The Rules of Wolfe (4 page)

Neto relieves him at a quarter to four and is displeased to see that none of the girls are at the pool to refresh themselves after their hot trip.

3

Eddie and Miranda

That evening Eddie stands in the same dark recess near the same stairway as before, M-16 again slung on shoulder, waiting for Miranda to come down to supper. The sun has set behind the mountains and the courtyard lamps have come on. The lounge music thumping from the courtyard speakers will grow louder yet as the night deepens.

He learned the party routines the last time. He knows the girls are excluded from taking supper in the main dining room with the men except at the big dinner on the last night of a party. On the preceding nights, the girls eat in the smaller of the house's two kitchens, tended by the old cook, while the men dine in the main room on meals prepared in the main kitchen by a chef from Culiacán. After supper the girls will put on their party dresses and join the men in the lounge with its dance floor and live band, and the raucous hilarity will carry through the compound until dawn.

It has occurred to him that she might not come down alone. Might this time be with some girl she has befriended since the last party. If that's the case, he will approach her anyway and ask if he can have a private word. She will say yes or no, and if no, well, too bad for him. But he's sure she'll be alone.

And here they come. He watches from the darkness as they descend, dressed in jeans, shorts, T-shirts, sandals, chatting and tittering. She isn't among them and he isn't surprised. But time passes and she still does not appear. He wishes he'd worn his watch. He wonders if maybe she doesn't eat supper. The old cook said some of them don't.

When she still hasn't come down after what he judges to be at least another fifteen minutes, he knows she isn't going to. The other girls will shortly be back to dress for the party. There's nothing he can think to do but try accosting her in the morning near the entrance to the pool courtyard. A riskier tactic for being in open daylight and with other girls nearby, but if it's all that he can do it's what he'll do.

He starts across the courtyard toward the gate leading to the guards' quarters, then looks up at the gallery fronting the suites where the girls are lodged and sees a girl leaning on the rail at the near end of the gallery—sees her face clearly enough in the glow of the gallery's lantern lights to recognize her as Miranda. In a dark robe and smoking a cigarette. Studying the starry sky.

He stops and looks about, sees no one else in the courtyard. He walks over until he is almost directly below her. She remains unaware of him, her attention still on the sky.

“Oye,” he says.

She looks down and he extends his arm toward her and once again shoots her with his thumb and forefinger.

Even in the low light, he sees the vague whiteness of her grin, and she puts a hand to her breast.

She scans the deserted courtyard and looks back down at him for a few long seconds during which he feels like some commodity under appraisal. Then she beckons him with a waggle of fingers without raising her hand from the rail.

He casually walks to the shadowy stairway—thinking, Yes, yes, yes—
and then takes the stairs three at a time. She is standing by the second door down from the landing. As he heads toward her she goes inside, leaving the door ajar.

He enters a small dark parlor lit by a single candle atop a low table next to a sofa. From a shadowed doorway across the room she says, “Cierra la puerta.”

He shuts the front door and follows her into the bedroom, congratulating himself on the ease of it all.

The bedroom too is lit by a single candle, and in the low orange light she draws back the bedcovers and shrugs off the robe and eases naked into the bed as if into a pleasant pool of water.

Eddie Gato's experience with sexual windfall has taught him the wisdom of keeping his mouth shut at moments like this. He props the rifle against the wall and shuts the door and swiftly undresses. Thinking, Fish in a barrel.

p

They are just completing their first coupling when they hear some of the girls passing by on the gallery. He drops onto his side, pulling her with him, and they lie that way a few minutes, their gasps slowing, before he detaches from her. She is facing him, the candle behind her so that she is in silhouette. She runs a fingertip over his lips and he lightly bites it and she laughs low in her throat. Before long they join again, this time her atop. And this time they are less urgent about it, restraining themselves until they ache and then finishing in a flurry of grunting flexions. She collapses on him, and then rolls off with a sigh.

They lie on their backs for a time, again catching their breath, keeping to their own thoughts. Then she sits up with her back against the headboard and pulls the sheet up over her breasts and tucks it under her arms. She lights a cigarette and offers the pack to him.

“No, gracias,” he says. The first words to pass between them since she told him to shut the door. Only now does he notice a bruise under her left eye. He gestures at it and asks how she got it.

