Читать книгу The Bones of Wolfe - James Carlos Blake - Страница 12
ОглавлениеIt’s a pleasant Saturday afternoon on the Gulf. We’re bearing south along the Texas coast, about a mile and a half off Padre Island. The sky is bright and nearly cloudless. On the distant eastern horizon a freighter is trailing a thin plume of dark smoke. There’s no other vessel in view except a small boat a quarter mile ahead of us and off to starboard.
My brother, Frank, and I are on the bridge of the Salty Girl, a thirty-five-foot customized sportfisher belonging to one of our uncles, Harry Morgan Wolfe, who normally uses it for fishing charters, but it sometimes serves other purposes as well. Frank’s at the wheel and I’m astraddle the swivel stool beside him.
Out on the foredeck, Rayo Luna and Jessie Juliet are lying side by side on their tummies, sunning their exquisite butts in string bikinis and talking about God knows what. Thick as thieves, those two—Rayo of the caramel skin and short black shag, Jessie a tanned strawberry blonde, her long hair loosely knotted in a bunch at the back of her head. They know we’re enjoying the view and that our pleasure isn’t hindered a bit by the fact they’re our cousins. Like Frank and me, Jessie is part of our family’s Texas side and is only a couple of branches removed from us. Rayo’s from the Mexico City half of the family, which originated from the same paternal root and is also surnamed Wolfe, but it places her further out from us on the genealogical tree. For the fun of it we sometimes refer to the two sides of the family in unison as the House of Wolfe. Over the generations, the Mexican Wolfes acquired a touch of mestizo strain through marriage, and most of them have the same light brown complexion and black hair as Rayo. In contrast, we on the Texas side of the house largely reflect the original family’s Anglo-Irish origin, almost all of us fair-haired and light-skinned. Frank and I are the only American Wolfes with a wee drop of mestizo blood, gained by way of a grandaunt whose father was Rodolfo Fierro, Pancho Villa’s right-hand man, and for whom I am first-named and Frank middle-named. For whatever reason, though, Frank tans more readily and darkly than I do, and given his black hair and bandido mustache, when nut-brown in high summer he bears a strong likeness to the Fierro we’ve seen in historical photos. The rest of the Texas clan could be taken for typical natives anywhere in Western Europe.
Rayo hollers, “Look!” and points at a bounding bunch of dolphins that’s surfaced on the port side and is keeping pace with the boat. Frank and I and Jessie grew up around here and have been familiar with boats and the sea since we were children, but Rayo had never even been to a seacoast before she made her first visit here eleven years ago when she and Jessie were sixteen. She grew to love the beach even more during her years at the University of Miami, but ski boats and day sailers were the only kinds of watercraft she was familiar with until she came to live with us two years ago and we took her out on deepwater boats. By now she must’ve seen dolphins on dozens of occasions, and she still gets excited as a kid every time. She still marvels at everything about the sea.
“You know what?” she says, looking up at me and Frank. “I been thinking about how great it’d be to live on this boat. Never go ashore for anything but supplies, a little barhopping and dancing.”
“Well, you better give it plenty of thought before you take up a cruising life,” Frank says. “There’s an old saying—it’s better to be on shore wishing you were at sea than it is to be at sea wishing you were on shore. Lot of downsides to boat life,”
“There are a lot of downsides to any life,” Jessie says.
“Such bleak perspective from one so young and fair,” Frank says in the professorial mode he at times assumes for the fun of it and has enjoyed doing since we were in college. The truth is he could’ve been a professor. “I suppose,” he says, “it stems from a frequency of journalistic exposure to a surfeit of human woe.”
Jessie’s a reporter for the local paper. She makes a face at him.
“Actually, some good arguments can be made for boat living,” I say, “and the best of them was made by the Phoenicians. They believed that no day spent on the ocean was deducted from a man’s life.”
“What about for a woman?” Rayo says.
“They didn’t say.”
“Of course not,” she says, tossing her head in disgust.
“Well, I’ll tell you something, Rudy boy,” Jessie says, pointing at me. “Back in the Middle Ages it was widely believed that every time a man had sex it shortened his life by a day. And they didn’t say anything about a woman, either!”
“Yeah!” Rayo says. She and Jessie trade high fives.
“Well now, that’s just rank nonsense,” Frank says. “Because if it were true, I would’ve been dead a long time ago!”
The girls whoop. “Listen to him!” Jessie says. “Frankie Casanova. Sex probably hasn’t taken two weeks off his life!”
“Unless self-abuse counts,” Rayo says. “In that case he could kick the bucket any minute.”
They laugh it up some more.
“Self-abuse?” Franks says in an injured tone.
“Spanking the monkey, waxing the tent pole, shaking hands with the bishop,” Rayo says. “All those cutesy clever phrases guys have for it.”
“Massaging the midget!” Jessie adds. “Strangling Mister Johnson!”
Those really get them howling, and Frank and I can’t help grinning. They can always give as good as they get.
“I must say, brother,” Frank loudly declares, “I am aghast to hear this sort of talk from women of allegedly proper upbringing.”
“Words cannot describe the depth of my own distress,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rayo says. “Listen, if I were you boys I’d play it safe from now on and never have sex, not even with just yourself, except on a boat.”
She gives me an exaggerated wink, then laughs when I point my forefinger at her and flick my thumb like I’m shooting her. Ever since she’s come to live with us, she and I have had some lovely times together, but she’s made it abundantly clear she’s not my “girlfriend,” a word she enunciates like it’s been soaked in sour milk. What she and I are, she’s also made quite clear, is good-buddy distant cousins who like to get it on with each other. Quote, unquote. She’s like that. Direct as an arrow. At the University of Miami she got her degree in theater arts and lettered in track, tennis, and swimming—and was a regional collegiate swim champ. When she went back to Mexico she got into stunt work in movies and TV. Some of the stunts she’s done are unreal, but the worst she’s ever been hurt in any of the “bits,” as she calls them, was a sprained thumb. One Sunday morning we were strolling by a schoolyard playground and she jumped the fence and hopped up on a set of monkey bars and went through a workout routine worthy of a spot in the Olympics. She was wearing a loose short skirt, and it wasn’t the first time she’d simultaneously shown me her gymnastic skills and her scanty underwear. She once said she was almost ashamed of herself for teasing me like that, because, as she put it, “It’s so girly.” From up in the wheelhouse, her so-called tramp stamp—a little red tattoo inscription just above the thong strap and between her sacral dimples—is scarcely discernible, but I’ve many a time read it up close. FACTA NON VERBA.
