The House of Wolfe (2 page)

The cats have vanished but it's unlikely the shots have alarmed any of the residents. Gunfire isn't uncommon in the Landing. The shooting range behind the Republic Arms gets almost daily use, and it's no rarity to hear somebody taking target practice along the river or at one of the resacas, and every so often there's a shooting contest behind the Doghouse, even at night. Just the same, Frank goes out to see if anyone's been roused to curiosity, but he reports no sign of it. Except for his and mine and Charlie's houses, all the Landing's residences stand at a distance from the Doghouse, and it could be nobody even heard the gunfire, not with the houses closed up against the rain.

I retrieve the Redhawk from Eddie and eject the spent shells while he chugs down the beer I had on the bar. Then he starts on the rest of Charlie's brew as he tells us how he got to the restroom foyer and saw what was going on and whipped back around into the men's room and went out the window and over to the truck for the guns. He'd fired two fast rounds from each gun at the bases of their skulls, going for the brain stems to cut motor function and reflex trigger pulls, but he wasn't used to the Redhawk, and its first shot obviously missed the medulla because the guy jerked the trigger in the microsecond before the second bullet cut his lights. The buckshot charge peppered the far wall and shattered two of the glass-framed posters hung on it. One of them, which Lila made, reads, “Resist Much, Obey Little” directly above a hand-scrawled “I mean
all
you sonofabitches! Uncle Walt.” The other is a large blowup of Natalie Portman lying naked on a big towel on a plank floor and staring lustily at the viewer, a trio of buckshot holes in one gorgeous thigh right next to an inscription reading, “To Charlie Baby, the world's greatest plowman, from his most grateful furrow. Yours forever and
ever
, Nattie.” Our cousin Jackie Marie made it for Charlie for his fortieth birthday three years ago. She lost a bunch of bets that he wouldn't hang it on the wall.

Charlie swigs from a fresh Negra and lets Eddie finish his account, then chastises him for taking such a reckless chance that could've got some of us killed.

“I got an M-4 with auto select under here,” Charlie says, tapping the bar counter. “I could've put the whole magazine in the two of them before they cleared the parking lot.”

But his heart's not in the reproach and we all know it, because he'd have done the same thing in Eddie's shoes. Besides, Eddie's mode was first-rate. The casual “excuse me” in Spanish didn't spook them into blasting away but distracted them just enough for us to hit the deck before the barrage went off.

Eddie says it
was
a risky thing to do and he knows it, and yeah, we could've nailed them outside or hunted them down afterward. Still, he was afraid they might shoot us any second for whatever dumbfuck reason, or even by accident, so he had to chance it.

Charlie seems about to rebut that argument, but then shrugs and lets it go.

The ruin a magnum hollow-point can make of a human head is impressive. Except for the blood that's sopping through the ski masks, we're able to contain most of the mess inside the hoods as we pull them up carefully to look at the faces. Neither guy is anybody we know. They're both carrying wallets. One has a Texas driver's license with a Laredo address, the other a Mexican license. Maybe the names are real, maybe not. Makes no difference. Both wallets hold pictures of women, lottery tickets, paper pesos, a few dollars.

Although we're in the legal clear in putting down a pair of armed robbers, Charlie sees no reason to report the matter to the sheriff's office in town. We all agree. Why go through the bother, the questions, the paperwork? We anyway don't like being in the news in connection with a violent incident. We have political and media friends in town who at times help us avoid that sort of publicity, but we prefer not to use them except in extreme cases.

Lila accepts the Professor's offer to help clean up. Tomorrow she'll get somebody to repaint the shot-up wall and reframe the posters. The rest of us put on our rain ponchos and pick up the bodies and shotguns and haul them out the back door.

It's still drizzling and the night's gone colder. The river's barely visible under the dense cloud cover and the risen mist. I bring my truck around and we load the bodies into the back and strip them to undershorts and masks, leaving the masks on because I don't want any more blood than necessary on the truck bed. We put the clothes and shoes and wallets into a plastic trash bag and add a couple of big rocks and tie it off and I cut a few slits in it with a jackknife. Then Eddie takes the bag and the two cut-offs over to the dock and flings it all into the river.

Charlie gets in the cab with me, and Frank and Eddie climb into the bed, and I drive slowly down a narrow track that snakes into the deeper regions of the grove. This is the darkest part of the Landing even on the brightest day, and tonight it's so gloomy we can't see anything but what the headlights show. The wipers swipe hard at the tree drippings. We can see vague orange lights in the windows of Charlie's piling house as we go by but can't make out its shape.

