The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  “Nothing gets by a college guy.”

  “Pro carriers can make it hairy,” Billy said.

  “It can always get hairy. But odds are not this one. The investment people been using this laundry for a lot of years, using the same carriers. Never had a problem. The carriers are good, but they’ve been doing this for so long without trouble they’ll probably be sleepwalking it and we won’t break a sweat. Still, you never know, and the take is worth a three-man team. I already scouted the scene, mapped the thing out. I’ll take you there, show you how it lays. We can run through it all except for the inside stuff, and I can draw that for you on paper. We’ll be ready is what I’m telling you. So … what do you say? In or out?”

  “You ain’t said when or even where,” Billy said. “Here in Houston?”

  “You boys ain’t said in or out.”

  Axel and Billy looked at each other.

  “In,” Axel said. “And we ain’t boys, we’re just not old as you.”

  Cisneros laughed. “Three weeks. Third of July. Dallas.”

  21

  Cacho goes to the rollup back door and raises it head-high, the door rattling on its roller tracks and folding under the ceiling. The rain blows in and soaks him. The little medical supplies van comes around the driveway, its panel doors windowless and without outside door handles, its side emblazoned with a triangular logo of three small red crosses over the name “Tri-Cross Medical Supplies, Big Spring, Texas.” It follows the paved circle partway past the infirmary door and then backs up and stops with its hatchback some six feet from it. By prison regulation—and without exception even in bad weather—no vehicle may park within five feet of a building doorway, assuring that the nearest tower guard can observe everything that passes between vehicle and door. Keeping the engine idling and the windshield wipers going, the driver releases the lock on the hatchback door and Cacho darts into the rain and raises it. Zanco is the biggest delivery of the driver’s day and half the compact cargo area still holds small cartons of medical goods, over the tops of which Cacho meets the driver’s wide jumpy eyes. His name is Balestro, and he’s the civilian insider. Bushy-haired and thinly mustached, he’s been making the Tri-Cross deliveries to Zanco Unit for years, but this is Cacho’s first time in the infirmary and hence the first time they’ve ever seen each other.

  “Sorry I’m a little late,” the driver says. “Took longer than I thought it would to change the flat, and this rain, man, I—”

  “Shut up,” Cacho says. He nods at Axel and starts taking cartons out of the van and chucking them into the room.

  Mason has already handed Axel the two pairs of plastic flex cuffs off his belt, and at Cacho’s nod that all is in order, Axel stuffs one pair into his waistband and cuffs Mason’s hands behind him with the other, then turns him back around. “How’s that, Matthew? Not too tight?” He has never before addressed Mason by his first name.

  “Cut the shit and get to it.”

  “Right,” Axel says. He snatches Mason’s shirtfront with both hands and yanks hard, snapping away buttons and pulling the shirt partway out of his pants, then tears open the neck of his white T-shirt. He puts a hand to his pompadour and musses it. He looks off to the side and says, “What’s that?” and when Mason turns to look, he digs his fingernails into his cheek and claws four scratches into it.

  “Jesus!” Mason says, glowering at him.

  “Gotta look good, Mattie,” Axel says. “You put up a fight but it was two against one and we had a blade. You’re lucky we didn’t kill you. You’ll be a hero just for trying.” He’s feeling the old adrenaline rush.

  Cacho comes over to them. They could have saved time by dealing with Mason while waiting for the van, but if for some reason it didn’t show up or not in time and the plan had to be scrapped they would’ve had the problem of Mason explaining his beat-up state. “You can bet we’d sock you,” Axel says. “So, shiner on the other cheek and we’re done.”

  “Just watch the teeth and nose,” Mason says, turning his head as Axel gets set to hit him—but Cacho pushes Axel aside and wallops the CO squarely in the face with a roundhouse that knocks him sprawling. As Mason struggles vainly to sit up, hindered by the cuffs, blood gushing from his broken nose, Cacho kicks him in the ribs and then the mouth.

  “Ya, enough!” Axel says, pulling Cacho back.

  “Watch the teeth and nose,” Cacho sneers at Mason. Then says to Axel, “Never liked this shitheel.”

