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Slowly, to demonstrate that he would not resist, he slipped the rosary around his neck and then lifted his hands, as instructed. “You’ve made some friends.”
“Better friends. Stronger ones.”
The padre nodded. So these were friends who had been bought, and could not be kept except with gold. He understood. Even if Eduardo had any lingering loyalties or leftover sentiment about the bad old days…his companions had no such softness about them.
His eyes flickered to Anna Perez, bobbing gently back and forth. Praying. Her hair fallen across her face. She was beautiful, and she did not want these men to see her; she was young, but she understood plenty about how the world worked. In the last row, the Garcia twins—eleven years old, had been sent to pray for their aunt. Both of them radiated panic and a desire to run for the door, but the padre knew they’d never reach it. Down front was the widow Santos, ninety years old. Frail and shaking, wearing a silver locket with a snippet of her husband’s hair. She was also wearing a wedding band worth more than anything else in the church, except perhaps Juan Rios’s fancy guns.
Which were in the altar.
They were wrapped in his dead brother’s shirt, still stained with old, dry blood, lying atop a box that held a tooth and a knuckle bone from a man who may have lived a thousand years ago, and may have died for Christ.
He glanced down at the nook. He masked it by briefly closing his eyes.
No.
The guns were not wrapped
in the shirt. They were lying naked, back to back. Handle to handle.
Did he do that? Before the mass? Before the bandits? After Eduardo’s visit, when he knew there was a very good chance they’d see one another again?
Maybe then, in a half-dreaming state of habit, he had unwrapped the guns and readied them, loaded them. He had been the one to lay them out, and prepare them for service. Hadn’t he?
Hadn’t he?
Yes. No. He couldn’t remember.
While the gunmen postured and preened, Rios lifted his gaze and looked from face to horrified face, along the rows of men and women seated on the rough-cut pews. He saw four families with nine children between them; one old man and three old women past the age of eighty; three maidens; half a dozen stray youths, caught in that odd age between boyhood and manhood, girlhood and womanhood.
He watched Eduardo’s eyes light up at the quivering, slump-back shape of the widow Santos. He saw one of the bandits use the barrel of his gun to nudge back Anna’s hair, in order to see her better.
“Eduardo,” the padre said. Not suddenly, but loudly enough to remind his old friend who had been the faster draw, the better shot.
Eduardo took his attention from the widow. “Juan Miguel?”
“Leave, and take your friends with you. I won’t ask again.”
The friends laughed. Eduardo did not. He met the padre’s serious stare blink for blink, while the chaos lifted and rose, conducted like music, by the men with guns. Anna cried out and ducked away, and the widow sobbed, and the antsy feet of the Garcia twins scraped against the floor.
Any moment, it would reach a pitch that meant there was no return, no snuffing of the dynamite’s wick.
The padre did not budge. His arms were not tired from being raised up beside his head. They did not twitch or shake, and he breathed as softly, as calmly, as if he were only standing in a garden. This was not his first time. This was not the first promise he would ever break.
Only the biggest.
He’d made up his mind. He only needed one word, one flicker of distraction. The timing would be everything.
Eduardo said, “It’s just as well.” And with a buck of his elbow he raised his gun.
Faster than that—Juan Rios didn’t know how, couldn’t remember how it happened—but the padre was holding his own guns. Always the better shot, always the faster marksman… always the first to make a decision, whether the decision was good or bad.
He’d made it now.
This decision. It was probably bad, but not all bad. It couldn’t be.
In that hair’s breadth of a moment, shaved down to an instant so narrow and fine that the padre saw it as static as a painting—as still and unmoving as the icon of the Mother behind him, looking down, watching him break the only important vow he’d ever made.
But this was important, too.
