The way Charlie explained it to me, the spiders are unknown to each other and don’t even know who they’re really working for. They relay their information to their district managers, who note its source and origin and get it keyed into computers, after which the data’s encrypted and sent to one of the many depots, as the Jaguaros call them—computer dealerships and tech support shops they own all over the city under the names of dummy corporations. The depots recode the information and then transmit it to a so-called warehouse through a routing system so labyrinthine that not even the depot techies know where it ends up. According to Rigo, those warehouses are some of the research institutes the Mexican Wolfes have endowed, a research institute being a perfect cover for filtering, cataloging, and storing coded information in readiness for Jaguaro computers seeking specific kinds of data.
That information network is why we came with the hope of finding Jessie fast. If there’s anything to be picked up out there that’ll lead us to her, the Jaguaros will find it.
15
The first fat raindrops are spattering the windshield and there’s a low roll of faraway thunder as we wheel into the building’s garage and park in Rigo’s reserved spot near the elevators. He uses an electronic key to activate an office elevator that takes us to the top floor.
In a spacious foyer appointed in colonial Spanish decor, a sleek young woman at the reception desk, her hair woven in a black braid extending to the small of her back, greets Rigo with warm informality. He introduces her as Ángela and she smiles and welcomes us to Jiménez y Asociados.
We go down a long hallway flanked by spacious offices and enter a storeroom whose walls are lined with ceiling-high shelves loaded with office supplies, then pass through another door and into a huge room spanning the width of the building but for one side that’s lined with private offices and the suite Rigo had mentioned.
The remainder of the room is full of cubicles containing computer terminals. The screens flicker. Printers hum. Young men in shirtsleeves are moving from cubicle to cubicle, reading screens and talking with the casually dressed technicians at the terminals.
Rigo tells us the techs have put in a coded request to the storage institute’s computers for all spider information gathered in the Federal District in the past three months that contains any reference, large or small, to kidnapping, as well as all information ranging from rumors to public records pertaining to Jaime Huerta or the Angeles de Guarda security company. The information has been coming in bits and pieces for the past three hours.
The techs scan it, Rigo says—speaking in Spanish for the first time since greeting us at the airport—and channel everything of related interest over to those computers.
He points to a table on the far side of the room where several men and one woman are seated at a long desk in front of a row of computers and focused on the monitors.
The woman looks up, and I see she’s Rayo Luna.
She grins at me in recognition, then says something to a young guy standing nearby who takes her place at the terminal and she rushes over to us. She hugs me and kisses me on the cheek and then does the same to Charlie, saying how happy she is to see us.
Then her face gets serious, like she just remembered why we’re here. We’re going to find her, she says. “Ya lo veras.”
Charlie makes no response. I smile and resist the urge to run my hand through her pixie haircut. We’ve known her since her first visit to Brownsville back when she and Jessie were around sixteen and Jessie was still living with Harry Mack and Mrs. Smith. Like Jessie, she’s a beaut—more of one, in my book, but then I’ve always preferred morenas, with their black hair and brown skin. She’s also something of a free spirit and nobody’s fool, I know that much, even though Jessie’s always tended to monopolize her on her visits and the rest of us never have much chance to spend time with her. In one of the few private exchanges I’ve had with her, I remarked—God knows why—that it was interesting we were both orphans as a result of our parents having vanished in the Gulf. She’d given me a strange look and said yeah, that was real interesting, all right. Can be hard to read her sometimes. Not a man of us isn’t impressed by the fact she’s a stunt woman. I’ve seen her run partway up the trunk of a palm tree and flip backward off it and land on her feet as lightly as a bird. She was wearing a flared skirt when she did it, and the peek of her undies made the exhibition all the more memorable. Frank once observed that she’s right out of Shakespeare. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” She’s not really all that little, maybe five seven or eight, around Jessie’s size, but she’s definitely fierce. Jessie’s told us about guys who were fools enough to cross her boundaries and suffered for it. The outfit she’s wearing—a black T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans—holds to her so nicely it’s an effort not to gawk. Plus she’s got this full-lipped mouth you can’t help but imagine yourself kissing . . . and yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s my cousin and so what? That’s never been an impediment to amorous liaisons in our family. The Mexican Wolfe patriarch, Juan Jaguaro himself, married his first cousin back when. Didn’t raise more than one or two family eyebrows.
