“¡Está muerto! ¡Santa Madre de Dios, está muerto!”He’s dead! Holy Mother of God, he’s dead!One of the young women turned toward the door, clearly planning to run for help. She saw Zach—and froze.
Zach spoke quietly but with enough menace to make sure the women knew he meant business. “Si quieres vivir, véte con tu amiga al coche y acuéstense.”If you want to live, you and your friend go get in the car and lie down.
Brown eyes that had already seen too much went wide, and without another word the girl took her friend’s hand and dragged her to the car, an ugly brown Nissan Tsuru, then opened the back door, pushed her inside, and piled in behind her, their two heads disappearing from view just as heavy footfalls sounded from inside the church—another pair of boots.
Zach whispered over his shoulder to Natalie. “Get down!”
She crouched behind him.
“¡Putas estupidas! ¿Qué problemas les están causando ahora?” Stupid whores! What trouble are you causing now?
Zach recognized the voice as belonging to one of the Zetas who’d kidnapped Natalie. The bastard stepped out through the open door—an older man with a tattoo of La Santa Muerte on his forearm—and Zach dropped him with a single shot.
A gasp from Natalie. Muffled screams from the prostitutes. Men’s shouts.
And then all was silent.
The Zetas knew they’d been taken by surprise, and they were regrouping.
Zach tried to put himself in their place, tried to see the situation from their point of view. They knew they were under attack, but they didn’t know by whom. They would probably assume their attackers were members of a rival cartel, and they would call for support. Then, when they realized there were only three of them left alive, they would take up defensive positions and wait for the fight to come to them.
Zach would hate to disappoint them.
Hoping adrenaline would keep him upright, he motioned to Natalie to get to her feet, then led her through the open doorway behind him, stopping just inside the threshold to clear the foyer and let his eyes adjust to the dim interior.
He took it all in at a glance.
It was a small mission church, the interior divided by fat stone pillars that rose from floor to roof. To his left, a crumbling flight of stairs led upward toward the bell tower. Directly ahead where there should have been pews sat a dozen unmade cots, posters of naked women in pornographic poses stuck to pitted walls, makeshift shelves holding magazines and clothes, weapons lying carelessly about.
What had once been the altar was now a shrine to outlaw narco-saints Jesús Malverde and La Santa Muerte, a portrait of Cárdenas hanging on the wall above it as if he were Christ himself. Off to the right, the baptismal nook appeared to have been converted into a junk heap. The sacristy stood to the left of the Malverde/Muerte shrine, its door half-open.
That was their little torture chamber. And that’s where they were hiding.
Or maybe not.
From somewhere nearby he heard the telltaleka-chunkof someone working the bolt on an AK-47, slipping a new magazine into place.
Zach shoved Natalie behind a pillar, shielding her with his body as the first volley exploded, sending up a spray of stone around them.
Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat!
He watched the bullets hit, trying to discern their attacker’s location.
At least four meters away and to the right.
He leaned down, whispered. “Stay here. Stay down.”
He turned his back to Natalie, dropped to one knee, pivoted to his right, and looked around the pillar, catching a glimpse of an AK muzzle and the top of a man’s head peeking up from behind a cot. He fired, aiming low, knowing the 9mm rounds would penetrate the mattress.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
A man in BDUs and a white T-shirt rose clumsily to his feet, aiming his weapon unsteadily at Zach, blood spreading down the front of his shirt. Then he pitched forward and lay still, AK at his side.
Four down, two to go.
Zach’s hands itched to get ahold of that weapon, but he couldn’t cross the room to retrieve it without exposing himself to fire from that back room, and he didn’t want to leave Natalie alone or—
A shadow fell across the floor, framed by the doorway.