The Rules of Wolfe (20 page)

Once she's out of the tub she begins singing softly, as is her habit, so that whichever maid has an ear to the door will know she has survived one more bath without bad luck. She emerges in her robe to a deserted hallway and goes to the kitchen, where both maids sit at the little table, having coffee and cinnamon rolls. A kettle of water for her evening tea is simmering atop the stove. A saucer holds a small pot of honey and a slice of lemon, and in her favorite mug is a ready tea ball, its little chain dangling over the rim. Rosario gets up and pours hot water into the mug, and while the tea steeps they all bemoan this summer's heat, which seems to them to be worse than usual. The older maid, Lidia, says she has prayed to the Holy Mother to please let it rain tonight, though the weather report says there is only a small chance of it.

Catalina takes the tea into her bedroom and sets it next to her phone on the table beside her reading chair. And sees the red gleam of the little phone's message light.

24

Rudy and Frank

It's been a long Sunday.

Félix García and two of his guys, Tacho and Roberto, had been waiting for us last night when the Beechcraft set down at a private field a few miles north of El Paso. He greeted us as Rudolf and Francis, the way Aunt Cat calls us. We got into a black Grand Cherokee with Félix at the wheel, and with the other two following us in a gray Ram pickup we drove up I-10 to Las Cruces and stopped for supper at a Mex place Félix is partial to.

Félix is our cousin and our elder by twenty years, an underboss of an organization that controls most of the wetback traffic between El Paso and Ojinaga. We'd met him only once before, about three years ago, when he made a rare trip to Brownsville for a special meeting with Charlie Fortune and some other people and a brief visit with Aunt Cat. His grandmother, Angelica Wolfe Garcia, was Aunt Cat's sister-in-law and Frank and my great-grandaunt. Ever since she married into the García clan and went to live in El Paso, the Garcías and Wolfes have often been of help to each other professionally.

Aunt Cat had informed Félix about Eddie's situation. Over a supper of roast kid and rice and bottles of Bohemia, he said Eddie had to be pretty stupid to get crosswise with the Sinas.

“He's not stupid,” Frank said. “Rash at times. He's a kid.”

“Whatever,” Félix said. “You know how big the Sinas are?”

“We read a newspaper now and then,” I said.

Félix didn't think the kid had a chance in hell of making it to the border. Even if by some “wild-ass miracle” he did, the odds were one in a million he'd get any farther, since the Sinas have people all along the line between Nogales and California. And even if by some even greater miracle he did make it over the line, he'd still have to cross the worst part of the Sonoran Desert—la tierra del diablo, the locals call it. The sad fact, Felix said, was that the Sinas had probably already nailed him and there was no way we'd ever know for sure.

I'd been thinking the same thing and it saddened me in a mode I wasn't used to. I could tell the thought had crossed Frank's mind too.

“No disrespect to Doña Catalina,” Félix said, “but she's got you on a fool's mission. Me too. Anybody but her asked me to do this, I'da laughed in their face.”

He told us he's familiar with Nogales and knows a place there called Casa de Gallos, which bills itself in English as a “gentlemen's club” but is in fact a very fine whorehouse with beautiful girls. And just down the street from it is an excellent cantina with pool tables. He proposed we check into a hotel in that neighborhood and spend the next couple of days sporting with the girls, shooting a little pool, putting down a few beers. Then we call Catalina and say we're very sorry but we found no sign of Eddie. “She's happy we tried and we all go home,” he said.

He caught the look that passed between me and Frank. “I know,” he said. “You want to keep your word to the old girl. Me too.” Which was why, he said, he'd brought Tacho and Roberto. He told us they're of
Yaqui descent and know the Sonora border very well, they can speak three languages and can go without sleep for days at a time. He would send one of them to Sasabe and the other to Sonoyta. They'd keep their eyes and ears open and if they got any wind of Eddie they'd give us a call on a satellite and we'd haul ass out there.

“How's that for a plan?” Félix said. “You won't be lying when you tell her you tried.”

Frank looked at Tacho and Roberto, assaying them in some private way. They hadn't said a word throughout the meal. Then he looked at me.

