The House of Wolfe (11 page)

Jessie watches him until he goes out of sight behind the clunkers.

Then steps around Luz and bolts.

11 — JESSIE

She barely hears the sound of her feet on the gravel, but the neighboring dogs hear it and again burst into a frenzied barking—the ponytail yelling for them to shut the fuck up—as she runs for the fence, her dress restricting her to short quick strides. She runs through the fence gap and into the high weeds, keeping her head craned back in order to see under the sleep mask, fearful of tripping over something, of gashing a foot, expecting an outcry of pursuit any second. Stones bite into her feet.

She passes the dim entranceway of the tenement and reaches the alley and is elated to see that it joins a lighted street at the other end. She glances back toward the hold house and sees no one coming and dashes into the alley. It's darker in here and she fears even more for her feet, the threat of broken glass, upturned nails. Other dogs on other streets have joined in the general uproar.

She stops and squats and stretches her arms downward, sliding her bound hands under her butt, then drops to a sitting position and hunches forward, drawing her knees up to her breasts, and works her hands forward under her feet. She whips off the sleep mask and stands up, searches with her fingernails for the end of the tape gag, finds it, and peels it off, taking off some of her hair with it. She hears angry shouts through the clamor of the dogs—the ponytail has discovered she's gone. In the weak light of the alley mouth, she spots a large chunk of brick and crouches and sets it just above the hem of her dress, holds it in place with one foot, and yanks hard on the skirt to make a tear in the hem. With both hands she then rips the tear open all the way up her thigh.

Now
she can run.

She races to the end of the alley and hears the ponytail yelling that he's spotted her—“Ya la veo! Ahí va!”—from behind her as she rounds the corner onto a street.

She fights down her fear, ordering herself to breathe in a rhythm,
breathe
. She can outrun these bastards if she doesn't panic.

The street she's on is as ghostly as that of the hold house, as bare of traffic and people, streetlights as hazy, buildings as dark. She goes past a house from which a voice calls something she doesn't catch and then goes silent.

Back in the alley, the ponytail is shouting, “
Por acá!
” She's over here!

Before he comes into view, she dodges into the next alley. She sprints to its other end and out to another street, catches sight of someone vanishing into the shadows and hears a door slam. She's sure she's being watched from the lightless windows. The neighborhood is a tumult of enraged dogs alarming everyone into staying in hiding.

Holding to a mental map of the location of the hold house relative to her position, she moves away from it, turning left and right into alleys and streets, once stepping on something soft and slimy and almost losing her footing, twice reversing her course on entering an alley and seeing only the darkness of a dead end ahead.

She knows that if she keeps bearing away from the house she's bound to arrive at a street with traffic and people. Even if there's not a cop around, there's sure to be a café or store, someplace she can duck into and get free of the cuffs and borrow a phone and—

Damn it!

She's come deep into an alley before realizing it's another cul-de-sac. Behind the alley fences, dogs are insane with fury.

She whirls around to backtrack, and, in the dim light from the street, sees piles of old fruit crates and cardboard boxes, one of them heaped with empty food cans with the opened lids still attached. She plucks a large can from a box and sits down and sets it between her feet and saws through the plastic cuffs with the edge of the lid.

A vehicle's coming, engine rumbling low. She scoots over to the shadowed wall and hunkers next to a stack of empty crates.

An SUV comes in view, moving slowly. The Durango. No one in it but the driver. It stops. A driver-side spotlight comes ablaze and plays into the alley. She makes herself as small as she can, thinking the game's up, they've got her.

The spotlight beam moves over the opposite walls and fences, inciting dogs to higher pitch, then flicks over to her side of the alley and flashes along the wall above her head. Through the din of the dogs, she hears the driver's voice—speaking on a phone?—and the Durango speeds away.

She gets up and goes to the corner and peers around it to see the Durango make a turn at the end of the street. Holding to the shadows, she jogs along the broken sidewalk, stripping the severed cuffs off her wrists. She pauses at the corner, looks both ways, sees no one, and runs across the street to the shadows of the next block.

