The Rules of Wolfe, page 8
The cane rustles loudly as the other one starts coming around the front of the Escalade in a hurry and Eddie hears the Glock fire twice and the man cries out and the pistol cracks twice more and there’s a soft thud.
Eddie backtracks through the stalks until he’s within a few feet of the front of the Escalade and sees a man in a Houston Astros baseball cap and a yellow guayabera shirt, its front gleaming with bright blood. The man sits against the front bumper, chin on chest, legs doubled under him, arms lax at his sides. A MAC beside him.
Eddie strains to hear whatever he can but there is only the croak of a nearby crow. Keeping his eyes on the man, he says, “Miranda.”
“Chacho?” Her voice small.
There is no other sound. He’s convinced now there were only the two of them.
I’m coming out, he says. Don’t shoot me.
Keeping the M-16 pointed at the man’s head, he steps over to him. On one inner forearm is a well-wrought tattoo of the Holy Virgin cradling an AK, and on the other, above the wrist, is a black circle the size of a nickel with short black rays extending from it. The sign of Luna Negra, the Company’s elite cadre of gunmen. The man has two distinct wounds in his chest and his arm is bloody from another. Eddie puts his foot to the man’s shoulder and pushes him over on his side, the cap tumbling off to reveal the wound in his neck where a bullet passed through it.
Miranda comes out of the stalks, holding the Glock out before her, mouth slack, eyes wide and focused on the dead man.
Eddie sidles out of her line of fire and slings the rifle on his shoulder, then shows her how to place her finger on the trigger guard to prevent an accidental discharge and gently pushes down her hand so the pistol points at the ground.
I was so scared, she says. She examines the crotch of her jeans. I thought I wet myself.
Doesn’t look it, he says. Listen, you did real good. Hit him every shot.
You said shoot till he falls and doesn’t move.
Yeah, you sure did that.
Her eyes again fix on the dead man. I don’t . . .
What? he says.
What do you . . . I don’t know . . . feel? She gives him a quick look as if she’s afraid he’s going to ask what she means.
I feel a lot luckier than these pricks.
She wipes at her nose and nods awkwardly. Yes, she says. Yes. Me too. Then something settles in her eyes and her mouth tightens—and she kicks the man’s leg and mutters, Pig. And slips the Glock into her jeans.
Eddie smiles and thinks, Some girl. Grab our stuff, he says. We gotta move.
As she hurries off to the Escalade, he takes up the MAC and detects no smell on it of recent firing. He removes the magazine of .45-caliber cartridges and judges by its heft that it holds its thirty-round capacity or nearly so, then reinserts it. He’s handled a few MACs and always liked the gun, though some guys he knows consider it practically an antique. They come with a retractable stock but this one lacks it. He pulls up the man’s guayabera to get at his pockets and sees that, like the other Sina, he has a cell phone on his belt. The same model. He withdraws it from the holster and opens it and turns it on and taps a sequence of buttons he was taught by an aunt who knows about such things.
Shit, he says.
What? she says, returning with the tote bag.
It’s got a tracker, he says. And begins pressing another combination of buttons.
What’s that?
It lets somebody somewhere else know exactly where we are.
They know where we are? She looks all about in alarm.
He smiles, staring at the phone. No.
But you said—
It’s turned off.
He looks at the dead man and then toward where the other one lay. I get it, he says. They didn’t want their own guys to know where they were.
But why not? The more who help to chase—
Because there’s a reward for us and they didn’t want to share it. Except with the two cops. And the only reason they called them into it was to clear the way, give them cop cover.
How do you know there is a reward?
If you were the Boss wouldn’t you offer one for whoever killed your brother?
He shuts off the phone and closes it and shoves it into her bag, then considers the phone holster on the man’s belt. No need to let whoever finds him know for sure he had a phone. He removes the holster and adds it to her tote, then goes through the man’s pockets and takes his money and the keys to the Durango.
He leads her at a clumsy trot over the crushed stalks back to the field alley. He emerges from the cane and sees the Durango ten yards to his left at the end of parallel brake ruts in the dirt. And then on his right sees a crouching uniformed cop not ten yards away, raising a pistol at him. Even as he’s cocking and bringing up the MAC, Eddie thinks, He’s got me.