We’re joined by a guy whose smile is a little awkward. Not in a way that suggests shyness but as if smiling is something he doesn’t do very much. He and Charlie clutch in an abrazo and say it’s good to see each other. Rigo introduces him to me as his younger brother, Mateo Genaro Wolfe. He’s clean-shaven like I am, and built about the same. Quick-eyed. We embrace and smack each other on the back.
Though we haven’t met before, I know a lot about him by way of Charlie. He’s only a few years younger than Charlie and is in charge of a crew of guys called Los Chamacos—the Kids—who are the equivalent of us fixers, only there’s more of them than us, Charlie told me. When the Jaguaros come up against a problem they can’t settle in standard business fashion, they turn it over to Mateo and his Chamacos to right the matter. The word on him is that he’s very damn good at his work—and capable of a fury belying his reserved manner. The family tales about him are legion, but the one that’s always stuck with me is the one Charlie told about Mateo’s first assignment as a Chamaco, when he was hardly more than an actual kid. He was sent to collect the outstanding difference, plus interest penalty, on an underpayment for an arms shipment. The debtor was the chief of a Toluca street gang and not much older than Mateo. When Mateo tracked him down at a plush house just outside of Toluca and told him to pay up, the kid told him to fuck himself and had four of his guys jump him. They gave him a pretty good going-over, breaking his nose and blacking his eyes, then stripped him of his gun and wallet and took him out in a car and dumped him on a four-lane highway full of midday traffic. The way Mateo told it to Charlie, he went bouncing over the pavement for what seemed like forever with tires screeching and cars swerving and whipping by him, and he was sure he was going to get splattered. When he stopped rolling he was just a few feet from the shoulder and still in one piece and he crawled to it as fast as he could as an 18-wheeler sped by within a foot of him, its blow-by knocking him rolling. It was God’s almighty wonder he wasn’t killed or didn’t break anything more than the pinky of his left hand. His clothes were torn, his elbows and knees gashed, his head knotty with bloody bruises, and he was going to be sore from head to foot for a month. But he was intact and could walk. The only vehicle that pulled over to see about him was a large truck full of field workers. They gave him a ride into town and he practically had to force them to accept the money he pressed on them. He called the capital from a pay phone and waited on a park bench until a quartet of Jaguaros came for him and took him to a clinic where he was sewn up and bandaged and given injections. That evening, he and the four Jaguaros overpowered the outside guards at the gang chief’s house and slipped inside and took care of another three guys without much fuss or noise. They searched the house as quiet as cats until they found the young boss in a bedroom, asleep with a girl on either side of him, everybody bare-assed. The k
id woke to Mateo’s pistol muzzle on his mouth. Surprise of the fucker’s life, Mateo told Charlie. The kid was made to produce every last peso and dollar in the house, which amounted to twice as much as his debt to the Jaguaros. Mateo even got his gun and wallet back. He thanked the kid very much for his cooperation and then took him, still naked, down to his car and out on the same highway and had him kicked out of the speeding vehicle. There wasn’t as much traffic at that late hour as earlier in the day, but the kid wasn’t nearly as lucky as Mateo had been. In the brief moment before they lost sight of him, he was repeatedly struck and dragged and dispossessed of body parts. “You could say in complete truth,” Mateo had told Charlie in English, “that he paid more than an arm and a leg for his mistake.”
We spend the next half hour with Rigo and Mateo and Rayo in a private side room, where we’re shown a folder of photographs of the Belmonte and Sosa family members. Portrait photos, school pictures, newspaper and magazine shots taken at one or another soiree or sporting event or civic function.
