The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  Mason manages to bob his head. The man smiles and pats him on the shoulder and steps around him, and even as Mason hears a distinct snick sound, the man’s fingers close on his hair and his head is pulled back and he feels the incisive draw of the blade across his throat, at once icy and searing, and his blood jets. His attempted scream emerges as a thick gargle and he falls forward in the chair as far as his bound arms permit. He sees the blood cascading onto his shirtfront, spreading darkly on his pants, dripping down between his feet. Then everything goes black and he thinks he’s dead—not understanding that the men have turned off all the lights before quickly slipping out the front door and closing it again—and as he marvels at the revelation that there is consciousness after death, and wonders what other awesome surprises await him … he dies.

  35

  The three men move rapidly down a dark street lined with dripping trees. Their eyes cutting everywhere for signs of possible confrontation. The one-eared man carries the bag of money in one hand, and in the other—in a black trash bag he holds against his chest—the H&K submachine gun, his finger on the trigger guard. The other two men hold pistols under their shirts. They go around the corner and then down a long block to the convenience store where their SUV is parked in the side lot.

  While the Dallas Cowboy goes into the store to buy a twelve-pack of Corona and packets of beef jerky, the one-ear snugs the bag of money under the rear passenger seat, the tall one keeping watch for anyone who might show interest in them. The one-ear then sits up front in the shotgun seat, the H&K down between his legs, and the tall one gets behind the wheel. The Cowboy comes out with his purchases and settles himself in the backseat and they’re off, the tall one working the SUV’s radio tuner in search of local news reports, the Cowboy manning the scanner in the backseat with a set of earphones, monitoring police activity in the area.

  Earlier that day, in the midst of the late-afternoon storm, they had been listening to the scanner while parked in the rear lot of a motel at the east end of Fort Stockton, waiting for the Tri-Cross van to bring Cacho and his gringo friend to them for transport to the airfield at the nearby ranch. In addition to his own three-man team, the one-eared man is in command of three other teams, each with two men and each team assigned to repossess one or another of the bribe payments.

  Two of the other teams had already reported their success in recovering the cash from the homes of Wiley and Baker-Gómez without any trouble and were on the way back to Nuevo Laredo, but the one-ear and his team had failed to find any money at Mason’s house, and he intended to return there after taking Cacho to the plane. He knew Mason would have to undergo interrogation at the prison and likely require medical treatment and would be late getting home.

  As for the van driver, Balestro, on arriving at the motel lot he was expecting to get tied up and gagged and left in his vehicle to be found by whoever and then questioned by police. Such was the plan as it had been explained to him. He would tell the cops the same thing the guard Mason would—that the convicts had threatened to kill him if he didn’t do as they said—and that they had promised to let him go in Fort Stockton. When the cops were done with him, he’d reclaim the van and go home.

  In fact, however, the fourth of the one-eared man’s teams had also been waiting behind the motel, assigned to get back Balestro’s bribe money. Their intention was to put him in their SUV and take him home to Big Spring, 150 miles north, advising him en route that if he did not produce the cash they would kill everyone in his family in front of his eyes and then blind him, cut out his tongue, pierce his eardrums, and destroy his knees. They would of course do those things if necessary but didn’t think it would be. They knew Balestro was a devoted husband and father who had joined in this risky proposition mainly because his youngest daughter has a heart disorder and his job-provided bare-bones medical insurance had reached its cap. They had no doubt he would make the wiser choice of returning the money rather than lose his family and be reduced to a crippled, sightless, deaf and dumb state.

  As the two teams had waited in the motel lot, the scanner’s hiss in the one-ear’s vehicle was occasionally interrupted by a dispatcher’s voice directing a patrol car to intervene in some public disturbance or domestic altercation. But just about the time they expected the van to be departing the prison, the scanner suddenly began to emit a steady series of strident calls pertaining to a breakout from the Zanco Unit and they learned of the prison’s premature discovery of the escape and that the van was being pursued south over nameless ranch roads.

  The one-ear knew that whatever Cacho Capote now had in mind, it wasn’t to try to get to Fort Stockton. The kid had to know he’d never make it. And because there was no telling what might become of the van driver, the one-ear ordered the two men in the other SUV to leave for Big Spring at once and keep a round-the-clock watch on Balestro’s home until they received word about what to do next. He then called his chief and informed him of the breakdown in the plan. Reasoning that Cacho would likely try to cross the river somewhere along the Terrell County border, the chief said he would begin a search for him on the Mexican side, and he okayed the one-ear’s request for him and his team to go back to Mason’s house and wait for him and get back the money.

  And so they had.

  The one-eared man is Francisco Arroyo, known to his associates as Sinoreja—the one without an ear—more often simply as Sino. Wearing the Dallas Cowboy shirt is Enrique Fortas, called Vaquero for his love of the Texas footballers. Vicente López—El Alto, the high one—is the tall young man with the Hokey Pokey shirt. In addition to a Texas driver’s license, a Social Security card, and a voter registration certificate affirming residency in Laredo, Texas, directly across the river from Nuevo Laredo, they all three possess state permits to carry a gun. All these documents are of valid issue to counterfeit identities. And although none of these men has ever set foot on any of the four Laredo branches of So-Tex Motors Sales & Service, they are on the company’s personnel roster as auto mechanics and twice a month receive paychecks by direct deposit into their bank accounts. A So-Tex accountant files their federal income tax returns. None of them has a police record anywhere in the United States.

