The Rules of Wolfe (2 page)

Sonora

p

Friday

1

Eddie

Eddie Gato Wolfe watches the plume of dust rise from the distant shimmer of ground heat and begin to come his way like some badland apparition. He cannot account for his ominous impression of it. He is not given to apprehensive fancies and anyway knows that the dust is from a motor caravan bringing the Boss's people. Even so, you should never disregard a foreboding of threat—a presentiment, intuition, hunch, call it what you will. It's a rule. But then his family has many rules, and although some of them are more deeply rooted in him than he knows, there is one he has refused to abide by. That is why he is here on this late summer afternoon, in this desert watchtower of Rancho del Sol, at such far remove from home.

And then as abruptly as it came to him, the spectral notion passes. The dust now looks only like dust as it carries over the sunburned stony terrain of scrub brush and cactus and skeletal trees. He chides himself for his momentary illusion and lowers the binoculars and calls down to the courtyard, Here they come!

Flores, the security chief, gives orders and his men leave off flirting with the maids and hustle to their posts. The servants make for their stations. The security men are armed with AKs, the compound guards with M-16s. In the watchtower Eddie Gato mans a .50-caliber machine gun loaded with armor-piercing rounds.

p

For a little over two months the only inhabitants of Rancho del Sol have been Eddie Gato and the three other resident guards, plus an old married couple that does the cooking and laundry and sundry other chores, and a gardener of indeterminate age who keeps to himself
.
Then four days ago the ranch received notice from Culiacán that a party of guests would be arriving on Friday.
The next morning a crew of maids and other workers came from the village of Loma Baja to begin getting the place ready. Eleven miles from the rancho but a part of its property, Loma Baja is flanked by the only local parcel of ground suitable for the airstrip the Boss put there for his small jet plane, and the only bus in the village was supplied by the Boss to transport workers to the rancho. Once a community of goatherds, Loma Baja now exists for no purpose but to provide occasional labor for the rancho and to maintain the landing field and the garage alongside it that houses the Boss's Cadillac Escalade.

On Wednesday, the dapper Flores and his security team showed up, plus a communications crew with its load of equipment. They had all flown from Culiacán to Ciudad Obregón and then driven to the rancho in six dark-windowed SUVs of various makes. Flores posted pairs of armed guards at roadside points fifteen and seven miles west of Loma Baja, and another two guards on the crude road from the village to the compound, where he at once set up a security perimeter. Then yesterday came the trucks with their large cargoes of food and spirits, plus a chef and his kitchen staff.

And now, under the swelling billows of dust, here come the guests.

Flores has informed the staff that the Boss himself has been detained by last-minute business and will not come until midday tomorrow, when he and his brother, El Segundo—the Company's second in command—arrive in Loma Baja in the jet.

p

Eddie Gato is the youngest of the four rancho guards, having turned twenty in May, and he is one of the two newest, the other being twenty-two-year-old Neto Rincón. Both of them have been here four months. Javier Monte, also twenty-two, has been here ten months, and Jorge Santos, the twenty-seven-year-old guard captain, more than six years.

There is really no need for guards against thieves. The region has few inhabitants and they all know whose rancho this is and nobody would dare to steal from it even if it were left unattended and all its doors and windows open wide. But it is imperative to guard against infiltrators who may attempt to plant surveillance devices or explosives. The military. The police. Business competitors. Whoever.

The four guards work a regular rotation of eight-hour shifts in the watchtower so that every fourth day one of them has a full day off. They have ample diversion in their off-duty hours. The compound has a swimming pool, billiard tables, a library, satellite television. There are video games and a vast collection of music CDs and of DVDs ranging from the latest Hollywood movies to the best pornography on the market. There is a small gymnasium. There is a target range behind the house. The kitchen is always amply stocked and the old woman is a good cook. To satisfy their sexual urges they can go into Loma Baja and avail themselves of its handful of homely whores.

