The Rules of Wolfe (6 page)

If they don't break down, the Boss says, they'll be at the highway by first light. There's a trail out there, an old mining road or something. Rico told me. He said it's rough but it got him to the highway. The Mazatlán cunt was with him when he found it.

Tiburón rolls his eyes at Flores, who looks away.

Have a chopper search the scrub at first light anyway, the Boss says, in case they do break down. But if they make it into the highway traffic, the chopper won't be any help.

As Tibur
ó
n punches numbers on a cell phone and starts speaking into it in low voice, the Boss says to Flores, Get me a road map.

Right here, chief, Flores says, and gestures at Chato, who produces a map from his coat. Flores shoves aside the jumbled sheets and spreads the map on the bed. The Boss bends down and studies it.

Tiburón places his hand over the cell mouthpiece and looks at the Boss in wait of further instruction.

They'll come out somewhere in here, the Boss says, sliding a fingertip over a portion of the federal highway between Ciudad Obregón and a toll station about twenty-five miles south of the city.

They can't hide anywhere this side of the border without us finding him, Flores says. If he tries to lay low to let things cool, he'll make the odds worse for himself. The question is whether he's smart enough to know that. Flores puts his finger on the airport symbol a few miles south of the city and says, Odds are he's heading here. Or some private airfield. He can't fly out of the country without a passport, but he'll probably try to fly as far from here as he can.

Get his picture to our people in Obregón, the Boss says. I want lookouts on the airport entrance road, men everywhere in the terminal, at every ticket counter and boarding gate. I want the word out to every charter flight company in Sinaloa and Sonora, every airfield, no matter how small. I want men at the train stations, the bus stations, every car rental place.

In case the kid sticks to the road we should put men at the toll plazas north and south of town, Flores says. And get men cruising the stretch of highway that runs through the city.

Do it, the Boss says.

Tiburón relays the orders into the phone to a captain of Luna Negra, the Company's main band of enforcers.

The Boss stares at his brother on the floor. His anger seethes under his blank aspect.

What more, chie
f
? Tiburón says.

Put the word out, the Boss says. Anybody who helps him in any way at all will be made into dog food. Their families too. He pauses to consider how very much he would like to have the kid alive, but knows that when you try to take one alive you give him a better chance at escape. I want his head, he says. The man who delivers it will be well rewarded.

Very good, chief. And the girl?

Fuck her to death and throw her in a garbage pit.

Tiburón nods and speaks softly into the phone.

p

Just before sunrise the Boss's jet lifts off the rude airstrip at Loma Baja, bearing him and his brother's body to Culiacán, the only other passenger a bodyguard in the cockpit with the pilot. There is a funeral to be arranged, and as always, a host of urgent concerns await the Boss's attention. Tiburón will oversee the search for Porter from a Company office in Ciudad Obregón and keep the Boss informed of developments. The ranch guests have also departed, transported to the Obregón airport in the motorcade that brought them, from there to disperse to their own regions and the operations of their respective corps and undergangs. Every man of them carrying copies of Eduardo Porter's picture.

In the plane, the Boss opens a manila envelope containing a single sheet of information about Porter and a three-by-five-inch color photograph of him taken on the day he was hired. The data are mostly physical details. Five feet ten inches tall. One hundred sixty-five pounds. Light complexion, black hair, blue eyes. The face is brown but the Boss can tell it's a darkness of sun, not racial lineage. A face cocky with youth. A horizontal white scar under the left eye. He recollects having seen him at the party before this one. They passed in a gallery. The eyes bluer than in the picture. And quick. Quick and intelligent. The record shows that Porter was enlisted in Culiacán by Elizondo Morales, who does much of the Company's lower-level hiring.

