“Won’t leave much of a scar,” Quino says. “Doc said you can take the butterflies off in a week or so. Now then, the kid’s waiting on us if you think you can handle some breakfast.”
The question of breakfast makes him aware of his hunger, and he eases out of bed again. “Sounds good, but, ah …” He gestures at his robe.
“No worries. There’s clothes your size in the chest of drawers and the closet, but you don’t have to bother to get dressed now. Everybody’s already eaten except for the three of us. But, listen, before we go, ah … I want to express my gratitude. We couldn’t have rigged the thing without your info on the routines, the guards, all of it.”
“To tell the truth, I had no idea Cacho was passing it on to anybody, and I wouldn’t have thought it to be of much use anyway.”
“Well, you would’ve thought wrong. I mean, the thing didn’t exactly go as planned, but it got you guys out and we got to you and that’s all that counts. That wouldn’t have happened except for you. Another thing … the kid says you saved his life. And that when he went down and couldn’t get up you wouldn’t leave him. There’s no way I can repay that.”
“Repay? Hell, man, he saved my ass more than once. Anyway, I was half-dead myself and couldn’t have—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. He told me everything. You saved him, he saved you—that’s the way things work sometimes, no? But no more of the fucking self-effacement.” He grins. “Pretty fancy lingo, huh? You’re not the only one in this room been to college, amigo. Look, Axel, I’m just saying thanks, that’s all. He’s my little brother. Only family I got left. So I want you to know you’ve got a home here for as long as you want. I mean it. For forever or until death, whichever comes first, as we like to say. Now let’s go eat.”
42
They pass through a large dining hall—the long tables cleared, the chairs upside down on them, the floor being mopped—then enter a much smaller dining room containing only a single table just off the kitchen doorway. Cacho is already seated there. He, too, is in a terry cloth robe. They laugh at the sight of each other.
“Man, you look like fucking Frankenstein,” Cacho says. “Good thing you were ugly to begin with, old-timer, or you’d have something to feel bad about.”
“Like you, you mean,” Axel says. Cacho’s face is dark with sunburn but not as reddened as Axel’s, and its many scratches are splotched with iodine. His lips are scabbed, too, his hands also lightly bandaged. His foot is encased in a light blue cast shoe, and a pair of crutches is propped against the wall behind him.
A kitchen girl comes out and asks what they’d like to eat. She’s slim and pretty. Axel stares at her and she blushes and looks away.
“Hey, Ax, what’d we say we were gonna have, first thing?” Cacho says.
He returns the kid’s grin, remembering their last breakfast at Zanco, and they both say at once, “Chorizo con huevos!” and burst into guffaws.
The girl gives them a bemused smile and heads back to the kitchen. Axel watches her go.
“Hate to tell you, but she’s unavailable,” Quino says. “There are only a dozen women on the place and all of them married to resident workers who are not part of the gang. I’ve given their husbands my assurance that the women are safe from molestation of any sort. The good news is that the day after tomorrow we’re having a party. Have one twice a month. Some very fine-looking young ladies from Monterrey will be on hand from six until midnight. How’s that sound? Thirty of them, and most not twenty years old. Enough to pair up every guy here and ensure plenty of extras for any guy who wants to enjoy more than one in the course of the evening, and most guys do. You can’t have possession of more than one at a time, but you can keep the same girl for the whole visit if you want, just so you get her back to the transport vehicles by midnight. Some of the younger dudes will fuck three of them before the party’s over. Me, if I can do two, I’m happy.”
They converse over a breakfast of eggs scrambled with a mixture of ground chorizo sausage, plus refried beans, goat cheese, and flour tortillas, neither Axel nor Cacho deterred from cleaning their plates by the tenderness of their lips, then linger over coffee. Axel learns that the police helicopter and crew that found them had been arranged by Quino’s “chiefs,” as he refers to them. “They have excellent relations with various law enforcement agencies,” Quino says, “which of course is configured on a certain quid pro quo.”