But no. The cop’s gun barrel bobs slightly and he looks confused in the instant before Eddie’s burst hits him just above the eyes and sprays the top of his head onto the dirt behind him and he falls backward.
Eddie goes to him and picks up the pistol. A blued Taurus 9-millimeter with the safety lever still on. He wonders if the cop was unused to the gun or simply panicked and forgot.
Miranda comes up and makes a face at the sight of the man’s destroyed head.
The one who shot at us, Eddie says. Car must’ve got stuck in the field. He should’ve walked off the other way.
He puts the Taurus and the MAC in her bag and then drags the body into the cane while she stands lookout in the alley. Then they hustle to the Durango and get going.
He can’t believe nobody else has shown up. Which doesn’t mean they’re not on their way—even though there’s no show of dust from the road on the other side of the fields.
Luck, luck, luck, Eddie thinks. Talent is a very good thing to have, but absolutely nothing beats good luck. There’s a rule of some sort about it.
p
They come to a cross alley and turn west. A few miles farther, they exit the sugar field at a road leading to a junction with the highway.
She has kept silent ever since they got into the Durango, smoking one cigarette after another. He wonders if she’s dwelling on how close she has come to getting killed in recent hours and is perhaps wishing there might be some way to make her peace with the Company.
As if she’s heard his thoughts, she turns and says, All I want is to get to the other side.
Well, yeah, he says, a little puzzled. That’s the whole idea.
No . . . I mean I don’t expect anything from you once we get across. I just . . . I want you to know that.
He looks at her. Then back at the road. He knows that when a woman says she doesn’t expect anything from you, you can bet the ranch she damn well does. No response is best if they let you get away with it.
I only hope you don’t run out on me before we get across, she says.
It’s not a remark that can be ignored. I wouldn’t do that, he says.
It would not be so strange, she says. Men do that.
Yeah? Well . . . not me. And not your father. And not . . . what’s-his-name. Gabo. Hell, neither man you’ve told me about has run out on you.
No. They both died.
He can’t read her face. Well I promise you I’ll do my best not to die. All right?
Thank you, she says. And half a minute later says, You did come a little close back there, you know.
Yeah, well . . . so did you.
She nods and looks out the window and then back at him. But here we still are, she says.
Damn right. As somebody I know once said, they have to catch us before they can kill us.
They exchange a grin. Then both look away and then back at each other. And erupt into laughter. Into huge convulsive guffaws. She stamps the dashboard with her feet. He pounds the steering wheel with his palm and nearly runs off the road—and they laugh even harder and it takes a while for them to gain control of themselves, cramped bellies aching.
p
At the highway junction is a small plaza comprising a gasoline station, garage, and café. He sends her into the café for a takeout bag of food.
While she’s at it, he takes out his mini Swiss pocketknife and removes the back cover of the Sina phone. And there the tracker is, nestled in the array of circuit board components. On casual inspection it looks like any one of dozens of other parts, but on careful scrutiny he spies a miniscule pink dot near one end of it and then knows what kind of tracker it is and is impressed. Made for insertion in a cell phone, it’s nothing but a directional signal with a distance readout. Nothing uncommon about it, except that according to his Aunt Laurel—who owns and manages Delta Instruments & Graphics and knows everything there is to know about these things—its signal is transmitted in a broken pattern. Frequency fragmentation, she called it, something like that. Almost any receiver within range can pick up the signal fragments but they will seem to be coming from different directions. As she explained it, the only way to “descramble” the signal is by connecting a second receiver to the first one as a sort of ancillary booster and calibrating them to operate in tandem on the same screen. But because the tracker’s signal is configured according to minute differentials in a given phone model’s circuitry, the calibration varies not only from one brand of phone to another but also from model to model of each brand. Without knowing the calibration code for the receivers and both the brand and the model of the phone the tracker is attached to, it’s impossible to tune in its signal. That’s the device’s big selling point. The thing had showed up on the black market a year or so ago but nobody knew who made it. The shipping points were from all over the world. Laurel thought it was some maverick nerd somewhere, but because the batch she bought—which came with a thick booklet of calibration codes—was from a longtime associate in Taiwan, at Delta Instruments they called it the Buddha. She’d paid a pretty penny for them, but they were in turn sold to Mexican buyers at a hundred-percent markup. The next time Laurel tried to buy some, however, her Chinese associate said he was unable to get any more. Rumor had it that Israeli agents had tracked down the maker and confiscated his entire supply, but it was only a rumor. Eddie grins at the thought that the tracker in this phone might have come from a Delta sale.
