Not bad, she thought. Not bad at all.
She sang, On the beach/And the meadow run, then she looked past him through the glass and saw Heriberto turn toward the door. She glanced back down at the notebook to make sure it was Follow a dream/Follow a dream and when she looked up again at Armenta he was smiling. She looked past him over his shoulder and through the glass to Heriberto, but he was gone.
In his place Bradley and Charlie Hood and two other men she did not know were moving fast and low behind the glass, bristling with weaponry and headed for the big wooden door that separated the rooms. She looked back to Armenta and held his gaze to show that nothing was wrong, and she was able to remember the next lines without looking down at the notepad. But her days of terror and anger rose up inside and her eyes filled with tears as she sang: And when you return/A man you will be.
And Armenta knew. He dropped his hand from the keyboard and reached behind his back, but the tooled leather straps of the accordion halted his motion. Whirling to face the men he reached for his armament belt hanging over the stool. Erin saw him raise a sleek pistol with each hand and they boomed at Bradley but he did not fall. Instead he rocked back, but his shiny little gun spat away almost silently and the accordion splintered and someone fired from behind the glass and the window shattered and dropped like a curtain. Armenta’s pistols roared away through the window and someone fell. He strode across the room to her and she could hear the bullets whacking into the accordion and see jagged pieces coming off him. When he reached her the shooting stopped and Armenta pulled her off the piano bench to the floor. He turned and lunged toward the window opening and climbed onto the sill to fire down on his tormentors but this only gave them a better target and Armenta dropped and staggered back as the ivory keys burst and the ruptured baffles sighed. He reeled against a tracking booth and the little silenced guns chattered at him and Armenta fell to his knees. One of his pistols dropped to the floor. He looked at it as if to gauge his strength against the distance and seemed to forget the gun in his other hand. He looked at Erin for a long moment, then pitched forward to the floor, draping over his instrument.
She stood and walked over to him but there was nothing to be said or done except to watch his blood run. Bradley ran to her and took her in his arms and she could sense the gun held firmly in his hand, but still she looked down at Armenta. She clamped on to Bradley with all of her strength and she felt the flood of hope-alien, forbidden, delicious hope-rushing through her.
Over Bradley’s shoulder she saw Hood and a bull-like man she didn’t know. The man shot down by Armenta climbed back into view, using the mixing board to pull himself up. He looked Arabic and he steadied himself as he looked at Armenta and felt at the two unbloodied rips in the chest of his shirt. Then the studio door swung open and Cleary and Caroline burst in.
“The Army is here,” said Cleary. “We might want to get out like right now.”
“I need Saturnino,” said the Arab.
“He’s at the bottom of a cenote,” said Erin. “I put him there.”
Bradley pulled her across the studio. In the hallway outside she stepped around Heriberto’s bullet-pocked body and followed Bradley toward the stairs. Through a tall window she could see the smoke rising from the distant guardhouse and the tanks and jeeps and trucks rolling into the parking area.
“There are innocent people here,” said Erin. “Atlas and Dulce. All the servants and the lepers. The novitiates.”
“I didn’t come this far to get you killed,” said Bradley.
“They’re innocent people!”
“We’ll get them out,” said Hood. “There’s time.”
“Dulce is on the third floor with the lepers,” said Erin. “We have to use the outside stairs.”
Erin shoved her way through the massive entryway doors while the monkeys and birds shrieked and scattered. Freedom! But as they ran into the courtyard the troops were already coming up the drive, heavily armed and armored, running past the sicarios killed by Bradley and Hood.
Up the road she saw the soldiers coming, some of them carrying olive green military gas containers and she could see that the containers were heavy. The soldiers trotted toward the courtyard. A phalanx broke off and ran in unison around the north side of the Castle while others waited at the foot of the outside stairway as the lepers in white silence ran down the steps and across the drive and scattered into the jungle. Dulce was with them. Erin saw Atlas and half a dozen gray-clad servants hustle into the foliage and disappear. Atlas looked at her. The flames from the burning guardhouse climbed above the tree line, and a small two-winged airplane flew just through the tops of them; Erin saw someone in the open cockpit aiming something down at the scene. More of Armenta’s bodyguards lay dead on the drive and they looked frail and very human to her as two jeeps maneuvered around them, soldiers training the big mounted guns on the front Castle door. Erin ducked onto the jungle path behind Bradley, turning once to look back at the flames from the guardhouse climbing the sky.
She held her husband’s hand and they soon fell behind the others. Charlie maintained his distance ahead, but Erin never lost sight of him. Before they’d gone far into the forest Erin brought Bradley to a stop and turned his bruised and battered face to hers and looked at him. He smiled largely and she saw the gap of the missing tooth and its sharply broken neighbor.
“It’s good to see you, Brad.”
“I love you so much. Sorry about my face.”
“Don’t worry, baby,” she said softly. “Don’t you worry. You’re going to heal up all pretty again.”
He touched her pale cheek with one dirty finger and placed his free hand on her stomach. “You are my whole life.”
“No, I am not. Your lies almost killed me. And you. And the baby.”
“I’ll do anything to make it right again.”
“It never was right.”
A short distance later they climbed a rise and stopped again. Erin turned and saw the Castle sitting in a red meadow of flames, gas-mad fire pouring from the windows and doors, climbing the walls and palms. The four novitiates and Edgar Ciel clambered across the courtyard toward a group of soldiers. Ciel towered above his charges, his arms draped around the two nearest ones as if for their protection. He appeared furious, thrusting his face into that of an officer, then waving his arms high, shouting orders drowned by the roar of the fire.
Erin watched two lions and two leopards break through a wall of flames on the lower level and run into the jungle. Then came the tigers. The black jaguar was last, sauntering up the drive, shoulders rolling and tail swinging as he entered the foliage where Erin had entered it. Sparks arced high into the thunderhead of black smoke that roiled up from the roof of el Castillo.
In a small camp pitched deep in the jungle Erin watched Fidel and his men remove cut branches from four filthy, bullet-pocked SUVs. She looked at the men and saw that they were nearly identical to the men who had kidnapped her and beaten Bradley and been left for dead back at the Castle. Narcos, pure and simple. Not the Mexican “counterparts” that Bradley had named them. Not his “law-enforcement friends.” Or maybe they were. She caught Hood looking at her and she guessed that he was thinking the same thing she was. Hood looked as vacant and betrayed as she felt. She looked away.
Everyone climbed into the SUVs and they drove twenty minutes farther down a dirt road, away from the Castle, toward where she thought the coast was. She heard the engine humming under her and the huffing of the air conditioner and she could not fully believe that she was leaving this place. The jungle scrolled past outside the dirty, chipped windows. She sat back with her hands over her stomach and for the first time in ten days didn’t care who saw her pregnant. And for the first time in ten days she let the tears roll down her face without a thought to hiding them or slapping herself silent. A sign said Bacalar.