The Rules of Wolfe (27 page)

Frank finds the tracker phone in a backpack we assume is Eddie's.

But no Eddie.

Not till we go up on the outcrop and find him belly-down and unconscious, with a belt tourniquet above a shinbone that's badly shot but still in one piece. His pulse strong, though, respiration good. A Sako rifle next to him, a pair of binoculars.

I scan with the glasses and spot an orange vehicle slowly moving northward. “It's that Rover from Nogales,” I say. “Big fucker was driving, remember?”

“Yeah. Well, he's the big fucker who gets away,” Frank says.

“Must've been him I shot. I know I hit him.”

“Well, there's hitting and there's hitting.”

I give him a look he ignores.

Eddie moans as I haul him upright, doing my best to keep his weight off the bad leg. Frank does what he can to help get him up on my shoulder. The kid's solid and heavier than he looks. I hear him puke and feel it sop the back of my shirt at the waist.

I ease my way down the slope and then carry him over to the Cherokee and lay him on the back seat. He says something too slurred to catch, then his eyes open, red and glassy with pain. “Miranda,” he says. And passes out again.

Frank brings the Sako and the Remington and gets on the satellite to Félix, telling him as much as he can without getting too specific, in case of intercepts. But Félix is an old hand at improvised phone code and gets the picture pretty quick. He says he's sure his man “T” can make the necessary arrangements and says he'll get back to us quick as he can.

Now there's only the girl. We go over to her and I tell Frank her name's Miranda. If it's her. Breathing shallow and raspy. Pulse weak. The round hit her in the back and punched out a hole under her left tit big enough to fit your fist in. God's own wonder she's still among the quick.

“Nothing to do,” I say.

Frank gives me a look of a sort I don't often get from him.

“She's lung-shot, Frankie. She won't even make it to the car and you know it.”

“It's probably her,” he says. “Tell me we should leave her while she's still ticking. Let me hear you say that.”

I take all the care I can getting her into my arms, but she gives a deep groan, even as out as she is.

I'm almost to the Cherokee, her blood soaking warm through my clothes, when the feel of her changes. I stand there holding her while Frank searches her throat for a pulse. Then I set her down and go through her pockets. A switchblade and some Mex money but nothing in the way of ID.

The best we can do is cover her over with big rocks.

The others we leave to the scavengers.

I take off my shirt and toss it away. The dead guy nearest to being my size is the bullethead, so I strip him of his shirt and put it on. It smells like coal smoke.

p

We're swaying and jarring eastward when Eddie says, “Hey?”

Frank turns in the shotgun seat and I crane my head to look at Eddie in the rearview.

“Miranda?” he says.

“I'm sorry, kid,” Frank says.

Eddie closes his eyes.

Eddie

He feels the reverberant earth passing under him, growling through the floor of the Cherokee like some badland spirit in a tremoring rage to get at him. He wants to weep. Howl. Wants to shoot something. But only lies there closed-eyed and tight-jawed in his red pain.

He considers yelling for them to stop, turn around, go back for her, take her with them. Bury her at sea. In the Gulf she would have loved.

So that her spirit won't feel like it's holding its breath until it can get back to where it belongs.

Then thinks how goddamn stupid he is. There isn't any her anymore or even any spirit of her except in his head. And she'll either stay there or she won't.

And thinks how even stupider it is to believe there's any possibility she might not stay there until there's no more him either.

47

The Boss and Tiburón

In the company of El Tiburón, Flores, and a trio of bodyguards, the Boss exits his Culiacán headquarters through its double section of foyers and its triple sets of barred, electronically controlled doors with armed guards at each set. The five-story building bears a large sign identifying it as Relámpago Finanzas, SA and its network of security cameras is monitored round the clock by a crew in a room on the mezzanine.

The Boss has many things on his mind at present, among them the chafing lack of any word from Martillo about his search for Porter. Would it be such an inconvenience for the bastard to take a minute to call and say how the thing is going? If he has a lead on the kid? If he's crossed into the north in pursuit of him? He's not obligated to submit reports, no, but couldn't he do it as a favor, a sign of respect, one man to another? Not that arrogant son of a bitch. Martillo may be the best at what he does, but the Boss has very nearly decided that he will not deal with the smug prick again.

