The Rules of Wolfe (9 page)

Stop! he yells, and she brakes hard and the Escalade slews to a halt amid the high stalks in a raise of dark dust.

He pushes the right-side back door open against the hard press of cane and slides out with the M-16 and stays behind the open door for cover, facing back into the ragged swath they gouged through the field, ready to shoot.

They don't appear.

He tells her to cut the motor and she does and he hears the Durango's idling engine out on the alley. Then it too falls silent.

They're coming on foot, he whispers.

He reaches in for the Glock and tells her to come on. She crawls over the console and out the door and he takes her by the hand and leads her into the cane ahead, holding the rifle crosswise in front of him to ward the sharp-edged leaves from his face, feeling them cutting his knuckles. A few yards in, he squats and pulls her down beside him. The front of the Escalade is discernible through the packed stalks. They listen but hear only their own breath. The air is still and heavy and smells of dirt.

He instructs her in a whisper to lie on her stomach, facing toward the Escalade, then brandishes the Glock and asks if she knows how to use it. She shakes her head. He says, That's all right, it's an easy gun to shoot, there's no safety lever to work or hammer to cock. He hands it to her and tells her it'll fire with every pull of the trigger, but not to shoot unless she see somebody. If she shoots one and he falls and she can still see him, shoot him again, and if he still moves, shoot him again. There's at least two of them, he whispers, but there could be more.

I'll be over there, he says, gesturing ahead and a little to the left, so don't shoot in that direction. He instructs her to count to thirty and then give the stalks a little shake and listen hard while she counts to thirty again. If she doesn't hear anybody coming, shake them again and count again. Same thing over and over till she hears somebody coming or she hears his call for her.

She nods. Eyes wide. Start counting, he says.

He eases carefully through the cane to a spot abreast of the Escalade and maybe twelve feet from it and hunkers on one knee. He hears a swishing of stalks over where he left her, and he starts counting to thirty but is only at twenty-four when the stalks swish again. She's nervous and counting a little fast.

She has swished the stalks once again, and he is at the count of nineteen when he hears the crunch of someone treading on the flattened stalks in the nearest bend of the Escalade's trail into the field.

He breathes deeply and slowly through his mouth and holds the rifle ready.

But she evidently hasn't heard them yet and swishes stalks again and the footsteps stop.

Silence. Then raspy unintelligible whispers. Then rustlings. He's sure now that there are only two of them and they have split up and are advancing on either side of the Escalade.

There are no more swishings from where she is. She's heard them too.

The one coming around on Eddie's side is stepping slowly and carefully, but it is impossible to move through the cane in silence. A moment more and the shadowy form of a man appears a few feet in front of him and Eddie fires a three-rounder into his face and the man heaves rearward, triggering a reflex burst of automatic fire that rips through the stalks over Eddie's head and brings chunks of cane down on him.

From the other side of the Escalade a man shouts,
You get them?

Eddie eases forward and sees the man he shot sprawled in a cane furrow. Boots, jeans, green muscle shirt. Eyes wide and lightless, a hole under one, two holes above it. The ground mucking red under his head. A MAC-10 machine pistol near his hand, a chromed Beretta in his waistband, a cell phone holstered on his belt.

The cane rustles loudly as the other one starts coming
around the front of the Escalade in a hurry and Eddie hears the Glock fire twice and the man cries out and the pistol cracks twice more and there's a soft thud.

Eddie backtracks through the stalks until he's within a few feet of the front of the Escalade and sees a man in a Houston Astros baseball cap and a yellow guayabera shirt, its front gleaming with bright blood. The man sits against the front bumper, chin on chest, legs doubled under him, arms lax at his sides. A MAC beside him.

Eddie strains to hear whatever he can but there is only the croak of a nearby crow. Keeping his eyes on the man, he says, “Miranda.”

“Chacho?” Her voice small.

There is no other sound. He's convinced now there were only the two of them.

I'm coming out, he says. Don't shoot
me
.