“Okay with me if it's okay with you,” I said.

p

We didn't get to Nogales until after midnight, Frank and I managing to get a little sleep on the drive. The town dwarfs the American one of the same name directly across the border, so that only when you speak of the American Nogales do you have to specify which one you mean. We checked into a hotel, and while Félix went off to make a landline call from a phone at the rear of the lobby we had a drink with Tacho and Roberto at the bar. We'd left our weapons with a pal of Félix's on the U.S. side because the Mexican authorities can be very harsh indeed with somebody who tries to slip a gun into the country. Such stringent gun-control laws are pretty funny when you consider the kind of firepower steadily shipping in to the cartels, some of it from us Wolfes, I admit. But Félix had a connection in Nogales, a guy named Trejo, who could fix us up. When he got back from making the call he said that sometime before dawn a dark green Trailblazer would be parked next to the Cherokee in the far corner of the hotel lot and the keys to it left for us at the front desk. In the Trailblazer would be a large tool chest containing five Beretta nines and a pair of M-4 carbines, plus extra loaded magazines for each weapon. While it was unlikely we would need the guns, it was better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. Longtime rule.

p

Frank and I slept late and then joined Félix in the hotel patio for brunch. He told us Roberto and Tacho had departed before sunrise, one in the Trailblazer, the other in the Ram. They'd slipped a note under his door and left the keys to the Cherokee at the desk. The note said, Todo exacto. Félix had gone out to the Cherokee and found the tool chest with the weapons in it, minus two pistols that Roberto and Tacho took, but with the nice surprise of scopes on the M-4s. Trejo would charge a bit extra for that amenity but had been wise to include it. In such open country the lack of a scope could be a serious deficiency. Tacho and Roberto knew what Eddie looked like because Félix had given them a copy of a picture of him taken at Aunt Cat's birthday party six months ago. He'd received the picture yesterday afternoon in El Paso via e-mail from Jessica, sent at Catalina's instruction. I wouldn't think Aunt Cat had explained to Jessie why she sent it or that Jessie asked.

We lingered over coffee till past noon and then Félix took us for a leisurely drive around Nogales so we could have a look at it. He had his sat phone at hand in case Roberto or Tacho called. We all had Berettas under our belts.

There's no discounting the difference between the heat here and what we're used to. On the Texas coast, midsummer's as humid as dog breath and the sky's full of bright clouds that can swiftly blacken and tower into thunderheads. You sweat plenty. Here your sweat evaporates as fast as it forms and the air is so drily hot it can make your nose bleed. The sky is huge and cloudless and the pale blue of a gas flame. The sun's a white smear. There hasn't been a wisp of cloud all day, but the TV said there was a chance of rain tonight. I thought it was a joke but Félix said it could happen. He said the only thing you can truly predict about a desert summer is that it will be dry and scorching except for rare times when it isn't, and those exceptions sometimes give notice they're coming and sometimes don't.

He drove us all around, showing us this and that, including the fence—made mostly of old sheet metal panels—separating the gringo and the Mexican Nogales. The fence runs for a few miles through the hills east and west of the towns, but doesn't do much to slow the wetback traffic, as the coyotes simply take their chickens to crossing points beyond the ends of the fence. Félix said there are parts of the border with only a single strand of wire to step over or duck under, and in some places there's no fence at all, not for miles. Only a sign here and there to denote the boundary line.

