The Rules of Wolfe (17 page)

The Littles' early reports said he was well liked and seemingly content. But before he'd been there two months he was complaining of boredom and asking to go out on a bill collection or an arms delivery. They reminded him that Doña Catalina would not permit it, and he said there was no need for her to know. Such, they told her, was his willfulness. She granted their request to at least let him help load shipments of contraband for transport out of Patria Chica, as it might give him some small sense of the adventure he craved.

Then in March came the unscheduled call from cousin Stilwell to tell her Edward had gone to work for the organization called Las Sinas. He hastened to assure her the job had nothing to do with smuggling or any other dangerous undertaking. It was a guard post at some isolated ranch periodically used by Sinas chieftains for a brief recreation. Edward would be living there with only a handful of other guards and a few caretakers. He'd gotten the job by way of a Sinas crew that came to Patria Chica to pick up a shipment of arms. Stilwell could only assume that Edward took the job because he saw it as a possible means to the smuggler life he craved. But as the crew chief had described it, life at the ranch was so dull that Stilwell thought it very possible Edward would become even more bored there than he'd been at Patria Chica and soon enough return to the Littles, maybe even home to Texas. In any event, they could not have stopped him from leaving except by holding him prisoner. That, she agreed, would not have been the thing to do.

However, while Edward was gathering his belongings from the house, the Littles told the crew chief that the Porter kid was the boyfriend of one of their nieces and asked if there might be some way they could be kept informed of his well-being. The chief knew someone who worked in a minor administrative section of Sinas operations that included oversight of the Sonora retreat. They received periodic reports and requisitions from the place, but the only time a report might include mention of a guard was if the man was seriously hurt or too sick to work and a replacement for him was needed. The Littles said that was good enough. They offered to deposit a sum of money every week into a bank account in the name of the crew chief—money he might share with his administrative friend in whatever proportion he chose—in exchange for a weekly notice of whether there had been any communication from the ranch and, if so, whether it contained mention of Eduardo Porter. The chief said they had a deal.

Stilwell told her he was sorry they would be unable to report more specifically to her about Edward, but they would at least know if he should become ill or injured. It would be, Stilwell said, a case of no news being good news, as the gringos say.

Yes, she had said, so it would seem.

And so had it proved.

Until this afternoon.

Tierra
del Diablo

p

Sunday

19

Eddie and Miranda

The morning sun is flaring at the mountain ridge when they depart the motel. They wear their Naranjeros baseball caps and the work clothes from the secondhand store, shirts untucked. Before leaving she pinned two bandannas together and then wrapped them tight over her breasts to better disguise her femaleness from anyone who regards her from any distance beyond close up. Her shiner has faded to a pale yellow and ­Eddie's wound is healing well and almost painless under the cinch of the money belt. The MAC and Glock are between them on the seat and covered with a shirt. The Taurus is in his waistband, the M-16, detached in two, in his backpack.

They double back through town the way they came in, stopping at a grocery store for a plastic cooler and ice and soda pop and drinking water, then at a hardware store for a pair of five-gallon jerry cans and some jugs of radiator antifreeze—and joke about the need for such a thing in order to drive through a desert. At a fast-food place he buys a sack of takeout breakfast tacos and two big paper cups of coffee, then at the edge of town he pulls into a Pemex station and fills the truck's tank and the jerry cans. Then they head north.

p

The Sunday morning traffic is light and there's no toll station to evade on this portion of highway, but Eddie holds his speed below the limit. They keep watch in the rearviews and get tense each time they see some late-model truck or SUV with tinted glass closing up behind them or coming from the other direction. Then breathe easier when it passes by. She says some of them must be Sinas. He says she's probably right. She says she feels like a fish swimming through a sea of sharks.

p

Forty miles out of Guaymas he exits west onto a secondary road that makes a wide sixty-mile northward curve to a junction on the road between Hermosillo and the coast, and then he heads farther westward, away from Hermosillo, in traffic thickening with beachgoers. They pass through the ranching community of Miguel Alemán and turn north again, passing by large cattle ranches and farms. The good roads soon give way to rough ones connecting smaller ranches lying farther apart from each other. And then they are on a dirt road bearing into the open desert.

Take a good look behind you, he says. That's the last paved road we'll see for a while.

She says her father once told her it was bad luck to look back at the port as your boat set out to sea.

Yeah? Well, good thing we're not in a boat.

Once again resorting to a matchstick and the map scale, she calculates that Caborca lies roughly 150 miles ahead. From there it's sixty miles or so to the border.

A little more than two hundred miles is not so very far, she says.

