The Rules of Wolfe (22 page)

And then the trail curves and clears a rise and the lights behind them disappear.

26

Eddie and Miranda

The trail is only vaguely visible in the meager reach of the parking lights and they skid off it on the tighter turns, the Suburban each time shuddering, rocks banging the underside, Eddie fearing for the oil pan. A sharp curve along an embankment tilts them so steeply they almost capsize.

Beto tells Cisco to take it easy, slow down, nobody's chasing them, they're too busy killing each other, it's a turf fight between big dicks.

The Suburban slows. They're still running without taillights. Eddie can see nothing behind them but darkness.

Beto says they can use the headlights now and Cisco turns them on and heaves a long breath. God
damn,
he says.

Those others, the Martínez woman says. My God . . . those poor people!

“Cállate, mujer!” her husband says, and she goes silent.

They're all scared, naturally, but Eddie has a hunch gunfire is not an entirely new experience for any of them. He sets the safety on the Taurus and slips the pistol back into his pants and feels Miranda tug at her tote bag, replacing the Glock.

Where to? says Cisco.

“Keep going,” Beto says in English.

“I
know
keep going. Where
to
?”

“There's another gate. Farther up. Keep going till I tell you.”

“You still gonna cross? Hell, man, why not wait till—”

“I got good money coming for delivery of this bunch by morning.”

Beto turns to the chickens and says, Listen to me, all of you. It's terrible about the others, but thanks be to God
we're
all right. Those lunatics aren't coming after us and in a few minutes we'll be at the crossing point. We're all right now. We're safe.

The chickens make low sounds of relief.

“Fuckers were looking for somebody,” Cisco says. “That first bunch.”

“Seemed that way,” Beto says. Hey you, Mendoza. Why'd he tell you and your sister to get out?

Eddie's been waiting for it. He raises his hands in a gesture of profound incomprehension and puts a strain in his voice. The hell if
I
know! Maybe he thought I was somebody else. Man, all I could think was
why me
? Christ, I nearly shit my pants! I'm not ashamed to admit it.

He prompts a few chuckles.

I damn sure know why he wanted your sister to get out, Cisco says.

Hey man, Eddie says.

Yeah, yeah, Cisco says. Don't scare me, tough guy.

p

The rush of adrenaline has blunted Eddie's perception of time, and when Beto tells Cisco to stop and they come to a halt at the end of a wide bend under the star-bright sky, he has no clear idea how long it's been since they fled the gunfight. Ten minutes? Forty?

Back up, Beto says.

Cisco slowly negotiates the long curve in reverse, backing up about fifteen yards and onto a downward incline before Beto says, Stop.

The headlights shine on a trio of saguaro cactuses at the top of the rise, the rightmost cactus leaning against the center one. Close behind them stand a few fence posts.

“That's it, Francisco old buddy, that's the marker,” Beto says in English. “Kill the lights.” Cisco switches off the headlights and the world goes dark but for the vast spangle of stars against which the three saguaros are visible. “Be right back,” Beto says.

He gets out and they watch him scrabble up the incline and then lose sight of him. He's gone only a minute or two before he slides back into the vehicle and points off to the right.

“The Aguila Mountains are over there, all by theirselves, maybe five miles off. A low little range but I can make them out okay against the lower stars.” He is speaking as if reciting a lesson well-learned. “I keep those mountains hard on my right and a couple of miles up alongside them I come to a pass. Fairly narrow and runs a mile or so. From the other end of it I'll see a little bigger set of mountains to the east about another five miles. That's the Viudas. I cut around the lower end of them and another two miles farther on I'll hit the Sells road just a little south of a good pickup point. Maybe fifteen, sixteen miles all told. Rough but mostly flat ground. Strong bunch like this can walk it in five, six hours tops.”

“Seem awful sure about that for never crossing here before,” Cisco says. “How you know so much about it?”

