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 few such runs and enjoyed it, but not as much as tracking down people. She doesn’t find it as satisfying. “Not as much juice,” she says.
Most of our arms shipments go to our Mexican kin, who in turn sell them to their clients. Like us, the Mexican Wolfes are a large family of social standing who own and operate an assortment of lawful and profitable businesses in addition to engaging in various unlawful pursuits. And like us, they have always trafficked in such activities primarily for the satisfaction of asserting their independence from the horde of bastards who own the government and devise laws that first and foremost serve their own interests. It’s a matter of self-respect, of a pride that’s bred in our bones. Our Mexican cousins don’t like being played for saps any more than we do. Unlike us, however, they conduct their illicit dealings by means of a small outfit of their own creation called Los Jaguaros. To this day, not the Mexican government, the police, or the press is conclusively certain the Jaguaros even exist, notwithstanding the pervasive rumors that they’re the principal suppliers of arms to some of the country’s largest criminal societies. It has long been alleged by much of the news media and by political enemies of the current administration that the Jaguaros are a fabrication of the federal government, intended to cover up many of its own misdeeds. Over the years a number of captured cartel operatives have said that much of their armament come from the Jaguaros, but none of them knew where that organization is headquartered or could name any of its members. Some government critics insist that such prisoner allegations of the Jaguaros’ existence are outright lies intended to conceal the true sources of cartel arms. Despite all such conjectures and suppositions, the Jaguaros’ tie to the Mexico City Wolfes remains an impenetrable secret. Even the cartels chiefs who do business with the Jaguaros don’t know of the connection to the family. Not even most Jaguaros know of it—except, of course, for their Wolfe crew chiefs, all of whom use false surnames.
Also, unlike ours, the Jaguaros’ primary stock-in-trade isn’t guns but information, and the cartels are their foremost market for that commodity, too. They sell military intelligence, police records, names of informants. They sell blueprints of banks, jewelry stores, art museums, prisons—of any venue someone might want to break into or out of. Much of that information comes from insiders at government bureaucracies, police and military agencies, corporate offices, construction companies, et cetera. But almost as much of it originates from the Jaguaros’ squads of ace hackers. Their access to so many sources of information also serves the Jaguaros very well in finding people who may or may not want to be found. Their boundless web of informants—whom they call “spiders”—reaches to every region of the country and every level of society, from shoeshine boys house maids, whores, and gardeners to hotel staff, media reporters, cops, and politicians. Not even the federal police have such a comprehensive network of eyes and ears as the Jaguaros do, or as secure a system for transmitting, sifting, cataloging, and storing the data they amass. And even while the cartels are their primary buyers of information, the Jaguaros have compiled vast files of data on each of them as well. That knowledge, however, is not for sale. It’s maintained by the Jaguaros solely for their own purposes. They of course also have a security unit, and it says something about Rayo Luna that she was a member of it before she came to live with us and joined the shade trade.
It’s a rock-hard rule in the Texas family that no member of it can work in its unlawful trades without first earning a college degree, which can be in any major except phys ed or one that ends in the word studies. Charlie got his BA in history at A&M. Frank and I both got ours in English at UT Austin. He’s a Hemingway man, Frank, and his senior thesis contended that Stephen Crane’s influence on Hem’s short works was even more significant than had been previously recognized. His mentor thought that with a few minor tweaks the paper could get published in an academic journal, but Frank shrugged it off. My thesis was on Alexander Pope, who could express more insight in a heroic couplet than most poets can muster in an entire poem. The department offered Frank a graduate fellowship, but he turned it down. And even though he’d told the baseball scouts he wasn’t interested in a pro career—he had a rifle-shot fastball, plus a changeup that made a hitter swing like a drunk, and he came within four strikeouts of