The House of Wolfe (29 page)

Charlie peeks through the window, then runs into the house, and I jump up and follow and see him stop at a doorway and shoot into it twice. We hear a vehicle pulling away in the alley and we dart to the back door and hop out over the goat-beard guy, our guns up and ready to shoot the tires, and we see Rayo huddled on the white truck's bumper. Looking back at us all big-eyed.

She wouldn't be there unless Jessie's in the truck.

“Come on!” I say, and we run to the Jeep. We were both given a key to it this morning and then Charlie gave his to Rayo but I've still got mine. The truck turns at a cross alley as I get us rolling, and Charlie says, “Dumbfuck cooze! Why didn't she get off and get in with us?”

It's a silly question I don't bother to answer. He knows why. Because she couldn't be sure we'd catch them, but as long as she's on the Sierra she's with Jessie.

I whip into the cross alley, banging a back fender on the stone wall, and we see them up ahead, one red taillight and one white. They're hauling ass pretty good.

“That busted light's
her
doing, man,” I say. “Smart!” The tag light's out too but probably their deliberate doing.

We figure they took Jess because somebody made us when we drove through the neighborhood. Saw we were Yankees and so knew who we'd come for, who to hold the gun to. We also assume they saw us getting in the Jeep before they made the alley turn and know we're coming. I leave our headlights off anyway, just to make it tougher for them, not pinpoint ourselves.

We follow them this way and that, turning into other alleyways, other streets, zooming down long lightless lanes of mostly dark buildings, our wipers working at the drizzle. Intermittent vehicles go by in the other direction, and now and again we have to pass somebody that turns out in front of us from a side street and whose headlights give us a glimpse of Rayo before we cut ahead of them and can't see her anymore. I have to wonder what those drivers make of a girl crouched on a rear bumper. Or of us running without lights. Probably nothing. Not around here.

48 — THE NEIGHBORS

Within minutes of the last gunfire, of the sounds of vehicles speeding away in the alley, the boldest of the young street rats converge on the scene, moving in warily. Then the word goes out that the place is deserted but for the dead, and the neighbors descend on it with their tool kits and looting sacks. They make swift work of stripping the vehicles, ransacking the house. The vanguard rats acquire guns and phones, the cash and credit cards and driver licenses from the wallets of the four downstairs bodies, one of which they have to unwrap from a blanket. There is outrage on discovering nothing of value on the bodies upstairs but their shoes. Across the street, three young boys happen on Gallo, and while two of them fight over which of them will have his gun, the third runs off with his wallet and phone. The last looters to leave the house call the police and report a mass killing in the neighborhood and that two of the dead are federal policemen, an embellishment to ensure that the cops will respond and clear the bodies away before they stink up the neighborhood.

The police arrive in a half-dozen wailing, flashing vehicles, including a special tactics team in body armor and armed with automatic weapons, plus a night beat crime reporter who was at the station when the calls came in. The cops are both relieved to find no colleagues on the scene and furious to have come out here for any lesser reason than to assist their own. Their first inclination is to interpret the scene as a gangster dispute that for whatever reason included the obvious executions of the two males and two females upstairs. There are no purses to be found, and discarded wallets are without money or credit cards or other forms of identification—except for a body in the hallway, next to which are scattered several club membership cards.

Half an hour after their arrival at the Alpha house, the lead investigator and the reporter are on their way to deliver the terrible news to Mrs. Belmonte and ask what she knows about her husband's presence in that place.

49 — RUDY AND CHARLIE

We're soon out of the slum altogether and jarring over a muddy washboard road, moving through utter blackness except for the city's glow behind us and the Sierra's headlights on the road ahead, its red and white taillights, and a dull amber glow along the lower sky ahead. We'd seen the glow when we turned off the southbound road but didn't give it much thought, then lost sight of it in the slum. Now there it is again. We're on a gradual rise, moving into the foothills. Charlie can't believe she's been able to stay on that bumper.

“That latch isn't much to hold to,” he says. “I was just waiting for that corduroy section back there to shake her loose.”

