57
Where the highway terminates at the beach—most of which is part of a state park—it faces the Gulf. Between the dunes and the highest reach of the tide, the sand is firm enough to drive on. Roughly four miles to the left—northward—the beach ends at a jetty at the entrance to the Brownsville Ship Channel, with Padre Island and its rows of condominium towers on the channel’s other side. About three miles south of the highway’s connection with the beach is the mouth of the Rio Grande, with Mexico just across the way.
Axel turns right. The wind has reduced to a fitful breeze, the rain slackened to a drizzle. He proceeds slowly, his mirrors showing only the vague glow of the Padre Island condos. He lowers his window a little to admit the mild spray of rain and the sound of breakers swashing onto the beach. He’s almost to the river and no longer on state park property when a small yellow glow slightly upriver comes into view. He knows it to be from Harry Morgan Wolfe’s house way back in the dunes. Somebody’s at home. Jessie or Rayo or maybe both of them. His pulse picks up.
He hasn’t been to the house since he was fifteen years old and Harry Morgan hosted a barbecue for the family. It’s a single-story, mounted on pilings a dozen feet high and three feet thick, deep-rooted and cemented into the riparian ground, with a narrow covered gallery along the sides and rear of the house and a spacious covered porch. It was built by Harry Morgan’s grandfather, Morgan James Wolfe, in the 1920s, and has withstood every hurricane since. Its twenty-acre ground has been known to the family as “Playa Blanca” since the time of its acquisition, shortly after the founding of Wolfe Landing, and its southern and western boundaries abut the Rio Grande. All the locals know who the place belongs to and none would dare to trespass on it. For those who don’t know, there is a sign affixed to one of the shoulder-high iron posts on either side of the property’s trail entrance, a pair of padlocked barrier chains hung between them, one at chest level, the other thigh-high. The sign advises, “Private Land. Trespassers May Incur Regret.”
The sign comes into the side glow of his headlights and he parks the truck just past it, then gets out and goes to the barrier. The narrow trail beyond the chains is just wide enough for a large vehicle. It is composed of a dense layer of hard-packed clay and was ingeniously constructed by Morgan Wolfe and some engineer friends way back when. The chains came much later and are impossible to sever with anything less serious than an acetylene torch. Both of the padlocks are equipped with a digital sensor that triggers an alarm in the house should anyone tamper with them.
The rows of dunes to both sides of the trail are high and softly yielding and the only vehicle that might negotiate them without bogging down is the sort of blatantly loud dune buggy that anyone at the house could hear coming long before it got there. The only way a trespasser might make it to the house undetected is on foot, and over the decades there have been a few such incursions, all but one by nosy beachgoers in bright daylight who were gently rebuked and sent back the way they came.
The exception was a pair of late-night robbers whom Harry Morgan had heard as they came up the gallery stairway. He unlocked the front door and positioned himself in the dark living room with a twelve-gauge pump and waited until they stepped inside before blasting them both dead and then notifying the police. He refused to grant the newspaper an interview but was pleased that it put the story on the front page. It was a sign of wider reach and stronger import than even the one at the trailhead promised.
Axel ducks between the chains and starts up the trail, advancing slowly and carefully, ready to spring aside and hunker behind a dune should somebody come driving toward him.
58
Billy sees Axel’s lights turn south at the beach entrance and vanish behind the dunes. The microbus goes out of sight in the other direction. He cuts off his own lights before turning onto the beach and following Axel toward the river. But for the shrinking taillights of the microbus in his mirror, there’s no sign of other beach traffic. When Axel’s brake lights brighten and halt, Billy stops too. He judges the truck to be forty yards ahead. He’s certain Axel can’t see him back here in the blackness. Then the truck’s lights go off and Billy can no longer see him either.
What’s he doing? Waiting for somebody?
Can’t just sit here.
Billy backs up in a semicircle and behind the cover of a dune, the 4Runner facing the sea. He waits a moment, then turns on his lights and wheels back onto the beach and heads toward the river. He could be anybody … a guy and his girl looking for a more private fuck spot. He lowers his right window.
