“Sex dolls?” Lila says as she sets our beers on the counter. “That’s what I love best about this place, the highbrow conversation.” She goes off to attend to other customers, pert ass and ponytail swinging.
Talking just loud enough for us to hear, Eddie tells us that Alberto Delmonte and his crew were bushwhacked last night as they were heading back on the Boca Larga trail. “Every man of them dead and the load jacked,” Eddie says. “Charlie told me as soon as I got back. He got it from Rigo himself.”
“We know who did it?” Frank says.
“Not yet. Charlie said don’t discuss it out here, but I thought you oughta at least know. He wants to see us all in the office after closing.”
The Doghouse shuts down at midnight, and at twenty till there’s nearly two dozen people still here when Lila yells, “Last call!” rousing the usual groans of protest. She goes over to the juke and hits the kill switch, prompting more grousing, but she just shrugs and smiles.
As she’s passing by the other end of the bar to go back behind the counter, a tall, rangy guy in a western shirt and cowboy boots gives her ass a swat and loudly says, “Yo! That is fine, mama!” I’ve never seen him before, or the two men with him, all of them grinning.
Lila spins around with a glare. She puts her finger in the guy’s face and says, “Don’t ever do that again. I mean ever!”
“Ah, now, sugar, I was admiring is all.”
“You’ve been warned,” she says.
He draws closer, looming over her. “But what if I just can’t help myself, darlin’?”
“Then you’ll have to deal with them.” She points at us at the end of the counter, where Frank and Eddie and I have stepped away from the bar in readiness to engage with the three of them, Frank putting a hand to Captain Harry’s chest to keep him out of it. But when the rangy guy turns his head to look our way, Lila does a nimble little move with her feet and drives her knee up between his legs. He hunches forward and his mouth drops open, and she stiff-arms him hard in the chest with both hands, propelling him backward into one of his pals, who tries to support him by the underarms, but the rangy one’s legs quit him and he sags in the man’s grip and almost pulls his pal down with him.
Onlookers cheer and laugh, and a woman shouts, “All right, girl!”
“Get him out,” Lila tells the rangy one’s buds. “He chucks up in here, you’ll clean the mess.”
They half carry, half drag him out the door. In keeping with his duty, the Professor goes to a front window to make sure they go away. Whenever somebody gets booted from a bar, and especially if he’s drunk, there’s always a tense interval afterward because there’s no telling if he’s one of those guys who’s coming right back with a gun. The Professor stands watch at the window for a minute, then looks at Frank and gives him a thumbs-up. He’ll continue to keep an eye out for a while in case their vehicle returns.
Lila goes behind the bar and is grinning big when she comes over to us. Captain Harry tells her he’s never seen man nor woman deliver a knee to the cojones with such grace and asks if it was pure luck or what.
“Pure execution, Captain,” she says. “Rayo taught me. It’s all distraction, timing, and speed.” She points off to the side as she says, “Distract, set, do it,” fluidly shifting her feet and whipping up her knee.
“Be damned if the women around here aren’t getting downright dangerous,” Frank says. He tells Eddie he better never piss off Lila again unless he’s wearing a cup.
Our laughter’s strained. But still, it’s a minor respite from the bad tidings about Alberto and his guys.
A half hour later, Lila and the other barmaids have gone home and the only ones still in the Doghouse are Frank and me, Uncle Harry, Eddie, and Charlie. We’re in Charlie’s office, and he’s given us the details about the ambush and hijacking and told us about Donasio Corona and the all-out search for him by the Jaguaros’ army of informants.
“I’ve promised Rigo that, if necessary, I can have a replacement load ready in five days. He’s talked to the Zetas and they said okay, but if they have to wait longer than that they’ll demand a late-delivery fine of twenty percent of what they paid for the original load. Rigo didn’t have any choice but to agree, and if we end up having to pay the fine he and I will split it. He’s pretty sure, though, that Mateo will find the rat quick, and as soon as he does, they’ll let us know. When the word comes, you two”—he looks at me and Frank—“are going down there. I want you with the Jaguaros when they brace the bastard and find out who jacked our load, and I want you with them when they get it back and into the Zetas’ hands in less than five days. If it’s a close call in timing and the Zees give Mateo any shit about a late delivery of just a few hours, I want you to remind them who sells the Jaguaros the guns they sell to the Zetas. They should be made to understand that any disagreement they have with the Jaguaros could become a problem with us and therefore a problem with one of their main lines of arms supply.”
