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He did not breathe. He counted.
Thirteen men, and only twelve bullets in his guns. Every shot must be perfect, and at least one shot must pull double duty. He must fire quickly—so quickly that surprise remained on his side, for he would not get another hair’s breadth to reconsider. Not another bullet, should he miss a single mark.
His mind drew lines between the men in the church, the men only just now realizing that the man in the cassock was armed and prepared to defend the flock. In English, a snippet of the old King James he’d read somewhere, he murmured—“He shall give His angels charge over thee”—while the calculations churned.
He didn’t see any angels. He saw targets.
The moment broke, the painting slashed. The imagined photograph torn to shreds by gunfire. Precise gunfire.
Bullets to heads: one, two, three.
Bullets to hearts: four, five, six.
Bullets to backs: seven, eight.
More bullets, more heads: nine, ten, eleven.
Plaster from the statues chipped to powder and rained down on his shoulders. Bullets fired in return, some striking the ceiling, the altar, the icons. The windows. Most of them hit their wayward, harmless marks before the men who fired them hit the ground. Twitching, or not. Each one of them dead before they had any time to wonder what had happened.
It was not even a painting. Not even a photograph.
Two men remained: Eduardo and a thickly mustached man behind him. The other man was ready to run; he’d halfway turned already, statistics or fortune had let him live the longest, and he knew a lost fight when he saw one. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to rob a chapel anyway. Maybe he only took the job because he was hungry, or desperate for some other reason.
Well, he was here now. And he was still holding one gun, having dropped the other. Halfway turned, and no—not ready to leave. Reaching for the widow Santos, to hide behind her? To hold her hostage, one big gun to the side of her fragile head?
There were no more moments to split, and only one bullet left in the gun.
Juan Rios hesitated, not long enough for it to matter to anyone but Eduardo and the twelfth gunman. But it mattered to the angles, too…the mentally sketched lines that told the padre where to aim, and how. Two men left, one bullet, and no path that would send it careening through both of them.
And Eduardo, he’d been a friend once, hadn’t he?
The answer was “no,” of course, and Juan Rios knew that better than anyone, but it cost him the last bullet all the same. He made up his mind, and sent the bullet past Eduardo—nicking his ear and making him swear, but otherwise doing him no harm.
Behind him, the twelfth bandit fell down dead. He toppled over the back of a pew, his backside in the air. Undignified to the last.
Eduardo lifted one hand to his bleeding ear, and looked Juan Rios in the eye.
The bandit did not look over his shoulder to see the shocking state of the small sanctuary. Men, women, and children huddled on the floor, holding their breath, covering their heads. Twelve dead men, felled by twelve shots.
Unheard of. Unlikely. But there it was.
“That was practically a miracle,” Eduardo gasped, blood squeezing out from between his fingers. Louder, he said, “People will wonder about it, anyway. The priest with the pistols, killing twelve bandits with twelve shots. They’ll drag your name before the Holy Father. In twenty years’ time you’ll have your own medallions, Juan Miguel.”
The guns were empty, but they were heavy in the padre’s hands. He did not lower them, though he began to shake. He did not know why. Eduardo, always the showman, continued. “Mark my words, as soon as you’re dead these people,” he gestured at those cowering behind him, “will descend upon your corpse like buzzards. They will tear your frock, and snip your hair, cut your nails. They’ll pick you over, wanting something to show their grandchildren, to prove they were here when it happened. Or, then again, maybe they won’t. They may decide it was luck after all. Luck, and the leftover skill of a man who used to kill for a living. For surely, if this were any true miracle—true and proper—I would be the one out of bullets.” He raised the gun, aiming it between the padre’s eyes and pulling back the hammer. “It would be me. Not you.”
It was only a reflex, Juan Rios supposed—just some leftover memory buried in his muscles that made his trigger finger tighten. He knew the chamber was empty. He knew this was no miracle, that it was only his last breath.
But the trigger slipped back.
And the fancy gun with the silver plate finish and engravings of squash blossoms fired.
Eduardo never had a chance to be surprised. He stood upright, dead as a stone, for a count of five, six, seven seconds; he collapsed knees first, then his hips folded, and he dropped to his side, flopped onto his back, and stared at the crossbeams in the ceiling above without seeing a goddamned thing.
Half an hour later, the padre stood in the courtyard of the Jacaranda Hotel—a wide rectangle surrounded on three sides by the wings of the building itself, and capped on the fourth by a large fountain. He faced this fountain, trying to decide if there was any significance to the patterns of colored tile, or the statue of a woman holding two water vessels; he could scarcely make out any of the finer details, for the sky was a deeper purple than before and the moon struggled to appear, without any success. Only a cool, pale blot marked its place in the heavens, and only a persistent drizzle proved the clouds.
He was reasonably certain he’d seen the exact same statue on a fountain in Mexico City, and the tile was good-quality, but not custom-made.
The nun joined him. She stood silently beside him, likewise staring at the fountain. “Sometimes, it’s only art,” she said, echoing his unspoken sentiment.