  They take a northside ramp onto I-10 East and see the scores of flashing lights at the roadblock on the south side of the interstate. The SUV’s radio is full of excited chatter about the prison break and they learn that the kidnapped van driver was earlier found dead alongside the Zanco road. Sino calls the chief with this information and they confer for a minute. Then he phones the two men he sent to Big Spring and gives them further instructions.

  For the next one hundred miles they see roadblocks at every southside ramp, and then no more of them after they pass through Ozona. Another hundred miles farther on, they turn south at the town of Junction and head for the border, a cloudless red daybreak heralding a scorcher that is predicted to exceed one hundred degrees.

  36

  Shortly after the red sunrise, a rancher’s twelve-year-old son, eager to get a look at the flooded creek, finds the body of Zanco Unit CO Tillis Moore snared in bank brush two hundred yards above the creek’s junction with the Rio Grande, the upturned face missing much of its left side, its ruin being fed upon by small eels. The boy runs home to tell his father, who telephones the sheriff.

  The autopsy report will cite the cause of death as either of the victim’s two gunshot wounds, both inflicted by the same nine-millimeter weapon, one round penetrating the victim’s right side at a slight upward angle, fracturing the number eight false rib and passing through liver, stomach, and abdominal aortas before lodging between the fourth and fifth left-side true ribs, the other round entering the cranium just below the right zygomatic and inflicting fatal trauma to the brain before exiting through the left-side temporal. Investigators will presume he was killed by the fugitives—though they will be unable to explain how Moore encountered them or how they acquired a nine-millimeter handgun—and capital murder will be added to the charges aga
inst them.

  Almost three hours after Moore is found, one of the crews searching along the creek comes upon the sunken Tri-Cross van jammed between the bank and a boulder. It takes more than another hour for a tow truck to make its rough passage to the site and winch the van ashore, its cargo space crammed with a fragment of leafy limb. There is no one in the vehicle, but a search of it turns up the shiv CO Mason referred to in his account of the escape. Lacking evidence that anyone debarked from the van at this point, and because summoned trackers and their dogs find no trace of the convicts within a mile of the site, the search team can only assume that they tried to achieve the bank here, or had maybe tried to do it somewhere farther upstream, but were overcome by the current and carried away on it. The creek-side search for them is intensified and reaches the Rio Grande shortly after midday without turning up the body of either man. It can only be supposed they were borne out into the booming river and drowned, if they weren’t already dead before then.

  That afternoon a Texas Ranger helicopter searching along the river detects a plume of smoke from a narrow canyon and tracks it to a fire on a rock beach where a man is waving a shirt above his head. Near him is a small blue tent. Hovering above the gorge rim, the chopper lowers a rescue line and the man straps himself into it and is hoisted up. “Sweet baby Jesus, that’s one hairy ride!” he says when he’s pulled aboard. “Near shit my britches thinking I was gonna fall off!” The Ranger crewman takes a revolver from the man’s waistband, saying, “I’ll just hold this for you, sir.” As they head back to the operations center at Fort Stockton he tells them he is Gaston Bonheur and thanks them profusely for saving him and says it took hours for him to find enough burnable wood to get a fire going but at least it raised pretty good smoke. He tells of his inflatable boat being stolen by a pair of thieves in the night. “God alone knows how they even got to where I was! River blasting like that and them with no boat? How, I ask you? And they couldn’t just ask me for help, no sir, didn’t say word one, just snuck up and took my boat and left me for dead in the wild. No way I coulda got outta that canyon except by boat. If you boys hadn’t come along, I’da been a goner sure, starved to damn death. Oh, them no-goods had some brass balls, let me tell you! I fired warning shots—you know, way up over their heads, not wanting to really shoot nobody and maybe get in a jackpot with the law—but they didn’t slow down even a little bit. Then I shot the boat and had to’ve deflated at least one chamber but they shove off in it anyways, and I don’t care how good they can paddle, there’s no way in hell they could make it past the downriver rapids. The both of them in that little boat with a air chamber out? No way, José. You boys go have a look-see below the rapids, you’ll find them fellers floating asses-up, you can put money on it.” Did he see how they were dressed? Not really, it was so damn dark. Kinda light-colored clothes, about the best he can recall. Both of them.

  After interviewing Gaston Bonheur, investigators believe it possible but improbable that the men who stole his boat were the escapees. It defies credulity they could have made it down the stormy river canyon without a boat or a life vest all the way to where Bonheur was camped and not have drowned or even been separated. The helicopter resumes its river search and late that afternoon sights a capsized inflatable boat caught in strainer brush almost thirty miles downriver from where Bonheur had made camp. The pilot radios the coordinates to the operations center, and a pair of vehicle teams are sent out. They arrive at the site in the last hour of daylight and confirm that the boat is Bonheur’s, but there is no evidence that anyone had been in it when it got there.

