The Ways of Wolfe E-Book

James Carlos Blake

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: The Wolfe family series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 392

Beschreibung

A master of historical and crime fiction, James Carlos Blake delves back into the dark realms of the Wolfe family, a clan whose roots run deep on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, and whose prevailing interests straddle both sides of the law. Twenty years ago, college student Axel Prince Wolfe - heir apparent to his Texas family's esteemed law firm and its 'shade trade' criminal enterprises - teamed up with his best friend, Billy, and a Mexican stranger in a high-end robbery that went wrong. Abandoned by his partners, he was captured and imprisoned, his family disgraced, his wife absconded, his infant daughter Jessie left an orphan. Two decades later, with eleven years still to serve, Axel has long since exhausted his desire for revenge against the partners who deserted him. All he wants now is to see the woman his daughter has become, despite her lifelong refusal to acknowledge him. When the chance comes to escape in the company of Cacho, a young Mexican inmate with ties to a major cartel, Axel takes it, and a massive manhunt ensues, taking the pair down the Rio Grande and into a desert inferno. With his chance to see Jessie now within reach, a startling discovery re-ignites an old passion and sends Axel headlong toward reckonings many years in the making.

Leseprobe

THE WAYS OF WOLFE

Twenty years ago, college student Axel Prince Wolfe – heir apparent to his Texas family’s esteemed law firm and its ‘shade trade’ criminal enterprises – teamed up with his best friend, Billy, and a Mexican stranger in a high-end robbery that went wrong. Abandoned by his partners, he was captured and imprisoned, his family disgraced, his wife absconded, his infant daughter Jessie left an orphan. Two decades later, with eleven years still to serve, Axel has long since exhausted his desire for revenge against the partners who deserted him. All he wants now is to see the woman his daughter has become, despite her lifelong refusal to acknowledge him. When the chance comes to escape in the company of Cacho, a young Mexican inmate with ties to a major cartel, Axel takes it, and a massive manhunt ensues, taking the pair down the Rio Grande and into a desert inferno. With his chance to see Jessie now within reach, a startling discovery reignites an old passion and sends Axel headlong toward reckonings many years in the making.

Racing across desolate landscapes from West Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, The Ways of Wolfe is the taut story of one man’s love for a daughter he has never met and his fateful struggle with his own reckless spirit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo credit: Maura Anne Wahl

James Carlos Blake is one of the America’s most highly regarded living authors of historical crime fiction. Born in Mexico, his family moved regularly when he was a child, living in various towns along the border and coast before finally settling in Texas when he was six. After a stint in the army, Blake attended the University of South Florida and received a Master’s degree from Bowling Green State University, both universities where he would later teach. In 1997 he left teaching to write full-time.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FORTHE HOUSE OF WOLFE

‘Brilliant and uncompromising, Blake again proves why he is one of the best writers working today’ – Ace Atkins

‘The laws of nations are thinnest at the edges, and Blake’s story throws a spotlight on those outliers who have chosen their own codes over any others. This fast-paced, well-plotted thriller reads like a mix of Cormac McCarthy and Elmore Leonard’ –Library Journal

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FORCOUNTRY OF THE BAD WOLFES

‘[A] beautifully crafted book… rich in historical detail and featuring memorable characters… takes the historical novel to an entirely new place… an exceptional piece of modern fiction’ –Tucson Citizen

‘[A] sprawling saga… Blake’s knowledge of the history and particulars of the periods and places where the account takes place reveals close research and almost encyclopaedic knowledge, especially in small details… his [is a] prodigious talent’ –Dallas Morning News

‘Blake excels in gorily choreographed fight scenes, with all make and calibre of guns discharging, sabers slashing, and body parts taking wing’ –Texas Monthly

‘full of wry humor and thoughtful writing’ –Kirkus Reviews

‘engrossing and wonderfully realized’ –Publishers Weekly

‘[I]mbued with the magical realism of García Márquez… [and] the frontier brutality of Cormac McCarthy… Blake’s story will entertain fans of historical and adventure novels alike’ –Shelf Awareness

‘A literary page-turner… a romantic, violent, panoramic historical saga... [written] with a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s love of words… a fascinating read’ –San Antonio Express

‘Spanning three generations, [Blake] spins the tale of a family “cursed by twin passions.” Some in the Wolfe clan are “in thrall to the passions of the flesh,” others “to a passion for risks of blood,” and many are “damned by both.” Love and violence rule the day, and are parceled equally between the sexes… Country of the Bad Wolfes is an engrossing novel’ –Texas Observer

‘Over the years, Blake has often been compared to Cormac McCarthy, mainly because both writers often use Mexico as setting and symbol and both are known for focusing on aspects of the human attraction to violence. Blake delivers on both in Country of the Bad Wolfes…[which] is the first of a rumored series of books about the big bad Wolfes. This first book will lead many readers to look ahead anxiously for the next one’s appearance’ –Southwestern American Literature