He reminds her that those two hundred miles are on a straight line, while the roads ahead will be primitive and none of them at all straight. But that's all right. They don't want to get to the border before dark.

p

As they press deeper into the desert, the sky seems to get higher. The land becomes starker, paler, its vegetation coarser. The mountains ahead are slower to enlarge. The light now so bright Eddie squints behind his sunglasses. Small and large escarpments all around.

They come upon junctions with other rugged roads, unmarked on the map and leading who knows where. At each junction, Eddie opts for the way bearing most northward. The trails wind around clusters of peppercorn hills, snake between outcrops. The speedometer needle rises and falls, at times touching thirty-five, often bobbing below fifteen.

The heat swells and shimmers on the distant flats but he keeps the air conditioner at its lowest setting to avoid adding to the engine's strain. Each time she lowers her window a little to toss out a finished cigarette, the inrushing air is hotter yet.

They now and again pass by a village, none with a sign to identify it by name. Some are neat hamlets of whitewashed buildings, animal pens, a well or two, a tidy cornfield defying the surrounding barrenness. Others are but a litter of decrepit huts with no obvious means of sustenance. They see few vehicles in even the largest of these villages. See fewer still on the roads, and most of them so far off it is impossible to identify them as cars or trucks or something other. At times they see the dust of what might be a vehicle but proves to be a wayward whirlwind traversing the wasteland.

My God, Miranda says, even Rancho del Sol isn't as far from the world as this.

There's a lot more of this ahead of us. More and tougher. All the way up past the border.

How do you know it's tougher?

I've read about it. Heard about it.

I have heard we should not believe everything we read or hear.

He smiles. Yeah, I've heard and read that too.

She gestures at a lone buzzard gliding high over the open flats. Look at that stupid thing. Searching for something dead to eat in a place where almost nothing lives and so there's almost nothing to become dead.

Maybe he's keeping an eye on us, Eddie says.

Ho ho, that is so very funny.

p

It is past noon when they follow a curve around a rocky hill and see a beat-up Plymouth station wagon blocking the road ahead. Two men in caps and sunglasses are standing to either side of the raised hood.

Eddie stops twenty feet shy of the wagon, unable to go around it because of the rock wall to the right and a stony slope to the left. He doesn't see anybody in the wagon but that doesn't mean there isn't anyone in it. For a second he considers putting the truck in reverse and backing up fast around the bend until he has enough room to turn the truck about and scoot the other way. But then what? Go back to the last junction and take a different road? Hell with that.

One of the men lifts a hand in greeting and starts toward them, showing very white teeth. The other one moves up beside the station wagon's passenger-side window.

As he lowers his window, Eddie withdraws the cocked MAC from under the shirt on the seat, keeping it out of the men's view. He places it on his lap and fingers the safety off.

Miranda holds the Glock between her knees and says, Are they—?

Watch the other one, Eddie says. If he shows a gun, shoot him.

“Hola, amigos!” the smiling man says, coming up to within a few feet of the truck, taking off his glasses and hooking them on the neck of his shirt. We have a loose electric connection, but I can fix it if I had pliers. Do you maybe—

You're in luck, Eddie says. I have some in the back. I'll get them.

The man's grin widens. Very good, my friend. Damn good luck for us that you have come.

Still holding the MAC out of the man's sight, Eddie opens the door and steps out. The man tugs at his shirtfront and says, What heat, eh? And reaches behind him with his other hand as if to tug the back of his shirt too.

Eddie brings the MAC up to the door window and tells him to freeze. The man does, his hand behind his back, his expression that of someone who has just set eyes on an ugly blind date.

“Cuidado!” Miranda yells.

The other man has snatched a double-barreled shotgun from the wagon—and in the course of the next three seconds a load of buckshot converts a section of the right side of the truck's windshield to a pale web of fractured safety glass centered on a hole the size of a grapefruit and Miranda feels a spatter of glass bits on the side of her face and fires four times into the shotgunner's chest and the other man starts to bring a revolver from behind his back and Eddie shoots him with a jet of bullets that knocks him backward off his feet.

Miranda continues to lean out the window and point the Glock at the awkward heap of the shotgunner as Eddie goes over to the man he shot and regards his bloody chest, the stillness of him. He picks up the revolver and gives it a look and lobs it down the slope. Then goes to the shotgunner and rolls him onto his back with his foot. The man's sunglasses cling to one ear. He tells Miranda this one's dead too and she gets out of the truck.

He sets the MAC's safety and hands the weapon to her and tells her to bring the shotgun. Then drags the shotgunner by the feet to the edge of the slope and pushes him over and the man tumbles down about midway before getting snagged on a clutch of prickly pear cactus.