Axel is curious about those bosses but holds to his ingrained prison rule of not asking questions of someone you don’t know well.
“When we spotted you two we thought you were dead,” Quino says. “Even after we loaded you in the chopper I wasn’t giving better than even odds on either of you making it.”
They had refueled at Ciudad Acuña and then flown downriver to a landing site at the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo. They were driven to a private clinic in town where a team of doctors examined them from head to foot. Cacho’s distended ankle was X-rayed, found to be only sprained, and put in the cast shoe. They were cleaned up, bandaged, wrapped in robes, and brought here, where they were put in pajamas and tucked into bed.
“Kept you doped to the gills the whole time. I mean, the both of you were out,” Quino says.
“I still don’t know where we are,” Axel says.
“Rancho Chivito,” Quino says, and tells him it’s an isolate goat ranch twenty-five miles west of Nuevo Laredo. It had long ago been a working hacienda, hence the walled compound containing a big two-story main house as well as smaller domiciles and outbuildings. The place produces meat, milk, and cheese for the Nuevo Laredo markets—and is the outland headquarters of Los Malos, a criminal gang of which Quino has been chieftain for the past five years. Before that, his uncle, Alfredo Capote, had been its chief for a dozen years. Because Quino had always been a good student and spoke English, Alfredo had granted his wish to go to college in the U.S.
“UT San Antonio,” Quino says. “Economics major, philosophy minor. Some combo, eh? But man, college was a lot of fun. My unofficial major was blondes. That’s what you gringos should be smuggling to us. Not enough real blondes on this side of the river.”
On graduation, Quino came home and became the Malos’ head accountant and established a real estate company that has ever since also been the gang’s city headquarters. Los Malos had come into being in the 1970s, and in their early years dealt primarily in gambling, prostitution, and extortion, occasionally smuggling wetbacks and sometimes marijuana across the river. However, by the time Quino returned from San Antonio, the drug trade was booming and the cartels had taken possession of the border.
“When the big dicks got in the picture,” Quino says, “little guys like us had to choose between getting killed, getting out, or getting in with one of them.”
The Malos got in with Los Golfos—the Gulf cartel—whose present territory ranges from the coastal city of Veracruz northward through the state of Tamaulipas to Matamoros, near the mouth of the Rio Grande, and then along the river all the way up to Ciudad Acuña, a 375-mile stretch of border that includes some of the most valuable drug routes into the United States. But rival organizations have long disputed the Golfos’ claim on the border upriver of Nuevo Laredo, and the war for control of that stretch of the Rio Grande has steadily grown more intense. The Golfos have held their ground primarily through the might of their enforcers, a paramilitary unit composed mostly of special forces deserters from the Mexican army, most of them trained in the United States.
“Los Zetas,” Quino says. “I suppose you’ve heard of them?”
“Who hasn’t?” Axel says. “Inside the walls they’ve got a rep as one of the baddest-ass bunches in the world.”
“They have that rep everywhere, and for very good reason. In any event, a main duty of the Zetas has always been to defend the Golfos’ border routes, and all of the Golfo subgangs on the border are under the Zetas’ direct command.”
“You guys work for the Zetas?”
“Not bad bosses, really
, as long as you don’t fuck up,” Quino says. “And very handy ones. Who you think arranged for the police chopper? We don’t have that kind of pull with the cops. And where you think we got the money for the bribes? To repay it to them, though, we had to get it back, and we did, all but fifty grand of it, which we had to make up out of our own pocket.” He looks at Cacho and says, “I don’t know if he’s worth fifty G’s, but what the hell, he’s my brother. Started pleading to get in the gang from the time he was fourteen. No way, I told him, not till you finish high school. To his credit, he did. So I let him in.”
“Soon as this ankle’s okay, I’m back in action,” Cacho tells Axel. “Figure to be made a crew chief before long, you watch.”