You got the advantage on him with your lights, he thinks. You’ll be able to see him in the cab as you move in, but he can’t see you. Pull up next to him, toot the horn, and ask real loud if there’s a public toilet around. Soon as he starts talking, turn on the interior light and give him one good second to see you before you raise the .45 so he can see it … then boom!
When he draws close enough for his lights to illuminate the cab, he doesn’t see anyone in it. He stops alongside the truck, holding the .45 pointed out the window. He scans in front of the truck and spies a yellow gleam deep in the far-off dunes. House lights? In the red cast of his taillights he sees the sign on the chain post. He backs up to put his headlights on it, sees the chains and the trail it’s blocking.
Goes to the house, he thinks. That’s where he’s gone.
He backs the SUV into a space between dunes and cuts off the lights and motor, grabs an extra magazine from the console, and gets out into the soft rain. No telling who else might be there, but so what? Move fast enough and you might catch him before he even gets to them. Best if he could see you before you do him, but fuck it, put him down first chance you get and split quick.
The .45 in hand, he hustles up the trail at a jog.
59
The trail ends where the dunes curve back around and to the river. Morgan Wolfe had not wanted anyone to be able to drive right up to the house and therefore built it a couple of dune rows farther in from the end of the trail. The only way to get to the house from here is over those dunes, on foot. Some years ago the dunes had become too laborious for Aunt Christy, Harry’s wife, and rather than extend the trail to the house, Harry had bought a residence in town.
Parked at the trail’s end are a truck and an SUV. The girls’ vehicles? They both at home? They alone? With boyfriends? He clambers up a dune, the wet sand sticking to his hands, getting in his shoes. From its crest and beyond another row of dunes, he sees the house directly ahead, one of its front windows bright with light. The open area under the house is dark but for the vaguely lighted stairway off to his right.
She’s here. He knows she is, he can feel it.
Cat-foot it up the stairs, start checking windows, and you’ll see her. Really see her. And that’ll be that.
He slogs down the dune and starts up the next one.
Somebody’s here, Billy thinks, breathing hard when he comes trotting in sight of the two vehicles. He sticks the gun in his pants and scrabbles up the dune on all fours and sees the lit window of the piling house. And in the cast of its light sees the dark form of someone moving in a crouch over the top of the next dune. Him.
He pulls the .45, but Axel vanishes down the other side of the dune before he can take aim.
Shit.
Can wait right here till he comes back. Or by the vehicles. Pop him soon as he shows up.
And if he doesn’t come back till tomorrow sometime? Gonna stay awake out here till then? And what if he’s not alone when he comes back? These are somebody’s vehicles. Can’t be too many of them, though, and you can maybe do them all if you go up and take them by surprise. But if they catch you down here in the daylight …
He sticks the gun back in his pants and half-walks, half-slides down the dune and starts up the next one.
Axel arrives at the bottom of the dune, then sprints through the rain mist and into the deep shadow under the house, then makes his way to the stairs. They’re illuminated by an outer light j
ust above a door at the landing at the top of the steps. He slowly ascends to the landing and pauses there, under the roof’s wide eave. There are two windows on this side of the house, a dark one to the right of the landing, near the rear corner of the house, and one midway ahead along the gallery, open to the breeze and showing bright light. He hears music.
He starts toward the window ahead and then flinches at the soft thunk of his foot glancing against an overturned plastic bucket in a shadow by the door. He holds stone-still. Seconds pass. The music persists. He hears muted voices. A low, brief laugh.
He moves up to the window and carefully leans and peers in with one eye. A kitchen. Nobody in it. Dishes in a sudsy sink. The music clearer here. He recognizes it. A Cuban song. “Siboney.” There’s a drone of voices in another room and then laughter. Women’s laughter. Probably just her and Rayo here.
