The House of Wolfe (10 page)

They won't trust the fuckers not to kill her even if they're paid, Rigo says. Neither would I. Now listen, I'm going to have Mateo himself handle this, and you'll work with him. He'll contact you shortly. Be ready.

Yes . . . yes sir, I will.

She hears his soft sigh before he says, I know you'll do well and exactly as you're told.

Yes sir. You can depend on me.

“And remember, chica,” Rodrigo adds in English. “Like our gringo cousins like to say . . . watch your ass.”

“Yes sir, I definitely will.”

She'd been hoping Rodrigo might assign her to a part in this because of her close relations with their Texas kin—but to work with Mateo! He's Rodrigo's younger brother and the head of the family's enforcement squad. She almost bounces on the seat in her excitement.

Then she thinks of Jessie and rebukes herself for such selfishness.

10 — JESSIE

They haven't been on the road very long when she hears the chirp of a phone and then the blond man's voice saying, “Sí?” Then he says, No, no problems at all. The cargo's on the way to the warehouse right now. . . . I understand. Until tomorrow.

Let me guess, says the voice of the ponytail man. Espanto.

Who else? Mother hen, that guy.

Fucking toady, the ponytail says. Always sucking up to Galán.

He's not sucking up. He's the number two man doing his job.

Again the phone chirps. The blond mutters, Now what? And then says, Yeah, what is it? in an acerbic tone that makes Jessie think it very unlikely he's talking again to the one called Espanto.

There's a silence and then the blond says, Jesus Christ. Well, tell him to do it fast, God damn it. I want it ready when we get there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell him to do it fast.

Who was
that?
the ponytail says.

Cabrito. Water pipe busted on the lower floor. Flooded the place. He's got a guy working on it but it may not be fixed before we get there.

Fucking slums, man, the ponytail says. Pipes
always
busting, roofs
always
leaking. Walls and floors full of holes. Why the hell use those rattraps?

Because, the blond says, out there nobody ever sees anything, hears anything, knows anything. Galán tells Espanto to find houses out there and then checks them himself before giving the okay. You want to argue with Galán about his choice of hold houses?

The ponytail doesn't answer.

It's a slow drive at first, with numerous stops at traffic lights, with constant sounds of proximate vehicles. The bare metal floor jars them at every bump and pothole. It hadn't taken long for Jessie to accept the impossibility of working her hands free of the cuffs, but she's been slowly rubbing her left cheek on a rib of the metal floorboard and, bit by bit, she's managed to push that side of her sleep mask upward until its lower edge is on her upper eyelid and she can see.

The whole time she's been working the mask up, she's feared that one of the bastards is watching her, enjoying her effort, waiting to see if she'll succeed in uncovering the eye. Ready to bust out laughing and smack her for her trouble if she does. But she's done it . . . and still no laugh or punch.

She's on her side between two other captives, so all she can see in the intermittent light of passing lampposts is the dark form of someone lying in front of her. A man's back. Aldo, she's pretty sure. She very slowly squirms partway onto her back until she can discern the two men in the front seat. They stop for a red light at a loud, bright intersection and she cranes her head around and sees no one else in the back of the Suburban besides other captives, all lying motionless, hands bound behind them. The ones from her Town Car, she figures, plus Luz. The rest of the party must've been packed off in the other Suburban. They're being taken to hold houses, she's sure of it. She's had it explained to her by cops. Two houses, maybe three, it's how they sometimes work it with more than one captive. Parcel them out to different holding places, so that even if one place becomes known, a rescue won't be attempted for fear of getting the captives at the other places killed.

The sound of traffic becomes sporadic and gradually lessens to almost none. They enter a part of town with fewer stoplights. The road is bumpier. They go straight for a long way without streetlights or stops or turns until at last they make a turn to the right. It's straight ahead again for a distance and then she feels the light centrifugal pull of a long curve and then they're moving straight but more slowly and over a still rougher surface. There are streetlights again, but dimmer and fewer than before. They move slowly for block after block and then pass through a flashing green cast of light and she glimpses a raised sign reading “Chula's” and bordered with green lightbulbs.

