The rules of wolfe, p.2
The Rules of Wolfe, page 2
Eddie and Neto were informed of the rules before they accepted the job, and when they arrived, they and their baggage were searched and the guard captain Jorge Santos advised them to take the rules very seriously. A guard under the influence of drugs or alcohol was an intolerable threat to security. The two guys they were replacing had been dismissed because the old couple had smelled liquor on them and made a phone call. The next day four security men arrived from Obregón and searched the guards’ quarters and found a bottle under a mattress. The guards admitted they’d sometimes take a drink in the room but swore neither of them had ever been drunk on the rancho or in the village. The man in charge only shrugged and he and another man took the guards away. The other two security men stayed behind to fill in for them until permanent replacements were sent. But because the Boss believed that ranch guards should be willing volunteers and would not have anyone assigned there who did not want the job, it was nearly three weeks before Eddie and Neto were selected as the replacements.
Neto said he thought the two guards deserved to lose their jobs but it galled him that the old couple had snitched. He said the guards should have told them they’d break their neck if they ever ratted on them.
Jorge Santos said it would be foolish to threaten the old ones. Like us, they must do as told, he said. And anyway, who do you think they are more afraid of, us or the Boss?
He told Eddie and Neto a story about one of the Boss’s nieces and a Company lawyer who was also an old friend. The niece and the lawyer went on a date one night to a notorious nightclub and both got very drunk. While they were dancing she stripped to her underwear as the crowd cheered her on and she ended up sucking the lawyer’s cock on the dance floor in front of everyone. When word of the incident reached the Boss the next day, he was embarrassed and extremely displeased. The lawyer was having lunch with some friends when he excused himself to go to the men’s room and that was the last anyone saw of him. It was rumored that he had been slowly towed behind a boat in the Sea of Cortéz until the sharks were finished with him. Others said his punishment was in truth not so severe, that he’d only had his dick cut off and was sent to a small Company office in the Yucatán for the rest of his life. As for the girl, it was said she had been placed in a ratty whorehouse in Los Mochis and anybody could have her for ten pesos. She was there for several months and became infected with an awful disease and then was removed to a convent hospital somewhere where she has since spent her days cleaning up shit and vomit.
My point, Jorge said, is this. If the Boss will punish one of his friends that way for displeasing him, if he’ll punish a niece that way, how do you think he would punish the old couple? Punish you?
Eddie Gato asked what became of the fired guards. Jorge said he had heard they were taken to Flores, who told them that because they liked to drink he was going to treat them to all the liquor they could hold. He had them stripped naked and drowned in barrels of rum. The barrels were then sealed with clear glass tops so you could see the men’s upturned faces, their bulging eyes and bared teeth. The barrels were said to be in the courtyard of the Boss’s Culiacán offices where everyone who comes and goes can have a good look. A sign on the barrels says “Drink Responsibly.”
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It is easy to understand why there are so few willing to be a rancho guard. Almost the only ones who volunteer for the job are young recruits ready to do anything—live in the desert, forgo liquor and phone communication, make do with unattractive whores—just to be part of the Company. But the Boss understands how hard it can be for a man to live in such isolate conditions for very long, and he permits reassignment to any guard who wants it after a year at the rancho. A guard who likes the job can keep it as long as he wishes, but it seems to Eddie that only a man of reclusive nature and minimal appetites could ever choose to stay here longer than the requisite year.
Like the other guards, Eddie is not a heavy drinker, so the booze restriction is no burden. But unlike the others, he receives no pleasure at all from the village whores and very little from those of the Hotel Rey. Their lack of allure has limited his satisfaction to that of scratching an itch. He keenly misses the sort of girls he has enjoyed since he was thirteen. None of them less than very pretty and all of them sweetly clean. He misses the fun of sexual banter, of seducing and being seduced. But this job was the only ready entry into the sort of life he desires and he took it with the certainty that he could bear its privations until he earned a transfer to a better post. A smuggling crew is his ambition. If he can’t have that at first, well, the job of an enforcer or a bodyguard or collector will suit him too. Even chauffeur to a chief will suffice, if that is the only position open. Any such duty would not only be more exciting than this one but also get him closer to a smuggling branch of the Company. And of course would offer him more interesting cities than Obregón. Larger cities, with their greater numbers of pretty women.
Still, before he can get a transfer he must endure eight more months at the rancho, and the boredom of the job already weighs on him. He no longer even wears his watch, having no desire to remind himself how slowly time is passing.
The Boss
“Rancho” is too thin a term for this retreat at the foot of the western slope of the Sierra Madre. It is a renovated hacienda, an expansive property whose walled compound contains several courtyards and a sprawling main house of two stories with dozens of small suites. The estate’s most exceptional feature is the cold-water stream running down to it from the mountains, so that even in this lower reach of the Sonoran Desert the courtyard trees and gardens are lush and the swimming pool is always full. The summer days are of course very hot, but under the looming sierra the rancho nights are often cool even during the dog days.