As she nears the entrance of the next alley, hoping it won't be another blind, she hears footfalls behind her and turns to see the ponytail man not ten yards from her and coming fast.

She runs into the alley, the ponytail yelling for her to stop. “
Párate
, pinche concha!”

It's an open alley but a long one. She's gasping as much in fear as for breath. She stumbles and regains her balance, hears the man's running feet, his cursings louder. Some of the alley fences are of concrete, some of wood, all about seven to eight feet high, and it sounds like there are raging dogs behind every one of them. The only chance she sees is to start hopping fences and damn the dog bites.

The alley lamppost shows no glass shards on top of a stone fence on her left, and she veers to it and jumps and catches hold of its top with both hands. She pulls herself up chin-high to the rim of the wall and works her right foot up to the top of it, but before she can bring up her other leg, the ponytail catches it by the ankle and yanks her down.

She drops onto him and he topples backward and hits the ground with her on his chest, the air bursting from his lungs. She rolls onto her hands and knees and starts to get up but he again snatches her ankle with both hands, holding her down as he fights for breath. She kicks and kicks at his face with the heel of her free foot, kicking his mouth, his eyes, and one of his hands slips off her foot. She keeps kicking and her ankle comes free. She scuttles rearward on hands and heels and butt as he fast-crawls after her, snarling like one more dog trying to get at her, grabbing at her feet. She kicks him in the face again, then rolls over and starts to get up but he dives and tackles her around the thighs and brings her back down. Dogs for blocks around going mad.

She's on her side, writhing and twisting like a lunatic amid the dogs' crazed howlings, trying to detach from him, her hands in frantic search of the ground for anything that might serve as a weapon. He's cursing in gasps, punching her ass and hips, struggling to keep his grip on a fistful of dress at her waist as he tries to get to his knees.

Her hand closes on a large chunk of concrete block and she twists around to face him as he starts to rise to his knees and she swings the concrete chunk with her arm extended and hits him hard on the ear. He grunts and his hand lets go of her dress and he falls over sideways.

She kicks free of him and scrambles to her feet. He's breathing but not moving, and she has an impulse to hit him again, harder, to break his goddamn skull. But she doesn't. She drops the concrete chunk and again jumps and grabs the top of the wall, and it's a greater effort this time to lug herself up.

The wall is flat-topped and almost a foot wide, and on its other side a pair of large dogs are leaping and leaping, jaws snapping at her overhanging face as she labors to get her legs up on the wall top, then does. She sits with her knees drawn up, catching her breath. Then notices the man and woman watching her from the open back door of the house. It's too dark to see their faces, but as she stares at them they go back inside and shut the door.

The ponytail groans and stirs.

Go!
she thinks.

She stands up and quicksteps with sure balance to the end of the wall, where it abuts the top of the neighbors' wooden fence, behind which a small dog is apoplectic at her looming presence. She follows the stone wall to the left until she's about three feet from a neighboring house with a flat roof not two feet higher than her head. It's a tricky jump that requires her to catch hold of the narrow eave without banging her knees on the side of the house—and she does it, grabbing the eave and lighting on the wall with the balls of her feet, then hefts herself up onto the roof.

From up here, the furious racket of the dogs sounds even louder. She sees a wide orange glow in the looming foothills and reckons it for one of the fire pits that consume the city's garbage. Its position gives her a clear fix on which way to go—in the other direction.

She proceeds from rooftop to rooftop, the houses so close to each other it's less a jump than a running skip between most of them. The people inside surely hear the thumping of her footfalls, but no one comes out to see who's tramping on their house. Some of the roofs are of corrugated tin, some of gravel over wood, some no more than tar-papered planks that yield somewhat under her weight as she crosses them. Some are festooned with clotheslines and she has to bat her way through hung laundry.

