Coyote Crossing

• Writer - Greg Rucka
• Artist - Leandro Fernandez
• Colorist - Studio F
• Lettering - Virtual Calligraphy
• Lettering - Rus Wooton
• Ass't Editor - Axel Alonso
• Editor - Warren Simons
• Editor in Chief - Joe Quesada

Summary

  Somewhere in Texas, on a deserted highway near a "Last Chance" gas station, a motorcycle is seen pulling up to one of the pumps. Logan gets off the motorcycle, and notices no one is around the station. He looks inside, only to find no one present. His senses does catch a scent emitting from the garage area and quietly goes to investigate. His silhouette at the doorway catches the attention of two criminals inside, Merrick and Lake. The body of the service attendant laid on the floor. Merrick commands Lake to look for the keys to the truck inside as he pointed his gun at the doorway. As Lake searches for the keys, Logan's shadow disappears. Marrick hides behind the doorway, cursing, telling Lake to quickly find the keys. On the other side of the doorway, Logan unsheathes a set of his claws, and punches through the wall with them, killing Merrick on the other side. Lake reaches for the gun on the floor that Merrick had held, but looks up at Logan. Logan commands Lake to pick the gun up from the ground, but Lake couldn't do it. Logan grabs Lake's hair, and points at the body on the ground, asking whether he killed the boy. Lake denies it, saying that Merrick had killed the boy. Logan asks why, and Lake tells him the reason was outside of the gas station.

  Meanwhile, back in Portland, Cassie Lathrop pulls into an army surplus store operated by Sycamore Blaine, one of Logan's old Vietnam war buddies. [Sidenote: Blaine was the guy Logan visited back in Wolverine #2.] Cassie presents Blaine with a sketched photo of Logan, asking Blaine if he had seen the man in the sketch a few months back. At first, Blaine said no, and tries to divert her attention to some of his merchandise that he was selling. She asks him to take another look at the sketch again, just to make sure. Again, he denies ever seeing the person in the sketch. Cassie promises that she wasn't out to arrest him; rather, she tells Blaine that she wanted to talk to him because she thinks Logan had saved her life.

  Back at the gas station, where Lake kept trying to convince Logan that it wasn't his fault, he's not a bad guy, and that everything that happened was Merrick's idea: about ditching the truck, about killing the kid at the service station, about him trying to convince Merrick not to shoot and that Merrick was just flat-out crazy. He leads Logan over a small hill. Down below was a tractor trailer being encircled by vultures. Logan opens the doors to the trailer, and inside were nineteen dead people, presumably illegal immigrants trying to cross the U.S. border in an unventilated, hot trailer. Lake tells Logan that though these people were pounding and shouting in the trailer as they were being transported, Merrick kept telling Lake that they would be ok, that these people knew the risk that they were taking when they paid for the transportation to sneak into the U.S. Logan asks Lake who had arranged for the transport of these people. At first, Lake denies any knowledge, that he was only along for the ride while Merrick did all the business and the work. Unsheathing his right claws, Logan threatens to kill Lake if he didn't tell Logan more, and that Lake wouldn't know any less if he killed him right there, on the spot. Lake provides Logan with a single name, "Ritter", who was in El Paso. Logan resheathes his claws, and drags Lake over to the tractor trailer, where he locks Lake inside the back with the bodies. (Logan uses a chain and lock to hold the doors together on the trailer doors, which allows for air for Lake to breathe.)

  Back in Portland, where Blaine tells Cassie all he knows about Logan: about how they served in Vietnam thirty years back, and shows her old photos of them serving together. She comments about how Logan doesn't look any different back then as he does now, and Blaine comments that he wouldn't look any different. He tells Cassie that he only knew Logan by that single name, and that Logan is a loner who doesn't like looking for company. Cassie asks Blaine how she could get a hold of him to "thank him personally for saving her life", but Blaine tells her that he couldn't help her get a hold of Logan. Frustrated, Cassie leaves the store, and tells herself to give up in her search for Logan.

  In El Paso, after placing a call to the local law enforcement about the location of the tractor trailer and the culprit, Logan enters a local bar there seeking the help of a man named Nestor, who owned the bar. After being told by Angel, the bartender, about the man who was looking for him, Nestor meets Logan, and thanks him for saving his boy. Logan tells Nestor that he was in El Paso to look for a man named Ritter, whom he believed to be a local "coyote" in the town.

  Back at her apartment, Cassie was placing an order for a pizza. In the background, the television blared the day's news. The news reported of the discovery of 19 illegal immigrants who had perished in the back of a tractor trailer, and how the law enforcement had apprehended one of the possible "coyotes". The news was able to record the arrested person (who was Lake), babbling about some guy who had claws in his hands who was the guilty one, and that he was innocent. This catches Cassie's attention, as she hears on the news that this report was being filed from El Paso, Texas.

Summary

  Wolverine kicks off the second Greg Rucka storyline, "Coyote Crossing." According to the solicitations, this is another five-parter, so presumably decompression is still going to be the order of the day.

  As with the first arc, Rucka is sticking to realistic antagonists. This time round it's the "coyotes" who smuggle illegal immigrants across the Mexican border, frequently asphyxiating them all in the process. In theory, these sort of people make ideal villains for Wolverine solo stories; he works best with relatively low-key opponents. The previous arc went a bit awry because the opposition never seemed in any danger of posing a threat to Wolverine, making it all a bit of a foregone conclusion (even by the standards of the genre). We'll have to see whether Rucka can avoid the same problem this time around; it's a bit early to tell.

  Meanwhile, in the subplot, Cassie Lathrop is still hunting for Logan. Rucka's certainly done a fabulous job of rounding her out as a supporting character. I still have a degree of difficulty with the idea that she can't identify the man with the distinctive hairstyles and the claws as the world-famous superhero Wolverine, which you would thought only called for an elementary level of detective skills. But evidently the book has decided to act as if it's semi-detached from continuity in this regard, and once you allow it to make that jump, Cassie's arc works just fine. She's certainly the strongest new element Rucka has brought into the book.

  With Darick Robertson off working on a Deathlok miniseries, we have Leandro Fernandez on art for this arc. Rucka and Fernandez have worked together before on the excellent Queen & Country. I wasn't entirely convinced by Fernandez' art on that story, largely because he over-sexualised the lead character. He doesn't make the same error with Cassie (and in fairness, he doesn't generally - I have no clue what came over him with Q&C).

  Fernandez does stylised figures who retain their three-dimensionality even while they're edging into caricature. In fact, this issue is somewhat underplayed compared to some of this work. It's a style that works quite neatly for Wolverine, a character who works best in a heightened reality with the emphasis more on "reality."

  There's a definite possibility that this arc could repeat the same problems that dragged down the previous storyline. But for all that, it's a strong start.

  Rating: B+