The House of Wolfe (31 page)

He listens for sounds of their approach but hears nothing other than his own pained breath. He stands up and stumbles over to the adjoining mound and sits down, facing directly at where he put the money. It's right there, he tells himself. That's all you have to remember.

Sweet Mother Mary, just
look
at this suit.

There's a darkness on his shirt and the front of his pants where the blood has spread. He takes off his jacket and balls it up and presses it tight to his stomach with one hand and holds the Glock in the other. They show themselves, you kill them. If they don't . . . fuck them. Just sit here till the garbage trucks or the flatbeds come in the morning. Won't be long. You pull the bags out and give a driver money and ride into town with him, then give him more money and direct him to Mago's. Mago will fix you up. Done it before. . . .

58 — RUDY

If I see you
, the guy hollers,
if I hear you coming
. . .
I kill her!

“That motherfucker!” Rayo hisses. “I swear to God, Rudy, I
swear to God.
. . .”

“Hush,” I say. “Listen.”

We're standing in the little clearing in front of the pit rim. It's hard to place where the guy's voice came from. Rayo's waiting for me to say what we're going to do, and I don't know. We stand still, listening hard. Waiting . . . waiting.

“
Charlie!
. . .
Charlie!
”

We turn toward Jessie's call and Rayo's about to yell something but I say low voiced, “Don't answer! He might be with her.”

We listen and listen.

“
Charlie!
”

She runs out from behind a mound less than fifteen feet away, just her, and Rayo calls, “JJ! Over here, baby!” At the same time I yell, “Jessie, this way!”

She stops and stares at us as we come running.

And then we've got her, and I cut off the cuffs.

The cloud cover has broken somewhat, and although there's still sporadic sprinkle, bits of moonlight are coming through. Jessie's limping, rubbing her chafed wrists, Rayo holding her close. I'm bringing up the rear, continually checking behind us. Jess said she left the Galán guy with a switchblade in his gut, so there's not much chance he's going to come up and nail us from behind. I keep a close eye anyway. If you're not sure they're down for good, you assume they're not. Basic rule.

We spy Charlie up ahead, sitting in the road. He sees us, too, and gets up slowly, dropping the hand from his side and tucking his pistol in his pants.

Jessie slips out from under Rayo's arm and hobble-runs to him. I flinch when she throws herself on him and he swings her around. He sets her down with a slight cringe and she realizes he's hurt. She puts his arm around her shoulder as if she might support him, insisting he lean on her, and he's grimacing and laughing.

We move off into the shadows and Charlie tries Chino's phone and it's as dead as mine, but Rayo's still has a charge and he gets reception. He calls Rigo and tells him where we are and says yeah, we're all okay except he got nicked in the side and Jess is pretty beat-up and her feet need attention. He listens for a time before saying, “Yeah, I think so, too. That's how we'll do it. . . . All right, we'll be waiting.”

Charlie tells us somebody in the hold house neighborhood called the police and they found Belmonte's body there, and his wife and the Sosas have told them all about the kidnapping. Tumaro and his guys are coming for us and will take us to a private medical center where he and Jessie can get patched up. Rigo thinks it's better to let the cops know Jessie's alive rather than let them think she's dead and later find out she's not. Charlie agrees. She'll have to talk to them, though. Routine stuff, but some Wolfe lawyers are going to talk to her first. Also, Mateo is no longer critical.

Charlie then calls Harry Mack. “Hello sir, it's Charlie. . . . Yes sir, we have her. She's all right. . . . No, sir, no, we're all okay.” He listens, clears his throat, and says, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.” He listens some more. “Yessir, I understand. . . . Yes sir.” He hands the phone back to Rayo but doesn't say anything about the call.

We go back down to where the two vehicles are and wait in the Jeep, Rayo and I in the front seat, Jessie with Charlie in the back. While we wait, she tells us the whole thing.