You said they couldn't cover these back roads, she says. She is staring at the man on the slope.

What?

You said there are too many back roads for them to guard.

You think . . . ? Hey, girl, these guys aren't
Sinas
. You ever seen Company guys with shitty weapons like these? A car like
that
? These are local hicks who thought they were Pancho Villa.

Bandits? Out here?

Like everywhere else, yeah.

He flings the shotgun whirling and it strikes the rocks below and breaks in two between breech and stock.

That's crazy. Who is there to rob out here?

Whoever comes along. They probably watch this road every day, praying somebody'll come by with more than a few pesos in their pocket.

Like us.

Yeah . . . except unarmed. He glances back toward the road bend and then hastens to the other man and drags him over to the slope.

You're
sure
they're not Sinas? she says.

Maybe in their dreams.

He gives the man a shove and he goes flailing all the way to the bottom and comes to a halt on his back with his ankles crossed and one hand behind his head and the other on his chest.

Look at that, she says. He looks so at ease. A minute ago he was complaining about the heat.

Let's hurry it up, Eddie says.

Oh yes, let's hurry before somebody comes along any day now.

They find nothing of interest in the Plymouth wagon. She says maybe they should take it. It will be less noticeable than a truck with a shotgun hole in the windshield. He says no. The bandits may have come from someplace up ahead and the wagon might be recognized.

He puts the transmission in neutral and releases the brake and they push the wagon over the slope. It bounces and sways all the way to the bottom, then veers and crashes over onto its side in a swell of dust.

They get back in the truck and move on. He has her count the cartridges left in the Glock's magazine. Five. Plus one in the chamber. The MAC is down to seven.

A few miles farther on, peering in the side mirror, he says, Look back there. It's amazing how fast they get the word.

She looks in her side mirror and sees a convergence of buzzards spiraling down toward the road bend.

Jesus, she says. This fucking country.

20

Martillo and Pico

Over a late breakfast in a rear corner booth of Chucho's, a small café in Nogales, they once more review the lean packet of information about the Porter kid. A single sheet of basic data. A single photograph. A summary account of his known actions since Friday night. A set of police reports about the fight in the sugar field. An inventory form listing everything recovered at that scene.

Pico scoops the last of his huevos rancheros into his mouth with a fold of flour tortilla and goes over the data sheet on the kid. Martillo permits the waitress to refill his cup, then returns his attention to the reports.

It's interesting, Pico says, that one so young was able to dispose of two Sinas and two cops by himself. A simple rancho guard.

He may not be so simple or have been by himself, Martillo says. The girl may have been with him. She may still be with him. Martillo is one for factual exactness whenever possible.

If she was with him, Pico says, do you think she killed any of them?

I cannot know that.

Because if she was with him and did not kill any of them, then it's even more interesting that he killed all four.

Martillo and Pico have known each other since boyhood, have fought side by side against other street gangs and trained together in the army special forces and worked as a team for the Zetas before breaking away on their own—and yet Martillo is still prone to irritation with Pico's propensity for perplexing assertions. He knows, however, that to ask him to clarify some puzzling remark is to risk a lengthy and convoluted explication that may be even more baffling than whatever he said in the first place. He therefore holds his tongue and keeps his focus on the document before him.

And a minute later says, Hey.

Pico looks at him.

That special bunch of Sinas pistol men, Luna Negra, they all carry phones issued to them by the organization. Best money can buy. Batteries that can light up Hermosillo for a week.

So I've heard. What about it?

The list of items the cops found at the scene includes a cell phone. Found it on one of the Sinas.

Martillo says no more, affecting to study the inventory sheet. Pico knows he's waiting for a prompt to continue. It's how Martillo has always been. Big dramatizer. He once said that if he had to choose another profession he would like to be a movie actor. He believes he could play roles like those of the famous Emilio ­Fernandez—known to all Mexican moviegoers as “El Indio”—whom he strongly resembles. He sometimes amuses himself by reciting some of El Indio's lines as General Mapache in
The Wild Bunch
.

So? Pico says.

So there's only one phone on this list.

Pico drums his fingers on the tabletop.
So?

I have to wonder if anybody's looked at this list besides the cop who put it together. Wouldn't any Sina who looked at this be a little curious why the other guy didn't have a phone on him?

What's there to be curious about? Maybe the guy didn't take it with him because they didn't need two phones. Maybe he forgot it somewhere. Left it home, at his girlfriend's, some cantina. Maybe lost it in the cane field. What's the big mystery?

Martillo makes no response, keeping his eyes on the papers in front of him.