The rules of wolfe, p.4
The Rules of Wolfe, page 4
His side is burning and he feels a fleeting impulse to vomit but fights it down. He has never killed anyone before, though he has come close to it. He inhales through his teeth as he probes the raw patch of powder-burned flesh with his fingertips, searching for a bullet hole but not finding one.
He now has his first clear look at the dead man’s face—tongue extruding, mustache thick with red nasal discharge, bulging eyes scarlet. It takes him a moment to comprehend that this man is not the Boss.
The girl is zipping up her jeans, pulling on a T-shirt, big-eyed but moving with purpose. She takes up an open switchblade from the bedside table and folds it closed and puts it in her pocket. Eddie has no idea where the knife came from. Under her pillow? As she stuffs T-shirts and underwear into her tote bag, she asks Eddie if he’s hurt.
It rankles him that she seems less frightened than he is, but his anger helps to suppress his fear.
Who the hell’s this guy?
She takes a wad of pesos from the dresser drawer and puts it in her jeans. You don’t know? Enrique.
Who’s Enrique?
“El chingado Segundo,” she says. The bastard wasn’t supposed to be here till much later. Him and his prick brother.
She lofts Eddie’s pants to him.
Segundo? You’re Segundo’s woman?
She looks at the dead man. Not anymore.
Oh Jesus Christ . . .
Take it easy, kid. We—
Take it easy? They’ll kill me twenty times.
Me too, she says. But they have to catch us first.
p
She tends to his wound in the bathroom with swift dexterity. It’s on his flank, directly below his rib cage, a raw seared gash of about three inches. As she cleans it with a wadded cotton sock doused with hydrogen peroxide, he grunts and flinches, and she chides him for a baby. He’s got the Glock in his hand and keeps cutting looks at the bedroom door, though it’s not likely anyone will come to disturb the number two man while he’s taking his pleasure with his woman.
She folds the other sock and soaks it with peroxide and has him hold it against the wound while she twirls a large light scarf into a band and then wraps it snugly around his waist to hold the folded sock in place and fastens it with a safety pin. Eddie puts on his shirt and leaves it untucked to cover the Glock in his waistband.
They go back into the bedroom to search Segundo, expelling hard breaths at the stench of his stained pants. Only now does Eddie notice the money belt the man is wearing. It does not feel very thick as he takes it off him to find that it holds a layer of American hundred-dollar bills. He thumbs through a portion of them and approximates a total of maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand. He puts the belt on under his shirt, fitting it above his makeshift bandage. In Segundo’s jacket they find a cell phone, a packet of Mexican currency in 200- and 500-peso notes, a thin wallet with some American credit cards. Eddie pockets the cash, tosses aside the phone and cards.
All the while, they are talking fast about what to do.
Eddie thinks they can make it out of the compound easily enough in a Jeep with her hidden under a tarp behind the seat. The security men all know he’s a ranch guard and he’ll tell the guy at the gate he’s going to the village to get laid. But he doubts he can talk his way past the guard posts between the village and the Obregón road.
She tells him they don’t have to go by that route. She knows another one. It’s a bumpy little trail but drivable if they take it carefully. But when she says it’s in the opposite direction from the village, Eddie shakes his head.
The guard in the tower will see the way we’re heading and wonder what’s going on and give the security guys a call. Unless . . .
What?
Unless we’re in the Boss’s car. It never stops at the gate. With its dark glass the guards won’t know who’s in it. They’ll assume it’s the Boss, or maybe Segundo, like always.
The Boss’s car, she says.
We can do it, he says. The car park is way off in the corner of the compound, out of sight of everything. The flunky drivers aren’t going to question a guard who says Segundo told him to use the Boss’s car for . . . I don’t know, some errand. I don’t have to explain anything to them. But there may be a security guy there. If there is, I’ll tell him, ah . . . Segundo ordered me to fetch a briefcase he forgot on the plane. And to be damn quick about it.
Yes! That’s very good, yes.
But how to explain you?
Me? Segundo sent me with you because . . . because I’ve been on the plane. I know where he keeps the case.
I don’t know, Eddie says. Might work. If it doesn’t—
It will work, she says. “Ya lo verás.”
He grins despite himself. I’m real glad to hear it.
