RUDY

13

The plane is a five-passenger business jet belonging to the Three Uncles, but it isn’t ready. Something about a faulty instrument light. It’s not till a couple of hours later that Charlie shakes me out of my doze in an office chair and we board the plane and take off. It’s a little four-seater but we’re the only passengers.

The rain has stopped but the cloud cover’s still thick. As we turn southward, the lights of Brownsville and Matamoros are patchwork glimmerings. Then we’re over Mexico and there’s only darkness down below.

Uncle Harry Mack has seen to the clearances for us to land at an auxiliary strip at Benito Juárez International in Mexico City, where we’ll be met by our cousin Rodrigo Wolfe. We’ve got passports and a bag of clothes. Everything else we need, the Mexican Wolfes will provide.

I can’t remember the last time Charlie left home to attend to a problem personally. That’s what Frank and I are for. From the time we graduated from college almost twelve years ago, we’ve worked as field agents for Wolfe Associates, which makes us state-licensed investigators, a handy sanction. According to the firm’s job description, a field agent traces witnesses, serves subpoenas, runs background checks and so forth, and sometimes we actually do such things, though the firm contracts with a private company to do most of that. For us Wolfes, “field agent” is mostly an occupation of record we enter on our tax forms. In truth we work for Charlie Fortune, mainly as gunrunners and sometimes as “fixers” for both him and Wolfe Associates. Whenever the firm is faced with a serious difficulty that can’t be resolved in a courtroom, or whenever someone fails to hold up his end of a deal with Charlie or in any way threatens a family project, we’re called on to resolve the matter. To fix it, if you will. Sometimes someone who wrongs us will haul ass and go into hiding, and so we first have to find him. We always do. At present, there are two other fixers in addition to me and Frank—a cousin named Roy Wolfe, and as of six months ago when he graduated from LSU, Eddie Gato. Roy likes to work alone, while Frank and I usually work as partners, but because Eddie’s new to the trade, Charlie has had him working with me since last summer.

Frank was irked at being left out of this one, but Charlie needs him to run things in his absence. Eddie Gato wanted to come too, naturally, but was already assigned to go to New Orleans tomorrow night to lend a hand to the Youngblood family. They’re our relatives through marriage, and our most important arms supplier east of Texas. They’re having a problem with a smuggling outfit that’s been trying to poach some of our southeastern sources and is suspected of hijacking shipments meant for us. It’s not so much that the Youngbloods need the help, but Charlie’s been wanting Eddie to get acquainted with them and saw this as a good opportunity to send him on his first solo job.

Immediately following the call from Harry Mack, Charlie filled us in on the situation with cousin Jessie. We knew she’d gone to Mexico City a few days ago to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of a couple she’s known since her college days, and she was expected to return to Brownsville the day after tomorrow. But according to Harry Mack—who received the information from Juan Jaguaro, the head of the Mexican Wolfes—she’d been kidnapped tonight, she and nine other members of the wedding party, including the bride and groom. Kidnapped late last night, to be more accurate, since it’s now Monday morning. The ransom’s five million, U.S., and the bridal couple’s parents have agreed to pay. The transfer’s set to begin at four o’clock this afternoon. The parents do not intend to tell anyone about the snatch and are unaware the Mexican Wolfes have learned of it. That’s all Harry Mack knew. We’ll get the details in Mexico City.

Evidently, the parents believe they have no choice but to trust the kidnappers. That’s their prerogative. We choose not to. We’re tolerant and liberty loving, as I’ve said, but we’re not free with our trust except with each other, and even then we can sometimes be chary. It could be that the snatchers truly intend to release the captives on receipt of the money. It works out like that more often than it doesn’t. But we know of too many kidnappings in which the ransom was paid in full and in exactly the manner dictated and without any violation of the agreement with the kidnappers, and the captives were killed anyway. Mainly for the age-old reason that the dead don’t tell tales. Even if the perpetrators don’t plan on doing away with the captives when they get paid off, they might get riled or panicked about something for whatever reason and decide to kill one for effect. To make a point of their seriousness. In such a case, the likely victim would be the captive who’s most expendable. The only one of the bunch not related to either bride or groom. Meaning Jessie.

It’s a possibility we can’t risk.

Find her before the money changes hands—and move fast to get her out. That’s our plan in a nutshell.

By tonight we’ll know how it went.

As we make our descent, the cloud-blurred lights of Mexico City materialize. It’s almost dawn but the overcast is well entrenched and the pilot says the prediction is for rain all day. I managed a catnap but I can tell that Charlie didn’t even try to sleep.

I’ve been to a number of places in northern Mexico, but this is my first time in the capital. Some might find that odd, considering the large family we have here, but that’s how it is. The Three Uncles have all come here at one time or another, but I don’t think any of them have been here in ages. Other than Charlie Fortune, who comes down once or twice a year to see the Jaguaros about things that neither he nor they will discuss in any way but face-to-face, Jessie’s the only Texas Wolfe who’s been in Mexico City in recent years, so far as I know. The Mexican Wolfes are the same way about Texas. The only one of them who’s visited us in years is our cousin Rayo Luna. We’re all under the same roof and in business together, but the two sides of the family generally tend to keep to their own side of the house.

The Beechcraft lands smoothly and taxis to a small building where a mustached man in a dark suit stands waiting by a door. We debark into a light wind threaded with the scent of rain. The man comes over and welcomes us, saying, “Bienvenidos a México, primos!” He introduces himself to me as my cousin Rodrigo Álvaro Wolfe but says to call him Rigo. We shake hands and embrace each other tight in a backslapping abrazo, then he and Charlie do the same. Charlie has met with him a number of times before and thinks highly of him. They’re about the same age, and as operations chief of the Jaguaros, Rodrigo is Charlie’s Mexican Wolfe counterpart. He has a degree in economics from UCLA and is as fluent in English as any of us. Like Charlie, he reports only to the heads of his family—his father, Plutarco, and his uncle, Juan Jaguaro, who is Plutarco’s big brother and the top man.

“Let’s get the customs bullshit over with,” Rigo says. “Then we’ll talk in the car.”

