The Rules of Wolfe, page 22
Eddie looks over his shoulder and sees him a few feet away, regarding them with a small smile and again holding the rifle like a pistol. Pointing it at them.
Better move your head, boy, he tells Eddie. I haven’t been shooting real good today.
Please, she says. Let him . . . kiss me. . . . Please.
Kiss you? Pico says. Jesus, girl, you in a movie or what?
Ah, man, Eddie gasps.
Pico lowers the muzzle and grins. I am such a fool for romance, he says. Do it quick. Too bad you can’t make it a last fuck. Be more fun to watch.
Eddie pulls himself closer to her and rises on his elbows and she partly turns her face up to his with a whimper. He puts his left hand to her cheek and kisses her gently. His back blocks Pico’s view of his right hand sliding under her, feeling the heat of her blood. She groans.
“Ya, basta,” Pico says. Move your head, kid.
Eddie ends the kiss and gingerly starts to shift himself out of the line of fire—then whips out the Glock she lacked the strength to withdraw and shoots Pico three times in the span of a second, the first bullet hitting him just above the heart, the second in the junction of the collarbone, the third passing through an eye and removing a portion of the back of his head. As he falls, Pico reflexively triggers a round that ricochets off the stony earth a foot from Eddie’s head.
On the outcrop the big man jumps up with an expression of shocked rage. Eddie fires at him and part of the man’s left ear vanishes—and the pistol’s slide locks back, all bullets spent. The man starts to raise his rifle and then makes a jerky sidestep to the distant chirp of an automatic rifle and he drops out of Eddie’s sight.
Be dead, be dead, Eddie thinks.
The man yells, Mother . . . fuckers!
Eddie cannot think what to do. There is no cover he can crawl to. The man is wounded but maybe still capable of getting up and shooting him from up there. He’s got me, Eddie thinks. And waits.
Then comes the sound of an engine starting up on the other side of the outcrop and then a vehicle rumbling away.
43
Rudy and Frank
I’ve made only a couple of scans through the scope when I hear a distant rush of handgun poppings and a single rifle crack from somewhere ahead. I catch a movement of something at the rim of the outcrop as the scope passes over it and I cut back to it as the handgun pops again and I see the top half of a large figure silhouetted against the sky and I squeeze off a three-rounder. . . .
44
Eddie
He manages to get up and hops on one foot over to the thin man’s Remington police rifle, oblivious of his own outcries at the pain of his maimed shin. When he stoops to pick up the weapon he loses his balance and screams when he falls on the wound. Then he’s up again and hopping over to the outcrop, shrieking like a berserker. He flings the rifle up to the crest and then climbs the slope on both hands and one foot.
He sees the orange Land Rover winding away through the broken badland, angling around toward the border. Then looks northward and is puzzled not to see the vehicle that had been coming. And then it backs out of an arroyo, a dark SUV he would guess at two hundred yards, and it starts coming again.
He spots the Rover guy’s rifle lying on the ground. A Sako. He hops over to it, whimpering, and carefully lowers himself to pick it up. He’ll do what he can against the ones coming, but if they’re going to kill him he can at least see to it right now that the one in the Rover doesn’t get away from them either.
He eases himself to a prone position, yowling with his pain, then takes up the Sako and chambers a round and braces the barrel on a rock to steady his sighting. He peers into the scope but his vision is hazed and he wipes away the pain tears and puts his eye to the scope again.
He’s certain the Rover has bulletproof glass and so concentrates on the tires. He fires and the left rear of the Rover abruptly sags. Yes! He chambers a round and wipes his eyes again and resights and with the next shot flattens the right-side back tire. The Rover presses on but its progress is perceptibly slowed, its weaving course more ungainly. He watches it in the scope and waits till it alters course enough to give him a sight line on a front tire. And with the next shot blows out the left one.
Still the thing drives on. Not gonna get too far on three flats, bubba, Eddie thinks, working the bolt. Then again, who knows? Better get that last one. But as he waits for a clear sight on the right front tire his focus begins to blur.
