They slow down even more, and the blond says, Gallo’s here already. Always picks that Durango at Loro’s.
Whose shitty truck?
Must be the guy’s who’s fixing the pipe.
They make a turn and come to a stop and the engine cuts off. Dogs close by break out in a rage of barking, joined by dogs at a greater distance.
They’re parked in deep shadow but there is sufficient sidelight of some sort for Jessie to see the two men. The blond says he’s going to check on things and gets out.
The barking intensifies and the blond yells, “Cállense, condenados!” but the dogs don’t slacken a bit. Jesse guesses they’re pent behind some barrier.
As the ponytail man twists in the driver’s seat to look back at them, she turns her head slightly to conceal the skew of her mask. She hears the snick of a lighter, then smells cigarette smoke.
Long minutes pass in the steady yelpings of the dogs. Then the blond’s voice is at the driver’s window, saying that the plumber will be finished with the pipes in another fifteen or twenty minutes. The problem is that he can’t restore running water to both the upstairs and downstairs of the house, not tonight. That job will take a couple of days. So Rubio chose to have water on the upper floor so it won’t be necessary to take a captive downstairs every time one has to use the toilet.
These fucking rattraps, the ponytail says.
I’m gonna stay on the guy’s ass to hurry it up, the blond says. Take this bunch over there so we can quickly move them all inside as soon as the place is ready.
The ponytail gets out and opens the right-side back door and says, All right, children, time to get out of the boat.
She hears Aldo being pulled out. He gives an angry grunt, and then a cry of pain through his gag.
Kick at me, cocksucker! the ponytail says. Aldo groans.
Come on, the ponytail says. Then he and Aldo are gone and there’s only the barking of the dogs.
Jessie wonders if Luz and Susi and José are all right. If they have any notion of where they are. Even if she weren’t gagged, she wouldn’t dare speak. For all she knows, somebody’s standing at the open door of the vehicle.
It seems not more than a minute before the ponytail’s back. Susi whimpers under her gag, and the ponytail snickers and says for her to quit the act, he’s not hurting her, she probably likes it. He tells her to wiggle forward, and Jessie feels Susi shifting about on the floor. Then she’s gone with the ponytail.
Emotional stress can skew your sense of time, Jessie knows, and she concentrates hard, trying to be as accurate as she can in estimating how long the ponytail is gone. When you’re in danger, keep your head and try to learn as much as you can as fast as you can about the state of things. The more you know, the better your chances of being able to do something about it. A rule she’d learned from Charlie.
The ponytail returns, and she guesses he was gone for two minutes, maybe a little longer. Now you, my love, he says. His hands slide up Jessie’s legs and over her breasts to clasp her by the shoulders and pull her to a sitting position. He then holds her by the hips and tells her to work herself toward him on her ass. She keeps her face down and wriggles forward, feeling like a child, the hem of the dress bunching up at her knees. When her lower legs dangle from the vehicle, he puts his hands under her arms and pulls her out to her feet. Holding her by one arm, his other arm around her and his hand on her breast, he conducts her over uneven ground, bracing her each time a heel tilts under her. The night is chillier now. He’s on her right and so she’s able to peek up without his seeing the raised edge of her mask. It’s a small yard containing a pair of wheelless cars propped up on concrete blocks, plus another junker, and he guides her around them. Directly ahead stands a house of unpainted concrete block, with a second story that covers only the right two-thirds or so of the building. At the far end of the house, the one-story part, there’s a small front porch with a bare yellow bulb glowing above the door. The porch is fronted by a dirt driveway where a red Durango is parked, and a few yards past it is a stone wall of what is probably the neighbor’s courtyard. Behind it are the yammering dogs. Only two, maybe three, Jessie guesses, but they sound fierce.
The ponytail steers her toward the other corner of the house, in the shadow of the trees, where she sees Aldo and Susi standing at the wall. He positions her next to Susi.
The blond man calls, “Todo bien?”
Jessie risks a peek at the porch and sees the blond at the open door in his shirtsleeves, his pistol holstered under an arm.
What’s the holdup? the ponytail says.
Not much longer, the blond says, and goes back inside.
The ponytail flaps a hand in disgust toward the door and in mimicry of the blond man says, Not much longer, as he starts back to the Suburban.