‘[A] worthy book… Country of the Bad Wolfes is a poetic…offspring of Gabriel García Márquez and Cormac McCarthy… The Wolfe family is said to be cursed by “passions of the flesh” and “risks of blood”…“a curse like a ready noose around the neck of every Wolfe.” In the end, it is the quick, thoughtless choices of flawed men, women, leaders and nations that cause suffering, violence and early death. For Blake, it seems, we are all cursed with that noose around our neck’ –Tucson Weekly

‘A great read from start to finish, full of grit, local color, and a large cast of vibrant characters… this brawling, high-spirited, and superbly realized family saga… offers many pleasures, including endearing characters, unlikely love stories, and all manner of mayhem. Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction’ –Library Journal

‘This is the masterwork that Blake has been working on for years. Don’t be intimidated by the book’s epic, multi-generational scope either. You’ll be absolutely riveted from the first page… Full of fascinating history, the Wolfe family saga is ribald, raunchy and essential reading… don’t miss it’ –Poisoned Pen

‘Blake has a sure-handed grasp of 19th-century western US history and culture that is every bit as engaging and authentic as say, Cormac McCarthy and Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jim Harrison… [A] skillful and astute narrative… an enthralling tale’ –Our Man in Boston

‘A sprawling, magnificent story of three generations of men, their fortunes, loves and losses, during a fascinating time in the history of the United States and Mexico’ –Bookworks

‘[A] wild tale of family, twins and politics… [with] Hemingway-like descriptions… You won’t want to put this one down until it’s over… The Wolfes are a lively bunch… that make Zorba the Greek look dull… The book is not for the weak-hearted, or the highly Moral. It will make you squirm a bit, no matter how open-minded or tough you think you are. It is a violent book… of turbulent times… [but] there is beauty and love, and antics of a high-spirited family. It is exciting and rewards an intellectual curiosity about how things work, how the world changed, how history is interpreted. You will want to read all of Blake’s books. Bravo’ –Helium

‘[A] sweeping family saga [of] adventuring and philandering, smuggling and murdering and politicking in early-1900s Mexico and the borderlands… Blake not only weaves a good fireside yarn, he produces a strong literary tale too. [He] expertly plays with form, changing verb tense and perspective occasionally, slipping back and forth through time and place as though from string to string on a guitar neck… [And] the women in this novel are also strong, smart, and funny… men’s equal in Wolfe country’ –Rain Taxi

‘The book is trademark Blake with rogue heroes, duels, and demons and angels of human nature locked in a violent dance with one another. It’s a look at the United States and Mexico and the bloodshed, politics, and history that lies between the borders… As a whole, James Carlos Blake’s work has the feel of lived-in legend. It’s a collection of old folk ballads singing to a new present. And I highly recommend you listen… Country of the Bad Wolfes tells us the best is yet to come’ –Mystery People

‘[In] a story of power and what will be done to keep it, James Carlos Blake puts together a historical novel packed cover to cover with intrigue… a fine and much recommended addition to any historical fiction collection’ –Midwest Book Review

‘This is historical fiction in the manner of Umberto Eco… many-faceted, slow, and savory’ –Booklist

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR JAMES CARLOS BLAKE AND THE RULES OF WOLFE

‘Blake’s literary badlands are uniquely his own’ –GQ

‘For anyone who has never experienced the exceptional talent of the idiosyncratic Blake, this is a wonderful novel to start with… Passionate, bloody and yet incredibly romantic, it is a tribute to the genius of its author’ –Geoffrey Wansell,Daily Mail

‘Nobody writes about blood and guts better than James Carlos Blake’ – Washington Post

‘James Carlos Blake writes with the muscularity of great pulp novels and the grace of a dancer – from the edge of an America that is forever frontier’ –James Sallis

‘Blake’s prose is muscular, his dialogue and details are keenly observed… one hell of a ride’ – Booklist

‘Blake’s customary zest for life and death makes his latest modern historical thriller violent, sexy and exciting’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘Blake writes with a fearless precision and a ruthless sensibility, his prose is spare and tough, and his descriptions detailed and cinematic’– Publishers Weekly

‘One of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life’ – Entertainment Weekly

‘James Carlos Blake is a formidable writer [and] a deft stylist, welding the language with power and authority’ – Tucson Weekly

‘James Carlos Blake is of the Cormac McCarthy/Sam Peckinpah school of storytelling: Make it bloody as hell, but make it beautiful’ – Dallas Morning News

‘One of the most original writers in America today’ – Chicago Sun-Times

‘An epic chase’ – Men’s Journal

‘Riveting’ – Latinidad

‘This sand-blasted odyssey is quick, bloody and beautiful with prose as eloquent and unexpected as a cactus flower’ – Madison County Herald

In memory of

James Dickert,

Donald R Wyly, Jr,

and

Thomas E Sanders

Great teachers all.