But then? she says. Where do we go?
Out of the country damn quick as we can. There’s no hiding from these guys anywhere in Mexico. We go to Ciudad Obregón and get on a plane to the United States.
Her face pinches. I can’t fly out of the country. I have no passport.
Eddie says neither does he—though in truth he does, some six hundred miles away at a place called Patria Chica—but he tells her they don’t need passports, Segundo’s money will get them across. He knows a charter pilot in Obregón with his own plane. For a few grand in American dollars he’ll file a phony flight plan and take them to some cow pasture in Arizona or New Mexico. He slings the M-16 on his shoulder.
She grins and picks up her bag. That is a very fine plan.
At the front door she says, Wait. Let me see if there’s anyone around. She hands him the bag and opens the door just enough to slip out.
As soon as she’s gone he is seized by the certainty she’s not coming back. She’s decided her best chance is to go straight to the security team and tell them what happened. After all, she didn’t kill Segundo. Yes, she fucked a guard, but that was all she did, and so—
“All clear,” she says at the door.
p
Eddie’s driving without headlights, the SUV rocking and pitching over the donkey trail, the stony landscape eerily illumined by a lean crescent moon scarcely clear of the mountains. The M-16 is propped between the console and her seat, the Glock between his legs.
It’s frustrating to have to drive so slowly in an SUV with a high-horsepower V-8. Eddie repeatedly and unconsciously speeds up until the tires start to lose purchase on the curves, and he each time marvels when the Electronic Stability Control senses the skid sooner than he does and counteracts it by working the brakes in ways impossible to him. He feels like all he’s doing is steering while the Escalade does the driving. He’s reminded of the common grievances some in his family have against computers—the loss of control to machinery, the surrender of privacy and personal freedom, and so on and so forth—even though almost all of them use computers for one purpose or another, even most of the oldsters, and some in the family are aces with them. He thinks of his cousins Rudy and Frank and their beloved Mustangs and Barracudas with stick-shift transmissions and he can imagine what they think of the Escalade and its ESC. But he’s damned glad to have the device. And that the gas tank is full.
There had been a security man at the car park and he nodded when Eddie explained his task for Segundo. The man’s attention was mostly on Miranda, who made eyes at him while the Escalade was brought from the garage. He told her she could get arrested for looking so good even with that black eye, and she laughed and said she guessed it was a good thing for her he wasn’t a cop. He asked how she got the eye and she said, Wouldn’t you like to know? His only remark to Eddie was about carrying a rifle simply to get a briefcase at the airfield. Eddie said, Yeah well, orders, you know how it is. The man nodded and said he sure the fuck did.
It’s Eddie’s guess that they’ve got at least until sunrise before anybody has reason to look for Segundo and goes to Miranda’s room. By then—if her recollection is accurate about how long it took her and Segundo to get to Ciudad Obregón that day in the Jeep—they should be arriving at the Obregón airport. If they’re really lucky, however, Segundo won’t be found until much later in the morning, by which time they’ll be in the States. They could use a little luck with Eddie’s pilot pal too. Evaristo. He lives only a few minutes from the airport, so even if he’s not at his hangar and they have to call him at home he can get there fairly fast. Here’s hoping he’s not off on some job. If he is, well, they’ll find another charter, that’s all there is to it. There are plenty of private pilots ready to cross the border for the right price.
She finds some CDs in the console and slips a disc of contemporary corridos into the player and sets the volume low. Then lights a cigarette and directs the smoke out her partially open window.
They’ve been driving about half an hour and have exchanged fewer than a dozen words when she says, I’m glad he’s dead.
He cuts a look at her but she keeps her gaze out the window.
