The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  Last month he was nothing but a low-pay prison hack and likely to stay one the rest of his working life, and then until a half hour ago he was a rich man planning a move to Canada! And now? No money, no job, nothing. No family. Never no wife. Neighbors just to wave to. No real friend since Lucas Jonesbury at Coffield Unit back when. Been five years at Zanco and living in Fort Stockton and still nobody’s pal, never nobody’s guest to supper. Even when there’s a party where the whole staff’s invited, he’s always on the outside of the talk and joking, just standing there with a beer and smiling at nothing like a goddamn ass. And that sheriff! Giving him the stink-eye and practically accusing him of having something to do with the break!

  Good God almighty, what if he does get found out? Talk about how things can change! Go from CO to inmate in a blink and even that wouldn’t be the worst of it because everybody knows what cons do to ex-cops and ex-hacks.

  He goes over and lies on the bed, steeped in self-pitying misery. Then it’s daybreak and he knows she’s up and is making breakfast for her daddy and momma as usual and any minute now they’re gonna see the news on TV or in the paper.

  A few minutes later his cell rings. He doesn’t answer. After another twenty minutes he hears her car pull into the driveway, then her key in his front door, then “Dear Lord!” when she sees the mess. Then she’s in the bedroom and looking at him curled up in bed in all his clothes, hugging a pillow to his chest. “Oh, sweetie, what is it?” she says.

  She lies down with him and holds him close and he tells her all about the prison break and losing his job for not searching the van and how the sheriff threatened him, and if all that wasn’t bad enough, he comes home and finds the place tore up, the cash he kept hid in the sock drawer gone, same with some money he kept in the freezer. Most likely some shitkicker Mex kids having a high old time playing at being bandidos.

  She pets him and coos to him and tells him to just lie there and relax, and then makes a call to her cousin Buddy Joe up in Midland who’s been a paralegal for nearly four years. She catches him before he leaves for work. He’s heard about the prison break on the news, and she tells him about the trouble Ronnie’s in on account of it. Buddy Joe tells her that the TDCJ can fire Ronnie for the dumb-ass mistake of not searching the van, which it surely was, but no way was it a crime, and if they try to make it one without solid evidence they’re dumb-ass themselves because it’ll never stick.

  “So there, you see?” Gretchel tells Roland Wiley after the call. Worse they can do is fire him and who cares about that stupid old job, anyway? There are lots of other jobs, better jobs where he won’t have to be around a bunch of criminals every day. Heck, she just bets she can get him on at the motel, no problem at all. She thinks they may be looking to hire a new handyman, and he’s real good at that sort of stuff. “Don’t you worry, sweetie pie,” she says, hugging him close. “Everything’s gonna be fine.” He slips his hand under her shirt and she smiles and they fumble out of most of their clothes and have sex. He will never tell her the truth about the break and the brief time he was rich.

  Later she will make breakfast for him and afterward they will clean up the mess and then go shopping for groceries to replace what had to be thrown away. By that time he will have understood that things might have been very much worse.

  Because those old boys might’ve still been there when he came home.

  34

  Matthew Mason, too, lives in Fort Stockton, where the Terrell County deputy has driven him to the hospital. X-rays show that one of his ribs is fractured, and the doctor says nothing can be done about that except to take pain relievers as needed and avoid stressing the rib; it will repair on its own. Another physician tends to his facial injuries and makes an appointment for him with a dental surgeon the following month, after his face is sufficiently healed. The attending doctor wants to keep him in the hospital overnight for observation but Mason refuses. He tells the waiting deputies he can drive himself home, it’s only a short way, but they say no, the doc told them he’s too full of painkillers to get behind the wheel. One of them drives him in the Wrangler, the other follows in the Terrell squad car. It’s half past midnight and the rain has quit.

  He lives in a neighborhood of big homes, though the house has seemed even bigger since Linda Jean left. A note on the kitchen counter said she’d gone to her sister’s and not to call because she was all done with talking. When the papers came he signed them and sent them back and that was that. Made him an official three-time loser at marriage, and the third time the shortest. Well, good riddance and up yours, Linda, you sorry bitch. And thank you so very much for cutting yourself out of my good fortune, which I never woulda told you about nohow.