The past is the present… It’s the future, too. We all

try to lie our way out of that but life won’t let us.

– Eugene O’Neill

These violent delights have violent ends.

– William Shakespeare

All men should strive to learn before they die what

they are running from, and to, and why.

– James Thurber

Who is not of our ways is our enemy.

– Anonymous

PROLOGUE

Dallas, Texas. 1984

Axel Wolfe stole a white Ford Fairmont out of the zoo parking lot, then followed Duro’s black Mustang up to I-30 and then eastward a few miles to an exit near a shopping mall. They left the Mustang in the next-to-last row at the rear of the mall’s outdoor lot, then took a busy street north for several miles before turning off into a small commercial plaza consisting of a single L-shaped one-story building housing a dozen small businesses, including a jewelry shop. It was twenty past nine and the bright morning was heating up fast on a day predicted to hit the high nineties and maybe break a hundred.

They parked next to a row of shrubbery near the jeweler’s – which stood in the middle of the long side of the L layout, its venetian blind down and the slats closed – then went to the Mexican café at the end of the short side of the L and sat in a window booth. All three of them wore light sport jackets. Axel and Billy also wore plain-lens eyeglasses, Axel a false mustache, Billy a plastic-strip bandage across the bridge of his nose. Duro wore sunglasses he did not remove.

They had a clear view of the jeweler’s, about sixty feet from the café on a diagonal line through the parking lot. They ordered coffee from the young waitress and when she brought it they insisted on paying the tab and tipping her then and there. To save time, Duro told her, because they were waiting for a pager notice from a client and would have to hurry off as soon as they received it. He withdrew a laminated bar graph from an expandable attaché case and they affected a relaxed review of it as they chatted in low voice.

The case also held eight sets of plastic flex cuffs, a wide roll of duct tape, and a pair of loaded 9mm Browning pistols fitted with suppressors. Brandished indoors, such accessorized pistols look the size of small cannons, the better to induce unhesitant cooperation. A third Browning, sans silencer, lay under a folded newspaper on the front seat of the Fairmont. Each man carried two extra fully loaded magazines.

They sipped their coffee. No one entered or exited the jeweler’s, and its blinds stayed down. A few minutes before ten a yellow Camaro pulled into the lot and parked a few cars over from theirs. The two men in it got out – both in sunglasses, jeans, boots, loose baggy shirts, one of them carrying a slim black document pouch – and went into the jewelry shop.

They slid out of the booth and exited the café with casual dispatch, Billy and Duro bearing toward the jeweler’s, Axel toward the Fairmont. At the shop’s door, Duro unzipped the briefcase and he and Billy furtively withdrew the Brownings, then went inside. Axel got in the Fairmont and cranked it up and turned on the air conditioner. He took off his jacket and tossed it on the backseat, then lowered the car window and removed his mustache and flung it into the shrubs. He broke the fake glasses in two and wiped the lens on each half with his shirt and flung the glasses into the shrubs too and raised the window. A station wagon pulled into the lot and parked and a man got out and went into a locksmith’s shop. A trio of gesticulating girls came out of a nail salon and got in a small sedan and departed. Now there was no activity at all in the plaza. No one in view. Time seemed arrested. He fingered the pistol under the newspaper.

Then out they came, Duro in the lead, the briefcase under an arm and hiding his gun hand, Billy right behind him and shutting the door as he exited, holding his gun under his jacket, both of them moving with the same cool briskness as before. Billy got in the back and Duro slid into the shotgun seat. Axel backed out, drove up to the exit, and melded into traffic.

‘We’re rich!’ Billy Capp cried, flinging his nose bandage and glasses out the window and then closing it. ‘God damn if we ain’t!’

* * *

‘They’re standing and talking at the counter, and you shoulda seen their faces, all of them – the old jeweler and his guard and the two carriers! Their eyes got this big when we come in pointing the pieces at them.’ Billy was telling Axel about it as they headed back to the mall. ‘Duro says hands up, and every hand just flew up. I keep them covered and Duro takes their pieces and sticks them in the briefcase. Pouch was right there on the counter and he checks to see the bonds are there, sticks it in the briefcase too. Tells everybody get on the floor and for me to shoot anybody even looks like he’s thinking to try something. Cuffs them hands and feet, and then zip-zip-zip, gags them with the tape. Tells one of the carriers he’s left his wrist cuffs loose enough he oughta be able to work free in ten, fifteen minutes if he puts his mind to it. And we were out of there! Man, oh man, went like clockwork! Feel like goddamn Dillinger!’

* * *

The shopping center parking lot was shimmering with heat and packed with cars on this day before the July Fourth holiday. It was fenced all the way around except at the center’s main entrance and had various entry-exit gates. The sun was glaring off everything of glass, of chrome. They turned in to the parking lane where they’d left Duro’s car and were almost to it when a small red sports car shot rearward out of a space directly in front of them. Axel braked hard but couldn’t avoid bashing into it.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Duro said.