It is a flight of less than an hour and a half, and the Boss spends most of it thinking of his brothers. Less than twelve hours ago he and Rico had been on this plane and headed for the rancho, drinking and laughing and ready for fun. They somehow got on the subject of their brothers, and Rico told one of their favorite stories about Marco, the eldest, about the time when he was seven­teen and was caught in bed with both daughters of the barrio butcher. He managed to escape through a window, running naked through the morning traffic, dodging cars and pedestrians on the sidewalks, the butcher chasing him with a huge knife for almost three blocks before giving out. There were dozens of witnesses and one of them took a picture and mailed it to him. It showed him in mid-stride, grinning hugely, his dick and balls outslung, bystanders gawking. Marco liked the picture and wished he knew who'd sent it so he could pay him. The four sisterless brothers had been orphaned a few years earlier and had since then been living with their widowed Aunt Juanita, who was something of a bohemian spirit. She loved the photo so much she framed it and hung it on the living room wall. Marco had to keep a sharp eye out for the butcher after that, and had to fuck the daughters elsewhere than in their own house.

The Boss had enjoyed that story many times before and did so again on Rico's retelling. And now he recalls that six years later, when all four brothers were working for a city gang chief, a van carrying five drunken teenagers swerved across the median on the state highway and hit Marco's truck head-on at seventy miles an hour, slaughtering everyone in both vehicles including a girl riding with Marco. The bloody evidence strongly suggested she had been sucking his cock at the time. The Boss was nineteen then, Rico seventeen, their other brother Pedro twenty-one, and that there were no survivors on whom to take vengeance was the greatest frustration any of them had yet known.

It was a different matter some five years afterward when Pedro was shot dead by a trio of gunmen belonging to a rival gang. He and Rico found out who Pedro's killers were and disposed of them one by one. They cut the throats of the first two and left their bodies hanging in public by the feet, one from a tree in a park plaza and the other from a lamppost in a soccer stadium parking lot. The third man—who was said to have spit on Pedro after they killed him—they burned alive. Then deposited his charred remains in a garbage bag in front of the central police station to ensure his forensic identification and that his name be made known in the news. The Boss had razored both ears from all three men and to each corpse appended a note saying, This is what happens to whoever harms my people. And signed it La Navaja. The severed ears became his signature, and his notoriety grew with the number of bodies found earless. The Company was at that time still known as the Alliance of Blood and called itself a syndicate. He became its main assassin and Rico his partner. He won the admiration of many of its men and gradually gained the allegiance of some of the strongest underbosses. At the conclusion of a brutal internecine war for control of the organization, he emerged as el jefe máximo. The supreme chieftain. The Boss. The Company was soon afterward one of the two most powerful criminal societies in the country.

Today the major news agencies on both sides of the border less often call them organizations or syndicates and more often call them cartels. Like most of the other bosses, he likes the term for the same reason the news media do. “Cartel” has an impressive ring. It suggests a powerful association of international capacity and outsized ambitions. Like OPEC.

But he also knows that, like most of what is reported in the media, the term is erroneous. A cartel is a group of businesses that deal in the same goods and conspire to regulate the availability and price of those goods, and he cannot envision that sort of cooperation ever obtaining between Mexican criminal outfits. As much as he likes the term “cartel,” and even the public nickname “Las Sinas,” he still prefers that his people call themselves the Company. But even that name is really no more accurate than “cartel.” Despite their great size and power, the Boss knows that all of these groups are truly nothing more than gangs.

Naturally, other men have tried to take his place. Always there is someone watching for a chance to do it. The latest of them a sly young tough called El Chubasco, the chief of the Company's enforcement gang in Los Mochis. He is reported to have made clandestine overtures to some of the other undergangs, even to have made contact with one of Las Sinas' Peruvian cocaine suppliers. The Boss knows he must tend to that fucker very soon. Deal with him as with the other overly ambitious young Turks.

It is a constant struggle for the Boss to retain his command of the Company, but over the years he has done it well, with Rico as his segundo and with a cadre of good captains like Tiburón and Flores, men reliable and proficient and—most important of all—trustworthy. To a degree, anyway.