  Mason chokes and coughs as they drag him over to the big desk. He works his tongue and spits out a front tooth. “Mother … fuckers,” he gasps, reflexive tears mingling with blood and mucus.

  While Cacho goes to the door and lowers it to waist level, Axel cuffs Mason’s ankle to the leg of the heavy desk and then rips a long strip off his torn T-shirt, rolls it, and uses it to gag him, tying it so the gag holds down his tongue yet permits him to breathe through his mouth. He regards Mason’s battered face and dull red-eyed stare and marvels at the shit some men will eat for money.

  “Let’s go!” Cacho calls.

  They duck under the rollup door and into the rain and Axel crawls into the cargo space as Cacho lowers the infirmary door the rest of the way and then dives in after him and pulls down the hatchback.

  “All set? Go?” the driver says in a strained voice.

  “I’ll tell you when,” Cacho says.

  The storm is still gaining strength, and the afternoon has darkened under a solid gray cloud cover. Because the panel doors lack windows, Axel and Cacho have to scrooch up to the folded-down front passenger seat and look out the driver’s window to see the guard tower and the slate sky behind it. A cylindrical compass mounted on the dashboard reads due east. Axel has seen the driver on previous infirmary assignments, but the man seems not to recognize him. Few visitors to a prison ever really look at the convicts. “What are we waiting for?” the driver says.

  “What time is it?” Cacho asks him. “Exactly?”

  The driver raises his wristwatch and pushes a button to illuminate its face. “It’s exactly four forty-fi—”

  “There!” Cacho says as a red flare bursts in the high sky beyond the guard tower—a parachute emergency flare that even in broad daylight would have attracted the notice of every tower guard and is even brighter in the gloom of the storm and reeling on the wind.

  “What the hell’s that?” the driver says.

  “Get moving,” Cacho says.

  The nervous driver almost goes off the driveway in getting back on the access lane and Cacho says, “Easy, man!”

  “Sorry,” the driver says. “I’m okay.” They turn off the access lane onto the perimeter road and head south toward the fore of the prison. The posted speed limit is 20 and Cacho tells the driver to hold to it. Then says, “You got something for me?”

  “What? Oh yeah … yeah.” He fumbles at his shirt pocket and withdraws a small black cell phone and hands it to him.

  Axel has never used or even held a cell phone, but he knows enough about them to recognize this one as a cheap sort, what’s called a burner. Cacho will use it to let the men waiting in Fort Stockton know when the van has passed through Sanderson, and then again to alert them when the van’s within a few minutes of the rendezvous point. Cacho presses a button and the phone face comes alight. Then presses another and looks at the little screen, smiles, dims the screen, and puts the phone in his shirt pocket.

  Now visible in the hatchback window, the flare is slowly descending by fits and starts, whipping about erratically in the wind gusts. Axel shifts his attention between the back window and the windshield, scanning for any sign that they’ve been found out.

  “Quit worrying, old man, we’re cool,” Cacho says, leaning forward over the folded front seat and probing under it. “It’ll be an hour before they even wonder where Mason’s at, and then a while more before they go looking for him. By the time they find him we’ll be way up in the sky and chugging cold beers. Nothing now but the gate.”

  From un
der the seat, he pulls out what looks like a small cloth handbag and sits up. The driver gives it an anxious look. As instructed, he had made a restroom stop at a specified minimart gas station in Midland that morning, during which respite the bag had been placed in the van, as he had been told it would be, though on returning to the van he had not dared even to feel under the seat for it. Cacho unzips it and takes something out and holds it up for Axel to see—a crude shiv fashioned by filing a plastic toothbrush handle on the concrete floor to shape its sharp point and hone both sides to keen edges. In the story Mason and the driver will tell investigators, it’s the weapon against which Mason dared to resist and with which Cacho threatened to slash the driver’s throat if he gave the gate guard any indication of the convicts’ presence in the van. Cacho chucks it aside to be found by police investigators, then takes something else out of the bag. A pistol.

  Axel’s shock is such that he says, “What’s that?” before he can check the stupid question.

  “Glock,” Cacho says, thinking he was asked about the make. “A seventeen.”

