The House of Wolfe (3 page)

Huerta ignores him.

Rubio returns from the bathroom and says that Gallo's okay and getting cleaned up. They put the three Angeles agents with the other two at the back wall of the garage. Huerta takes the bags of guns and wallets to the Town Car nearest the garage door and puts them under the front seats. He gets a handful of flex-cuffs and a roll of duct tape from the trunk and he and Espanto gag the three arrivals in the same way as the other two, then cuff all five of them with their hands at their backs.

Gallo reappears, having cleaned off his suit with damp paper towels. His neck shows small dark bruises but he has washed his face and combed his hair and looks presentable enough to carry on.

He gives the big man a hard look and calls him a son of a whore.

The big man stares back in glum silence.

Again holding to the shadows, Espanto and Huerta take the five Angeles men from the garage to the garden's rear gate. The music from the house is louder now, the voices and laughter. The north sky now starless for the massing rain clouds.

Espanto has warned the bound and gagged men that if they try anything stupid he will beat them unconscious with his pistol, but if they do exactly as they're told, they'll be fine. They will be taken to a house outside the city and there spend the night. In the morning they will be set free. We don't give a fuck what you do after that, Espanto told them.

When they get to the gate, Huerta extracts black blindfolds from his jacket pockets and applies one to each man. He senses a swelling of their fear and says, Don't worry, boys, this is just so you won't have to lie to anybody when you tell them you don't know where you were held. Remember, I'm the bad guy, not any of you. You guys are in the clear.

One of them mutters angrily but unintelligibly through his gag. Espanto smacks him on the head and tells him to keep quiet.

They've been waiting in the darkness only a few minutes, Espanto at the open peep window, when they hear the rumbling engine of a vehicle coming down the alley. It stops just outside the gate. Espanto opens it and he and Huerta move the men outside. Standing there with its engine idling is a gray van, two men in the front seats. A man of Oriental features pokes his head out of the driver's window and says, All aboard, gentlemen.

Espanto slides open the rear door and Huerta helps the blindfolded men to get in. The backseats have been removed. The man in the passenger side front seat tells them to lie down and stay that way until they're told to do otherwise.

Huerta slides the door closed and its lock clicks. Espanto slaps the roof and says, “Váyanse.”

The van departs.

Should've been smoother, Espanto says as they go back through the gate. Hardhead bastard nearly fucked things up.

Could've been worse, Huerta says. We might've had to haul a body out here.

At twenty minutes to eight, they take the four Town Cars—Huerta driving the lead vehicle, then Espanto, Gallo, and Rubio—up the wide curving driveway, lined on both sides with the attended cars of special guests, and around to the front of the house and park one behind the other in the reserved stretch along the curb near the verandah steps. On the other side of the driveway is a large courtyard, its dense trees softly underlighted. The men get out of the cars and come around them to post themselves on the passenger sides, facing the house.

A few couples stand along the verandah railing, some of them silhouetted against the brilliant windows, holding each other close, murmuring, laughing low. From the ballroom come the jolly strains of a Strauss waltz.

At ten past eight, the small party they've been awaiting comes out of the house in a loud jabber and flows down the flight of steps to the Town Cars, and the waiting drivers open the doors to receive them.

2 — JESSIE

As the orchestra crescendos toward the conclusion of Strauss's “Voices of Spring,” Jessica Juliet Wolfe whirls round and round in the arms of Aldo Belmonte. He's waltzing her toward the corner of the chandeliered ballroom where a row of tall potted palms blocks the room's view of the restroom foyer.

Jessie knows what he's up to and she's decided the thing to do is let him make his move and get it over with.

He spins her off the floor and behind the palms as the last notes sound and the ballroom bursts into applause for the orchestra. He brings her to a halt at the wall, a hand at her nape under hair of strawberry blonde, gazing in her eyes with a soulfulness so theatrical she nearly laughs. She surprises herself by not averting her mouth from his kiss, but isn't at all surprised to feel his hand slide down to her ass or the press of his hardness on her tummy. He tries to insinuate his tongue into her mouth but she locks her lips in a tight smile, then giggles at the feel of his tongue tip trying to breach the barrier.