Almost the whole thing. She purposely leaves something out. Over the years I've interrogated a lot of people and listened to a lot of explanations and versions of one thing or another, and I've gotten pretty good at sensing when something's being deliberately omitted. Maybe Charlie and Rayo picked up on it too. Whatever she's skipping, though, it's not something that would endanger any of us for not knowing it, or she would not have left it out.

“He's still got the money,” Jessie adds. “Half of it, anyway.”

For a minute nobody says anything. Then Charlie finally says, “The money's not our business. They didn't take it off anybody in our house. We got what we came for.”

Nobody argues the point. Jessie falls asleep against his chest and doesn't wake till Tumaro and his Jaguaro crew show up in the two Acadias, plus a tow truck to take the Jeep back.

Tumaro asks if any of us is in shape to drive one of the Acadias, then tosses me the keys and says to follow the other one, and he and the other Jaguaros get in it. Having caught a whiff of us, they'd rather ride back in a crowded vehicle than in one with any of us in it.

59 — GALÁN

He does not immediately know what revives him or how long he's been out. It's very cold. The rain has stopped. The clouds have broken and there's a bright oval moon. Under the abiding stink of the pit, he can smell the sop of his own blood. His tongue tastes of copper. His swollen mouth is gummy.

There it is . . . the sound that roused him from his pain-hazed sleep.

Growling.

From near the mound to his right. He can't see the dogs but knows they're there. The pistol!
Where's the pistol?

At his side where he dropped it.

All right, you sons of bitches . . .

He points the gun into the black shadows where the loudest growls are and squeezes the trigger—and the pistol, its barrel packed with mud in his struggle with the girl, blows apart and removes his thumb.

He screams and curses. Howls his agonized rage at the moon.

The dogs flee.

Then a short time later come back.

More of them this time. The growling is louder and seems to come from all sides.

The first of them materialize from the shadows like nightmare apparitions. Snarling. Craze eyed. Insane with hunger. Drawn by his blood on the fetid air.

And then they're on him in a biting, tearing frenzy.

60 — RUDY

We follow Tumaro to a medical center in which the Mexican Wolfes are chief shareholders. Everyone recoils at our reek, and once Charlie and Jessie are put on gurneys and rolled away to be treated, Rayo and I give the staff a break by going outside to wait on a bench. The Jaguaros are out here too, but stay upwind of us. The sky is mostly clear now, with a gibbous moon to the west. It's cold out here but feels good.

A pair of criminal lawyers in the employ of Juan Jaguaro himself had been waiting when we arrived. They had a short private session with Jessie before she was rolled off for treatment, then they called the police. Rigo has already spoken to the head administrator, who in turn has instructed the staff in what and what not to say to the cops if they're questioned. Shortly, a trio of homicide detectives shows up and they and the lawyers repair to a private room to wait for Jessie.

For a while Rayo and I just sit there on the bench, not saying anything. It's been a hell of a day but it's been easy working with her. Yet for some reason I can't figure, and even though I'm older than she is and, if I say so myself, I've had a way with the ladies since I was a kid, I don't know what to say to her.

Which is when she tells me she'd like to go back to Texas with us to spend some time with Jessie. “I know she'll have the best of care,” she says, “but it'll be a while before she can walk without pain. Plus, she might have a time of it for a while dealing with, you know, what's happened to Luz and the others. She might like it if I was around to lend a hand or, I don't know, just to talk to. What do you think? Should I ask her?”

“Oh hell yeah, you should ask her,” I say. “I think it would make her really happy. She'd love to have you there while she heals up, she really would, really good of you. It's a great idea.” It's a struggle to quit babbling.

She's smiling the greatest smile I've ever had smiled at me. “I'm glad you think so,” she says.

Charlie had been afraid the bullet hit a kidney, but he proves lucky. Like Lila the barmaid says, he's not called Charlie Fortune for nothing. He walks out of the place on his own, stitched and bandaged, all cleaned up and in sweat pants and sweater. Rayo goes to him and hugs him gently and asks if he's in pain and he says not now, after the injection they gave him. Catching my “do not disturb” look, he excuses himself to go talk to the Jaguaros, and she comes back to the bench.

