Other Works
By James Carlos Blake
Novels
The Ways of Wolfe
The House of Wolfe
The Rules of Wolfe
Country of the Bad Wolfes
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel
Handsome Harry
Under the Skin
A World of Thieves
Wildwood Boys
Red Grass River
In the Rogue Blood
The Friends of Pancho Villa
The Pistoleer
Collection
Borderlands
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2020 by James Carlos Blake
Cover design by Cindy Hernandez
Cover photographs: sun with palm trees © Delphotos/Alamy Stock Photo; hawk © Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo
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Published simultaneously in Canada
First Grove Atlantic eBook edition: July 2020
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-8021-5688-4
eISBN 978-0-8021-5696-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
The Mysterious Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
DEDCATION
To
The Distler IV
Joseph
Nancy
Emma
Morgan
EPIGRAPH
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, weal or woe.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
Do what thy manhood bids thee do
From none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
—Sir Richard Francis Burton
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.
—Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.
—James Salter, Light Years
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedcation
Epigraph
I
The Shipment
Eddie and Alberto
The Crews
Rodrigo and Mateo and Charlie
Rudy
Jessie and Charlie
II
The Girl
Catalina
Catalina and Jessie and Charlie
Rudy
III
The Crossings
Rudy
Rayo Luna
Rudy
El Chubasco
Rudy
El Chubasco
Rudy
El Chubasco
Rudy
El Chubasco
Rudy
I
THE SHIPMENT
EDDIE AND ALBERTO
The Gulf of Mexico on a moonless midsummer night. Star-clustered sky over placid black water. A frail and tepid offshore breeze. Eddie Gato Wolfe throttles back the engines as the boat closes in on a barrier island partitioning the Gulf from the southernmost reach of the Mexican Laguna Madre and the long stretch of uninhabited marshland beyond it. The vessel is an artfully customized trawler model fitted with a reinforced shallow-draft hull and powered by supercharged twin Hemis. Even with a full load it can fly, and empty of cargo it can outrun almost anything short of a speedboat. Its hull registration number belongs to a commercial fishing boat whose sinking eight years ago was never reported, and its registered owner is a man who perished in a Veracruz nightclub fire six years ago with fifty-two other victims, his remains never identified. The name Bruja and home port of La Pesca displayed on the transom are also falsehoods.
Eddie’s crew consists of Romo at the bow with a pair of night-vision binoculars, scanning for signs of other boats; Tomás at the stern and doing the same; and Gustavo in the wheelhouse, attending the navigation screen and keeping Eddie advised of the heading for the lagoon inlet. They have all slathered themselves with repellent in readiness against the mass of mosquitoes. Each man carries a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol, and the wheelhouse locker holds three fully loaded M4 carbines and three extra thirty-round magazines per man.
The island is profuse with mangroves. Its width ranges from sixty to eighty yards, and the breadth of lagoon between it and the mainland is less than a quarter mile. Both the island and a sizable expanse of the marshy coast are owned by Eddie’s Mexican kin. The inlet he approaches was excavated by them decades ago and is not to be found on any nautical charts but their own and those of their Texas relatives. It is hidden from aerial view by a canopy of dense tree growth, and the design of its channel—like a horizontally elongated N that on the chart looks like a wide, wry smile and inspired its name of Boca Larga—obscures offshore detection of its entrance. The inlet is never used in daylight lest the boat be seen entering or exiting, and to navigate it at night, even with GPS assistance, requires an expert hand at the wheel. The spotlight at the fore of the wheelhouse roof is strictly for emergencies. Eddie knows this night passage well. He has steered through it many times before.
The inlet’s mouth is barely twice the width of the boat, and not until they’re within forty feet of it can they distinguish the deeper blackness of its gap against the extensive wall of mangroves. Eddie slows the Bruja to a brisk walking pace and they pass into the channel with the engines growling low. The darkness in here is nearly absolute, the air danker. GPS emitters implanted at intervals along both banks enable Gustavo to keep Eddie on a course exactly in the center of the channel. They make the starboard turn into the long middle portion of the passage, which is also its widest and allows the boat almost six feet of leeway to either side, and at the end of this stretch Eddie wheels left into the channel’s other short arm and they pass through it into the lagoon. Though the depth here does not at any point exceed four feet and in places is around three, the Bruja’s shallow draft easily clears the bottom. From somewhere in the darkness comes the loud splattering of a school of fish in flight from a predator. Eddie’s watch shows 9:45.
They’re moving even more slowly now, holding to the centerline of the lagoon, and Eddie brings the boat to an idling halt. Romo turns on a large flashlight, pointing it directly ahead, slowly raises its beam straight overhead, and as slowly sweeps it to the left and right three times and turns it off. Several seconds elapse and then a row of low-watt yellow lights appears along a short stretch of cleared bank. Eddie heads toward it. As they advance on the landing, they make out the figures of four men standing in the ground lights’ hazy glow.