Jessie tilts her head and surveys the narrow street fronting the house in the sickly glow of lampposts. There’s no one in sight on the street or at a window. Some windows iron barred, some boarded up. Not a place for night strolls, she thinks, not when these guys come around. The street’s littered with trash and lined with close-set little buildings of concrete block. Beat-up vehicles parked everywhere. The blond and ponytail were right, it’s a slum—though this one’s not nearly so bad as many she’s seen. There are ramshackle quarters like this everywhere on the fringes of the capital, residential neighborhoods that sprang up next to an industrial plant or shipping depot that provided good jobs until the plant was shut down or the depot was excised from the transportation system, and then the neighborhood was left to wither into isolated slumhood. There is little police presence in these places, a patrol car is an uncommon sight. Hence all the dogs, the poor man’s security service. Few crimes short of murder will bring the cops, though it can be hours after the fact before they arrive. A major blaze will draw the fire department, but hydrant hookups are a rarity, and often a fire must be fought with water-tank trucks until the flames are doused or the tanks run dry. People are born and die in neighborhoods like this with no record of either event. The Other Mexico City, she heard the slums called on a previous visit to Rayo, when she’d been escorted through several of them so she could take pictures and notes for a Texas magazine article about the different societies of the capital, from the wealthiest and artiest zones of the central city to the bleak outskirt localities like this one. Even bleaker than slums like this, however, are the shantytowns of the surrounding hills, where the dwellings consist mostly of discarded shipping crates and construction rubble, cardboard covered with shower curtains. Jessie has long been familiar with the shantytowns along the lower Tex-Mex border, but the squalor of those girding the outer reaches of Mexico City exceeds any she’s seen elsewhere. Wretched, lawless settlements outside the regard of municipal authority, without electricity or running water, subject to chronic brutalities of every sort. The largest shantytowns border the enormous garbage dumps and fire pits where the city disposes its daily tons of rubbish. Yet even the meanest society desires identity, and every shantytown she’s been to has had a name. She’s passed through places called Absent Souls, the Devil’s Patio, Little Hell, Tears of Mother, and a number of others dubbed in a similar vein. The air here smells mostly of exposed garbage, but it carries tinges of carrion and charcoal fires, open privies and putrid muck—olfactory indications that whatever slum she’s in it isn’t far from a shantytown that’s a hell of a lot worse.
To her left, across a short span of gravelly, trash-strewn ground and just behind the trees, is a skewed picket fence silhouetted by a distant corner streetlamp and showing a small gap of missing pickets. Beyond the fence is a two-story building that may once have been a small hotel but now serves as a tenement. Few of its windows are lighted, and its forward ground is overgrown with high weeds. Past the tenement are other buildings, some dimly lighted, some totally dark. She’s sure that the gap between the tenement and the next building is an alley.
That’s the ticket, she thinks. Down that alley. With a two-minute head start you can be into it well before they even know you’ve gone. You cut through there to the next street and find your way to a phone somewhere, a taxi, hitch a ride, something.
What if the alley’s a dead end? Go to the next street and make your turn there. You play it as it comes. What you goddamn well have to do is try. Might be the only chance you’ll get.
She slips the pumps off her feet and kicks them behind her. Can’t run in those. She’d grown up a barefoot tomboy and her feet were toughened all the more by years of ballet and modern dance. Her feet have known pain, and a few cuts won’t be anything she can’t endure. Better the cuts than a shoe heel giving way and twisting or breaking an ankle. The dress is no help, either, but there’s nothing to be done about that for now.
The ponytail returns with Luz and positions her beside Jessie, saying, Stand here and don’t move. Then goes off to get José, the last of them.
Jessie watches him until he goes out of sight behind the clunkers.
Then steps around Luz and bolts.
11 — JESSIE
She barely hears the sound of her feet on the gravel, but the neighboring dogs hear it and again burst into a frenzied barking—the ponytail yelling for them to shut the fuck up—as she runs for the fence, her dress restricting her to short quick strides. She runs through the fence gap and into the high weeds, keeping her head craned back in order to see under the sleep mask, fearful of tripping over something, of gashing a foot, expecting an outcry of pursuit any second. Stones bite into her feet.
She passes the dim entranceway of the tenement and reaches the alley and is elated to see that it joins a lighted street at the other end. She glances back toward the hold house and sees no one coming and dashes into the alley. It’s darker in here and she fears even more for her feet, the threat of broken glass, upturned nails. Other dogs on other streets have joined in the general uproar.
She stops and squats and stretches her arms downward, sliding her bound hands under her butt, then drops to a sitting position and hunches forward, drawing her knees up to her breasts, and works her hands forward under her feet. She whips off the sleep mask and stands up, searches with her fingernails for the end of the tape gag, finds it, and peels it off, taking off some of her hair with it. She hears angry shouts through the clamor of the dogs—the ponytail has discovered she’s gone. In the weak light of the alley mouth, she spots a large chunk of brick and crouches and sets it just above the hem of her dress, holds it in place with one foot, and yanks hard on the skirt to make a tear in the hem. With both hands she then rips the tear open all the way up her thigh.
Now she can run.
She races to the end of the alley and hears the ponytail yelling that he’s spotted her—“Ya la veo! Ahí va!”—from behind her as she rounds the corner onto a street.
She fights down her fear, ordering herself to breathe in a rhythm, breathe. She can outrun these bastards if she doesn’t panic.
The street she’s on is as ghostly as that of the hold house, as bare of traffic and people, streetlights as hazy, buildings as dark. She goes past a house from which a voice calls something she doesn’t catch and then goes silent.
Back in the alley, the ponytail is shouting, “Por acá!” She’s over here!