  First thing he’d done was take one of the hundred-dollar bills to the bank to have it checked. He told them he won it in a poker game and just wanted to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit before he used it. He was gonna spend his recuperation leave watching ball games and movies on the TV, eating T-bones, drinking Jim Beam and Shiner Bock, planning a trip for his next vacation. Vegas, by God, where he’s been wanting to go. A fella at Chuckie Sewell’s poker barn in Odessa told him of a Vegas escort service he swore can’t be beat. Said it’s expensive but you can arrange a visit there ahead of time over the Internet and they definitely will not cheat you and they got pictures of so many great-looking girls to choose from you’ll near go crazy just trying to decide which one you want. Might buy himself a brand-new vehicle up there, too. Truck, maybe. Tell everybody back here he won it in a drawing.

  The deputy parks the Wrangler in the driveway of the dark-windowed house and they get out. The young officer starts toward the door with him but Mason assures him he can make it into his own house without help. He ain’t crippled, for Chrissake, just a little beat up, no big deal. The deputy joins his partner in the idling county car and they wait while Mason fumbles with the door key before managing the lock. He reaches in and turns on the porch light and waves at them. They give him a horn toot, wheel around, and head back to Terrell County.

  He goes inside and clicks a wall switch that turns on the table lamps at either end of the sofa. He’s already closing the door behind him before his mind registers the sofa’s rippedopen disarray and then he sees the man hunched low at the far end of the table in the dining room and holding a firearm much larger than a handgun pointed squarely at him. In druggy alarm, Mason turns toward the door but a man standing beside it with his back against the wall steps forward and punches him in the side of the head, dropping him to his knees, the blow inflaming the pains of his mouth and nose wounds.

  All is confusion to him as he’s jerked to his feet, squealing at the agony of his broken rib, at the rough pressings into it as hands search him, relieve him of wallet, keys, phone, his assailants addressing each other in Spanish. A dining chair is dragged over and he’s shoved down onto it. He thinks there are three of them now but isn’t sure. His hands are bound behind the chair back with what feels to him like a belt. He chokes and coughs. The low light of the table lamps is the room’s only illumination, and tears blur his vision, but he now sees there are only two of them. Mexicans. They talk in whispers a few feet away. The windows are closed, their drapes drawn, the air conditioner cranked up high and humming.

  He knows they’re here for the money. There’s no other reason. And he tells himself he won’t give it up. Whatever they do, he’ll live through it. Bust his bones, his teeth, okay, it’ll hurt, but bones heal and teeth can be replaced. He can take a stomping and they don’t want a murder rap. Wouldn’t do them any good to kill him. Just lay a good dodge on them and man up. That’s the trick. It won’t last forever.

  The one with the big firearm—a submachine gun, Mason now sees, with a forward-curved magazine jutting from its underside—comes around the table and lays the weapon on it and pulls up a dining chair and sits directly in front of him, their knees almost touching. He is short and stocky, thick of hair and mustache, and is absent a left ear. Under his open windbr
eaker of light nylon, the butt of a shoulder-holstered pistol is visible.

  “Hablas español?” the man asks.

  “No,” Mason says, “I’m … I no—”

  The man flicks a hand. “Is okay. I have English. No so very good like this one”—he gestures at the other man—”but good for talk with you, I think. First I say is very good luck for all of everybody the two policemans don’t come in this house. If they was come in this house everything is then very bad. Much shooting, much blood, you know, then we have to make the fast, ah …” He looks at the other one. “Escapada?”

  “Escape,” the other one says. He is as short as the one-eared guy but leaner and sinewy, dressed in jeans and a blue-and-white Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, a rolled blue bandanna around his head, his mustache neater, nattier. A blued pistol is tucked in his waistband at his belly.

  Even as Mason listens, he’s concocting a dodge.

  “Ah, si, claro … ‘escape,’ “ the one-ear says. “We have to make the very fast escape, and then … Ay, Chihuahua!” He flaps a hand upward to suggest some great catastrophic consequence. Then looks past Mason and says, “Pues? Nada?”

