“Wooo!” Quino says. “With any gun he shoots like Pancho Villa.”
“It’s still the one, gents,” Axel says, wagging the .45.
“No way,” Cacho says. “Thing weighs a ton and only holds seven shots. Eight if you carry one in the chamber. I’ll take the seventeen in the Glock.”
“There’s some who need seventeen,” Axel says.
He extracts the empty magazine, lets the slide snap closed, and extends the pistol butt-first to Quino, who waves it off, saying, “It’s yours, hombre. There’s a damn good shoulder holster for it in the truck.”
Quino next withdraws an M4 carbine from the bag. It is a smaller, lighter version of the M16 rifle, a type Axel often fired at the Republic Arms, and he is impressed by the M4’s lightness and easy maneuverability. “It’s a better weapon than the M16 for close fighting,” Quino says. “Every Malo at the ranch has one, every man on a crew.” The selective-fire switch permits a choice between shooting one round with each trigger pull or a three-round burst with each pull. The bursts are more fun, and Axel makes quick work of shooting up three magazines in acquainting himself with the weapon. Quino offers to show him how to fieldstrip it for cleaning, but the carbine is so similar to the M16 that Axel quickly breaks it down, and then as swiftly reassembles it. Quino grins and shrugs and says, “It’s yours, too. Keep it close.”
On the roaring drive back to the compound they hit 110 miles per hour on a straightaway, all three howling like wolves.
At lunch, Quino tells them he’s received a report that a gang working for the Sinaloa cartel is planning to smuggle a load of cocaine across the Rio sometime soon in the Malos’ sector. “Supposed to happen not too far from here, right in the heart of our territory,” Quino says. “The brass balls on those fuckers! Nothing definite yet on exactly where they’ll do it, but the word is it’ll likely go down within a week. If the spot’s within fast enough reach of the ranch, I’ll be taking a team to deal with them myself. If you’re feeling up to it, Maestro, you’d be welcome to come along, see how we earn our keep.”
That’s why the target practice, Axel thinks. The man wouldn’t ask him to go out with a team without first finding out if he can shoot. He was wasting no time putting him to the test. “I’m up to it,” he says.
“It’ll get dicey, I can promise you that,” Quino says.
“All the better. Count me in.”
“Me, too,” Cacho says. “I can give cover fire from—”
“You don’t go anywhere until you can walk from point A to point B without assistance,” Quino says. “End of discussion.”
47
As always on the evenings when the girls come to the ranch, the Malos have supper early, then get spruced up. The girls will already have eaten, too. As the men see it, the visit will be brief enough without wasting time over a dining table. The music is provided by Los Jóvenes, a band as adept with a slow-dance number as with a rousing conjunto to set the dancers whirling. They are highly popular with the resident Malos and have played at each of their last six parties, coming all the way from Monclova, more than a hundred miles away.
All day Axel had been increasingly nervous about the party, wondering if maybe he’d become one of those guys Quino had mentioned at supper the first night. What if after all those years of using his own hand and growing accustomed to its manipulations that was the only way he could get off anymore? Maybe the only way he could even get it up. He was afraid he might embarrass himself terribly. He’d finally chided himself for being a damn fool who was simply nervous because it’d been so long, that’s all, and he’d been holding tight to that thought since.
The girls arrive at the circular driveway of the main house in a caravan of five chauffeured Chevrolet Suburbans. The lead vehicle stops where Quino is standing a few feet from the head of the line of men, who greet the girls with cheers. Axel had come out to the driveway at twenty minutes to six, thinking it early enough to be close to the head of the line, but many of the men were already waiting and he is somewhere near the middle, and despite all his self-assurances of there being nothing to worry about, he is keenly nervous again.