They descend the wide stone steps from the building entrance to the cars waiting at the curb, the Boss's car parked between the two bodyguard SUVs. A front-foyer guard pokes his head out the door and calls down to Tiburón that there's a phone call for him from Mexico City that claims to be urgent. Does he want to come take it or have the security guys transfer it to his phone?

Tiburón pats his coat pockets and says to the Boss, Shit, I left it on my desk. I'll meet you at the Cocina. He jogs back up the steps and into the building.

The lead SUV pulls out, the Boss's Town Car behind it and followed closely by the rear guard vehicle. Almost every day the Boss has lunch in a private, well-guarded room at the Yaqui Cocina restaurant, a place in his old neighborhood and across the street from a police station whose every man is on the Sinas payroll. Each time they go there, his driver proceeds by a different one of a dozen routes, depending on which one Tiburón has told him to follow.

Tiburón prefers to take the call on his own phone and waits in the lobby for the security man to come down with it. Then he walks off a short way for privacy before saying, “Bueno.”

He expects it to be an underling assigned the job of making this call to detach him from the Boss's party, but instead hears the familiar voice of the rabidly ambitious young man named Jaime Montón Delacruz, better known as El Chubasco. During recent weeks Tiburón has had a half dozen clandestine meetings and a number of phone talks with him, the upshot of which has been El Chubasco's assurance of Tiburón's imminent chieftainship of all Sinas operations between the border and Ciudad Obregón.

Today's route is as you said? Chubasco asks.

Of course.

Good. I was certain it would be.

There are several seconds of silence and then Tiburón says, Is there something more?

Ah, you wonder why I've called. Well, simply to share the moment.

Share the moment?

Listen.

More seconds pass.

And then Tiburón hears it. Half the city hears it.

But no one can ever know if the Boss and those in the car with him as it made a turn at an intersection heard anything more than the tap against the windshield in the millisecond before the rocket-propelled grenade blasted the car into flaming fragments. . . .

p

Not a minute later, as Tiburón and the building guards stand on the sidewalk, gazing toward the rising black smoke in the distance—Tiburón thinking, You should have given me what I deserved, you should have—three vehicles abruptly pull up directly in front of them and Tiburón sees the smiling face of El Chubasco behind a passenger window as men jump out of the far-side doors and raise automatic weapons above the car roofs.

In that last second of his life, like a man proud of his excellent health who suddenly learns he has a metastasized cancer, El Tiburón, who regards himself as a man of sage practicality, is profoundly saddened by the knowledge that he is dying of a stupid greed.

48

Rudy and Frank

It's a small hospital at the edge of town, owned on paper by a highly reputable medical association, Félix tells us. In fact it's an Azteca property. Félix had spoken to Trejo, who then spoke to some people, and by the time we arrived in Nogales both Frank and Eddie were already registered admissions under false names. Trejo had also arranged for guards to be posted both inside and out, some in medical dress, some clothed as janitors or groundskeepers.

Frank gets patched up in less than an hour—wound debrided and stitched, shoulder bandaged, arm in a sling. He's lucky. The bone was only nicked, like I'd thought. The docs don't expect any complication from it. Trejo's guys bring us fresh clothes and we clean up in a bathroom.

Eddie's in surgery for two hours. Afterward the doctor explains the process but all I really catch is that the shin was set with a plate and screws. The great danger is of bone infection but the doc says he's certain they've precluded that possibility.

When Eddie's rolled into a room, we go in to see him but he's still sleeping off the anesthesia. His leg's in a blue plastic cast from foot to just below the knee.

“His color's good,” Frank says. It's what our grandmother used to say in favorable judgment of somebody's medical condition or recuperative progress. And I feel myself grin for the first time in a while.

p

The whole thing was going to cost us a pretty penny, but we've had time enough to arrange everything before we come back to Eddie's room at dusk. He's sitting up and cleaning off the last of his supper plate. A little glassy-eyed with pain and meds, but ravenous, a good sign. Frank asks how he's doing and Eddie says okay.

We'd already decided to let him take the conversational lead, give us an idea of the lay of his psychic land, but he only looks back at us without expression, now at me, now at Frank. I think he really doesn't know what to say. He looks down at his hand and works it open and closed, like he's just learned how to do it.