He pulls his head back. Very cute, he says.

“Sorry, sailor,” she says in English, pushing his hand away. “A cop of ass and a dry smooch is as far as it goes tonight.”

“Tonight, huh?” He consults his Rolex. “Well, it'll be tomorrow in just a few hours.” His English has a tinge of Spanish accent.

“Forget it, amigo,” she says. “I told you.”

He puts his hands on her hips and again presses his pelvis to her. “
This
old amigo of yours would really like to, ah, get together again.”

“Jesus, Aldo. Suave as ever.”

She squirms free of him and shakes straight her shoulder-length hair and runs her hands over her hips and bottom as if to smooth her gown but really just to tease him because he has it coming. The dress is a navy sheath of silk jersey, sleeveless and floor-length, identical to those of the other two bridesmaids, and she knows how fetchingly it holds to her butt. He comes toward her again and she moves out from behind the palms.

“C'mon, JJ, don't be—”

“Would you be a dear and get me a glass of white?”

“Now? We'll be leaving in a minute.”

“Would you please?”

He sighs, but says, “Yeah, sure,” and goes off to the bar as the orchestra begins a jazzy number.

Rayo Luna Wolfe emerges from the crowd along the near side of the dance floor, smiling as she heads toward Jessie with a green drink in hand. Jessie grins at her pixie-haired cousin's brazen strut and the way she pretends not to be aware of all the attention she draws as she passes. Her clingy black minidress dispels all question of whether she's wearing anything under it save maybe a thong.

“Hey, you sexy thing,” Rayo says in English. “I thought you'd be gone to that other shindig by now.”

“Pretty soon,” Jessie says. She gives a pointed look at the obvious jut of Rayo's nipples against the dress. “And speaking of sexy things, it's not
that
chilly in here, kiddo. What's got them so worked up?”

Rayo looks down at herself, then leans closer and says, “It's this dress. They
love
the feel of silk. That and the looks I been getting from a certain dude.”

“More than one dude, sweetie, take my word for it.”

“No, mija, I mean a real stud. And you know what they say. Guys get horny at weddings.”

“I thought that's what they say about women.”

“That's what
guys
say they say about women.”

“Well it's true enough of one woman I could name.”

Rayo makes a face at her. “Actually, guys get horny if they're awake. And you? I saw you and Aldo go waltzing off into that little jungle.”

Jessie rolls her eyes. “Christ, he won't quit.”

“I been there, babe. Some guys, you do them in college, they think it gives them a lifetime ticket.
So
dickhead.”

“What the hell
is
that?” Jessie asks, staring at Rayo's green drink.

“Not real sure. For a joke I asked the bar guy for absinthe. I mean who drinks absinthe, right? But the guy doesn't bat an eye and pours me this.” She sips at it. “Yipes. I think it
is
absinthe.”

Like much of the Mexican side of the Wolfe family—and most of the three hundred guests at this reception—Rayo is of mostly mestizo lineage, caramel skinned and black haired, a sharp contrast to Jessie, whose light red hair and cream complexion make her one of the fewer than three dozen racial standouts in attendance.

