The Rules of Wolfe (12 page)

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They couple again, the room dark but for the amber cast of a streetlight through the open window, their grunts mixing with the low booms of the breakers. Amid their thrashings the Glock slides out from under a pillow and he moves it away. The MAC is on the bedside lamp table, bolt open and ready, safety off.

Afterward they flip a coin and she wins and chooses the first two-hour watch. She turns on the little lamp and rummages in her canvas tote for a fresh pack of cigarettes and takes out a cell phone and says she's been wondering why he bought it. Two of them. Plus the Sina guy's. Why all the phones?

Thought it a good idea to have a phone or two handy in case we need to call somebody.

Like who?

I don't know. Maybe somebody who can help us out. He smiles. You know anybody we can call for help?

No, she says, not smiling. Nobody. Do you?

He has been mulling that question off and on all day. He does not tell her that there are people who very possibly could help him and would probably do so without hesitation and no questions asked—at least not until later. That's why he bought the phones. He did not think about it when he did it, but he knows that's why. In case he should decide to call them. More than one phone because when you're being sought by Las Sinas you do not use the same phone twice. If he called and got a recording he would need a second phone to leave the number of, and even that would be risky.

But he has not been able to bring himself to make the call.

You do not tell people to go fuck themselves and then later when you're in trouble ask them to help you.

He had not heard it said as a rule but was sure it must be.

No, he tells her. Nobody.

Texas

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Saturday

12

Catalina

It is early afternoon when the little phone silently vibrates in Catalina's skirt pocket. A gift from her great-great-granddaughter, the phone still looks to her like a makeup compact when closed and like some kind of silly toy when open. By her definition, a true telephone is one that has a wire leading into the wall and then running out to a high pole outside. There is such a phone in her house and it is listed under her name in the local directory, but many years have passed since she last answered the phone herself and began leaving that chore to her maids, none of whom knows how to speak English. Everyone Catalina knows is bilingual or speaks only Spanish, and so a caller who doesn't know Spanish is sure to be a stranger, and strangers who call on the telephone never have anything to say that she wishes to hear. If a caller cannot speak Spanish, the maids are under orders to say, “No hablo inglés,” and hang up.

The wireless phone is but one more in the blur of technological inventions Catalina has witnessed in recent decades, and at first she had regarded it as a needless innovation and disdained to learn anything about the instrument. But then she decided she was willfully abetting her own ignorance, and one's ignorance is of benefit only to one's enemies. She has long known that truth, but with regard to the cell phone, she had been slow to remember it. And the reason for that slow realization was hard to deny. You're getting old, she had told herself, that's all there is to it. Then thought,
Getting?
Dear God, woman, have you ever been
other
than old?

She has since come to appreciate the many useful aspects of the little phone, and it is her practice to keep its ringer turned off in favor of a silent vibration in order to conceal from anyone within earshot the fact of an incoming call. She is a woman of many secrets, large and small, and of mysterious sources of information, and everyone in the family knows it. To one degree or another they are all a little in awe of her.

On this early Saturday afternoon she is in her reading chair on the back porch when the phone quivers in her pocket. She sees on the phone's screen that the call is from Patria Chica. She presses a button and says, “Bueno.”

The caller is her very much younger cousin Stilwell, the present head of the family into which she was born. She and Stillwell are descended from the same great-grandfather but have never met in person, though they have known each other through the mail and the telephone for almost fifty years.

They exchange brief amenities and then she listens carefully while he speaks without pause for a full minute. He concludes with a caveat that he is simply passing on to her the information he has received and he cannot attest to its full accuracy. The only thing he absolutely knows for sure is that Edward is without a passport, having left his at Patria Chica because it is in his true name.

“Can you assist him?” she says, speaking in English in case a maid is within hearing.

“No. We have nobody on the other side of those Sierras. It's all theirs and they have people everywhere. It can hurt us pretty plenty if we even try to find him. Lo siento mucho, señora.”

She says she understands. He says he will let her know if he should hear anything more, but doubts very much that he will. She thanks him and they end the call.

She ponders. Then refers to the little phone's directory, selects a number, and presses it. She listens for a moment, then says, “Es tu tía vieja. Call me at once.” She tries another number and gets another recording and leaves the same message.

Then calls another number.

A gruff male voice answers, “Doghouse.”

“I wish to speak to Frank or Rudy.”