  Although the Glock did not come into prominence until after he was imprisoned, Axel has read and heard a great deal about it. This is the first one he’s seen other than in photos. There isn’t enough light in the cargo space for Cacho to see if there’s a round in the chamber by drawing the slide back a little and taking a look, but Axel sees him feeling for the jut of the ejector with his forefinger to assure himself a bullet’s chambered. “You never said anything about a gun,” he says. For the first time it occurs to him that Cacho may have withheld some details of the plan.

  The driver, too, seems unnerved by the pistol. The kid catches his look and says, “Just drive.” Then says to Axel, “Why add to your worries? Think of it as Plan B. If there’s a problem at the gate, I put this to the hack’s head and he gives the tower the open-up sign.”

  “They don’t open up for hostages. Any hostages.”

  “So they say. Let’s hope we don’t have to see if it’s true.”

  Axel feels his pulse in the palms of his fists, in the soles of his feet. His tongue tastes of copper. It’s the old euphoric fear.

  On their right the passing buildings’ windows are aglow. As the road nears the end of the side fence, it curves westward until they’re driving parallel to the front fence. Ahead and off to their left is the front gate, brightly lighted in the stormy dusk. A guard tower looms over it. As they approach the intersecting road that leads to the gate, they can distinguish the guard’s small dark form at the tower booth window. They turn at the intersection and head for the gate, the dash compass rotating to SSW.

  Cacho crouches behind the driver’s seat, pistol in hand. Axel up close behind him.

  “All right, my man,” Cacho says to the driver. “Nice and cool.”

  22

  Not until after the escort CO has conducted the three members of Axel’s work crew through the administration annex, released them to go to the chow hall, and then returned to the duty office to finish up some minor paperwork in the last hour of his shift—first sidetracking to assist a female CO in breaking up a trash-talking, finger-jabbing confrontation between an Aryan Brother and a pair of Texas Syndicate Chicanos, then pausing for a chat with a fellow Houston Astros fan who works in data processing—does he realize he is minus his favorite pen, a big-barreled orange ballpoint topped with a smiling bust of the cartoon character Yogi Bear. The CO’s name is Jeffrey Berra and the pen was a stocking gift last Christmas from his bride of three months, a joke present inspired by his nickname among his coworkers. Her giggling delight in giving it to him had made the silly pen special. The thought that he may have lost it upsets Berra until he remembers having handed it to Mason in the waiting room to cosign the release form for the inmates. Heading back to the infirmary, he hopes that if Mason put the pen in his pocket he hasn’t yet finished with the late delivery job and already gone back to the maintenance office, which is way the hell over in a separate building and would oblige a hike through the storm. No problem if Mason left it on the desk, because Berra has an infirmary key. He finds the door locked though its frosted glass shows there’s a light on inside, suggesting someone’s still in there or that Mason forgot to cut the lights when he left. He raps on the door, waits a few seconds, then uses his key. The waiting room is deserted and the pen’s not on the desk and he lacks a key for the locked drawers. He goes to the storeroom and sees no one there and is puzzled by the jumble of supply cartons near the rear door. Then he hears a strained snarling and turns to see Mason squirming on the floor—hands behind him, foot cuffed to the desk, eyes bulging in his bloody face, teeth bared in a white-gagged grimace.

  Berra grabs for the phone on his belt.

  PART II

  FUGITIVES

  23

  The prison’s front gate is in fact a pair of gates, one at either end of a large cagelike sally port made of ironwork and chain link, a structure that affords visibility into it from every side as well as from up in the adjoining tower, where an armed guard operates both gates electronically. When entering or leaving the prison, a vehicle must first be cleared by a gate guard on the ground who checks the identification of everyone in the vehicle and, if he so decides, searches it. However, vehicles of regional companies under long-standing contract with the prison and whose drivers are well-known to the gate guards are rarely searched, a detail Axel has many times observed over the years of front-fence cleanup jobs. One such vehicle was the Tri-Cross Medical Supplies van, which came twice a month. It was one of the many aspects of Zanco operations he had passed on to Cacho in their Q&A sessions. In either case, once the vehicle is cleared by the guard on the ground, the tower guard opens the first gate to admit the vehicle into the sally port and then shuts the gate behind it. The second gate is then opened and the vehicle enters or exits the prison.

