The House of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  She backtracks to the end of the van and starts around it—and flinches to a halt at the blasts of several gunshots from its immediate other side. There follow three pistol reports from somewhere downhill, all three bullets striking the van. Then two more louder, closer shots.

  Then silence but for the rain in the trees.

  She stands immobilized. Scared. Then thinks, Move, bitch!

  She steps around the end of the van, two-handing the Ruger straight out in front of her, wincing at the crunch of loose rock underfoot.

  Standing by the front bumper is a man turning toward her with a pistol, and all in an instant she sees his face in stark clarity under his black Giants cap—young brown flat nosed, his wide eyes seeing her more intensely than she’s ever felt herself seen—and as fast as she can pull the trigger she fires four rounds into him, knocking him back in a sprawl.

  She keeps the Ruger pointed at him, her heart and lungs heaving, and eases up to where he lies with legs in awkward splay, arms outflung, cap askew, open eyes overrunning with rainwater. There’s a red wound at the base of his neck and three others in a tight group over the heart.

  She assesses her sensations, her feelings, and finds neither shock nor regret among them. She has grown up among men who have killed but speak of it only in serious timbre when they speak of it at all, and perhaps such familiarity and outlook have prepared her for this moment more than she could have known. She picks up the man’s Glock. It’s a fine weapon, and that it might have killed her had she been a second slower doesn’t alter its worth. She tucks it in her pants.

  She hears a car pass by up above, and then another behind it. She looks to where Mateo had been but doesn’t see him. She calls out for him.

  “Acá ’stoy. Por acá!” The response sounds strained, his voice odd, coming from off to the right of where she’d last seen him. Over here! he calls again.

  She scrambles down through the trees and scrub and finds him lying on his side, one hand pointing his Beretta at her, the other pressed to his bloody stomach. He sees it’s her and lowers the gun. He’s also been shot in the thigh, his pant leg soaked with blood, and has already tied his belt as a tourniquet just above the wound.

  He asks if she put the guy down for good and she says yes, holstering the Ruger. She hurriedly takes off her Windbreaker and the holster and her sweatshirt and balls up the sweatshirt and places it against his stomach wound. He groans and lays the pistol aside and holds the sweatshirt to himself with both hands, still on his side. Before permitting her to tend him further, he tells her to call Jaguaro operations and tells her what to say. She does it. Then she takes off her T-shirt and rips it into a long strip that she uses to bind his leg wound. She’s shivering, goose fleshed, feels her nipples chilled rigid under the flimsy bra. He’s closed his eyes. When she’s bandaged him, she puts the Windbreaker back on.

  They’ll be right here, she says. Won’t be long.

  He nods, eyes still closed. Then his arms slacken and the sweatshirt falls free of his belly.

  She says, Oh God, and puts her fingertips to his neck. He’s still alive. She eases him onto his back and replaces the balled sweatshirt on the wound and holds it there.

  Keep breathing, she says, just keep breathing, that’s all you have to do and you’ll be all right. Keep breathing.

  She hears another car go by and wonders if the passing traffic has had any curiosity at all about the unattended car at the roadside. She gives thought to binding the sweatshirt in place and then going up there and at gunpoint stopping the next vehicle to come along and commandeering it to get him to a hospital. But she doesn’t think her belt will hold the shirt properly, and anyway cannot bring herself to leave his side for even a minute, fearful that if she should cease exhorting him to breathe he will cease to do it.

  Jaguaros arrive. A pair of SUVs with three men in each, and they move with brisk efficiency. One team of three carries Mateo up to the road, pausing to peer over the berm to make sure no witnesses might be coming, then places him in the rear of one of the SUVs. Two of the men then speed off with him, followed by the other man and Rayo in the Charger, the guy driving.

  The other three Jaguaros have taken cans of gasoline down to the van. They heave Chato’s body up to the open door and drop it inside, then splash gas into and over the vehicle and set it afire. Flames rush at them along the gas-soaked ground and they leap back, whooping with laughter.

