The Bones of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  “Up yours, Jack. I wouldn’t drop out of this for love or money. I mean, woo, this girl hunt has crossed over to a whole other thing.”

  “Listen to her,” I say. “She grooves on this. The riskier, the better.”

  Frank eyes her in the rearview. “Lives for danger, our gyno-American associate. Ain’t no buncha Sinas can spook her.”

  “Gyno-Mexican,” she says, “and read between the lines.” She holds up her hand, the back of it toward us, the thumb and pinkie folded into her palm so that we can see only the three middle fingers, an old schoolyard affront that prompts all of us to laughter for no reason except our shared rush in a job whose jeopardy factor has taken a sizable jump.

  She’d had coffee while she waited in the café but held off on breakfast, thinking we’d probably be hungry after the meeting and would want to grab a bite somewhere. She thought right. An hour down the road we pull off into Santa Ana and the parking lot of the first restaurant we spot. Frank tells us what he wants for breakfast, and Rayo and I go inside to wait for him while he calls Mateo.

  It’s not long before he joins us in our corner booth, and the waitress ambles over with a coffeepot to fill his cup and refill ours and says our food will be ready in a minute. He holds off on the particulars of the call until our plates arrive and the waitress again withdraws.

  Because of our pledge of confidence to Aunt Catalina, he had to fudge the facts a little with Mateo, though he didn’t like doing it. He told him we’d been engaged by an old friend of Harry Mack’s, a Houston oilman named McCabe, to find his eighteen-year-old daughter, Kitty Anne. The girl ran away from home a couple of years ago, leaving a note saying not to bother looking for her, and hadn’t been in touch with her family ever since. Then the day before yesterday McCabe received a call from a young woman in Los Angeles who said she was Kitty’s roommate and best friend and frankly confessed they had both been working in porn films for the past year. She told McCabe that about a month ago she and Kitty had gone to a film production party in Tijuana, and Kitty took a shine to a man she met there, but it wasn’t until after she and the man left the party together that somebody informed the roommate he was none other than El Chubasco. Neither she nor any of Kitty’s other acquaintances has heard from her since. They all supposed she’d stayed in Mexico with him, but then they began to worry he might be keeping her there against her will. Kitty had confided to the roommate about her wealthy father and his many political connections in Texas, and the girl finally decided to phone him in the hope he might somehow be able to find out if Kitty was all right and help her if she wasn’t. McCabe then hired us to try to find her and get her home to Houston, irrespective of her wishes.

  Mateo agreed with Frank that it didn’t look like a kidnapping or daddy would certainly have received a ransom demand by now. But he said we must owe McCabe a hell of a favor to get involved in something that could put us crosswise with the Sinas. He told Frank that just last week a Durango chief whose gang was suspected of trying to steal a Sina drug shipment had found a sackful of his men’s heads at his front gate. However, Mateo said, since all we wanted to steal from Chubasco was a girl, we might not be risking the loss of anything but our dicks. Then he’d laughed and asked how he could be of help. Got a quirky sense of humor, Mateo, especially about death. That happens with some guys who have come as close to dying as he has. A couple of years ago in Mexico City he was seriously wounded, and if Rayo hadn’t been on the spot and tended to him as capably as she did, he wouldn’t be around today.

  Frank told him we’d been informed that Chubasco has a residence in Ensenada but it’s a good bet that like most cartel chiefs he has several other homes, too. Where are they? Does he have known routines? Favorite hangouts? We want everything Mateo can come up with that might help us find him so we can do a little close-up reconnaissance and see if the girl’s still with him. Mateo said he was sure he could uncover that information and thought most of it might already be in the Jaguaro files. He said he’d get back to us at eight o’clock on the dot, our time.

  In San Diego we buy swimsuits at a shopping plaza and then check into a beachside hotel—a room for me and Frank, another for Rayo. The place has a laundry service, and the maid says she’ll have our clothes cleaned and back in the rooms in two hours. The sun’s still fairly high and the sea breeze light when we carry folding lounge chairs and a cooler of pale ale out to the beach, Rayo’s high-cut one-piece displaying most of her glorious butt and attracting lots of attention even in the swarm of pretty women in skimpy swimwear. The waves are large and breaking loudly, two or three dozen surfers having a grand time. We open up the chairs and uncap some bottles and fully relax for the first time since leaving Texas.