Quino has told him that some of the girls will be making their first visit, but most will have been here before, and some of the men have favorites among them. But there is a rule that no one can stake a personal claim on any girl and no girl can deny herself to any man, and as always Quino will be selecting girls from the vehicles at random and allocating them to the men in the order that they have lined up. In the years that he has been chief, there have been very few fights over a party girl, and in every case but one he punished the men involved by banning them from the next party. The exceptional case was an instance in which one of the antagonists killed the other with a knife before the fight could be stopped. Quino punished that man with a bullet in the head.
He opens the back door of the first Suburban and assists a girl in getting out, then takes her over to the first man in line, who leads her off to his room in the dormitory. All of the girls are pretty mestizas, caramel-skinned and black-haired. Most of the men will take their girls straight to their room and then later to the lounge for drinking and dancing and maybe to select another girl for another round of sex. Only a few couples will go to the lounge before heading to the dorm.
When Axel reaches the front of the line, Quino is whispering into the ear of the next girl. Her hair touches her shoulders. Her minidress reveals trim legs and the tops of her breasts. He steers her to Axel and turns her over to him and gives him a wink. She smiles and seems to take no notice of his wounded cheek and sore lips. He takes her hand and asks her her name as they go into the house. Celinda, she says.
He had intended to have a drink with her first, then a slow dance or two, but he now decides that such delay would only make him even more anxious and so chooses to go directly to his quarters. As they pass through the large main room and various hallways, she looks all around trying to see everything at once. This is not the way to the dormitory, she says. No, he says, I don’t live there. Ah, she says. He lets go of her hand and tries to dry his sweaty palm by pretending to brush off the front of his jacket.
Then they’re in the dimly lit room and staring at the bed, whose covers he’d turned down before going out to the driveway. She says that Quino told her he has been in prison for many years until very recently and she does not want him to worry, everything will be fine.
She puts a hand to his face and gently kisses the butterfly stitches on his cheek and then his sore lips and presses her belly to him and her perfume is dizzying and his heart begins to race and everything seems to be moving too fast and he feels himself responding weakly and his fear of failure is like a fist in his gut and she steps back and removes the little dress with a fluid overhead action and drops it on a chair and slips off a pair of tiny panties and goes to the bed and slithers onto the sheets and beckons him with both hands as he undresses and he’s dismayed by the obviousness of his mere semi-readiness and he gets into the bed and she takes him in her arms and kisses him and insinuates her tongue in his mouth and he desires her madly but is still not ready and if he could only use his hand he knows he could set himself right but he’s afraid of what she would think and then her hand is on him and her fingers are moving artfully and as he responds to the talent of her touch she neatly maneuvers herself under him and guides him into her and enfolds him with her legs and works her hips and then they’re rocking and rocking and everything is exactly as it should be and then he suddenly feels as if he’s falling and a tremulous moment later collapses on her in gasping exhilaration.
And then he’s laughing and laughing and she’s laughing with him and kissing the tears on his face.
More than two hours later, after dancing naked to a CD of Sinatra songs and making love again, this time taking it slow, after drinking a few beers from the fridge and conversing about the kinds of music they like and the many DVD movies she recommends, they finally get out of bed and get dressed.<
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But at the door he embraces her from behind and presses himself to her and she feels his revived readiness yet once more and says, “Dios mío,” and again takes off the dress. This time they go about it even more languidly, Axel in no hurry at all, wanting to prolong the union as long as possible, and they do. Then he gets another two beers and they drink them sitting up in bed, their backs against the headboard, idly stroking each other and talking of this and that. When she asks if he thinks he might have had enough now, he gets out of bed and affects a slouching limp as he crosses the room to where his clothes lie scattered, and she cackles with delight.
In the lounge, where most of the Malos and their girls have already gathered, he touches his bottle of Bohemia to hers and toasts her in a whisper as the finest lover in the world. She thanks him very kindly and toasts him as the world’s second-finest lover, and they both laugh. When it’s time for the girls to go, he walks her out to the row of Suburbans, where the drivers hold open the doors. He would like to kiss her good night but is mindful of the silliness of that impulse and so puts the tip of his finger to her nose and thanks her for a good time. She grins and pretends to snap at the finger and says she had a good time too. Then she’s in the vehicle and the driver shuts the door and goes around and gets behind the wheel and the little caravan departs. Axel and the few other men who came out to see the girls off, including Quino and Cacho, watch the vehicles until they pass through the front gate and their taillights turn to the north and vanish.