We’re on our way home from Louisiana, where we delivered two men and a woman, all three using the name Aguirre, and perhaps they were truly related, we didn’t ask. We had been contacted about them by our Mexico City relations, our usual source of clients in desperate need of a stealthy exit from Mexico and a new identity in the States. They sent us the necessary photos and pertinent physical data, then kept the Aguirres in a safe house down there while we arranged their relocation. Two weeks later when the Aguirres were transferred to the Salty Girl from a boat we rendezvoused with just a few miles off the Tamaulipas coast, we presented each of them with an American birth certificate, a duly issued Social Security card to match it, and a bona fide Texas driver’s license showing the address of a rooming house we own in Harlingen. At a Mississippi River boatyard a few days later and some thirty miles below New Orleans, we turned them over to some associates—kinfolk of ours named Youngblood—who escorted them the rest of the way to their new home. Because they had expressed a desire to live in a beachside community, a spacious apartment had been leased for them in Panama City, Florida.
A body run is what we call that sort of smuggle. Rayo Luna has been on a few of them with us before, all of them to Corpus Christi, Galveston, or Houston. She thinks they’re pretty dull and they usually are. But when she heard we were making a run up near New Orleans and would be spending the night there, she asked if she could come along, and when we said okay, she asked if Jessie could come, too. Neither of them had been to New Orleans since Mardi Gras in their senior year of college. But unlike Rayo, Jessie isn’t in our line of work and has never wanted to be, and Frank and I make it a rule not to take anyone on a run who isn’t in the trade. We don’t need anything more than the cargo to safeguard or worry about. Then again, a body run is the least likely sort to encounter trouble, and we knew that even if things should for any reason get a little dicey, Jessie would be no liability. Like the rest of us she learned how to use a gun when she was a kid, and a couple of years ago down in Mexico City she proved beyond question she can handle herself pretty well. So we made an exception and took both of them along, and after the conclusion of business in the boatyard we treated them to a night in the French Quarter before starting for home the next morning.
All in all, it was a satisfying trip.
It’s what we do, we Wolfes: we smuggle. Mostly into and out of Mexico, now and then Cuba or Central America. Been doing it for over a hundred years, ever since we settled in Brownsville, Texas, which is on the Rio Grande, about twenty-five miles upriver from the Gulf. We began by smuggling booze from Mexico into the States, then started running guns down there before the outbreak of the Revolution. During Prohibition we ran more booze than ever until repeal killed that gold-egg goose. Over the generations we’ve expanded into high-tech military gear and today we carry everything from infrared and thermal-imaging optical instruments to portable radar units to a wide range of explosive-device components. The only things we don’t smuggle are drugs and wetbacks. The drug biz is un-arguably a money river, but it attracts too many crazies. Smuggling is chancy enough without having to transact with such impulsive personalities. Besides, except for alcohol, we take a dim view of drugs. Ruinous stuff. As for dealing in wetbacks, the process entails too many stages and too many agents and too many people overall for too little reward. We like to keep every operation as uncomplicated as we can and restrict its number of participants to the fewest necessary. We do smuggle people every so often but usually carry only one or two individuals and never more than three, and what they all have in common is that they’re running from mortal danger and can afford to buy a sure escape from it. Ours is a costly service but worth every dime, considering the official documents we include in the package. The federal government can’t hide you better than we can. The fact is ID documents in general are selling better than ever, and not just to those on the run. Lots of people have something to hide that can best be hidden by way of various certifiable identities, and that’s become truer than ever in our worldwide digital age. We can supply as many identities as anybody might want, each one supported by authentic documents registered in the files of the relevant agency. A certificate of birth or baptism or naturalization, a Social Security account, a military service record—whatever paper or set of papers a client requests, we can produce it. Some of our clients have asked how we do it. Our stock answer is that we have our ways. The simple truth is that the world turns on greed, and greed slavers at an ample bribe. Our insiders at official agencies, bureaus, and record departments have long prospered by way of our incentives.
Among the family, our extralegal pursuits are known collectively as the shade trade, and its main constituent has always been gun smuggling, guns being an article of commerce that, unlike drugs, we very much favor. Nothing else in the world so ably and indisputably accords physical equality between human beings as a gun. A 250-pound man has no advantage over a 90-pound woman if both of them are armed. As we see it, self-defense is the most elemental of all natural rights and includes the right to possess the same means to defend yourself as might be used to assault you. Absent that right, you have to rely on agents of the state for protection, but you can’t count on such an agent being at hand when you find yourself at the mercy of an armed antagonist. We choose not to depend on someone else to safeguard us or to rely on anyone’s mercy. We’re aware that many people of intelligence and good intention would disapprove of our outlook and deem it sophistic, cynical, self-serving, pick your righteous reproof. That’s okay. Sticks and stones. Other people have their ways of looking at things, we have ours.
The family also owns a variety of legitimate and profitable enterprises—a law firm, a real estate company, a tech instruments and graphics store, a marine salvage and repair boatyard, a gun shop, plus a few others. The majority of those businesses are in Brownsville, all of them gainful and, not altogether coincidentally, most of them of advantage to the shade trade. As a matter of record, Frank and I are employed as “field agents” by Wolfe Associates, one of the most respected law firms in South Texas. So are Rayo Luna and two other of our cousins. The firm’s three partners are our uncles Harry McElroy Wolfe—Harry Mack to those who know him—and his close cousins Peck and Forrest. The position of field agent requires that we be state-licensed investigators, a hugely valuable sanction. The most routine duties in our formal job description—serving papers, conducting background checks, searching police records, and so on—are carried out by lower-level hires. What we mainly do is track down essential witnesses who deliberately or against their will have gone missing. We’re as good at finding people as we are at helping them to get lost. I love everything about the work—tracking them down, keeping them under wraps for as long as the firm requires, and all the while staying alert for whoever might be trying to get them back from us or simply wanting to prevent them from appearing in court or making a deposition. Rayo’s been on several such assignments with me and Frank. She’s got all the right instincts for the trade.
When we’re not on a job for the Associates, we work for our cousin Charlie Fortune, the chief of shade trade operations. He’s big-muscled but limber as a fly rod, and with his close-cut dirty-blond hair, a scar through one eyebrow, and the beard he keeps at a five o’clock growth, his countenance is as daunting as his physique. His only boss is his daddy, Harry Mack. Frank and I have been Charlie’s main smugglers since graduating from college, though for the past year or so he’s been letting one of our field agent cousins, Eddie Gato, do gun runs, too. Rayo has gone with me and Frank on a few such runs and enjoyed it, but not as much as tracking down people. She doesn’t find it as satisfying. “Not as much juice,” she says.