Don’t fade, he tells himself, don’t. . . .
His head slumps off the rifle stock and into the dirt.
45
Martillo
Oh, those cocksuckers! Those eaters of shit! Sons of mangy bitch whores!
A three-round burst, he’d heard it distinctly. M-4. Two hits. One in the left ass cheek which hurts plenty but the one through his lower ribs is the one he’s worried about. Kidney’s probably fucked. He’s known worse pain and the wound’s not a gusher, but it’s red enough it could be a nicked artery. Need a doc fairly soon. Otherwise he’d circle back right now and put all those cocksuckers—
Bam! The left rear tire collapses. Jesus. That’s gotta be Porter, the Sinas can’t be there yet. Fucking kid! Busted leg and kills Pico and still gets up there and—
Bam! The Rover’s right rear sags. Oh, you little bastard! You little rat cunt. Oh, you . . . He feels something on the side of his neck and puts his fingers to it and they come away bloody, then explores his left ear and learns a segment of it is missing. That little shit!
He would pay any price for the opportunity to teach Porter something about pain. But what chance of that? Those Sinas closing in will have the kid’s head in Culiacán before the sun sets.
Well, no matter, Martillo thinks. He’ll find out who they are, those bastards who shot him. Find them and at least get the satisfaction of giving them pain they’ve never even imagined.
Bam! The left front dips.
p
His fury is of some avail against the agony in his side as he wrestles the crippled Rover over the uncertain ground. But now the shredded tires have come off their rims one after another and he thinks this must be what it feels like to drive a very shitty tank. Not even a Rover’s going to get very far on three rims over ground like this. He calls Gómez on the satellite phone and the man makes him repeat himself several times even though the connection sounds clear enough to Martillo. He tells Gómez the coordinates of the border location where he can meet him, Gómez again making him repeat himself before finally saying he’s on his way.
Gómez will get him to a Sinas doctor in Nogales and that’ll be that. A little healing, then start hunting for the fuckers who shot him.
p
He’s driving over a series of rocky rises, from the crests of which he can now see the border fence just fifty, sixty yards ahead. The horizon already quivering with ground heat. Then he hits soft sand at the bottom of a rise and the Rover mires.
God damn it! Now he’s got to walk to the fence and wait in the sun for Gómez. He manages to get his door open but when he starts to step out the world tilts and he falls headlong.
What the hell? It takes all his effort to sit up. His hat. He needs his hat from the front seat. And his pistol. Hat and pistol and he’ll be set. Fucking desert sun. Ni modo. Another fifty yards and there you are. Fence. Border. He tries to stand and falls over. . . .
It’s a labor to open his eyes. The lids gummy. His right cheek burning in the sand. He can’t make sense of the black shape he’s seeing in front of him. Then recognizes it as the horizontal form of a huge raven standing very close to his face, black feathers gleaming. And now another beside it. He hears the raucous calls of still others close by. The two ravens step closer, black eyes bright, bills parted. One of them croaks and Martillo would swear it said, “Cuato.” Then the other bobs its head at him and Martillo’s left eye goes black.
He gasps in shock and tries to lift his head but is unable. Can shift it only somewhat to better see with the remaining eye as the other raven pecks into the left socket too and he sees the red slime extracted on its beak. He wants to scream at them. Frighten them away. But he cannot summon the breath. . . .
p
Gómez will not find any sign of Martillo at the coordinates he was given. But he will have in mind that there was great pain in Martillo’s voice and perhaps the man was not very clear in the head. So he will drive on, slowly, keeping a sharp eye, and after a time will see at a distance the low swirl of buzzards. He will finally arrive at a spot on the fence about fifty yards south of a high sandy rise, behind which the buzzards are alighting and where ravens are hopping about. He will consider the situation for a minute or two, then turn his car around and head back for Nogales. And all the way back he will be looking forward to his wife getting home from her job at the maquiladora and to kissing her and taking great pleasure in whatever she will cook for their supper.