Axel backed up a few feet and stopped as the driver stormed out – a kid, tall and skinny – shouting, ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ He came to the rear of his car and furiously regarded the broken tail light and dented fender. It was a Porsche 911 Coupe with a Southern Methodist University decal in the back window. There wasn’t enough room to drive around it. The kid glared at him and yelled, ‘Asshole! Look what you did!’ A pretty girl with a ponytail emerged from the passenger side and stood there, squinting against the brightness.

‘Hell with this,’ Duro said, opening his door. ‘Let’s hoof it to my car.’

‘He’ll follow and get your tag,’ Axel said. ‘Get a good look at us.’

Duro yanked the door shut. ‘Then back out into the cross lane and –’

‘Hey!’ the kid yelled. ‘Hey! Over here!’ He was looking past them and waving his arms over his head.

They turned and saw the police cruiser idling on the cross lane behind them. The sunglassed driver the only occupant. He raised a radio handset to his mouth.

‘Of all the shit luck,’ Billy said. ‘What’s –’

‘He’s checking the plate,’ Axel said. ‘Might’ve been reported right after we took it.’

‘Come on!’ the kid yelled, beckoning the cop.

The cruiser backed up and then slowly turned into their lane and stopped about fifteen feet from them. The cop was talking on the radio.

‘What the hell, man?’ the kid said, shrugging at the cop, palms up.

There was a crackle from the cruiser’s activated megaphone. ‘Everyone in the white car! Exit the vehicle now! Keep your hands where I can see them!’

‘He made us,’ Duro said. ‘Go!’

Axel goosed the Fairmont and rammed the right rear of the Porsche, knocking it out of their way and into an adjacent car with a crash of metal and glass, the girl jumping away with a shriek.

The cop’s roof lights came ablaze and the cruiser leaped after them as Axel sped to the end of the parking lane and wheeled onto the lot’s perimeter road, tires screeching, then raced along the flanking chain-link fence. There were few cars parked in this farthest reach of the expansive lot. No people in view.

‘Get us lost in all them cars in the middle of the lot,’ Duro yelled. ‘We’ll scoot out and mix with the crowd, sneak back to my car.’

‘Not with this fucker on our ass!’ Billy yelled, looking out the rear window as the cruiser swung into Axel’s rearview mirror. The cop was driving with one hand and holding the handset to his mouth with the other.

Duro yelled, ‘Go for the engine block!’ and leaned out the window and Axel heard the whamp-whamp-whamp of the suppressed gunshots, and then Billy was shooting from his window too.

The cruiser dropped back as if a tow rope had been severed, steam billowing from under its hood.

‘Yow! We hit something!’ Billy said.

The cop braked to a halt and jumped out, drawing his revolver and aiming it two-handed as Axel slowed to make a tight left into a lane of parked cars and void of people. Almost all in the same instant, he heard the cop’s two shots and the two thunks against the door and felt a jolt in his hip and yipped. Then they were out of the cop’s view and he slowed the Fairmont and turned right at the next cross lane.

‘You hit?’ Billy said.

‘Okay! I’m okay!’ Axel said.

He eased into a parking lane where a scattering of people were heading toward the mall building or returning to their cars, a few looking around, maybe having heard the cop’s gunshots but not comprehending what they were.

They slowly wove from parking lane to parking lane toward the center of the lot, into densely packed rows of vehicles and heavier pedestrian traffic, Axel’s hip throbbing. There was a siren in the distance.

‘Gonna be cops all over real quick,’ Billy said. ‘Let’s bail right here.’

‘No,’ Duro said. ‘We leave this barge blocking the lane, the guy behind us’ll get pissed and start a racket, attract attention. Gotta park it.’

The next lane Axel turned into was also jammed with parked cars but was bare of pedestrians. ‘There!’ Duro said. A car was backing out of a space just ahead. More sirens now, growing louder. More people looking around, holding shopping bags, standing at pushcarts, jabbering at each other.

Axel wheeled into the vacated spot and cut off the engine and Duro and Billy got out, Duro with the briefcase again hiding the Browning in his hand. Billy’s pistol was in his waistband under his jacket. Axel stepped out and almost fell at the stab of pain in his hip. The bloodstain was dark and he pulled out his shirttail to cover it. They were about a dozen rows from where the Mustang was. Duro and Billy sidled over near a handful of people cutting through the parked cars, pushing their carts and walking fast, one of them saying there must’ve been a terrible accident nearby. Jaw clenched, Axel limped ahead, sopping with sweat.

