The Rules of Wolfe (13 page)

Just then the front door opened and a young woman in a dark blue A&M T-shirt that didn't completely cover her ass came out holding a cup of smoking coffee in both hands. She was somewhat hard-faced but very nicely put together. She blew on the coffee and looked off at the hills and then turned and saw me holding the gun on her and a finger to my lips.

Her mouth went slack and she dropped the cup. The hot coffee splattered on her feet and she yelped and broke toward the door at the same time that Goetzman came charging out in nothing but a pair of Jockeys and with a huge revolver in his hand and smacked into her with an ugly thud. The collision jarred him off-balance and he bonked his head on a support post and she was knocked rearward off the porch and went tumbling all the way down into the creek.

I yelled “Drop it!” and was
this
close to popping him in the heart when Frank came lunging out the door and swatted him across the face with his pistol. Goetzman spun half around and the revolver fell from his hand as he took a header onto the porch steps and then rolled down the slope too. The girl was standing in tit-high water alongside the bank when he crashed down on her.

I retrieved his gun—a blued Redhawk .44—and we eased down the slope as Goetzman stood up in the creek, coughing and snorting and bloody-faced. He saw us coming and turned and started slogging toward the opposite bank. Frank picked up a rock the size of a baseball and smacked him with it under the shoulder blade and Goetzman flinched and cried out and nearly went under again. At UT Austin, Frank twice struck out sixteen guys in a game. Had a heater that hopped a foot and a sinker that broke like it was rolling off a table. He was drafted by the Orioles in the second round but took a pass. A little better traction on that slope and he could've buried the rock in Goetzman's rear ribs.

“Get her up!” Frank said. “Move!”

The girl was struggling to stand up but kept falling and going under and seemed about to drown. Grimacing and bent sideways, Goetzman went to her and got hold of her hand but they were both having trouble with their footing and for a minute it looked like a tug-of-war as he tried to get her up and she almost pulled him down. She finally came upright, choking and hacking, hair plastered to her head, and she smacked him a good one in the face with her fist. He cursed and was about to punch her in return but Frank yelled for them to cut the shit and get out of there.

We let Goetzman haul himself out but I gave the girl a hoisting hand. I had thought she was bare-assed but now saw she wore a tan thong. It's a golden age in women's underwear. She hunched on all fours to heave up some more creek water, presenting me with a fine perspective of her lovely butt.

Both of them were pretty well scratched up, and the gash on Goetzman's cheek was oozing blood through his fingers. He sat cross-legged, muscular in that overtight way you can get from pumping iron as your sole exercise.
Probably had a hell of a punch but lacked the speed
and agility to land it against anybody who could fight. Still, he had almost half a foot and at least thirty pounds on either of us and I would've hated to let him get a good hold on me. The Corps insignia was the only tattoo on his arms but he had some of lesser quality on his chest and back. Jailhouse jobs expressing the usual banalities of the self-proclaimed badass.

“The fuck're you guys?” he said with as much bluster as a man can manage who's bleeding and dripping wet in his undershorts with a gun held on him. He had an easy face to read. He knew we weren't cops.

“You stole from some people we know,” I said. “A serious lapse in judgment.”

It's the way we usually work, Frank and I. He's the imperative, I'm the exposition. We share the punitive.

“Dallas guys, huh?” Goetzman said.

I let him believe it. “Oh shit, huh?”

He talked fast, saying it wasn't his idea, none of it, the “beaners” had come to
him
. “No offense,” he said to Frank, and got the Stone Eye in return. Frank can be taken for a beaner easy enough with his big mustache and dusky complexion. In fact he looks a lot like our ancestor, Rodolfo Fierro, after whom we're both named. He was Pancho Villa's right-hand man in the Revolution, and his daughter by an American woman named Davis was our grandmother. Me, I look Anglo as they come, like most of the Wolfes this side of the river.