Jessie's no less lucky—a black-and-blue ear, a few stitches in her feet, a bunch of bruises and cuts but no real gashes. We're notified when she's brought out of the treatment room in a wheelchair and we go inside to see her. She's been cleaned up and makes a big show of holding her nose and waving us away. An attendant then wheels her to the room where the police are waiting and we go outside again.

As we later find out, she gave them a simplified version of events, omitting details that might naturally be missing in an account of a terrified and confused kidnap victim—which, as she has emphasized to us more than once, she damn well was. Mainly she wanted them to know what happened to the other five members of the wedding party. The cops had heard of the meth lab explosion—a not altogether uncommon occurrence in the slums—but would never have tied it to the missing kidnap victims if not for Jessie's information. One of them immediately relayed it to headquarters.

When she asked if Mrs. Belmonte or the Sosas had requested to speak with her, the cops seemed embarrassed to have to tell her they had already asked the surviving parents if they wished to see her, and they had all said they saw no reason to.

Who can blame them? Not us. They have ten members of their family to bury.

Ten.

Rigo and the other Wolfes want us to stay for as long as we'd like, at least a few days, but they understand that the Texas side of the house is anxious about Jessie and wants her home as soon as possible. She's now wearing a pair of thick sponge-soled sock slippers that are easy on her bandaged feet, and she can limp around with the help of a cane, though the doctors have advised her to stay off her feet as much as she can for the next two weeks. She jokes about comparing walking sticks with Aunt Cat when we get home.

While I get cleaned up at the Operation Center, Rayo Luna goes home to do the same.

We collect her on the way to the airport.

TUESDAY MORNING

61 — CHINO

He has been scraping and scraping the tape of his bound hands on the seat's metal frame, his shoulders and arms aching, blood seeping from his wrists, his broken thumb a swollen anguish. At last the tape severs. He sits up, groaning at the pain in his spine, then carefully works the tape off his eyes and mouth. His broken tooth is an agony. By his watch, it's 4:27. The rain has quit and there are glimmers of starlight. He reaches under the driver's seat and finds the Glock and eases out of the car. He makes sure there's a round in the chamber and that the magazine still holds ammunition, then slowly stretches and twists, grunting, sighing. He probes under the floor mat on the passenger side and finds his spare key. He goes around and gets behind the wheel and starts the Focus and backs up and looks into the empty alley. He had heard the shooting, the vehicles speeding away. Had some time later heard the sirens, the crackling car radios, had surmised the whole thing had gone to hell. He drives up to the intersection and passes through it slowly and sees the flashing light of a single remaining cop car in front of the Alpha house. Maybe some of them got away, he thinks. Maybe with some of the money. Nothing to do but go to a doctor, a dentist, then home. Wait to see what happens. Anybody who made it will be calling soon, checking to see if
he's
still standing. And if after a while no call comes, well . . . there are other gangs.

62 — Melitón

The morning breaks bright and chilly and pretty. The sky an immaculate blue but for the wispy smoke at the far horizons of the greater city. Melitón's neighborhood lies refreshed, the streets gleaming, the green trees sunlit, the air clean and bracing. At a sidewalk table of a corner café, he reads about the kidnapping of an entire wedding party the night before last and its terrible outcome last night. The families have declined to speak to the media. The police say none of the perpetrators have been identified, but the investigation is ongoing.

He sighs. Then signals the young waitress through the plate glass. She comes out and refills his cup and remarks on the lovely weather, and he smiles and says it is indeed.

The pity, she says, is that it doesn't last.

Yes, he says, that is the pity.

63 —THE PIT

By midmorning the bulldozers have come off the flatbeds and are at their task, engines gnarling, the drivers wearing goggles and smog masks, wielding the extended blades, gouging smaller heaps out of the mounds and shoving them into the smoking pit, all the dross and refuse and bloated dead things, all the jetsam and junk and now worthless matter, including a pair of engorged blue gym bags and the muddy remnants of a white silk suit.