  Minutes later they’re making away in the SUV, a dense column of black smoke churning up through the hillside trees.

  32 — RUDY AND CHARLIE

  The rain’s coming down a little harder again but there’s almost no wind. We make our way through the sidewalk crowd, staying about thirty feet behind Chong, who’s less than half that distance behind Belmonte, who’s carrying the two bags with no apparent difficulty. More than a few of the people streaming past us on either side—tight faced under their umbrellas, seeming oblivious to everything but their own foul-weather thoughts—would start killing each other on the spot to get those bags if they knew what was in them.

  As we approach the intersection before the block containing the public parking square, Chong takes a look back, and then a few paces farther on, looks again.

  Belmonte crosses the intersection—the traffic light’s little green stick figure walking in place, the yellow numbers above him counting down the remaining seconds before the light change. But Chong remains at the curb on this side and looks all around like maybe he’s unsure of an address or something. He looks our way again. Charlie stops at a newspaper kiosk and I sidle over to browse at a shoe store window.

  Chong waits at the curb until the light countdown flashes down to 1, then sprints across the intersection as the light turns red and the four lanes of traffic start moving in both directions, cutting us off till the next green. The lead car in the far right lane has to brake sharply to keep from hitting Chong, and the driver gives him a long blast of the horn. Chong gives him the finger and melds into the crowd.

  We stand at the curb and wait. I don’t know if he made a suspicious note of us or was just pulling a routine tactic, but I admire his expertise.

  “God damn it,” Charlie says. “If we lose that bastard . . .”

  He jams his umbrella in the corner trash barrel and I follow suit, preferring to get wet and have both hands free.

  The light changes and we jog through the people up ahead, rousing curses as we push our way through. The parking lot is halfway down the street, situated between a pair of tall buildings. We slow to a walk as we reach the entrance.

  It’s a large open square spanning the width of the block, with more than a dozen long rows of metered spaces. The entrance is on this street, the exit at a traffic light on the flanking street. Vehicles are pulling in and out, people parking, people on foot cutting through the lot from one street to the other. We don’t see Belmonte or Chong.

  Get the car, Charlie says as he keeps scanning for them.

  The six-year-old Jeep SUV that Rigo lent us is parked a couple of rows away, and as I’m heading for it I spy Belmonte’s black BMW backing out of a space a few cars to my left. It comes down the lane toward me and I pause, looking this way and that, like I don’t recall where I left my car. Behind the swishing wipers, Belmonte’s aspect is grim as he goes by. He turns at the end of the row and heads for the exit where a short line of cars is waiting at a red light.

  I look back at Charlie and he nods that he’s seen him too.

  A nearby car horn emits a long resounding blare. It’s coming from a dark green Focus one row over from me.

  Chong’s at the wheel.

  He’s behind an unmoving panel truck barring his way. The driver’s on the phone and seems to be in a heated argument. He responds to another blast of Chong’s horn with a two-finger “up yours” gesture into the side-view mirror. The exit light turns green and Belmonte drives away. />
  Chong gives the truck the horn again, an even longer honk this time, and the driver jabs the fingers up and down with greater vigor even as he’s shouting at someone on the phone. Chong takes a hand off the wheel and I wonder if he’s going to pull a gun on the dumbshit. Then his face goes funny and I realize he’s searching himself for something he can’t find. His phone.

  He looks over and catches me staring at him. Then looks past me at Charlie.

  He’s pegged us.

  The Focus starts backing up fast, and Charlie yells something I don’t catch.

  Chong’s almost reached the end of the lane when a pink car turns into it. The Focus brakes and comes to a stop with a hard bang into the pink car’s bumper—and then Chong’s out and running, splashing through puddles, hightailing for the street on the exit side of the lot.

  We go tearing after him, plans A and B shot to hell.

  We race around the corner of the building and it takes me a second to see him, well up ahead and weaving through the thicket of pedestrians. Now he’s in sight, now not, now giving us a look back, now vanished again.