He puts the phone back together and returns it to her tote, then checks the map. Guaymas is less than fifty miles up the highway. The highway forks a few miles south of the city, one branch passing through the town, the other looping around it but passing through a toll station. Forget the loop.
Miranda returns with a whole grilled chicken, a half dozen cheese empanadas, some roasted ears of corn, a variety of small pastries, two big paper cups of coffee. The aromas are delectable.
But he has spotted a helicopter low in the sky and coming from the direction of Obregón. Maybe it’s a commercial craft. Or maybe not.
He cranks up the Durango and wheels out of the plaza lot, an empanada in one hand, and turns onto a frontage road that a mile farther on merges into the northbound traffic of the federal highway.
9
The Boss
That morning the Boss receives a summoned Elizondo Morales in his office. The room is almost chilly with air-conditioning, yet Morales’s face shines with sweat. He confirms for the Boss that he hired Porter back in March. The kid was brought to him by Alberto Desmayo, chief of the crew that collects arms purchases throughout the central zone. Desmayo had met Porter at Patria Chica, a large ranch in San Luis Potosí state belonging to the Little family.
The Boss knows who the Littles are, though he has never met any of them in person. A clan descended from an American who settled in Mexico long ago, hence the surname. Even as they prospered in beef cattle and thoroughbred horses, they have also trafficked in an assortment of illegal trades, mainly arms brokering, and mainly for a Mexico City group called Los Jaguaros. By way of the Littles, the Company has been buying guns from the Jaguaros since before he became the Boss. He has never met any of them, either.
Morales explains that Desmayo has been making the arms pickups from Patria Chica for three years and has come to know the Littles well. On his most recent trip there, they introduced Porter to him as a distant in-law from Tampico who’d had to leave there a few weeks before because of some trouble with the law. While they were loading the arms, the kid asked Desmayo if there was any chance of getting a job with the Sinas. The Littles seemed surprised that he was willing to leave them, but Porter said he wanted to do something more exciting than work with cows and horses and sometimes load guns on trucks. Desmayo told the kid the only Company jobs he’d heard of lately were for a couple of guards at a ranch the Company chiefs at times use for special parties. He warned him it was a shitty job, way the hell in the desert, no drinking or phones allowed, no women on the premises.
Morales interrupts himself to assure the Boss that he means no offense in his description of the ranch job but is only repeating what Desmayo told the kid. The Boss shows no expression and gestures for him to continue.
When Porter said he wanted the job anyway, Desmayo told him it was of course required that a guard be a good shot with a rifle, and he would have to prove it before he was hired. So the kid got a rifle from a truck and showed how well he could shoot. Put on a hell of a show, according to Desmayo, who agreed to take Porter back to Culiacán with him and recommend him for the job. The Littles tried to talk him out of going, but the kid was set on it.
So Desmayo brought him to me, Morales says, and I made him show me that he can shoot, and I have to say, he’s a deadeye. He looked pretty strong and healthy, so I saw no reason not to hire him. I am truly very sorry to hear of what happened to El Segundo, my chief. When I was informed of it this morning, I immediately sent a copy of Porter’s file to Tiburón. Believe me, if I’d had the least suspicion that Porter—
The Boss raises a hand to silence him. He has been weighing in his mind whether Morales made an error in hiring the kid. It is Morales’s good fortune that he has decided he did not. He has determined that Morales could not possibly have known Porter would be trouble. He thanks Morales for his report and tells him to go back to work. And nearly sighs at the great relief on Morales’s face. How can a man bear to live in such fear of another?