Over the generations, the Mexican side of the family has prospered even more than ours. They own two investment firms and are part owners of two banks. They own data processing companies. They have controlling interest in a shipping line. They’re established in Mexico City society and are prominent philanthropists who have endowed a number of education foundations and research institutes. And under the guise of Los Jaguaros, they’ve long been buying arms from us and selling them all over Mexico. Like us, they don’t deal in guns only for the money or because they believe strongly in the right of self-defense and in ownership of the means to exercise it. They do it because, like us, they believe in greater allegiance to our own rules than those of governments owned by powerful interests who play the public for fools. It’s a matter of self-respect as much as anything else.

Although the Jaguaros have received very little attention in contrast to the major crime cartels, they haven’t wholly escaped public notice. As periodically described by the news media, they’re the most covert criminal organization in the country, and some reports call them a cartel of their own. No one can say when their name first became known. Their home territory is rumored to be the capital itself but no one has ever proved it. The number of members in the organization is anyone’s guess, and so far as journalistic investigators have been able to determine, not a single member of the Jaguaros is known by name to any government agency. The only thing the federal authorities know about them is that they traffic solely in the sale of firearms, but on a scale that makes them the largest arms dealer in Mexico.

Some news outlets, however—their editors in the pay of shadowy intermediaries of the Jaguaros—have expressed chronic doubts that a Jaguaro organization even exists. They’ve repeatedly conjectured that the Jaguaros are nothing more than the fabrication of federal officials, one more ploy to distract the public from the government’s failure to stem the arms flow into Mexico or curb the spreading violence of the real cartels, and maybe even—as some of the bolder tabloids have insinuated—to cover up their collusion with those cartels. Some apprehended members of various crime gangs have told police that the Jaguaros certainly do exist and that their organizations have many times bought guns from them. The same skeptical media sources have dismissed these claims as a clever tactic to keep secret the cartels’ true suppliers.

The truth is that not even the other cartels know who the Jaguaros are. They know the Jaguaros work out of the capital, yes, and they know how to make contact with them to arrange an arms purchase, certainly. But to this day, none of the outfits has any inkling that the Jaguaros are connected to the estimable Wolfe family of Mexico City.

14

A white Tahoe picks us up in front of the terminal. The smell of the coming rain has grown stronger. In better weather the sun would be up now, but the cloud cover is so thick I don’t even know in which direction the sun might be. Rigo takes the shotgun seat and Charlie and I sit in back. Despite the overcast, the driver wears dark wraparounds. Wood-faced dude. He nods when Rigo introduces him as Chuy.

Even at this early hour the traffic into the city is already something to reckon with, but Chuy navigates it with ease. According to Charlie, you haven’t really risked your ass until you’ve tried driving in Mexico City.

Sitting half-turned toward us, Rigo asks how much we know about the snatch.

“Only what Harry Mack got from Juan Jaguaro,” Charlie says, and gives him the spare rundown.

Rigo then gives us the full account, which he says originated with his cousin—and ours—Rayo Luna, though he doesn’t say how she came by the information. The key points are that the kidnapped party’s being held in two groups at different sites, each group to be ransomed in turn, then all the captives released at the same time, and that the guy who claims to be running the show calls himself Mr. X.

“Number of perps unknown,” Rigo says. “But no question it’s an inside job involving the Huerta guy, the security chief working for Belmonte. What we don’t know is if Huerta’s the only security guy involved or if some of his men are in it too. It’s a small company, seven agents, all of them on duty at the reception, but we haven’t found any of them. Could be the whole outfit’s in on it. He’s got two secretaries, both single, both live alone. We’ve braced them, told them we were federal cops, grilled them good. Neither one seems to know anything. Got them under house arrest, man posted with them so they can’t contact anybody. We tossed the office but found nothing.

“What do you have on the Mr. X dude?” Charlie says.

“Nothing but what the parents said. Came across as a cool customer. Smooth talker, they said, educated.”

“Cartel?” Charlie says.

“Don’t think so,” Rigo says. “They’d be breaking an agreement the big guys have about Mexico City. The cartel honchos have to live somewhere, too, after all. A lot of them have homes here, their families. The understanding is it’s okay to talk business here but not do business here, and for damn sure not make war here. Some of their cowboys might get in a dustup now and then but it doesn’t happen often, and it’s always some personal deal, not war. The big guys don’t want undue attention here. They don’t want to alarm the good citizens or the tourists or hurt the city’s business. The government will deny it till doomsday, but word has it that as long as the resident big boys don’t make trouble in the capital, the feds will leave them alone in the capital.”

“So you figure small-time locals for the grab,” Charlie says.

“Who else?” Rigo says. “God knows how many kidnap gangs there are in Mexico City. Hell, man, snatcher gangs have made the bodyguard business a boom industry in this town. The thing is, most of their grabs are middle-classers who can’t afford a ransom like—”

“Smalltimers fuck up,” Charlie interrupts. “They’re reckless. The people they grab tend to get hurt, even killed, sometimes by accident, sometimes not. That’s what I know about small-time snatcher gangs. It’s riskier to Jess if it is a small-time bunch.”

“Normally I’d agree with you, cuz. But these Mr. X guys, they grab ten richies at once, and, according to the parents, without hurting anybody. Pretty smooth, no? The parents treated politely, taken to meet Mr. X so he can explain the deal in person instead of by phone or a letter. He has them driven home. Cool. Reassuring. They’re smart, these guys, they’re not greedy. They could tag these people for more than five mil but they don’t. They figure the families can pony up the five faster than, say, even ten. And they figure that two and a half mil from two banks is easier and faster than five mil from one. I think speed’s their thing. The faster it moves, the less chance of cops coming into it, of anything going wrong. My money’s on a small and highly competent bunch that’s looking to move up in status and knows there’s no percentage in harming the hostages. They get the money, they’ll let them go.”

“Unless they don’t,” Charlie says. “Look, man, ease up on the fucking comfort campaign. I don’t need it.”

Rigo gives him a narrow stare. “Fuck your comfort, Charlie. You wanna believe they’re gonna do her, whoever they are, go ahead and believe it. I don’t. Odds are they’re not gonna hurt any of them. All I’m saying. Those are the odds.”

For a minute nobody says anything. Charlie stares out the window. Rigo makes a show of checking his watch, the overcast sky.

“Sorry, man,” Charlie says without looking at him.

“Skip it, cuz,” says Rigo.

We’re in the central city now, in a six-lane river of nearly bumper-to-bumper traffic ranging from scads of limousines and luxury sedans to hordes of junkers trailing clouds of smoke. The Mexico City soundtrack, some call the steady blaring of car horns.

