Crossing the Line (10 page)

“Who’s next?” Mary demanded.

I described the squat, round face and the rap-star jewelry of the one called Shorty.

They knew him, too. He was thought to recruit and control the many expendable barrio bangers Hidalgo used for both protection and intimidation.

Shorty had been with Hidalgo since the beginning of his drug operations, sometime in the early 1980s. They had tons of pictures of Shorty, but little information. Not even his real name. But he was said to be a sexual predator who preyed on the young American women who partied in Tijuana bars where the unenforced age limit was only eighteen. It was a way to impress the new recruits—give them some pretty white high-school or college girls that they could rape with impunity. The victims were drugged with Roofies or Ketamine and then driven away by Shorty and his boys, later to be dumped in an alley somewhere. Mary and Tom had spoken to several girls after they’d reported their victimization to the local Tijuana police, who turned them away ostensibly because there was no evidence, but really because they were either working for or terrified by Hidalgo.

Most of the others I described were either unknown to both the Feds and my brother, or I was unable to recall them with enough detail. Where I didn’t have a nickname, Mary asked me to make one up. I wasn’t too original. There was Punk 1, 2, and 3, as well as Pineapple Face for a young guy who looked like he might have had smallpox. A few I couldn’t remember at all.

Mary made Roberto look at each file, whether there was a picture and other information or not, and repeat, memorizing, the names. He needed to know these guys so that he wouldn’t have to describe them too much when he sent out his messages. Once I’d gotten past Zafado, though, and onto the guys he didn’t know, he lost interest. Instead of paying attention, he just doodled on a legal pad he held close to his chest so that none of us could see it. It was something he’d been doing all day. When I’d asked him earlier what he was drawing, he had just grinned and said, “None of your business,
che
.”

“How is it that Hidalgo is able to control these guys?” I asked when we were finally done with our rogues’ gallery. “You’d think Shorty or Zafado or Bruto would get ambitious. Knock Jesús off and take over. Is it smarts or charisma or what?”

Mary answered, “We think he’s both smart and charismatic, but there’s probably more to it than that. He’s respected. He makes things happen.”

She was standing and shaking out the wrist she’d been writing with, letting the hand flop around on the end of her arm. Then she folded her right arm across her chest and pulled the elbow in with her left. It was an ordinary stretch, but it was done in a particular, practiced manner. The way a hotshot climber would. Or maybe a professional dancer. I looked again at the muscular delineations on her legs and decided she’d either been a dancer or a gymnast. And I wondered again what her immigrant parents must have thought when she joined the FBI.

“These guys aren’t that smart. They’re just ruthless,” Tom said.

“Dude’s got the power,” Roberto said, surprising all of us, since he hadn’t seemed to have been paying us any attention after we’d moved beyond the guys he knew. “He’s plugged in, you know? Not one of those pricks could deal with the government bigwigs or army guys like Jesús can. It’s like he’s one of them. That, and he’s loyal to those who are loyal to him. Except for those dumb gangbangers, he takes care of his people.”

This was a better assessment than either Tom or Mary had offered. Tom knew it and blew out a lungful of smoke in my brother’s direction. Mary nodded thoughtfully. Roberto put down the legal pad—facedown—and stood up. He wandered over to the table with Tom’s guns on it.

“Stay away from those,” Tom said, back in pain-in-the-ass mode. “You want a gun, get it from your buddy Jesús.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute? Outside?”

Mary followed me out onto the porch. A sliver of a moon was rising over the steep rim of the crater. The stars overhead were high-wattage pinpricks, and you could clearly see the neon red of Mars. She stared up at the sky.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. How come it’s so clear here? Is it the altitude?”

“It’s just clean. No pollution. No city lights to reflect off all the dust particles in the air.”

“Wow. It’s pretty amazing.”

I let her stare at the sky for a few minutes while I stared at her. Over the last twenty-four hours she had lost a little of the wall she’d tried to build around herself. She was loosening up, and I knew it was Roberto’s doing, not my supposed charm. My brother was hard not to like unless you were a complete butthead like Tom. It wasn’t just the way he looked. Sure, he made people nervous, but his wildness was so evident and so playful that you wanted to stroke him the way, giggling uneasily, you might stroke a tame tiger. You knew he was dangerous but you also knew he wouldn’t hurt you. As long as you didn’t cross him. But you feared what would happen to him. What he might do to himself.

He’d been gently teasing Mary throughout the day. Making fun of her seriousness, making light of her job. At first she’d tried to be as stiff as she’d been during the long drive up the day before. But I’d watched her iron spine weaken, her awkward, smart-girl’s defenses melt, until she was teasing him back in an almost shy way. Like what she’d said to him about carrying a gun. Despite herself, maybe she was beginning to like the man she might be sending to a bad death. And that would be a good thing—she might relent.