  A man emerges from the hallway. “No,” he says, and comes over to stand where he can see Mason’s face. He is unusually tall for a mestizo, over six feet by Mason’s guess. Buzz cut, clean-shaven. Also in jeans and T-shirt, this one reading, “What If the Hokey Pokey Really IS What It’s All About?” Like the other man, he has a pistol in his waistband, and in his hand is a Taurus 9-millimeter semiautomatic that Mason recognizes as his own. Bastard took it from the bedroom dresser.

  The one-ear glances at his watch and fixes Mason with a mildly tired look. “Okay, my friend,” he says. “We have wait for you much time. Enough the, how you say, shit-shat, eh? Where is the money?”

  “The money?”

  The man sighs. “The money was give you, where is it?”

  “Hey, man, we had a deal! Me and … your guys, your boss, whoever the fuck,” Mason says, high-voiced. “I carried out my end, didn’t I? I’m the one who got them out! I earned that money! Man, just look at my fucking face!” He feels he’s playing it well—a wronged but very scared pussy who’s easily enough going to give it up. That’s the image he has to project here.

  The man stares at him. “Don’t be a stupid. I have not very much time for you. You want deal? Here is deal. You don’t tell us where is the money, we give you very much bad pain. To stop more very much bad pain you will give us the money, and then you don’t have the money no more but you still have the bad pain. You see? Is not smart for you, hombre. Don’t have the pain. Be smart. Ahora … one more. Where is the money?”

  Mason works his face into a desperate display of fear and interior struggle. “Okay, okay,” he says. “I ain’t no brave guy, I ain’t no hero, I admit it. But goddamnit, listen … how about you leave me with … thirty thousand? That’s fair, ain’t it? We had a deal but, all right, yeah, I get it, this is how it’s gonna be and what the fuck can I do about it. But thirty’s fair, ain’t it? After what I done for you guys, the beating I took from those fucks?”

  The one-eared man studies him. Mason wants him to believe he will do anything, give up anything, to avoid any further pain, but wants also to convey a burning desire to come away from all this with something in his pocket. Greed is always real, always believable. He is counting on that truth to pull off his ploy. He wouldn’t be asking for a cut of money he didn’t have, would he? Money he’s ready to turn over?

  “All right, all right … twenty!” Mason says. “Jesus, man, just leave me with twenty!”

  The one-eared man purses his lips. “Twenny towsands, eh?” He smiles. “Okay. Is a deal.”

  “Yeah? We got a deal?”

  “Chure. You give us the money, we give you the twenny towsands for your helping, and we go. So … where?”

  “The bedroom,” Mason says. “Under the mattress, up near the head of the bed. People always look under a mattress but never right at the head of it, did you know that?” He simpers. “You oughta let me have another five grand for teaching you something.”

  The man looks up at the tall Hokey Pokey one, who shakes his head.

  “No,” the one-eared man says. “He look. Is no there.”

  “What?” Mason blurts this with all the raw confusion he can simulate. “Bullshit! It’s there! I put it there! What the fuck’s going on? Look again! Near the head of the mattress! Look again!”

  The three men look at him blankly.

  “Oh Jesus fuck! Somebody … somebody musta come here! Somebody had to’ve come and stole it! Oh, fuck me, they stole my money!”

  Doing good, he thinks, doing good.

  The man asks the other two something in Spanish. The tall one replies and goes into the hallway. Mason hears him rummaging in the closet.

  “I’m telling you, man,” he says, weeping, raspy voice breaking. “It was there! I swear to you it was there this morning! It’s been there ever since I got it. I check it every fucking day before I leave for work! If it wasn’t your guys came and took it … shit, man, I don’t know who the hell’s got it! Son of a bitches!”

