Without Warning (54 page)

“Listen,” said Moorhouse, stepping forward. He was a short man with all of the attendant psychological problems. Jules estimated that standing face-to-face with his girlfriend, he’d be smothered by her breast implants. His features were flushed, and he was sweating profusely. “We have had a very stressful morning here. Those people began arriving before dawn. The hotel has been locked down for hours by security men. We were stuck in our rooms, no air-conditioning, no cable, no idea what was happening. If it took a couple of trinkets and baubles to get that Colombian thug to run interference for us, that was well worth it. Now I suggest you start earning your money and get us the hell out of Acapulco.”

Tempted to pistol-whip him, Jules merely nodded, silently.

“Right then. Miguel? Can I talk to you? Privately. For two minutes. Do we have two minutes?”

The background roar was building, but not in a way that made her think a boilover was imminent. The vaquero patted his wife on the shoulder and gently rubbed the head of his youngest child, a little boy who was crying silently. He bent down to whisper a few words in his ear before kissing his forehead. With the child settled, for the moment, the two of them walked off to the other side of the terrace.

“This conga line of relatives and … whatever. Have you planned on provisions and stores for them? Because I haven’t. We had an agreement. Your wife and children. I don’t recall agreeing to take all of the supporting cast from
The Three Amigos.
“

Pieraro looked physically pained. His next words came out like teeth extracted one after the other.

“If you cannot take them, you cannot. I will explain.”

The man’s discomfort was so palpable, so deeply etched into the fissures of his sunburned face, that Jules had to look away. She covered the moment of weakness by pretending to scan the hotel grounds for trouble. Unfortunately, standing right in her line of view were his family, the sorriest, most bedraggled-looking losers she’d seen in a long time. The crowd in front of the hotel was young, middle-class white people with a leavening of upper-echelon Mexicans. They were frightened, but still well fed and used to having their own way. Pieraro’s family looked like they would turn around at one word from her and slouch off to their fate.

Jules risked a quick glance at her paying customers. They seemed entirely nonplussed, and she supposed they had no reason to question the arrival of the Pieraro clan. Miguel had clearly established himself as a powerful figure in their eyes only yesterday. If that power meant he could drag along his extended
family they would probably accept that. After all, they were all too used to the privileges of power themselves.

The crowd noise intensified, noticeably, spilling over and around the Fairmont’s centerpiece architectural statement, the main hotel built in the form of a giant Aztec pyramid. She could see dozens of guests on their balconies hiding from the disturbance outside, and too many of them were pointing at her little group. Time to go.

“Listen,” she said. “This isn’t over. Not by a fucking long shot. I cannot take all of those people you’ve brought. I do not have stores for them, and they will not be allowed off the boat at the other end. Not to mention the trouble it’s going to cause with everyone who actually paid for their passage.
But.
We don’t have time to get into this now. We need to get away from this city. It is going under. Right now. I’ll take your extras on today. Take them a safe distance down the coast, away from the city. That’s where it’s going to be worst. But they will have to get off. Do you understand? You need to talk to them about where that might be. I’m sure they will have relatives somewhere, in some stagnant backwater, who’ll take them in. Probably be glad of the extra hands come bean-harvest time. But I can’t take them.”

She held Pieraro’s eyes this time, not flinching away from the falling man she saw in there.

“Because they cannot pay,” he said at last, with an air of injured dignity.

“If you want to make me the bitch, okay. Because they cannot pay. Nobody is going to fuel and provision me if
I
cannot pay. That is the only reason I’m taking those rich arseholes anywhere. They are buying my fuel, my food, my arms and ammunition, and surely even you can see that right now nothing trumps that.”

“They have brought their own food,” said Pieraro in a dry, flat voice. “Beans. Dried meat. Flour. They will not be a burden.”

“Oh, my God, I cannot believe we’re even having this discussion. You are not an idiot, Miguel. You know how things are. You know what’s coming
…fuck,
you know it’s already here.”

“They are my family, Julianne.
My family.
Do you not have a family of your own?”

His attempt at guilting her out produced only a short, bitter laugh.

“Oh, Miguel, that is
so
not a road to go down with me. Look. We have to move. Now. Get everyone down to the … Heritage, was it? Get them onto the buses. We have to get around to the bay, to the big jetty up the beach from the Hyatt. Do you know it? Good. Fifi and Thapa will be waiting there. It is going to be a very crowded trip out to the
Rules.
“

Pieraro closed his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said, as if in prayer.

“We are dropping them off, Miguel. Somewhere. Okay?”

“Okay. Somewhere safe.”

The crackle of gunfire started, muted by distance and smothered by the sudden roar of an enraged, terrified mob.

“I think Roberto has taken off his smiley face,” said Jules. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Jeez, Julesy. We taking a mariachi band with us? Cool.”

Fifi had switched over to a Larry the Cable Guy camouflage baseball cap with the trademark fishhook in the bill. Jules ignored the hat, especially the Confederate flag.

“Don’t start, Fifi. Just get them on board.”

The trip around the southern headland of Acapulco Bay had not been entirely uneventful. Both Shah and Julianne had been forced to open fire on a couple of makeshift roadblocks that had not been there an hour earlier. The roadblocks were being manned by would-be carjackers. At least she assumed they were carjackers.

Her passengers, paying and nonpaying, poured out of the two beaten-up-looking school buses Pieraro had obtained from God only knew where, and stood blinking in the harsh light, on a massive baking slab of cracked concrete, an empty parking lot overlooking the water. They were all upset, and some of the Americans looked positively ill. The
Aussie Rules
‘s giant sports fisher bobbed slowly up and down at the end of the pier, which jutted out more than a hundred meters into the bay. No other craft were moored there,
and one look out over the water told her why. Thousands of vessels, from small aluminum dinghies to oceangoing megayachts, were on the move, heading away from shore toward the mouth of the bay. Only the slightest puff of breeze ruffled the ubiquitous palms onshore, but out on the bay the enormous flotilla had churned up a mass of white water.