“So, what did you want to talk to me about?” Mary asked now.

I took a deep breath, not wanting to say what I was about to say, and definitely not wanting to do what I was about to suggest.

“I want to be the one to go in. I want to take Zafado up on his offer.”

“No,” she answered automatically.

“Why not? I’m trained for this kind of stuff. I’m good at this. Wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot better to have a cop in there? And Zafado himself, a top
capitán,
offered me a job.”

“Because they’d kill you,” she said simply. “You’re too well known, Anton. Someone would eventually recognize your face. And even if they didn’t, these people are smart enough to check your background before they let you get close to anything they’re doing. Your information would come from Zafado or one of the other captains and it would be useless for getting Hidalgo. And we would have to create a whole legend for you—here and in Mexico. We don’t have the time or the resources. Your brother, on the other hand, doesn’t need any story. He’s already known to these people. He’s a friend of Hidalgo’s—he rescued him off that mountain and he’s worked for him. He’s an open book, with next to nothing to hide. We couldn’t ask for a better confidential informant. He’s perfect.”

“Except that he’s reckless.”

“And you’re not?” She smiled.

“He’s a drug addict.”

“He’s been clean since we picked him up. We’ve made sure of that.”

I wasn’t so sure, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t have any proof, and besides, I was pretty sure that even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. They seemed determined to run the operation through Roberto. Reckless druggie or not.

Reliance on a single confidential informant—especially one as lawless as my brother—was something that I knew was dangerous in an undercover investigation. They should have known that, too, after losing their friend and colleague in Mexicali. But now they were going to gamble another life. Another family, actually, but one they probably considered expendable. A junkie felon, a semi-disgraced state cop, and their expatriate parents. I didn’t fault the Feds for that. Maybe I was being cocky, but I thought I could take care of myself. Mom and Dad and their vaqueros on Grandfather’s ranch could look out for themselves, too, once they were warned. Besides, I really wanted to get Hidalgo. I wanted to do something important with my professional life. I was getting tired of putting dime-baggers in prison while the big guys skated.

My main criticism of their operation came down to just one simple thing: I didn’t want Roberto going in there. It was a nest of vipers—I’d seen how those men were in the bar just an hour or two earlier. Hidalgo and his men were stone killers. But I had to admit that Roberto was a killer, too. His criminal history proved it.

I said something about how we should pull out—about how the whole thing was too risky. There had to be another way. Pressure the Mexicans. Someone had to be willing to testify against Hidalgo. Surely they could find someone he’d bribed or threatened who, with the right incentives and guarantees of protection, would be willing to talk.

Mary wasn’t having any of it. She looked up at me, her eyes glittering in the light of the moon and the stars.

“Do you know how many deaths we believe Hidalgo is responsible for? Hundreds, at least. More likely thousands. And then there are all the people who buy his drugs, who overdose or kill someone else while under the influence or are rotted away by daily use. Hundreds of thousands.”

“Hidalgo doesn’t inject them or shove it up their noses,” I objected, sounding not at all like a narcotics agent. But I thought I’d learned something over the years. “You can’t blame him for the users.”

“No?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “Maybe you should ask Tom about that. Ask him about his sister. If people weren’t selling the drugs, people wouldn’t use them.”

“Take out Hidalgo and someone just as bad will fill his shoes.”

I was wussing out and I knew it. And Mary called me on it.

“Maybe. But we will have stopped
him
. Cut off his head and mounted it on the wall, as Tom likes to say.”

As she said it she drew her hand across her throat like that guy in the window had, but she slashed instead of sawed. And she didn’t stick out her tongue. I had to nod at her words, imagining Hidalgo and a whole row of his
sicarios
looking down from a long wall with dead, glassy eyes.

“What we’ve learned over the thirty years of the so-called War on Drugs is that although we will never win it, each time you lop off a head, the head that replaces it is weaker. Taking Hidalgo down will not only accomplish that, but it will also let them know that they cannot kill American agents with impunity. Right now they think they’ve gotten away with it. We need to teach them otherwise. They need to learn something about respect.”

We watched each other for a minute. This time I was the one who looked up and studied the stars. It was getting cold out. I’d been hot and sweaty since leaving the bar, and the cold air felt good.

Mary, though, crossed her arms and shivered.

After a while she said, “This place is crazy. It’s burning up one minute, freezing the next.”

I didn’t answer.

“Your brother is an extraordinary man, Anton. You know that, don’t you? He can do this. I know he can. No one wants him to get hurt. That’s not a price we want to pay just to get Hidalgo.”

Oh? Would your partner agree with that?
I didn’t think so.
And if Roberto’s killed, maybe even while being filmed on Tom’s camera, then they can call in the troops and make an arrest for murder. That would sure be convenient, wouldn’t it?

