphan. Hell, the judge’s finca was crawling with them. But such thoughts were fantasy. Time. There just hadn’t been time. In a moment of desperation, he’d considered simply ripping the kid from Clara’s arms, coming here to Villas de Miramonte, and dropping her like a foundling near the security gate. But he’d remembered that undertone in Hector’s voice, the suspicion lurking in the silences. The girl shows up that quick, he’d thought, no matter how or why, he’ll see through the ruse. No such thing as parting friends, not in that crowd. Not with what I know.

If time was the gremlin, though, Jude was its sidekick, him and the old man, Axel Stumblefog. All they had to do was admit the obvious, give up, go away. But no, they had to blunder into what they didn’t understand to accomplish the impossible. Like the upright Americans they were.

And that was the sum of it, he thought. Nothing else to say. You tried, they jinxed it, and there was no time to make it right.

He dragged Strock’s body away from the weapon and tucked it into the corner. Both rounds had exited through the mouth and blood drained out. The eyelids had slid down to half-mast and Malvasio closed them the rest of the way. Sleep now, he thought. Or head off to wherever it is restless, bitter drunk souls go. Back to Indiana, for all I know. Send me a postcard.

Using a T-shirt of Strock’s for a rag, he wiped away the blood on the rifle, making sure in particular the scope and trigger were clean. He searched Strock’s things, looking for surprises, found none. The cell phone’s outgoing calls were limited to his test of 9-1-1 two days earlier, the hopeless ass. The incoming numbers included Malvasio’s, and though he’d be ditching that particular phone soon, there was no point being sloppy.

Strock’s wallet contained a picture of the little girl, Chelsea. She was three maybe, but no telling how old the picture was. Straw-colored hair, milky skin, the kind of smile kids figure out early, playing the grown-ups. I’ll send her some money, he thought, and tucked the picture back where he’d found it.

He flipped the mattress to avoid lying in blood and found a shank lying there, made from a sharpened piece of wood, a rag for a handle. The crudeness of the thing only made it more startling as he realized, That was meant for me. He kept staring at it as though it might spring to life, tell him things. He thought: Phil, you sly, untrusting fuck. That’s how close we come sometimes. Shaking himself out of his daze, he settled in, lay prone, and arranged his business, nestling his elbow into the bag of kitty litter and fitting the rifle’s stock snug against his shoulder as he squinted through the scope. The front doorway of Consuela Rojas’s house sprang to life within the crosshairs. Two hundred thirty yards, the man had said. The scope was already zeroed in. Remember your cold shot’s gonna land high right a quarter of an inch.

Osorio ambled to the door, dressed in a clean white shirt, crisp slacks. The pain in his hands was bad today—they shook, and he’d nicked himself shaving. The bloody scrap of tissue still clung to his cheek. He opened the door, expecting to greet a man. What he found instead was a jumpy, bug-eyed clown in coveralls.

Sleeper forced his way in, pushed Osorio against the wall, a hand across the old man’s mouth as he stabbed his chest, over and over, a dozen times then a dozen more, his hand a blur as the blade punctured both lungs. No air, no screams. The bright white shirt was a tangle of blood by the time Sleeper was through. He pushed the old man aside and the wispy-haired fool dropped in a shudder to the floor. The look in his eyes, begging with fright, as a raspy wheeze rose faintly from his throat, the blood bubbling up. He was drowning in it.

Sleeper said, “Saludemos la Patria, jodido.” Hail the motherland, fucker. He wiped his blade on the old man’s pants.

Malvasio flipped open his cell. “Tell me.”

“One down,” Sleeper said. “How things look up there?”

Malvasio glanced over his shoulder at the body, remembering another time Strock had looked that serene, minus the blood. He’d been sleeping off a bender in the back of his squad car, parked behind the infamous Green Bunny on the south side, of all places. Malvasio had rousted him, tapping his nightstick against the window glass, thinking it was a miracle some burner hadn’t taken him out while he was lying there.

“We’re good,” he told Sleeper. “Ready when you are.”

Sipping coffee, Jude tugged the curtain aside to glance out the dining room window. A white van he hadn’t seen before sat parked in front of a house across the street, three doors down. There was lettering on the side panel, it belonged to a house painter. He called Consuela from the kitchen. “Remind me.” He pointed. “Who lives there?”

Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she smiled acidly. “Ah. Osorio. The old chambroso.” Gossip.

“I’d like his number if you have it.”

Consuela went to check while Jude dialed the number on the van. He reached an answering machine, the taped voice garbled but clearly a man’s, identifying himself as Joaquín Mojica. That checked. Jude left a message asking for a quick callback, he wanted to confirm a job on Senda Numero 6 in the Villas de Miramonte. Consuela returned with the phone book, pointing to the name and number for a Pedro Osorio. Jude dialed and the phone rang and rang, no answer. He hung up, checked the number, confirmed he’d gotten it right, and redialed. Same as before, no matter how long he let it ring.

“What’s the number of the security gate up front?”

Consuela looked at him as though that were the oddest question. “I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never—”

“It’s okay,” Jude said, cutting her short. Out the window he watched as the Mercedes appeared, turning the corner into the cul-de-sac. Jude had the number on speed dial and he thumbed the two-number code. Carlos picked up.