He has no wife or children and has never wanted either. In this treacherous whore of a world he has never put full faith in anyone but his brothers. And now the last of them is dead. Wrapped in a blanket in the aisle of this aircraft bearing him to a Culiacán graveyard. Rico. Enrique.

Alone in the cabin, the Boss weeps for the first time since childhood. Weeps for his little brother. For all his dead brothers. For himself. For the lonely isolation he must henceforth endure to the end of his life.

And weeps the more furiously for his deep shame at such reprehensible self-pity.

6

Eddie and Miranda

The sun is clear of the hills when Eddie eases out of the flow of traffic on the federal highway and onto a frontage road and then into a large service plaza. He pulls up to a gasoline pump at one of the dozen islands and sits there with the engine idling as he scans the parking lot and the vehicles at the other pumps. His burn wound now stinging only a little under the scarf bandage.

As they were bumping along the trail in the dark it had occurred to him that the Escalade is carrying a tracker. He'd cursed himself for a dope for not having thought of that before. But then what difference would it have made if he had? They could not have gotten away except in the Escalade, and all the Company's other vehicles were certain to be rigged with trackers too. He knows something of such devices—they are among the commodities in which his family traffics. He reflects on the ironic possibility that the unit in the Escalade was shipped into Mexico by his own kin. It would be so well hidden he'd be wasting precious time in searching for it.

The bright side, he tells himself, is that nobody intercepted them when they got to the highway. Which means that Segundo hasn't been found yet, and may not be for a while longer, and that would be ideal. Or it could mean he's only just been found and they're now in the process of getting a fix on the Escalade. Or they already have a fix and are heading this way at this very minute.

It's only another few miles to the turnoff to the Obregón airport, and although the Escalade is low on fuel they easily have enough to get them there. But it's a rule that you can never know how a plan will go, so it's best to be prepared in case it goes bad. Right now, the only preparation Eddie can think of is a full tank of gas.

Miranda too is peering all around. What are we looking for? she says.

Anything that doesn't seem right. Anybody who looks suspicious.

Hey man, everybody out there looks suspicious.

Yeah, he says. You know how to pump gas?

Oh hell no, it's way too complicated.

He ignores her sarcasm and shuts off the engine. Then slips the pistol under his shirt and says for her to fill the tank while he calls Evaristo.

Dear God, I pray I am able do this, she says as she gets out.

The plaza building is divided into a restaurant and a convenience store. There is a bank of telephone booths along the rear wall of the store, and after he gives the girl at the register a deposit to activate the gas pump, he finds a booth with a directory and looks up the number for Evaristo Sotomayor's charter aircraft company and is relieved to find a home number for him too. He'd been afraid he might have only a cell. Evaristo is a longtime friend from school days in Brownsville. He learned to fly a plane before he was legally old enough to drive a car, and he'd been out of high school only a year when he got his Mexican commercial license in Matamoros and then went to work at a charter business in Ciudad Obregón that was co-owned by a cousin. Five months later the cousin was killed in a crash landing and Evaristo became the co-owner. He still has kin in Matamoros and has visited a few times and on each return got together with Eddie for a beer or two. But they haven't seen each other now in almost a year. He's the only person not in the Company whom Eddie knows anywhere in Mexico except for Mexico City and Tamaulipas state.

He calls the office first and the woman who answers tells him Evaristo isn't there. No, he isn't out on a flight, and she doesn't know if he's at home. Eddie thanks her, then tries the home number. An answering machine tells him to leave a message. Damn, what if he's not home? The machine beeps and he says, “Oye, Risto,” and then pauses, unsure how to proceed, not wanting to record anything the wrong people might hear. Better to decide what to say and then call back. He's about to hang up when the receiver clicks and Evaristo's voice says, “Bueno?”

“Risto. Eddie Wolfe here. Long time, mano.”

“
Eddie?
. . . Oh, fuck, if I'd known it was you . . . whoa . . . you on a cell?”

“Landline. Why? What's going on?” Damn, Eddie thinks, if
he
knows . . .