p
Seventeen days will pass before anyone discovers the Rover. A trio of Papago scavengers on one of their regular truck searches along the most isolate areas of the border will happen upon it. You never know what you might find jettisoned by border crossers in these badlands, or, sometimes better still, in the packs and pockets of the dead. The Rover will be their largest bonanza in years. The vehicle in excellent condition but for the lack of three tires. A pair of Magnum revolvers. Two tracker receivers. Four binoculars, two of them infrared. A satellite phone. A Rolex wristwatch and excellent boots and a fine suit needing only a thorough cleansing to rid it of the various stains imposed on it by the half-withered corpse. Nearly five thousand pesos and more than seven hundred dollars in its pockets. Four gold teeth in the dead man’s mouth. After stripping the body they will bury it, but on their return from Tucson with the tires and a generator pump to inflate them they will find that the corpse has been exhumed by coyotes and reduced to a ragged thing of bones hung with a few scraps of black flesh. Even the skull largely flensed. They will not reinter these remains, which a few hours later are all that will be left behind in the fiery light of the setting sun.
46
Rudy and Frank
We find six of them behind the rise, all shot, five of them dead—four men, one woman. The ants already busy at eyes and mouths. The dead woman missing half her head. Man, those Magnums. The other woman’s still breathing but hit bad and unconscious. Younger than the dead one. Maybe the one he was running with.
There’s a Glock lying there and I pick it up and tuck it in my belt. The only other weapon in sight is a Remington cop rifle in a guy’s hand. Frank stands over him and says, “Look familiar?”
The dead man’s missing an eye and it takes me a second to recognize the bullethead Félix almost got into it with in Nogales. World’s smaller all the time. There’s a money belt beside him and I pick it up and see it’s holding a bunch of hundred-dollar bills, then fasten it around my waist.
Frank finds the tracker phone in a backpack we assume is Eddie’s.
But no Eddie.
Not till we go up on the outcrop and find him belly-down and unconscious, with a belt tourniquet above a shinbone that’s badly shot but still in one piece. His pulse strong, though, respiration good. A Sako rifle next to him, a pair of binoculars.
I scan with the glasses and spot an orange vehicle slowly moving northward. “It’s that Rover from Nogales,” I say. “Big fucker was driving, remember?”
“Yeah. Well, he’s the big fucker who gets away,” Frank says.
“Must’ve been him I shot. I know I hit him.”
“Well, there’s hitting and there’s hitting.”
I give him a look he ignores.
Eddie moans as I haul him upright, doing my best to keep his weight off the bad leg. Frank does what he can to help get him up on my shoulder. The kid’s solid and heavier than he looks. I hear him puke and feel it sop the back of my shirt at the waist.
I ease my way down the slope and then carry him over to the Cherokee and lay him on the back seat. He says something too slurred to catch, then his eyes open, red and glassy with pain. “Miranda,” he says. And passes out again.
Frank brings the Sako and the Remington and gets on the satellite to Félix, telling him as much as he can without getting too specific, in case of intercepts. But Félix is an old hand at improvised phone code and gets the picture pretty quick. He says he’s sure his man “T” can make the necessary arrangements and says he’ll get back to us quick as he can.
Now there’s only the girl. We go over to her and I tell Frank her name’s Miranda. If it’s her. Breathing shallow and raspy. Pulse weak. The round hit her in the back and punched out a hole under her left tit big enough to fit your fist in. God’s own wonder she’s still among the quick.
“Nothing to do,” I say.
Frank gives me a look of a sort I don’t often get from him.
“She’s lung-shot, Frankie. She won’t even make it to the car and you know it.”
“It’s probably her,” he says. “Tell me we should leave her while she’s still ticking. Let me hear you say that.”
I take all the care I can getting her into my arms, but she gives a deep groan, even as out as she is.