  There’s a big intersection ahead, on a busy six-lane avenue, and we’ve lost him when we get to it. The light’s red against crossing straight ahead, and while I scan the other side of the avenue for any sign of Chong, Charlie’s searching the sidewalk crowd to our left and right.

  “There!” he says, looking right, and runs into the throng. I stay behind him, letting him plow the way through this street’s heavier press of people, our shouldering eliciting maledictions and threats.

  Chong’s getting into a taxi at the corner up ahead. We’re still twenty feet from it as it pulls away into the passing traffic, his impassive face staring at us through the watery rear window. It’s one of the thousands of green-and-white Volkswagen taxis working the city’s streets, but this one’s flying a Blue Cross soccer team pennant on its radio antenna. It cuts over into the center lane and stops a block away in a waiting line at a red light. We’d never reach it before the lights turns, and there we’d be, on foot in the middle of traffic.

  “Damn it!” Charlie says.

  We’re looking around for a taxi when a microbus pulls up to the curb beside us, exactly like the one that outslicked Rigo’s driver on the way in from the airport. As riders disembark from the rear door, Charlie and I cram in behind other boarders at the front door, each of them dropping pesos into the cash box next to the driver, who looks all of fifteen or sixteen years old under a Diablos Rojos baseball cap and is commanding the standees to press farther back. Charlie digs a fold of American cash out of his pocket and peels a few bills off it. He holds them fanned open under the kid’s nose—five or six fifty-dollar bills—and points ahead and tells him if he keeps us in sight of the taxi with the Blue Cross pennant until it gets where it’s going, the money’s his. The kid’s eyes widen at the wad and he looks out at the taxi, which now starts moving again with the green light. I’m standing braced at the open front door, barring a handful of pissed-off people who want to crowd aboard. In my shirt, the kid says.

  Charlie stuffs the money in the kid’s shirt pocket, saying, You lose him, I take it back.

  The micro jerks out into traffic, raising outcries and causing wet skiddings. We’re lightly bumped from the rear and there’s a concentrated outbreak of car horns, but we’re okay, off and running.

  “Tell Rigo what’s up,” Charlie says.

  I get out my phone and thumb his number and he answers on the first ring. I fill him in fast, speaking in English, and tell him where Chong’s car is, in case there’s anything in it that might be of use. He says he’s got guys homing on our GPS and to leave my phone on. “Will do,” I say, and zip it into my jacket pocket.

  The taxi’s now more than a block ahead but our kid’s a whiz at the wheel. He works us into the center of the three lanes and nimbly wedges the micro into one flanking lane or the other in order to pass, and little by little we’re gaining on the cab. The kid’s ignoring all his stops and the waiting people flapping their arms at him as we speed past, and he’s deaf to the cries of passengers demanding to be let off, cursing at him, though some of the riders nearest to me are grinning like lunatics, having caught on that a chase is in force and loving it. Charlie yells for everybody to stay put and not touch their phones. He takes out another fifty and hands it to a husky guy standing near him who’s plainly enjoying the adventure and tells him to keep an eye out for anybody who tries to use a phone. You bet I will, chief! the guys says. He glowers all around and says, I see a fucking phone I’ll make you eat it!

  We’re only five or six vehicles behind the taxi when it goes through an intersection in the last seconds of a yellow light. Go, go! the kid urges the cars in front of us, and most of them do, two of them after the light turns red. But the orange sedan directly ahead us brakes for the light as vehicles start into the intersection from our left and right. Without slowing, the kid whips the micro around the sedan and just ahead of a braking bus in the adjacent lane and we barrel into the intersection cross traffic.

  As if he’s done it a hundred times before, the kid zigzags us left-right-left-right through the moving cross traffic, the micro swaying with each swerve and almost losing traction, and on one sharp zig to the left I nearly get slung out the open door. I see cars coming at us and skidding off to our rear and to certain smashups but I don’t hear any of them for all the passengers’ screaming and bellowed prayers and, so help me, God, laughter.