The Boss—whom the news media have made widely known as La Navaja but to his people is always and simply the Boss—loves the seclusion here. Loves the clear dry air of such contrast to the mugginess of Culiacán. Loves the black night’s trove of stars and its howls of wolves. He has been heard to rue that his business keeps him from visiting the rancho more often than every few months and only for three or four days at a time. But for all his professed love of the place, his intimates know he could never be at home anywhere other than Culiacán, where he was born and has lived all his life and whose every street and alleyway he is familiar with. Where he gained early fame as the foremost assassin in the state of Sinaloa.
It is a secure haven, this rancho, impossible for anyone to approach, even in the dark, without distant detection. Should he receive warning of an imminent attack, the Boss is certain he can get to the village airfield ahead of the raiders and into the sky and gone. In the event he was somehow cut off from the airstrip, he and his brother would resort to a covert ground route to make their getaway. El Segundo had found it on their last visit when he and a favored girl went out in a Jeep one morning to hunt quail. He came across it behind a low escarpment south of the compound where nobody ever had cause to go except to hunt and he was the only one who ever did. It had once been a donkey track out of the mountains and was not much wider than the Jeep. Curious to see where it led, he followed the rugged route through scrubland and outcrops. It took well over an hour to go twenty-plus miles—the girl bored and unable to nap in her seat for the Jeep’s constant jouncing. The trail finally connected with a dirt road, an old mining run, long unused and badly weathered. But he could drive a little faster on it and it lay mostly straight and an hour later he was merging onto the federal highway heading north to Ciudad Obregón and thirty minutes after that was there.
Eddie
In a raise of dust, the motor caravan comes wheeling through the outsized open gates and into the main courtyard. A black SUV in the lead, followed by a white Lincoln and a half dozen other luxury cars, another black SUV bringing up the rear. All vehicle glass bulletproofed and tinted to obscurity. The rock and rap and narco-corrido music booming within the cars is audible even to Eddie Gato up in the tower.
They park one behind the other in the shade of the palm trees around the circular fountain centered on a statue of a mermaid pouring water from a conch shell. The engines shut off and the music stops and the passengers alight amid much laughter. A few favored chiefs emerge from the Lincoln, underbosses of various sectors of the Company, the men dressed as if for golfing. Eddie easily spots El Tiburón, the Company’s number three man, who keeps his hair cut short to better exhibit the scarred and earless right side of his head. Lesser captains have come in two of the other cars.
The rest of the cars carry only women, young and attractive without exception, their light summer dresses exposing much skin. Servants begin unloading luggage from the car trunks and one of the SUVs.
Eddie scans the guests in vain search of a certain one, and he feels a keen disappointment.
But then there she is. The last to exit the cars. Big sunglasses. Little yellow dress showing lean brown legs. Gleaming black braid to the small of her back.
Miranda.
2
Eddie and Miranda
This is the second party held at the rancho since Eddie Gato has been here, and he has been looking forward to it, notwithstanding that it is only for the invited guests. Even in their off-duty hours the rancho guards and security men are excluded from the fun.
The last party was in late May and spanned four days. Delivery trucks coming and going, the air thick with the aromas of roasting meats. The evenings boisterous with music and gaiety and shrieks from the windows of the upper floor where most of the bedroom suites are. There were periodic shooting contests in the patio behind the bar lounge. The indoor lights and courtyard lamps blazed through the nights.
It had been Eddie Gato’s first look at the Boss, little more than a glimpse as the man and his entourage passed by him in one of the narrow galleries that ran the length of the building walls facing the courtyard. The Boss was tall for a mestizo and walked with an athletic litheness, his dark eyes taking in everything, including Eddie when their glances met for an instant. The man was said to be in his forties but Eddie thought he looked younger. He’d heard that the Boss’s brother had come too, but if Eddie saw him he did so without knowing who he was.
The Miranda girl had also been among the guests, though Eddie did not notice her until the third day, when for the first time since the party began he had the 8 AM to 4 PM shift in the tower. Neto had told him of the treat he had in store. The tower offered a clear view of the swimming pool courtyard, where some of the girls would sunbathe topless in the morning.
He had been in the tower nearly an hour when a group of them appeared in the pool courtyard, all of them in short robes and big hats and sunglasses. The sun had cleared the mountains and the air was already warm. The compound was in a brief period of quiet and you could hear the crooning of doves. At poolside the girls took off their robes and draped them over the lounge chairs and from their bags withdrew lotions and cigarettes and magazines and MP3 players with earphone attachments. They wore thong bikinis and they all but one took off their tops. They applied lotion to their legs and bellies and breasts and by turns to each other’s backs and buttocks. Some lay faceup and some facedown and Eddie kept looking from one to another to another and wished he had more eyes.