Keeping the M-16 pointed at the man's head, he steps over to him. On one inner forearm is a well-wrought tattoo of the Holy Virgin cradling an AK, and on the other, above the wrist, is a black circle the size of a nickel with short black rays extending from it. The sign of Luna Negra, the Company's elite cadre of gunmen. The man has two distinct wounds in his chest and his arm is bloody from another. Eddie puts his foot to the man's shoulder and pushes him over on his side, the cap tumbling off to reveal the wound in his neck where a bullet passed through it.

Miranda comes out of the stalks, holding the Glock out before her, mouth slack, eyes wide and focused on the dead man.

Eddie sidles out of her line of fire and slings the rifle on his shoulder, then shows her how to place her finger on the trigger guard to prevent an accidental discharge and gently pushes down her hand so the pistol points at the ground.

I was so scared, she says. She examines the crotch of her jeans. I thought I wet myself.

Doesn't look it, he says. Listen, you did real good. Hit him every shot.

You said shoot till he falls and doesn't move.

Yeah, you sure did that.

Her eyes again fix on the dead man. I don't . . .

What? he says.

What do you . . . I don't know . . .
feel
? She gives him a quick look as if she's afraid he's going to ask what she means.

I feel a lot luckier than these pricks.

She wipes at her nose and nods awkwardly. Yes, she says. Yes. Me too. Then something settles in her eyes and her mouth tightens—and she kicks the man's leg and mutters,
Pig
. And slips the Glock into her jeans.

Eddie smiles and thinks, Some girl. Grab our stuff, he says. We gotta move.

As she hurries off to the Escalade, he takes up the MAC and detects no smell on it of recent firing. He removes the magazine of .45-caliber cartridges and judges by its heft that it holds its thirty-round capacity or nearly so, then reinserts it. He's handled a few MACs and always liked the gun, though some guys he knows consider it practically an antique. They come with a retractable stock but this one lacks it. He pulls up the man's guayabera to get at his pockets and sees that, like the other Sina, he has a cell phone on his belt. The same model. He withdraws it from the holster and opens it and turns it on and taps a sequence of buttons he was taught by an aunt who knows about such things.

Shit, he says.

What? she says, returning with the tote bag.

It's got a tracker, he says. And begins pressing another combination of buttons.

What's that?

It lets somebody somewhere else know exactly where we are.

They
know
where we are? She looks all about in alarm.

He smiles, staring at the phone. No.

But you said—

It's turned off.

He looks at the dead man and then toward where the other one lay. I get it, he says. They didn't want their own guys to know where they were.

But why not? The more who help to chase—

Because there's a reward for us and they didn't want to share it. Except with the two cops. And the only reason they called them into it was to clear the way, give them cop cover.

How do you know there is a reward?

If you were the Boss wouldn't you offer one for whoever killed your brother?

He shuts off the phone and closes it and shoves it into her bag, then considers the phone holster on the man's belt. No need to let whoever finds him know for sure he had a phone. He removes the holster and adds it to her tote, then goes through the man's pockets and takes his money and the keys to the Durango.

He leads her at a clumsy trot over the crushed stalks back to the field alley. He emerges from the cane and sees the Durango ten yards to his left at the end of parallel brake ruts in the dirt. And then on his right sees a crouching uniformed cop not ten yards away, raising a pistol at him. Even as he's cocking and bringing up the MAC, Eddie thinks, He's got me.

But no. The cop's gun barrel bobs slightly and he looks confused in the instant before Eddie's burst hits him just above the eyes and sprays the top of his head onto the dirt behind him and he falls backward.

Eddie goes to him and picks up the pistol. A blued Taurus 9-­millimeter with the safety lever still on. He wonders if the cop was unused to the gun or simply panicked and forgot.

Miranda comes up and makes a face at the sight of the man's destroyed head.

The one who shot at us, Eddie says. Car must've got stuck in the field. He should've walked off the other way.