Then one of them is approaching the kitchen as she asks the other if she wants another beer. Axel draws aside from the window because whoever’s coming will be facing it directly and might see him and if it’s not her, what then? The other voice says no thanks, and the voice in the kitchen says she’s going to take a bath. Axel ventures another one-eyed peek and glimpses a woman with short black hair and wearing a thin green robe just before she rounds the kitchen door and goes out of view. Rayo Luna. Then the window near the rear corner comes alight and the sash is raised. The bathroom.
From the top of the dune Billy sees Axel hurrying under the house and loses sight of him. He stares hard and barely discerns the poorly lighted stairway at the north side of the house. Then catches the shadowy movement of Axel’s dark figure just before it goes up the stairs and out of view. He scrambles down the dune and scurries under the house, halts, and listens hard. Then wends his way around the pilings and to the stairway. Gripping the .45 in both hands, he steps out from under the house, aiming upward and ready to shoot, but the stairway is bare. He starts up the steps.
Axel advances along the gallery to the front corner of the house, takes a peek, then goes around it and onto the porch. The door is flanked by large windows on both sides, the near one dimly lit, the farther one very bright and casting a rectangle of light on the porch floor. He eases up to the near one. It’s draped with a gauzy material through which the room within is a smeary vision of colors and shapes. He sees an indistinct form standing by the far wall and softly singing along with the Spanish song.
It’s her, he knows it is. He moves over to the other window and takes a look around the frame.
And sees her. At a CD player on a table by a bookcase. She’s in a white robe, her red-blonde hair in a ponytail. More beautiful than in any picture he has ever seen of her.
The song ends. She removes the disc and replaces it in its case. She moves to the center of the room and he sidles over a little further into the light of the window, the better to watch her as she gathers magazines off the sofa and arranges them in a neat stack on the coffee table, pausing at times to scrutinize a cover.
At the top of the stairs, Billy stops and listens hard. Faint music. He regards the closed door, the two windows on this side, both of them showing light. He’s in there. But there’s still the question of who else and how many.
He starts toward the forward window to have a look, lightly kicks the bucket by the door, and freezes. The only sound is the continuing music. He moves up to the window and looks into a deserted kitchen. Hears somebody singing along with the song. A woman. No one to worry about.
As he quickly moves up the gallery, the music stops. He pauses at the front corner and carefully peeks around it and sees Axel at the far window, no weapon in hand, staring at something inside, looking a little drunk.
Got you, he thinks.
He steps around the corner, thinking, Don’t hit the heart with the first one, and says, “Hey, Axel!”
Axel makes a flinching half-turn, stepping back into the full light of the window, seeing a dark figure pointing a gun at him, feeling his own holstered gun a distant world away. Jessie hears it distinctly—”Hey, Axel!”—and whips around to the window to see him standing there, her impulse to shriek stifled by his name, by her immediate and astonished recognition of him … the TV and newspaper pictures … the photos on Uncle Charlie’s walls … and the word is out of her mouth before she can think to say it. “Daddy!”
As he starts to turn to her, Billy’s .45 blasts with a yellow flare and the slug smacks him in the chest and knocks him flat.
Jessie screams.
Axel can’t breathe. Can’t raise his head.
Billy Capp walks up and stands over him in the light of the window, wanting Axel to see him clearly. He smiles down at him. “Come to kill me, huh?” He points the pistol at his face.
A gunshot disintegrates Billy’s forehead in an outward spray of bloody bone and brain, and he’s dead even as he pitches past Axel and falls.
Rayo Luna stands at the corner of the gallery, naked and dripping wet, a large revolver in her hands. She’d been in the tub and heard the thunk of the bucket and lunged out of the bath and to the towel closet and grabbed up the .44 Magnum she kept there. Then came out the back door and to the stairway side of the house and saw a man sneaking up to the front corner and going around it. She was racing down the gallery when she heard the shot and Jessie’s scream.