He considers having the transport chief, the Desmayo fellow, brought to him for a talk. Then decides against that too. The kid had worked for the Littles, which was recommendation enough for Desmayo to in turn recommend him to Morales. Nothing questionable about it. And the Littles would never have let the kid come here if they’d known he was a crazy bastard capable of jeopardizing their ties with the Company. Money always comes first with them. It’s in their gringo blood. Desmayo could not know anything about Porter except for what the Littles told him. Could not know anything he should have told Morales but did not.
So does the Boss decide.
p
Shortly past noon he receives a call from Tiburón, who with customary straightforwardness reports that Porter was twice spotted driving north and was both times pursued and both times escaped. In the first instance, two Company men were killed in a multi-vehicle smashup in Ciudad Obregón. In the second, two Company men and two state cops in the pay of the Company chased him into a sugarcane field north of town where all four were later found dead. Witnesses to the beginning of the second chase said a police car was after a black SUV and then another black SUV sped after the cops, but none of the witnesses could identify the make of either of the civilian vehicles. A police helicopter was dispatched and spotted the cop car and one of the SUVs in the cane field and directed a squadron of cops to the scene. The SUV was the Boss’s Escalade—whose registration is in the name of an orphan child who died five years ago in Mexico City. The police interpretation is that the cops got caught in a fight between rival gangs. They think the two cops tried to call for help but their radio malfunctioned. They have identified the dead guys in the cane field as ex-convicts with extensive records but are unaware that they were in the Company’s employ. They know nothing about the ones who got away other than they were in a black SUV.
All this information, Tiburón tells him, derives from police reports that were copied to the Company’s underboss in Ciudad Obregón as soon as they were filed at police headquarters. Copies are en route to the Boss. The Obregón underboss apprised Tiburón that the two Sinas in the cane field had been driving a Dodge Durango, and so Porter obviously fled in it, though by now he may have switched to another vehicle.
Tiburón has also spoken with the head of the Little family, who expressed dismay on learning of Porter’s murder of Enrique and asked that his condolences be conveyed to the Boss. He assured Tiburón that nobody at Patria Chica had heard from Porter or expected to hear from him, but if the kid should make contact they would let the Sinas know right away. The Little boss said their kinship to the kid was too remote for it to warrant any disturbance of their long association with the Company.
In short, Tiburón says, the Littles see it as Porter’s fuckup and Porter’s problem. The kid’s on his own.
The Boss smiles tightly in appreciation of his own prescience.
Tiburón has posted Company men at every airport and train depot and major bus station north of Guaymas and between the seacoast and the Sierras, and the word has gone out to every private airfield. But, he tells the Boss, he believes Porter has anticipated all of that and will stick to the road and try for the border. All of the Company’s lookouts on the coast and along the mountain roads have been alerted and there are men at every toll station. But if Porter’s as smart as he seems to be, Tiburón is sure he will avoid those riskier courses and will head for the backcountry roads. If he gets into them, there’s not much chance of intercepting him before he reaches the frontier. On the other hand, he’ll have to take it a lot slower on those trails and probably won’t reach the border till late tomorrow. The only real question is where. The kid was with the Company long enough to know how easily they can cover the main highway exits and toll stations, the ports of entry. He must know how stupid it would be to try for California on the only road through the Altar Desert. He’s probably figured out the only choice he’s got is to cross somewhere between Nogales and Sonoyta. That still gives him a door some 125 miles wide, but it’s the worst part of the desert and he’ll have to cross it on foot. Maybe he’s crazy enough to try it on his own, but his only real chance is with a guide. His picture has gone out to all the known coyotes in Sasabe and Sonoyta. The Company is of course not the only organization smuggling drugs and migrants in that region—the Baja outfit and its undergangs persist in their encroachments, and God alone knows how many independents are still at it despite the dozen or more of them killed in warning this past year—but word of the fat reward for him has been spread all along the line, and Tiburón has ordered lookouts assigned to every hotel, motel, and private residence where coyotes are known to assemble their chickens in readiness to take them across.