  I nod off before I finish my ale, and when I open my eyes again Frank’s dozing in his chair, an empty bottle next to it. I hear Rayo’s laughter from out on the water and have to scan hard before I spot her. She’s on her stomach on a surfboard at the fore of a growing wave and paddling hard with her hands, several surfers flanking her to either side and doing the same. When the guys flex up onto their feet, knees bent and arms out, she does, too—and lets out a gleeful yowl as the wave swells higher under her and gains speed. She told me once that she’d always wanted to try surfing but had never been to a beach with adequate waves. Now the one she’s riding begins to crest, and she maneuvers the board left and right with shifts of her weight and rides down the wave’s face with as much panache as if she’s been doing this all her life. The wave breaks and she rides the foamy rush all the way into the shallows, nimbly hops off into knee-high water, and grabs up the board.

  “Wa-hoo, Pixie!” one of the surfers yells at her. “Third try’s the winner, babe! You rock!”

  She tucks the board under one arm, raises a fist, and shouts, “You guys are great teachers!”

  “One more!” another of them calls to her, but she laughs and waves so long. She slogs out of the water and goes over to a tall, bearded guy off to our right who’s been standing there watching her. She hands him the board, saying, “Thanks for the loan!” They bump fists and he goes off with his board. She comes over to me and I hand her a towel.

  “Pixie?” I say.

  “The surfer name they gave me,” she says, grinning wide with the excitement of the ride. “Because of the haircut, I guess. Little embarrassing, the wipeouts the first two times, but I knew I could do it on the next one.”

  “I missed the wipeouts,” I tell her, “but I woke in time to see that ride just now. Damned impressive for a rookie.”

  “Hear, hear,” says Frank, who’s awake and smiling. He opens an ale for each of us and we toast her triumph. The breeze has picked up, and she wraps the towel around herself from armpits to thighs. We sit on the lounge chairs and sip our ales and watch the surfers begin to thin out, carrying their boards over to a nearby parking lot.

  “I don’t know about you guys,” Rayo says, “but I’m so hungry I could eat this chair if I had a little salt to put on it.”

  We rinse the sand off us under the hotel’s beach showers and repair to the rooms to get dressed, then amble down the street a few short blocks to a seafood diner the desk clerk recommended. We pick a window table overlooking the ocean and begin with a pitcher of beer, platters of raw oysters on the half shell, and bowls of peel-it-ourselves boiled shrimp. For main courses we order steamed crab claws, fried scallops, and grilled swordfish and share the dishes with each other. It’s a nice place, small, not at all loud, and we linger over the last of the beer before heading back to the hotel.

  The street traffic is thick with tricked-out wheels of all kinds but heavy on low-riders and jacked-up pickups, most of them packed with high school or college kids, their speakers blasting a hodgepodge of pop-music styles. A lifted Chevy truck with a front-fender flame job slows down as it comes alongside us. A Latino kid sticks his head out the passenger window and calls out, “Hey-hey, yo, mamacita! You are sooo hot!” He looks about seventeen and is wearing a baseball cap ba
ckward. Rayo smiles without looking his way. I step around her to the curb side of the sidewalk and stare at him. He grins, points at me with both index fingers, and shouts, “You lucky fuck!” And the truck guns away.

  She gives me one of her sly smiles. “I’d say that young man has your circumstance pegged perfectly.”

  The sun has set when we take the lounge chairs out on the beach again and sit ourselves facing the fading pink streak along the ocean horizon. The dusky shoreline is now deserted except for us and a few couples strolling by hand in hand. It’s exactly eight o’clock when Frank’s phone hums. He checks the screen, nods at us, looks around to see if anyone else is in earshot, and says into his phone, “Hey, cuz, what’s the story?”

  He listens, then tells us to get out our phones for a group call. Mateo wants us all to hear his report together, the better to avoid mix-ups. My phone buzzes faintly and my screen shows his number and the alias under which he’s in my contacts roster. “I’m on,” I tell him. A few seconds pass and Rayo’s phone beeps low and she answers, “Bueno, cousin.”