A patrol car with roof lights flashing rolled slowly into view in the cross lane to their right, the two cops in it checking both ways. Looking for the Fairmont, Axel thought, and paused to peer all about as if in search of his own vehicle. His hand instinctively eased to his waist for the reassurance of the Browning and he realized he’d left it in the car. The cop car moved on and Axel hobbled after Duro and Billy, wincing at every step. They wended through rows of vehicles, staying close to one group of shoppers or another in order to seem part of them. When Axel came abreast of a Latino family unloading goods from shopping carts into a van, a pair of boys in Texas Rangers baseball caps gaped at him – at his dripping face, at the blood now staining his pants below the shirt hem. Axel hurried past them, walking faster, gritting his teeth. Sirens closing in from every direction.

They were but two rows from the one with the Mustang when he stumbled on a jut of asphalt and fell beside a parked pickup. He managed to sit up but couldn’t stand. ‘Billy!’ he cried.

Billy glanced back and halted and seemed bewildered to see him on the ground. Duro stopped and looked back too. Axel raised his hand toward Billy and said, ‘Pull me up, damn it! I can walk – just haul me up!’

Billy took a step toward him and then turned and saw Duro hurrying away into the next row of cars. He looked back at Axel and his outstretched hand. Then spun around and hurried after Duro.

Axel was trying to pull himself up by the pickup’s door handle when the boys in the Rangers caps came running around the back of the truck, saw him, and stopped short.

‘Here!’ one yelled, pointing at him. ‘Right here!’

He let go of the handle and slumped against the truck door. The boys jumped aside as a massive cop in full SWAT gear came stomping past them, eyes wide, teeth bared, and put the muzzle of his shotgun in Axel’s face, shouting, ‘Gimme a reason! Gimme a reason!’

* * *

There were two police guards posted at the door of his hospital room when he was wheeled in from recovery, still a little groggy. Somebody in plain clothes took pictures of him with a small camera and hastened away. A while later, a pair of detectives showed up. One of them read Axel his rights and then did all the talking. He said they had identified him by way of his prints on a license-to-carry form. Son of a hotshot criminal lawyer in Brownsville and he was gonna need daddy’s help for sure.

A jewelry store in West Dallas had been held up that morning and the robbers made off with a load of gems valued at forty thousand dollars. Three perpetrators: a black-and-white stickup team and a white driver. The stickup guys wore dark glasses, but the white guy took his off when he got outside and the jeweler and a customer got a look at him through the window. They’d been shown Axel’s photo and were leaning toward a positive ID. They only glimpsed the getaway vehicle but were in agreement it was a four-door of light color, as was the stolen Fairmont Axel crashed into the college kid’s car at an eastside mall where he and his partners had stashed another getaway car.

Axel stared at the cop in mute astonishment. West Dallas was across town from the jewelry shop where they’d ripped the bonds.

The SMU student and his girlfriend had positively identified him as the driver of the stolen Ford but they had not had a good look at either of the other two men in the car and could say only that one of them was dark-skinned. But the officer who pursued them in the parking lot had got a fairly good look at the men shooting at him from the windows. He was in his disabled cruiser and talking to headquarters when the same two men sped past him in a black Mustang.

He sent out the vehicle description and a partial-plate, and a cruiser spotted the perps two blocks from the mall and gave chase. The pursuit was marked by an exchange of gunfire and several traffic accidents, and that no one was shot or seriously injured was, in the cop’s words, ‘a fucking miracle.’ The perpetrators escaped, and some hours later the Mustang was found abandoned on a side street, blood on the driver’s seat. Its registration proved fictitious. The two men remained at large. The cop told Axel that things would go a hell of a lot better for him if he told them everything, beginning with who the partners were.

Axel said nothing.

* * *

Harry Mack Wolfe arrived that evening, and it was an act of will for Axel to meet his father’s eyes. The first thing Harry Mack said, in a whisper at his ear, was, ‘I would call you a stupid son of a bitch but that would be an insult to your mother, who would be in despair were she alive.’ He then asked if he had said anything to the police, and Axel assured him he had not.

Wolfe Associates, the family’s law firm, was being assisted by a Dallas law partnership of his long acquaintance, Harry Mack informed him. As things stood, Axel was facing felony charges of aggravated robbery and aggravated assault.

Axel swore to him they had not robbed the West Dallas jewelry store, nor had he fired a shot or even brandished a weapon at anyone, nor in any way assaulted anybody.

Even if any of that were true, Harry Mack said, it was his word against that of two eyewitnesses who placed him at the robbery. Eyewitnesses could be unreliable, of course, at times notoriously so, but in the absence of an alibi and contradicting witnesses, they were a potent element in the state’s case. And even if in truth they hadn’t done that holdup, they had stolen a car and his companions had fired shots, including at a cop, and had caused havoc and severe public endangerment and extensive property damage, and according to the law of parties, as it was known in Texas, Axel bore equal responsibility for all their actions.

‘The fact is, there is no question you will go to prison. The only matter at issue is for how long.’