“She's strong,” I say. “And limber as a cat.”

“Pretty cold wet cat about now.”

If we turned on our lights we'd see her, but we might blind her too, maybe spook her by lighting her up, plus we'd be letting them know exactly where we are. Without ambient light, and the sky so black, they can't see us, can't know how close we are. All they know is we're back here somewhere. If she weren't on the bumper we could move up close enough to shoot out their tires, bring the bastards to a halt, have a parlay. Tell them keep the money, take the Jeep, just give us Jess. They'd have nothing to lose and could go for it. That'd be just fine. We could track them down later and exact recompense.

But she
is
on that bumper. If we get too close and she falls off without us seeing it, we could run over her before we know it. There's nothing to do but keep our distance and tail them till they stop, then try to promote the deal before anybody pulls a trigger.

I don't now how far we've come or how much time has passed when they turn off onto a side trail, rutted and rocky and steeper yet. Wherever we are, it's way the hell outside the city. The glow across the lower sky is now directly ahead and seems to be redder.

“What
is
that?” Charlie says.

Their headlights swing left and right as they climb and we follow them a long way before the lights disappear, and we know they've cleared the hilltop.

Then we crest the hill, and Charlie says, “God
damn
.”

The source of the red glow is spread before us like a sea of hell.

To the left, the Sierra's making away on the tableland bordering the pit—and in the hazy radiance of the fires, we can see Rayo's dark figure still hunched at the tailgate.

We give chase.

50 — JESSIE

Winding their way up the hillside, they talk as freely as if she weren't even there, jammed between them on the seat. Though they can't see it, they know they're still being followed by the Jeep with the two gringos—
Charlie
, Jessie's sure of it, him and somebody else of the family. As the Sierra wove through the lamplit alleys and streets of the slum, Espanto had caught glimpses of the Jeep in his side mirror, running with its lights off. Since entering the darkness of the countryside, he's lost sight of it, but neither he nor Galán doubts the gringos are still right behind them.

Galán plans to bushwhack them. They're heading for a shantytown he is familiar with, a place bordering a garbage fire pit. They'll follow the pit's perimeter to where both the road and the pit rim make a sharp turn leftward behind a rocky rise that will put them out of sight of the Jeep long enough to cut off their lights and pull over and get out, ready to shoot. When the Jeep comes around the curve, they'll be within ten feet of it and they'll fire as many rounds as they can into the windshield and front windows. The Jeep's momentum will carry it off the curve and onto the shoulder and probably into the pit, but if it doesn't quite make it, they'll push it over the rim. Once it sinks into that smoldering rot-sodden bottom it will be forever lost.

Galán sees it as a much wiser and neater way of getting rid of the gringos than if they had killed them back at the hold house. Three dead gringos on television and in the papers is a matter the federal police could not dismiss, and zealous federals on a mission are a distraction to every criminal enterprise in the capital, small and large. It would not be in our interest, Galán said, to be the cause of any distraction to the Zetas. Jessie has read about the Zetas, and the idea that these men are in some way associated with them deepens her dismay.

Three
absent
gringos, on the other hand, Galán had continued, is a much different matter. Who can say where they have gone or why or whether they even want to be found? Who can even say whether they are dead or alive? No bodies, no crime. No distractions from the federals. The Zetas will be appreciative of such care on our part.

Three dead gringos.

Jessie heard him clearly.

Three absent gringos.

Charlie and whoever's with him . . . and who else but her?

They talk, too, of the Beta house, which she comes to understand is the other hold house.
Was
the other house. There was an accident, an explosion in the basement. A drug laboratory they hadn't been aware of. It destroyed the place and everyone in it—their partners, and the other half of the wedding party. Galán tells Espanto to see to it that Spoto pays for that mistake.

As they say, however, Galán adds, there's nothing bad that happens that doesn't bring some kind of good with it.

Espanto glances past her to grin at him. More for
us,
he says.

