the curving length of the grove and could see daylight between the trees ahead, indicating a clearing at the river bend. Then they heard voices—and they stopped and stood fast.
They listened hard. Men laughing. Speaking in Spanish. Somebody telling of a fight in a Matamoros cantina and involving a woman named Carla. They set their packs down and eased forward as soundless as cats to the edge of the clearing. Some ten yards away a mule-drawn wagon stood near the riverbank and three men were taking wooden cases from it and stacking them on a raft with railed sides and moored by a line to a stake in the bank. A large tarp lay heaped beside the wagon and there were only a few cases left to unload. The logos on the cases identified their contents as bottles of James E. Pepper bourbon whiskey. On the far bank was another wagon and three more men, one of them holding a rope that slacked into the water and reappeared near the outer end of the raft, where it was attached. The men loading the raft were mestizos, one of them bigger than the twins. He and another one had holstered pistols on their hips and the third man looked to be unarmed. The twins looked at each other and nodded.
They came out of the palms in quick soft stride, Colts in one hand and machetes in the other, and closed to within twenty feet of the men before someone on the other bank shouted a warning and the three on this side turned and saw them. One of the armed men threw off the mooring line and jumped onto the raft and ducked behind the stacks of cases. The big man grabbed for his pistol—and in a move he had practiced a hundred times, Blake Cortez flung his machete overhand and it flew in a lateral blur and transfixed the man’s lower torso, several inches of the pointed end jutting from his back just below the ribs. The man grunted and his half-drawn gun tumbled from its holster and he clutched both hands around the machete blade and fell to his knees and then onto his side, cursing through his teeth. James Sebastian pointed his Colt at the unarmed one, who already had his arms straight up and now yelled “No me mates! No tengo arma!” James told him to sit on the ground with his hands under his ass, palms down. He jabbed his machete into the ground and picked up the fallen man’s revolver and slipped it into his waistband.
Blake stood on the bank, holding the Colt down at his side, and watched the raft being pulled across by two of the men while the third held a rifle half raised and kept his eyes on him. The man on the raft was watching him too, still crouched behind the cases and peering over them. Blake tucked the Colt into his pants and the man on the raft stood up and holstered his pistol too and the one on the bank lowered the rifle. The raft was almost to the other side when Blake turned to the fallen man. He seemed smaller than before and his curses had thinned to a low muttering. The machete had severed an artery and the ground under him was red muck. Blake stood over him and the man stared back, eyes wide, breathing in shallow gasps, brown face paled from the loss of blood. He tried to speak but could not. Then died. Blake sat beside him and took hold of the machete handle with both hands and placed his feet against the man’s chest and to either side of the blade and with a hard yank extracted it, falling on his back. He sat up and wiped the blade on the man’s pants and lobbed the machete to James, who stuck it in the ground beside his own. Blake searched the man’s pockets, rolling the body to one side and then the other, and found a fold of American currency. He stood up and counted it and smiled. Across the river the raft was mooring, the three men making haste to transfer its cargo to their wagon.
Blake went over and stood beside James Sebastian. The prisoner looked from one to the other the way everyone did at the first close sight of them. “He know English?” Blake said. James said he didn’t think so but he might fake that he didn’t. Blake smiled at the man and brandished the money and said, “Para el whiskey, no?” The prisoner nodded. He asked if they were going to kill him. Blake put the money in his pocket and said, Let’s start with
The man told them everything they asked to know and more. His name was Anselmo Xocoto. He was twenty years old. For the past eight months he had been working for Evaristo Doria, a smuggler who took things across the river in either direction. Mostly liquor, whiskey to Mexico, tequila and mescal to the United States. This was one of the best spots for smuggling between Brownsville and the gulf because it was close to the Boca Chica road but well-hidden from it and the ground here was much firmer than almost anywhere else along the lower part of the river. There was a curving gap through the palms, a sort of natural trail wide enough for a wagon. Everybody called the place the Horseshoe because of the shape of the river’s loop here. Evaristo had won control of it about a year ago after a war with some other smugglers, but he himself no longer came out on any of the jobs. He had a couple of men who took turns making the actual transactions. Well, only one now, Anselmo said, glancing at the dead man. Anselmo was the helper. There was no regular schedule for the transactions. Sometimes they did two or three in a month, but once they went two months without doing any. Almost all of Evaristo’s dealings were with the Goya brothers in Matamoros. If there were others, Anselmo didn’t know who they were. He described Evaristo as dark- skinned, about forty years old, tall for a Mexican and on the skinny side, with a thick mustache to the corners of his chin. He had a wife and children and lived at the west end of town.