Partly in English, partly in Spanish, sometimes in both languages within the same sentence, Rayo tells us everything she’s already told the Jaguaros several times. She says she was fooling around with a guy in a room in the Belmonte house when the bridal parents unexpectedly entered an adjacent office and she overheard them talking about the kidnapping. “Fooling around” is her phrase, spoken without hint of embarrassment. Which is another thing I’ve always liked about her—she’s as forthright as they come. She’s absolutely sure of what the parents said because they kept repeating things to each other, comparing their memories of what Mr. X had said to them.
“When I checked my landline messages this morning,” she says, “there was one from Sosa. Me díjo que JJ had gone with the rest of the wedding party a un rancho en Cuernavaca for another day of good time. Pero she lost su teléfono and so asked him to please give me a call and let me know she wouldn’t be home till tonight. He was covering for her absence.”
Rigo’s going to post men at the banks where Belmonte and Sosa will get the money. Lookouts for anybody shadowing either man. Mateo nods at Rayo and says, The kid and I will watch Sosa’s bank. It’s closest to the Belmonte house. Anybody looks right, we tail him. If he keeps on looking right, we grab him, see what he has to say. Same for the lookouts at Belmonte’s bank.
That’ll be me and Rudy, Charlie says.
Rigo nods like he was expecting that. If you wish, he says. Mateo will assign another man to you, too, just in case.
Duarte, Mateo says. Good one.
Charlie shrugs.
Rigo tells us that so far all the kidnapping items his communication techs have received have been in reference to snatches no more recent than two weeks ago, and the file searches on Huerta and his security company have uncovered nothing more than repetitious data attesting that Angeles de Guarda is a fully registered business with impeccable financial records and client evaluations that universally laud the company’s good service. Except for the bureaucratic data relating to his proprietorship of the company, there’s nothing on Huerta himself but a single police record of arrest for fighting in the streets when he was sixteen.
Something will come up, Rayo says. It’s hard to keep a secret in a small town, and you know what they say about Mexico City. It’s a small town of twenty million people.
Rigo goes off to the suite, and Mateo and Rayo take us into a room furnished with only a couple of long bare tables in its center and rows of lockers along the walls. Mateo opens one of the lockers and extracts a pair of cell phones and hands one to Charlie and one to me. Their directories contain no names and only three numbers—the first is Rigo’s, the second his, the third Rayo’s. All the phones are equipped with trackers. He withdraws a wallet from the locker, takes a gander in it, and hands it to me, then gets out another and gives it to Charlie. The wallets contain two kinds of identification with our picture and physical description—a Federal District driver’s license and an ID card for employees of Montoya Investigaciones SA, a private Mexico City investigation company. Montoya Investigaciones is a real company, Mateo tells us, owned by the Jaguaros through a combination of fronts. Its owner of record is a retired and highly venerated naval captain named Alejandro Montoya whose nephew is a ranking attorney in the mayor’s office. The company’s office is on a lower floor of the building we’re in.
If you should have to deal with the police, Mateo says, show them the card. The federals don’t care for private investigators, but they know Captain Montoya and give his people some latitude.
There’s a knock at the open door and one of the computer guys beckons Rayo. She excuses herself and goes off with him.
Mateo takes a pair of pistols from the locker and places them on the table and beside each one sets two 13-round double-stacked magazines and a shoulder holster. Beretta .380 Cheetahs. He asks if they’ll do or if we prefer something else.
Truth to tell, I prefer revolvers, big ones like my Redhawk. Revolvers don’t jam. Plus I hold with the view that if you need more than six shots to hit something, you really shouldn’t risk getting in a gunfight in the first place. But Charlie likes pistols and regards the Beretta highly. They’ll do fine, he says.
