The rules of wolfe, p.5
The Rules of Wolfe, page 5
But apparently, she says, there was a change in his plans.
Apparently, Eddie says.
And a minute later he says, How old are you?
Nineteen.
p
They arrive at the dirt road and pick up speed and in another hour they spot the distant lights of traffic moving along the federal highway. The eastern horizon now red as a raw wound.
5
The Boss
The Boss enters the malodorous room, accompanied by El Tiburón. Already present are Flores and his main security aide, Chato. They step aside as the Boss goes to his brother’s body and stands over it. He is a master of inexpressiveness, a trait that has long served his reputation as a man of cool blood whose decisions have the solid finality of a gravestone. His face gives no hint of his sorrow or his rage—or his embarrassment at his brother’s fouled trousers. He’s known countless men who shat themselves in fear or agony at the moment of death and he never before felt anything about it except occasional disgust.
Looks like he caught her fooling with a guy, Flores says. One of the ranch guards. There was a fight, obviously, and . . . He gestures at the body. We found two casings, he says, nine-millimeter. One hole in that wall, one in that one. There’s a towel with blood on it, but not much. I’d say Rico tried to shoot him while they were fighting but couldn’t do it but anyway managed to bloody his nose or mouth or something. They took his pistol and cash, left the credit cards and phone. Seems the guy’s not completely stupid.
Who is he? says the Boss.
Eduardo Porter. According to Santos, he’s been with—
Santos?
The guard captain.
Go on.
Porter’s been with us since March. He was hired by Morales. As far as Santos knows, it’s the kid’s first job with the Company. Been reliable, he says.
Tiburón snorts and says, Till now.
The Boss ignores him. How old is he?
Twenty.
Where’s he from?
Tampico, Santos says.
I want to see everything we have on him.
It’s on the way, Flores says. Photo too.
The Boss squats beside his brother. They had finished their business in Culiacán sooner than expected and decided to fly to Loma Baja tonight instead of wait until morning. Decisions sometimes have extraneous consequence, usually too insignificant for remark, but sometimes . . . sometimes the extraneous consequence is something like this. He fingers Rico’s discolored neck and feels no break in it. Strangulation. They had been at the rancho only a few minutes and were having their first drink when Rico said he was horny as a goat and was going to go get a fast fuck from . . . the Boss has trouble recalling her name. The one from Mazatlán that Rico picked up three-four months ago. Marisol? Miralinda? . . . Miranda. Good-looking but with mustang eyes, like so many crazy ones. They can be great fun in bed but they aren’t worth their loony irritations. He’d told Rico so a dozen times. But that’s how he liked them.
He gently pushes Rico’s tongue back into his mouth and closes his jaws and with two fingers draws the lids down over the bulbous red eyes. “Pañuelo,” he says, reaching back without looking. Flores takes a folded handkerchief from his breast pocket and hands it to him and the Boss wipes the bloody snot and saliva from Rico’s face.
He’d said he’d be right back, just a quickie. He still hadn’t returned when Flores said the communications net with Hermosillo couldn’t be completed until the tech crew had the new cell codes Segundo had brought from Culiacán. The codes were in a courier case he’d left with the Boss but the case was locked and Rico had the key. The Boss called Rico’s cell but he didn’t answer. Having too much fun with the Mazatlana, he thought. He gave the case to Flores and told him to get the key from Rico, then thought no more about it until a runner from Flores was shouting into his ear to be heard above the music, shouting Flores’s message that he should come to the girl’s room right away.
The Boss stands up and asks Flores, What do we know?
Prior to the Boss’s arrival, Flores made some calls and has learned that an hour and a half ago Porter and the girl left the compound in the Boss’s Escalade. The kid told the security man at the car park he and the girl had been ordered by Segundo to use the SUV to go to the plane and get a briefcase from it and Segundo meant right the fuck now. The security man knew Porter was a guard but thought of checking with Segundo anyway, but then was afraid he’d get his ass chewed for delaying their errand.
The men at the gate of course thought it was you in the car and let it pass, Flores says. So did the guard in the tower. He thought it curious you would drive off into the desert but who is he to question what the chief does?
The Boss sighs and rubs his eyes. The security man who spoke to him at the car park, you know him?
Yes, chief. Busteros. Been with us about four years. Good man.
No he’s not. If he was, the kid wouldn’t have got the car. Set him free.
It is the Boss’s standard phrase for ordering someone’s execution. Flores blinks at the severity of the punishment. Yes, chief.
The tower guard too, the Boss says. We cannot grant leniency for security failures. A reminder to the others.