I’m almost to the Cherokee, her blood soaking warm through my clothes, when the feel of her changes. I stand there holding her while Frank searches her throat for a pulse. Then I set her down and go through her pockets. A switchblade and some Mex money but nothing in the way of ID.
The best we can do is cover her over with big rocks.
The others we leave to the scavengers.
I take off my shirt and toss it away. The dead guy nearest to being my size is the bullethead, so I strip him of his shirt and put it on. It smells like coal smoke.
p
We’re swaying and jarring eastward when Eddie says, “Hey?”
Frank turns in the shotgun seat and I crane my head to look at Eddie in the rearview.
“Miranda?” he says.
“I’m sorry, kid,” Frank says.
Eddie closes his eyes.
Eddie
He feels the reverberant earth passing under him, growling through the floor of the Cherokee like some badland spirit in a tremoring rage to get at him. He wants to weep. Howl. Wants to shoot something. But only lies there closed-eyed and tight-jawed in his red pain.
He considers yelling for them to stop, turn around, go back for her, take her with them. Bury her at sea. In the Gulf she would have loved.
So that her spirit won’t feel like it’s holding its breath until it can get back to where it belongs.
Then thinks how goddamn stupid he is. There isn’t any her anymore or even any spirit of her except in his head. And she’ll either stay there or she won’t.
And thinks how even stupider it is to believe there’s any possibility she might not stay there until there’s no more him either.
47
The Boss and Tiburón
In the company of El Tiburón, Flores, and a trio of bodyguards, the Boss exits his Culiacán headquarters through its double section of foyers and its triple sets of barred, electronically controlled doors with armed guards at each set. The five-story building bears a large sign identifying it as Relámpago Finanzas, SA and its network of security cameras is monitored round the clock by a crew in a room on the mezzanine.
The Boss has many things on his mind at present, among them the chafing lack of any word from Martillo about his search for Porter. Would it be such an inconvenience for the bastard to take a minute to call and say how the thing is going? If he has a lead on the kid? If he’s crossed into the north in pursuit of him? He’s not obligated to submit reports, no, but couldn’t he do it as a favor, a sign of respect, one man to another? Not that arrogant son of a bitch. Martillo may be the best at what he does, but the Boss has very nearly decided that he will not deal with the smug prick again.
They descend the wide stone steps from the building entrance to the cars waiting at the curb, the Boss’s car parked between the two bodyguard SUVs. A front-foyer guard pokes his head out the door and calls down to Tiburón that there’s a phone call for him from Mexico City that claims to be urgent. Does he want to come take it or have the security guys transfer it to his phone?
Tiburón pats his coat pockets and says to the Boss, Shit, I left it on my desk. I’ll meet you at the Cocina. He jogs back up the steps and into the building.
The lead SUV pulls out, the Boss’s Town Car behind it and followed closely by the rear guard vehicle. Almost every day the Boss has lunch in a private, well-guarded room at the Yaqui Cocina restaurant, a place in his old neighborhood and across the street from a police station whose every man is on the Sinas payroll. Each time they go there, his driver proceeds by a different one of a dozen routes, depending on which one Tiburón has told him to follow.
Tiburón prefers to take the call on his own phone and waits in the lobby for the security man to come down with it. Then he walks off a short way for privacy before saying, “Bueno.”
He expects it to be an underling assigned the job of making this call to detach him from the Boss’s party, but instead hears the familiar voice of the rabidly ambitious young man named Jaime Montón Delacruz, better known as El Chubasco. During recent weeks Tiburón has had a half dozen clandestine meetings and a number of phone talks with him, the upshot of which has been El Chubasco’s assurance of Tiburón’s imminent chieftainship of all Sinas operations between the border and Ciudad Obregón.
Today’s route is as you said? Chubasco asks.
Of course.
Good. I was certain it would be.
There are several seconds of silence and then Tiburón says, Is there something more?
Ah, you wonder why I’ve called. Well, simply to share the moment.