We join Rigo in the suite, where a table in the outer room is set with platters of sandwiches and bowls of fried chicken and baskets of pastries. There’s a large urn of coffee, and the refrigerator holds juices and soda pop and beer. Mateo fills a plate with pieces of chicken and cracks open a beer and sits at the table to eat. Rigo’s slumped on the sofa, watching a weather channel with the sound off. He says he likes the maps, the colors of the temperature bands. It’s very soothing, he says, the weather channel.
A radar map shows a pulsing bright green swath, wide and ragged, extending from South Texas down through central Mexico and all the way to a strip of coast that includes Acapulco. The forecast is for the rain to continue into the night.
Charlie says he’s going to take a fast shower, but as he starts for the bedroom, Rayo comes in with a printout paper in her hand and says, We got something on Huerta.
Everybody looks at her.
Nothing big, but it’s something, she says, suddenly looking a little nervous with so many expectant eyes on her. She tells us that just two weeks ago Huerta was seen coming out of the Alameda park in the company of two unidentified men, one of whom had a spike haircut. Huerta departed on foot, and the two men were picked up at the curb by a silver Grand Cherokee driven by a man of distinctly Asian extraction. The spider reported it because he knew Huerta owns a security company and such people are often of interest. The third man was said to be as tall as Huerta and wore a wide-brimmed hat and expensive white suit.
We stare at her.
And? Mateo says. The spider get a name? A plate number?
Well . . . no, she says. But the man with the spike hair . . . he has to be the one the parents mentioned, no?
It could well be, Mateo says. So now we know for certain that the parents can identify a spike haircut when they see one. And that one of the kidnappers dresses well. Was there anything else in the report?
No, sir, Rayo says. I just thought . . . no sir.
Thank you, Rayo, Rigo says. Attach it to the file, please.
It’s something, isn’t it? she says, a little flushed.
“It’s nothing,” Charlie says in English, getting up and going off to shower.
I don’t care for their tone. She was just trying to help.
When she leaves the room, I follow her out and say, “Oye.”
She looks back and stops, her eyes bright with anger and injured dignity.
“Listen,” I say. “It is something. It shows that the parents’ accounts are pretty accurate and reliable, which is a good thing to know.”
She nods and gives me a small smile. “Yeah, well . . . thanks.”
I watch her walk off. God, that rump.
When Charlie’s done with the bathroom, I take a turn in the shower and get into a pair of jeans, a sweater, the Beretta shoulder holster, a waterproof Windbreaker. Charlie’s dressed the same way. The spare magazines go in an outer zip-up pocket, the wallet with Mexican ID in an inner one.
In the dining room we help ourselves to sandwiches and coffee, then sit on the couch with Rigo and Mateo, who are talking about a pal of theirs who’s about to get married for the third time. The guy never learns, Mateo says.
He’s hardly the only one, Rigo says. Men tend to remember the best things about the women they’ve loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to forget the best things about the men they’ve loved and to remember the worst, which is why so many women are so bitter about men.
I can see Charlie’s not listening. He just stares at the pulsing green colors of the TV weather maps and checks his watch every two minutes.
16
Hardly anybody really knows Charlie Fortune. It’s not that he’s aloof or closed-mouthed. He enjoys kidding around and batting the breeze as much as the next guy, and he’s always liked swapping jokes with me and Frank. It’s just that he’s never been one for sharing his feelings, as they say. The truth is Frank and I probably know him better than anyone else does, even his daddy, if only because nobody else has spent as much time with him as we have. We’ve worked for him for around a dozen years now and have lived practically next door to him for the last sixteen, ever since he took us in when our parents died.
At least, everybody assumed they died. All anyone’s ever known for sure is that on a fine spring day of ideal weather and mild seas, they went out for a weekend sail one Friday morning in their sloop, the Annie Max, and never came back. When nobody had heard from them by Monday morning, the Coast Guard was notified and air units made a wide search for the next three days without spotting any sign of them. No flotsam, not a life jacket, nothing. After another two weeks, the family accepted their death as a fact. There was a memorial service for them and plaques were set in the family graveyard.
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