“Been told by guys who know. Listen, you get over to Sonoyta and call the pickup people on a landline and tell them the change in pickup spots. About six to eight miles down the Sells road, tell them. Where the road cuts through a rock rise. They'll know where you mean.” There's a soft blue light from Beto's watch as he checks the time. “I figure we got maybe eight hours before first light. Tell them the spotter can start making passes an hour before dawn.”

“Shoulda brought a compass, man,” Cisco says. “It's a new gate, no moon, supposed to rain.”

“Day I need a compass you can shoot me for a worthless sack.”

His disdain for a compass is familiar to Eddie. Every guide he's met on the lower Rio Grande feels the same way. It's a point of pride among them to make their way by expert reading of the land's lay. And forget cell phones. They're for pussies and anyway useless in all the dead zones of the deserts. Besides which, if the Border Patrol catches you with one they'll make you for a guide, and the law's much rougher on a guide than on a chicken. That's why you dress like them and if you're caught you talk like them and play dumb as them. Instead of jail you're booted back to Mexico and can get right back to work.

All right, friends, Beto says, here's the door to the north! The land of plenty! Everybody out. And no smoking. We can't make even the smallest light.

Possessions in hand, they tumble out the doors in a low excited babble, laughing softly. They bend and stretch in the wonderful feel of the light wind after the cramped ride, their recent terror overcome by the thrill of arriving at the border. The boy is coming too. Apprenticing the trade is Eddie's guess.

Beto tells Cisco, “Watch out for anybody coming your way. Fuckers mighta called for help.” He shuts the door and slaps the Suburban's roof. Cisco drives off around the curve and is gone. In a whisper Eddie tells Miranda to hold on to his backpack strap and then eases over next to Beto, holding to his plan to stick close to the guide and if he cuts out, cut out with him. If he objects, produce the gun.

The crossers are but shadowy forms to each other as they follow Beto up the stony incline to the saguaros and a fence of two sagging wires. Beto holds one wire down with his foot and raises the other with his hand and they all pass through and into the United States.

Miranda tugs at Eddie's backpack and he half-turns to her mouth at his ear, and she whispers, We made it!

27

The Boss

Two of the gunmen yet alive. One drags himself into the glare of headlights and there affixes a belt tourniquet to his bloody leg and then one to the maimed arm of his ambulatory comrade whose lower jaw and tongue have been shot off, blood running off the gaping wound and sopping his chest. This one then fetches a satellite phone from the Navigator and brings it to the sitting man.

p

An hour later the scene stands cleared of vehicles, armament, the dead. The bodies of the Sinas, including the two who bled to death while awaiting the arrival of their fellows, go to graves. Those of the other bunch—who are identified as members of Los Espantos, an enforcement unit of the Baja organization—are taken to a Tijuana roadside and left there in an orderly and headless row. A note attached to one by a steak knife in the sternum reads, The stupid need no head.

Tomorrow evening the heads will be returned to their employer in a pair of sacks flung smashing through the front window of the exclusive Tijuana club where the Bajas' leader will be dining in a private back room and in the company of a police captain, a flock of pretty women, and a dozen bodyguards. At about the same time, the Espantos chief will be dancing with a girl of fifteen in an Ensenada nightclub and whispering something into her ear that makes her laugh just as a pair of Sinas less than ten feet away open fire on them with submachine guns and as other Sinas begin shooting the Espantos at a table and at the bar. The gunfire will last almost fifteen seconds and the Sinas will vanish from the premises in less time, not a man of them hurt. In addition to the chieftain and the girl and the seven other Espantos present, six bystanders will be killed by the gunfire, seven others will be wounded, and many others badly hurt in the panicked stampede for the doors.