The moon has not yet risen, and the sky is a brilliant crush of stars. You’ve never really seen the stars, Axel reflects, until you’ve seen them from far out at sea or deep in the desert.
As they go back into the house, Cacho places a hand on Axel’s shoulder and says, Well, old man, how was it? As good as your hand?
I don’t know about that, but it was definitely better than a stick in the eye, he says.
Which gets a big laugh from the brothers.
48
Barely an hour later he’s awakened by Quino, who’s shouting at him from the bedroom door to grab his gear and get out to the driveway, fast.
In minutes Axel is dressed and out the door, the M4 in his hand, three thirty-round carbine magazines in the ammo belt at his waist, his shoulder holster holding the .45 under one arm and a double-magazine pouch under the other, his phone in his jacket pocket.
Quino’s Ram pickup truck and a black SUV—a Jeep Grand Cherokee—are idling in the driveway. He glimpses Vaquero at the wheel of the Cherokee, Alto in the shotgun seat, two other men in the back. “Move it!” Quino yells at him from the truck. Axel scrambles into the backseat and the truck roars away, its sudden acceleration slamming the back door shut. In the front passenger seat, Sino is speaking into a satellite phone. With the Cherokee following, they speed through the already opened front gate and turn onto a narrow trail bearing to the northwest.
Axel braces himself against the front seats as the truck gains speed, rocking over the rough road. The Cherokee’s headlights are hazy orange in the trailing dust. He leans forward and sees a half-folded topography map on Sino’s lap in the glow of a dashboard lamp. Yes, I’ve got it, Sino says, pressing the phone hard to his intact ear against the rumble of the truck. He draws a small circle on the map with a ballpoint pen, then states its coordinates and asks for a verification, listens for a moment. How fast are they going? he asks. Axel follows his glance at the speedometer—the Ram is doing 80, the truck swaying and jouncing, leaving the ground at every roll in the road.
I estimate forty minutes, Sino says into the phone. Let me know immediately if anything changes. He sets the phone on the console and says to Quino that the call of a few minutes ago was correct, the transfer will be at Dos Burros. They’re in two vehicles, he says, one security, one the payload. Our contact’s tailing them in a Volkswagen bug. He started out of Piedras Negras in the traffic ahead of them so they’ve got no reason to be suspicious that he stayed behind them after they passed. They’re sticking to the speed limit and he’s holding a long way back but keeping them in sight. He’ll let us know if they speed up. If they don’t, we’ll get to Dos Burros twenty minutes to a half hour ahead of them. Plenty of time to get set. The tail will let me know when they make their turnoff onto the trail to the clearing, then he’ll head back.
Quino nods and says, Very good.
Where and what’s Dos Burros? Axel asks.
Sino tells him it’s a riverside clearing about eighty yards off the border highway and well concealed by an extended stretch of high, dense brush. It’s a fairly narrow and shallow crossing with solid footing to permit the load to be hand-carried across. It was a popular crossing point for wetbacks before the Golfos took it over for drug shipments.
Quino slows down, makes a turn onto the northbound trail, and then they’re doing 80 again, then 85.
Crouched in the thick scrub growth on the river side of the two-lane border highway, Axel awaits the coming smugglers, M4 in hand. Mosquitoes whine at his ears. Quino’s pickup and the Cherokee are hidden in a clump of mesquites on the other side of the road, which is twenty yards behind him. Even if he stood up to look back he wouldn’t be able to see the highway for the foliage. This is an isolate stretch, sparingly traveled at night, and the few vehicles that whoosh by seem in a great hurry to be away from here.