Before he comes into view, she dodges into the next alley. She sprints to its other end and out to another street, catches sight of someone vanishing into the shadows and hears a door slam. She’s sure she’s being watched from the lightless windows. The neighborhood is a tumult of enraged dogs alarming everyone into staying in hiding.
Holding to a mental map of the location of the hold house relative to her position, she moves away from it, turning left and right into alleys and streets, once stepping on something soft and slimy and almost losing her footing, twice reversing her course on entering an alley and seeing only the darkness of a dead end ahead.
She knows that if she keeps bearing away from the house she’s bound to arrive at a street with traffic and people. Even if there’s not a cop around, there’s sure to be a café or store, someplace she can duck into and get free of the cuffs and borrow a phone and—
Damn it!
She’s come deep into an alley before realizing it’s another cul-de-sac. Behind the alley fences, dogs are insane with fury.
She whirls around to backtrack, and, in the dim light from the street, sees piles of old fruit crates and cardboard boxes, one of them heaped with empty food cans with the opened lids still attached. She plucks a large can from a box and sits down and sets it between her feet and saws through the plastic cuffs with the edge of the lid.
A vehicle’s coming, engine rumbling low. She scoots over to the shadowed wall and hunkers next to a stack of empty crates.
An SUV comes in view, moving slowly. The Durango. No one in it but the driver. It stops. A driver-side spotlight comes ablaze and plays into the alley. She makes herself as small as she can, thinking the game’s up, they’ve got her.
The spotlight beam moves over the opposite walls and fences, inciting dogs to higher pitch, then flicks over to her side of the alley and flashes along the wall above her head. Through the din of the dogs, she hears the driver’s voice—speaking on a phone?—and the Durango speeds away.
She gets up and goes to the corner and peers around it to see the Durango make a turn at the end of the street. Holding to the shadows, she jogs along the broken sidewalk, stripping the severed cuffs off her wrists. She pauses at the corner, looks both ways, sees no one, and runs across the street to the shadows of the next block.
As she nears the entrance of the next alley, hoping it won’t be another blind, she hears footfalls behind her and turns to see the ponytail man not ten yards from her and coming fast.
She runs into the alley, the ponytail yelling for her to stop. “Párate, pinche concha!”
It’s an open alley but a long one. She’s gasping as much in fear as for breath. She stumbles and regains her balance, hears the man’s running feet, his cursings louder. Some of the alley fences are of concrete, some of wood, all about seven to eight feet high, and it sounds like there are raging dogs behind every one of them. The only chance she sees is to start hopping fences and damn the dog bites.
The alley lamppost shows no glass shards on top of a stone fence on her left, and she veers to it and jumps and catches hold of its top with both hands. She pulls herself up chin-high to the rim of the wall and works her right foot up to the top of it, but before she can bring up her other leg, the ponytail catches it by the ankle and yanks her down.
She drops onto him and he topples backward and hits the ground with her on his chest, the air bursting from his lungs. She rolls onto her hands and knees and starts to get up but he again snatches her ankle with both hands, holding her down as he fights for breath. She kicks and kicks at his face with the heel of her free foot, kicking his mouth, his eyes, and one of his hands slips off her foot. She keeps kicking and her ankle comes free. She scuttles rearward on hands and heels and butt as he fast-crawls after her, snarling like one more dog trying to get at her, grabbing at her feet. She kicks him in the face again, then rolls over and starts to get up but he dives and tackles her around the thighs and brings her back down. Dogs for blocks around going mad.
She’s on her side, writhing and twisting like a lunatic amid the dogs’ crazed howlings, trying to detach from him, her hands in frantic search of the ground for anything that might serve as a weapon. He’s cursing in gasps, punching her ass and hips, struggling to keep his grip on a fistful of dress at her waist as he tries to get to his knees.
Her hand closes on a large chunk of concrete block and she twists around to face him as he starts to rise to his knees and she swings the concrete chunk with her arm extended and hits him hard on the ear. He grunts and his hand lets go of her dress and he falls over sideways.
The wall is flat-topped and almost a foot wide, and on its other side a pair of large dogs are leaping and leaping, jaws snapping at her overhanging face as she labors to get her legs up on the wall top, then does. She sits with her knees drawn up, catching her breath. Then notices the man and woman watching her from the open back door of the house. It’s too dark to see their faces, but as she stares at them they go back inside and shut the door.
The ponytail groans and stirs.
Go! she thinks.
She stands up and quicksteps with sure balance to the end of the wall, where it abuts the top of the neighbors’ wooden fence, behind which a small dog is apoplectic at her looming presence. She follows the stone wall to the left until she’s about three feet from a neighboring house with a flat roof not two feet higher than her head. It’s a tricky jump that requires her to catch hold of the narrow eave without banging her knees on the side of the house—and she does it, grabbing the eave and lighting on the wall with the balls of her feet, then hefts herself up onto the roof.
From up here, the furious racket of the dogs sounds even louder. She sees a wide orange glow in the looming foothills and reckons it for one of the fire pits that consume the city’s garbage. Its position gives her a clear fix on which way to go—in the other direction.
The House of Wolfe Page 9