Carelessness, she says.

Again they hear the other girls out on the gallery, their voices and laughter louder this time. Excited. On their way to the men in the lounge.

Hell, he says.

What?

He gestures toward the gallery. You have to go.

No I don't.

Those guys are waiting for you.

Not for me.

She takes a drag of her cigarette and exhales the smoke at him and smiles as he fans it from his face.

He feels a stir of apprehension. I don't get it, he says. How come
you. . . . And now remembers the Boss isn't at the rancho and won't be
until tomorrow.

He sits up. Jesus Christ, you're
his
girl!

Whose girl?

The Boss's.

She laughs and says, Is that what you think? Her expression turns sly. What if I am? I hope you won't wet my bed in your fright.

Oh man, you crazy bitch.

He starts to get out of the bed but she grabs his arm. Whoa, kid, calm yourself, I'm teasing. I'm not the Boss's woman, I swear. She grins. You ought to see your face.

He cannot read her eyes. Has no idea if she's telling the truth. Then why don't you have to be down there with the others?

What does it matter to you? Look, I told you I don't have to go and I told you I'm not the Boss's woman. And nobody's going to come to fetch me—another thing you don't have to worry about. You don't want to believe me, fine. If you want to go, go. I never would have thought you are such a rabbit.

That stings him.

She lets the sheet fall to her waist and grinds the cigarette out in a bedside ashtray and then busies herself lighting another.

He doesn't believe her. There's no reason she'd be exempt from the party except she's the Boss's girl. Then again . . . the man won't be here until around noon, Flores himself said so. Why not enjoy her some more while she's available? And why, he wonders, given the severe threat to his ass if discovered, is he feeling so . . .
pleased
with himsel
f
?

Well hell. The
Boss's
girl! His cock stirs.

She blows a smoke ring at it and smiles. I think he is more daring than you.

What about you?

You think there is no danger to me in this? she says. I am not the Boss's woman, but we are not supposed to fool with any of you guys. Rancho guards, security men, none of you.

Yet here I am.

Yes, yes, I know. It's just . . . they have all these fucking
rules.
Sometimes I just—

Whatever she was going to say, she catches herself. Then says, “Me caes bien, chacho.” You're fun. Stay fun, all right?

Quit calling me kid. I told you, my name's Eduardo.

I'm so sorry, she says with mock rue. I did not mean to offend your manly dignity. Then nods at his erection and says, I think maybe he's had enough talk.

He makes himself twitch and says, I thinks he agrees.

She grins and takes up a small clock from the bedside table and winds it. The clock has hands that glow in the dark and she says its alarm is loud enough to wake the dead. She sets the ringer for three o'clock.

At that hour, she says, everybody will be drunk and fucking and nobody will see you slip out.

She places the clock beside her on the stand and then slides down onto her back and stretches with exaggerated languor, arching her breasts upward.

And laughs as he growls and pounces on her.

p

They converse in the interludes between lovemaking. The music from the bar lounge is now audible to them even at this distance and in this rear room.

He has discovered that the red tattoos on her shoulder blades are of little wings broken at their joints. He asks why she got them and she says she lost a bet and it's a long story and maybe she'll tell it to him some other time.

For her part, she's curious about his blue eyes. Is he a gringo?

No, he lies, but some of his ancestors were. Most members of his family are Caucasians of Anglo and Spanish blood, though there are a few mestizos in there.

Her curiosity now the more piqued. “Como te apellidas?” she asks.

“Porter,” he says. It is the surname by which he is known here but is in fact his mother's maiden name.

Can you speak English?

“Claro que sí,” he says, and intones, “My nem ees Eh-war Porrter.”

She laughs and asks what he said about his name and he tells her.

Where are you from?

The border. And thinks, Porter from the border. I'm a poet.

She says she doesn't believe him. She knows people from the border, not only from Sonora but Chihuahua too, and his accent is different from theirs.

Because he's from the other end of the border, he tells her, from Matamoros, near the mouth of the Rio Bravo.

“Ah, pues,” she says. And asks what brought him so far from home, how he came to work for the Company?

Her questions becoming too many for comfort. To deflect them he says, How did you?

She says it is another long story.

Mine too, he says.

She laughs and rolls onto him.