  And just like that, we’re clear of the intersection and still moving along. With a strong odor of piss added to the micro’s air.

  The cab’s now making some moves of its own. Whether the driver said something to Chong about the goings-on in the rearview mirror or Chong looked back and witnessed our reckless passage through the intersection, there’s no doubt he knows we’re in the micro.

  “If the cabbie’s got a phone,” I say, “Chong’s calling for help.”

  “Duh,” Charlie says without looking at me.

  The taxi’s cutting from lane to lane, its size giving it definite advantage over us in maneuverability, but we’ve got a higher vantage point plus the miracle kid at the wheel. There’s no letup in the micro’s tumult of frightened weeping and enraged imprecations as we alternately gain on the taxi and lose ground to it, but it stays on this thoroughfare and its forest of camouflaging traffic, and sometimes we have the cab in view, sometimes we don’t. It would have lost us easily enough but for that telltale pennant flapping above its roof.

  We’re coming up fast on a roundabout intersection circling a huge fountain with a statue in the center. We’re four cars behind Chong as we enter the circle, and we’re both in the center lane. Then the clever bastard cuts over in front of a full-size metro bus in the right lane and we lose sight of him. We have no choice but to get in the right lane too, a couple of vehicles behind the bus, because the lane offers drivers the option of exiting onto an upcoming turnoff or staying in the circle, and we have to be ready for whichever option Chong chooses. Not till the bus goes beyond the exit can we see that the taxi’s turned off onto it and is whizzing toward a busy four-lane road. Then we’re exiting too, passengers still screaming to be let off and some demanding to know where the hell we are, some telling each other to shut up or to fuck themselves, some still asking what’s going on.

  The taxi speeds down the road and then takes the first right, skidding partway into the opposing lane and forcing an oncoming car off the road and into a low ditch. Our kid makes the turn and now we’re on a two-lane road running through a business zone of small stores and warehouses and garages. It’s a straight road with no traffic light in sight and we’re gaining on them. The kid asks in a shout what we intend to do when we catch up to it and Charlie yells back, We’re gonna run his ass off the road! The kid purses his lips and arches his brow and Charlie digs out another pair of bills and tucks them in the kid’s shirt poc
ket and the kid grins and says, goddamn right we are! Then glances in his side mirror and says, Oh mother, look behind.

  We can’t see out the rear window for the jam of standing passengers, so I angle over and look in the right-side mirror.

  “SUVs,” I tell Charlie. “Pair of them. Black. Way back but coming fast.”

  “Como?” says the kid, frowning at our English, his eyes are fixed on the taxi.

  “Cops, you think?”

  “In two SUVs?” I say. “After us for what? Careless driving? Chong made a call, man.”

  “Como?” says the kid.

  Catch the fucker! Charlie yells at him.

  We’re fifteen yards behind the taxi when it enters an intersection at the same time that a silver pickup truck barrels through a right-side stop sign and rams into its rear, sending the cab’s bumper flying and knocking the car spinning off into the muddy lot of a lumberyard as the truck veers left and bounces over the corner curb and smashes to a stop against the side of a small grocery store, bringing down its plate glass window in a shower of shards.

  The kid nimbly wheels the micro to a stop on the shoulder just past the intersection, and Charlie and I jump out and run across the road to the taxi, hands to our guns under our jackets.

  The taxi driver’s slumped over the steering wheel, dead or out cold. Chong’s pulling himself off the floor and onto the backseat, looking stunned, one hand fumbling under his jacket. Charlie reaches in and grabs him by the collar and yanks him face-first into the door post. Chong groans and goes slack. Charlie opens the door and lets him fall out, then reaches into Chong’s jacket and pulls out a Glock.

  People are coming out to have a look, but at the sight of the pistol in Charlie’s hand they stop short and keep their distance and some move back close to the doors.

  Charlie squats beside Chong and puts the Glock muzzle to his forehead and says, Where are they?

  Chong coughs, spits blood to the side, and says, Where’s who?