Jacaranda by Cherie Priest Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    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