Malvasio drew a bead on the driver’s side of the tinted windshield as the Mercedes passed the van outside Osorio’s. Suddenly the car jerked to a stop, something was wrong and he knew he couldn’t wait. He squeezed the trigger, reminding himself, a quarter-inch high right. The weapon fired, its report muffled by the silencer—a tinny, grating, hollow sound—followed by the ping of the cartridge onto the floor. The recoil felt no worse than a nudge and he almost gave in to a fleeting urge to look up, but then remembered Strock’s words: Stay married to the weapon. Through the scope he watched the windshield shatter, a spiderweb pattern the size of a saucer. Not quite where I wanted, he thought. Calm down. He fired two more shots in quick succession, the windshield shattered further. The car began to drift backward.

As soon as he saw the windshield fissure, Jude pushed Consuela down and pulled the curtains. “Stay away from the windows!” He ran to the front door, checked the lock, and threw the chain—it wouldn’t keep out a rumor. To Consuela he said, “Go upstairs with Oscar and his mother. Put the vests on and lock the door.”

Axel scrambled down the stairs, stopping at the landing midway as Consuela climbed toward him. “Get the pistol I gave you,” Jude said, running to his duffel to dig out the extra clips he’d loaded, stuffing one in each pocket. He told Eileen, rushing in from the back garden, “Shut the screen door and latch it. Leave the glass door open, get the shotgun. Make sure it’s loaded.” He pitched a box of nine-shot to her. “Here’s backup.”

“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.

He hoisted himself onto the same table in the corner the kid had used as a firing stand and waved for everyone to come toward him. “We’ll get out this way,” he said, gesturing to the neighbor’s house. Consuela managed to get Oscar’s mother to her feet and lead her to the garden wall. With tortured eyes, she handed up her son’s body to Jude. It felt like nothing, the bones so slight, skin like paper, but blood came away on Jude’s hands as he set the boy down gently in the grass. He climbed back up onto the table, wiped his hands clean, then held them out and the woman grabbed on and climbed over, quickly scrambling down to pick up her son again and wrap him in her arms.

Next, Consuela and Axel helped Eileen. She couldn’t put weight on her left leg so they had to hoist her up to where Jude could wrap both arms around her. She bit down to fight the pain, puling in his ear as she kicked herself over with her one good leg. Jude eased her down slowly but her whole left side collapsed. Her eyes were dull, she was panting, her breath smelled like tin. They needed to get her to a hospital before she went into shock. Jude turned back to help Consuela then, and finally Axel.

Everyone eyed the wounded young gunman but no one approached. His stare seemed fixed on something else—far away or deep within, Jude didn’t know or much care. Axel, wearing a look of anguished desperation, trained his pistol on the boy and nodded that he had the situation under control as Jude drew his own gun and lifted it close to his chest in a ready position, venturing inside the strange house.

He’d seen only four men charge out of the van, but there could be others, maybe one of them hidden here, a trap. But when Jude got beyond the doorway, he found only the owners, an aging couple, the Chilean missionaries, crouched in terror behind an armchair in the corner of the living room, the man’s arms wrapped around his tiny wife. Jude asked if there was anyone else in the house and they said no, just the one who had run through to the garden. Still, Jude checked every room. Once he knew the place was clear, he went back out and collected everyone, telling them to move on inside. Everyone did except Oscar’s mother, who remained kneeling in the garden, clutching her dead son and staring at the young man, not much older than Oscar, who had killed him.

The old woman in the house saw Eileen’s blood and ran to her kitchen to fetch clean towels and soap. Her husband said he’d called emergencia—he’d been told the police were on their way, but that felt like ages ago. Jude looked at his watch, realizing only then that barely fifteen minutes had passed since he’d first looked out Consuela’s window and seen the strange van parked down the street.

The old man’s wife returned from the kitchen and, using sewing shears, cut away the bloody cotton of Eileen’s dress and underwear and gently washed the wound. Once the blood was wiped away, Jude could see the bullet, lodged within the puncture it had made in the muscle of her hip. Eileen shook and gritted her teeth, looking up at Jude. “It’s gonna be okay, I know it, I can feel it, it’s gonna be fine. You gotta help Oscar.”

The old woman glanced at Jude to suggest he leave Eileen alone for now, so she wouldn’t exhaust herself with further talk. Jude leaned down, squeezed Eileen’s hand, and kissed her hair, not knowing what to tell her, then went to the front door, pulled it open, and stepped outside.

His pistol still at the ready, he checked the street and found the shooter who’d hidden near the van lying where he’d fallen, dead. Nearby, another lay crushed in his own blood where the van had run over him, his back corkscrewed. Up the street, the large one lay facedown. That, plus the kid in the back garden, made four. Jude checked inside the van, ready to shoot, but found no one else. Then he remembered the van had been parked outside a house up the block, the old gossip’s place. Osorio. That’d bear checking.

He turned to head that way and found Axel wandering ahead of him, toward the black Mercedes.

Jude hurried to catch up, snagged Axel’s arm. “I need you to stay inside.”

Axel shook him off. “I have to see Carlos.”

Jude planted himself in Axel’s way. “It’s not safe out here, you’re not wearing a vest, I need—”

“I’m not much concerned about your needs, frankly.” Axel stared into Jude’s eyes with a vacant, hateful intensity. “Isn’t safe? Out here? Well, isn’t that refreshing? In contrast to all the perfectly secure and docile places I’ve been of late. Why, didn’t you know, just a few moments ago, I was sitting inside the home of a dear friend. We had a little fire going and—”

The bullet came silently and from nowhere and hit the side of Axel’s head near the ear, the impact creating a tiny halo of blood. His expression froze, the eyes suddenly glassy and wrong. He tottered. Then a second round hit him in the throat and he buckled into Jude’s arms.