“Any trouble getting away?” asked Jules.

“Some,” admitted Fifi, who was dressed in a denim microskirt and distressed red tee emblazoned with the legend
Zombie Squad—We can handle it from here. We’ve talked about this on the Internet.
A Marlboro dangled from her lips. Jules wondered what her friend would do when she finally ran out.

She hefted up her PKM. “But we got her done.”

Jules winced.

“You didn’t kill anyone, did you?”

Fifi rolled her eyes, “Just a few rounds downrange. Jeez, who died and made you Captain Sensible?”

Jules stared past Fifi into a place she wasn’t even sure existed.

Fifi caught the hint. “Oh. Yeah. Pete. Uh, sorry.”

“Fine,” said Julianne, throwing up her hands. “Let’s just get them on board before we draw another crowd.” She could see cars beginning to pull over to the side of the freeway on the hill up above them. Small groups of people were already picking their way down through the scrub, doubtless hoping to clamber on board the boat with them. Across the confusion of the bay, the center of Acapulco was a disaster movie. Fires blazed at so many locations she couldn’t count them, but it was eerily quiet, like watching TV with the sound down. After a second she realized why. No sirens, anywhere. The absence was chilling.

“Come on, move your arses,” she called out to the dawdling travelers. Phoebe had actually stopped to take pictures with a small digital camera.

“Where the fuck are you going to get them printed?” cried Jules in frustration. “Move!”

Shah and Thapa began herding everyone toward the dock, occasionally glancing back up toward the roadway. A few more cars had pulled over. Pieraro spoke to an old man among his people, who nodded before firing off a scorching fusillade of native oaths and curses and clouting a teenaged boy, who’d stopped dead, transfixed by Fifi’s T-shirt. The Mexicans, all hauling heavy sacks of food by the looks of them, began to run down the pier. The Americans, dropping some of their luggage as they went, followed suit as Thapa chivvied them along.

“If you would be so kind as to hurry your arses up now.”

“Mr. Shah?” said Jules. “My gun if you please.”

The Gurkha sergeant produced her shotgun from the cabin of the SUV, racking a round into the chamber before handing it over to her.

“Thank you,” said Jules. She fired three shots into the air over the heads of the people swarming down the hillside toward them. It had a salutary effect on her own charges as well, speeding their passage down the jetty to a sprint.

“Hell, yeah,” enthused Fifi. “Time for a little redneck persuasion.”

She let rip with a short, snarling burst from her heavy Russian machine gun, firing into the windows of an abandoned building overlooking the parking lot, shattering a dozen panes of glass. The sound was scarifying, and the small horde descending the slopes stopped and dropped immediately.

“Go, go,” said Shah, waving them off toward the boat, where Thapa and Pieraro were hurriedly helping everyone aboard, in some cases by throwing them bodily over the side.

The girls didn’t wait to be told twice. They set off at a sprint. A few moments later Jules heard the car start up again, and, looking back over her shoulder, she saw the former soldier drive it onto the jetty. He followed them, stopping halfway down, before turning the wheel to effectively block any further access.

“They’ll just crawl over it,” said Fifi, leveling the PKM on the makeshift blockade.

“They won’t,” promised Jules.

Shah climbed out, tossed something into the cabin, and ran as quickly as she’d ever seen a short, refrigerator-shaped man run. A few seconds later, as the first of their desperate pursuers made the start of the pier, the grenade exploded, lifting the vehicle a few inches off the deck, but not moving it far enough to topple it into the water. Everyone ducked. When Jules straightened up, access from the shore was blocked by the burning wreckage.

“Nice work, buddy,” said Fifi as Shah trotted up to them. “You like NASCAR at all?”

Smiling like an imp, Shah lifted his shoulders.

“NASCAR. Never heard of it. But I never liked Toyotas much,” he said.

Fifi wondered if anyone even drove a Toyota in NASCAR.

Out on the water, it was worse. The sports fisher was big and powerful enough to speed around or muscle through the occasional logjams of smaller craft that blocked its way, and the sight of Pieraro, Thapa, and Shah heavily tooled up and guarding against all attempts at boarding precluded any such
misadventures. But Jules still had a hell of a time clearing the bay, on which an unknowable number of vessels jostled for primacy. Where the hell most of them thought they were going, she had no idea. The little runabouts and motor boats and inflatables that numbered in the thousands would founder in even moderate seas, and word from Mr. Lee back on the
Rules
was that storms in the high latitudes had whipped up a bitching four-meter swell on a nasty chaotic cross chop of at least another meter and a half. They were going to have a lot of seasick passengers in less than half an hour. But at least they would survive.

Jules shook her head as she spun the wheel to dodge what looked like a garbage barge barely able to stay afloat under the weight of seven or eight hundred people, all tightly packed onto mounds of rubbish. They were throwing the rotting, malodorous ballast overboard as quickly as they could, but the wake from her sudden turn set the flat-bottomed scow wallowing dangerously, and at least a dozen men and women went over the side. She nudged the throttles forward and tried to ignore their flailing figures. They wouldn’t be the last people to drown today.

A cacophony of horns, whistles, sirens, and Klaxons overlay constant screaming and calls for help. The farther out into the bay she took them, the worse it grew. Bodies began to appear in the churning water, some floating near capsized boats, others obviously killed by gunfire. At one point she cut their speed back to allow a small pod of surf skiers to paddle by. They saluted her with their oars before resuming their rhythmic progress.