“Maybe we should call them motherfuckers while we’re at it,” Frank says, deadpan. “Just to make extra sure we piss them off enough to kill us on the spot.”
The word comes from Mateo the following afternoon. He tells us the rat’s in Monterrey, holed up at his brother’s house. Mateo’s taking off from the capital in twenty minutes with a three-man team in a company Learjet. He gives us the coordinates and code letters of a private airfield on the outskirts of Monterrey. He’ll take care of our landing clearance, but he won’t wait there for us longer than an hour.
Frank and I have been ready to go since last night. We’ve got our Mexican documents—passports, driver’s licenses, gun carry permits, and ID badges as employees of Toltec Seguridad, a private security business owned by the Mexican Wolfes and headquartered in Cuernavaca, its high-powered legal department always prepared to render whatever assistance we might require. We slip into shoulder holsters holding Beretta nines, put on ultralight waterproof windbreakers to conceal them, and grab our ever-ready gym bags holding short-trip essentials, three extra twenty-round magazines, and a pistol suppressor, what the movies like to call a “silencer.” We call ours a “Quickster” because it’s custom-made for us by Jimmy Quick, who is a firearms genius. Though it’s only three and a half inches long, roughly half the length of most suppressors, it muffles a gunshot better than the bigger ones. And it’s a lot easier to carry a Quickster-equipped pistol on your person than one with a standard-sized suppressor.
A driver takes us out to the Spur Aviation Company’s airstrip and hangars, where Wolfe Associates keeps its two twin-prop aircraft, one a four-passenger model, one that carries six. Harry Mack’s provided us with the smaller one. The pilot is Jimmy Ray Matson, an amiable, red-haired young man out of Mississippi who claims to be twenty-six but doesn’t look old enough to drive a car. He’s an ace pilot and has ferried us before, and he’s already got the engines running when we climb aboard. The cockpit’s in open view of the cabin, and Jimmy Ray—dressed as usual in denim shirt and pants, hiking boots, and a gray Confederate army cap—greets us with “How do, fellers, good to see ya.” He puts on his earphones, tells the tower we’re ready, and in minutes we’re airborne.
Mexico City is about three times farther from Monterrey than we are, but a twin-prop is no Learjet and Mateo got the jump on us. He’ll get there before we do.
The sun has just begun to settle behind the mountains when the little airfield appears below us, Monterrey spread out in the near distance beyond it. There are two runways, three hangars, and a two-story building containing the control tower. A Learjet is on the apron, four men standing next to the plane. The only other people in sight are two guys in mechanic overalls at the entrance to one of the hangars. We touch down and taxi up close to the apron. Three of the men get into the Lear and one starts toward us. I recognize him as Mateo. Officially, he’s chief of security for various of the Mexican Wolfes’ legitimate businesses. Under the name of Mateo Dos Santos, he’s also the operations chief of the Jaguaros.<
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We lower the cabin stairs, and as we exit the plane Mateo calls out, “Tell your pilot he can refuel at that truck by the far hangar, then go home! His flight’s cleared!” He has to shout for us to hear him over the rumbling idle of our plane’s engines and the high whine of the Learjet as it turns about on the apron to face the runway. Frank leans into the cabin and relays the instructions to Jimmy Ray, who yells back, “Okeydoke!”
We each embrace Mateo in turn and he says, “Excellent timing! We haven’t been here half an hour! Soon as you guys started making your approach, I told my pilot to fire up the jet again! Come on, let’s get aboard! I’ll tell you everything on the way!”
As the Learjet levels off at cruising altitude, the last of the day’s light is deep red along the mountain ridges on our left and the black earth below is showing small clusters of town lights. In Spanish, Mateo has introduced us to his three-man team as Francisco and Rodolfo. His guys are a big black dude unimaginatively nicknamed El Negro, small and bucktoothed Conejo, and burly Gancho, whose name indubitably derives from the chrome hook he has in lieu of a left hand. El Negro carries a zippered bag strapped across his chest. Mateo sees me looking at it and says in English, “Mufflers, flex cuffs, duct tape, other essentials.”