Most of our arms shipments go to our Mexican kin, who in turn sell them to their clients. Like us, the Mexican Wolfes are a large family of social standing who own and operate an assortment of lawful and profitable businesses in addition to engaging in various unlawful pursuits. And like us, they have always trafficked in such activities primarily for the satisfaction of asserting their independence from the horde of bastards who own the government and devise laws that first and foremost serve their own interests. It’s a matter of self-respect, of a pride that’s bred in our bones. Our Mexican cousins don’t like being played for saps any more than we do. Unlike us, however, they conduct their illicit dealings by means of a small outfit of their own creation called Los Jaguaros. To this day, not the Mexican government, the police, or the press is conclusively certain the Jaguaros even exist, notwithstanding the pervasive rumors that they’re the principal suppliers of arms to some of the country’s largest criminal societies. It has long been alleged by much of the news media and by political enemies of the current administration that the Jaguaros are a fabrication of the federal government, intended to cover up many of its own misdeeds. Over the years a number of captured cartel operatives have said that much of their armament come from the Jaguaros, but none of them knew where that organization is headquartered or could name any of its members. Some government critics insist that such prisoner allegations of the Jaguaros’ existence are outright lies intended to conceal the true sources of cartel arms. Despite all such conjectures and suppositions, the Jaguaros’ tie to the Mexico City Wolfes remains an impenetrable secret. Even the cartels chiefs who do business with the Jaguaros don’t know of the connection to the family. Not even most Jaguaros know of it—except, of course, for their Wolfe crew chiefs, all of whom use false surnames.
Also, unlike ours, the Jaguaros’ primary stock-in-trade isn’t guns but information, and the cartels are their foremost market for that commodity, too. They sell military intelligence, police records, names of informants. They sell blueprints of banks, jewelry stores, art museums, prisons—of any venue someone might want to break into or out of. Much of that information comes from insiders at government bureaucracies, police and military agencies, corporate offices, construction companies, et cetera. But almost as much of it originates from the Jaguaros’ squads of ace hackers. Their access to so many sources of information also serves the Jaguaros very well in finding people who may or may not want to be found. Their boundless web of informants—whom they call “spiders”—reaches to every region of the country and every level of society, from shoeshine boys house maids, whores, and gardeners to hotel staff, media reporters, cops, and politicians. Not even the federal police have such a comprehensive network of eyes and ears as the Jaguaros do, or as secure a system for transmitting, sifting, cataloging, and storing the data they amass. And even while the cartels are their primary buyers of information, the Jaguaros have compiled vast files of data on each of them as well. That knowledge, however, is not for sale. It’s maintained by the Jaguaros solely for their own purposes. They of course also have a security unit, and it says something about Rayo Luna that she was a member of it before she came to live with us and joined the shade trade.
It’s a rock-hard rule in the Texas family that no member of it can work in its unlawful trades without first earning a college degree, which can be in any major except phys ed or one that ends in the word studies. Charlie got his BA in history at A&M. Frank and I both got ours in English at UT Austin. He’s a Hemingway man, Frank, and his senior thesis contended that Stephen Crane’s influence on Hem’s short works was even more significant than had been previously recognized. His mentor thought that with a few minor tweaks the paper could get published in an academic journal, but Frank shrugged it off. My thesis was on Alexander Pope, who could express more insight in a heroic couplet than most poets can muster in an entire poem. The department offered Frank a graduate fellowship, but he turned it down. And even though he’d told the baseball scouts he wasn’t interested in a pro career—he had a rifle-shot fastball, plus a changeup that made a hitter swing like a drunk, and he came within four strikeouts of breaking the conference strikeout record in his senior year—the Orioles picked him in the third round anyway, hoping to change his mind with a big-bucks offer, but he nixed that, too. I was a good-field, good-hit third baseman and got a few offers myself, but the scouts didn’t swarm me like they did him. We’ve now been in the shade trade about fourteen years, and I can’t speak for Frank, but I think it’s safe to say that, like me, he hasn’t any regrets about his college major or career.
This time it’s Jessie who shouts, “Look!” She’s pointing at a fish hawk that’s appeared to our left, circling, on the hunt. It’s a beautiful thing, its breast and shoulders bright white against the gray-and-white checkering of its underwings and tail.
“Osprey!” Frank tells the girls. “Name comes from the Latin ossifraga. Means ‘bone-breaker’!”
“Bone-breaker!” Rayo says. “That’s so perfect!”
I wouldn’t say Frank’s a showoff, but he does like to impress women every now and again with his erudition, and I have to admit most of them get a kick out of it. Just a few nights ago, Rayo and I were at a bar with him and a girlfriend of his, a nursing instructor at UTB, who got riled at the bartender for some reason and said to Frank, “Hit him with an English major put-down, baby.” So Frank said to the guy, “You, sir, are the terminus of an alimentary canal.” We all laughed, even the bartender, who admitted he didn’t know what Frank called him but thought it sounded funny.
Now the osprey spies a fish and wings around to the east before turning back again.
“He’s coming into the sun so the fish won’t see his shadow,” I tell the girls. Frank’s not the only one on the boat who knows stuff.
The osprey’s gliding now as it starts angling into a descending trajectory and picking up speed, tucking its wings back as it swoops down. It’s just a few feet above the water when it slings its legs forward with the talons spread and wham, it hits the surface with a terrific splash and flies up with a sea trout in its grip.
We all cheer and watch the hawk rise and start angling off to wherever its nest is. Then it jerks sideways a split second before we hear the gunshot, and it drops into the water about twenty yards from us, still holding the fish. It’s trying to fly but is just splashing around in a small circle.
“Son of a bitch!” Frank shouts, slowing the boat and turning it toward the hawk.
“It was them,” Rayo says, pointing at the small boat we’d noted earlier.
I pick up the big field glasses and home in on it, a little over a hundred yards off and bobbing at anchor. A bowrider, twenty-two, twenty-three feet, stern drive, its Bimini top furled. Two guys standing in it, long-billed fishing caps, dark glasses, looking this way. One holding a scoped rifle with one hand, muzzle up, the butt resting on his hip.
We draw up beside the hawk, and Frank tells me to take the wheel and hold us in place, then gets his SIG nine from the bridge locker and goes down and around to the fishing cockpit, where the girls are discussing how to get the hawk out of the water. It’s beating one wing in a spread of blood, and even from the bridge I can see the other wing’s crippled and the chest torn. No way it can be saved. Frank picks up a long gaff and Jessie says, “Not with that, you’ll hurt it worse.” Then she sees the pistol in his other hand and says, “Ah, hell.”
Frank steps around them and starts to take aim at the hawk, but it abruptly goes still. Before it can sink, he gaffs it out of the water, the fish still in its clutch, and lays it on the deck. He looks up at me and points at the other boat, and I start us toward it, then reach down and take my Beretta nine out of the locker and slip it into my waistband.
