10

As the years passed, his embitterment about Billy Capp began to exhaust him. He came to see it as a sort of sickness that would make him old before his time—old and sour and maybe even loony—if he did not somehow surmount it. Wherever Billy was, dead or alive, it simply did not matter anymore. So did he tell himself.

At the beginning of his fifteenth year of incarceration he was transferred to the Charles Zanco Unit in Terrell County. By then he had been able to stay out of trouble for more than seven years. No fights, no serious frictions of any sort. He was civil to the COs but never friendly, and, as always, he sought no friends among the inmates. He read copiously—histories, tech journals, newsmagazines. The Internet had come into being after he was imprisoned and he informed himself about its rudiments through magazines and Charlie’s letters and listening in on discussions between some of the younger inmates. He kept fit with cell exercises and daily runs around the yard. He wrote to Charlie every two weeks and received a letter every other week in return. Though Zanco was much farther from Brownsville than were any of the other units where he’d done time, Charlie never failed to make his monthly visit.

Midway through his second year at Zanco he was permitted “contact visits” for the first time ever and could now greet Charlie with a hug in the outdoor visiting area, where they would sit at a table under an umbrella and chat while sipping soda pop. Their conversations no longer monitored, they could speak freely in low voice, and Axel was finally able to tell him who his partners had been. Charlie was outraged to learn that Billy Capp had deserted him, but Axel said he really didn’t care anymore, that he’d exhausted his anger for Billy. It wasn’t worth the toll it had been taking on him. Charlie said he was going to try to track him down anyway, the Duro guy, too, but Billy was his main ambition. Axel shrugged and said, “Whatever makes you happy, little brother.”

Charlie continued to bring pictures of Jessie, including one taken at her high school graduation, and four years later, one of her receiving her BA in Journalism. There was a picture of her at her desk the first day on the job as a Brownsville newspaper reporter and one of her at the door of her new apartment. By then Charlie was allowed to bring a small camera to leave with the officer in charge at the Zanco visitors’ entrance and with which the officer would take Charlie and Axel’s picture at the end of the visit. Charlie had framed some of the better photos and put them on his living room wall, and on more than one occasion when Jessie came for supper, he had peeked out from the kitchen and seen her staring at them, though she never made mention of them. Still, Axel was pleased to hear it. Pleased that she knew what he looked like.

So well did he comport himself at Zanco that in his fifth year at the unit he was made a trusty. He proved worthy of the position, and he welcomed his responsibilities as a work crew leader as an additional distraction from his usual preoccupations. The X’s on his calendar seemed to accumulate more quickly. The weeks passed. The months. The years …

And then last February, during his monthly visit, Charlie said he had a story to tell him, but began by assuring him that Jessie was at home and perfectly fine and unharmed.

“What? What happened?”

A few weeks earlier, Charlie told him, Jessie had gone to Mexico City to visit Wolfe relatives and serve as a bridesmaid at a college friend’s nuptials, and the entire wedding party—bride and groom, four ushers, and four bridesmaids—had been abducted by a gang demanding five million dollars for all ten in the bunch from the wealthy parents of the wedding couple.

Charlie had gone down there with Rudy Wolfe, one of his best operatives, and with the help of their Mexico City relatives they extracted Jessie unharmed. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” Charlie said, “because why make you worry about something that worked out okay? But I knew it wouldn’t be right to keep it from you. Believe me, though, Ax, she’s absolutely fine; I wouldn’t lie to you about that. Hell, man, I came out worse than her. Took a bullet in the side, but luckily no real damage. You oughta be damn proud of her, man, the way she handled herself. She’s a Wolfe all the way to the ground.”

One of their Mexican cousins, Jessie’s longtime best friend, Rayo Luna Wolfe, had been a big help in getting her out of that jackpot, and she had come back to Texas with them. She and Jessie were renting the old beach house belonging to Harry Morgan Wolfe, an elder cousin of many younger Wolfes who call him “Uncle” in deference to his age. Axel wasn’t pleased by the idea of the two of them living by themselves in that isolated place way back in the dunes, but Charlie said he didn’t have to worry. In addition to being a stuntwoman in Mexican movies and TV shows, Rayo Luna had been a Jaguaro and was now working for him in the shade trade. “If you saw how that girl can use a gun and kick ass,” Charlie said, “you’d know Jessie’s got all the home security she needs.”

Still, as Axel’s yearning to see Jessie had grown keener over time, he had begun to fret that something might happen to him before he ever got the chance. Charlie’s report of her abduction gave rise to another anxiety—that something might happen to her before he got the chance.