Axel’s chest tightened but he kept his face blank. His father had not asked exactly what he had been involved in or why. He never would.

As for bail, Harry Mack said that the prosecution had persuaded the judge that, notwithstanding his prominent family, Axel was a flight risk. Someone who was a party to shooting at a police officer and attempting to evade arrest was apt to try to flee the country, and Axel Wolfe had the connections and financial means to do it. The judge could not deny bail but had set it at five hundred thousand dollars.

‘We could ask for a reduction and probably get it,’ Harry Mack said, ‘but we aren’t going to ask because I have no intention of providing the bond in any case. Given the fact of what you’ve done to be in your present position, I can’t help but think that you might be foolish enough to attempt flight and make things even worse for yourself. I think it best you await trial in jail.’

‘I see,’ Axel said. ‘For my own good.’ In truth it had crossed his mind that as soon as he was bailed out he might take refuge with their Wolfe kin in Mexico City.

His father regarded him sadly. ‘You’re a damned fool, boy. You’re very fortunate no one was hurt, but even so you’re in severe straits.’ He instructed him to remain silent with the police, said he would see him again sometime soon, and left.

* * *

On his next visit he brought a sheaf of documents for Axel to sign, including one that granted Harry Mack full control of Axel’s assets.

‘Unless you don’t trust me to attend faithfully to your wife and child’s security,’ he said.

Axel signed.

* * *

The doctor told him he was extremely lucky in that the bullet had but slightly glanced the hip’s iliac crest before lodging in muscle tissue. Minute fracture, no major blood vessel damage. He would limp for a while but that would be the worst of it.

* * *

A wheelchair conveyed him from the hospital to the patrol wagon that transported him to the county jail. Two days later he was placed in a morning lineup and neither the jeweler nor the customer had any doubt at all that he was one of the robbers. That afternoon he stood in a lineup again and the SMU guy and his girl identified him as the driver of the Fairmont.

* * *

Ruby came to visit. The auburn-haired Cajun beauty he’d fallen in love with shortly after they met in college two and a half years ago. She had soon thereafter become pregnant and they had married and he loved her still. Their daughter, Jessica Juliet, was eighteen months old.

Ruby said she couldn’t understand how he could’ve done something so crazy, so reckless, so heedless of his wife and child, his entire family, his whole future.

‘How come, Axel? Can you please just tell me how come?’ He said he couldn’t explain it.

‘I’d guess not! How can anybody explain such a thing? But you did it, Axel, and there’s got to be a reason somebody does something. Harry Mack says you’re sure to go to prison, maybe for years and years. For God’s sake, what am I supposed to tell our little girl when she’s old enough to ask about her daddy? When she asks why he’d do something that took him away from us like it’s done?’

He didn’t know. Nor did he know that Ruby’s deepest distress derived from having learned that Harry Mack was now Axel’s fiduciary and she stood zero chance of availing herself of any Wolfe assets beyond what Harry Mack allotted to her.

She left in tears.

* * *

‘One more year and you’da had your degree and been in the shade trade,’ Charlie Fortune said. ‘But that’s not how it went, and how it went’s all that counts. Whyever you did it, you had your reason. I want you to know this, though, and I mean know it. I’m your brother, Ax. Always will be. Know what I mean? I’ll say it right out if you want.’

‘No need,’ Axel said. ‘I can hear it.’

He put his hand to the Plexiglas partition and Charlie put his to it on the other side.

* * *

He awoke nights to the sporadic bangings of iron doors, the loud voices of inmates and jailers, and sometimes could not get back to sleep. He would lie there with eyes closed and see Billy just as clearly as he’d seen him that last time. Would see his face fraught with indecision as he gawked at him on the ground, at his extended hand. Would see him turn and run.

Afraid of being captured?

Or thinking… More for me?

No. He wouldn’t do that. Not Billy. Not to him.

* * *

After weeks of bargaining, Harry Mack and his Dallas colleagues at last forged a deal with the prosecution. If Axel pled guilty to aggravated assault, he would be sentenced to fifteen years.

‘You’ll be up for parole in five,’ Harry Mack said. ‘It’s a golden deal.’

‘What’s the catch?’ Axel said.

‘You give them the other two.’

‘If I don’t?’

‘They’ll add aggravated robbery. You can then plead guilty to the two charges and get thirty years, or you can choose to make a trial of it and they lock you up until you’re old and gray and incontinent.’

‘For a first offense? Even though I didn’t shoot, didn’t even have a gun in my hand? Even though I didn’t lay a finger on anybody?’

‘That is correct. It’s only because it’s your first offense that they’re holding it to thirty if you plead to the charges. It, too, is a more attractive offer than I had anticipated, considering that some of the gunfire was directed at law enforcement officers and considering the degree of public peril created by your companions. And by the way, if you choose the thirty, you’ll technically be eligible for a parole hearing after ten years, but they have made it abundantly clear you will not qualify for that hearing, nor any other. You will do the full thirty.’