Goetzman said the cholo gang had threatened to kill him if he didn't turn over the load and blah-blah-blah. I said we could discuss it in the house, and we went back up there, me behind the girl to better consider the aesthetics of her behind. You can take it for a rule that if a woman has a good ass the rest of her will be nicely configured too, except for maybe the face. The face is always on its own.

We entered the cabin's main room and Frank told Goetzman to sit at the table and that if he moved from it without permission he would shoot him. He said it in a tone he's perfected over the years, one bespeaking bored indifference to whether he has to shoot a guy or not. I can do a fair imitation of it but I can't match his Stone Eye. It gives him the edge on me in the fearsomeness department.

The only phone in the house was a flip cell lying on the counter separating the main room from the kitchen. Frank put it in the microwave and pressed the “popcorn” button. I took the girl in the bedroom and told her to sit in the middle of the bed. There was a shirt hanging on a bedpost and she asked if she could put it on and I nodded. She turned her back only partway as she took off the wet tee, giving me a good gander at one hooter before she slipped the shirt on, then sat herself on the bed. Goetzman's wallet was on the dresser, together with a checkbook that showed a balance of a little over eighteen hundred. The wallet held 153 bucks, a Texas driver's license, three credit cards in three different names, and a photo of the girl lying nude on her side and facing the camera with a stiff smile. Not real artfully composed but I took a moment to appreciate it anyway, then winked at her. She shrugged and turned up her palms. I told her to stay put and went back in the main room.

One side of Goetzman's face was a bloated red-purple bruise with a deep tear in it, but the bleeding had slowed to a trickle. I told him the cargo he'd helped hijack was worth 125 grand. In truth it was a hundred even, but why tell him, since that was entirely beside the point, as was the fact we'd paid only fifty for it. I said he had to reimburse us and asked how much cash he could round up. He said not that much. The cholos had paid him ten thousand but all of it had gone toward the truck he bought the next day. He said there was five thousand in a sock in the top drawer of a clothes chest in the bedroom and about two thou more in his checking account and that was it. The cabin belonged to a friend who was away in California and letting him use it.

I gave him a sad shake of the head and returned to the bedroom and ransacked it and found no cash other than the five grand in the sock. But I found a little metal case containing some documents and current Florida and Georgia driver's licenses with Goetzman's name and photograph. One of the papers was a deed in Goetzman's name to an eighty-acre piney woods tract on the Trinity River. Made me smile. Worth well more than $150,000. Every once in a big while the recoup comes just that easily.

I went outside and searched the Silverado and found the registration and title but no money. Then walked up the road and got in the 4Runner and drove back to the cabin and parked it out of sight of the road. I took a little briefcase from the backseat and went back in the house. The briefcase held a miscellany of blank legal forms and a silencer.

We didn't really need the silencer, not out in those boonies, but the mere introduction of it can be very helpful in gaining a guy's ready cooperation. Goetzman's eyes widened when he saw me hand it to Frank, who took his time about screwing it onto the Heckler.

I showed Goetzman his property deed and saw in his face it hadn't even crossed his mind we might find it. He said he'd inherited the land from his grandmother a few months ago. Only good luck he'd ever had. His plan was to sell fifty acres and build a cabin on the rest, where, as he put it, “I can keep my distance from the fucken world.”

I said I understood the impulse. Then placed the Silverado title and a blank property bill of sale in front of him and told him to sign the seller's line on both papers, and he did so without hesitation, saying the land alone was worth more than what he owed us. I said I hoped for his sake he was right, and we'd keep the difference as an irritation fee. I made sure the signatures matched the one on his license. When we got back home I would turn the papers over to people who are expert at the niceties of completing and registering official documents. Within a few days there would be a file on record in the county clerk's office of a series of legal actions regarding Brian Goetzman's outstanding debts to one or another Wolfe business and his settlement of them by way of property transfers.

Frank went to the kitchen and got a dishcloth and tossed it to Goetzman. Then told him to stick a leg out, whichever one he preferred.

“Aw shit, guys,” Goetzman said, “I been cooperative, ain't I? You busted my face, you cleaned me out. You ain't gotta do
this
?”

