Axel stared at the cop in mute astonishment. West Dallas was across town from the jewelry shop where they’d ripped the bonds.
The SMU student and his girlfriend had positively identified him as the driver of the stolen Ford but they had not had a good look at either of the other two men in the car and could say only that one of them was dark-skinned. But the officer who pursued them in the parking lot had got a fairly good look at the men shooting at him from the windows. He was in his disabled cruiser and talking to headquarters when the same two men sped past him in a black Mustang.
He sent out the vehicle description and a partial-plate, and a cruiser spotted the perps two blocks from the mall and gave chase. The pursuit was marked by an exchange of gunfire and several traffic accidents, and that no one was shot or seriously injured was, in the cop’s words, “a fucking miracle.” The perpetrators escaped, and some hours later the Mustang was found abandoned on a side street, blood on the driver’s seat. Its registration proved fictitious. The two men remained at large. The cop told Axel that things would go a hell of a lot better for him if he told them everything, beginning with who the partners were.
Axel said nothing.
Harry Mack Wolfe arrived that evening, and it was an act of will for Axel to meet his father’s eyes. The first thing Harry Mack said, in a whisper at his ear, was, “I would call you a stupid son of a bitch but that would be an insult to your mother, who would be in despair were she alive.” He then asked if he had said anything to the police, and Axel assured him he had not.
Wolfe Associates, the family’s law firm, was being assisted by a Dallas law partnership of his long acquaintance, Harry Mack informed him. As things stood, Axel was facing felony charges of aggravated robbery and aggravated assault.
Axel swore to him they had not robbed the West Dallas jewelry store, nor had he fired a shot or even brandished a weapon at anyone, nor in any way assaulted anybody.
Even if any of that were true, Harry Mack said, it was his word against that of two eyewitnesses who placed him at the robbery. Eyewitnesses could be unreliable, of course, at times notoriously so, but in the absence of an alibi and contradicting witnesses, they were a potent element in the state’s case. And even if in truth they hadn’t done that holdup, they had stolen a car and his companions had fired shots, including at a cop, and had caused havoc and severe public endangerment and extensive property damage, and according to the law of parties, as it was known in Texas, Axel bore equal responsibility for all their actions.
“The fact is, there is no question you will go to prison. The only matter at issue is for how long.”
Axel’s chest tightened but he kept his face blank. His father had not asked exactly what he had been involved in or why. He never would.
As for bail, Harry Mack said that the prosecution had persuaded the judge that, notwithstanding his prominent family, Axel was a flight risk. Someone who was a party to shooting at a police officer and attempting to evade arrest was apt to try to flee the country, and Axel Wolfe had the connections and financial means to do it. The judge could not deny bail but had set it at five hundred thousand dollars.
“We could ask for a reduction and probably get it,” Harry Mack said, “but we aren’t going to ask because I have no intention of providing the bond in any case. Given the fact of what you’ve done to be in your present position, I can’t help but think that you might be foolish enough to attempt flight and make things even worse for yourself. I think it best you await trial in jail.”
“I see,” Axel said. “For my own good.” In truth it had crossed his mind that as soon as he was bailed out he might take refuge with their Wolfe kin in Mexico City.
His father regarded him sadly. “You’re a damned fool, boy. You’re very fortunate no one was hurt, but even so you’re in severe straits.” He instructed him to remain silent with the police, said he would see him again sometime soon, and left.
On his next visit he brought a sheaf of documents for Axel to sign, including one that granted Harry Mack full control of Axel’s assets.
“Unless you don’t trust me to attend faithfully to your wife and child’s security,” he said.
Axel signed.
The doctor told him he was extremely lucky in that the bullet had but slightly glanced the hip’s iliac crest before lodging in muscle tissue. Minute fracture, no major blood vessel damage. He would limp for a while but that would be the worst of it.
A wheelchair conveyed him from the hospital to the patrol wagon that transported him to the county jail. Two days later he was placed in a morning lineup and neither the jeweler nor the customer had any doubt at all that he was one of the robbers. That afternoon he stood in a lineup again and the SMU guy and his girl identified him as the driver of the Fairmont.
Ruby came to visit. The auburn-haired Cajun beauty he’d fallen in love with shortly after they met in college two and a half years ago. She had soon thereafter become pregnant and they had married and he loved her still. Their daughter, Jessica Juliet, was eighteen months old.
Ruby said she couldn’t understand how he could’ve done something so crazy, so reckless, so heedless of his wife and child, his entire family, his whole future.
“How come, Axel? Can you please just tell me how come?”
He said he couldn’t explain it.
“I’d guess not! How can anybody explain such a thing? But you did it, Axel, and there’s got to be a reason somebody does something. Harry Mack says you’re sure to go to prison, maybe for years and years. For God’s sake, what am I supposed to tell our little girl when she’s old enough to ask about her daddy? When she asks why he’d do something that took him away from us like it’s done?”
