The Rules of Wolfe (24 page)

Under the shimmer of ghostly light the man lies supine and unmoving. The chickens hunched low. Eddie goes to him and picks up the gun—a .25-caliber—and chucks it away. He kneels and seeks a pulse in the man's neck but isn't sure he feels one or if it's only a shudder of the earth, the tremor of his own hand.

Miranda comes up beside him. Alive? she says.

I don't know.

Move, she says. He stands and steps aside and she points the Glock and shoots the man through the forehead, the yellow gun blast prompting another small cry from the Martínez woman.

Now we know, she says.

The others stay hunkered, too frightened to move. Lacking ammunition for the MAC, Eddie hurls it into the racing flood of the wash. The chickens are relieved to see him do it. And to see the girl put the pistol in her bag. Eddie again tells them they can come with him if they wish.

Who
are
you? the lean Fonseca says.

A guy who wants to get the hell out of here, same as you.

The Martínez man says something to his wife and she begins gathering the food and water they dumped out. We'll go with you, Martínez says. The Fonsecas say they will too, that it's best they all stick together, and they hasten to recover their meager supplies.

But the Sando uncle is gone. No one saw him leave. They shout for him between crashes of thunder. Did he run off in fear of the shooting? Go downstream to search for his nephew's body?

We can't go looking for him, Eddie says.

The Fonsecas agree. They have to keep going. They must get to the road in time to meet the pickup vehicle. Their cousin Alberto is waiting for them to return for him.

Miranda looks off toward the surging wash and says, You think maybe he . . .

I don't know, Eddie says.

“Ay Dios,” the Martínez woman says, and makes a sign of the cross.

Eddie drags the Panama guy to the wash and rolls him into the torrent and the body is gone. Then he returns to his pack and picks it up. And pauses. And thinks, What if we don't find the road? What if the Panama guy was right and Beto wasn't sure where they were? What if they do find the road but don't get picked up? What if . . . ?

Do it, he thinks.

He sets the pack down again and hunches over it and slides his hand under the flap and feels around for the Sinas phone. He brings it up to the edge of the flap and opens it and is glad to see the screen light come on. It's reputed to be weatherproof and its battery to be a dynamo but he has no idea how much of its power has been drained since its last charge. He taps a short sequence of numbers.

There. You can't say you didn't try. They'll pick up the signal or they won't. Maybe try to help, maybe won't. Maybe can't.

If any of the others are curious about his action, none of them says so. He reseals the flap and slips the pack over his shoulders and starts walking. Miranda at his side, the others following.

p

They shortly come to a fence of sagging wire and the fat Fonseca wonders aloud what kind of ranch anyone could ever have tried to have in this wasteland. A goat ranch, maybe? the Martínez man says. “Un rancho de babosos,” the lean Fonseca says, elicit
ing chuckles at the image of a fenced ranch of drooling idiots.

33

Martillo and Pico

They listen to CDs of the marimba-laden Jarocho music they are partial to and tell stories they've told each other many times before. They figure the kid's group is waiting out the dust storm, either in the pass or hunched down behind rock cover near one end of the range or the other.

When at length the dust ceases, they crank up the Rover and put the night goggles back on and drive until they can make out the east end of the pass that cuts through the Aguila Mountains. They park on a rise with a clear line of sight toward the pass mouth and over the open flats to the north and south, and there wait for the group to emerge from the pass or present itself at either end of the Aguila range.

I wish there was a moon, Pico says. We wouldn't have to wear these damn goggles.

If you're going to wish for what's not, why not for floodlights every quarter mile?

Hey, if I was going to wish for something that can't be, I'd wish for Penelope Cruz to be here to help pass the time. And for you, oh, Salma Hayek. How's that?