They slow down even more, and the blond says, Gallo's here already. Always picks that Durango at Loro's.

Whose shitty truck?

Must be the guy's who's fixing the pipe.

They make a turn and come to a stop and the engine cuts off. Dogs close by break out in a rage of barking, joined by dogs at a greater distance.

They're parked in deep shadow but there is sufficient sidelight of some sort for Jessie to see the two men. The blond says he's going to check on things and gets out.

The barking intensifies and the blond yells, “Cállense, condenados!” but the dogs don't slacken a bit. Jesse guesses they're pent behind some barrier.

As the ponytail man twists in the driver's seat to look back at them, she turns her head slightly to conceal the skew of her mask. She hears the
snick
of a lighter, then smells cigarette smoke.

Long minutes pass in the steady yelpings of the dogs. Then the blond's voice is at the driver's window, saying that the plumber will be finished with the pipes in another fifteen or twenty minutes. The problem is that he can't restore running water to both the upstairs and downstairs of the house, not tonight. That job will take a couple of days. So Rubio chose to have water on the upper floor so it won't be necessary to take a captive downstairs every time one has to use the toilet.

These fucking rattraps, the ponytail says.

I'm gonna stay on the guy's ass to hurry it up, the blond says. Take this bunch over there so we can quickly move them all inside as soon as the place is ready.

The ponytail gets out and opens the right-side back door and says, All right, children, time to get out of the boat.

She hears Aldo being pulled out. He gives an angry grunt, and then a cry of pain through his gag.

Kick at
me,
cocksucker! the ponytail says. Aldo groans.

Come
on,
the ponytail says. Then he and Aldo are gone and there's only the barking of the dogs.

Jessie wonders if Luz and Susi and José are all right. If they have any notion of where they are. Even if she weren't gagged, she wouldn't dare speak. For all she knows, somebody's standing at the open door of the vehicle.

It seems not more than a minute before the ponytail's back. Susi whimpers under her gag, and the ponytail snickers and says for her to quit the act, he's not hurting her, she probably likes it. He tells her to wiggle forward, and Jessie feels Susi shifting about on the floor. Then she's gone with the ponytail.

Emotional stress can skew your sense of time, Jessie knows, and she concentrates hard, trying to be as accurate as she can in estimating how long the ponytail is gone. When you're in danger, keep your head and try to learn as much as you can as fast as you can about the state of things. The more you know, the better your chances of being able to do something about it. A rule she'd learned from Charlie.

The ponytail returns, and she guesses he was gone for two minutes, maybe a little longer. Now you, my love, he says. His hands slide up Jessie's legs and over her breasts to clasp her by the shoulders and pull her to a sitting position. He then holds her by the hips and tells her to work herself toward him on her ass. She keeps her face down and wriggles forward, feeling like a child, the hem of the dress bunching up at her knees. When her lower legs dangle from the vehicle, he puts his hands under her arms and pulls her out to her feet. Holding her by one arm, his other arm around her and his hand on her breast, he conducts her over uneven ground, bracing her each time a heel tilts under her. The night is chillier now. He's on her right and so she's able to peek up without his seeing the raised edge of her mask. It's a small yard containing a pair of wheelless cars propped up on concrete blocks, plus another junker, and he guides her around them. Directly ahead stands a house of unpainted concrete block, with a second story that covers only the right two-thirds or so of the building. At the far end of the house, the one-story part, there's a small front porch with a bare yellow bulb glowing above the door. The porch is fronted by a dirt driveway where a red Durango is parked, and a few yards past it is a stone wall of what is probably the neighbor's courtyard. Behind it are the yammering dogs. Only two, maybe three, Jessie guesses, but they sound fierce.

The ponytail steers her toward the other corner of the house, in the shadow of the trees, where she sees Aldo and Susi standing at the wall. He positions her next to Susi.