Rigo tells us his people have the groom’s parents’ house under surveillance from a house two blocks away. A three-story house whose top floor affords an excellent telescopic view of the Belmonte place. An associate of the Mexican Wolfes, a realtor dealing in exclusive homes, knows the owner of the house, who is vacationing in Hawaii. As a favor to the Wolfes, who told him they’re doing it as a favor to a filmmaker friend of the family, the realtor was able to rent the property for two days and nights so the director could shoot a few scenes set on a sumptuous estate. A Jaguaro team went there with movie equipment and told the household staff they could take the next two days off and paid them all a sum equal to a week’s wages.

We’re headed for the offices of Jiménez y Asociados, a legal firm dealing mainly in customs and international trade contracts. It’s only a few blocks from the Zócalo—the city’s immense central plaza containing the major federal offices, the National Palace, and the Metropolitan Cathedral. Jiménez has got the top six floors of a twelve-story building whose owner of record is Grupo Azteca Mundial, SA, a Latin American conglomerate whose financial ties would be very difficult for anyone outside the firm to unravel. In fact, the conglomerate is headed by Plutarco Wolfe, Rigo’s daddy, and the building belongs to the Wolfe family.

“The top floor is our operations center,” Rigo says. “It’s got a suite, if you’d like to clean up, have a bite.”

“Rayo be there?” I ask.

“For sure. I figured you’d want to talk to her, since she’s the one came up with the info. I’ve put her on this thing. Her first biggie.”

“She’s a Jaguaro?” I say.

He nods with a look of mock rue. “Insisted on a tryout. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Thing is, and just between us, she might actually work out.”

I grin back at him, not really that surprised by any of it.

Rigo clears his throat. “Look, guys, I know how you—”

Chuy hits the brakes and we all sling forward and hear the screech of tires behind us. A green-and-white microbus that cut in front of us from the lane to our right now cuts into the faster-moving lane on the left, squeezing in ahead of a braking taxi whose driver leans hard on his klaxon as if its squall means anything in the incessant cacophony. Then the traffic in that lane slows and we come abreast of the microbus. It looks like an oversized bread box, and I’d noticed a number of them since leaving the airport, all of them as packed with riders. Look like they can seat maybe two dozen and carry that many more standees holding to overhead rails. The driver of this one wears a red bandanna headband and looks to be in his twenties. He’s obviously irked at his mistake in moving into a slowing lane and he’s flicking glances at ours, looking for a break to slip back into it.

Chuy lays on his horn to attract the driver’s notice and says, “Chinga tu madre,” enunciating slowly so the guy can read his lips.

The driver’s eyes cut away from Chuy and go wide as he points ahead of us and mouths, Watch out!

Chuy taps his brakes as he whips his attention forward—and the microbus zips into the sudden gap in front of us.

The driver sticks his arm out and gives us the finger. Then he swerves ahead of a full-sized bus in the lane on the right, and the micro’s gone.

Motherfucker, Chuy says under his breath, the deep darkness of his ears evincing his embarrassment at having been faked out.

Rigo tells us there are thousands of such micros plying the streets of Mexico City, the cheapest form of public transportation in the capital. A lot of people still call them peseros because for many years their fare was one peso. Only after they’ve earned a daily quota determined by the company do the drivers start to earn their own pay. It’s a cutthroat competition, Rigo tells us, and hardly any wonder the drivers take such chances.

Charlie’s staring out at the passing traffic, not really listening.

“Hey, cousin,” Rigo says, and Charlie turns to him.

“They didn’t just take your niece,” Rigo says. “They didn’t just take a Texas Wolfe. They took somebody from the house, man. Jessica’s our blood, too, and we want to find her as much as you do, as fast as you do. I want to find her yesterday. But I don’t know if it can happen before payoff time. All I can say is we’ll probably hear something soon. We’ve got our spiders on this. Gave them the word without giving them specifics. They know how to do it, ask around without tipping anybody off. We don’t want the perps getting wind of somebody maybe being on to them. We want them believing they’re the smartest guys on the planet and this is the coolest snatch that ever was and nobody knows about it but them and the snatchees and the two sets of parents. The longer they believe that, the lower their guard and the better our chances of getting a fix on them.”

Charlie nods. Then goes back to staring out the window.

I understand why Rigo’s so confident about getting a quick lead of some kind. Charlie’s told me all about the “spiders” Rigo mentioned. They’re the Jaguaros’ information collectors. Every day, they range through an enormous web of sources that extends into every corner of the Federal District, sources from every social level—street rats, corporate staffers, shoeshine boys, political aides, cops, whores, bartenders, newspeople, you name it. The federals are wrong about the Jaguaros dealing only in guns. They also sell information. Almost exclusively to the cartels, who are always ready to pay for any report or rumor concerning anything that may affect them by way of the federal authorities and their American advisers, who are in this country in greater numbers than either the American or Mexican public knows. All the crime outfits have their own information sources, naturally, but, according to Charlie, they all know that none of them can match the network of Jaguaro connections in the capital.

The way Charlie explained it to me, the spiders are unknown to each other and don’t even know who they’re really working for. They relay their information to their district managers, who note its source and origin and get it keyed into computers, after which the data’s encrypted and sent to one of the many depots, as the Jaguaros call them—computer dealerships and tech support shops they own all over the city under the names of dummy corporations. The depots recode the information and then transmit it to a so-called warehouse through a routing system so labyrinthine that not even the depot techies know where it ends up. According to Rigo, those warehouses are some of the research institutes the Mexican Wolfes have endowed, a research institute being a perfect cover for filtering, cataloging, and storing coded information in readiness for Jaguaro computers seeking specific kinds of data.

That information network is why we came with the hope of finding Jessie fast. If there’s anything to be picked up out there that’ll lead us to her, the Jaguaros will find it.

15

The first fat raindrops are spattering the windshield and there’s a low roll of faraway thunder as we wheel into the building’s garage and park in Rigo’s reserved spot near the elevators. He uses an electronic key to activate an office elevator that takes us to the top floor.

In a spacious foyer appointed in colonial Spanish decor, a sleek young woman at the reception desk, her hair woven in a black braid extending to the small of her back, greets Rigo with warm informality. He introduces her as Ángela and she smiles and welcomes us to Jiménez y Asociados.