A minute passes. Without turning from the window she tells him she was kidnapped off the streets of Mazatlán five months ago. She and her boyfriend Gabo were walking to the movies when a car pulled up beside them and a pair of men sprang out and one of them grabbed her. There were pistol shots that made her ears ring and she saw Gabo huddled on his knees as the men dragged her into the car. She was able to get out her knife and tried to cut them but they got it away, nearly breaking her thumb, then cuffed her hands behind her and told her to quit struggling or they’d knock her cold and wrap her in rope. As they sped away she looked back through the window and saw Gabo lying in the street with the awkwardness of the dead. People peeking from doorways and behind parked cars. She kept asking where they were taking her but they wouldn’t answer. She knew that gangsters kidnapped rich people and sometimes some who were not so rich and demanded ransom from their families. She told them they had a big fucking surprise coming if they thought they would get ransom for her. Her only family was a drunken mother who didn’t have fifty pesos to her name and even if she had any money she wouldn’t use it to ransom her. You stupid bastards snatched an empty purse, she told them. She was so scared she couldn’t stop talking and she was afraid they would hurt her to shut her up but they ignored her as if they were deaf. They took her far out of town to a house with a view of the sea. Segundo was there, though she didn’t yet know who he was. He politely introduced himself as Enrique—she would later come to know that he was called Rico by his brother and close friends, Segundo by everyone else. He said he was the brother of La Navaja and asked if she had ever heard of that man. Of course she had. Like everyone, she had heard a great deal about the Sinaloa criminal organization and its leader. Had heard of their gun battles with other gangs and the police and even the army. Had heard of the horrific things they did. Heads left in bags at the doors of police stations. Bodies hung from overpasses. Charred corpses along country roads. Atrocities of every sort that had become so commonplace they were no longer shocking, only something to take precautions against, like the flu. And here was the brother of the chief of that organization of murderers. She was scared, naturally, but scared mostly in that strange way like at a movie about monsters or ghosts. Scared but also kind of excited, she can’t explain it. One of the men handed him the switchblade he’d taken from her, and Segundo snicked it open and smiled and then closed it and gave it to her and she put it in her pocket. He told her he’d seen her near the market a few days before and thought she was very beautiful. He said he wanted her for his girlfriend. He said she would have her own apartment with a big television in a nice colonia in Culiacán. He would take her to wonderful parties. She would dine on the best food and drink. She would have pretty dresses, jewelry. She would have a life most women can only dream of. He said he could see she was afraid, maybe too frightened to refuse him, but he promised he would not harm her if she turned him down. He would be disappointed, yes, but he would send her back to her miserable life if that was what she chose. His exact words—“tu vida miserable.” He said he knew how hard it must be for her to believe this was happening and she probably needed some time to think about it, and so she should do that while he made a phone call in the patio.
She lights another cigarette. On the CD player a norteño band sings of a bold contrabandista idolized by the common folk for his bravery and violent defiance of the law.
Imagine my life, she says. Then tells Eddie she was born and raised in Mazatlán in a loud portside barrio that always stank of fish and rage and meanness. A neighborhood of derelict apartments where every night you heard cursings, shriekings, wailings. As a child she many times saw men brawl in the streets and once was witness to a fight with knives that left both men dead on the sidewalk like mounds of bloody rags. She saw a man beat his wife to death with a hammer in an apartment hallway. She saw a woman flung from a rooftop and her head burst on the street like a melon. But her father was a big man, strong, a good fighter, and other men were afraid of him, you could see it in their faces. Her father made her feel protected, her and her one-year-elder sister Felicia and their mother, who was very pretty and always getting looks from men. He worked on a fishing boat and often spoke of getting a house of their own in a better part of the city, but he loved to gamble and was not good at it and they could never afford to move out of that awful place. She was almost fourteen when he drowned at sea. Then life became truly hard. Her mother had no money, no family or friends she could ask for help. She worked at a cannery for a while and earned barely enough to support them. Then there was an accident with a machine and she lost the thumb and part of the first finger of her right hand and nearly died from the infection before she got better. They were going hungry by then, they were close to being put out on the street. So her mother naturally became a whore, an old story everywhere and especially in that neighborhood so full of whores where the seamen came for their fun. But as a whore she could pay the rent and feed the three of them. She brought men to her room almost every night. All the men drank and so she drank with them and became a drunkard. Over time the drinking spoiled her looks and fewer men came home with her and she made less money. By that point she was almost a stranger to her and Felicia, who were now learning for themselves about men and sex and the power of being pretty. When Felicia was seventeen she got pregnant by a forty-year-old man who owned a café in Villa Unión, and rather than have an abortion she gulled him into marriage. Being wife to a café owner was her sister’s notion of a good life. She herself continued to go to school for a while longer, mostly because it was a clean and safe place to pass the day, and it was there that she learned about contraception. She had liked sex from her first time at fifteen but had been unbelievably lucky not to get pregnant before learning how to prevent it. She had seen what happened to so many young girls who got pregnant, married or not. Had seen how fast they got fat and bitter, how fast they got old. When she took up with Gabo, who was an errand runner for a waterfront boss, the only thing she knew about her future was that she did not want it to be like her mother’s or her sister’s. She did not love Gabo, but he was good-looking and fun and tough. He made her feel safe, as her father had, and he taught her a few things about protecting herself, like how to use the knife he gave her for her birthday. All of which was sadly funny when you consider what happened when Segundo’s men drove up in the car.
