The sergeant was courteous, but he requested that the family come with him and his officers to the local station, where they would await further instructions.
Ernesto thanked him for the offer of protection, but he did not instruct his family to go along with the municipales.
An extremely congenial standoff began to develop there on the hot street.
Gentry stepped into the crowd, anxious to get his entourage moving. Enough with this polite bullshit, he thought to himself. Though friendly and hardly threatening themselves, these cops, by delaying their escape from the Black Suits, were quickly becoming a threat to Court’s operation. He spoke Spanish. “Sergeant. You are asking them to stay. And they are telling you no. There is nothing left to discuss. Adios.” He looked to the family. “Everyone in the truck. We are leaving.”
The police sergeant said, “Señor, you are free to go. We were not told to keep you here, but the familia Gamboa needs to come with us to the station.” He turned back to Ernesto Gamboa. “We will protect you all there. Come this way.” The policeman smiled at them and motioned to the pickup, as if all seven of them should climb in the bed. This vehicle was barely half the size of Eddie’s big rig.
“Are they under arrest?” Court asked.
“Of course not. We would just like to watch over them for now.”
“They aren’t going anywhere, except with me. Now. Get out of the way.”
“Amigo, if you are interfering with police business, I can arrest you.”
“You can try.” Court stared the heavy man down, but the machismo of the officer was something that Gentry hadn’t considered. Court could stomp the out-of-shape middle-aged man into the dust without breaking a sweat, but this dude wasn’t going to back away from a physical confrontation.
The two men held hard eye contact. Martinez said, “Let me see your papers.”
Gentry did not blink. “I’m a little light on papers.”
“Passport? Entry card?”
Court just shook his head, his steely stare fixed. “Nada.”
“How did you get in the country?”
“I bribed one of your colleagues down in Chiapas into letting me come over the Guatemalan border. There seem to be a lot of dirty cops in Mexico.”
The sergeant’s mustache twitched with a facial tick, but the rest of his body stood as still as stone. The two men glared at each other for a long time. Court could almost see the wheels turning in this man’s head: How much trouble is this gringo going to make?
Ernesto stepped forward, broke the staring contest, defused the impending encounter. “Bueno, Sergeant, everything is fine. We accept your offer of protection. We will come with you.”
“Don’t get in that truck.” Court said it to Ernesto, but the old man and his compliant wife walked towards the police vehicle. Two local cops lowered the back gate and prepared to help the couple up into the rear. Court repeated himself to Elena as she passed him in the street. She looked nervous and confused but resigned to the fact they would not be rushing out of San Blas at the moment after all.
Laura passed him now. She spoke to Gentry softly. “These are our friends. They have nothing to do with the narcos.”
“But they can’t protect you. If the sicarios come, or if the federales want to take you away, they can’t stop them. If the state police or the army—”
Just then a rumble up the street turned everyone’s heads. Three olive drab pickup trucks turned off the road from the plaza and onto Canalizo, the Gamboas’ street. Standing in the beds and leaning on the cab’s roof in each vehicle were two Mexican Army soldiers with bulky green flak jackets and large black G3 rifles. Behind them in the truck beds were two more armed soldiers facing the rear, their weapons trained on the street. Counting the driver and a passenger in each cab, Court realized eighteen guns and gunners had just arrived on the scene.
“Or the army,” Court repeated, more to himself than to Laura.
His three.357 Magnum bullets seemed so much worse than nothing now.
The army vehicles pulled to a stop, and the soldiers climbed out and jumped off, began speaking with the six San Blas cops, who now seemed ridiculously unprepared to protect anyone, outfitted as they were with Billy clubs and baby blue polo shirts.
TWENTY-THREE
Five minutes later nothing had been settled — in fact, the situation had turned even more precarious. Another pickup full of local cops had arrived, so now eleven. San Blas municipales now lined up against eighteen National Defense Army soldiers. The police sergeant and an army lieutenant argued in the middle of the street, politely at first, but now the discussion had become heated.
Behind them a scuffle broke out between the two sides. A soldier had leaned against one of the municipales’ pickups, and a young cop had shoved him off of it. The lieutenant shouted at his men, and they raised their weapons on the police.
There was enough testosterone and machismo on the street to ignite a fight as big as what went down in Puerto Vallarta earlier in the day.
Ignacio Gamboa, Eddie’s brother, had been leaning against the wall of his brother’s house, taking advantage of the slight shade there. When the guns came up, the big man raised his hands in surrender. When no one else followed suit, he lowered them slowly.
Court discerned from the army lieutenant’s arguing that he had been ordered by his superiors at their base in Puerto Vallarta to take the Gamboas back down to PV. And the San Blas cops made it clear that they had been told by their superiors to keep the family here until the Jalisco state police could make it up the coast to pick them up and then return the Gamboas to the Puerto Vallarta police for questioning about the shoot-out at the Parque Hidalgo.
The Gamboa family did not want to go with either group. Court saw that Ernesto and his family found it suspicious that both organizations represented here in the street claimed to be doing the bidding for the same organization down in PV, but their orders were, essentially, in direct opposition to each other.
Yeah, thought Court, this is bullshit. At the very minimum one of the two groups here fighting for control of Eddie’s family was lying. It was not hard for him to imagine that both groups were working for narcos or the corrupt elements in their organizations, either directly or unwittingly. As the standoff turned personal between the two sides, as the intractable argument turned to threats and more shoving and angrier glares between the opposing forces, Gentry felt more and more certain this power struggle playing out in the dusty afternoon street had nothing to do with jurisdictional authority — it had to do with a bounty de la Rocha had placed on the Gamboas’ heads, and both groups, or at least their masters, were determined to earn it.
The Gamboas and Gentry stood in the street in front of the house. The pickup was packed up and ready to go in the drive; Court even considered briefly trying to load up the family while the argument continued and simply driving away, but when the soldiers formed into squads on either side of the road, he nixed the idea. No, they would just sit here and wait to see who would win this argument, who would win the prize of the familia Gamboa.