We go down a long hallway flanked by spacious offices and enter a storeroom whose walls are lined with ceiling-high shelves loaded with office supplies, then pass through another door and into a huge room spanning the width of the building but for one side that’s lined with private offices and the suite Rigo had mentioned.

The remainder of the room is full of cubicles containing computer terminals. The screens flicker. Printers hum. Young men in shirtsleeves are moving from cubicle to cubicle, reading screens and talking with the casually dressed technicians at the terminals.

Rigo tells us the techs have put in a coded request to the storage institute’s computers for all spider information gathered in the Federal District in the past three months that contains any reference, large or small, to kidnapping, as well as all information ranging from rumors to public records pertaining to Jaime Huerta or the Angeles de Guarda security company. The information has been coming in bits and pieces for the past three hours.

The techs scan it, Rigo says—speaking in Spanish for the first time since greeting us at the airport—and channel everything of related interest over to those computers.

He points to a table on the far side of the room where several men and one woman are seated at a long desk in front of a row of computers and focused on the monitors.

The woman looks up, and I see she’s Rayo Luna.

She grins at me in recognition, then says something to a young guy standing nearby who takes her place at the terminal and she rushes over to us. She hugs me and kisses me on the cheek and then does the same to Charlie, saying how happy she is to see us.

Then her face gets serious, like she just remembered why we’re here. We’re going to find her, she says. “Ya lo veras.”

Charlie makes no response. I smile and resist the urge to run my hand through her pixie haircut. We’ve known her since her first visit to Brownsville back when she and Jessie were around sixteen and Jessie was still living with Harry Mack and Mrs. Smith. Like Jessie, she’s a beaut—more of one, in my book, but then I’ve always preferred morenas, with their black hair and brown skin. She’s also something of a free spirit and nobody’s fool, I know that much, even though Jessie’s always tended to monopolize her on her visits and the rest of us never have much chance to spend time with her. In one of the few private exchanges I’ve had with her, I remarked—God knows why—that it was interesting we were both orphans as a result of our parents having vanished in the Gulf. She’d given me a strange look and said yeah, that was real interesting, all right. Can be hard to read her sometimes. Not a man of us isn’t impressed by the fact she’s a stunt woman. I’ve seen her run partway up the trunk of a palm tree and flip backward off it and land on her feet as lightly as a bird. She was wearing a flared skirt when she did it, and the peek of her undies made the exhibition all the more memorable. Frank once observed that she’s right out of Shakespeare. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” She’s not really all that little, maybe five seven or eight, around Jessie’s size, but she’s definitely fierce. Jessie’s told us about guys who were fools enough to cross her boundaries and suffered for it. The outfit she’s wearing—a black T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans—holds to her so nicely it’s an effort not to gawk. Plus she’s got this full-lipped mouth you can’t help but imagine yourself kissing . . . and yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s my cousin and so what? That’s never been an impediment to amorous liaisons in our family. The Mexican Wolfe patriarch, Juan Jaguaro himself, married his first cousin back when. Didn’t raise more than one or two family eyebrows.

We’re joined by a guy whose smile is a little awkward. Not in a way that suggests shyness but as if smiling is something he doesn’t do very much. He and Charlie clutch in an abrazo and say it’s good to see each other. Rigo introduces him to me as his younger brother, Mateo Genaro Wolfe. He’s clean-shaven like I am, and built about the same. Quick-eyed. We embrace and smack each other on the back.

Though we haven’t met before, I know a lot about him by way of Charlie. He’s only a few years younger than Charlie and is in charge of a crew of guys called Los Chamacos—the Kids—who are the equivalent of us fixers, only there’s more of them than us, Charlie told me. When the Jaguaros come up against a problem they can’t settle in standard business fashion, they turn it over to Mateo and his Chamacos to right the matter. The word on him is that he’s very damn good at his work—and capable of a fury belying his reserved manner. The family tales about him are legion, but the one that’s always stuck with me is the one Charlie told about Mateo’s first assignment as a Chamaco, when he was hardly more than an actual kid. He was sent to collect the outstanding difference, plus interest penalty, on an underpayment for an arms shipment. The debtor was the chief of a Toluca street gang and not much older than Mateo. When Mateo tracked him down at a plush house just outside of Toluca and told him to pay up, the kid told him to fuck himself and had four of his guys jump him. They gave him a pretty good going-over, breaking his nose and blacking his eyes, then stripped him of his gun and wallet and took him out in a car and dumped him on a four-lane highway full of midday traffic. The way Mateo told it to Charlie, he went bouncing over the pavement for what seemed like forever with tires screeching and cars swerving and whipping by him, and he was sure he was going to get splattered. When he stopped rolling he was just a few feet from the shoulder and still in one piece and he crawled to it as fast as he could as an 18-wheeler sped by within a foot of him, its blow-by knocking him rolling. It was God’s almighty wonder he wasn’t killed or didn’t break anything more than the pinky of his left hand. His clothes were torn, his elbows and knees gashed, his head knotty with bloody bruises, and he was going to be sore from head to foot for a month. But he was intact and could walk. The only vehicle that pulled over to see about him was a large truck full of field workers. They gave him a ride into town and he practically had to force them to accept the money he pressed on them. He called the capital from a pay phone and waited on a park bench until a quartet of Jaguaros came for him and took him to a clinic where he was sewn up and bandaged and given injections. That evening, he and the four Jaguaros overpowered the outside guards at the gang chief’s house and slipped inside and took care of another three guys without much fuss or noise. They searched the house as quiet as cats until they found the young boss in a bedroom, asleep with a girl on either side of him, everybody bare-assed. The kid woke to Mateo’s pistol muzzle on his mouth. Surprise of the fucker’s life, Mateo told Charlie. The kid was made to produce every last peso and dollar in the house, which amounted to twice as much as his debt to the Jaguaros. Mateo even got his gun and wallet back. He thanked the kid very much for his cooperation and then took him, still naked, down to his car and out on the same highway and had him kicked out of the speeding vehicle. There wasn’t as much traffic at that late hour as earlier in the day, but the kid wasn’t nearly as lucky as Mateo had been. In the brief moment before they lost sight of him, he was repeatedly struck and dragged and dispossessed of body parts. “You could say in complete truth,” Mateo had told Charlie in English, “that he paid more than an arm and a leg for his mistake.”