“You’re lucky a sprained ankle’s the worst you got,” Quino says. “I should’ve let you stew in the joint a little longer to heal your sprained brain. Give you more time to consider the stupidity of getting in such a mess and costing me so much money for no reason except you had to follow your dick over the border after some gringa.”
“Oh, man, if you’da seen her …” Cacho says.
Quino flaps a dismissive hand at him. He tells Axel that Los Malos’ principal duty under the Zetas is to guard the Rio Grande smuggling routes between Nuevo Laredo and the upriver town of Piedras Negras—a span of about 110 miles—against incursions by rivals. They have a network of informants in both towns, and there are Malos lookouts patrolling that stretch of Federal Highway 2, the border highway, twenty-four-seven. In both Piedras Negras and Nuevo Laredo, Malos defense crews on rotating shifts are ever-ready to respond to an alert from the lookouts, and there’s always a backup defense crew here at the ranch. Whenever the Malos encounter trespassers they deal with them on the spot and confiscate their loads.
“Most of them will fight to the end,” Quino says. “They know if they surrender we’ll turn them over to the Zetas, who will hang them from some overpass or leave their bodies lined along the roadside, maybe with a dozen knives sticking out of each one, maybe with their dicks cut off, maybe their heads. Sometimes they dump the heads on the front steps of the nearest police station. They know how to make a point, the Zs, and they can be quite theatrical about it.”
It was in a riverside fight with a smuggling crew out of Juárez five years ago that his uncle Alfredo was killed, and then Quino took over as chief. At present the gang’s membership stands at eighty men. Twenty of them are stationed at the ranch and live in a large dormitory building affording every man a private room; the others all live in either Nuevo Laredo or Piedras Negras, and each of those groups is under the command of a subchief who answers directly to Quino’s second-in-command.
“Now you know who you’re among,” Quino says, “and as I said before, you’re welcome here forever. And I mean in the main house, not the dormitory. The quarters you’re in right now are yours. You’ll have no need of money, but if you ever want a job with a crew, you can have it. We pay pretty good, and you could bank it all for your golden years.”
“I think he’ll want in,” Cacho says. “This dude was a robber, bro. Means he liked action. Maybe still does, even if his golden years are just around the corner.”
Axel gives him a two-finger “up yours” sign.
“No respect, this kid,” Quino says. “Thinks I’m old, and I’m only thirty-eight. Got a shitload to learn but thinks he already knows everything.”
“I know what the robbers say,” Cacho says, giving Axel a look. “The good ones don’t get caught.”
“Anybody who believes that doesn’t know anything about robbery,” Axel says. “The truest thing ever said about it is that anytime you go out to pull one, there’s fifty things that can go wrong, and if you can think of half of them you’re a mastermind.”
“I’ve heard that one,” Quino says. “So, assuming you’re a mastermind and planned for the twenty-five possibilities you could think of, which of the other twenty-five fucked you up and put you in the joint?”
Axel had not told Cacho any of the particulars of his robbery career, not even about the job that put him in prison. The kid had of course asked about it, and he’d said, “Stuff went wrong. End of story.” But he now sees no reason to keep it from them, and so he tells of Duro Cisneros recruiting him and his robbery pal, Billy, for a Dallas rip of three-quarter-million in bonds. He tells how smoothly it all went until they got back to the mall to switch to the other car and rammed into the college kid. Tells of the cop that came along and made the plate of the stolen Ford, of being wounded while losing the cop in the parking lot, of the horde of police that showed up, of sneaking through the parking lot crowd to try to get to their own car. Tells of his leg giving out and how he couldn’t get up without help and of his partners leaving him and being chased by the cops and getting away.
“There’s no way,” Axel says, “to plan for a kid backing out of a parking space at the wrong time.”
“Maybe not,” Quino says. “But I could argue that the more obvious reason you went to prison is that your partners ran out on you. If they had helped you, you might have gotten away with them.”