Jessie comes out, her face anguished, and looks down at her father. His eyes are open and moving over her, wide with desperation. He wants to tell her everything that he has wanted to tell her for so many years, but cannot now muster the breath. He can only behold her a moment more. Then die.
60
It isn’t easy for Rayo—now wearing jeans and a T-shirt—to convince Jessie they have no other choice, that it’s the only way. There’s no place in the entire delta they can bury them where the first tropical storm or hurricane won’t bring them up again. Body pops up, gets DNA-tested, its dental work X-rayed, and chances are good it’ll get made. Cops of every sort would come poking around and asking questions of everybody in the family and maybe raising some serious problems. “They can’t be found,” Rayo tells her, “not ever, neither of them. Not a scrap.”
Jessie can’t stop crying, intermittently shaking her head as if she’s trying to rid it of something, until Rayo finally grabs her and shakes her. “That’s enough, for Christ’s sake! Enough! I know it’s hard, but goddamnit, you’ve been through worse than this! We have to do this, and do it now! You gonna help me or pussy out?”
Jessie helps, though she still weeps softly as they go about the preparations, cleaning out the men’s pockets of keys, IDs, money, putting it all except the keys and the money in a plastic bag, together with their pistols. They strip the bodies, wrap them in blankets and tie them in place at the feet and above the head with cloth strips, then push the bodies off the porch. They slosh the blood off the porch planks with pans of water, then go down and begin the arduous task of lugging each body in turn over the dunes and to the vehicles. It takes both of them to transport each body, with panting pauses in the process. They open the back of Jessie’s Durango SUV and push aside the jumble of gym bags and golf club bags and cardboard boxes full of old newspapers, then lay the bodies inside and cover them over with the clutter.
They make one more trip to the house to collect the bag with the men’s guns and personal items, plus the long pole they use for knocking wasp nests off the underside of the house. They then go on foot to the trailhead and find the men’s vehicles and drive them back to the trail end. Tomorrow Rayo will speak to Jesús McGee at Riverside Motors at the Landing and—no questions asked—he’ll arrange to get the vehicles to the garage, attach new VINs, work up new registrations, and sell them off.
With Rayo at the wheel of the Durango, they head for the beach entrance and turn onto the Boca Chica road. It’s a bit tense when they stop at the Border Patrol checkpoint on the return side of the road, but they’re well acquainted with all the guys of the local unit and the only reason they’re ever stopped is so t
he duty officers can flirt with them for a minute before waving them through.
A little before eleven o’clock, they roll into the Landing, the rain now no more than a mist. All business places are closed at this hour except the Doghouse Cantina. They turn onto Gator Lane and follow it past the place, the light over its front door still on, its parking lot holding but a half-dozen vehicles, then turn onto the narrow lane that leads into the deepest thickets and tree stands in the Landing. They proceed slowly through the greater darkness along the misty, winding track. They see a small light deep in the trees—the light over the doorway of Charlie Fortune’s piling house, the most isolate residence in the Landing. But they know he’ll be at the Doghouse until he closes it at midnight. His house is as far as Jessie has ever come this way before.
Now they’re there. At a reed-cleared portion of bank on the Resaca Mala. Rayo leaves the headlights on and shining out over the dark water and against the cattail reeds on the opposite bank. Jessie had long before heard of how Doghouse kitchen scraps are disposed of here, but had never cared to witness the spectacle, and not until Rayo informed her earlier this evening did she learn of the other sort of disposals that sometimes occur here. Rayo herself had learned of it shortly after moving here from Mexico City and going to work in the shade trade.
They work quickly in the illumination of the interior lights and the reflected glow of the headlights. The surrounding shadows are long and deep and loud with the ringing of frogs, the heavy air rife with the smells of decayed vegetation. Rayo gets the bag with the men’s guns and other belongings, cuts slits in it with a pocketknife, then slings it far out into the water and it vanishes in a splash. They drag out one of the blanket-wrapped bodies and lug it over the edge of the bank, turn it facedown, and then retrieve the other one.
The Ways of Wolfe Page 22