Frank detaches the trout from the osprey and lobs it overboard, then places the hawk at the foot of the cockpit’s starboard gunwale. He goes up close to Jessie and says something to her, glancing over at the bowrider as he talks. She looks out at it, too, then nods and goes up to the bow and stands by the rail. He beckons Rayo to him and furtively hands her the SIG as he speaks to her. She listens, then moves back to the stern, holding the pistol out of sight behind her leg. Frank looks up at me, his back to the bowrider, and shows me with his hands how he wants me to position our boat in respect to theirs. It’s pretty much what I had anticipated, and I show him a fist to let him know I got it.
The two guys watch us close in on them, and I draw up alongside, our deck several feet higher than theirs. I align our cockpit right next to their open bow, where the one with the rifle, the bigger and older of the two men—midforties, I’d guess—is standing with the rifle barrel now propped against his shoulder, his finger on the trigger guard. It’s an M1 Garand out of the Second World War and a fine weapon to this day. The other guy’s in the cockpit, a kid of eighteen or nineteen, his thumbs hooked into the front of his cargo shorts to either side of the .38 revolver tucked there. Four fishing rods, their lines out, are in rod holders affixed to the stern. Both guys take off their shades for a better look at the girls and keep smiling from one of them to the other at either end of the boat.
“Y’all come over here to tell me what a helluva shot that was?” the big man says.
“It was something, all right,” Frank says. “Damn bold, too, seeing as it’s against both state and federal law to shoot a hawk.”
The big man shrugs. “I don’t reckon you for no game warden.”
“Oh, hell no. Thought you might want your prize, though.” Frank picks up the osprey and lobs it down near the big man’s feet.
“Hey, fellas!” Jessie shouts. The two men both look over at her, and she yanks her top up to show her tits.
In the moment they’re gawking, Frank vaults over the gunwale and drops into their boat, grabs the M1 with both hands, and wrenches it away as he shoulders the big man backward—and Rayo whips up the SIG and fires a round through the bowrider windshield and yells, “Hands high, boy!” and the kid’s hands fly up. Frank drives the rifle’s steel butt plate into the big man’s mouth with a crack of teeth I hear in the wheelhouse, knocking him on his ass, blood gushing over his chin. He tosses the rifle into the water and kicks the guy onto his back and straddles his chest, pinning his arms with his knees, then picks up the hawk by one of its feet and rakes the talons down one side of the guy’s face and then the other side, the guy just screaming and screaming. Frank gets off him, hauls him to his feet, and pushes him over the side, then turns to the kid, who can’t raise his hands any higher. “Hey, man, hey, I didn’t do nothin! I didn’t do nothin’!” the kid screeches. Frank takes the revolver from the kid’s pants and backhands him with the barrel, cracking his cheek and dropping him to his knees, then flings the gun away and yanks the kid up and shoves him overboard, too. The two guys tread water clumsily, gasping and moaning, blood running off their faces.
“I don’t know where you shitheels are from and don’t care!” Frank shouts. “But I ever see either of you around here again, I’ll cut your face off!”
He picks up the hawk and hands it up to Jessie, who’s got her top back in place, then pulls himself aboard and signals me to move out. Rayo’s draped a beach towel over the transom to hide the boat’s name from the two guys—playing it safe despite the unlikelihood they would ever try tracking us down.
About a half mile farther on, Frank has me stop again. By then the two shitheels have managed to get back into the bowrider and are just a speck heading off in the other direction. Frank hooks the transom ladder to the stern and lowers himself into the water until it’s up to his chest, then Rayo hands him the hawk. He holds it below the surface for about half a minute before letting go of it, and we watch it slowly sink. Then he climbs back up on deck and gives me a hand sign and I head us for home.
I’m not saying Frank’s a softy or anything, but in truth he’s always been prone to get a little upset when he witnesses mistreatment of an animal.
It’s after dark when we come off the Gulf and into the seventeen-mile ship channel leading to the Port of Brownsville. Near the channel’s halfway point we turn off into a short canal that ends at the entry to Wolfe Marine & Salvage, a south-bank boatyard owned and operated by Harry Morgan Wolfe, known to everyone in the family as Captain Harry. The yard contains two long docks, one for local boats undergoing maintenance or repair, the other reserved for fishing and family vessels.
We tie up next to a trawler rig we know Eddie Gato used for a run to Boca Larga last night. A painter working at its transom by lamplight is putting the finishing touches on the name Gringa and, just below it, “Brownsville.” He’s already restored the true hull numbers. It’s good work in that there’s nothing fresh-looking about it. Frank and I used to do the Boca Larga run, but it became so rote it was starting to get boring, and when Charlie said Eddie wanted it, we said by all means.
The night manager, Dario Benítez, informs us that Captain Harry’s already gone but left word he’d meet us at the Doghouse Cantina. Frank and I get cleaned up and into fresh clothes, but the girls plead tiredness and say they’ll take a pass on the crowd and racket of a Doghouse weekend night, and they head for home in Rayo’s pickup. We hop into Frank’s restored ’68 Mustang GT named “Stevie” and follow a well-graded dirt road through the scrubs to State Highway 4, known locally as the Boca Chica Road. A few miles east, roughly halfway between Brownsville and the sea, we exit onto a sand trail where a low roadside marker reads WOLFE LANDING just above the arrow pointing toward the river and a grove of tall palms mingled with hardwoods hung with Spanish moss. The grove’s an extraordinary geographic incongruity out here, where most of the countryside consists of marsh grass, scrub brush, and mudflats. Once upon a time, however, much of this low stretch of the Rio Grande was lined with palm trees as tall as the masts of the Spanish ships that landed here—Rio de las Palmas, those first Europeans called it. Now the only other local palm grove besides ours is one in Brownsville that’s been a nature preserve for a lot of years. The trail to the Landing is just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, and our headlights sweep from one side to the other along the winding route through the high brush before a final eastward curve brings us into the Landing’s glow.
Our ancestors established Wolfe Landing in the early 1890s, and in 1911 they somehow managed to get it chartered as a town, even though to this day it’s no more than a village covering about 60 acres in the middle of the 450-acre grove. Only for a few short periods in the past has the Landing’s population exceeded a hundred residents. The most recent census put the number at seventy-something. It’s a place of perpetual shadows, its air always dank and heavy with the odors of fecund vegetation, its nights loud with frogs and cats and owls. From an airplane, the river all along the border of Cameron County looks like a tangled string, so closely bunched are the serpentine loops and crooks of its meanders, a feature that over time has formed numerous resacas on both sides of the river—what they call “bayous” or “oxbows” in the Deep South and other regions. There are several resacas in the palm grove, and the biggest of them, Resaca Mala, is in the gloomiest and most remote part of the property. It has been home to a small colony of alligators since the first Wolfes settled the place, though nobody knows about them except for a few of us in the shade trade. Charlie’s house is the only one back in there.
