I slapped LQ on the shoulder and said, “Do it.”
He stood up and leaned around the door and fired a long sweeping burst of the BAR, the rifle pumping out rounds in bam-bam-bam fashion, flaring bright and cracking loud. I’d never heard one before and it was pretty impressive.
Brando and I ran up the driveway. It was wide and cobbled and flanked on either side by torchlights and low hedges, stone benches, various statues. The diagram hadn’t mentioned all the trees on the place. The courtyard was straight ahead, a circular stone fountain in the middle of it with some kind of sculpture spouting water in the center of the pool. The house just beyond it was blazing with light. From the shadowy area off to our right voices shouted, “Por allá! Allá están! Por allá!”
I ran in a crouch as gunshots cracked. A bullet struck a statue close to my head and stone fragments pecked my cheek. Rounds hummed through the hedges. Then LQ’s BAR was hammering again and there was screaming and it sounded like LQ shot up an entire magazine before he stopped firing. There were anguished cries, shriekings for help.
The courtyard hedge was higher than the one along the driveway and as I ran around the fountain a man came rushing out of a hedge pathway with a pistol in his hand and seemed astonished to see me. I blasted him in the chest with the ten-gauge and he flew backward into the hedge and hung there in a bloody tangle.
“Right side!” Brando yelled, and I turned and saw two more with rifles coming out of the other hedge. Brando’s shotgun took half the head off one of them. The other fired at me from the hip and I heard the bullet pass me. I gave him a load in the belly and he bounced off the base of a horse statue and left a red mess on the stone.
The BAR was rapping again and there was more screaming—and then Brando cried out. I turned and saw him on the ground, clutching his side and cussing a blue streak.
Two guys came out of the hedge on the other side of the fountain and I fired at them and one spun around and went down and the other ducked behind the fountain. Brando sat up and pulled his revolver and the guy never knew Ray was there until he peeked around that side of the fountain and his hair jumped when Brando shot him in the head.
“Go on, go on!” Brando yelled.
I started for the house and spotted a man looking down from the balcony—a guy with long white hair and a black eyepatch. I raised the shotgun and he darted away just as I blew fragments off the stone rail where he’d been standing. I thought I heard a woman scream up there. Daniela.
The shotgun lever seized and I flung the weapon away and drew the Mexican Colt and ran up the front steps. A man in an apron and gripping a meat cleaver came at me from a side door—brave but stupid. I shot him and he fell down, blood spurting from his neck. I ran into the main parlor and damn near shot a pair of terrified maids hugging tight to each other.
I raced up the wide stairway, taking the steps two at a time, but as I reached the middle landing a large man suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs and shot at me and my right foot kicked out from under me and I fell sideways on the steps. His next bullet gouged a hole in the carpet under my nose. Then we fired at the same time and my cheek burned and he flinched and his gun hand drooped. He started to raise the revolver again and I shot him in the chest and he discharged a round into the wall and dropped the gun and came tumbling down the steps to the landing and lay on his back without moving.
I sat up and checked my foot and saw that the heel of my boot had been shot off. I raised my other foot and whacked the heel with the Colt barrel a half-dozen times before it broke off. I wiped blood from my right cheek, then stood up and looked down at the guy and saw that he was still alive and staring at me. He had a pencil mustache and a bandaged ear.
“Te doy un recuerdo de Felipe Rocha,” I said. He opened his mouth to speak but never got it out before I shot him in the eye.
I reloaded the Colt and went on up to the top landing, moving warily now. I heard the BAR again—and then froze at the sound of a submachine gun, firing rounds faster than LQ’s Browning ever could. It was a long burst.
A tommy gun. Jesus.
The tommy and the Browning fired at the same time, long bursts…and then nothing. I stood waiting, and there came a few pistolshots, and then no more gunfire. Nothing but the muted crying and wailing of wounded men and terrified women.
But Daniela was somewhere up here—and the thing to do right now was find her.
The first room I tried was an empty bedroom. In the next one a young maid was huddled in a corner and crying.
“Donde está Daniela Zarate?”
Gone, she said. The patrón took her—just a few minutes ago. There was a private stairway in his chambers.
I grabbed her and shoved her into the hall and told her to show me the way to Calveras’ room. She looked down the hall and her eyes went large and I stepped out into the hall and pointed the Colt at a guy dressed like some dandy from another age. He wore a sharp little beard in the old gachupín style and his hair was tied back in a ponytail. He’d been about to descend the staircase but now put his hands up slightly and said he wished me no harm and was surrendering without conditions. He lowered his hands to his side and turned the palms outward in a show of capitulation and asked how he could be of service. I asked where the patrón’s chambers were. He pointed past me and even as I turned to look I sensed my mistake and I whirled back around to see him raising a pocket revolver and we both fired. I hit him in the heart and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
I felt a burning in the muscle between my neck and shoulder and found that he’d nicked me through it. It burned but the blood flow wasn’t too bad. I stuffed a handkerchief against it up under my shirt and coat. The maid was pressed back against the wall with her hands at her mouth.
“Enséñame la escalera,” I said, and she led me to the patrón’s chambers and showed me the secret stairway. It was a narrow winding thing, tight as a corkscrew. I followed it down to a little door that opened into a patio at the rear corner of the house, next to a narrow driveway that curved around from the courtyard.
There was only one way out of the compound—so if LQ was still holding the gate, Calveras was still inside the walls. I hustled back around to the driveway in front of the house, the Colt in my hand. The wailing was louder out here. LQ had done plenty of damage with the Browning. A group of house servants caught sight of me and ran back into the casa grande. The courtyard was deserted, the bodies already removed except for the dead guy in the hedge. Brando was gone too, but the torchlight was sufficient to show the dark bloodstains where he’d fallen.
As I hurried down the drive, others saw me coming and fled into the darkness to either side of the hedges. They did the smart thing. I was ready to shoot anybody who even looked at me wrong. The moaning and crying was scattered in the darkness to my left, but much of it was concentrated over where a cast of light showed above the trees. According to the hacienda map the bunkhouse was over there, and I supposed that was where the wounded had been taken, the dead too, probably. I wondered if Brando was among them—and figured I’d know soon enough.
I could see the gate up ahead. Somebody was sitting there with his back against the open door. If it wasn’t LQ I hoped it was somebody dead or too shot-up to shoot me.
The west side of the compound, where the worker quarters were, was all dark. As soon as the shooting started, the peons had probably shut their doors and blown out their lamps. They didn’t need to know what was going on to know it was no business of theirs.
The torchlights were bright on me, but even as I got closer to the gate I still couldn’t make out who was sitting there in the shadows. And now I noticed that the open gate-door was slightly askew, its lower hinge twisted almost free of the wall. Then LQ’s voice said, “Who goes there, friend or foe?”—and he chuckled.