Saturday

4

Eddie and Miranda

He wakes to darkness and a sense of threat.

The candle has burned out. The clock reads 2:25.

Rock music booming through the compound. The girl sleeps on her side with her back to him. He sits up and sees a bright line of light along the lower edge of the bedroom door.

Boss!

He bolts out of bed and over to the wall alongside the door, heart jumping. The M-16 is on the other side of the doorway. He is about to spring over and grab it when the door opens toward it and blocks it from him.

In the high shaft of light from the outer room, a man's shadow extends from the threshold to the bed.

The girl stirs, raises her head, squints into the light. “Chacho?”

“Quién?” says the man.

A wall switch clicks and the room comes ablaze with overhead light as a man in a cream suit enters.

The girl's eyes reflexively cut to Eddie at the man's right—and as the man starts to turn to see what she's looking at, Eddie lunges and clamps an arm around his neck from behind.

They stagger across the room, crashing into furniture, the man bucking and flexing to try to break free of the choke hold. He is taller than Eddie and very strong but Eddie Gato is very strong too and has a solid grip on the wrist of the forearm across the man's throat.

One of the man's hands scrabbles into his coat and the girl cries, “Pistola!”

The gun now in the man's hand and he angles it behind him and Eddie twists away from the muzzle as the gun fires and he feels a burning in his side. The pistol blasts again as he wrenches the man around and slams him headfirst into the wall without losing his hold on him and the gun clatters to the floor.

They stumble and fall down, locked together like crazed lovers. The man now making guttural sounds, thrashing and kicking wildly, clawing with both hands at Eddie's throttling arm as Eddie constricts the forearm with all his strength. It seems the man will never cease struggling. And then he goes slack and there is a stink of shit. But if you're fighting for your life hand to hand and have to kill somebody, you better be damn sure he's dead before you let up, and even though Eddie can feel that he's dead, he maintains his hold full force for another ten eternal seconds during which he hears only the music from outside and his own gasps and expects security men to come bursting in at any second and kill him.

It is painful effort to unlock his hand from his wrist, his arm from around the man's neck. Heaving for breath, Eddie gets to his feet and picks up the pistol, a Glock 15. He extracts the magazine and its weight tells him it is nearly full, then he snaps it back in place. He looks into the front room and sees the door is shut. The music outside is thunderous. Could be nobody heard the shots. Must be. Or they'd be here.

His side is burning and he feels a fleeting impulse to vomit but fights it down. He has never killed anyone before, though he has come close to it. He inhales through his teeth as he probes the raw patch of powder-burned flesh with his fingertips, searching for a bullet hole but not finding one.

He now has his first clear look at the dead man's face—tongue extruding, mustache thick with red nasal discharge, bulging eyes scarlet. It takes him a moment to comprehend that this man is not the Boss.

The girl is zipping up her jeans, pulling on a T-shirt, big-eyed but moving with purpose. She takes up an open switchblade from the bedside table and folds it closed and puts it in her pocket. Eddie has no idea where the knife came from. Under her pillow? As she stuffs T-shirts and underwear into her tote bag, she asks Eddie if he's hurt.

It rankles him that she seems less frightened than he is, but his anger helps to suppress his fear.

Who the hell's this guy?

She takes a wad of pesos from the dresser drawer and puts it in her jeans. You don't know? Enrique.

Who's Enrique?

“El chingado Segundo,” she says. The bastard wasn't supposed to be here till much later. Him and his prick brother.

She lofts Eddie's pants to him.

Segundo? You're
Segundo's
woman?

She looks at the dead man. Not anymore.

Oh Jesus Christ . . .

Take it easy, kid. We—

Take it easy? They'll kill me twenty times.

Me too, she says. But they have to catch us first.

p

She tends to his wound in the bathroom with swift dexterity. It's on his flank, directly below his rib cage, a raw seared gash of about three inches. As she cleans it with a wadded cotton sock doused with hydrogen peroxide, he grunts and flinches, and she chides him for a baby. He's got the Glock in his hand and keeps cutting looks at the bedroom door, though it's not likely anyone will come to disturb the number two man while he's taking his pleasure with his woman.

She folds the other sock and soaks it with peroxide and has him hold it against the wound while she twirls a large light scarf into a band and then wraps it snugly around his waist to hold the folded sock in place and fastens it with a safety pin. Eddie puts on his shirt and leaves it untucked to cover the Glock in his waistband.