  Axel feels the van slow down and then stop in the amber cast of the gate lights. The driver lowers his window, which is leeward of the blowing rain. From his position behind Cacho and the driver, Axel can’t see the guard who has come out to the van, but he knows that he is the third prison insider.

  He sees the guard’s hand at the window to receive the driver’s Zanco pass and ID card. Rain sprays into the van on a swirl of wind, the storm gusting in thick sheets, the lightning and thunder unremitting.

  The guard returns the driver’s ID and goes back into his booth to clear the vehicle with the tower guy. The driver shuts his window and they wait. Axel forces himself to take slow deep breaths. He smells the cleaning solvent on Cacho’s pistol, and the scent conjures a flash memory of the Republic Arms gun shop at Wolfe Landing.

  A loud buzzer sounds and then there’s the whir of the gate as it draws open laterally. The van advances into the sally port and again halts and there’s another buzz. Through the back window Axel watches the gate draw shut behind them.

  Seconds pass and nothing happens.

  They know, Axel thinks. They wanted to get us in this cage. They’ll be on us in—

  The buzzer blats.

  The outer gate opens.

  The van starts moving.

  As he watches the gate slide shut behind them, Axel is profoundly aware of being free and wants to howl his elation. He knows of course that anything can happen in the next crucial hour between here and the transfer vehicle in Fort Stockton that’s waiting to take them to a private airfield outside of town and a ready plane to Nuevo Laredo, but right now, right this minute, he’s by God, no-question-about-it free.

  Cacho grins and slaps him on the arm. He slips the pistol into his waistband and says to the driver, “Okay, dude. Don’t speed. Next stop, Stockton.”

  They’re only a hundred yards from the prison and still in blurry sight of it—and less than a mile from where the road ahead curves west and out of sight behind a range of hills—when, through the pounding of the rain, they hear the rising wail of Zanco’s lockdown sirens.

  “They’re on to us!” Axel says.
/>   “Go! Hit it!” says Cacho.

  As the van gains speed, there’s a thunk-pock of a bullet piercing the roof and forming a starburst near the bottom of the windshield an instant before they hear the rifle shot.

  “Floor it!” Cacho shouts.

  “It’s floored!” the driver says. “It’s four-cylinder.”

  The tower guard is armed with a semiautomatic Ruger and its reports come in quick succession. It is hard to stop a fleeing vehicle when shooting at it from the rear and at an elevated angle, but the shooter is an able rifleman and his bullets punch through the rooftop, through the hatchback door and window, whang off the metal framework, and lodge in the windshield, in the center console, in the padding of the seats.

  “Holy Mother!” Cacho says, his forearms clasped on top of his head.

  “Cut the lights! Weave!” Axel yells, crouched behind Cacho, pressed against the panel door.

  With its lights off, the van’s a tougher target, and the driver shrugs low over the steering wheel, wipers flapping at full tempo, tires whumping through puddles, the driver weaving through the rain haze but only slightly for fear of skidding off the road. Then the gate tower’s spotlight comes ablaze and its beam races up the road through the glittering rain and finds the hatchback door and the rifle shots come faster, the bullets thunking through the roof, pocking through the glass, ricochets chinging off the chassis under the floorboards. One hits the heel on Axel’s shoe and bats his foot aside.

  The driver grunts and slumps over the wheel and the van veers to the right and off the road and out of the spotlight. It tears into the scrub brush, rocking and bouncing as Cacho crawls over the console and grabs the wheel with one hand and reaches across with the other to unlatch the driver’s door and shoulders the man hard against it, tumbling him out of the slowing vehicle—whether dead or alive, Axel can’t say—and slides onto the driver’s seat. They pitch and sway over the rugged ground, the spotlight beam flicking all around the van, unable to settle on it. They slew into a mud pocket and the drive wheels lose traction and for a sinking second Axel thinks they’ve mired, but then the wheels grip and the van heaves out of the muck and Cacho gets it back on the road.