There are, however, stringent restrictions. The guards are forbidden to possess a passport, and any man found to be hiding one will be dealt with summarily. There is no telephone line to the rancho, and although there is a cell tower in the form of a flagpole displaying the national flag, guards are not permitted to have cellular phones and are prohibited from using the phones supplied to the old couple for contact with the Company, each of which is destroyed after a single call. Drug use is certainly forbidden, and the guards may not possess liquor on the property. The large bar lounge in the main house is kept locked when the Boss is away, and on his order the sole cantina in Loma Baja was years ago razed and the village told to stay dry. The guards may drink only on their day off and someplace other than the rancho and Loma Baja, and the old couple is under strict directive to report any man they suspect of being drunk or having booze on the property. On his free day, every guard in his turn usually chooses to go to Ciudad Obregón in one of the compound Jeeps. The city is seventy miles away in a straight line but almost twice that on the odometer because of the serpentine route from the compound to the state highway, a drive of more than three hours. The Hotel Rey in Obregón is available to the guards at no charge. In addition to a fine cantina, the hotel has a resident cadre of whores better-looking than those of Loma Baja—though in Eddie Gato's estimation not by much.

Eddie and Neto were informed of the rules before they accepted the job, and when they arrived, they and their baggage were searched and the guard captain Jorge Santos advised them to take the rules very seriously. A guard under the influence of drugs or alcohol was an intolerable threat to security. The two guys they were replacing had been dismissed because the old couple had smelled liquor on them and made a phone call. The next day four security men arrived from Obregón and searched the guards' quarters and found a bottle under a mattress. The guards admitted they'd sometimes take a drink in the room but swore neither of them had ever been drunk on the rancho or in the village. The man in charge only shrugged and he and another man took the guards away. The other two security men stayed behind to fill in for them until permanent replacements were sent. But because the Boss believed that ranch guards should be willing volunteers and would not have anyone assigned there who did not want the job, it was nearly three weeks before Eddie and Neto were selected as the replacements.

Neto said he thought the two guards deserved to lose their jobs but it galled him that the old couple had snitched. He said the guards should have told them they'd break their neck if they ever ratted on them.

Jorge Santos said it would be foolish to threaten the old ones. Like us, they must do as told, he said. And anyway, who do you think they are more afraid of, us or the Boss?

He told Eddie and Neto a story about one of the Boss's nieces and a Company lawyer who was also an old friend. The niece and the lawyer went on a date one night to a notorious nightclub and both got very drunk. While they were dancing she stripped to her underwear as the crowd cheered her on and she ended up sucking the lawyer's cock on the dance floor in front of everyone. When word of the incident reached the Boss the next day, he was embarrassed and extremely displeased. The lawyer was having lunch with some friends when he excused himself to go to the men's room and that was the last anyone saw of him. It was rumored that he had been slowly towed behind a boat in the Sea of Cortéz until the sharks were finished with him. Others said his punishment was in truth not so severe, that he'd only had his dick cut off and was sent to a small Company office in the Yucatán for the rest of his life. As for the girl, it was said she had been placed in a ratty whorehouse in Los Mochis and anybody could have her for ten pesos. She was there for several months and became infected with an awful disease and then was removed to a convent hospital somewhere where she has since spent her days cleaning up shit and vomit.

My point, Jorge said, is this. If the Boss will punish one of his friends that way for displeasing him, if he'll punish a
niece
that way, how do you think he would punish the old couple? Punish
you
?

Eddie Gato asked what became of the fired guards. Jorge said he had heard they were taken to Flores, who told them that because they liked to drink he was going to treat them to all the liquor they could hold. He had them stripped naked and drowned in barrels of rum. The barrels were then sealed with clear glass tops so you could see the men's upturned faces, their bulging eyes and bared teeth. The barrels were said to be in the courtyard of the Boss's Culiacán offices where everyone who comes and goes can have a good look. A sign on the barrels says “Drink Responsibly.”

p

It is easy to understand why there are so few willing to be a rancho guard. Almost the only ones who volunteer for the job are young recruits ready to do anything—live in the desert, forgo liquor and phone communication, make do with unattractive whores—just to be part of the Company. But the Boss understands how hard it can be for a man to live in such isolate conditions for very long, and he permits reassignment to any guard who wants it after a year at the rancho. A guard who likes the job can keep it as long as he wishes, but it seems to Eddie that only a man of reclusive nature and minimal appetites could ever choose to stay here longer than the requisite year.