All of the Landing’s streets and trails are narrow and packed with crushed shell except for Main Street and Gator Lane, which are paved with tar and gravel. The trail off the highway melds into Main Street, on which stands the community’s only stone building—the single-story town hall, comprising the mayor’s office, the police department, and a two-cell jail. Charlie Fortune is both Wolfe Landing’s mayor—now many times reelected—and the chief of its police force, which at present consists of only himself and has never had more than one deputy. Also on Main are the Republic Arms gun shop and shooting range, Mario’s Grocery, Riverside Motors & Garage, Get Screwed Hardware, and Lolita’s, a little place that sells secondhand clothes. Main ends at a trail that curves northward past a couple of piling homes—one of them Frank’s, the other mine—and up into the grove’s higher ground, where you’ll find the graveyard and main residential area, composed of a scattering of cabins and mobile homes. Many of the Landing’s inhabitants are in the employ of Charlie Fortune in one way or another, while others operate businesses of their own but only with his approval.
Branching off Main, just opposite the Republic Arms, is Gator Lane. It runs straight to the river and ends at the Doghouse Cantina, with Big Joe’s Bait & Tackle store just across the lane. Big Joe is Joseph Stilder, who showed up last year in a banged-up old Buick with expired New York plates, saw the FOR SALE sign in the store window, gave the place a quick look-over, and bought it from Charlie for cash. He’s a burly guy with thick white hair and could be anywhere from fifty to seventy. Highly sociable dude and a talented teller of tales, a much-revered gift in a community where even skillfully wrought bullshit is highly prized. Like almost everybody else who lives here, he’s not big on personal disclosure, but he became a hell of a good bartender somewhere along the line and is always willing to fill in at the Doghouse. He’s also a voracious reader, and in addition to everything you might expect to find in a bait-and-tackle store, the place sells used books—fiction, histories, travel guides, sex manuals, name it. People would be surprised at the number of readers in the Landing, and they much appreciate Big Joe’s sideline.
The Doghouse is owned by Charlie Fortune and is the largest building in the village. Its short-order grill serves breakfast, lunch, and supper, and its spacious bar fronts a dance floor flanked by dining booths along three walls. There’s a side room with pool tables, and the office in the rear is the base of operations from which Charlie runs the shade trade—a fact of course known solely to those of us in the trade. The only Wolfes who live at the Landing are Charlie, Frank, me, and a cousin named Jimmy Quick, who manages the Republic Arms, also owned by Charlie. Jessie and Rayo live at the beach, way back in the dunes, in a stilt house they rent from Captain Harry. The rest of the family lives “in town,” which to everyone in the Landing means Brownsville—or, as Frank likes to refer to it, the Paris of Cameron County. Big Joe once heard him call it that and he said that was why he had decided to settle here. He’d always wanted to live in Paris.
As on every Saturday evening the Doghouse parking lot is jammed. Most of the vehicles belong to Brownsville regulars who come out every weekend for the supper specials of seafood gumbo on Friday night and barbecued ribs on Saturday. During the week Charlie will work the grill at the end of the back bar for about two hours every morning and then for another hour around midday. He’s a superb short-order cook and sandwich maker. The backroom kitchen he mostly leaves to Concha and Juana, a mother-daughter team that can handily accommodate the Friday night crowd by making large kettles of gumbo well ahead of the supper hour. But grilling the Saturday ribs is a nonstop task, and Charlie always assists them with it. There aren’t any waitresses. You pay for your order at the bar and receive a card with a number, which you take to the little kitchen window at the end of the bar and give to Charlie or one of the other cooks, then sit and wait for the number to be called. Signs in each booth say CLEAN YOUR TABLE, and the big garbage barrels along the walls are labeled either NON-POOD or SCRAPS. Charlie employs a balding graybeard known only as the Professor to keep an eye out for patrons who neglect to bus their table or who empty their trays into the wrong barrel. To commit either of those transgressions is to get barred from the Doghouse for a month. Runs a tight joint, Charlie does. Every Sunday afternoon a couple of us will load the weekend SCRAPS barrels into a truck and take them to Resaca Mala and feed them to the gators. Those brutes have long been useful for disposing of all sorts of organic matter.
The place is boisterous, and the ceiling fans are whirling with minor effect against the concentration of body heat. The dining booths are full, and at the bar every stool is taken and the spaces between them packed with standees, keeping the weekend trio of barmaids on their toes. Even though the jukebox is turned way up against the laughter and loud conversation, Charlie’s kitchen bellow of “Eighty-two and eighty-three!” carries through the din and a guy scoots out of a booth and over to the window to collect his ready plastic plates of ribs.
The Doghouse juke is renowned for the variety of its musical selections. It holds everything from Tex Ritter to Sinatra to Elvis to Los Tigres del Norte. About a third of its content, though, is “swing music,”1930s and ’40s big band tunes by Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and their ilk, even though Charlie and Frank and I and the Professor are just about the only ones who ever play it. Actually, the dances of that era are a lot of fun. Our mother—who had learned them from her mother—taught Frank and me how to do the Lindy Hop, fox-trot, jitterbug, and other such dances when we were still in grammar school, and it’s a rare girl who doesn’t get a kick out of learning them from us. Sometimes a patron will complain about all the big band stuff, but Charlie says anybody who doesn’t want to hear it can go somewhere else. A guy once told him he should put some hip-hop in the juke, and Charlie said he’d sooner hire an idiot child to sit in the corner and bang pots and pans together.
Captain Harry and Eddie Gato are standing at the far end of the bar, leaning close in conversation. We go over and press up beside them, the nearest standees making room when they see who we are, and I signal Lila for a couple of Shiner Bocks. She’s Charlie’s only full-time bartender and is in charge of the two part-timers who assist her on weekends. On her days off or a busy weeknight, Charlie or Big Joe will help her out. As she heads for the beer cooler, her brown ponytail swings above a delectable butt snugged into faded jeans that cling to it like pale blue skin. It’s shaped like a perfect upside-down Valentine’s heart, and when she bends over into the cooler, the heart turns right-side up. She and Eddie have had an on-again, off-again thing for the past few years.
Frank claps Captain Harry on the shoulder and says, “What’s the good word, Unc?”
“Evening, fellas,” Harry says. But his smile’s a puny thing and Eddie’s looking grim.
“What the hell, guys?” Frank says. “You look like somebody let the air out of your sex dolls.”
“Sex dolls?” Lila says as she sets our beers on the counter. “That’s what I love best about this place, the highbrow conversation.” She goes off to attend to other customers, pert ass and ponytail swinging.
Talking just loud enough for us to hear, Eddie tells us that Alberto Delmonte and his crew were bushwhacked last night as they were heading back on the Boca Larga trail. “Every man of them dead and the load jacked,” Eddie says. “Charlie told me as soon as I got back. He got it from Rigo himself.”