He tells us that the Jaguaros’ intelligence people searched through Donasio Corona’s prison files, then through the civic records of every place he’s ever lived or been jailed, then looked up every relative or friend of his mentioned in any of those records. They came up with only four known friends who aren’t dead. Three of them are in prison, the fourth’s a paraplegic who lives with his mother.
“Donasio’s only living kin,” Mateo says, “are a sister in Oaxaca—she’s a deaf widow with several children—and a brother, Luis, who’s been arrested for robbery a few times but only been in prison once, a two-year fall. He got out about four months ago. Lives in a run-down barrio just outside Monterrey. Holds the registration on an old Chevy pickup. All that information came to me this morning. I had a spider stake out Luis’s place, and he wasn’t on lookout three hours before he calls and tells me he saw Donasio come out of the house and get something from the truck. Talk about shit for brains, hiding at his brother’s, like that wouldn’t be one of the first places we’d look. I called a couple of my Monterrey guys and gave them Luis’s address and truck plate number and told them to go there and hold both the fuckers till I arrive. In the interest of time, I also told them what I wanted to know from Donasio and how to radio the plane if they got that information while I was still in the air. Promised them a bonus if they did. Well, they don’t waste time, these guys, and we were making our descent into Monterrey when they called me with their report. They’d gone to Luis’s place, showed him police ID, and went inside just as Donasio came out of the kitchen with a beer in his hand. Wham-bam, they get them both on the floor and handcuffed. They ask Donasio who jacked the arms shipment at Laguna Madre the night before last, and he says he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. So they drag him into the kitchen and get a cleaver and hack off his thumb, then roll a hand towel for him to bite on and stifle his howling, and they wrap up his wound with another one. They ask him again who did the hijack and he starts blabbing nonstop. His brother, too. Didn’t take long to get the whole story, which is short and simple. Not long before Luis got out of prison, he met a guy who’s a member of Los Sangreros, a street gang working out of Juárez and El Paso, Bunch of young bucks with a rep as up-and-coming. To impress the guy, Luis brags to him about his brother who makes gun-smuggling pickups for some big league Mexico City gang, and the guy says he’ll pass that on to his boss, who’s always in the market. A week or two after Luis gets out of the pen, the Sangrero boss, guy named Miguel Soto, gets in touch with him. Says he’d like to talk to Luis’s brother about a gun deal, and Luis arranges a meet in Mexico City. Donasio tells Soto he works for a band of smugglers he won’t name but that mainly deals in U.S. Army weapons, and Soto says that’s good. Thing is, he tells Donasio, he’s convinced that most gun smugglers are greedy bastards who gouge their buyers, and he’d rather rip them off than let them fuck him over. He offers Donasio ten grand American for nothing more than a solid lead on a smuggle transfer. Donasio says he’ll be in touch, and then a couple of days before the Boca Larga run he calls Soto and says he’s got something good for him. They meet again and Donasio tells him he wants fifteen grand, ten up front. And, because he knows we’re going to find out pretty fast it was him who sold us out, he wants a job with the Sangreros, plus some fake ID and a place to live in El Paso. Soto says yeah, sure, no sweat. He sends one of his guys out to the car and he comes back with a money belt holding ten gees. Soto tells Donasio he’ll get the other five right after the hijack when they pick him up at Luis’s place on their way back to the border. In exchange, Donasio gives Soto a packet of information—descriptions of Boca Larga and of the little trail to it, hand-drawn maps, an estimated timetable of the drop—all the necessary details. Soto tells him welcome to the Sangreros and they’ll see him at Luis’s in two days.”
“And Donasio swallowed it?” Frank says. “They’d pick him up at Luis’s and pay him another five? Take him into the gang? Hide him in El Paso?”