They go back into the bedroom to search Segundo, expelling hard breaths at the stench of his stained pants. Only now does Eddie notice the money belt the man is wearing. It does not feel very thick as he takes it off him to find that it holds a layer of American hundred-dollar bills. He thumbs through a portion of them and approximates a total of maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand. He puts the belt on under his shirt, fitting it above his makeshift bandage. In Segundo's jacket they find a cell phone, a packet of Mexican currency in 200- and 500-peso notes, a thin wallet with some American credit cards. Eddie pockets the cash, tosses aside the phone and cards.

All the while, they are talking fast about what to do.

Eddie thinks they can make it out of the compound easily enough in a Jeep with her hidden under a tarp behind the seat. The security men all know he's a ranch guard and he'll tell the guy at the gate he's going to the village to get laid. But he doubts he can talk his way past the guard posts between the village and the Obregón road.

She tells him they don't have to go by that route. She knows another one. It's a bumpy little trail but drivable if they take it carefully. But when she says it's in the opposite direction from the village, Eddie shakes his head.

The guard in the tower will see the way we're heading and wonder what's going on and give the security guys a call. Unless . . .

What?

Unless we're in the Boss's car. It never stops at the gate. With its dark glass the guards won't know who's in it. They'll assume it's the Boss, or maybe Segundo, like always.

The
Boss's
car, she says.

We can do it, he says. The car park is way off in the corner of the compound, out of sight of everything. The flunky drivers aren't going to question a guard who says Segundo told him to use the Boss's car for . . . I don't know, some errand. I don't have to explain anything to them. But there may be a security guy there. If there is, I'll tell him, ah . . . Segundo ordered me to fetch a briefcase he forgot on the plane. And to be damn quick about it.

Yes! That's very good,
yes
.

But how to explain you?

Me? Segundo sent me with you because . . . because I've been on the plane. I know where he keeps the case.

I don't know, Eddie says. Might work. If it doesn't—

It
will
work, she says. “Ya lo verás.”

He grins despite himself. I'm real glad to hear it.

But then? she says. Where do we go?

Out of the country damn quick as we can. There's no hiding from these guys anywhere in Mexico. We go to Ciudad Obregón and get on a plane to the United States.

Her face pinches. I can't fly out of the country. I have no passport.

Eddie says neither does he—though in truth he does, some six hundred miles away at a place called Patria Chica—but he tells her they don't need passports, Segundo's money will get them across. He knows a charter pilot in Obregón with his own plane. For a few grand in American dollars he'll file a phony flight plan and take them to some cow pasture in Arizona or New Mexico. He slings the M-16 on his shoulder.

She grins and picks up her bag. That is a very fine plan.

At the front door she says, Wait. Let me see if there's anyone around. She hands him the bag and opens the door just enough to slip out.

As soon as she's gone he is seized by the certainty she's not coming back. She's decided her best chance is to go straight to the security team and tell them what happened. After all, she didn't kill Segundo. Yes, she fucked a guard, but that was all she did, and so—

“All clear,” she says at the door.

p

Eddie's driving without headlights, the SUV rocking and pitching over the donkey trail, the stony landscape eerily illumined by a lean crescent moon scarcely clear of the mountains.
The M-16 is propped between the console and her seat, the Glock between his legs.

It's frustrating to have to drive so slowly in an SUV with a high-horsepower V-8. Eddie repeatedly and unconsciously speeds up until the tires start to lose purchase on the curves, and he each time marvels when the Electronic Stability Control senses the skid sooner than he does and counteracts it by working the brakes in ways impossible to him. He feels like all he's doing is steering while the Escalade does the driving. He's reminded of the common grievances some in his family have against ­computers—the loss of control to machinery, the surrender of privacy and personal freedom, and so on and so forth—even though almost all of them use computers for one purpose or another, even most of the oldsters, and some in the family are aces with them. He thinks of his cousins Rudy and Frank and their beloved Mustangs and Barracudas with stick-shift transmissions and he can imagine what they think of the Escalade and its ESC. But he's damned glad to have the device. And that the gas tank is full.