Martillo lifts his goggles to look at him, suspecting a gibe. He has always believed that his former wife bore a striking resemblance to the actress Salma Hayek, but never said so to anyone except to her. If Pico noted the likeness he never remarked on it, and Pico's mien at the moment as he scans the darkness suggests that the mention of the actress was a simple coincidence.

p

The horizon comes aglow on crooked legs of lightning. The darkness issues a long low snarl of thunder.

Do you believe
this
? says Pico.

We'll be able to see them more easily with the lightning, Martillo says. If it keeps up.

And if doesn't hit us, says Pico.

34

Rudy and Frank

We've been taking turns catnapping and watching the screen when the dust all of a sudden quits. The wind's still blowing but at least we can start patrolling for the Buddha's signal. We can both use some coffee before we set out, so I hustle down about three blocks to an all-night café to get some to go.

The place is jammed with guys who'd waited out the dust like us, and by the time I get back to the Cherokee with a couple of coffees and a dozen cinnamon churros, the sky's full of thunder and lightning. A double whammy of weird weather. Frank's as incredulous and as pissed as I am. We no sooner get the lids off our coffee and start up the Cherokee than the rain hits—coming at us on the wind like a sidewise waterfall.

There's even less chance of picking up Eddie's signal in this storm than there was in the dust. The smart thing to do would be to stay put and wait out the worst of this one too. But we're fed up with being stuck here, so the hell with the smart thing. Better to poke along at ten miles an hour in a thunderstorm and with no chance of getting the Buddha's signal than sit here another minute.

35

Eddie and Miranda

They walk and walk through the incessant storm. The night endless. They encounter other washes but luckily none so wide or deep as the one that took Sando, Beto, and the boy. But the currents are yet strong enough to knock you down should you make a faulty step, and they can drown you quick in less than three feet of water. They traverse some of the wider washes by way of large rocks, hopping from one to another in the tricky flickers of lightning, clutching briefly to each rock before hopping to the next. They cross some of the shallower washes by forming a chain of tightly linked hands and straining to keep their balance against the current's hard tug at their knees as they slowly sidestep across. At one ford Mrs. Martínez slips from her husband's grasp and only the fat Fonseca's tenacious grip on her wrist keeps her from being whisked away. He pulls her back to them and with Martínez's help gets her back on her feet. But the Martínez provisions are lost.

None among them has a watch. By Eddie's reckoning they should have come to the Viuda range by now, even with the slow crossings at the washes. Could they have strayed off course and missed the Aguilas altogether? Not very probable, he tells himself. It's just the storm confusing his sense of time, making it seem longer than it's actually been. The others are likely to be thinking the same thing. They walk on. The thunder and lightning lessen. The wind drops, and the rain dwindles to a drizzle. The blackness begins yielding to gray.

36

Martillo and Pico

Only by their watches do they know when the day has dawned. The black sky gives no indication of it. The storm now playing out but for light rain and lingering wind.

Pico lowers the night vision binoculars and says, I think maybe they went by some other way.

Maybe so, Martillo says, irked at the interruption of his reverie. He was thinking about his former wife, how she used to love thunderstorms, especially at night. She would run out into them and dance and come back to him sopping. The smell of her then. And when she woke beside him in the mornings. And after she finished a hard ride on her stallion or lay beside him on the beach at Acapulco while the sun dried the seawater on her skin. . . .

“Mira!” Pico says.

On the topographic receiver screen is the little red dot of the tracker signal. But now it's gone. And now it's back. Weak and wavering.

Fucker turned it on, Pico says.

I have eyes, Martillo says.

Jesus Christ, look where they are. Below the border. What the hell they doing
there
?

The dot disappears. Martillo gives the receiver a little slap.

Weather's still playing hell, Pico says.

The dot returns. Martillo adjusts the receiver map for a closer view of the topography.

Why turn it on down there? Pico says. What's going on?

Be quiet a minute.

They watch the screen.

Going south, Pico says. The fucking Sinas got him. That's why he turned it on.