We spend the next half hour with Rigo and Mateo and Rayo in a private side room, where we’re shown a folder of photographs of the Belmonte and Sosa family members. Portrait photos, school pictures, newspaper and magazine shots taken at one or another soiree or sporting event or civic function.

Partly in English, partly in Spanish, sometimes in both languages within the same sentence, Rayo tells us everything she’s already told the Jaguaros several times. She says she was fooling around with a guy in a room in the Belmonte house when the bridal parents unexpectedly entered an adjacent office and she overheard them talking about the kidnapping. “Fooling around” is her phrase, spoken without hint of embarrassment. Which is another thing I’ve always liked about her—she’s as forthright as they come. She’s absolutely sure of what the parents said because they kept repeating things to each other, comparing their memories of what Mr. X had said to them.

“When I checked my landline messages this morning,” she says, “there was one from Sosa. Me díjo que JJ had gone with the rest of the wedding party a un rancho en Cuernavaca for another day of good time. Pero she lost su teléfono and so asked him to please give me a call and let me know she wouldn’t be home till tonight. He was covering for her absence.”

Rigo’s going to post men at the banks where Belmonte and Sosa will get the money. Lookouts for anybody shadowing either man. Mateo nods at Rayo and says, The kid and I will watch Sosa’s bank. It’s closest to the Belmonte house. Anybody looks right, we tail him. If he keeps on looking right, we grab him, see what he has to say. Same for the lookouts at Belmonte’s bank.

That’ll be me and Rudy, Charlie says.

Rigo nods like he was expecting that. If you wish, he says. Mateo will assign another man to you, too, just in case.

Duarte, Mateo says. Good one.

Charlie shrugs.

Rigo tells us that so far all the kidnapping items his communication techs have received have been in reference to snatches no more recent than two weeks ago, and the file searches on Huerta and his security company have uncovered nothing more than repetitious data attesting that Angeles de Guarda is a fully registered business with impeccable financial records and client evaluations that universally laud the company’s good service. Except for the bureaucratic data relating to his proprietorship of the company, there’s nothing on Huerta himself but a single police record of arrest for fighting in the streets when he was sixteen.

Something will come up, Rayo says. It’s hard to keep a secret in a small town, and you know what they say about Mexico City. It’s a small town of twenty million people.

Rigo goes off to the suite, and Mateo and Rayo take us into a room furnished with only a couple of long bare tables in its center and rows of lockers along the walls. Mateo opens one of the lockers and extracts a pair of cell phones and hands one to Charlie and one to me. Their directories contain no names and only three numbers—the first is Rigo’s, the second his, the third Rayo’s. All the phones are equipped with trackers. He withdraws a wallet from the locker, takes a gander in it, and hands it to me, then gets out another and gives it to Charlie. The wallets contain two kinds of identification with our picture and physical description—a Federal District driver’s license and an ID card for employees of Montoya Investigaciones SA, a private Mexico City investigation company. Montoya Investigaciones is a real company, Mateo tells us, owned by the Jaguaros through a combination of fronts. Its owner of record is a retired and highly venerated naval captain named Alejandro Montoya whose nephew is a ranking attorney in the mayor’s office. The company’s office is on a lower floor of the building we’re in.

If you should have to deal with the police, Mateo says, show them the card. The federals don’t care for private investigators, but they know Captain Montoya and give his people some latitude.

There’s a knock at the open door and one of the computer guys beckons Rayo. She excuses herself and goes off with him.

Mateo takes a pair of pistols from the locker and places them on the table and beside each one sets two 13-round double-stacked magazines and a shoulder holster. Beretta .380 Cheetahs. He asks if they’ll do or if we prefer something else.

Truth to tell, I prefer revolvers, big ones like my Redhawk. Revolvers don’t jam. Plus I hold with the view that if you need more than six shots to hit something, you really shouldn’t risk getting in a gunfight in the first place. But Charlie likes pistols and regards the Beretta highly. They’ll do fine, he says.

We join Rigo in the suite, where a table in the outer room is set with platters of sandwiches and bowls of fried chicken and baskets of pastries. There’s a large urn of coffee, and the refrigerator holds juices and soda pop and beer. Mateo fills a plate with pieces of chicken and cracks open a beer and sits at the table to eat. Rigo’s slumped on the sofa, watching a weather channel with the sound off. He says he likes the maps, the colors of the temperature bands. It’s very soothing, he says, the weather channel.

A radar map shows a pulsing bright green swath, wide and ragged, extending from South Texas down through central Mexico and all the way to a strip of coast that includes Acapulco. The forecast is for the rain to continue into the night.

Charlie says he’s going to take a fast shower, but as he starts for the bedroom, Rayo comes in with a printout paper in her hand and says, We got something on Huerta.

Everybody looks at her.

Nothing big, but it’s something, she says, suddenly looking a little nervous with so many expectant eyes on her. She tells us that just two weeks ago Huerta was seen coming out of the Alameda park in the company of two unidentified men, one of whom had a spike haircut. Huerta departed on foot, and the two men were picked up at the curb by a silver Grand Cherokee driven by a man of distinctly Asian extraction. The spider reported it because he knew Huerta owns a security company and such people are often of interest. The third man was said to be as tall as Huerta and wore a wide-brimmed hat and expensive white suit.

We stare at her.

And? Mateo says. The spider get a name? A plate number?

Well . . . no, she says. But the man with the spike hair . . . he has to be the one the parents mentioned, no?

It could well be, Mateo says. So now we know for certain that the parents can identify a spike haircut when they see one. And that one of the kidnappers dresses well. Was there anything else in the report?

No, sir, Rayo says. I just thought . . . no sir.

Thank you, Rayo, Rigo says. Attach it to the file, please.

It’s something, isn’t it? she says, a little flushed.

“It’s nothing,” Charlie says in English, getting up and going off to shower.

I don’t care for their tone. She was just trying to help.

When she leaves the room, I follow her out and say, “Oye.”

She looks back and stops, her eyes bright with anger and injured dignity.

“Listen,” I say. “It is something. It shows that the parents’ accounts are pretty accurate and reliable, which is a good thing to know.”

She nods and gives me a small smile. “Yeah, well . . . thanks.”

I watch her walk off. God, that rump.

