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.