‘They can do it, too, can’t they? See I don’t get parole?’ ‘They want the shooters, kid. If they don’t get them, you’re the one to pay. You really have no choice.’

He wanted to say he couldn’t do it because one of them was a friend, but that would be telling too much. His father would muster the investigative forces to check into everybody known to be his friend and they’d soon narrow it down to Billy. ‘I can’t rat them out.’

‘Oh? Is either of them one of ours?’

‘One of ours? Is that all that counts?’

‘A superfluous question. I repeat, is either of them one of ours?’

Axel said nothing.

‘You’re an even bigger fool than I thought.’

* * *

For several more weeks Harry Mack and his associates strove to achieve a more favorable compromise, calling on every political connection who might be able to assist them. But the prosecution had its own cadre of potent connections and was adamant in its insistence that Axel name the accomplices.

‘I strongly counsel you to reconsider,’ Harry Mack said. Axel did not.

* * *

The trial date came.

The proceeding was brief.

Axel pled guilty to the two charges.

He was sentenced to thirty years and credited with time served.

He entered prison with twenty-nine years and six months to go.

PART I

Charles Zanco

Prison Unit, Texas

2008

1

You can’t chance it.

The thought comes to Axel the moment he wakes once again from this hot night’s fitful sleep. The dim tier light casts a cross-barred shadow on the wall. He has each time wakened with a start, not knowing what time it is or how long he has been asleep. Each time wakened to the hoarse snoring of his cellmate, to the mumblings and sleep whimpers from neighboring cells, once to the footfalls of a guard passing by on the iron walkway, doing the night head count. Each time wakened to the same fearful thought like a low voice in some dark corner of his mind.

You can’t chance it.

* * *

‘Hey, old man, what say we bust out of this zoo?’

That was how Cacho had broached the idea. He was Mexican but spoke English well and with only a slight accent. They had known each other six weeks at the time, and Axel did not yet know that Ramirez was not his true surname.

He had laughed and told the kid to forget it. There was no way. He’d been in prison since before Cacho was born, and he had been privy to a lot of escape plans but never joined any of them. Always for the same reason. Because he knew they wouldn’t work. Only a handful of them were ever attempted, he told Cacho, and not one of them succeeded.

The kid gave him a pitying look. ‘All these years inside and you never once tried to bust out?’ Axel’s advisory did not dissuade him nor diminish his confidence. He was sure there was a way out. ‘There’s always a way,’ he said. ‘All we gotta do is figure it.’

The ‘we’ made it clear from the start that he considered Axel to be in on it and was in any case counting on his assistance by way of information. Over the following weeks he questioned Axel daily, mining his extensive knowledge of the prison’s protocols and procedures, its routines, its personnel.

Axel answered his questions as well as he could. He didn’t see any reason not to. He knew the information would lead to nothing, that the kid would never devise a feasible breakout. The Q&A sessions were anyway a pleasant diversion from the daily tedium, and in the course of them Axel surprised himself with how much he had come to learn about this place where he had been for the last ten years – the last four of them as a trusty – far longer than in any of the other prison units where he’d served portions of his sentence.

Besides, he liked the kid, who was the sole exception he’d ever made to his longtime prison practice of befriending no one. All prisons abound with bravado, but hardcore optimism is generally in short supply, and he felt a benign amusement about Cacho’s confidence in concocting a successful break. Of course, the kid was only twenty.

His amusement gave way to incredulity when Cacho told him – on a late Saturday afternoon and not quite three months after his first mention of it – that the break was all set and would take place in nine days. It was a visiting day and the kid had seemed antsy ever since his weekly meeting with his lawyer a few hours earlier. For his part, Axel had been feeling low all day, as he always did on visiting days when his brother Charlie didn’t come to see him, never mind that Charlie had been there just two weeks ago and that each of his monthly visits was a day-long undertaking for him, having to fly from Brownsville to Fort Stockton, then rent a car for the drive to Zanco.

They had just finished their daily presupper jog around the perimeter of the exercise yard and were still winding down, circling the yard at a walk, when Cacho told him the plan was in place. Axel had stared at the kid’s wide smile and said, ‘Bullshit.’ But when the kid explained the particulars – and told him his real name was Capote and his older brother was the head of a subgang of a major Mexican criminal cartel – his disbelief gave grudging way to absorption.

‘And just how were you able… well hell, the lawyer, right?’

Axel said. ‘Somoza? Through him, in the visits. You all the time telling me he’s working on an appeal.’

‘How else, man? First time he came to see me he said to find somebody who really knows this joint and get him to tell me everything about how it runs, about the towers and the gates, especially everything about the bosses and the guards. Didn’t take long to know that guy was you – been here the longest, been a trusty for a while. You told me the sorta stuff he wanted to know, I told him, he told our guys, they went to work and put the thing together. Somoza brought it to me today. Jesus, Ax, just think, nine days, man. Each one’s gonna be a month long, know what I’m saying?’