  Mateo says for us to hold off on questions until he’s finished, then does all the talking for a while. He tells us Chubasco has four residences, two of them on the Baja peninsula, and that we were correctly informed that one of them is near Ensenada. That one’s a large seaside ranch called Vista Pacifica, a few miles south of the city and just off the coast highway. Its deed is held by the CEO of a multinational investment corporation. The ranch perimeter is lined with multiple types of alarms and a triple row of barbed-wire fencing—the middle row electrified—and is patrolled around the clock by armed crews in Jeeps. Chubasco usually takes his Sinaloa people there in a pair of private planes that land at the airstrip of an aircraft parts factory a mile south of the ranch. The other Baja place is named Finca de Plata and is in the southern part of the peninsula, deep in the state of Baja California Sur. It’s an old hacienda and silver mine up in the mountains, at the end of a rugged trail that winds almost thirty miles up from the nearby gulf coast city of Loreto. It’s a tough drive with no guardrail on it. Because the Finca compound is so much more difficult to access than any of Chubasco’s other homes, it’s also much easier to defend against attack, for which reason it’s reputed to be his favorite. The place is completely enclosed by high stone walls, and its entrance gate—a huge thing of iron bars—is the only way in or out by vehicle. Chubasco used to go up there by helicopter, but those mountain winds are unpredictable, and last year his chopper nearly crashed in a rough-weather landing that broke a skid and scared living hell out of everybody on board. That was it for going to the Finca by helicopter. Now he flies to a private ranch about twenty miles north of Loreto, and from there to the Finca it’s strictly by wheels. His other two domiciles are a hacienda in the foothills of the western Sierra in Sonora state and a mansion on sprawling grounds in Culiacán. All his compounds have resident girls and guards. He moves from one place to another pretty much at random except for the Baja places, both of which he always visits two weekends a month. The Vista Pacifica ranch is within easy proximity of the various headquarters of his top Sonora and Baja subchiefs—the guys in charge of his most valuable smuggling routes and who operate the outfit’s biggest meth labs. Ever since last year, when an upstart Tijuana outfit called Los Fuegos began trying to cut into some of the Sinas’ routes, those regional chiefs have become more important to Chubasco than ever. He likes to get together with them at Vista Pacifica on every other Friday to discuss business and do some partying. Today is one of those Fridays, and he and those cronies are there right now. Most of the subchiefs take their lieutenants with them, and Chubasco always takes along a group of women from his stable in Culiacán to supplement the girls who live at the ranch. In order to ensure a variety in women every couple of parties, he tends to take his most recently acquired girls—which is why, if Kitty McCabe is still with Chubasco and has found favor with him, there’s a good possibility she’s among the girls he took to the ranch this time. It’s of course also possible that she won’t be with the group or isn’t even with Chubasco anymore. It shouldn’t be hard to find out, though, because part of the Ensenada routine is that on the Saturday morning after the party, all the girls, sometimes as many as two dozen of them, are taken to a high-end mall in town to spend freely for three hours on lines of credit arranged by Chubasco. They go there in several vehicles with Sina escort crews, who wait outside the mall while the girls do their shopping. While that’s going on, another crew goes off to collect a bimonthly shipment of meth from the Sinas’ regional lab, which is rumored to be somewhere east of Ensenada, way the hell out in scrub and vineyard country. The place is so well concealed that even Jaguaro scouts haven’t been able to find it. In any case, the meth pickup is never made there but always at some different transfer point. The collection crew then goes back to the mall and waits with the escorts until the girls are ready to go. When the convoy gets back to the ranch, Chubasco distributes the meth load among the subchiefs charged with smuggling it into the States along the border from California to the Texas Big Bend, and those guys take off. The remainder of the group—Chubasco, the Culiacán women, a few other subchiefs—then go off to spend Saturday night at Finca de Plata. Next day they go down to Loreto and fly home from there. Mateo gives us the address of the Ensenada mall and says it opens at nine and the party girls usually get there just before the doors are unlocked. They shouldn’t be hard to spot, all those great-looking women arriving together at the front steps of the place in a line of vehicles. If the Kitty girl’s not among them, then that’s that and we might as well go home and break the bad news to her daddy. But if she’s with them, then all we have to do is spirit her away without her or any of the other girls raising a fuss and attracting the attention of the escorts, who won’t hesitate to shoot us on the spot. If she’s with the group but we aren’t able to get her away from it, and if we’re still alive after the Sinas leave town—Mateo laughs when he says that—he wants us to know he remains ready to help us out any way he can.