“We know who did it?” Frank says.
“Not yet. Charlie said don’t discuss it out here, but I thought you oughta at least know. He wants to see us all in the office after closing.”
The Doghouse shuts down at midnight, and at twenty till there’s nearly two dozen people still here when Lila yells, “Last call!” rousing the usual groans of protest. She goes over to the juke and hits the kill switch, prompting more grousing, but she just shrugs and smiles.
As she’s passing by the other end of the bar to go back behind the counter, a tall, rangy guy in a western shirt and cowboy boots gives her ass a swat and loudly says, “Yo! That is fine, mama!” I’ve never seen him before, or the two men with him, all of them grinning.
Lila spins around with a glare. She puts her finger in the guy’s face and says, “Don’t ever do that again. I mean ever!”
“Ah, now, sugar, I was admiring is all.”
“You’ve been warned,” she says.
He draws closer, looming over her. “But what if I just can’t help myself, darlin’?”
“Then you’ll have to deal with them.” She points at us at the end of the counter, where Frank and Eddie and I have stepped away from the bar in readiness to engage with the three of them, Frank putting a hand to Captain Harry’s chest to keep him out of it. But when the rangy guy turns his head to look our way, Lila does a nimble little move with her feet and drives her knee up between his legs. He hunches forward and his mouth drops open, and she stiff-arms him hard in the chest with both hands, propelling him backward into one of his pals, who tries to support him by the underarms, but the rangy one’s legs quit him and he sags in the man’s grip and almost pulls his pal down with him.
Onlookers cheer and laugh, and a woman shouts, “All right, girl!”
“Get him out,” Lila tells the rangy one’s buds. “He chucks up in here, you’ll clean the mess.”
They half carry, half drag him out the door. In keeping with his duty, the Professor goes to a front window to make sure they go away. Whenever somebody gets booted from a bar, and especially if he’s drunk, there’s always a tense interval afterward because there’s no telling if he’s one of those guys who’s coming right back with a gun. The Professor stands watch at the window for a minute, then looks at Frank and gives him a thumbs-up. He’ll continue to keep an eye out for a while in case their vehicle returns.
Lila goes behind the bar and is grinning big when she comes over to us. Captain Harry tells her he’s never seen man nor woman deliver a knee to the cojones with such grace and asks if it was pure luck or what.
“Pure execution, Captain,” she says. “Rayo taught me. It’s all distraction, timing, and speed.” She points off to the side as she says, “Distract, set, do it,” fluidly shifting her feet and whipping up her knee.
“Be damned if the women around here aren’t getting downright dangerous,” Frank says. He tells Eddie he better never piss off Lila again unless he’s wearing a cup.
Our laughter’s strained. But still, it’s a minor respite from the bad tidings about Alberto and his guys.
A half hour later, Lila and the other barmaids have gone home and the only ones still in the Doghouse are Frank and me, Uncle Harry, Eddie, and Charlie. We’re in Charlie’s office, and he’s given us the details about the ambush and hijacking and told us about Donasio Corona and the all-out search for him by the Jaguaros’ army of informants.
“I’ve promised Rigo that, if necessary, I can have a replacement load ready in five days. He’s talked to the Zetas and they said okay, but if they have to wait longer than that they’ll demand a late-delivery fine of twenty percent of what they paid for the original load. Rigo didn’t have any choice but to agree, and if we end up having to pay the fine he and I will split it. He’s pretty sure, though, that Mateo will find the rat quick, and as soon as he does, they’ll let us know. When the word comes, you two”—he looks at me and Frank—“are going down there. I want you with the Jaguaros when they brace the bastard and find out who jacked our load, and I want you with them when they get it back and into the Zetas’ hands in less than five days. If it’s a close call in timing and the Zees give Mateo any shit about a late delivery of just a few hours, I want you to remind them who sells the Jaguaros the guns they sell to the Zetas. They should be made to understand that any disagreement they have with the Jaguaros could become a problem with us and therefore a problem with one of their main lines of arms supply.”
“Maybe we should call them motherfuckers while we’re at it,” Frank says, deadpan. “Just to make extra sure we piss them off enough to kill us on the spot.”
The word comes from Mateo the following afternoon. He tells us the rat’s in Monterrey, holed up at his brother’s house. Mateo’s taking off from the capital in twenty minutes with a three-man team in a company Learjet. He gives us the coordinates and code letters of a private airfield on the outskirts of Monterrey. He’ll take care of our landing clearance, but he won’t wait there for us longer than an hour.
Frank and I have been ready to go since last night. We’ve got our Mexican documents—passports, driver’s licenses, gun carry permits, and ID badges as employees of Toltec Seguridad, a private security business owned by the Mexican Wolfes and headquartered in Cuernavaca, its high-powered legal department always prepared to render whatever assistance we might require. We slip into shoulder holsters holding Beretta nines, put on ultralight waterproof windbreakers to conceal them, and grab our ever-ready gym bags holding short-trip essentials, three extra twenty-round magazines, and a pistol suppressor, what the movies like to call a “silencer.” We call ours a “Quickster” because it’s custom-made for us by Jimmy Quick, who is a firearms genius. Though it’s only three and a half inches long, roughly half the length of most suppressors, it muffles a gunshot better than the bigger ones. And it’s a lot easier to carry a Quickster-equipped pistol on your person than one with a standard-sized suppressor.
A driver takes us out to the Spur Aviation Company’s airstrip and hangars, where Wolfe Associates keeps its two twin-prop aircraft, one a four-passenger model, one that carries six. Harry Mack’s provided us with the smaller one. The pilot is Jimmy Ray Matson, an amiable, red-haired young man out of Mississippi who claims to be twenty-six but doesn’t look old enough to drive a car. He’s an ace pilot and has ferried us before, and he’s already got the engines running when we climb aboard. The cockpit’s in open view of the cabin, and Jimmy Ray—dressed as usual in denim shirt and pants, hiking boots, and a gray Confederate army cap—greets us with “How do, fellers, good to see ya.” He puts on his earphones, tells the tower we’re ready, and in minutes we’re airborne.
Mexico City is about three times farther from Monterrey than we are, but a twin-prop is no Learjet and Mateo got the jump on us. He’ll get there before we do.
The sun has just begun to settle behind the mountains when the little airfield appears below us, Monterrey spread out in the near distance beyond it. There are two runways, three hangars, and a two-story building containing the control tower. A Learjet is on the apron, four men standing next to the plane. The only other people in sight are two guys in mechanic overalls at the entrance to one of the hangars. We touch down and taxi up close to the apron. Three of the men get into the Lear and one starts toward us. I recognize him as Mateo. Officially, he’s chief of security for various of the Mexican Wolfes’ legitimate businesses. Under the name of Mateo Dos Santos, he’s also the operations chief of the Jaguaros.