  “La televisión,” the one-ear says. The Dallas Cowboy picks up the remote control and examines it, then turns on the TV. A game show. He clicks through the channels and finds a music video station, then raises the volume and sways in place to the beat. Whatever they’re going to do, Mason knows, it’ll likely make him holler a goodly bit, and they don’t want to take a chance of him being heard by anybody who might pass by out on the sidewalk. But that’s okay, that’s okay. They won’t kill him. They don’t need that kinda trouble. Anything else, bring it on, he can take it. For a hundred grand? Damn straight he can take it. After a while he’ll be okay again, and then it’s good life here he comes!

  The tall man returns with a claw hammer and hands it to the one-ear.

  Mason’s gut stirs at his sight of it. Hold tight, man, he thinks, just hold tight. The tall guy squats and pulls the shoe and sock off Mason’s right foot.

  “No, man, don’t, don’t,” Mason says. “I don’t know where it is, I swear to fucking God!”

  “Mordaza,” the one-ear says.

  The Cowboy takes the bandanna off his head and wads it and stuffs it into Mason’s mouth. Then the one-ear whips the hammer down and converts Mason’s big toe to a scarlet crush of flesh and bone.

  The pain surpasses any Mason has ever before known and instantly eradicates his resolve not to tell where the money is, though he cannot immediately say so because he’s screaming into the balled bandanna. The one-ear doesn’t even look up at him before swinging the hammer again, this time driving its face into the upper arch of the same foot, the bone-crack audible above the TV and stoppered shrieks. Mason writhes in such frenzy that both of the other men have to hold the chair to keep it from tipping over.

  The one-ear looks up and says, “Shush, mister, shush. Is no so very bad. No yet. Shush, hombre! Listen to me.”

  Mason is able to restrain his cries to a stuttering low wail. Mucus runs from his nose and he is choking on the bandanna. The one-ear turns the hammer in his hand to better display its claw head to Mason. “This part is for … la rodilla?”

  “The knee,” another says.

  Mason’s wail rises.

  “For the knee,” the one-ear says. “But maybe no. Maybe you want to say where is the money.”

  Shrilling into the gag, Mason nods and nods, struggling for breath, his streaming eyes wild. The handkerchief is yanked from his mouth and he throws up on himself.

  A minute later, the Cowboy goes outside and gets in the Wrangler and starts it up, opens the garage door with the remote, then drives in and cuts the motor off and lowers the door again. The tall one is there, holding a plastic grocery bag from the kitchen, and waits until the door comes down before he turns on the garage lights. The Cowboy gets out and unlocks the gas cap, then removes it. One end of a length of fishing line is looped around the top of the gas
filler neck, and the rest of the line runs down into the tank. The Cowboy slowly pulls the line up hand under hand, withdrawing an attached length of flexible plastic tubing like a long black snake, and with it a pervasive odor of gasoline. They lay the tube on the floor in a wide spiral, then the Cowboy slits it open as carefully as a surgeon and they remove the end-to-end rolls of cash. They make a scan count of it and put it all in the grocery bag, seal it with a twist tie, and head back to the living room.

  Mason is slumped forward in the chair, his hands still belted behind its back. The room is frigid with conditioned air laced with the reek of his vomit. All his other pains are overwhelmed by that of his misshapen foot, which in its bloody-purple bloat looks to him through his tears like a foul discard from a butcher shop. The one-ear is now standing before the television, absorbed by a video of a tall man in top hat and tuxedo dancing with a trio of young women in scanty dress who seductively strip him of his tie and cummerbund, seemingly intent on disrobing him.

  When the other two men enter from the garage, one of them turns up a thumb and the one-ear smiles. The three converse in whispers, then the two men go over and stand by the front door, and the one-ear returns to Mason, who stares up at him, unable to suppress his low keening despite his fear that it might anger the man into harming him further.

  “Very good, mister,” the one-ear says. “Is there like you say. The truth is good, no? Always more better, the truth.” Then adds with a comradely grin, “But maybe sometime no with the womens, eh?”

  Mason’s attempt at an acquiescent smile is grotesque, so stark is his terror.

  “Ay, hombre, don’t be so very afraid,” the man says. “You have no more trouble of us. No more pain. You don’t have no twenny towsands but you are still alife, no? Now we go and you never see us no more again, eh?”