The guard captain was in the tower, Flores says. Santos.
The Boss stares at him.
Done, my chief, Flores says.
The Boss turns to Tiburón. What do you think?
I think the kid’s got stone balls, Tiburón says. He knew he’d never get by the checkpoints and the only way he could go was into the scrub. But even an SUV can’t handle that country except at a crawl. And that’s in daylight. They’re in the dark. If they’ve got any brains they’re scared shitless and they’ll probably push it too hard and bust a wheel or roll over or something. Then they’re on foot, if they can still walk. Even if they don’t break down, odds are they’ll be out there at sunup, roaming around like lost dogs. We can get a helicopter here and it’ll find them damn quick . . . wherever they might be.
The Boss doesn’t miss Tiburón’s insinuation. If the Escalade had a tracker in it they would know exactly where they were and could easily cut them off at the highway. Almost all of the Company’s vehicles carry such a device, but he did not permit one to be put in the Escalade for fear that enemies might intercept its signal.
If they don’t break down, the Boss says, they’ll be at the highway by first light. There’s a trail out there, an old mining road or something. Rico told me. He said it’s rough but it got him to the highway. The Mazatlán cunt was with him when he found it.
Tiburón rolls his eyes at Flores, who looks away.
Have a chopper search the scrub at first light anyway, the Boss says, in case they do break down. But if they make it into the highway traffic, the chopper won’t be any help.
As Tiburón punches numbers on a cell phone and starts speaking into it in low voice, the Boss says to Flores, Get me a road map.
Right here, chief, Flores says, and gestures at Chato, who produces a map from his coat. Flores shoves aside the jumbled sheets and spreads the map on the bed. The Boss bends down and studies it.
Tiburón places his hand over the cell mouthpiece and looks at the Boss in wait of further instruction.
They’ll come out somewhere in here, the Boss says, sliding a fingertip over a portion of the federal highway between Ciudad Obregón and a toll station about twenty-five miles south of the city.
They can’t hide anywhere this side of the border without us finding him, Flores says. If he tries to lay low to let things cool, he’ll make the odds worse for himself. The question is whether he’s smart enough to know that. Flores puts his finger on the airport symbol a few miles south of the city and says, Odds are he’s heading here. Or some private airfield. He can’t fly out of the country without a passport, but he’ll probably try to fly as far from here as he can.
Get his picture to our people in Obregón, the Boss says. I want lookouts on the airport entrance road, men everywhere in the terminal, at every ticket counter and boarding gate. I want the word out to every charter flight company in Sinaloa and Sonora, every airfield, no matter how small. I want men at the train stations, the bus stations, every car rental place.
In case the kid sticks to the road we should put men at the toll plazas north and south of town, Flores says. And get men cruising the stretch of highway that runs through the city.
Do it, the Boss says.
Tiburón relays the orders into the phone to a captain of Luna Negra, the Company’s main band of enforcers.
The Boss stares at his brother on the floor. His anger seethes under his blank aspect.
What more, chief? Tiburón says.
Put the word out, the Boss says. Anybody who helps him in any way at all will be made into dog food. Their families too. He pauses to consider how very much he would like to have the kid alive, but knows that when you try to take one alive you give him a better chance at escape. I want his head, he says. The man who delivers it will be well rewarded.
Very good, chief. And the girl?
Fuck her to death and throw her in a garbage pit.
Tiburón nods and speaks softly into the phone.
p
Just before sunrise the Boss’s jet lifts off the rude airstrip at Loma Baja, bearing him and his brother’s body to Culiacán, the only other passenger a bodyguard in the cockpit with the pilot. There is a funeral to be arranged, and as always, a host of urgent concerns await the Boss’s attention. Tiburón will oversee the search for Porter from a Company office in Ciudad Obregón and keep the Boss informed of developments. The ranch guests have also departed, transported to the Obregón airport in the motorcade that brought them, from there to disperse to their own regions and the operations of their respective corps and undergangs. Every man of them carrying copies of Eduardo Porter’s picture.
In the plane, the Boss opens a manila envelope containing a single sheet of information about Porter and a three-by-five-inch color photograph of him taken on the day he was hired. The data are mostly physical details. Five feet ten inches tall. One hundred sixty-five pounds. Light complexion, black hair, blue eyes. The face is brown but the Boss can tell it’s a darkness of sun, not racial lineage. A face cocky with youth. A horizontal white scar under the left eye. He recollects having seen him at the party before this one. They passed in a gallery. The eyes bluer than in the picture. And quick. Quick and intelligent. The record shows that Porter was enlisted in Culiacán by Elizondo Morales, who does much of the Company’s lower-level hiring.