The thing relied on bribery, the oldest and generally most effective of means, and usually the simplest. Axel favored simplicity. He had grown up among people who held it for a rule that the simplest approach was usually best, a view borne out by his own experience. But these bribes involved prison insiders, and that, Axel pointed out, was the plan’s flaw.

‘You ought to know by now you can’t trust anybody on the inside. Not a convict, not a CO, not anybody.’

‘I’m on the inside,’ Cacho said. ‘I’m a convict. You too. You don’t trust me? We don’t trust each other?’

‘Present company excepted.’

Cacho laughed. ‘Present companyexcepted. I love the way you college dudes are always covering your ass with fancy talk. You and my brother sound just alike.’ In the kid’s estimation, Axel was a ‘college dude’ by dint of having completed three years at a university. His brother, he had told Axel, had graduated from the University of Texas.

Cacho said there was no cause to worry about the inside guys. There were only four of them, and none of them convicts. ‘One civilian and three corrections officers,’ he said, sardonically emphasizing the bureaucratic term for prison guards, ‘who are doing what is most correct for their greedy-ass pockets.’

He told Axel who the COs were and that all of them were already so deeply compromised they couldn’t back out without burning themselves too.

‘You mean they already took the money?’

‘I mean they alreadytook the money,’ Cacho said. ‘These hacks don’t get paid jack shit. Drop a few packs of Bennies in front of them, they slobber all over theirselves. They’d sell their fucking mothers for a hundred Gs.’

‘They really got a hundred per man?’

‘Somoza’s guy personally gave the money to each one. Said it was the same with all of them. Eyes about bugged outta their heads when they saw it. And they know if they break the deal they get their throat cut. If they break the deal and somehow find a place to hide, they get ratted to the cops, the feds, the press, everybody. They got no out, man. And check this… all three of the COs know who the civilian is, but each of them thinks he’s the only prison insider. The civilian, he knows there’s somebody else in it but don’t know who or how many.’

‘Nice engineering.’

‘I told you, my people don’t fuck around. It’s all set. Only a matter of waiting for the insiders’ schedules to line up. That’ll happen in nine days. Nine days! All we got to do till then is think about the fun we’re gonna be having in ten days. Now come on, gramps, before they shut down the chow line.’

He could have opted out any time. Could’ve said thanks but no thanks and stepped away from the whole business. But he didn’t. To the contrary, only a few days later, as they were discussing the details of the thing yet again, he heard in his own voice the same confidence as in the kid’s. The same note of conviction that the plan would not fail. And the conviction had held strong.

Until tonight. Until the thought came to him like a whisper on the first of his wakings on this final night before the thing takes place. The thought he’s had on every waking since.

You can’t chance it.

They’ll kill you or catch you. And if they catch you –

The cell block lights come ablaze and the PA blares the wake-up call.

It’s four o’clock. The daily commotion commences. The vocal din. The shrill chirrings of electric locks and the clashings of iron doors. The harsh squawkings of the PA. The customary cacophony.

The showers are open and breakfast will be served until 5:30. Then comes a cell head count. Then crews to their jobs at 6.

The day is here.

2

Axel Prince Wolfe was three years old when his mother died giving birth to his brother, Charlie Fortune. His sister, Andrea Marie, was two. Their father, Harry McElroy Wolfe, was only a few years out of law school but already the main criminal defense attorney at Wolfe Associates, the family law firm in Brownsville, Texas.

In addition to their practice of law since the early twentieth century, the Wolfes have conducted a variety of illicit enterprises under the collective name of the ‘shade trade,’ the main enterprise of which has always been gunrunning, the bulk of it to their Mexican relatives, also named Wolfe and concentrated in Mexico City. For their part, the Mexican Wolfes operate a small and highly secretive cartel of their own, Los Jaguaros, which chiefly sells guns and information of all sorts to other cartels.

By family rule, any Wolfe who aspires to be part of the shade trade must first earn a college degree, which can be in any major except physical education or anything that ends in ‘Studies.’ The exception of the ‘Studies’ major is of much more recent vintage than the college requirement itself, which has been in force since the 1930s and is without dispensation. The rationale behind the rule is not only that higher education is a valuable asset in itself – no less so to the criminally inclined than to the legally minded – but also that, in the process of earning the degree, one might stumble onto one’s true calling.

Once you reach the age of sixteen, you can, if you wish, spend your high school summers learning the ins and outs of the shade trade’s main components, but you cannot take an active role in any actual undertaking. You can learn about gunrunning and other forms of smuggling, about document forgery, about finding people who are lost or in hiding or in captivity. There are any number of specializations you can concentrate on, and you also receive training in the arts of self-defense, such arts of course being equally useful for persuasive or retributive purpose.