“Hey there, Mamacita! Nice to hear from you. Been a while. I'm doing fine, thanks for asking. How about yoursel
f
?”

“Cease the foolishness, Charles.”

“Yes, mam.”

In answer to her questions, he tells her Frank and Rudy left town on a business matter last night but are due back today, he's not sure exactly when. Yes, they took prepaid cells with them as they always do when at work, but no, they didn't notify him of a number, probably because they would be away so briefly.

She knows he's lying about not having their number. He simply doesn't want her to interrupt them while they're on an assignment for him, not unless she tells him why she must talk to them and he deems it sufficient reason to permit her do it. She will not submit to that. Charles Fortune's arrogance has always chafed her and she suspects he knows it, but she will not give him the satisfaction of hearing her say so.

“Have them call me the minute they return,” she tells him. “Make sure of it, Charles.”

“Yes mam. Can I ask what it's about?”

“Yes, you may,” she says, and cuts off the connection.

Then makes a call to Harry McElroy Wolfe. Then one to El Paso.

13

Rudy and Frank

Frank and I had been looking for Brian Goetzman for over a week when we found out he was holed up in a cabin in the Hays County hills. The tip came from a guy in Laredo who owed us big and was glad of the chance to square things.

Goetzman was a driver for a Dallas engineering supply company that also traffics in black market high-tech military instruments. Twelve days ago he had been dispatched with a shipment of rifle scopes and night vision binoculars for delivery to Republic Arms, one of our family's firms, but he never arrived. Two days later his company minivan was found empty at a rest stop on I-35 a little north of San Antonio.

The Dallas guys agreed with us that it looked like an inside job. Goetzman had been with them less than three months and they were as pissed off as we were. They went to his apartment in Garland and found it an abandoned mess, absent all clothes and personal possessions. They sent us a photo and description. Big dude. Six-three, 215. Brown hair to his nape, Marine Corps insignia tattoo on his inner forearm. Lengthy arrest record but few convictions and only two incarcerations exceeding sixty days—a six-month stay in the Travis County jail for assault, and eleven months at a Fort Bend farm for burglary. It was the Dallas company's experience that ex-cons generally made dependable hirelings, but every so often they'd get one like Goetzman.

We put the word out and started the hunt for him, but after eight days with no luck we were ready to believe he had skipped the state or was dead, or both.

Then late last night the Laredo guy called and verified that Goetzman had been in on the theft and told us where he was. He said Goetzman had been bought off by a San Antonio cholo gang who then smuggled the shipment across the river with the big idea of selling it to the Zetas, the enforcers for the Gulf cartel. The tipster said he didn't think anybody in the gang had ever met a Zeta. In Nuevo Laredo they made a deal with a local gang called Cien Demonios to broker the sale for them. The next day all nine of the cholos were found laid out along the shoulder of a road outside of town, each of them shot in the head and every man of them with his feet cut off—a Demonios signature treatment of intruders on their turf. Our guy said the Demonios worked for the Zetas and had turned the cargo over to them, so we could forget about getting it back.

How he knew all this is of no matter. We never ask that of informants. But their information had best be accurate. He gave us directions to where Goetzman was, but said he didn't know how long the man would stay there or whether he was alone.

We phoned our cousin Charlie Fortune and gave him the report. He told us to get a paper from Uncle Forrest and head for Hays County. He wanted us to recover whatever we could from Goetzman and “impress upon that stupid sonofabitch the error of his ways.” Over the years we've developed a lexical code with Charlie. “Impress upon” means bestow memorable pain but leave alive. We then phoned Uncle Forrest, apologized for disturbing him at such a late hour, and explained our urgency. He said he understood and would “secure the instrument without delay.” That's how Uncle Forrest talks.

Forty minutes later we were zipping past Brownsville's north city limits.

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On the dotted line we are Francis Fierro Wolfe and Rudolf Maxwell Wolfe. To family and close friends we're Frank and Rudy, sometimes Frankie Fierro and Rudy Max. It's no accident we're a large family, since we believe blood relatives make the most reliable partners, though now and then you'll get an exception to the rule. The family tree has grown so many branches, however, that we long ago quit specifying kinship by degree and number of times removed and so forth. We hold to the simple identifiers “cousin” or “uncle” or “aunt,” regardless of the distance between us on the tree.

