The Bones of Wolfe. James Carlos Blake
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Название: The Bones of Wolfe
Автор: James Carlos Blake
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Триллеры
isbn: 9780802156969
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The two guys watch us close in on them, and I draw up alongside, our deck several feet higher than theirs. I align our cockpit right next to their open bow, where the one with the rifle, the bigger and older of the two men—midforties, I’d guess—is standing with the rifle barrel now propped against his shoulder, his finger on the trigger guard. It’s an M1 Garand out of the Second World War and a fine weapon to this day. The other guy’s in the cockpit, a kid of eighteen or nineteen, his thumbs hooked into the front of his cargo shorts to either side of the .38 revolver tucked there. Four fishing rods, their lines out, are in rod holders affixed to the stern. Both guys take off their shades for a better look at the girls and keep smiling from one of them to the other at either end of the boat.
“Y’all come over here to tell me what a helluva shot that was?” the big man says.
“It was something, all right,” Frank says. “Damn bold, too, seeing as it’s against both state and federal law to shoot a hawk.”
The big man shrugs. “I don’t reckon you for no game warden.”
“Oh, hell no. Thought you might want your prize, though.” Frank picks up the osprey and lobs it down near the big man’s feet.
“Hey, fellas!” Jessie shouts. The two men both look over at her, and she yanks her top up to show her tits.
In the moment they’re gawking, Frank vaults over the gunwale and drops into their boat, grabs the M1 with both hands, and wrenches it away as he shoulders the big man backward—and Rayo whips up the SIG and fires a round through the bowrider windshield and yells, “Hands high, boy!” and the kid’s hands fly up. Frank drives the rifle’s steel butt plate into the big man’s mouth with a crack of teeth I hear in the wheelhouse, knocking him on his ass, blood gushing over his chin. He tosses the rifle into the water and kicks the guy onto his back and straddles his chest, pinning his arms with his knees, then picks up the hawk by one of its feet and rakes the talons down one side of the guy’s face and then the other side, the guy just screaming and screaming. Frank gets off him, hauls him to his feet, and pushes him over the side, then turns to the kid, who can’t raise his hands any higher. “Hey, man, hey, I didn’t do nothin! I didn’t do nothin’!” the kid screeches. Frank takes the revolver from the kid’s pants and backhands him with the barrel, cracking his cheek and dropping him to his knees, then flings the gun away and yanks the kid up and shoves him overboard, too. The two guys tread water clumsily, gasping and moaning, blood running off their faces.
“I don’t know where you shitheels are from and don’t care!” Frank shouts. “But I ever see either of you around here again, I’ll cut your face off!”
He picks up the hawk and hands it up to Jessie, who’s got her top back in place, then pulls himself aboard and signals me to move out. Rayo’s draped a beach towel over the transom to hide the boat’s name from the two guys—playing it safe despite the unlikelihood they would ever try tracking us down.
About a half mile farther on, Frank has me stop again. By then the two shitheels have managed to get back into the bowrider and are just a speck heading off in the other direction. Frank hooks the transom ladder to the stern and lowers himself into the water until it’s up to his chest, then Rayo hands him the hawk. He holds it below the surface for about half a minute before letting go of it, and we watch it slowly sink. Then he climbs back up on deck and gives me a hand sign and I head us for home.
I’m not saying Frank’s a softy or anything, but in truth he’s always been prone to get a little upset when he witnesses mistreatment of an animal.
It’s after dark when we come off the Gulf and into the seventeen-mile ship channel leading to the Port of Brownsville. Near the channel’s halfway point we turn off into a short canal that ends at the entry to Wolfe Marine & Salvage, a south-bank boatyard owned and operated by Harry Morgan Wolfe, known to everyone in the family as Captain Harry. The yard contains two long docks, one for local boats undergoing maintenance or repair, the other reserved for fishing and family vessels.
We tie up next to a trawler rig we know Eddie Gato used for a run to Boca Larga last night. A painter working at its transom by lamplight is putting the finishing touches on the name Gringa and, just below it, “Brownsville.” He’s already restored the true hull numbers. It’s good work in that there’s nothing fresh-looking about it. Frank and I used to do the Boca Larga run, but it became so rote it was starting to get boring, and when Charlie said Eddie wanted it, we said by all means.
The night manager, Dario Benítez, informs us that Captain Harry’s already gone but left word he’d meet us at the Doghouse Cantina. Frank and I get cleaned up and into fresh clothes, but the girls plead tiredness and say they’ll take a pass on the crowd and racket of a Doghouse weekend night, and they head for home in Rayo’s pickup. We hop into Frank’s restored ’68 Mustang GT named “Stevie” and follow a well-graded dirt road through the scrubs to State Highway 4, known locally as the Boca Chica Road. A few miles east, roughly halfway between Brownsville and the sea, we exit onto a sand trail where a low roadside marker reads WOLFE LANDING just above the arrow pointing toward the river and a grove of tall palms mingled with hardwoods hung with Spanish moss. The grove’s an extraordinary geographic incongruity out here, where most of the countryside consists of marsh grass, scrub brush, and mudflats. Once upon a time, however, much of this low stretch of the Rio Grande was lined with palm trees as tall as the masts of the Spanish ships that landed here—Rio de las Palmas, those first Europeans called it. Now the only other local palm grove besides ours is one in Brownsville that’s been a nature preserve for a lot of years. The trail to the Landing is just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, and our headlights sweep from one side to the other along the winding route through the high brush before a final eastward curve brings us into the Landing’s glow.
Our ancestors established Wolfe Landing in the early 1890s, and in 1911 they somehow managed to get it chartered as a town, even though to this day it’s no more than a village covering about 60 acres in the middle of the 450-acre grove. Only for a few short periods in the past has the Landing’s population exceeded a hundred residents. The most recent census put the number at seventy-something. It’s a place of perpetual shadows, its air always dank and heavy with the odors of fecund vegetation, its nights loud with frogs and cats and owls. From an airplane, the river all along the border of Cameron County looks like a tangled string, so closely bunched are the serpentine loops and crooks of its meanders, a feature that over time has formed numerous resacas on both sides of the river—what they call “bayous” or “oxbows” in the Deep South and other regions. There are several resacas in the palm grove, and the biggest of them, Resaca Mala, is in the gloomiest and most remote part of the property. It has been home to a small colony of alligators since the first Wolfes settled the place, though nobody knows about them except for a few of us in the shade trade. Charlie’s house is the only one back in there.
All of the Landing’s streets and trails are narrow and packed with crushed shell except for Main Street and Gator Lane, which are paved with tar and gravel. The trail off the highway melds into Main Street, on which stands the community’s only stone building—the single-story town hall, comprising the mayor’s office, the police department, and a two-cell jail. Charlie Fortune is both Wolfe Landing’s mayor—now many times reelected—and the chief of its police force, which at present СКАЧАТЬ