It is a flight of less than an hour and a half, and the Boss spends most of it thinking of his brothers. Less than twelve hours ago he and Rico had been on this plane and headed for the rancho, drinking and laughing and ready for fun. They somehow got on the subject of their brothers, and Rico told one of their favorite stories about Marco, the eldest, about the time when he was seventeen and was caught in bed with both daughters of the barrio butcher. He managed to escape through a window, running naked through the morning traffic, dodging cars and pedestrians on the sidewalks, the butcher chasing him with a huge knife for almost three blocks before giving out. There were dozens of witnesses and one of them took a picture and mailed it to him. It showed him in mid-stride, grinning hugely, his dick and balls outslung, bystanders gawking. Marco liked the picture and wished he knew who’d sent it so he could pay him. The four sisterless brothers had been orphaned a few years earlier and had since then been living with their widowed Aunt Juanita, who was something of a bohemian spirit. She loved the photo so much she framed it and hung it on the living room wall. Marco had to keep a sharp eye out for the butcher after that, and had to fuck the daughters elsewhere than in their own house.
The Boss had enjoyed that story many times before and did so again on Rico’s retelling. And now he recalls that six years later, when all four brothers were working for a city gang chief, a van carrying five drunken teenagers swerved across the median on the state highway and hit Marco’s truck head-on at seventy miles an hour, slaughtering everyone in both vehicles including a girl riding with Marco. The bloody evidence strongly suggested she had been sucking his cock at the time. The Boss was nineteen then, Rico seventeen, their other brother Pedro twenty-one, and that there were no survivors on whom to take vengeance was the greatest frustration any of them had yet known.
It was a different matter some five years afterward when Pedro was shot dead by a trio of gunmen belonging to a rival gang. He and Rico found out who Pedro’s killers were and disposed of them one by one. They cut the throats of the first two and left their bodies hanging in public by the feet, one from a tree in a park plaza and the other from a lamppost in a soccer stadium parking lot. The third man—who was said to have spit on Pedro after they killed him—they burned alive. Then deposited his charred remains in a garbage bag in front of the central police station to ensure his forensic identification and that his name be made known in the news. The Boss had razored both ears from all three men and to each corpse appended a note saying, This is what happens to whoever harms my people. And signed it La Navaja. The severed ears became his signature, and his notoriety grew with the number of bodies found earless. The Company was at that time still known as the Alliance of Blood and called itself a syndicate. He became its main assassin and Rico his partner. He won the admiration of many of its men and gradually gained the allegiance of some of the strongest underbosses. At the conclusion of a brutal internecine war for control of the organization, he emerged as el jefe máximo. The supreme chieftain. The Boss. The Company was soon afterward one of the two most powerful criminal societies in the country.
Today the major news agencies on both sides of the border less often call them organizations or syndicates and more often call them cartels. Like most of the other bosses, he likes the term for the same reason the news media do. “Cartel” has an impressive ring. It suggests a powerful association of international capacity and outsized ambitions. Like OPEC.
But he also knows that, like most of what is reported in the media, the term is erroneous. A cartel is a group of businesses that deal in the same goods and conspire to regulate the availability and price of those goods, and he cannot envision that sort of cooperation ever obtaining between Mexican criminal outfits. As much as he likes the term “cartel,” and even the public nickname “Las Sinas,” he still prefers that his people call themselves the Company. But even that name is really no more accurate than “cartel.” Despite their great size and power, the Boss knows that all of these groups are truly nothing more than gangs.
Naturally, other men have tried to take his place. Always there is someone watching for a chance to do it. The latest of them a sly young tough called El Chubasco, the chief of the Company’s enforcement gang in Los Mochis. He is reported to have made clandestine overtures to some of the other undergangs, even to have made contact with one of Las Sinas’ Peruvian cocaine suppliers. The Boss knows he must tend to that fucker very soon. Deal with him as with the other overly ambitious young Turks.
It is a constant struggle for the Boss to retain his command of the Company, but over the years he has done it well, with Rico as his segundo and with a cadre of good captains like Tiburón and Flores, men reliable and proficient and—most important of all—trustworthy. To a degree, anyway.
He has no wife or children and has never wanted either. In this treacherous whore of a world he has never put full faith in anyone but his brothers. And now the last of them is dead. Wrapped in a blanket in the aisle of this aircraft bearing him to a Culiacán graveyard. Rico. Enrique.