The girls seemed oblivious of him. From time to time one looked his way but it was as though he were invisible, and his strenuous smiles were to no effect. And he knew better than to use the binoculars. The day before, one of the girls had glanced up at the tower to see Neto glassing them and she gave him the finger and yelled for him to go fuck his hand. The others laughed. Neto backed away from their line of sight for a while before easing up to the parapet again to peek some more but without the glasses. They evidently did not mind being admired but drew the line at binoculars. From this distance Eddie couldn’t hear them talking but at times caught low ripples of their laughter.
The sun was well up and the heat still rising when they started to gather their things and head back indoors. The music had once again cranked up in the house and it carried over the compound on outdoor speakers. The last of the girls to leave had kept herself somewhat apart from the others and their conversations. She was the only one who had not removed her top, and so at first received the least of Eddie’s attention, though he’d noticed a little pair of indistinct red tattoos on her back, one on each shoulder blade. Now he was wondering what her breasts looked like uncovered. They weren’t large but seemed well formed. She put on her robe and left it unbelted and put on her hat and slung her bag on her shoulder. Then adjusted her sunglasses and looked up at the sky. Then turned her gaze toward him.
His reaction was impulsive. He snatched off his hat so she could clearly see his face and he formed his hand into a pistol and pointed his index finger at her and flicked his thumb as he silently mouthed, Pow. She grinned whitely in the shadow of her hat brim and slapped a hand to her breast as if shot. Then turned and sauntered away.
Eddie leaned over the parapet to keep her in sight all the way to the end of the courtyard. She was almost to the house when she paused at a row of shrubs in bloom with large yellow flowers. She fingered a flower and leaned down to smell it. The gardener came around the corner with his wheelbarrow of tools and nodded a greeting as he maneuvered past her. She spoke and he stopped, and she spoke again and gestured at the flowers. They conversed for a moment and he tipped his hat and she went into the gallery and out of Eddie’s sight.
Neto had told him to expect a second entertainment around mid-afternoon when some of the girls would return for a dip in the pool. And some did, though fewer than in the morning, and absent the one he’d flirted with. There were a handful of men with them this time, guys who had slept off their hangovers and were ready to resume the fun.
This time the girls got completely naked. Their crotches were shaved bare or pubic hair neatly trimmed to fuzzy patches, a cosmetic option Eddie Gato had not seen in the flesh since Jackie Marie’s little auburn arrowhead. But the men kept their swim briefs on even when they joined the girls in the pool for splashing horseplay.
Neto showed up for his shift a half hour early in hope that some of the girls would still be poolside, and he was delighted by the antics taking place. “Madre bendita,” he sighed. Why can’t one girl in the village—or even at the Hotel Rey—look like any of those down there? Were there many this morning?
More than now, Eddie said. I wonder when they sleep.
The old woman said they don’t drink very much, not like the men. They don’t get hungover. And they know how to take naps. Like cats, she said.
The frolickers were in the pool only a short time before getting back out, the girls teasing some of the men for their obvious hard-ons and yipping as the men plucked at their breasts and bottoms. They all put on their robes and hurried off into the house to continue their good time upstairs.
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Despite his youth, Eddie Gato has great confidence with women and believes he knows a thing or two about them. He sets great store on humor’s value as a lubricant to carnal cavort. Show him a woman who laughs at a playful come-on and he’ll show you one who is readily amenable to sexual adventure. Which was why, after her reaction to his pantomimed shooting of her at the previous party, the girl with the red tattoos had remained in his mind. The party girls were the best-looking women he had seen in many months and he was heady with the conviction that he could have his way with Miss Tattoos.
The problem was the lack of time to work his way with her. The Boss was hosting a big dinner for all his guests that evening and the party was due to break up the next day. But there would be another party in another two or three months. Eddie figured that if he moved fast he could at least prepare the groundwork with her for the next time.
That evening he went to the gardener’s quarters. The man was plainly nervous at this visit from a guard, and Eddie had to assure him that he wasn’t in any trouble, that he only wanted to know about the girl who had spoken to him in the courtyard. What’d she say to you? Eddie asked. The gardener told him she wanted to know what the flowers were named. She had never seen such flowers and thought they were very beautiful. She was delighted to know they were called delicias. She said it was a perfect name for them.
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At noon the next day, as servants were carrying suitcases to the cars and while the Boss and his men had a parting drink together in the bar lounge, Eddie Gato stood in a dim recess near the bottom of the stairway the girls would use to come down from their wing of suites. The M-16 slung on a shoulder would identify him as a guard to any security man who might take note of him.