So, she says to Eddie. Imagine yourself a woman and in my place. What choice would you have made?
The same one you did, I guess.
You guess?
I’m sure I would’ve.
Segundo was happy to hear her choice. Then took her into a bedroom and fucked her.
He gave her all he promised. The apartment with the big TV, the nice dresses. He took her to fancy parties and nightclubs. But although he and his brother owned several houses in Culiacán and in other cities, he never took her to any of them for the simple reason that he had a different girlfriend at each of them—a fact she learned from some of the women at the parties, catty bitches who told her Segundo went through young girls even faster than his brother and she better be ready for the day he got bored with her and kicked her back into the street. She felt very foolish for not having understood that’s how it would be, that of course he would have other girls, of course he would one day get bored with her. She told herself it didn’t matter, since she was not in love with him and wasn’t jealous. What did she care what he did when he was not with her? Why not enjoy the luxury while she could? But she very soon had to admit it did matter. Because it forced her to face the fact that she wasn’t a girlfriend, she was a whore, one more whore in a world with no lack of them, as much of a whore as her mother, except better dressed and fed and housed and protected. No, more of a whore, because her mother had no alternative but to become one, while she had chosen to. It was an undeniable truth. One that every day became harder for her to bear. She’d been with Segundo two months when she ran away. She got on a bus to Mazatlán, but before it was ten miles out of town a big car with two men in it forced it to pull over, and one of the men came aboard and got her and they drove her back to Culiacán. Segundo seemed more amused than angry by her attempt at escape. She told him she’d changed her mind, she didn’t want to be his girlfriend, and asked him to please send her back to Mazatlán as he had said he would do. He said no. He had given her a choice and she had made it and now must live by it. But why not let her go, she asked him. He’d soon be tired of her and kick her out anyway. He said that was very possible and when that happened she could leave but not before. He had a tattooist put the little broken wings on her back. A reminder, he told her, that she could not fly away from him. More effective than the tattoos were the informants she now knew were keeping watch on her and would report to him any attempt she made to leave. A couple of weeks later he took her to a party at Rancho del Sol. It was the farthest she had ever been from home, not only in miles but in feeling. The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the cloudless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness. She hated the other women, who were out-and-out whores and who hated her in turn for looking down on them. It was four days of drinking and fucking except for one time when he took her to hunt quail but they spent most of the day driving out here in the scrub. She was glad to get back to Culiacán. During the next two months he came to see her at the apartment more often than before. It was as though her desire to be free of him had made him want her more. But he also seemed very ready to hurt her if she should fail to satisfy him. She had heard stories of what he had done to women who had displeased him, and she did not hesitate to grant whatever favors he asked and do so with enthusiasm. She was convinced he could smell her fear and that it increased his pleasure, a realization that made her almost as angry as she was afraid, but she was careful to conceal it. It wasn’t so much a matter of who did he think he was, to take such enjoyment in making her afraid, as who did he think she was? But of course she already knew the answer to that question, and every time she thought of it she wanted to both weep and hit something. Then a few days ago he told her to pack a bag, they were going to another party at Rancho del Sol. Without thinking, she said, Shit, and next thing she knew she was on the floor with a numb eye socket and an eye blurred with tears. Excuse me, he said, I don’t think I heard you clearly. Did you say you couldn’t wait to go? She was able to nod and he smiled and said that’s what he thought. He said it would be fun, like last time. Maybe they would go on another quail hunt. But on the morning of departure she was driven to the airport by a lackey who told her that Segundo and the Boss had been delayed and did not plan to join the rest of the party until the next day. She was glad to hear it. It meant one night of freedom at that damned ranch.