Four days later an American Border Patrol agent cutting for signs of crossers along the weathered fence line will call his headquarters to report a stationary vehicle he glassed a half mile south of the border that morning and which was still there in the afternoon. Mexican authorities will be informed of it and the next day dispatch a pair of policemen to that region where they rarely venture. They will discover a Chevrolet Suburban with its left-side tires flat and bullet holes in the left door and a dead man at the wheel. He will have wounds in his left side and one in the left temple encircled by a powder burn. His remains will eventually be identified as those of Francisco Soto Esquivél, whose criminal record is lengthy but unimpressive.

p

The Boss receives a report of the gunfight at the border even as the crew that cleaned up the scene is on its way back to Nogales. He is told the fight may have been started by some misunderstanding about a large SUV full of chickens who were all killed and that nobody among the dead fit the description of Porter or the girl. He is both angry and relieved. Angry that the kid is still out there on the loose and might yet get away. Relieved that Martillo might yet capture him and bring him to Culiacán alive.

28

Eddie and Miranda

It is rocky ground thick with scrub brush and cactus, but as Beto said, they're a strong group and can move at a quick pace. Heading east-northeast by Eddie's reading of the polestar. They weave around rocky rises and traverse arroyos—dry sandy streambeds more commonly called washes in Arizona, some narrow and shallow, some as wide as highways and several feet deep. To the west a distant range of mountains stands in low silhouette against the stars.

Eddie keeps close enough to Beto and the kid to hear bits of their low-voice exchanges. It is clear that they are related and that the boy is recently arrived from some other part of the country. He seems familiar with night-sky navigation but Beto has been tutoring him in the deceptive effects of desert darkness and distance.

p

After a time they arrive at the low Aguila range. Eddie reckons they've been walking nearly two hours. They hold close to its left flank, watching for the pass that should soon present itself. The breeze has grown to a light wind and Beto tells the boy it's a lucky thing because it covers their tracks. If Border Patrol sign cutters should come along later they won't find any mark of their passage. Even a Papago couldn't find our tracks tomorrow, he tells the boy.

What's a Papago? the boy asks.

A kind of Indian. This is Papago country.

I thought we were in the United States.

Beto laughs low and says, We are. I'll explain it later.

Now he stops and points and says, “Hay está el paso.”

The boy says he sees it.

Eddie does too. Their night vision by this time keenly honed and able to distinguish the deeper darkness of the pass a short way ahead. He gauges its breadth at the base at about fifteen yards, but it's hard to say in this gloom.

The wind has begun to gust. The Panama guy curses as his hat whips off his head and into the night. Eddie and Miranda take off their caps and stuff them into the tote.

“Mira, tío,” the boy says, looking west.

A horizontal band of insuperable blackness is rising very fast along the lower western sky and has obliterated the mountain horizon.

It's the rain they said we would get, the boy says. But it looks harder than they said. Look how dark. At least there's no lightning.

Or thunder, Eddie thinks. Or even the smell of rain.

The others have stopped to look back at the ominous black cloud that is growing with astonishing speed, rising like a titanic ocean wave and extinguishing the stars as it comes. The wind ahead of it blowing harder now and flinging sand.

“Ay qué chingada,” Beto says. “No es lluvia.”

Eddie too knows what it is. He has seen such storms in Texas but never the size of this.

Beto shouts for them to run for the pass, and they scramble up the scree slope after him.

What is it? one of them yells. What?

With Miranda holding to Eddie's backpack, they lag behind Beto and the kid but still outdistance the rest of the group as they head into the pass and the even greater darkness between the high rock walls they cannot see.

And then the wind comes roaring after them into the pass and the colossal cloud of dust swallows the mountain. . . .

29

Martillo and Pico

That afternoon they cross into Arizona at the Lukeville port of entry. The inspector says “How you fellas doin?” and glances at the topographical maps lying on the console, the surveying instrument cases in the back, the two large plastic coolers. He examines their Arizona driver's licenses identifying them as Nicolas Caldera and David Harris. They are prepared to present American passports, to show him mineral samples and the clearance documents for them, but he asks to see nothing else. He hands back the licenses and gives the Land Rover an admiring look and says he'd sure like to have one of these babies someday but it ain't about to happen. On his salary he couldn't even afford the gas. Martillo says he can't afford one either but at least he gets to tool around in the company's. “Lucky guy,” the inspector says, and waves them through.