“I think the word you might be looking for is thanks,” Frank says.

“Yeah,” he says, still looking at his hand. “Thanks.”

“Hell, kid, don't mention it,” Frank says. He tells Eddie the doc says he can travel in a couple of days.

“I can travel now.”

“You gotta be hurting,” I say. “Probably best not to push it.”

“I'm ready,” he says. “Let's go.”

It's what we were hoping to hear.

p

Félix pulls up at the front door in the Cherokee, and we hustle out to it, Eddie wheelchaired out by one of the Trejo guards. We set him on the back seat and I sit behind him. The Trailblazer follows us with Roberto at the wheel and Tacho riding shotgun. Another half hour and we're through the Nogales port of entry and heading for Texas.

Frank and I haven't informed anyone that Eddie's okay, and I ask him if he'd like us to call his folks or maybe Aunt Cat, let them know he's headed home.

He says no. He'll do the notifying when he gets there.

He keeps trying to nap, but even though he's pumped to the gills with painkiller he obviously can't sleep, and he finally sits up and stares out the window, face pinched with pain.

“Hey?” Frank says. “Who'd you kill to get them on your ass like that?”

Eddie leans back on the seat and closes his eyes, like he didn't even hear the question. But then says, “Guy who hit her.”

p

We're well into New Mexico before Eddie speaks again.

“I'm going back to school.”

We wait for more but that's it.

Then again, what more is there?

p

It's nearly eleven o'clock when we take off from the same field north of El Paso in the same Beechcraft that landed me and Frank there two nights ago.

It's been hours since Eddie's last pill. He keeps shifting in his seat and groaning low, like he's trying to find some position that will accommodate the pain. I offer him another OxyContin but he shakes his head, then sits slumped with his forehead against the window and stares out at the blackness.

We're across the aisle from him, Frank with a ratty paperback of
Winner Take Nothing,
which he's read God know how many times, me with a book of crossword puzzles I picked up at the hospital.

About a half hour into the flight Eddie says, “Hey?”

We look at him. He's still facing out the window.

“How come you did it?”

“What?” I say.

“You know. . . . Come for me.”

We just look at him.

He turns to us. “It a rule or what? I never heard it said is why I'm asking.”

We stare at him another few seconds before Frank says, “Yeah, well. There's some you don't hear said a lot.”

Eddie cuts his eyes from one of us to the other. And nods. Then turns back to the window.

Frank regards him a moment longer, eyes narrow. Assessing. Then turns to me and winks and gets back to his book.

A minute later Eddie leans back in his seat and closes his eyes, grimacing and grunting low as he shifts this way and that before sighing in a way that has nothing to do with having found comfort, and settles himself.

Epilogue

Catalina

She wakes in deep darkness. And knows he's alive. In pain but alive. And on his way home. Knows these things without knowing how she knows.

Her open windows show no stars and the earlier sliver of moon has long since set. A light wind rustles the palm fronds and ebony leaves. As always in this dark hour she can smell the river on its way to the sea. And smells too the coming rain. It did not rain as predicted last night, or today, but she can smell it on the air now and knows it is nearing swiftly. A relief from the swelter of recent days.

Ah, the days. They come and they come until they no longer do, but for some uncommon few such as herself they have come beyond all equitable allotment. She once told the boy that if he lived long enough he would find the years passing more swiftly than he could believe. He had smiled at her with youth's amused condescension toward the old. In her own childhood—so distant now it seems a myth—she no doubt showed the same smile when her Grandmother Gloria alleged that each year was now nothing more than Friday and Christmas.

She slips her hand under the pillow to feel the comfort of the bone-handled Apache knife with which at sixteen she killed two men and which in her will she has bequeathed to the boy. The weapon was a gift from her great-grandfather Edward Little on the celebration of her quinceañera. He whom she called Buelito. Who taught her much about the turns of the world and who loved no one but her just as she loved none other than him. Until this one named after them both and who from the moment she first saw him as a babe has reminded her of Buelito. Who can say why these things are?

She rises and puts on her robe and goes to a chair by a window and sits looking out into the darkness. Then the first drops are ticking into the trees and she breathes deep the earthy aroma of the closing rain.