Money is such a poor recompense for the loss of loved ones, Galán says. But we must carry on as staunchly as we can.

They both chuckle.

They're all gone, she thinks.
All
of them.

She cannot suppress a small sob.

They ignore her.

Now they're on a truck road overlooking a monstrous garbage pit to their right, its black surface mottled with countless patches of pit fires, red and steaming in the soft rain. She can tell there's a sort of slope all along its edge but has no idea how steep it might be. In the light of the dashboard, the men's faces are shadowy carvings. The speedometer reads a hair over seventy kph, which she knows is around forty-five miles an hour, very fast for a narrow muddy lane and seeming even faster in the encompassing darkness and the ghostly rain in the headlight beams. There's also a scattering of vaporous fires at a distance to their left, illuminating the shantytown dwellings in eerie geometric silhouettes. The roadside is littered with refuse of all sorts, much of it unidentifiable, though she notes a wheelless bicycle, a large headless doll, a birdcage, all of it passing in the flash of the headlights' side glow like fragments of a distraught dream.

She feels removed from her own reality. Abducted from herself.

By the glow of the garbage pit, Espanto can now make out the black shape of the unlit Jeep in his mirror. They're holding at about forty, forty-five yards, he says.

Good, Galán says. That's sufficient leeway for us to get set before they come around the curve. Dim the lights and be ready to move fast. It's coming up. Maybe a mile.

51 — RAYO

She's relieved to be able to see the Jeep's dark form behind them, to know they can now see her, if not very well. She's wet and shivering, rainwater running from her soaked hair down her neck and into her jacket and shirt like icy little snakes. The pit's smoky stench burns her throat, her nose, stings her eyes. Her fingers are almost numb from the cold drizzle and the effort of clinging to the small handhold of the gate latch. As the Sierra had come up the hill, the downward pull of her body strained her hands so that she thought her fingers would break, and her shoulders had hurt to their roots. She has at times almost lost her foothold to a hard bump, a jarring patch of road, a sharp turn. She cannot guess why these guys have come up here, or what Charlie and Rudy have in mind to do, but she knows she can't hold on much longer. It shames her that she can't, but it's the truth and she'd better deal with it, because if she tries to hang on like some kind of champ she's going to fall off and lose JJ. Once again, she has to
do
something.
Now
. She tightens her left hand's grip on the latch, gritting her teeth at the pain, then eases her right hand from the latch and grimaces at the ache of flexing those fingers to loosen them. She puts the hand to the Ruger in her jeans and makes certain she's got a sure grip on it before drawing it out. Then she leans down, hanging by her left arm, her right arm stretching below the bumper. She angles the Ruger slightly to the right and squeezes off a shot and blows the tire. The rear of the Sierra abruptly sags and yaws and detaches from her grip. She's briefly airborne and then tumbling over the muddy ground, still holding the Ruger, then crawling fast to the meager cover of a mud knoll and crouches there, knocking mud out of the pistol muzzle.

52 — RUDY AND CHARLIE

Her dark form moves, shifts on the bumper.

“What's she doing?” says Charlie.

Then
bam
, we see the muzzle flash and the Sierra tilts and sways and she's flung off as the thing skids and does a one-eighty and comes to a stop facing us, off the road and only a few yards from the edge of the pit.

I pump the brakes, trying to keep from skidding in the mud, and we fishtail a little as we slow down and stop about fifty feet shy of them.

Their headlights just sit there, the seconds ticking by, and I wonder how Charlie proposes to broach them about a deal. I can't find Rayo. “You see her?” I say.

“Hit the lights.”

I switch on our headlights and we see the front passenger door wide open and somebody standing behind it—and then their lights flare brighter, huge and blinding, and
bam
, they're shooting.

We duck behind the dashboard with bullets popping through the windshield and whanging on the engine block. Charlie squeezes between the front seats and into the back, and I'm right behind him. We yank down the backseats to get to the swing door and open it and he gives a loud grunt and we tumble out. I pull my gun and huddle behind the wheels . . . and God almighty, the stink!