Like the other guards, Eddie is not a heavy drinker, so the booze restriction is no burden. But unlike the others, he receives no pleasure at all from the village whores and very little from those of the Hotel Rey. Their lack of allure has limited his satisfaction to that of scratching an itch. He keenly misses the sort of girls he has enjoyed since he was thirteen. None of them less than very pretty and all of them sweetly clean. He misses the fun of sexual banter, of seducing and being seduced. But this job was the only ready entry into the sort of life he desires and he took it with the certainty that he could bear its privations until he earned a transfer to a better post. A smuggling crew is his ambition. If he can't have that at first, well, the job of an enforcer or a bodyguard or collector will suit him too. Even chauffeur to a chief will suffice, if that is the only position open. Any such duty would not only be more exciting than this one but also get him closer to a smuggling branch of the Company. And of course would offer him more interesting cities than Obregón. Larger cities, with their greater numbers of pretty women.

Still, before he can get a transfer he must endure eight more months at the rancho, and the boredom of the job already weighs on him. He no longer even wears his watch, having no desire to remind himself how slowly time is passing.

The Boss

“Rancho” is too thin a term for this retreat at the foot of the western slope of the Sierra Madre. It is a renovated hacienda, an expansive property whose walled compound contains several courtyards and a sprawling main house of two stories with dozens of small suites. The estate's most exceptional feature is the cold-water stream running down to it from the mountains, so that even in this lower reach of the Sonoran Desert the courtyard trees and gardens are lush and the swimming pool is always full. The summer days are of course very hot, but under the looming sierra the rancho nights are often cool even during the dog days.

The Boss—whom the news media have made widely known as La Navaja but to his people is always and simply the Boss—loves the seclusion here. Loves the clear dry air of such contrast to the mugginess of Culiacán. Loves the black night's trove of stars and its howls of wolves. He has been heard to rue that his business keeps him from visiting the rancho more often than every few months and only for three or four days at a time. But for all his professed love of the place, his intimates know he could never be at home anywhere other than Culiacán, where he was born and has lived all his life and whose every street and alleyway he is familiar with. Where he gained early fame as the foremost assassin in the state of Sinaloa.

It is a secure haven, this rancho, impossible for anyone to approach, even in the dark, without distant detection. Should he receive warning of an imminent attack, the Boss is certain he can get to the village airfield ahead of the raiders and into the sky and gone. In the event he was somehow cut off from the airstrip, he and his brother would resort to a covert ground route to make their getaway. El Segundo had found it on their last visit when he and a favored girl went out in a Jeep one morning to hunt quail. He came across it behind a low escarpment south of the compound where nobody ever had cause to go except to hunt and he was the only one who ever did. It had once been a donkey track out of the mountains and was not much wider than the Jeep. Curious to see where it led, he followed the rugged route through scrubland and outcrops. It took well over an hour to go twenty-plus miles—the girl bored and unable to nap in her seat for the Jeep's constant jouncing. The trail finally connected with a dirt road, an old mining run, long unused and badly weathered. But he could drive a little faster on it and it lay mostly straight and an hour later he was merging onto the federal highway heading north to Ciudad Obregón and thirty minutes after that was there.

Eddie

In a raise of dust, the motor caravan comes wheeling through the outsized open gates and into the main courtyard. A black SUV in the lead, followed by a white Lincoln and a half dozen other luxury cars, another black SUV bringing up the rear. All vehicle glass bulletproofed and tinted to obscurity. The rock and rap and narco-corrido music booming within the cars is audible even to Eddie Gato up in the tower.