We arrive at a small clearing next to a resaca, which in this part of Texas is what they call an oxbow. There are resacas all over the lower Rio Grande, and the palm grove around the Landing has no fewer than a dozen of all sizes. This one's called Resaca Mala and is the biggest and most remote in the grove. It's shaped like a boomerang and we're near its lower tip and there's no simpler way to get to any part of it than the one we've just come on. The air's heavier here, the smells riper. The banks are thick with cattail reeds and brush except for a few clearings like this one. I turn off the engine but leave the headlights blazing out over the black water and glaring against a wall of cattails on the opposite bank.

Charlie and I get out and go around to the back of the truck, and Eddie lets the gate down and we get the bodies out. The only sounds are of us and the massive ringings of frogs.

I grip the bigger guy by the wrists and Charlie gets him by the ankles and we carry him over to the bank and set him down. I take the hood off him, knot it around a fist-sized rock and toss it in the water, and rinse the blood off my hands. Then we pick him up again and Charlie says, “On three.” We get a good momentum on him with the first two swings and on the third one loft him through the air and he splashes down more than ten feet out, then bobs up spread-eagled in the ripples and floats off a little farther. The frogs have gone mute.

Frank and Eddie sling the other guy into the water. Even though he's smaller he doesn't sail quite as far as the one we tossed, but Frank's had a creaky shoulder for a few years now.

The water settles around the floating bodies, and Charlie says, “Cut the lights.”

I go to the truck and switch off the headlights and the world goes black as blindness.

We stand motionless and I hear nothing but my own breath. Then the reeds start rustling in different parts of the banks. There are small splashings. Then louder ones. Then the water erupts into a loud and frantic agitation of swashings mixed with hoarse guttural grunts.

“Lights,” Charlie says.

I switch them on and starkly expose the mad churnings of a mob of alligators tearing the bodies apart. Some of them are ten-footers, and Charlie's seen some around here bigger than that. This resaca has had ­gators in it since our family settled here in the nineteenth century. They've always served us well.

“Damn,” Eddie says.

“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Let's go.”

The water's still in a thrashing fury as we get in the truck and head back to the Doghouse.

In the morning there won't be so much as a bone or a bootlace to be found.

Now it's after one o'clock and the four of us are still in the Doghouse. An Irish string band is plunking on the juke. The floor's cleaned up, and we've put the robbers' vehicle around back—a Ram pickup truck about ten years old. Tomorrow Jesus McGee will come over and check it out. He owns Riverside Motors and Garage over on Main, and he'll decide whether it's worth giving the pickup a new VIN, tag, and title and selling it on this side of the river, or if it'd be better to peddle it “as is” to some Mex dealer in Matamoros.

Charlie had let everybody have one on the house when we got back from the resaca. The Professor gulped down his shot and thanked him and said he was going home. Lila asked if it'd be okay if she took off too and Charlie said sure, and she gave Eddie a little wave and left with the Professor. The other four of us have been nursing our drinks, but we've stretched out the pleasure of the evening's excitement long enough and we don't really mind getting run out when Charlie says, “Time, gentlemen. You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.”

We're all heading for the front door when the old rotary wall phone at the end of the bar starts jangling.

That phone's been there since before I was born. Nineteen times out of twenty, a call on it is either from some Landing resident looking for some other one, or from somebody in Brownsville asking about the weekend supper specials. Neither's likely at this hour.

“The hell with whoever it is,” Charlie says and goes to the door with the keys in his hand.

“Whomever,” I say. I'm not really sure if I'm right, but nobody but Frank would know, and he and I like to get a rise out of Charlie by flaunting the benefits of our B.A.s in English. He gives me a look.

The phone keeps ringing.

“Maybe Lila forgot something,” Eddie says, and goes over and picks up the receiver and says, “Yeah?” as if expecting Lila. Then he loses his smile and says, “Who wants him?”

“I ain't here, hang up,” Charlie says, and gives me another look and silently mouths the word “ain't.”

“Oh Christ . . . Sorry, sir, didn't recognize your voice,” Eddie says. “Eddie, sir, Eddie Gato . . . Yessir, he's right here.”