He didn’t know. Nor did he know that Ruby’s deepest distress derived from having learned that Harry Mack was now Axel’s fiduciary and she stood zero chance of availing herself of any Wolfe assets beyond what Harry Mack allotted to her.
She left in tears.
“One more year and you’da had your degree and been in the shade trade,” Charlie Fortune said. “But that’s not how it went, and how it went’s all that counts. Whyever you did it, you had your reason. I want you to know this, though, and I mean know it. I’m your brother, Ax. Always will be. Know what I mean? I’ll say it right out if you want.”
“No need,” Axel said. “I can hear it.”
He put his hand to the Plexiglas partition and Charlie put his to it on the other side.
He awoke nights to the sporadic bangings of iron doors, the loud voices of inmates and jailers, and sometimes could not get back to sleep. He would lie there with eyes closed and see Billy just as clearly as he’d seen him that last time. Would see his face fraught with indecision as he gawked at him on the ground, at his extended hand. Would see him turn and run.
Afraid of being captured?
Or thinking … More for me?
No. He wouldn’t do that. Not Billy. Not to him.
After weeks of bargaining, Harry Mack and his Dallas colleagues at last forged a deal with the prosecution. If Axel pled guilty to aggravated assault, he would be sentenced to fifteen years.
“You’ll be up for parole in five,” Harry Mack said. “It’s a golden deal.”
“What’s the catch?” Axel said.
“You give them the other two.”
“If I don’t?”
“They’ll add aggravated robbery. You can then plead guilty to the two charges and get thirty years, or you can choose to make a trial of it and they lock you up until you’re old and gray and incontinent.”
“For a first offense? Even though I didn’t shoot, didn’t even have a gun in my hand? Even though I didn’t lay a finger on anybody?”
“That is correct. It’s only because it’s your first offense that they’re holding it to thirty if you plead to the charges. It, too, is a more attractive offer than I had anticipated, considering that some of the gunfire was directed at law enforcement officers and considering the degree of pu
blic peril created by your companions. And by the way, if you choose the thirty, you’ll technically be eligible for a parole hearing after ten years, but they have made it abundantly clear you will not qualify for that hearing, nor any other. You will do the full thirty.”
“They can do it, too, can’t they? See I don’t get parole?”
“They want the shooters, kid. If they don’t get them, you’re the one to pay. You really have no choice.”
He wanted to say he couldn’t do it because one of them was a friend, but that would be telling too much. His father would muster the investigative forces to check into everybody known to be his friend and they’d soon narrow it down to Billy. “I can’t rat them out.”
“Oh? Is either of them one of ours?”
“One of ours? Is that all that counts?”
“A superfluous question. I repeat, is either of them one of ours?”
Axel said nothing.
“You’re an even bigger fool than I thought.”
For several more weeks Harry Mack and his associates strove to achieve a more favorable compromise, calling on every political connection who might be able to assist them. But the prosecution had its own cadre of potent connections and was adamant in its insistence that Axel name the accomplices.
“I strongly counsel you to reconsider,” Harry Mack said.
Axel did not.
The trial date came.
The proceeding was brief.
Axel pled guilty to the two charges.
He was sentenced to thirty years and credited with time served.
He entered prison with twenty-nine years and six months to go.
PART I
CHARLES ZANCO PRISON UNIT, TEXAS 2008
1
You can’t chance it.
The thought comes to Axel the moment he wakes once again from this hot night’s fitful sleep. The dim tier light casts a cross-barred shadow on the wall. He has each time wakened with a start, not knowing what time it is or how long he has been asleep. Each time wakened to the hoarse snoring of his cellmate, to the mumblings and sleep whimpers from neighboring cells, once to the footfalls of a guard passing by on the iron walkway, doing the night head count. Each time wakened to the same fearful thought like a low voice in some dark corner of his mind.
You can’t chance it.
“Hey, old man, what say we bust out of this zoo?”
That was how Cacho had broached the idea. He was Mexican but spoke English well and with only a slight accent. They had known each other six weeks at the time, and Axel did not yet know that Ramirez was not his true surname.
He had laughed and told the kid to forget it. There was no way. He’d been in prison since before Cacho was born, and he had been privy to a lot of escape plans but never joined any of them. Always for the same reason. Because he knew they wouldn’t work. Only a handful of them were ever attempted, he told Cacho, and not one of them succeeded.
The kid gave him a pitying look. “All these years inside and you never once tried to bust out?” Axel’s advisory did not dissuade him nor diminish his confidence. He was sure there was a way out. “There’s always a way,” he said. “All we gotta do is figure it.”
The “we” made it clear from the start that he considered Axel to be in on it and was in any case counting on his assistance by way of information. Over the following weeks he questioned Axel daily, mining his extensive knowledge of the prison’s protocols and procedures, its routines, its personnel.
Axel answered his questions as well as he could. He didn’t see any reason not to. He knew the information would lead to nothing, that the kid would never devise a feasible breakout. The Q&A sessions were anyway a pleasant diversion from the daily tedium, and in the course of them Axel surprised himself with how much he had come to learn about this place where he had been for the last ten years—the last four of them as a trusty—far longer than in any of the other prison units where he’d served portions of his sentence.