A few blocks past the city bullring Félix pointed at a gigantic warehouse on our right that covered almost the entire block, its sign identifying it as Azteca Construcción y Electrónica, SA. He said it was the central warehouse of a construction supplies business, which also happens to traffic in black market goods, mainly explosives, arms, and electronic gear, though it could get you almost anything you might want—an SUV, say, with plates registered to a dead person. Its biggest customer was said to be the Sinas. Félix keeps an open account with Azteca because its inventory is larger and its delivery quicker than those of any supplier in El Paso. His Nogales connection, the Trejo guy, is a managing partner and the one who arranged for last night's delivery of the Trailblazer and guns. According to Félix, the cops have raided the place only once in the past three years—about five months ago, acting on a tip to an uncrooked cop chief. But a cop on the Sinas payroll alerted the warehouse and the raiders found no scrap of evidence. It didn't take long for Trejo and his partners to learn that the tipster was a guy who'd once bought some guns from them and later traded the information to the police to get out from under an armed robbery rap. Trejo gave the guy's name to the Sinas, and the next evening when the tipster's wife got home from work she found his head in the refrigerator. Minus a tongue. They stashed the rest of the guy in pieces all over the house but were careful not to leave a drop of blood anywhere on the floor, as if they didn't want to make it easy to find the pieces. The cops found all of him except for the tongue and one foot. A few days later a stink led the missus to look under the washing machine in the utility room and there was the foot. A few days after that as she was making herself breakfast she found the tongue in a jar of jelly.

“I tell you, I gotta hand it to those guys,” Félix said. “They've got a real sense of, ah . . . ”

“Theater,” I say.

“Exactly.”

We were in the left lane and slowing for a red light at the intersection past the warehouse when an orange Land Rover gunned across in front of us from the right lane over into the left-turn lane. It would have cleared us by a couple of feet even if we didn't hit the brakes, but Félix reflexively stomped them, sending me hard against the dashboard and Frank banging against the back of my seat. A sedan behind us screeched its tires too to keep from ramming us.

“Stupid bastard!” Félix yelled.

The Rover was at the head of the turn lane, waiting for the light to change, and we pulled up alongside it. On its door was a logo showing a jagged black mountain range with “Gila Geological Inc.” under it in red lettering and “Tucson, AZ” under that in smaller print. The two guys in it wore dark glasses. The one in the shotgun seat was skinny and had a short thatch on a bullet-shaped head. The driver was a bear-size mestizo with a thin mustache and thick shiny hair combed straight back. He reminded me of somebody, some badass character actor in the movies, but I couldn't place him. If they were aware they'd nearly caused an accident, they gave no sign of it.

Félix rolled down his window and yelled, “Hey! Hey fuckheads!” He flapped his arm out the window. “Hey!”

The bullethead turned and stared at him.

You stupid cocksuckers! Félix said. Learn to drive!

The bullethead grinned and cupped a hand to his ear. The driver didn't even glance our way.

Can you can hear this, asshole? Félix said, and gave him the finger.

The bullethead grinned wider and brought his hand up shaped like a pistol and pointed his forefinger and clicked his thumb at each of us in quick succession, then put the tip of the finger near his mouth and blew on it.

Hey, go fuck your
mother
! Félix yelled.

The bullethead read his lips on that one. He lost his grin and started to open his door, but the big guy snatched him by the arm and I grabbed the back of Félix's shirt to hold him back too—and then the turn light turned green and the Rover gunned away in a tight left.

Félix stuck his head out the window and yelled, Fuck your mother in the
ass
, dickhead!

“Take it easy, old cuz,” Frank said. “You scared them off already.”

“Who's that shithead think he is?” Félix said. “And where'd that other one learn to drive? El Paso?”

Our light turned green and we got rolling, but Félix kept on muttering about “dickheads” and “shiteaters” and “ratfuckers” until Frank and I busted out laughing. He demanded to know what was so fucking funny, which only made us laugh harder. He stared ahead for the duration of another block before he started laughing too. Then a minute later he said, “I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready to go get laid.”

We had a fine time at the Casa de Gallos, where the girls were fairly good-looking, if not quite the sublime beauties Félix had described, then ate supper at a steakhouse, then repaired to the Cuervo Loco Cantina for a few beers and some eight-ball, where Félix proved to be a shark and took us for twenty bucks apiece. When we got back to the hotel, the sun was down and a hot breeze was swaying the trees and sailing trash paper down the streets.

p

Now, at the end of this long Sunday, we're bellied up to the hotel bar, having a nightcap. The bartender says the evening forecast is a seventy percent chance of rain, though it likely won't be more than a shower. Roberto and Tacho each phoned Félix during the afternoon and once again just a few minutes ago, and they gave him identical reports both times. Sasabe and Sonoyta was crawling with Sinas but there was no sign or word of Eddie.