“I tell you, cousin, the number of dumb shits in the world is doubling by the day. And get this. The ten grand was counterfeit. And very poorly made, as Donasio found out when he tried to exchange some of the Bennies for Mexican currency. The bank teller did a little chem test on a couple of the bills right in front of him and Donasio saw the smears and knew that wasn’t good. The teller told him to wait just a minute and went to the manager’s desk. The manager took a look at the bills and over at Donasio, then picked up a phone. Donasio figured the money’s queer and the cops are coming and he hauls ass. He went to another bank and told a teller he’d received a gringo hundred in payment of a gambling debt and wanted to be sure it was good. The teller tested it and laughed. So there he was, with all these hundreds not worth the cheap-ass ink and paper it took to print them and with us about to start hunting for him. And what’s he do? Goes to hide at his brother’s. Told my guys he thought it’d be a safe place because his brother didn’t have anything to do with the hijack so why would anybody look for him. My guys laughed in his face. I told them they’ll get the bonus.”
“And Donasio?” I say.
“Yeah. Well, he and Luis got relocated to another hiding place.”
“Another hiding place?” Frank says.
“Underground hideout.”
We get it. A grave.
“And we’re going to the border?” I say.
“Juárez. Our web guys ran down Soto and got an address. No picture, but we have a description.” He takes a little notebook from his jacket and flips a few pages. “Twenty-four years old. Five-nine, one-forty-five. Crew cut, clean-shaven, got a white scar down one side of his mouth. I’ve notified Charlie we’re on the way to brace the son of a bitch.”
We touch down at a regional airport just south of the city. The night’s hot. We go through the little terminal and find a pair of dark green Durango SUVs with drivers standing by parked one behind the other at the curb. Mateo dismisses the drivers and he and Frank and I get in the lead Durango, Mateo driving, and head into town, the other Durango staying close behind us. A green-lit dashboard screen shows a street map of Juárez with a yellow route laid out on it, courtesy of the Jaguaros’ info web. When the techs got Soto’s address, they drew up the route to it from the airport and downloaded it as a superimposition over the vehicle’s city map. The traffic is heavy, the going slow.
“It’s a nice house, nice neighborhood, but way below the security of the big chiefs,” Mateo says. “Soto’s not big enough yet to have to live on high alert or anyway not rich enough to do it. He doesn’t have guards or dogs, so we won’t have to cowboy our way in. Besides a maid, the only ones who live with him are his brother Julio, who’s in the gang, too, and both their girlfriends. Lot of trees along the street, plenty
of shadow cover. Front gate’s got a pushbutton lock and our guys got the code from the contractor records. Same for the front-door lock. The maid’s quarters are just off the kitchen but, lucky for us and luckier for her, she always gets Sunday off to visit her family and won’t be back till tomorrow morning. The four bedrooms are all in a row on the second floor, all the light switches on the wall just inside the door and on the left. We’ll park at the sidewalk in front of the house. Gancho will cover the front gate and courtyard. Conejo’s got the lower floor. Me, Negro, and the two of you will take the upstairs.”
We attach suppressors to our pistols.
Soto’s property is protected by a high stone wall topped with glass shards fixed in cement. The walkway entrance gate is fashioned of steel bars with spear points. Mateo taps the numerical code into the gate lock and there’s a soft click. Guns out, we pass through the gate and follow the walkway across the courtyard and to the front door. A few touches to the door lock’s keypad and we’re in the house. The lower floor is softly lighted and the air-conditioning’s going strong. We cross the living room and pause at the bottom of the stairs. There are muffled sounds from the second floor—recorded voices, snatches of sound track music. They’re watching TV, maybe a video. We go up the stairway as cautiously as cats.
The TV’s louder now and emitting sounds of gunfire and Spanish dialogue. They’re coming from the room at the end of the hall, its doorway fully open but only faintly and flickeringly lit, the TV probably the only light within. We take a look into each of the first three rooms by turn, silently opening each door, switching on the light, guns ready, and find all of them unoccupied. We come to the open door and Mateo very slowly leans into it for a peek, then backs us down the hall a little way before whispering that there’s four of them in there, two guys, two women, all in one bed against the far left side of the room, watching a big TV on the opposite wall. He tells us how we’ll work it, then leads us back to the room. He takes another look inside, then Frank and I follow him in, all of us holding close to the wall. El Negro brings up the rear and stays by the light switch. The glow of the TV is sufficient for us to see that the two guys are wearing only boxer shorts, the girls only panties. I recognize the Spanish-dubbed movie they’re watching. Heat. De Niro and Pacino. Good flick.
The Bones of Wolfe Page 5