  The consensual surmise is that the boat capsized in the upriver rapids and the two men who thieved it drowned. Perhaps they were the fugitives, perhaps somebody else, but in any case, either in the creek or in the river, the escaped convicts had surely drowned. Their bodies may eventually turn up along one bank or the other, but given the many isolate stretches of this section of the Rio Grande, the remains may go unfound for a long time, and if they should be hung up in bottom roots or wedged in an undercut, they may never surface. Moreover, for lack of the bodies, the fugitives cannot officially be declared dead, and the state posts a ten-thousand-dollar reward on each of them for any information leading to him, dead or alive.

  Earlier that day, both the Zanco Unit doctor and Mason’s physician at the Fort Stockton hospital had tried to contact him by phone but were able to access only his voice mail. Because of his heavy prescription of pain medication, they anticipated that he would be sleeping much of the day, and they opted to let him rest undisturbed. Both of them left the same message—they simply wanted to check on his condition. But when he will again fail to reach Mason by phone the next day, the Zanco doctor, who also resides in Fort Stockton, will drive over to Mason’s house that evening and find it completely darkened, the drapes drawn on all the windows, the air-conditioning unit alongside the house whirring at full function. He will ring the front door bell, to no avail, then peer in the little garage window and see Mason’s Wrangler, then again call the CO’s mobile and again get only voice mail.

  After banging hard at the back door and rapping loudly at all the windows and still raising no response, he will call the police. On arrival, they will repeat all the doctor’s attempts to rouse Mason, then at last jimmy the front door and find his bloody and waxen-faced corpse bound to the chair. The subsequent investigation will discount the possibility that his killing had any connection with the prison escape. If anyone involved with the break had wanted him dead, the escapees could have done it when they jumped him in the infirmary, or they could have taken him as a possible hostage and killed him elsewhere, but would have had no reason to bring him home first, nor to search his house. The police will give greater credence to the idea that he may have been killed by a former convict seeking revenge for some prison grievance. He had tortured Mason before killing him and decided to rob the house before he left. It will also be conjectured that Mason may have been the victim of a random home invasion, like the unfortunate old couple murdered by home invaders just ten months earlier at their house a few miles outside the city limits. That premise, too, would account for Mason’s searched house and mutilated foot. In the months to come, every convict released from Zanco in the last five years will be sought out and interrogated, but nothing will come of that line of investigation. As with the home invasion killings of the old couple, the murder of Corrections Officer Matthew L Mason will remain unsolved.

  When COs Marco Baker-Gómez and Roland Wiley hear of Mason’s murder and that his home was ransacked, they will each wonder if Mason had been part of the plan. But each of them had believed himself the only CO involved, and even now they have no concrete basis for believing that Mason or anyone else besides the driver was in it, too, or to disbelieve that he was a victim of a vengeful ex-con or a random home invasion, as investigators have speculated. They will of course wonder about each other, both of them having been disciplined for duty infractions associated with the escape. But wondering will be as far as it ever goes, because neither of them can take the chance of confessing himself to the other, and after another few weeks they will neither one even wonder anymore.

  37

  The Balestro residence is in a pleasant neighborhood near the state psychiatric hospital, a mix of single-family homes and small apartment houses. After a long night of keeping an eye on the house from their SUV in the parking lot of an apartment building a half-block away, the two men Sino sent to Big Spring rented a second-floor apartment in the building and have since maintained surveillance of the Tri-Cross van driver’s house from a street window.

  The neighborhood has been in gloom since the sheriff and a medical technician came last night and notified Mrs Balestro of her husband’s death, and the word along the block is that she is under sedation. Neighbors have been taking covered-dish meals to the house and looking after the widow and her four girls.

  Sino’s men will get their first look at her three days later when she leaves
for the funeral. Through careful eavesdropping and solicitous conversational gambits at the corner washateria, the two men will learn that the couple who accompanied her and her children to the cemetery were her brother and his wife, who live in Castroville. They will learn, too, of the widow’s plan to go stay at her brother’s house for a week or so, wanting to be with family for a while.

  The two men will phone this information to Sino and discuss the possibility that Balestro told his wife of the money and she might know where it is. If she knows, and if they don’t find it while she’s visiting her brother, they can extract it from her easily enough when she returns. But if she doesn’t know, then their interrogation of her would both be fruitless and become a police matter, which would then make it much harder to ever find the money.

  Sino will agree with their thinking but tell them they’re getting ahead of themselves. First see if it’s in the house.

  The following day the bereaved family will depart for Castroville in the brother’s station wagon, and late that night, the neighborhood in deep sleep, the two men will slip the back-door lock and enter the house and secure the drapes and blinds against any leakage of light and search the place. It will prove a short job, the house only a small two-bedroom. In the closet of the parental bedroom they will find a locked carrying case for a rifle or shotgun, a hand-printed notice taped to it—”DANGER. DO NOT TOUCH. ORDER OF DADDY.” They’ll break its lock and see that the case holds a bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifle and, tightly packed with it, three plastic bags containing a sum of twenty-five thousand dollars.