They told him he could bring his hands out from under his ass, and Anselmo rubbed them to help restore the blood flow. Blake informed him that this spot he called the Horseshoe was now part of their property and if Evaristo wanted to keep using it for his business he would have to come to some arrangement with them. He and his brother would like to meet with him to discuss it. Would Anselmo be seeing him tonight? Yes, yes, Anselmo said, breathless with relief that they were not going to kill him. After every job he had to take Evaristo the money received for the goods. Remembering the money, Anselmo again looked fearful. He will want his money, he said. Tell him we’ll talk about the money when we meet, Blake said. Tell him Berta’s Cafe in the Market Square, tomorrow morning, eight o’clock. Lots of people around, no place for trouble. Yes, Anselmo said, yes, he would tell him. They said he could go and James Sebastian helped him to his feet. Anselmo stared at the dead man and Blake said, We’ll take care of that. Anselmo nodded and went to the wagon and climbed up onto the driver’s seat. There were still four cases of whiskey in the wagon bed and he looked at them and then at the twins. You keep them, Blake Cortez said. Anselmo smiled for the first time since the twins had come into his life. “Gracias, jefes,” he said, and took up the reins and raised a hand in farewell, then hupped the mules into motion and the wagon clattered away.
They thought of dropping the body in the river but decided against it. Best not to chance anyone finding it, not with a living witness who knew how it came to be dead. They fashioned a carrying pole and ripped the sleeves off the dead man’s shirt to tie his hands to one end of the pole and his feet to the other and bore him to Wolfe Landing as they would a killed deer. It was full night when they got there. They built a campfire and lighted a torch and then shouldered the carrying pole again and conveyed the body to the resaca. And there did as before and tied the body to the rope attached to a tree and set it in the water and gave it a shove away from the bank. The rope would let them know if it were taken.
And when they checked at first light the next morning before mounting up and leaving for town, they found it had been.
MISTER WELLS
Berta’s was crowded and loud, as on every morning. The cafe was owned and operated by a family named Hauptmann. It was the most popular breakfast place with the town’s Anglos, but a number of Mexican businessmen and ranchers were regular patrons too, men who had more in common with Anglo ranchers and merchants than with Mexican laborers. The twins wore suits and ties, and like other men in the room they carried guns under their coats. They had made it a point to arrive early so they could have the rear corner table. It afforded good views of both the front door and the passageway to the kitchen, where the back door was.
At five minutes before eight, there entered a stocky Anglo of middle years with a big broom mustache and wearing a cattleman’s hat. He paused by the front wall and scanned the room as he received a chorus of greetings, some hailing him as Jim and some few addressing him as Mr Wells.
The twins knew who he was. It was Marina’s custom to save the daily newspaper for them to read on the weekends and they had seen Jim Wells’s picture in its pages many times. On some Saturdays they had seen him driving his cabriolet along Elizabeth as he commuted between home and law office, trading waves with friends as he went. The basic facts about his life were well and widely known. He’d been born and raised on a ranch near Corpus Christi and earned his law degree in Virginia. He came back to Texas and settled in Brownsville and became law partner to a man twenty-six years his senior and with the fitting name of Powers. An easterner with a New York