There had been a security man at the car park and he nodded when Eddie explained his task for Segundo. The man's attention was mostly on Miranda, who made eyes at him while the Escalade was brought from the garage. He told her she could get arrested for looking so good even with that black eye, and she laughed and said she guessed it was a good thing for her he wasn't a cop. He asked how she got the eye and she said, Wouldn't you like to know? His only remark to Eddie was about carrying a rifle simply to get a briefcase at the airfield. Eddie said, Yeah well, orders, you know how it is. The man nodded and said he sure the fuck did.

It's Eddie's guess that they've got at least until sunrise before anybody has reason to look for Segundo and goes to Miranda's room. By then—if her recollection is accurate about how long it took her and Segundo to get to Ciudad Obregón that day in the Jeep—they should be arriving at the Obregón airport. If they're really lucky, however, Segundo won't be found until much later in the morning, by which time they'll be in the States. They could use a little luck with Eddie's pilot pal too. Evaristo. He lives only a few minutes from the airport, so even if he's not at his hangar and they have to call him at home he can get there fairly fast. Here's hoping he's not off on some job. If he is, well, they'll find another charter, that's all there is to it. There are plenty of private pilots ready to cross the border for the right price.

She finds some CDs in the console and slips a disc of contemporary corridos into the player and sets the volume low. Then lights a cigarette and directs the smoke out her partially open window.

They've been driving about half an hour and have exchanged fewer than a dozen words when she says, I'm glad he's dead.

He cuts a look at her but she keeps her gaze out the window.

A minute passes. Without turning from the window she tells him she was kidnapped off the streets of Mazatlán five months ago. She and her boyfriend Gabo were walking to the movies when a car pulled up beside them and a pair of men sprang out and one of them grabbed her. There were pistol shots that made her ears ring and she saw Gabo huddled on his knees as the men dragged her into the car. She was able to get out her knife and tried to cut them but they got it away, nearly breaking her thumb, then cuffed her hands behind her and told her to quit struggling or they'd knock her cold and wrap her in rope. As they sped away she looked back through the window and saw Gabo lying in the street with the awkwardness of the dead. People peeking from doorways and behind parked cars. She kept asking where they were taking her but they wouldn't answer. She knew that gangsters kidnapped rich people and sometimes some who were not so rich and demanded ransom from their families. She told them they had a big fucking surprise coming if they thought they would get ransom for her. Her only family was a drunken mother who didn't have fifty pesos to her name and even if she had any money she wouldn't use it to ransom her. You stupid bastards snatched an empty purse, she told them. She was so scared she couldn't stop talking and she was afraid they would hurt her to shut her up but they ignored her as if they were deaf. They took her far out of town to a house with a view of the sea. Segundo was there, though she didn't yet know who he was. He politely introduced himself as Enrique—she would later come to know that he was called Rico by his brother and close friends, Segundo by everyone else. He said he was the brother of La Navaja and asked if she had ever heard of that man. Of course she had. Like everyone, she had heard a great deal about the Sinaloa criminal organization and its leader. Had heard of their gun battles with other gangs and the police and even the army. Had heard of the horrific things they did. Heads left in bags at the doors of police stations. Bodies hung from overpasses. Charred corpses along country roads. Atrocities of every sort that had become so commonplace they were no longer shocking, only something to take precautions against, like the flu. And here was the brother of the chief of that organization of murderers. She was scared, naturally, but scared mostly in that strange way like at a movie about monsters or ghosts. Scared but also kind of excited, she can't explain it. One of the men handed him the switchblade he'd taken from her, and Segundo snicked it open and smiled and then closed it and gave it to her and she put it in her pocket. He told her he'd seen her near the market a few days before and thought she was very beautiful. He said he wanted her for his girlfriend. He said she would have her own apartment with a big television in a nice colonia in Culiacán. He would take her to wonderful parties. She would dine on the best food and drink. She would have pretty dresses, jewelry. She would have a life most women can only dream of. He said he could see she was afraid, maybe too frightened to refuse him, but he promised he would not harm her if she turned him down. He would be disappointed, yes, but he would send her back to her miserable life if that was what she chose. His exact words—“tu vida miserable.” He said he knew how hard it must be for her to believe this was happening and she probably needed some time to think about it, and so she should do that while he made a phone call in the patio.