When Charlie’s done with the bathroom, I take a turn in the shower and get into a pair of jeans, a sweater, the Beretta shoulder holster, a water­proof Windbreaker. Charlie’s dressed the same way. The spare magazines go in an outer zip-up pocket, the wallet with Mexican ID in an inner one.

In the dining room we help ourselves to sandwiches and coffee, then sit on the couch with Rigo and Mateo, who are talking about a pal of theirs who’s about to get married for the third time. The guy never learns, Mateo says.

He’s hardly the only one, Rigo says. Men tend to remember the best things about the women they’ve loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to forget the best things about the men they’ve loved and to remember the worst, which is why so many women are so bitter about men.

I can see Charlie’s not listening. He just stares at the pulsing green colors of the TV weather maps and checks his watch every two minutes.

16

Hardly anybody really knows Charlie Fortune. It’s not that he’s aloof or closed-mouthed. He enjoys kidding around and batting the breeze as much as the next guy, and he’s always liked swapping jokes with me and Frank. It’s just that he’s never been one for sharing his feelings, as they say. The truth is Frank and I probably know him better than anyone else does, even his daddy, if only because nobody else has spent as much time with him as we have. We’ve worked for him for around a dozen years now and have lived practically next door to him for the last sixteen, ever since he took us in when our parents died.

At least, everybody assumed they died. All anyone’s ever known for sure is that on a fine spring day of ideal weather and mild seas, they went out for a weekend sail one Friday morning in their sloop, the Annie Max, and never came back. When nobody had heard from them by Monday morning, the Coast Guard was notified and air units made a wide search for the next three days without spotting any sign of them. No flotsam, not a life jacket, nothing. After another two weeks, the family accepted their death as a fact. There was a memorial service for them and plaques were set in the family graveyard.

Frank and I were our parents’ only children, seventeen and sixteen years old at the time, but both of us heading into our senior year of high school by dint of our parents’ finagling my enrollment in first grade when I was only five so that Frank and I could be in the same grade all the way through school. They had willed us the house and we wanted to continue living in it, just us two, but some of our relatives were very much opposed. They said it would be unseemly and irresponsible of the family to permit any of its children to live without adult supervision while they were still in school. Frank and I said we weren’t children and could take care of ourselves quite well, thank you very much. So they took the matter to the Three Uncles. Whenever there’s a family conflict that the principals can’t settle on their own, the Uncles are asked to decide it. In this instance they ruled that we had to live under direct adult supervision until we graduated. Either an adult relative moved in with us or we moved in with an adult relative. We didn’t like the choice worth a damn, but in our family the rules are the rules, and one of the most basic is that a decision of the Uncles is final. Most of our relatives were willing to take us in, but the only one willing to move in with us was our spinster aunt, Laurel Lee. She’s a nice person in many ways and a real whiz with digital gadgetry, but she’s got some rigorous views about the proper governance of the legally underage, and the idea of being under her authority was as appealing as a yearlong stretch in reform school. Still, it was a better option than moving in with another household. We intended to inform her of our decision right after the memorial ceremony, but as soon as the service ended, Charlie Fortune came up to us to express his condolences and ask how we were doing.

We didn’t know him very well then. He’d gone off to Texas A&M when Frank and I were in elementary school, but even as little kids, we knew about his athletic achievements in high school. He had set a state broad jump record that stood for five years and he twice made all-state in football as a running back and three times in baseball as a catcher. He went to A&M because he wanted to stay in-state and preferred College Station to the other university towns. He majored in history, took full-time coursework even in the summer sessions, and got his degree in three years. He has many times said he would’ve gone on to law school except he didn’t meet the entrance requirements because he’d been born of married parents. You wouldn’t think that old joke would continue to get as many laughs as it does in a family with a half-dozen lawyers in it, including Harry Mack. As soon as he graduated, Charlie came home and went to work for our daddy, Henry James Wolfe, whom everybody called HJ, and who by that time had been chief of the family shade trade for about ten years, since shortly after I was born. Daddy had promised him a position as soon as he met the rule that requires any family member who wants to work in the shade trade to get a degree first, which is why Charlie had matriculated year-round at A&M, to get it over with as soon as he could. Frank and I would do the same thing at UT Austin. Charlie quickly became Daddy’s number two operative, behind Uncle Harry Morgan Wolfe, but even then Frank and I still didn’t see much of him. Unlike Daddy, who commuted daily from Brownsville to the Landing, Charlie lived out there from the day he entered the shade trade and but infrequently came into town. The only times we saw him were at family gatherings on holidays or birthdays, and our exchanges with him were pretty much limited to “hey” when we arrived and “so long” when we left.

Frank and I were in junior high when he got married. Her name was Hallie Rheinhardt and she was nineteen years old and the marriage lasted exactly eight days. Frank and I never did meet her. Nobody did except some of the folks who lived or worked at the Landing back then, including Daddy. All he ever told us about it was that Charlie met her in Galveston and married her two days later, then brought her home to the Landing, where they mostly kept to themselves for a week before she lit out while Charlie was making a gun run to Laredo. When he got back and found out she’d left, he went looking for her and was gone for almost three weeks before he came back and told everybody the marriage was over and done and he did not ever want to hear a word about her. Daddy said everybody was wise enough to take his warning to heart, and nobody ever mentioned Hallie Rheinhardt within earshot of Charlie again. So far as I know, that’s still true. It’s a whole story of its own, Charlie’s marriage.

For a while after it happened, though, he kept to the Landing and refrained from attending family events. Daddy figured he was feeling humiliated and probably thought everyone saw him as a fool, though in truth nobody did. Charlie Fortune was not the first man to fall in love with the wrong woman, Daddy said, and he would get over it by and by. In the meantime, Charlie made him an offer on the Doghouse Cantina and Daddy took it. He had inherited the place and never cared for the onus of operating it, but Charlie loved the joint. He enjoyed the badinage of bartending, and its management was no burden to him. Daddy believed that operating the Doghouse and socializing with the patrons did a lot to help Charlie get over the embarrassment of his marriage, and he pretty soon resumed attending family get-togethers.

