The House of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  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 noth
ing 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!

  They’ve shot out our headlights and now the motor quits. The shooting stops for a moment, and then there are two more shots, a second apart, and their headlights are out, too, and the only illumination on us is our taillights. Charlie breaks the one on his side and I bust the other, and we’re in the blessed dark.

  “Guys? You okay? Guys, over here!”

  Rayo! She shot their lights.

  We peek around the Jeep and see the Sierra standing darkly against the back glow of its taillights, both front doors open, Rayo’s vague silhouette moving toward it.

  “They ran off!” she calls.

  We hustle over to the truck as she looks in the driver’s door, saying, “JJ?” and then opens the cab back door and asks again, and then we’re all at the rear of the camper, which is slanted to the right, the blown tire’s wheel mired in the mud. She lifts up the shell window as I lower the bed gate and we see by the taillights’ glow that Jessie’s not there either.

  “They went off that way,” Rayo says, pointing up ahead. “I couldn’t see clearly. They had these bags, the money, I guess, I don’t know. I couldn’t see if she was with them, but she must be! God damn it!” She starts sidling in the direction the way they went. “We can catch them. Come on!”

  “We can catch them,” I say to Charlie. “They don’t know if our vehicle’s dead and they have to reckon we’ll drive up the road, so they’ll stay way off it, close to the pit. But with Jessie and those bags, they ain’t gonna set any foot-speed record, wherever they’re going.”

  Rayo’s still moving away. “Come on!”

  “You guys do the chase,” Charlie says. “I’ll hoof it up the road in case they try to cut over to the shantytown.”

  There’s something in his voice besides the urgency of the moment, and he’s pressing a hand to his left side and just above his belt, the side away from me. I sidestep for a better look and see a stain under his hand. “Hey man—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says in a lowered voice, glancing past me at Rayo. “Don’t announce it. Can’t run, but I can walk up the road.” Then loudly says, “Get going, go!”

  “What is it?” Rayo says. Maybe she caught the thing in his voice too.

  “Go!” Charlie snaps.

  We do.

  A second later, the taillights go out. I hadn’t thought of the silhouettes we made against them. But Charlie did.

  53 — JESSIE

  Galán is pulling her along by the handcuffs, holding her to the bag hung on his shoulder, Espanto beside them. When they opened fire on the Jeep, she was sure they were going to shoot her, but here she still is, and the only reason she can think of is they still see her as a bargaining chip.

  The men cannot believe their tire was shot from a moving vehicle some forty yards behind them and running without headlights, but there’s no other explanation and in any event it doesn’t matter how it happened. They keep glancing back at the Sierra’s taillights, the vague silhouettes moving about them. Then the lights vanish and the darkness is mitigated only by the pit’s orange glow from their right and the ground before them is absolute blackness. The rain is in steady drizzle once again and their footing is unsure. They stumble on rocks, their feet suck through mud. Jessie’s socks are sogged around her
ankles and the pain of her feet is now worse. The bags weigh heavily on the men, and the engulfing fetor adds to the labor of breathing. Up ahead are what look like low black hills, their crests rosy with fire glow.

  Speaking in huffing breaths, Espanto says he’s sure they killed the Jeep’s engine, and just as sure the gringos are coming behind them on foot. But they’re not weighed down and are sure to catch up.

  Not before we get . . . into the Mounts, Galán says, panting. We ambush them . . . throw them in the pit. . . . In the morning when . . . the trucks come . . . we ride back in one.

  The Mounts! That’s what she sees ahead. Hills of a sort, yes. She’s seen them before, on a midsummer day during her research trip, and had been told that’s what the mounds of garbage in this region of the pit are called—Los Montes—and as bad as the stink is now, it had been far worse in the summer heat, the storm of flies like some biblical plague. Along here, the rim slants slightly into the pit, and it’s too dangerous for the garbage trucks to back up close enough to dump their contents into it, so they unload the garbage on the flanking ground. The daily mounds accumulate, and once a week bulldozers equipped with extrawide tracks and blades on extendable long arms are trucked up here to shove it all in.

  They’re almost to the nearest mound when Espanto looks back and says, Here they come! Keep going and . . . I’ll slow them down.

  Jessie sees them. A pair of vague forms in the smoky light. When Espanto stops and turns toward them, they drop to the darker ground. He fires shots in their direction, then hurries to catch up.

  Then they’re into the mounds, moving through firelight and shadows, weaving around heap after heap of garbage, clanking through tin cans, crunching on Styrofoam, their feet squishing in mud and who knows what else, Jessie again fearful of gashing or puncturing a foot. They catch periodic flashes of the fire pit, its profound stink undiminished by the rain. She hears the skitterings of rats in the rubbish, the low growlings of dogs in the deeper shadows.

  They arrive at a small clearing and there’s the fire pit, directly before them, their view of it framed by opposing pairs of mounds near the rim. Galán tells Espanto to position himself on the rim side of the mound to the right and he’ll set up on the inward side of the one to the left. Their chasers will most likely turn left just before the left-side mound, stepping into Galán’s line of fire and giving Espanto a clear shot at their backs. If they come up to the pit to search the rim side of the mounds, they’ll be presenting their backs to Galán. Either way, they’ll have them in a crossfire.