He covers the mouthpiece and holds the receiver out toward Charlie and says, “Harry Mack.”

That gets everybody's attention. As the eldest of the Three Uncles, Harry McElroy Wolfe is the head of the Texas family. He's also Charlie's dad, and it's unheard of for him to call the Doghouse phone. Whenever he calls Charlie he calls his cell, and if Charlie's got it turned off, he just leaves a message. He's probably tried the cell already. That he's calling the cantina phone at one-thirty in the morning implies an extraordinary circumstance.

Charlie takes the phone and says, “Yes, sir?”

I've never heard Charlie address his father by any name but “sir,” and whenever he refers to him in conversation it's always as we do—Harry Mack.

Charlie listens for more than a minute without saying anything other than “right” and “yessir” a couple of times. His face is unreadable.

“Yessir, we can,” he says. “Just need to get clothes and passports. We'll be there in less than an hour.”

Passports? I exchange looks with Frank and Eddie.

“Yessir, I do,” Charlie says. “Of course. Yes, I agree. . . . We will, sir. Thank you.”

He hooks the receiver back into its wall cradle and just stands there a minute with his hand still on the phone and his back to us.

Then he turns and says, “They've got Jessie.”

I

1 — ESPANTO AND HUERTA

Mexico City on a chill Sunday evening. A pink trace of sundown behind the black mountains. An oblong silver moon overlooking the city's sparkling expanse and bright arterial streams of traffic. Black clouds swelling in the north.

A gray van exits a thoroughfare into the opulent residential district of Chapultepec and makes its way into a wooded hillside neighborhood. The van glides along winding arboreous streets of imposing residences fronted by high stone walls and wide driveways with iron-barred gates manned by uniformed attendants. Before long it is passing through several long blocks whose curbs are lined with chauffeur-attended vehicles bespeaking some sizable social event taking place.

The van rounds a corner and midway down the street it stops at the mouth of an alleyway. Three men in black suits exit the van and it drives away.

A police car wails in the distance. Now an ambulance.

The three men walk through the amber cast of the alleyway lampposts jutting above the walls to either side. Like the street walls these extend the full length of the block and are ten feet high and two feet thick, but unlike the street walls these are topped with cemented shards of broken glass and rolls of razor wire. The sprawling grounds within are patrolled by armed men and teams of dogs trained to attack in silence. Every estate's segment of the alley walls is unnumbered but fronted by a set of large garbage bins and has a solid iron gate with an inset peep window. The gates cannot be opened from the outside by any means short of explosives. Even the alleys of the city's most privileged quarters are roamed by feral dogs, however, and a pack of them fades into the farther shadows at the men's approach.

The men count the gates as they pass them. They are almost to the one they seek when a pair of headlights swings into the alley from behind them. A neighborhood security cruiser.

Two of the men sidle to opposite walls so that the garbage bins shield them from the headlights, and from under their coats take out pistols fitted with silencers. The third man stands in place in the full glare of the car's lights and watches their slow advance.

The cruiser stops a few yards short of him, its radio crackling through the rumble of the engine. The man standing in the light has a brush mustache and a short spike haircut. His shoes gleam. He turns the palms of his hands forward so the security men can see he holds no weapon.

He walks up to the car and looks at its identification number on the rear fender, then waits until the radio volume is reduced before he leans down to the open window and says softly, Business of Zeta. I advise that you depart at once, car Q30-99, and forget you have seen us.

He steps back from the car and crosses his arms, one hand under his jacket.

For a few seconds nobody moves and the only sound is of the patrol car's idling motor. Then the car begins to roll slowly in reverse. It backs up all the way to the end of the block and around the corner, then guns forward past the end of the alley and is gone.

The other two come up beside the spike-haired man. One of them blond and clean-shaven, the other mustached under a large hooked nose.

Business of Zeta, the hooknose says, imitating the low tone of the spike-haired man. Then laughs softly.

Hey man, soon enough be true, the blond one says.

They all chuckle and continue down the alley, passing two more gates, then stop at the next one. Dance music is audible from the other side of the wall.

“La Cumparsita,” says the hooknose man, and executes a little tango step.

The spike-haired man draws a pistol from under his coat and gives the peep window two quick taps with the silencer attached to the muzzle.

The window rasps open and someone within inquires, “Quién es?”

“Espanto,” says the spike-haired man.

The window slides shut and there is a dull clunk of a large door lock, and on well-oiled hinges the gate silently opens inward just enough to admit each man in turn.