Martillo shakes his head. If the Sinas had him, that tracker wouldn't still be on and moving at walking speed. All right, listen . . . we don't know how long ago he turned the thing on, how long before we could pick up the signal. But we know they had enough time to get to the Aguilas before the dust hit. Let's say they got there. If you're in a pass when the dust blows in and you're blind, what would you do? Besides curse God for a motherfucker?

Feel my way out along the wall. Like we were taught.

Naturally. So would any coyote who's any good. But look. If they started following the wall before they were past here—this narrow branching passage on the right. See?—they'd follow it, wouldn't they? Thinking they were still in the main pass.

Not if they followed the left side of the wall.

But if they had done that . . .

Yes, of course, they would have come out of the pass and we would have seen them. They went into the branch. Which would bring them around like this—Pico moves his finger along the screen—and they'd come out . . . down here. Facing back the way they came.

More southerly, actually.

But they think they're still going east. Toward the Viudas.

And will continue to think so until the sky clears up enough for them to realize where they are. By that time they're going to be even farther south.

So if they don't know they're lost, why'd he turn the thing on?

You can ask him.

Pico laughs. Let's go.

We can't go straight at them, Martillo says. Not over that terrain. The big washes will be running like white rivers. We have to circle around on the higher ground.

If we go down this way. Pico says—again running his finger over the screen—and cut west through here . . . it'll put us due south of them. If we get there before the sun shows, they'll come straight to us. And if before they get to us they realize they've fucked up and turn back, we just come up behind them.

A commendable plan.

Glad you like it, Pico says, and starts up the Rover.

37

Rudy and Frank

We have a couple of close calls crossing washes, neither of them very deep but both packing unbelievable force, Frank driving both times. The first one's so strong it nearly overturns us before we make the opposite bank, and the second picks us up—you know how much a Cherokee
weighs
?—and twirls us completely around as it carries us partway downstream before we luckily hit a shallow and the wheels grab and Frank's able to gun the Cherokee up the opposite bank. Hell of a driver, Frank. I'm pretty good too but I'm not sure I could've got us out of that one.

We keep at it for the rest of the night, chugging back and forth through the storm, which starts petering out shortly after dawn. Pretty soon it's down to a drizzle and a few last gusts of wind, but the sky's still black for a while longer before graduating to a bleak gray.

I'm doing a turn at the wheel when a red blip shows up on the screen. I stop the Cherokee and we watch the blip fade, disappear for a few seconds, then come back. Then we realize where he is. According to La Gata's message he'd said he was crossing last night, but the directional and distance readings have him 19.2 miles from us, to south-southwest as the crow flies—and still in Mexico. We watch the blip a while to see if he's moving.

He is. South.

“Maybe the chasers cut him off and it's the only way he can run,” I say.

Frank spreads open the topo map and has me hold a flashlight on it while he uses a toothpick from his shirt pocket to make a scale according to the one on the map. In a minute he's got Eddie's present position at almost nine miles below the border.

He lays out a route that weaves us around the longest escarpments and the widest washes. Then says, “Let's go get his dumb ass.”

I think about calling Tacho and Roberto to come give us a hand, then reject the idea. You don't ask a friend to risk his ass in your personal fight. Kin, yes, but not friends.

Frank probably had the same thoughts, but he didn't say anything. Why should he? He knows the rule.

38

Eddie and Miranda

The storm at last desists.

They're sure the hour is well past sunrise but the cloud layer is still so dense they can see no hint of the sun's location. In this gray light a mountain range takes form in the distance ahead.

“Al fin,” the lean Fonseca says. There it is.

It's a low range but much longer than Eddie expected from Beto's description—and obviously a hell of a lot farther from the Aguilas than Beto had thought. But at least its southern end is almost straight ahead. The sight of it quickens their stride.

We'll never get to the pickup place in time, Martínez says.

Maybe we will, Eddie says. Maybe Beto was wrong about how long they would wait for us.