She's moving over ground of slight upward incline, and now she reaches its summit, atop a roof from which she spies brightly lighted streets straight ahead and about twelve blocks distant—red-yellow-green blinking of traffic lights, the play of neon.
That's
where she has to get. Maybe half a mile, she figures, maybe a little farther. The moon has vanished in the growing mass of clouds, and a wind has come up. She shivers in her thin dress.

She crosses another few roofs before finding herself on one that's too far from the neighboring houses for her to make the jump. A tall tree stands close and she descends it to the ground.

She has no idea how far she's come from the hold house, but there's less barking now. She thinks she's reached the perimeter of the slum because the streets are a little better paved here, most of the residences fronted with small yards and shrubbery.

She's advanced another two blocks, staying in the deeper shadows along the side of the street, when she hears something behind her. The tread of running feet? She darts over to a row of bushes and crouches behind them and holds still, listening hard. Now hears nothing except the most relentless dogs.

But maybe whomever she heard has also stopped and is listening as hard for her to make the next move. It occurs to her the ponytail was probably armed and she feels stupid not to have thought of it and taken his weapon when she had the chance. Damn it, girl,
think
.

She silently counts to sixty, alert for any suspicious sound, but at the end of the count she hears nothing but the dogs and the rustlings of the trees in the rising wind. She resumes moving slowly down the street.

Before she's gone another block she hears a vehicle approaching from the rear and hurries back to the bushes.

A compact car drives past, trailing rock music behind it.

Get a grip, she thinks. You've lost them. You have. Just keep moving to where the lights are.

Another vehicle is coming. She stays hidden and watches an ancient Volkswagen van pass by, a hand-painted logo of a crossed rake and shovel on its side. Two men in the front seat, two or three others in the back. Itinerant workers bound for yard jobs in some better section of town. As the van's single taillight fades down the street, she regrets not having tried to get a ride with them. A lot less risky than being out here on foot.

She moves on, alarmed by every rustle of leaves in every surge of wind, growing more conscious of how cold she is. A sweep of headlight beams comes around the corner behind her, and she again takes cover behind some shrubs.

It's an old pickup truck with slatted wooden sides on the bed. It clatters toward her in the weak glow of a streetlight. Another crew heading for a day's work in the greater city. She looks all about, sees no one else. Do it, she thinks.

She runs to the edge of the street, into the margin of the headlights, and waves her arms over her head. The truck slows with a squeal of brakes and stops a few feet from her. There's no one in it but the driver.

She runs up to the open passenger window and says, “Por favor, señor, necesito—”

The door flies outward and knocks her sprawling.

Stunned, she's trying to get up when she's grabbed by the hair and pulled to her feet. She sees it's the blond man and tries to knee him in the crotch but he pivots to take the blow on the hip and counters with a punch to her midsection that doubles her over, stopping her breath and practically paralyzing her. Her knees give way but he grips her under the arms and drags her around to the other side of the truck and braces her up against it, holding her turned away from him.

Her stomach feels crushed and she can't breathe. She thinks she's going to die. Then her lungs abruptly inflate and she's breathing again, though every inhalation is a wrench of pain under her ribs.

You going to throw up?

She shakes her head. Then bends forward and vomits, her knees buckling at the pain, but he holds her in place.

After several excruciating heaves, she can bring up nothing more. She hacks dry a few times and stops.

Done? he says.

She nods.

Sure?

She considers, and nods again. She now feels even colder than earlier and hugs herself.

A vehicle appears a few blocks away. He helps her to get in the truck and tells her to sit on her hands, then reaches past her and turns off the ignition and removes the key.

If you move from there or show a hand without my permission, I'll break your arms. You understand?

She nods.

Say it.

I . . . understand. She's still dazed. What she wants more than anything is for the pain to subside.

He shuts her door and waits beside the window for the vehicle to go by, an old sedan with a whining engine, then takes out his phone and makes a connection.