They enter a wooded garden encompassing more than two acres. Night blooms sweeten the air. The high trees reflect the soft glow of Japanese lanterns posted at intervals along meandering stone walkways. At a distance is a swimming pool radiant blue with underwater lights, and just beyond it a blazing two-story mansion, its music much louder this side of the alley wall.

The man who admitted them is tall and sports a mustache and he too wears a black suit. On his assurance that the Dobermans have been removed from the premises for the night—the owner of the estate not wanting to risk that one of his guests might stroll into the garden and get mauled—Espanto reholsters his weapon. He nods at a large low building on the far side of the garden and says, Garage?

Yeah, the tall man says. Come this way. Less light.

Keeping to the darker shadows and skirting a circular fountain centered by a mermaid sculpture spouting water from her upturned mouth, the tall man leads the men to the garage. Its wide roll-up door is closed and all the windows shuttered. They enter through a side door.

The interior of the garage is bright with ceiling lights and contains ten cars parked side by side in a row that yet has room for several more. The floor is spotless. Parked nearest to the roll-up door are four black Lincoln Town Cars. The other cars are all of different and expensive makes and models, and excepting a 1948 Tucker and a 1952 MGTD Roadster, none of them is more than three years old.

Now that they can all clearly see each other, Espanto introduces the two men with him to the tall man, whose name is Jaime Huerta. Espanto and Huerta have met once before, a few weeks ago at a park bench in the Alameda Central, where with another associate they clarified a few details of the plan for this evening. Huerta owns and manages Angeles de Guarda, a home security and bodyguard company, relatively small—seven male agents and two female office workers constitute his entire staff—but of excellent reputation. For the past four months he has served but one client, Francisco Belmonte, the owner of this estate, who employs Angeles de Guarda on a lavish and exclusive contract to provide round-the-clock protection for his home and family. Belmonte had fired his previous guard service when his wife caught its chief ogling their visiting teenage niece from the girl's second-floor bedroom window while she sunbathed topless in the pool courtyard below. He'd had his hard-on in his hand and wrapped in a pair of the girl's panties. In immediate need of another security firm, Belmonte accepted the recommendation of a friend who had twice employed Angeles de Guarda on brief assignments.

The two men with Espanto are Gallo and Rubio. Both of them are neatly barbered and they wear a suit well, the main reasons Espanto selected them to work with him tonight. Gallo's hooked nose and fierce black eyes give him an aspect of rooster, and Rubio, so called for his fair hair and skin, is the only man of them without mustache. He and Gallo position themselves to either side of the door through which they entered, Rubio at a window whose shutter he opens a crack to keep an eye on the pathways to the garage.

Espanto looks about and says, “Donde están?”

Over here, Huerta says, his Spanish tinged with the inflections of Puebla, his home state.

Espanto follows him past the cars and to the far end of the garage, where two men are sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, their hands bound under their knees with plastic flex-cuffs, their mouths covered with duct tape. Each gag has a small hole poked in the center so the man can breathe through his mouth if his nose should get stopped up. They are employees of Angeles de Guarda whom Huerta had assigned to guard the garden tonight. They wear black suits, Mr. Belmonte ever insistent that his security people present a uniform but dapper professional appearance.

You did up them up by yourself? Espanto says.

I had one do the other, Huerta says, then I did him, then I checked the first one to be sure he'd been done right.

The trussed men are glowering at Huerta.

Hey, guys, what the hell, Huerta says to them. I
said
I was sorry. Get over it. You see a chance like this, you take it, no? Don't tell me
you
wouldn't.

One of them tries to curse him through the tape gag.

Espanto checks his wristwatch. The drivers will be out here in about half an hour, right? he says. That'll leave two of your guys in the house. One in the ballroom, one on the front balcony.

Yeah, nothing's changed, Huerta says. They won't know what's happened till it's happened.

If the driver guys are late getting out here, Espanto says, we could have a problem. The pickup's at seven-thirty. I don't want my guys waiting out in the alley with their thumbs up their ass.

We been over this, man. They won't be late. I told them seven and they'll be here. Only thing not sure is when the after party bunch heads out. Supposed to be at eight, but, you know, fucking reception, no telling when they'll go out to the cars. I figure they'll hold to the schedule. The wedding and all, been partying for seven hours, and they still got this other thing. They'll want to get to it.