“Unless stopping to help me would’ve slowed them down and we all got caught. Must’ve figured they had no choice.”
“But they did have a choice. And they chose not to help you. But later on you had a choice, too, no? The prosecutor must’ve offered you a deal if you named them.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
Axel shakes his head.
“And you chose not to. Though they deserted you. Took your share of the money. And one of them a friend, you said. The thought must have crossed your mind more than a few times that they might be enjoying themselves somewhere, with your money as well as theirs. I can imagine your bitterness over the years, the size of your enmity.”
“ ‘Enmity!’ “ Cacho says. “You guys!”
“You learn to … repress things,” Axel says. “Otherwise you can end up bashing your skull against the bars. I knew some who did. Anyway, my bet’s they’re both dead or in prison.”
“Mine as well. But here you are, neither dead nor in prison. Perhaps the same is true of one or both of them. Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“When the Internet came around, my … this good buddy of mine tried to track them down. As time’s gone by he’s had better and better technical means for searching for Billy’s and Cisneros’s names in every prison roster in the country, but he still hasn’t come up with anything. He was surprised how many William Capps there are in prison. There are even more guys named Cisneros, and I never knew if Duro was his real name or just a nickname or even if either of his names was true. Didn’t know either one’s date of birth, either, only that Billy was around my age. A few years ago my guy asked me about physical details that might distinguish them from other guys with the same names. Said there are, whatchamacallits … databases … that include inmates’ identifying details like scars, birthmarks, tattoos. Did you know that? Amazing, the stuff that’s online.”
“It’s become a different world the last twenty-four years,” Quino says. “You give him what he asked for?”
“Not much to give except Billy had some puncture scars on the back of his shoulder where a guy stomped on him with baseball cleats, and Cisneros, he had a little red mark on his inside wrist. A tat or birthmark, I don’t know, looked sorta like a crescent. My guy ran their names again, checking them against those descriptives, and still nothing.”
“He got nothing because your partners have undoubtedly been using different names since the day of your capture. In case you should ever rat them. If they’ve kept to false names, as is likely, you can forget about finding them. Even if they’re dead, they could be buried under other names, if their graves are marked at all.”
“I know. I told my guy all that, but he still kept at it for about another year before he finally gave up.”
“Gave up?” Cacho says. “Shit, man, what about your money?”
“I’m not going to spend any por
tion of the life I’ve got left trying to get it. You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.”
Quino grinned. “Another sage old saw.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Axel says, “dead or alive, they’re gone for good.”
“Just like us,” Cacho says.
“Except there’s an army of cops hunting for us all up and down the border.”
Cacho gives him an odd look. Then turns to Quino and says in Spanish, You haven’t told him?
“Nobody’s looking for you,” Quino tells Axel. “Play it smart and they’ll never have reason to.”
“Not looking for us?” Axel says. “I don’t get it.”
Cacho leans toward Axel with a wide smile. “They think we’re dead, dude. Everybody thinks we’re dead!”
43
Everybody thinks we’re dead.
Back in his room, sitting in front of the open window, he considers how things stand in the light of this information….
Quino had shown them newspapers from Laredo, San Antonio, Austin. Had shown them recorded TV reports, some of them on-the-spot tapings with Zanco Unit in the rainy background. Their most recent prison pictures were in all the papers, were on TV. The getaway Tri-Cross van had been found in the creek and everybody was sure that they had drowned and been carried out to the river. A helicopter then found the stranded owner of the little boat, and the cops thought it possible that they had been the ones to steal it but didn’t see how they could have made it alive that far down the river. When they found the boat tangled in riverside brush below the rapids and some thirty miles downstream from where it had been taken, they could only conclude that whoever had stolen it had certainly drowned. Search teams were still combing the banks all the way down to the Amistad Reservoir, but a state police spokesman said the bodies might never be found, and until such time as they were recovered the state was offering a reward of ten thousand dollars per fugitive.
The Ways of Wolfe Page 16
