Free The Rules of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake

be alert, my man, but not so fucking jumpy.
    He lets out a long breath and follows her out to the Escalade.
    p
    They meld into the heavy traffic bearing toward the city.
    We can forget the airport, Eddie says. They’ll have people all over it. Same for the trains, buses, everything. It’ll be like that at every airfield and depot from here to the border. We can’t even stay on this highway. They’ll have guys at every toll station. Don’t stand a chance at a toll station.
    They can do that? Miranda says.
    Yes.
    They can have people everywhere ?
    Just about. And we can’t know where they don’t. He gives her a quick look. Hey, listen. We know what they can do. They don’t know what we can do.
    Right, she says. Her smile frail.
    He hands her the map and tells her to mark all the toll stations north of Obregón. She opens it on her lap and starts circling the stations with a ballpoint from the console. She sees how close they are to the Sea of Cortéz and that there is a ferry at Guaymas. She says maybe they should cross over to Baja California.
    He’s already considered that and says it’s a bad idea. The Company will have people at every port and marina. Even if we could cross, he says, we’d be on a peninsula. Fewer ways out. They’ll cut off the north end and down at the mouth of the Gulf. Forget Baja. It’d be stupid.
    Excuse me, she says, it was only a suggestion. And I’m not stupid.
    I know that, he says.
    A few seconds pass. You’re right, though, she says. Forget Baja.
    East? The Sierra Madres are in the way. He came to Sinaloa through those mountains, and the guys he was with said the Sierras are just as rough from one end to the other. The few roads that completely cross them are crooked as snakes and very slow going. Rockfall obstructions everywhere and sometimes blocking a road entirely. There are curves that run along the very edges of the cliffs. The slopes are littered with rusted and burned-up hulks of cars, trucks, buses. There aren’t many stretches without little white crosses marking the sites of fatal accidents. The real stopper, though, is that the Company has marijuana and poppy fields and processing labs all over those ranges through a chain of seven states and keeps a close watch on those roads.
    We get spotted up there, Eddie says, we’d have nowhere to even try to run. Forget cutting through the Sierras.
    He asks how far they are from the border, and she places a paper matchstick on the map’s mileage scale and then uses the match to calculate the distance. A hair over three hundred miles.
    â€œAs the crow flies. Too bad we ain’t crows.”
    â€œCómo?” she says with a frown at his use of English, and he repeats himself in Spanish.
    She studies the map, the expanding desert north of Ciudad Obregón. There is no metropolis ahead of them but Hermosillo, the state capital. The only other towns of size between them and the border—and very much smaller than the capital—are Guaymas, a hundred miles south of Hermosillo, and Caborca, 150 miles to its north. On the border itself is Nogales, ten times larger than the town of the same name on the U.S. side. That’s it for actual towns. The rest of Sonora is open desert encompassing widely scattered pueblos and villages, traversed by few paved roads other than the federal highway but by a wide web of dirt roads so little traveled they do not even have identifying numbers.
    Eddie knows the Sinas will have lookouts at the federal highway’s major intersections and exits, but they can’t cover those backcountry tracks. As he sees it, the trick is to make it through Guaymas and into the desert. If they can get on those desert trails, they can make it to the border.
    To where on the border? she asks.
    Yeah, he says, that’s the question.
    She again consults the map. Nogales? The highway from Caborca connects with a highway going to Nogales. But no,