  “That’s it,” he says. “Questions?”

  “Yeah,” Frank says. “How’d you get all that so fast? I mean, your intel system’s always been A-number-one, man, but it’s become nothing shy of stupendous. You could probably subcontract with the CIA.”

  Mateo chuckles. “They couldn’t afford us, Frankie. As you know, we keep files on all the outfit chiefs. There are inside people constantly reporting about them to others who in turn report to us. As I expected, all the information I just gave you was already at hand. Inside people, man—the best of all assets in this brave new tech world.”

  “Where are you?” I ask.

  He’s in Guaymas, on the eastern coast of the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortéz. The town’s around 400 miles from Ensenada as the crow flies and something like 130 from Loreto. He had to go there on business and will stay another few days. A small security crew is with him, and in addition to ground transportation he has a helicopter and a speedboat at his disposal. “Just so you know the resources that are fairly close to hand, should you for any reason require any of them,” he says. He also has some resident agents in Ensenada, not many, but all highly capable. By sunrise tomorrow, two of them will be keeping a telescopic eye on Vista Pacifica’s front gate from a woody hilltop a quarter mile east of the coast highway. Another Jaguaro, one familiar with Chubasco’s planes, will be overseeing a sham road-repair gang working near the aircraft plant’s hangars and with a clear view of the landing strip. “Any of them see anything to report, they’ll give me the word and I’ll relay it to you.”

  “I gotta say, man,” Frank tells him, “you’re going a lot of extra miles for us on this one.”

  “Hey, you noticed. Well, truth be told, Frankie, this assignment of yours greatly appeals to me. How could a search for a beautiful girl not appeal to me?”

  “Did I say she’s beautiful?”

  “You said she’s eighteen and been working in porn, so wha
t are the odds she’s a mug? Whole new breed of women in skin flickery, my man. Almost nothing but superfine lookers. But I digress. The point is, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need anything more—transportation, money, whatever. And I mean do not hesitate. Meantime, you guys tread lightly and stay quick.”

  As we head over to Rayo’s room where she has all the maps, she says she’s heard of the Tijuana bunch Mateo mentioned. Los Fuegos. “They’re big on using incendiary ammo, right? It’s why they call themselves the Fires?”

  “That’s them,” says Frank. “According to Charlie they’ve come up with a custom rifle grenade that’s smaller than most others on the market but has an equal penetration force and blast radius. Explodes about a millisecond after entering what it hits—vehicle, wall, whatever. A hell of a blast of steel frags and a flaming paste that’ll stick to everything in splatter range.”

  “How lovely,” she mutters.

  In her room we open the most detailed of the Baja maps, lay out our route to Ensenada, calculate our drive time, and decide on our hour of departure. Then Frank and I split for our room and we all hit the hay early.

  We’re up and ready at sunrise. As we get into the Cherokee, Rayo says she was watching a TV weather report and heard that this was likely to be the hottest summer on record worldwide. Russia was having its worse heat wave in 130 years, and there were nearly a thousand wildfires burning in various parts of that gigantic country.

  I ask if she happened to note what our weather was going to be.

  “Sunny and hot,” she says. “Duh, right? Since Baja’s mostly just more desert. But they said there’s a good chance of rain by this evening. Something about a weather system in the Pacific just a few miles off the lower peninsula. Weather system. Don’t you love how those guys talk?”

  We get breakfast sandwiches at the take-out window of the first fast-food place we see and eat them on the go. We’ve reckoned that the slowest part of the drive will be this first leg through the south end of San Diego and the congested San Ysidro Port of Entry, where we cross into Mexico and meld into the raucous jam of Tijuana traffic.