We lower the cabin stairs, and as we exit the plane Mateo calls out, “Tell your pilot he can refuel at that truck by the far hangar, then go home! His flight’s cleared!” He has to shout for us to hear him over the rumbling idle of our plane’s engines and the high whine of the Learjet as it turns about on the apron to face the runway. Frank leans into the cabin and relays the instructions to Jimmy Ray, who yells back, “Okeydoke!”
We each embrace Mateo in turn and he says, “Excellent timing! We haven’t been here half an hour! Soon as you guys started making your approach, I told my pilot to fire up the jet again! Come on, let’s get aboard! I’ll tell you everything on the way!”
As the Learjet levels off at cruising altitude, the last of the day’s light is deep red along the mountain ridges on our left and the black earth below is showing small clusters of town lights. In Spanish, Mateo has introduced us to his three-man team as Francisco and Rodolfo. His guys are a big black dude unimaginatively nicknamed El Negro, small and bucktoothed Conejo, and burly Gancho, whose name indubitably derives from the chrome hook he has in lieu of a left hand. El Negro carries a zippered bag strapped across his chest. Mateo sees me looking at it and says in English, “Mufflers, flex cuffs, duct tape, other essentials.”
He tells us that the Jaguaros’ intelligence people searched through Donasio Corona’s prison files, then through the civic records of every place he’s ever lived or been jailed, then looked up every relative or friend of his mentioned in any of those records. They came up with only four known friends who aren’t dead. Three of them are in prison, the fourth’s a paraplegic who lives with his mother.
“Donasio’s only living kin,” Mateo says, “are a sister in Oaxaca—she’s a deaf widow with several children—and a brother, Luis, who’s been arrested for robbery a few times but only been in prison once, a two-year fall. He got out about four months ago. Lives in a run-down barrio just outside Monterrey. Holds the registration on an old Chevy pickup. All that information came to me this morning. I had a spider stake out Luis’s place, and he wasn’t on lookout three hours before he calls and tells me he saw Donasio come out of the house and get something from the truck. Talk about shit for brains, hiding at his brother’s, like that wouldn’t be one of the first places we’d look. I called a couple of my Monterrey guys and gave them Luis’s address and truck plate number and told them to go there and hold both the fuckers till I arrive. In the interest of time, I also told them what I wanted to know from Donasio and how to radio the plane if they got that information while I was still in the air. Promised them a bonus if they did. Well, they don’t waste time, these guys, and we were making our descent into Monterrey when they called me with their report. They’d gone to Luis’s place, showed him police ID, and went inside just as Donasio came out of the kitchen with a beer in his hand. Wham-bam, they get them both on the floor and handcuffed. They ask Donasio who jacked the arms shipment at Laguna Madre the night before last, and he says he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. So they drag him into the kitchen and get a cleaver and hack off his thumb, then roll a hand towel for him to bite on and stifle his howling, and they wrap up his wound with another one. They ask him again who did the hijack and he starts blabbing nonstop. His brother, too. Didn’t take long to get the whole story, which is short and simple. Not long before Luis got out of prison, he met a guy who’s a member of Los Sangreros, a street gang working out of Juárez and El Paso, Bunch of young bucks with a rep as up-and-coming. To impress the guy, Luis brags to him about his brother who makes gun-smuggling pickups for some big league Mexico City gang, and the guy says he’ll pass that on to his boss, who’s always in the market. A week or two after Luis gets out of the pen, the Sangrero boss, guy named Miguel Soto, gets in touch with him. Says he’d like to talk to Luis’s brother about a gun deal, and Luis arranges a meet in Mexico City. Donasio tells Soto he works for a band of smugglers he won’t name but that mainly deals in U.S. Army weapons, and Soto says that’s good. Thing is, he tells Donasio, he’s convinced that most gun smugglers are greedy bastards who gouge their buyers, and he’d rather rip them off than let them fuck him over. He offers Donasio ten grand American for nothing more than a solid lead on a smuggle transfer. Donasio says he’ll be in touch, and then a couple of days before the Boca Larga run he calls Soto and says he’s got something good for him. They meet again and Donasio tells him he wants fifteen grand, ten up front. And, because he knows we’re going to find out pretty fast it was him who sold us out, he wants a job with the Sangreros, plus some fake ID and a place to live in El Paso. Soto says yeah, sure, no sweat. He sends one of his guys out to the car and he comes back with a money belt holding ten gees. Soto tells Donasio he’ll get the other five right after the hijack when they pick him up at Luis’s place on their way back to the border. In exchange, Donasio gives Soto a packet of information—descriptions of Boca Larga and of the little trail to it, hand-drawn maps, an estimated timetable of the drop—all the necessary details. Soto tells him welcome to the Sangreros and they’ll see him at Luis’s in two days.”
“And Donasio swallowed it?” Frank says. “They’d pick him up at Luis’s and pay him another five? Take him into the gang? Hide him in El Paso?”
“I tell you, cousin, the number of dumb shits in the world is doubling by the day. And get this. The ten grand was counterfeit. And very poorly made, as Donasio found out when he tried to exchange some of the Bennies for Mexican currency. The bank teller did a little chem test on a couple of the bills right in front of him and Donasio saw the smears and knew that wasn’t good. The teller told him to wait just a minute and went to the manager’s desk. The manager took a look at the bills and over at Donasio, then picked up a phone. Donasio figured the money’s queer and the cops are coming and he hauls ass. He went to another bank and told a teller he’d received a gringo hundred in payment of a gambling debt and wanted to be sure it was good. The teller tested it and laughed. So there he was, with all these hundreds not worth the cheap-ass ink and paper it took to print them and with us about to start hunting for him. And what’s he do? Goes to hide at his brother’s. Told my guys he thought it’d be a safe place because his brother didn’t have anything to do with the hijack so why would anybody look for him. My guys laughed in his face. I told them they’ll get the bonus.”
“And Donasio?” I say.
“Yeah. Well, he and Luis got relocated to another hiding place.”
“Another hiding place?” Frank says.
“Underground hideout.”
We get it. A grave.
“And we’re going to the border?” I say.
“Juárez. Our web guys ran down Soto and got an address. No picture, but we have a description.” He takes a little notebook from his jacket and flips a few pages. “Twenty-four years old. Five-nine, one-forty-five. Crew cut, clean-shaven, got a white scar down one side of his mouth. I’ve notified Charlie we’re on the way to brace the son of a bitch.”
We touch down at a regional airport just south of the city. The night’s hot. We go through the little terminal and find a pair of dark green Durango SUVs with drivers standing by parked one behind the other at the curb. Mateo dismisses the drivers and he and Frank and I get in the lead Durango, Mateo driving, and head into town, the other Durango staying close behind us. A green-lit dashboard screen shows a street map of Juárez with a yellow route laid out on it, courtesy of the Jaguaros’ info web. When the techs got Soto’s address, they drew up the route to it from the airport and downloaded it as a superimposition over the vehicle’s city map. The traffic is heavy, the going slow.