It was at the family Christmas party at Uncle Peck’s house just a few months before our parents disappeared that Frank and I had our first real conversation with Charlie. It came about when Daddy mentioned to him in our presence that Frank was now the best high school pitcher in the county and I was the best third baseman and so on and so forth. His bragging on us made us uncomfortable in light of Charlie having been one of the best-ever players in South Texas, but the baseball talk got the conversational ball rolling between us. He was only twenty-six then, yet there was an air about him that made us address him as “sir” until he said to quit it and just call him Charlie. We jawed about baseball with him for about an hour before he said he had to leave and had enjoyed the talk and hoped we could do it again sometime. But we didn’t see him again until the memorial service, when he came up and asked how we were doing. By then the Three Uncles had appointed him to take Daddy’s place as chief of the shade trade.

It so happened he hadn’t heard about our residence problem and the Three Uncles’ edict about it, and Frank told him the whole thing.

“Jesus,” Charlie said. “You guys are gonna live with Aunt Laurel?”

All we could say was it beat the alternative.

He looked at us in a way he never had before. Like he’d just been asked a question about us and was trying to come up with a good answer. Then he asked if we’d like to live out at Wolfe Landing in one of the rental trailers, a double-wide in good shape that happened to be available. We wouldn’t have to pay rent, not even if we sold our parents’ house—which we would end up doing—but we’d have regular chores to do in lieu of rent. Our homework would always come first, but then would come the chores. He said it would be a long drive to school in Brownsville, but he’d provide the vehicle, and because we were under eighteen, he’d see to it we were given “hardship” driver licenses so we could drive without a licensed adult in the car.

We couldn’t believe it. A house and a car and the licenses to drive it on our own. We also couldn’t believe the Uncles would allow it, since they’d said we had to live under the same roof with an adult.

Charlie said to leave it to him, he’d talk to the Uncles that night.

We didn’t think they would okay it, but they did. They said his offer to be our guardian and supervise us until we were of legal age met the terms of their ruling, and, notwithstanding the protests of some in the family, the matter was closed.

So Frank and I moved to Wolfe Landing.

Like all Texas Wolfes, we’ve known about the shade trade from the time we were kids, and we’d been taught never to speak of it to anyone outside the family. Until we moved to the Landing, however, we’d been there only once, back when we were still in grammar school. We nagged Daddy into taking us out there one Saturday but he wouldn’t let us go exploring, so there was nothing for us to do but fish off the dock, and we got so bored we never asked to go out there again. That suited Daddy just fine and very much pleased Momma, who never liked the Landing or its “denizens,” as she called its residents.

When we went to live there, though, we not only were older but had a whole summer to get acquainted with the place, and we came to love it. We loved its distance from the rest of the world. We loved its shadowy green daylight and the awesome blackness of its dank nights, the raw smells of the passing river and the surrounding resacas. The sudden frantic splashings in the dark. The ghostly calls of owls. The hissing of wind in the palms and the mossy hardwoods. We loved its wildness.

Our daily chore was to maintain the Landing’s dock, to keep it swept and mopped, ensure that the cleats and mooring lines and tire bumpers were in good shape and replace whatever wasn’t, and to help out Len Richardson at his Gringo’s Bait & Tackle store in any way he might need. Richardson had come to the Landing only a few years ago, supposedly from Florida. He knew a thousand good jokes, but he never said much about himself. Probably for good reason, since rumor had it he was on the run from more than one felony warrant. He was hardly the only resident of the Landing with such a rumor about him.

Twice a week we also had the duty of burning the Landing’s garbage in a pit—all except the large meat scraps and bones from the Doghouse kitchen. Those we took to the Resaca Mala and dumped into the water just before dark. The first time we were told to do it, we asked how come. It was a much longer haul from the Doghouse to the resaca than to the burn pit, and we’d have to transport the garbage bags in a pickup. Charlie said he did a lot of fishing there and liked to fatten up the fish, the turtles too, which made fine soups and stew. So off we went in the truck into a risen gray dusk. We were dumping the second garbage sack when the alligators came tearing out of the shadowy reeds of the opposing bank. We hollered and nearly pissed ourselves and put some fast yardage between us and the water’s edge before we stopped to watch them chomping up the scraps. Then we busted out laughing at both our fright and the thrill of the feeding frenzy. It was a hell of a spectacle. We then dumped the rest of the scraps, working our way along the bank, the snapping, growling armada of gators churning along behind us.

When we told him about the scare we got, Charlie laughed and said he knew there was something he’d forgotten to tell us. He said Resaca Mala has always been full of gators. “Those fellas long been useful,” he said, “for disposing of, ah . . .”

“Mortal testimony?” I said.

“Why yes, Rudy Max,” he said. “That is precisely their inherent and perennially valuable function.” He can talk like that when he wants to.

He was obviously pleased we weren’t shocked by the revelation about the gators, and from then on he took as much delight in telling us smuggling stories as we took in hearing them. By the time we had to go back to school we knew the shade trade was for us, and one evening when we were having supper with him, we told him so.

“Oh hell, gents,” he said. “I’ve known that since the first time you fed the gators.”

Thus began a routine that held throughout our last year of high school and during which time Charlie became more of a big brother to us than an older cousin. We drove the thirty-five-mile round trip to school every weekday and then usually went there again on weekend nights to take our dates to the movies or a dance, and then afterward, if they were the adventurous sort, out to a secluded stretch of riverside for a little moonlight dallying. We were diligent about our schoolwork and made good grades, and we conscientiously tended to our chores.

And best of all, we began to learn the shade trade.

Daddy had taught Frank and me to shoot when we were just boys, and we kept in practice and were both good shots. But under the tutelage of Charlie Fortune and Niño Ramirez, who back then ran the gun shop, we really came to learn about guns, about the workings of every type of small arm that came through the Republic Arms. On road and topography maps, Charlie showed us the overland passages to key delivery points in the geographic triangle formed by Brownsville, Laredo, and Monterey. He taught us astral navigation and how to read nautical charts. He showed us the locations of the hidden cuts into the Mexican stretch of the Laguna Madre and showed us the channels and transfer points inside the lagoon. In the spring, he brought Uncle Harry Morgan Wolfe into our training. Captain Harry, as everyone calls him, manages Wolfe Marine & Salvage, as well as the family’s shrimp boat and charter boat businesses, and some of his smuggling adventures in younger days are legendary. He’s about fifteen years Charlie’s senior, on which basis he could have succeeded our daddy as chief of the shade trade, but he didn’t want the job and preferred the Uncles give it to Charlie. He was satisfied with prepping the boats to make the runs, and from time to time making a delivery himself, just to keep his hand in. He and Charlie familiarized us with the smuggling vessels—the shrimp boats for offshore deliveries, a charter boat with a modified hull for deliveries in the lagoon shallows—and taught us to pilot them by day or night, on open sea and in coastal channels.

