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.
The House of Wolfe Page 27