By the frail light of a low crescent moon and through gaps in the foliage, he can vaguely discern where a rude trail bends into the narrow entry to the clearing. The smugglers will be coming on this trail after exiting the highway at a gap in the brush a couple of miles westward. Quino and the others are hidden in the scrub along the west edge of the clearing, set to ambush them. Axel’s assignment is to ensure that nobody escapes by retreating through the clearing entrance. Positioned as he and the other Malos are, all their lines of fire will be eastward to some degree, reducing the possibility of shooting each other.
A breeze kicks up and rustles the riverside reeds and he catches the ripe, mucky smell of the Rio. Another vehicle whisks by behind him. Minutes pass. Then he hears an engine, guttural and revving low, approaching from his left along the trail. He thumbs the M4’s selector lever from “safe” to “burst.”
Headlights appear out of the darkness, moving slowly. As the bulky vehicle passes abreast of him, not ten yards distant, he sees it is a pickup truck about the same size as Quino’s, several men standing in its bed. The security unit. The brake lights flare and the truck stops at the clearing’s entrance, and the men, five of them, debark from the bed. The truck’s headlights brighten and dim into the forward darkness three fast times, and a moment later there is a single spark of white light through the obscurant brush and from somewhere beyond the truck. The buyers, responding from the other side of the river. The men on the ground advance into the clearing and out of Axel’s sight as the truck’s brake lights flare one-two-three times, and seconds later he hears the rumble of another vehicle coming up the trail and then sees another set of headlights. Another pickup, this one carrying the payload. Two men in the bed. It stops a short distance from the first truck, engine throatily idling, and then the first truck proceeds into the clearing.
Long seconds pass. Over the sound of the idling engine of the payload truck he hears a loud but unintelligible voice. Someone calling across the river? Another minute passes and then a man appears in the headlight beams of the payload truck and beckons it into the clearing. The truck advances and slowly turns into the entry and the man hops onto the rear bumper and then this truck, too, vanishes into the clearing. Axel eases forward, closer to the trail, finds a spot with a better view of the entry and with more room to move to his left or right.
It happens fast. A pair of M4 three-round bursts shatter the silence—and then the night erupts into a raging fusion of gunfire, curses, screams. The thick brush between Axel and the clearing permits him only a few glimpses of muzzle flashes. He hears the rising roar of an engine and in the next second the payload truck comes barreling out
of the clearing in reverse, a lone man in the bed, leaning over the cab and shooting back into the clearing with a handgun.
Axel fires a burst at him, the carbine muzzle flaring whitely, and the man lunges sideways and tumbles from the truck as it crosses the trail and plows rearward into the heavy brush to Axel’s right. Axel shoots at the driver’s obscure form through the window and he slumps out of view and the truck keeps moving in reverse, slowly rocking and lumbering through the heavy scrub for another few yards before it jams in a denser thicket, its wheels spinning in mud. Axel moves over a few feet for a better angle at the front of the vehicle and shoots two bursts through its grille, and the truck sputters and quits. The rear right-side door swings open and someone drops to the ground in a crouch and fires three rapid-fire pistol shots before Axel triggers a burst at him and the man flings back in a supine sprawl. Keeping the carbine pointed at him, Axel is astonished to hear him wheezing. Then realizes all other gunfire has ceased, all screaming. Now the man is gasping, speaking softly to who knows whom. Praying? Axel starts to walk up to him, then halts. He tried to kill me, he thinks. Then shoots him with another burst, the man flinching, and the gasping ceases. He then goes up to the truck window and peers in and sees the driver’s crumpled, soundless form.
Quino comes out of the clearing, his M4 trained on the man Axel shot out of the truck bed. He prods the man with his foot, steps back, and shoots a burst into him, then comes over to where Axel is standing beside the disabled payload truck and the dead smuggler on the ground. He looks into the cab and says, Excellent work, Maestro, he says. Three of them.
Two, Axel says. You just did the third one.
The Ways of Wolfe Page 18