Shortly the Bruja ties up at mooring
posts alongside the clearing and a Mexican cousin of Eddie’s named Alberto Delmonte hops aboard. They greet each other with laughter and backslapping hugs.
Been waiting long? Eddie asks in Spanish. Like all their family on both sides of the border, he and Alberto are fluently bilingual.
About half an hour, Alberto says. Left the capital early this morning and made good time. Gonna be a long night for me and my guys, though. We gotta deliver this load to Irapuato by tomorrow afternoon, two o’clock. Thirteen-fourteen-hour drive and the first hour is on this slow-ass turtle trail back to the graded road.
Eddie takes a flashlight off his belt. Well, hell, let’s get to it.
They go belowdecks and into the dimly lighted hold. Because of the reconfiguration of the hull, the hold’s headspace was much reduced and they can stand no higher than a half crouch. The load comprises two crates of M4A1 carbines and two of M240 machine guns, plus a crate of 5.56 ammunition and one of 7.62. Each crate is stenciled with U. S. ARMY and abbreviated military descriptions of its contents.
Eddie opens a carbine crate and shines the light into it, and Alberto takes a look. Every load Eddie has ever delivered to Boca Larga has been collected by Alberto, and their examination of the cargo before its transfer between them is simply a rite of formality by which they assure themselves they are not becoming lax in their professional roles.
“I said it before and say it again,” Alberto says in English as he pats one of the M4s. “This baby’s the best there is for both open-field and street fighting, and I mean the AK, too. I know some say these jam too easy in sandy conditions, but I don’t know anybody it’s happened to.”
“Neither do I. M4’s our steady bestseller.” Eddie closes the crate and opens one that contains machine guns.
Alberto grunts as he raises one of the guns partway out of the crate with both hands. He works its action and dry-fires it with a loud snap. “I shot one of these at a ranch in Puebla last year. Felt like God.” He puts it back in place. “Gotta have some muscle to tote the son of a bitch, though. Weighs, what, twenty-five pounds?”
“Twenty-seven,” Eddie says. “Add a tripod and that’s another eleven. So yeah, takes an ox to haul it around.” He resets the crate cover. “Wasn’t easy for Charlie to get them on short notice, let me tell you.”
“It’s a special fast-lane order, but Rigo knew Charlie could fill it. I’ve always wondered how the hell he does it. Got inside men at a thousand armories or what?”
“Got his ways is what he’s got. Who’s the buyer?”
“Zetas.”
“Woo. Serious people.”
“Fucking A,” Alberto says. “Pay top dollar for what they want, though. The word is, they’re getting it for one of their enforcement crews along the lower border, but you know how it is with the word. About as reliable as Tina Maria.”
“Tina? Didn’t you break up with her three, four months back?”
“Yeah. Gotta tell you, though, I kinda miss her. I mean, she really knew how to deal with a dick. I ain’t kidding, Ed, soon as I’d ring her doorbell I’d get a boner. I told her that once and she said, ‘Pavlov’s dong.’ Another thing about her, she was good for a chuckle.”
“Always tough to lose a sex artist,” Eddie says, “but one with a sense of humor is a major loss.”
They go topside and tell the crews to get busy, then help them to unload the cargo and transfer it to a large pickup truck about fifty feet away—a dark Dodge Ram with a buttressed chassis, a quad cab, and a bed topper. Despite its big backcountry tires, Alberto did not park the truck any closer to the bank for fear of miring in the soft ground under the additional weight of the cargo. The vehicle stands on a narrow crushed-shell trail that was also constructed by his family and also is not on any official map. It snakes through sixteen miles of palms and marshy terrain before connecting to a dirt road that runs north to a gravel works and a junction with a main highway.
Each crate is borne by two men at either end of it. Mosquitoes keen at their ears, and the men curse the unsure footing that makes the work all the more laborious. Huffing as they lug the crates to the truck, they hoist them up to the bed and muscle them into place. When the last one is worked in among the others, Alberto swings up the tailgate and snaps it shut and then fastens the windowless topper gate to it with a large padlock. The lock is meant to thwart street kids skillful enough to hop onto the back bumper of a slow-moving truck in city traffic and peek under the topper to see if it’s carrying anything that might interest their robber employers.
Eddie checks his watch and says, Seventeen minutes. Not bad.
A couple of Alberto’s guys retrieve the landing lights from along the bank and put them in the Ram, while Romo and Gustavo hop aboard the Bruja, dig out icy bottles of Bohemia from a large cooler, and hand them out. The men raise their beers, say, “Salud,” take deep swallows, burp, and sigh with pleasure.