The blond man calls, “Todo bien?”

Jessie risks a peek at the porch and sees the blond at the open door in his shirtsleeves, his pistol holstered under an arm.

What's the holdup? the ponytail says.

Not much longer, the blond says, and goes back inside.

The ponytail flaps a hand in disgust toward the door and in mimicry of the blond man says, Not much longer, as he starts back to the Suburban.

Jessie tilts her head and surveys the narrow street fronting the house in the sickly glow of lampposts. There's no one in sight on the street or at a window. Some windows iron barred, some boarded up. Not a place for night strolls, she thinks, not when these guys come around. The street's littered with trash and lined with close-set little buildings of concrete block. Beat-up vehicles parked everywhere. The blond and ponytail were right, it's a slum—though this one's not nearly so bad as many she's seen. There are ramshackle quarters like this everywhere on the fringes of the capital, residential neighborhoods that sprang up next to an industrial plant or shipping depot that provided good jobs until the plant was shut down or the depot was excised from the transportation system, and then the neighborhood was left to wither into isolated slumhood. There is little police presence in these places, a patrol car is an uncommon sight. Hence all the dogs, the poor man's security service. Few crimes short of murder will bring the cops, though it can be hours after the fact before they arrive. A major blaze will draw the fire department, but hydrant hookups are a rarity, and often a fire must be fought with water-tank trucks until the flames are doused or the tanks run dry. People are born and die in neighborhoods like this with no record of either event. The Other Mexico City, she heard the slums called on a previous visit to Rayo, when she'd been escorted through several of them so she could take pictures and notes for a Texas magazine article about the different societies of the capital, from the wealthiest and artiest zones of the central city to the bleak outskirt localities like this one. Even bleaker than slums like this, however, are the shantytowns of the surrounding hills, where the dwellings consist mostly of discarded shipping crates and construction rubble, cardboard covered with shower curtains. Jessie has long been familiar with the shantytowns along the lower Tex-Mex border, but the squalor of those girding the outer reaches of Mexico City exceeds any she's seen elsewhere. Wretched, lawless settlements outside the regard of municipal authority, without electricity or running water, subject to chronic brutalities of every sort. The largest shantytowns border the enormous garbage dumps and fire pits where the city disposes its daily tons of rubbish. Yet even the meanest society desires identity, and every shantytown she's been to has had a name. She's passed through places called Absent Souls, the Devil's Patio, Little Hell, Tears of Mother, and a number of others dubbed in a similar vein. The air here smells mostly of exposed garbage, but it carries tinges of carrion and charcoal fires, open privies and putrid muck—olfactory indications that whatever slum she's in it isn't far from a shantytown that's a hell of a lot worse.

To her left, across a short span of gravelly, trash-strewn ground and just behind the trees, is a skewed picket fence silhouetted by a distant corner streetlamp and showing a small gap of missing pickets. Beyond the fence is a two-story building that may once have been a small hotel but now serves as a tenement. Few of its windows are lighted, and its forward ground is overgrown with high weeds. Past the tenement are other buildings, some dimly lighted, some totally dark. She's sure that the gap between the tenement and the next building is an alley.

That's
the ticket, she thinks. Down that alley. With a two-minute head start you can be into it well before they even know you've gone. You cut through there to the next street and find your way to a phone somewhere, a taxi, hitch a ride,
something
.

What if the alley's a dead end? Go to the next street and make your turn there. You play it as it comes. What you goddamn well have to do is
try
. Might be the only chance you'll get.

She slips the pumps off her feet and kicks them behind her. Can't run in those. She'd grown up a barefoot tomboy and her feet were toughened all the more by years of ballet and modern dance. Her feet have known pain, and a few cuts won't be anything she can't endure. Better the cuts than a shoe heel giving way and twisting or breaking an ankle. The dress is no help, either, but there's nothing to be done about that for now.

The ponytail returns with Luz and positions her beside Jessie, saying, Stand here and don't move. Then goes off to get José, the last of them.