He puts the Taurus and the MAC in her bag and then drags the body into the cane while she stands lookout in the alley. Then they hustle to the Durango and get going.

He can't believe nobody else has shown up. Which doesn't mean they're not on their way—even though there's no show of dust from the road on the other side of the fields.

Luck, luck, luck, Eddie thinks. Talent is a very good thing to have, but absolutely nothing beats good luck. There's a rule of some sort about it.

p

They come to a cross alley and turn west. A few miles farther, they exit the sugar field at a road leading to a junction with the highway.

She has kept silent ever since they got into the Durango, smoking one cigarette after another. He wonders if she's dwelling on how close she has come to getting killed in recent hours and is perhaps wishing there might be some way to make her peace with the Company.

As if she's heard his thoughts, she turns and says, All I want is to get to the other side.

Well, yeah, he says, a little puzzled. That's the whole idea.

No . . . I mean I don't expect anything from you once we get across. I just . . . I want you to know that.

He looks at her. Then back at the road. He knows that when a woman says she doesn't expect anything from you, you can bet the ranch she damn well does. No response is best if they let you get away with it.

I only hope you don't run out on me before we get across, she says.

It's not a remark that can be ignored. I wouldn't do that, he says.

It would not be so strange, she says. Men do that.

Yeah? Well . . . not me. And not your father. And not . . . what's-his-name. Gabo. Hell, neither man you've told me about has run out on you.

No. They both died.

He can't read her face. Well I promise you I'll do my best not to die. All right?

Thank you, she says. And half a minute later says, You did come a little close back there, you know.

Yeah, well . . . so did you.

She nods and looks out the window and then back at him. But here we still are, she says.

Damn right. As somebody I know once said, they have to catch us before they can kill us.

They exchange a grin. Then both look away and then back at each other. And erupt into laughter. Into huge convulsive guffaws. She stamps the dashboard with her feet. He pounds the steering wheel with his palm and nearly runs off the road—and they laugh even harder and it takes a while for them to gain control of themselves, cramped bellies aching.

p

At the highway junction is a small plaza comprising a gasoline station, garage, and café. He sends her into the café for a takeout bag of food.

While she's at it, he takes out his mini Swiss pocketknife and removes the back cover of the Sina phone. And there the tracker is, nestled in the array of circuit board components. On casual inspection it looks like any one of dozens of other parts, but on careful scrutiny he spies a miniscule pink dot near one end of it and then knows what kind of tracker it is and is impressed. Made for insertion in a cell phone, it's nothing but a directional signal with a distance readout. Nothing uncommon about it, except that according to his Aunt Laurel—who owns and manages Delta Instruments & Graphics and knows everything there is to know about these things—its signal is transmitted in a broken pattern. Frequency fragmentation, she called it, something like that. Almost any receiver within range can pick up the signal fragments but they will seem to be coming from different directions. As she explained it, the only way to “descramble” the signal is by connecting a second receiver to the first one as a sort of ancillary booster and calibrating them to operate in tandem on the same screen. But because the tracker's signal is configured according to minute differentials in a given phone model's circuitry, the calibration varies not only from one brand of phone to another but also from model to model of each brand. Without knowing the calibration code for the receivers
and
both the brand and the model of the phone the tracker is attached to, it's impossible to tune in its signal. That's the device's big selling point. The thing had showed up on the black market a year or so ago but nobody knew who made it. The shipping points were from all over the world. Laurel thought it was some maverick nerd somewhere, but because the batch she bought—which came with a thick booklet of calibration codes—was from a longtime associate in Taiwan, at Delta Instruments they called it the Buddha. She'd paid a pretty penny for them, but they were in turn sold to Mexican buyers at a hundred-percent markup. The next time Laurel tried to buy some, however, her Chinese associate said he was unable to get any more. Rumor had it that Israeli agents had tracked down the maker and confiscated his entire supply, but it was only a rumor. Eddie grins at the thought that the tracker in this phone might have come from a Delta sale.