Alberto takes a satellite phone off his belt and presses a few buttons. The order is complete, he says into the phone, then pokes a button on it and returns it to his belt. He chugs the rest of his beer and pitches the bottle into the water and his men do the same. “Gotta boogie,” he says. He and Eddie once more exchange hugs and back slaps, and Eddie tells him to give his regards to the rest of the Mexico City family. Alberto says for him to do the same with his Texas cousins.
A minute later the big Ram has slowly rumbled away into the darkness and the Bruja is making its way back across the lagoon. Eddie activates his phone and says into it, “I’m an old cowhand,” a code phrase apprising the listener that the transfer has been completed without incident.
He nimbly steers back through Boca Larga and out into the Gulf, then opens the throttles, rousing the Hemis to a roar as the boat accelerates with its prow rising, the men laughing as they hold tight against the rearward lean.
They don’t switch on the running lights or cut back to cruising speed until they’re a mile out and turn north for home.
THE CREWS
The Ram lumbers through the underbrush along the twisting shell track glowing pale bright in the headlights and holding the truck to a speed of around fifteen. The driver, Jorge, turns the air conditioner up another notch, grousing that he can walk faster than he can drive on this so-called road. Alberto’s riding shotgun. Neto and Felipe are in the rear seat.
They are discussing whorehouses, a subject initiated by Neto’s enthusiastic account of a recent visit to a new brothel in Mexico City called El Palacio de Los Ángeles. He claims it has the prettiest girls of any house he’s ever been to and it fully guarantees that they’re free of disease.
He and Jorge both favor the simplicity of brothels. You pick out a girl, you pay a fixed price for exactly what you want, you get it, and when you’re done you say, So long, darling, maybe I’ll see you again. Lots of variety and none of the problems of a regular girlfriend.
Alberto admits to the practicalities of clean whorehouses, but he much prefers sex that includes some affection.
Affection? Jorge says. You talking about love? Hey, man, every time I go in a whorehouse I fall in love. Then it’s over and I leave and I’m not in love no more. Works out great.
Not for me, Alberto says. It’s not as satisfying when you pay for it. If you want variety, do what I do and get a lot of girlfriends.
Any way you get it you pay for it, Neto says. You don’t spend money on your girlfriends? And every girlfriend sooner or later becomes as much of a nag as a wife. Who wants a lot of that?
He’s convinced me, Felipe says. Soon as I get home I’m kicking my girl’s ass out the door.
What girl? Alberto says. You haven’t had a girlfriend since Bettina kicked you out.
Yeah, well . . . if I did have a one, out she’d go.
Let’s have some music, Jorge says.
He switches on the CD player and ranchero music resounds from the speakers. The others all groan and Felipe says, No more of that hick shit, man. We had to listen to it all the way up here.
The driver picks the music, Jorge says, that’s the rule. Chief said so.
Well, I’m making a new rule, Alberto says. We take turns picking the music and it’s my turn.
He fingers through a row of CDs in the console and picks one. He ejects the ranchero disc from the player and inserts the selected CD, and the speakers begin booming the heavy-metal tempo of a band called Asesino.
Oh, yes! says Felipe. That’s more like it!
As Jorge grumbles about the unfairness of changing the music rule in the middle of a run, they enter a hairpin turn that forces him to cut their speed even more, the headlights dragging across palm trunks and high brush as the truck crawls through the bend. Then they’re out of the turn and facing a straight stretch, and the headlights expose a ponderous dark vehicle standing ten yards ahead and blocking the trail. It faces in the other direction, its lights off, its interior hidden within black glass.
Jorge stomps on the brakes and the truck crunches to a halt.
“What the hell?” Alberto says, and starts to reach for the volume knob on the player just as the dark brush on both sides of the mysterious vehicle detonates into a crackling, flaring barrage of automatic gunfire.
The men shriek and convulse as bullets punch through the Ram’s windshield and transform it into a thickening web of starbursts. The windows come apart in shards. The tires blow and the truck lurches and slumps and the engine quits. The music cuts off. The headlights go last—the ambushers having no further need of them to delineate their target.
Fifteen seconds after it commenced, the shooting stops. All screaming has ceased. The only light is the cab’s dashboard glow. The only sounds are a harsh hissing under the hood, the clacking of weapons being reloaded with full magazines, the snapping of cocking handles.
The vague form of a man holding a firearm at waist level with both hands appears from the gloom on the forward right side of the truck and cautiously approaches it. When he’s abreast of the cab he can see the men inside in the dim dash light, motionless, slumped in unnatural attitudes. A faint scent of blood exudes from the shattered windows and threads into the mix of gunfire fumes and marsh odors. He fires a luminous burst through the front window, jarring the two bodies, the near one folding atop the console, the driver crumpling lower against the door. He then sidles over and looses a burst into the men in the back seat. Then lowers the weapon and says, “Luz.”
The Bones of Wolfe Page 1