Besides, he liked the kid, who was the sole exception he’d ever made to his longtime prison practice of befriending no one. All prisons abound with bravado, but hardcore optimism is generally in short supply, and he felt a benign amusement about Cacho’s confidence in concocting a successful break. Of course, the kid was only twenty.
His amusement gave way to incredulity when Cacho told him—on a late Saturday afternoon and not quite three months after his first mention of it—that the break was all set and would take place in nine days. It was a visiting day and the kid had seemed antsy ever since his weekly meeting with his lawyer a few hours earlier. For his part, Axel had been feeling low all day, as he always did on visiting days when his brother Charlie didn’t come to see him, never mind that Charlie had been there just two weeks ago and that each of his monthly visits was a daylong undertaking for him, having to fly from Brownsville to Fort Stockton, then rent a car for the drive to Zanco.
They had just finished their daily presupper jog around the perimeter of the exercise yard and were still winding down, circling the yard at a walk, when Cacho told him the plan was in place. Axel had stared at the kid’s wide smile and said, “Bullshit.” But when the kid explained the particulars—and told him his real name was Capote and his older brother was the head of a subgang of a major Mexican criminal cartel—his disbelief gave grudging way to absorption.
“And just how were you able … well hell, the lawyer, right?” Axel said. “Somoza? Through him, in the visits. You all the time telling me he’s working on an appeal.”
“How else, man? First time he came to see me he said to find somebody who really knows this joint and get him to tell me everything about how it runs, about the towers and the gates, especially everything about the bosses and the guards. Didn’t take long to know that guy was you—been here the longest, been a trusty for a while. You told me the sorta stuff he wanted to know, I told him, he told our guys, they went to work and put the thing together. Somoza brought it to me today. Jesus, Ax, just think, nine days, man. Each one’s gonna be a month long, know what I’m saying?”
The thing relied on bribery, the oldest and generally most effective of means, and usually the simplest. Axel favored simplicity. He had grown up among people who held it for a rule that the simplest approach was usually best, a view borne out by his own experience. But these bribes involved prison insiders, and that, Axel pointed out, was the plan’s flaw.
“You ought to know by now you can’t trust anybody on the inside. Not a convict, not a CO, not anybody.”
“I’m on the inside,” Cacho said. “I’m a convict. You too. You don’t trust me? We don’t trust each other?”
“Present company excepted.”
Cacho laughed. “Present company excepted. I love the way you college dudes are always covering your ass with fancy talk. You and my brother sound just alike.” In the kid’s estimation, Axel was a “college dude” by dint of having completed three years at a university. His brother, he had told Axel, had graduated from the University of Texas.
Cacho said there was no cause to worry about the inside guys. There were only four of them, and none of them convicts. “One civilian and three corrections officers,” he said, sardonically emphasizing the bureaucratic term for prison guards, “who are doing what is most correct for their greedy-ass pockets.”
He told Axel who the COs were and that all of them were already so deeply compromised they couldn’t back out without burning themselves too.
“You mean they already took the money?”
“I mean they already took the money,” Cacho said. “These hacks don’t get paid jack shit. Drop a few packs of Bennies in front of them, they slobber all over theirselves. They’d sell their fucking mothers for a hundred G’s.”
“They really got a hundred per man?”
“Somoza’s guy personally gave the money to each one. Said it was the same with all of them. Eyes about bugged outta their heads when they saw it. And they know if they break the deal they get their thr
oat cut. If they break the deal and somehow find a place to hide, they get ratted to the cops, the feds, the press, everybody. They got no out, man. And check this … all three of the COs know who the civilian is, but each of them thinks he’s the only prison insider. The civilian, he knows there’s somebody else in it but don’t know who or how many.”
“Nice engineering.”
“I told you, my people don’t fuck around. It’s all set. Only a matter of waiting for the insiders’ schedules to line up. That’ll happen in nine days. Nine days! All we got to do till then is think about the fun we’re gonna be having in ten days. Now come on, gramps, before they shut down the chow line.”
He could have opted out any time. Could’ve said thanks but no thanks and stepped away from the whole business. But he didn’t. To the contrary, only a few days later, as they were discussing the details of the thing yet again, he heard in his own voice the same confidence as in the kid’s. The same note of conviction that the plan would not fail. And the conviction had held strong.
Until tonight. Until the thought came to him like a whisper on the first of his wakings on this final night before the thing takes place. The thought he’s had on every waking since.
You can’t chance it.
They’ll kill you or catch you. And if they catch you—
The cell block lights come ablaze and the PA blares the wake-up call.
It’s four o’clock. The daily commotion commences. The vocal din. The shrill chirrings of electric locks and the clashings of iron doors. The harsh squawkings of the PA. The customary cacophony.
The Ways of Wolfe Page 2