Although Charlie strictly adhered to the family rule that doesn’t permit a Wolfe to take part in any shade trade operation until after he’s out of college, I believe that by the end of the ten months Frank and I lived at the Landing before graduating from high school we were already better prepared for the trade than anybody our age had been since our ancestors back in the day. That’s how well Charlie trained us. And he did more than that. He taught us. He taught us the rules of the family, and he taught us a lot of truths as he saw them. The most important of them—Frank and I have always agreed on this—is that the only things you can ever truly own cannot be bought with money.

All of that is why I believe Frank and I know Charlie Fortune as well as he can be known. I don’t think anyone else, not even his own daddy, can make that claim.

Except maybe Jessie Juliet.

Besides being her uncle, Charlie is Jessie’s guardian. Not in a legal way—there’s no court document involved—but in the more binding sense that he had promised her daddy, his brother, Axel, that he would always watch out for her. When Axel was sent to prison for thirty years for the armed robbery of a Dallas jewelry store, he was just twenty-two years old and Jessie was two. It was a stiff sentence for a first-time conviction, but there had been shooting as the robbers made their getaway, and some people were wounded, including Axel, who took a bullet in the leg and was captured. He hadn’t fired a shot, but he refused to rat on his accomplices, both of whom got away with a load of jewels, so the court came down hard on him. Not even the Uncles’ most talented criminal law associates could get him a lesser sentence. He’d been inside the walls a year when his wife took off for parts unknown, deserting baby Jessie. Axel’s and Charlie’s sister, Andie, their only other sibling, had two young children of her own and wanted to take Jessie into her family, but Axel wouldn’t have it. He’d never approved of Andie’s poor choice of husband, and he asked Charlie’s promise to always take care of Jessie and not ever let Andie get custody of her. Charlie made the promise, but he was in his senior year at A&M at the time and couldn’t do much about tending to Jessie himself. So he went to their daddy for help, and even though Harry Mack looked on Axel as a severe disappointment, he agreed to take Jessie into his home under the care of Mrs. Smith, who had been his household employee for more than twenty years. She had only recently been widowed when he hired her to attend to his three young children after his wife died giving birth to Charlie, and even after Charlie left for college she stayed on as Harry Mack’s cook and housekeeper. Everyone liked her, but she wasn’t one for revealing much about herself, and though her first name was said to be Rachel, nobody, not even Harry Mack, so far as I know, ever referred to her or addressed her as other than Mrs. Smith. She was a handsome woman and a model of probity through all the years she worked for him, but there were whispers that she had long been more to him than his housekeeper and children’s nanny. Maybe she was, and if so, good for them. Frank and I had known Mrs. Smith since we were little kids and thought she was wonderful, and not just because she made the best pecan pies in Cameron County.

When Charlie graduated from A&M and came to work in the shade trade, he and Harry Mack both felt it would be best if Jessie remained under Mrs. Smith’s care. But he kept his promise to Axel to watch out for her. During the thirteen years she lived under his daddy’s roof, Charlie made it a point to go into town twice a week and take her out for a movie and a pizza, ask her about school and so forth, just generally chat. So far as I know, neither of them ever shared with anyone else the things they talked about, including her feelings about her daddy. Charlie did tell me and Frank that she only once asked to go visit him, back when she was about ten, but as they were about to enter the prison she suddenly busted out crying and ran back to the car. Charlie couldn’t persuade her to go inside. He went ahead and saw Axel, who said he understood. She never again asked to go see her father, and has repeatedly turned down Charlie’s invitation each time he goes. To this day she’s never been to visit him.

She was in her senior year of high school when Mrs. Smith died of a heart attack. Harry Mack was doing a lot of casework all around the state in those years and was often gone for days at a time and sometimes a week or more, and neither he nor Charlie wanted Jessie to be home alone. All our relatives offered to take her in, and Harry Mack wanted to hire another housekeeper, but Charlie said she was his responsibility, and although he’d been okay with Mrs. Smith watching over her, nobody else would do. So he rented a house in Brownsville for the two of them to live in until she graduated. As soon as Jessie would leave for school in the mornings, Charlie would go to the Landing, and he’d return home in time for them to have supper together. At that time, Frank and I had been in the shade trade about three years, and on most weekends we’d join the two of them for a patio barbecue and a rented movie. We saw a lot of Jess and Charlie over the course of those months until she finished high school, and if I hadn’t seen it for myself I wouldn’t have believed Charlie could look on anybody with such tender affection as he did her. It was the same for Jessie. You could see it in her eyes even as she’d mock-sass him or make him the butt of some joke he’d end up laughing at along with me and Frank.

However, people being how they are, a nasty rumor about Charlie and Jess began to circulate not long after they started living together. Frank or I or anyone else of the family would have loved to be the ones to deal with whoever started it, but we all knew Charlie would want to attend to it himself. He made inquiries and learned the rumor had originated with a former football teammate who’d long been resentful of Charlie’s having stolen a girlfriend from him. The fella now owned his own construction company, and that’s where Charlie ran him down one morning. Frank and I tagged along to make sure nobody else stepped in. The guy had been a defensive end and was every bit Charlie’s size, but Charlie pounded his ass from one end of the parking lot to the other. The fight being in public view, somebody called the police and they showed up pretty quick, which was a good thing or Charlie might’ve hurt the guy even worse. As it was, he was all busted up—broken jaw, one eye shut, a broken foot where Charlie stomped his arch, a few other ailments. Nonetheless, he was able to convey to the cops that he’d been the one to start the fight and didn’t want to press charges, which all in all was a right thing to do. Not too long afterward, Jessie got a note from the fella, expressing his regret for having said the awful lies he did and asking her to forgive him. She asked Charlie if she should, and he said it was up to her. And she did.

At the conclusion of her high school graduation ceremony, Jessie came running up to the family bunch of us in attendance and waved her diploma in Charlie’s face, saying, “My emancipation paper, Mr. Charles Fortune Wolfe! I’m free of you at last!” Then she flung herself on him and whooped like a kid as he whirled her around.

Yeah. If anybody else knows Charlie as well as Frank and I do, it can only be Jessie.