“It’s a nice house, nice neighborhood, but way below the security of the big chiefs,” Mateo says. “Soto’s not big enough yet to have to live on high alert or anyway not rich enough to do it. He doesn’t have guards or dogs, so we won’t have to cowboy our way in. Besides a maid, the only ones who live with him are his brother Julio, who’s in the gang, too, and both their girlfriends. Lot of trees along the street, plenty of shadow cover. Front gate’s got a pushbutton lock and our guys got the code from the contractor records. Same for the front-door lock. The maid’s quarters are just off the kitchen but, lucky for us and luckier for her, she always gets Sunday off to visit her family and won’t be back till tomorrow morning. The four bedrooms are all in a row on the second floor, all the light switches on the wall just inside the door and on the left. We’ll park at the sidewalk in front of the house. Gancho will cover the front gate and courtyard. Conejo’s got the lower floor. Me, Negro, and the two of you will take the upstairs.”
We attach suppressors to our pistols.
Soto’s property is protected by a high stone wall topped with glass shards fixed in cement. The walkway entrance gate is fashioned of steel bars with spear points. Mateo taps the numerical code into the gate lock and there’s a soft click. Guns out, we pass through the gate and follow the walkway across the courtyard and to the front door. A few touches to the door lock’s keypad and we’re in the house. The lower floor is softly lighted and the air-conditioning’s going strong. We cross the living room and pause at the bottom of the stairs. There are muffled sounds from the second floor—recorded voices, snatches of sound track music. They’re watching TV, maybe a video. We go up the stairway as cautiously as cats.
The TV’s louder now and emitting sounds of gunfire and Spanish dialogue. They’re coming from the room at the end of the hall, its doorway fully open but only faintly and flickeringly lit, the TV probably the only light within. We take a look into each of the first three rooms by turn, silently opening each door, switching on the light, guns ready, and find all of them unoccupied. We come to the open door and Mateo very slowly leans into it for a peek, then backs us down the hall a little way before whispering that there’s four of them in there, two guys, two women, all in one bed against the far left side of the room, watching a big TV on the opposite wall. He tells us how we’ll work it, then leads us back to the room. He takes another look inside, then Frank and I follow him in, all of us holding close to the wall. El Negro brings up the rear and stays by the light switch. The glow of the TV is sufficient for us to see that the two guys are wearing only boxer shorts, the girls only panties. I recognize the Spanish-dubbed movie they’re watching. Heat. De Niro and Pacino. Good flick.
Halfway to the bed, Mateo pauses and taps his gun against the wall, and Negro clicks on the lights. The girls let out short shrieks, and we dart out from the wall to form a firing line facing the bed as they all jerk around to gape big-eyed at the row of us pointing pistols at them. The girls are nicely hootered, and there’s no mistaking Miguel Soto with that mouth scar. He says, What the fuck—but Mateo tells him to shut up and orders them all to put their hands on top of their heads and they do. Julio looks as scared as the girls. Frank goes to the TV wall and yanks out a plug, and the screen goes dark and silent. If you’re curious about the ending, he says to the couples on the bed, the cop kills the robber.
Mateo tells the girls to push the covers and all the pillows to the floor, and they do it. He stirs the bedclothes with his foot to assure there are no weapons in them, then asks Soto if there are any firearms in the room and he says in the closet. Negro opens it and collects the two shoulder holsters hanging on door hooks, each one holding a large revolver. Mateo opens the window and sticks his head out and looks down, then tells Negro to drop the guns into the bushes below.
We flex-cuff the four of them with their hands at their backs, then gag and blindfold the girls and Julio with duct tape, but not Soto. We place Julio in an easy chair and tape his ankles to the forelegs. Mateo tells Negro to take the girls into the adjoining bedroom, put them on the bed, and tape their hands and feet to the bedposts. Negro hustles them away.
Mateo walks around the room, looking it over like he’s thinking of buying the place. He picks up a wad of currency from atop the dresser, seems to weigh it with his hand, then puts it back. He holsters his pistol and takes out a switchblade and snicks out the blade. Where’s the Boca Larga shipment? he says. If I have to ask you again, it’ll be after your dick’s on the floor.
Soto stares at him. Then at me and Frank. He looks like he’s considering every possible lie as fast as he can and not finding any of them propitious. Corona ratted, huh? he says. I shoulda shot the whoreson.
Mateo starts toward him with the blade brandished.
In the Suburban in the garage, Soto blurts out.
What garage? Where?
My garage. Soto juts his chin toward the rear of the house.
We look around at each other and smile. Sometimes it’s this easy.
Mateo puts away the knife. You and your brother and who else did the hijack? he asks.
Oh, hell . . . Cheto and Gaspar.
Frank casually looks at Mateo and strokes his mustache, his sign that he thinks Soto’s lying about the names. He’s the best I know at perceiving a lie. The best Mateo knows, too. Calls him a human polygraph.
Where are they? Mateo asks. Cheto and Gaspar.
Across the river in El Paso somewhere. I don’t know where they live, exactly. They don’t want me to know. Those fuckers don’t trust anybody, not even their own chief.
Another mustache stroke from Frank. Soto’s protecting his other two guys. He’s a loyal chief. There’s that to say for him.
El Negro returns, and Mateo takes him aside and whispers to him and they take out their phones. Mateo taps a button on his phone and Negro’s buzzes and he swipes the screen and nods. Keep it open, Mateo tells him, and they pocket the phones. Negro remains in the room with Julio as Mateo, Frank, and I take Soto, still cuffed and in his underwear, downstairs and out the back door.
We cross the high-walled rear patio to the garage, and Soto tells us the numbers to tap into the garage door lock. We go in and turn on the interior light to reveal a mud-smeared black Suburban with dusty black glass. Been driven hard over rough country and not cleaned up. We go around to its rear and I open the lift gate and there it all is—the unopened crates of carbines, machine guns, ammo. Plus a pair of loose M4s. I eject the magazine from one of them, make sure there’s no round in the chamber, take a whiff of its muzzle, and nod at Mateo that it’s recently been fired. Then I give the other one the nose test and say, “This one, too.” There’s also a small package, a carton wrapped in brown paper and sealed with packing tape and without any markings on it. It’s of a size to hold a few trade paperback books but feels lighter than that.
Mateo asks what’s in it and Soto says, Movies. DVDs. The chief likes movies. I was gonna give them to him.
Chief? Mateo says. I thought you were the chief of this bunch.
I am. I meant the chief of the Sinas. You know. El Chubasco.