On our tax forms, Frank and I are “field agents” for Wolfe Associates, a Brownsville law firm whose top partners are our uncles, Harry Mack, Peck Bailey, and Forrest Otis. They are, respectively, among the best tort, criminal, and contract attorneys in Texas. They are the three elder males of the family and a kind of ruling triumvirate, Harry Mack the oldest at sixty-five and hence the present patriarch. Whenever some serious disagreement in the family can't be worked out between the disputants, the Three Uncles will hear both sides of it and then settle it with absolute finality by a vote among themselves.

We've been at the job since we got out of college nine and eight years ago—Frank's my elder by a year—and we couldn't ask for a better one. State-licensed investigators with carry permits. The Wolfe Associates job description calls for us to trace witnesses, serve subpoenas, do background checks, search criminal records, and so on. In reality our primary function is to resolve certain matters of Wolfe business that for whatever reason cannot be resolved through legal channels. The “fixers,” some in the family like to call us. The matters we deal with only rarely concern any actual Wolfe Associates court case, but the firm always provides us with a subpoena attesting that the person named on it may be required to depose in some upcoming legal proceeding—and always assembles some quick file in ready support of the writ. A subpoena is a useful document to have in hand if, when we confront our guy, things take the sort of turn that attracts law enforcement agents. The only reason it took us forty minutes to leave town was having to stop at Uncle Forrest's to pick up the paper, and at a convenience store to buy a prepaid cell, whose number we called in to Charlie Fortune.

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It was after midnight when we left Brownsville, and the sky was still dark when we sat down to breakfast about three hundred miles north at a diner off the interstate near San Marcos. We knew that some of the hill terrain could call for four-wheel drive, so we made the trip in a 4Runner. We would have preferred to surprise Goetzman in the dark, better still while he was asleep, but we weren't sufficiently familiar with the area and chose to wait until first light before we set off into the hills.

We took a farm road past the Blanco River and up into the scrub brush and cedar brakes. The sky was reddening along the hilltops, and every crest presented a vista. I've always loved early-morning light in all its geographic and seasonal varieties, and up in these hills was for us an uncommon way of seeing it. I remarked on it to Frank but he only gave a little nod in response. He thinks talking about such things takes something away from them. Hemingway man. Did his senior thesis on him. English majors, Frank and I. For a laugh I sometimes say, “We're English majors, Frank and me,” but hardly anybody ever gets it. Grammar education ain't what it used to be. Me, I favored the Neoclassical poets. My own thesis was titled “The Role of the Interlocutor in Pope's Horatian Satires.” Frank still asks now and then if Hollywood's called yet about the rights. Those university years now seem as far removed from our lives as the moon.

We found the side road we were looking for. More stony trail than road, narrow and winding and steadily uphill, but easy enough in four-wheel. We drove past a farm where a herd of goats came to the fence to watch us go by as if they didn't often see strangers. We topped the hill and the road curved a few more times before we came to a rusty mailbox atop a wooden post on which was hung a cow skull, just like the tipster said. The mailbox stood at the entrance of a fenced property with a closed gate but no lock. A dirt driveway went up through the cedars to a large cabin with a cherry-red pickup parked beside it.

I drove around the next bend and out of view of the cabin and then pulled over on the narrow shoulder and cut off the engine. Frank pulled a small bag of dog biscuits out from under the seat and put a handful in his pocket. We checked our pistols—HK nines with threaded muzzles—then tucked them under our shirts and walked back to the open gate and up the drive.

The sun hadn't yet cleared the hilltop trees, and the cabin was still in shadows. Its rear side was toward the road and had no door and neither of the two back windows showed any light. I was hoping Goetzman had made a big night of it and was still sleeping it off. I've never liked mixing it up early in the day. The smart thing would've been for him to have a watchdog, but of course you can't ever count on anybody doing the smart thing, for better or worse. Longtime rule.

The truck was a two-year-old Silverado in cherry condition. I took a look in the cab as I passed by and saw some CD cases of shitkicker music and an empty Pearl can on the seat. We drew our guns and Frank headed around the right side of the house while I took the left.

There was no door on my side but the cabin stood on a crest and had a grand view of the hills to the south, and the hillside sloped down sharply about ten yards to a wide slow creek whose opposite bank was lined with cottonwoods. A roofed porch ran the length of the house and there was a window to either side of the front door. Frank appeared at the other end of the porch and told me with hand signs that he had found a door on that side and for me to get set out here while he went in. I nodded and eased up onto the porch.