and TV. Some of the stunts she’s done are unreal, but the worst she’s ever been hurt in any of the “bits,” as she calls them, was a sprained thumb. One Sunday morning we were strolling by a schoolyard playground and she jumped the fence and hopped up on a set of monkey bars and went through a workout routine worthy of a spot in the Olympics. She was wearing a loose short skirt, and it wasn’t the first time she’d simultaneously shown me her gymnastic skills and her scanty underwear. She once said she was almost ashamed of herself for teasing me like that, because, as she put it, “It’s so girly.” From up in the wheelhouse, her so-called tramp stamp—a little red tattoo inscription just above the thong strap and between her sacral dimples—is scarcely discernible, but I’ve many a time read it up close. FACTA NON VERBA.
We’re on our way home from Louisiana, where we delivered two men and a woman, all three using the name Aguirre, and perhaps they were truly related, we didn’t ask. We had been contacted about them by our Mexico City relations, our usual source of clients in desperate need of a stealthy exit from Mexico and a new identity in the States. They sent us the necessary photos and pertinent physical data, then kept the Aguirres in a safe house down there while we arranged their relocation. Two weeks later when the Aguirres were transferred to the Salty Girl from a boat we rendezvoused with just a few miles off the Tamaulipas coast, we presented each of them with an American birth certificate, a duly issued Social Security card to match it, and a bona fide Texas driver’s license showing the address of a rooming house we own in Harlingen. At a Mississippi River boatyard a few days later and some thirty miles below New Orleans, we turned them over to some associates—kinfolk of ours named Youngblood—who escorted them the rest of the way to their new home. Because they had expressed a desire to live in a beachside community, a spacious apartment had been leased for them in Panama City, Florida.
A body run is what we call that sort of smuggle. Rayo Luna has been on a few of them with us before, all of them to Corpus Christi, Galveston, or Houston. She thinks they’re pretty dull and they usually are. But when she heard we were making a run up near New Orleans and would be spending the night there, she asked if she could come along, and when we said okay, she asked if Jessie could come, too. Neither of them had been to New Orleans since Mardi Gras in their senior year of college. But unlike Rayo, Jessie isn’t in our line of work and has never wanted to be, and Frank and I make it a rule not to take anyone on a run who isn’t in the trade. We don’t need anything more than the cargo to safeguard or worry about. Then again, a body run is the least likely sort to encounter trouble, and we knew that even if things should for any reason get a little dicey, Jessie would be no liability. Like the rest of us she learned how to use a gun when she was a kid, and a couple of years ago down in Mexico City she proved beyond question she can handle herself pretty well. So we made an exception and took both of them along, and after the conclusion of business in the boatyard we treated them to a night in the French Quarter before starting for home the next morning.
All in all, it was a satisfying trip.
It’s what we do, we Wolfes: we smuggle. Mostly into and out of Mexico, now and then Cuba or Central America. Been doing it for over a hundred years, ever since we settled in Brownsville, Texas, which is on the Rio Grande, about twenty-five miles upriver from the Gulf. We began by smuggling booze from Mexico into the States, then started running guns down there before the outbreak of the Revolution. During Prohibition we ran more booze than ever until repeal killed that gold-egg goose. Over the generations we’ve expanded into high-tech military gear and today we carry everything from infrared and thermal-imaging optical instruments to portable radar units to a wide range of explosive-device components. The only things we don’t smuggle are drugs and wetbacks. The drug biz is un-arguably a money river, but it attracts too many crazies. Smuggling is chancy enough without having to transact with such impulsive personalities. Besides, except for alcohol, we take a dim view of drugs. Ruinous stuff. As for dealing in wetbacks, the process entails too many stages and too many agents and too many people overall for too little reward. We like to keep every operation as uncomplicated as we can and restrict its number of participants to the fewest necessary. We do smuggle people every so often but usually carry only one or two individuals and never more than three, and what they all have in common is that they’re running from mortal danger and can afford to buy a sure escape from it. Ours is a costly service but worth every dime, considering the official documents we include in the package. The federal government can’t hide you better than we can. The fact is ID documents in general are selling better than ever, and not just to those on the run. Lots of people have something to hide that can best be hidden by way of various certifiable identities, and that’s become truer than ever in our worldwide digital age. We can supply as many identities as anybody might want, each one supported by authentic documents registered in the files of the relevant agency. A certificate of birth or baptism or naturalization, a Social Security account, a military service record—whatever paper or set of papers a client requests, we can produce it. Some of our clients have asked how we do it. Our stock answer is that we have our ways. The simple truth is that the world turns on greed, and greed slavers at an ample bribe. Our insiders at official agencies, bureaus, and record departments have long prospered by way of our incentives.
Among the family, our extralegal pursuits are known collectively as the shade trade, and its main constituent has always been gun smuggling, guns being an article of commerce that, unlike drugs, we very much favor. Nothing else in the world so ably and indisputably accords physical equality between human beings as a gun. A 250-pound man has no advantage over a 90-pound woman if both of them are armed. As we see it, self-defense is the most elemental of all natural rights and includes the right to possess the same means to defend yourself as might be used to assault you. Absent that right, you have to rely on agents of the state for protection, but you can’t count on such an agent being at hand when you find yourself at the mercy of an armed antagonist. We choose not to depend on someone else to safeguard us or to rely on anyone’s mercy. We’re aware that many people of intelligence and good intention would disapprove of our outlook and deem it sophistic, cynical, self-serving, pick your righteous reproof. That’s okay. Sticks and stones. Other people have their ways of looking at things, we have ours.
The family also owns a variety of legitimate and profitable enterprises—a law firm, a real estate company, a tech instruments and graphics store, a marine salvage and repair boatyard, a gun shop, plus a few others. The majority of those businesses are in Brownsville, all of them gainful and, not altogether coincidentally, most of them of advantage to the shade trade. As a matter of record, Frank and I are employed as “field agents” by Wolfe Associates, one of the most respected law firms in South Texas. So are Rayo Luna and two other of our cousins. The firm’s three partners are our uncles Harry McElroy Wolfe—Harry Mack to those who know him—and his close cousins Peck and Forrest. The position of field agent requires that we be state-licensed investigators, a hugely valuable sanction. The most routine duties in our formal job description—serving papers, conducting background checks, searching police records, and so on—are carried out by lower-level hires. What we mainly do is track down essential witnesses who deliberately or against their will have gone missing. We’re as good at finding people as we are at helping them to get lost. I love everything about the work—tracking them down, keeping them under wraps for as long as the firm requires, and all the while staying alert for whoever might be trying to get them back from us or simply wanting to prevent them from appearing in court or making a deposition. Rayo’s been on several such assignments with me and Frank. She’s got all the right instincts for the trade.
When we’re not on a job for the Associates, we work for our cousin Charlie Fortune, the chief of shade trade operations. He’s big-muscled but limber as a fly rod, and with his close-cut dirty-blond hair, a scar through one eyebrow, and the beard he keeps at a five o’clock growth, his countenance is as daunting as his physique. His only boss is his daddy, Harry Mack. Frank and I have been Charlie’s main smugglers since graduating from college, though for the past year or so he’s been letting one of our field agent cousins, Eddie Gato, do gun runs, too. Rayo has gone with me and Frank on a