When Jessie was asked to be a bridesmaid, she was told she could bring a guest of her own to the wedding, and she naturally chose Rayo, whom she's known since they were both fifteen. Rayo was born and raised in Mexico City—like Jessie, an only child—and her mother had thought it a good idea for her to correspond with someone of their American kin in order to practice her English composition and maintain family ties, and she had suggested Jessica Juliet because they were the same age. So Rayo wrote to Jessie in English, who responded in Spanish to say she was happy to get her letter and liked the idea of being pen pals in each other's main language. They began swapping photos and descriptions of life in Brownsville and in Mexico City and were soon sharing confidences about family, school, personal aspirations, and of course boys. When Jessie invited Rayo to come visit the following summer, Rayo asked her parents, they said yes, and it was a memorable ten weeks. Jessie introduced her to friends and took her to raucous parties. They went sailing on the Gulf, rode horses, swam in resacas. They sometimes spent the day with her Uncle Charlie at Wolfe Landing, target shooting at the Republic Arms range. They had both been taught to shoot when they were kids, and Jessie was a good marksman, but Rayo was a deadeye and won most of their contests with both handgun and rifle. The girls shared favorite books and watched videos of favorite movies, talked and talked about boys and sex, subjects that at the same time fascinated them and induced howls of laughter. They'd each acquired an early confidence with boys but Rayo was the bolder. She had such an easy way of sassing them, of putting more sway in her stride when she knew they were checking her out, that Jessie was a little surprised to learn she too was still a virgin at sixteen. They had both, however, had their share of encounters with urgently naked erections, and they had each on occasion relieved one with her hand, and in a few instances of what-the-hell, with her mouth. They had also both known the reciprocal pleasure of a boy's tongue that through skill or blind luck found just the right spot—although they agreed the experience more often entailed a tedious endurance of sloppy lapping until the guy was glaze-faced and gasping and they'd pat him on the head and say something along the lines of, “Enough, baby, wow, really great.” In the course of that summer they became to each other the sister both had always wanted. Their bond was tightened all the more on the July night they happily ceded their virginities to a pair of brothers named Mike and Joey McCall, on blankets spread on either side of a Boca Chica sand dune under a sky encrusted with stars and hung with a crescent moon at the far reach of the sea. A year later, when Jessie informed her that the McCall boys had been killed in a highway accident on the way back from spring break in Corpus Christi, Rayo wept with as much heartache as her cousin. After high school Jessie attended the University of Texas in Austin to major in journalism and minor in dance, while Rayo studied theater arts at the University of Miami and lettered in track, tennis, and swimming. In each of their college years they got together in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, where once in a Jackson Square bar an obnoxious fool would not desist in his pawing of Rayo until she floored him with an expert knee to the balls that drew cheers from onlookers. They attended each other's graduation, but later that same summer Rayo's parents were killed when the private plane bringing them back from a Havana vacation crashed in the Gulf. Bits of the aircraft were found, but no bodies recovered. Since then, Rayo has lived alone, as has Jessie, and they have remained each other's closest confidante. In addition to alternating annual visits, they rarely let a month go by without an hour-long phone talk to share the doings in their lives, and their weekly e-mails sometimes include an attachment of Jessie's most recent newspaper feature or magazine article, or a video clip of Rayo's latest stunt work in some movie or TV show.

Jessie had long been aware of the arms smuggling partnership between the two sides of the family, but it wasn't until her visit to Mexico City last year that she learned of Rayo's recent entry into the family's Jaguaro organization, though she also still works in film. Because Jessie has had nothing to do with the family's illicit dealings, Rayo had thought of not mentioning her own role in them, but as she explained it, “There has to be
somebody
I don't keep secrets from, and you're it, kid.” Jessie was less shocked by the revelation of Rayo's membership in the Jaguaros than she was worried about the dangers of it. Rayo said she wished there
was
some danger to be concerned about, something to make the work more exciting, but she was never assigned to do anything riskier than keep an eye on somebody or serve as a diversion. “Mostly I'm the
girl
,” she said. “You know, the go-to whenever they a need a nice ass to distract some guy's attention.” She was willing to tell Jessie anything she might want to know about it, but said it was basically boring stuff and she herself would rather talk about other things. Jessie said she would too, and they hadn't spoken of the Jaguaros since.

“Ooh, there he is, míralo,” Rayo says. “Over by the bandstand. Cigarette, Caesar hairstyle. Gregorio something-or-other. Goes to school in California. His father owns mines or something. Longtime friends of the Belmontes. Son muy ricos.”

“
Everybody
here's real rich except you and me,” Jessie says. She gives Rayo a mock knowing look. “Hunting for a well-heeled hubby, are we?”

“Oh,
please
.” Rayo says. “Not well-heeled or any other kind, thank you. It's just this guy's got the look, you know? Like he can reeeally do it.”