Espanto regards the cuffed men on the floor, their fierce staring at Huerta. Jesus, he says. These guys would like to skin you alive. Belmonte will too. You're gonna have to get lost really good.

Listen, friend, day after tomorrow not even God will be able to find me, Huerta says.

Espanto smiles. Really? Where you going?

Huerta gives him an arch look and swings a hand in a circle around the room, saying, That way. The minute I get my cut, I am
gone
, buddy, I am nowhere.

Espanto smiles and says, I believe it.

Here they come, Rubio calls from his window post.

He and Gallo extract their weapons, compact Glock 19s with silencers, the same as Espanto carries. They move a little farther from the garage side door, keeping their backs to the wall. Huerta stands near the front of a yellow Cadillac and raises his hands in an attitude of captivity. Espanto ducks behind the Caddy's other side.

The side door opens and three men enter the garage, all wearing black suits—the Angeles agents Huerta has assigned to drive the Town Cars. Two of the men are laughing over something the third has just said.

They halt at the sight of Huerta with his hands up.

Hey, chief, one says, what's—

Do what they say, boys, Huerta says.

Espanto stands up from behind the Caddy with his gun pointed at Huerta's head and says, “Manos arriba, chingados!”

Do it
now!
Rubio orders, announcing his presence behind them. Get them
up!

Two of the men fling up their hands, but the third one, the biggest man in the room, his large head round and crew cut, starts to turn to look at Rubio, and Gallo rushes up behind him and clubs him hard on the crown with the silencer-weighted pistol barrel.

The man grunts and staggers forward with a hand to his head, then turns toward Gallo, who curses and goes at him and pistol-lashes him again, across the ear, snapping the man's head half around and sending him tottering sideways to bang against a car. But he remains upright, his hand trying to find its way into his jacket and to his gun.

Espanto points his pistol at him and says, Don't do it!

Infuriated that the man is still standing, Gallo snarls and lunges at him again, this time swinging the pistol like he's throwing it, and hits him just above an eye.

The man reels like a drunken dancer and falls backward, his head hitting the concrete floor with a hollow
bonk
. He lies unmoving, eyes closed. A small rivulet of blood runs from under his head. One ear looks like a mashed plum, and a red welt the size of a cheroot swells over his eye.

Jesus
, Gallo says. Head like fucking rock.

He dead? Espanto says.

Gallo gets down on one knee and reaches into the big man's coat, withdraws a Ruger .380 and slides it over to Rubio, then puts two fingers to the man's neck to probe for a pulse.

The man's eyes snap open and he clamps one huge hand around the wrist of Gallo's gun hand and the other onto his throat and yanks his face down toward his bared teeth. Gallo braces his free arm on the man's chest, keeping their faces inches apart, feeling the man's hot exhalations, unable to draw breath nor even scream at the pain of the thumb jabbing hard into his Adam's apple as they struggle in a frenzy, legs flailing.

Huerta crouches beside them with an open switchblade and with a deft stroke cuts into the bicep of the arm choking Gallo. Blood jets and the big man yowls and the cut arm drops limp.

Gallo slumps to the floor, gagging, then labors up to his knees and starts to raise his pistol to hit the big man in the face, but Huerta shoves him back, saying, “Basta!” and Gallo falls on his ass, still beset by choked coughing. Rubio helps him to his feet, and Huerta points toward a corner and says, Bathroom, and Rubio leads him away.

The other two security men are wide-eyed and still have their hands up. They all hear Gallo hacking in the bathroom while Huerta tends to the big man. He cuts away his jacket and shirt sleeves to expose the wound streaming blood, uses a strip of shirt sleeve to fashion a tourniquet above the gash, then binds the wound with a cleaning rag and another strip of sleeve. He loosens the tourniquet and helps the man to sit up, then stand. The back of the big man's head is a sticky web of blood and he cradles his arm to his chest like a sick child.

You didn't have to
cut
me, he says.

You moron, Huerta says. You're lucky you didn't get your brains blown out.

I'm still bleeding, the man says. He looks near to tears.

You're okay. It'll hold till a doctor tends you.

Huerta pats the man's coat and extracts a wallet from an inside pocket and tosses it to Espanto, who adds it to a ragbag holding the other Angeles men's wallets. Their guns are in another bag.

Why you
doing
this, chief? the big man says in a voice plaintive as a child's.