“Brian,” I said.

He sighed and rolled the dishcloth and stuck it between his jaws and bit down on it. Then gripped both sides of the chair seat and took a few deep breaths and extended his right leg, then quickly pulled it back and stuck out the left.

Frank was positioning himself as I went to the bedroom door to look in on the girl. She asked what was happening—and then there was a
thoonk
! sound and a scream and a heavy thump. The girl squealed and I pointed a finger at her and she put both hands over her mouth to stifle herself.

Goetzman was on the floor and wailing pretty loud even through the cloth between his teeth, writhing beside his toppled chair and clutching his leg above the knee. The knee looked like it had been pried open with a claw hammer. Frank knows how to shoot a knee so it's ruined for keeps but the guy doesn't have to lose the lower leg and get a prosthetic, not unless he chooses to. If he wants, he can settle for gimping on a stiff leg the rest of his life. A shot knee supposedly hurts worse than anything, but they say the same about belly wounds. All I know is you don't die from a shot knee. Goetzman had pissed himself and was streaming tears and snot, but all in all was being a good soldier. I've seen plenty of them pass out from a lot less pain.

Frank had picked up the casing and was using his buck knife to dig the round out of the wood floor. Way more precaution than called for, but that's Frank.

I set the chair upright and called for the girl to fetch a belt. She came out and saw the knee and looked like she might barf, but it was Goetzman who chucked when she helped me hoist him into the chair. We hopped aside quick enough to avoid getting any on us. When I was done wrapping the belt tight above his knee, Goetzman was breathing like he'd been chased a mile, but he wasn't bleeding anymore. Frank opened the door to admit some fresh air against the reek.

I told Goetzman this punishment was small compared to what would happen if he ever in his life trespassed against us or any of our associates again. I said we'd cut his arms off at the shoulder next time. He wouldn't be able to feed himself, wipe his ass, beat his dick. It's always an effort to maintain a menacing demeanor when I say such things. You only talk like that with smalltimers who can be scared out of even dreaming of crossing you again. With real players you don't make threats, you just get to it.

I said we'd call 911 for him as soon as we got back to paved road. He could tell the cops some guy broke in and shot him, then tossed the place. Some dealer, probably, who got him mixed up with somebody else. He could wing it any way he wanted, but none of it ever better splash on his former employers in Dallas. “We can find you again easy,” I said.

He said he could handle it. Still snorting snot and wiping away tears he couldn't put a stop to. He looked at the big Redhawk in my waistband like he was losing a pal.

The girl asked if we could give her a ride to the San Marcos bus station. I looked at Frank and he shrugged, so I told her she had exactly two minutes to be ready. She dashed to the bedroom without a glance at Goetzman.

He said, “Hey Jenny, what the hell, man.” Then looked at us and said, “I been
good
to her, no lie.”

Frank said he took her for one of those who says, “Even if you get crippled, baby, I'll still love you. I'll
miss
you but I'll still love you.”

Frank can be prone to the jocose once the work is done.

Goetzman said he didn't know why he gave a damn if she left, that she couldn't even give a decent blow job. “All the guys she's been with, you'd think she'da learned how to suck a dick.”

“Maybe that's why they split from her,” Frank said. “Her lack of aptitude.”

“Shoulda stayed in the Corps, what I shoulda done.”

I was inclined to say, “Woulda, coulda, shoulda,” but I didn't. He'd had enough for one day.

We went out and Frank got in the Silverado and I got in the 4Runner and we were about to pull away when the Jenny girl came running out with a small suitcase. She had put on jeans and an orange Longhorns T-shirt. She paused for a second, looking from me to Frank and back again. Then got in with him.

A lot of them are like that. Choose the badder ass every time.

We dropped her off in San Marcos and at mid-morning stopped for coffee and pastry in a café in Three Rivers. We were tired after the sleepless night, so from the restaurant we drove over to nearby Choke Canyon Park and picked out a tree overlooking the lake and napped in the shade for a couple of hours. Then got rolling again and by mid-afternoon were back home.