But there was something in her voice that kept me from speaking. I studied her, feeling my head cock a little to one side the way Mungo’s did when she was close to making a realization about some command I was trying to give her. It wasn’t what Mary had said but the way she’d said it. The words had sounded far different from the professional way she’d been speaking to me.

“You’re starting to like him, aren’t you,” I said. A statement of fact, not a question.

She kept staring at me with her glittering brown eyes. I imagined her blushing but it was too dark to see. I did see her stiffen, though. When she replied she sounded defiant.

“Yes. I am. If he hadn’t gotten so messed up with drugs, he might have really made something of himself. He might yet.”

“I’m scared that he’s going to die in there, Mary,” I said very softly.

Now it was her turn to look up at the stars.

SEVEN

W
hen I woke up the next morning my whole body felt sore, as if it were still recovering from the tension I’d felt when Shorty came at me swinging that knife. My watch said it was eight o’clock already. Roberto was gone. His sleeping bag lay on the cot next to me like a snake’s discarded skin. I expected to find him in the main cabin, where Mary would be making him cram for going across the river.

I would be driving him there later in the day.

The plan was that I’d take him across on the bridge that stood fifteen miles north of Potash, then drop him off high in the mountains. He would be carrying a pack and some of my climbing and camping gear. He’d spend twenty-four hours getting verifiably dirty and working his way down toward Hidalgo’s place. The full day alone was also to give him time to, as Roberto said, get his head on straight, but I knew he intended to do a climb. Solo, of course. I’d lobbied to go with him but Mary had turned me down flat. And my brother didn’t argue for me.

But they weren’t cramming in the main cabin. I spotted them the instant I stepped out of the ramshackle little cabin. Mungo did, too. She headed straight for them, loping across the weeds and sage then running up the incline so gracefully it looked like she was floating.

Roberto was clinging to the overhanging rock I’d been screwing around on the day before. He was a lot higher than I’d dared to climb, almost at the upper lip. Because of the overhang and the way the hillside sloped away below, he was almost forty feet off the ground. Roberto was definitely in the coffin zone. Shirtless, the brown muscles in his shoulders and back coiled and uncoiled as he gripped tiny edges.

Mary sat below him, her back against a small boulder and her knees close to her chest. She was dressed as she’d been yesterday in khaki shorts and a red fleece jacket. The clothes were less incongruous on her than they’d seemed the day before. Something about her posture or the setting made her seem almost relaxed. She had her steaming coffee mug balanced on her knees. She was sipping from it as she watched Roberto moving high above her. For a moment I stood still, watching her watching him.

Then Mungo busted through the brush. The mug leapt in Mary’s hands, and a brown spout rose a foot in the air before splashing down onto her shorts and legs. The spell was definitely broken. Mungo stood beneath Roberto, gazing up with tail wagging, while Mary wiped at her legs and looked at me with what might have been a scowl as I scrambled up the hillside.

My “Good morning” was answered with a curt nod.

“Where’s Tom?” I asked. “Already up on the ridge?”

I couldn’t see him. The shaded notch in the ridge looked unoccupied.

“No. He’s gone to town. To look for those foreign cigarettes Roberto wanted.”

“And the dude wasn’t too happy about it,” Roberto added, looking down over his shoulder. “Took off out of here like he was pretty pissed. I hope he’s watching his blood pressure.”

“He’s going to have to go all the way to Rock Springs to find them, I bet.” I wondered if Roberto had demanded the exotic bidis intentionally. Just to tweak Tom. The nearest store likely to have them was more than a hundred miles away. While I approved of the sentiment, I didn’t like the thought of Tom cruising throughout the state in the obvious Suburban with its telltale antennae and California plates. Too many people would recognize a truck like that for what it was. “Did he take the Fed-mobile?”

“Would you give him your keys?” Mary asked.

“Uh-uh,” Roberto answered for me. “No frigging way. What kind of car do you think ol’ Tom drives in civilian life?” He was descending now to a safer height and swinging easily despite tiny holds that wouldn’t accommodate much more than the tips of his fingers and toes.

“Tom doesn’t have a civilian life,” I said, thinking about it. “But if he did, he’d drive an identical truck, I bet. Smoked windows and antennae and all that. A guy like him needs to be the king of the road. And he’d have Harley stickers on the back.”

“Not a Firebird or a Camaro,
che
?”

“Nah. When he was a kid, maybe. But now those are too Latin for him. He’d be afraid of looking like one of us greasers.”

Roberto, on the ground now and shaking out his hands, nodded thoughtfully. He was smiling and I was, too. This was a game we’d played when we were kids. Guessing how far people would go to establish their identity, to fit into their chosen stereotype. It was intended to make us feel superior, I guess. A way of compensating with a new school on a new foreign base each year, with the same bullies and geeks and athletes. But it could be argued that we were guilty of it, too. The last thing I knew my brother to drive was a rebuilt Indian motorcycle from the 1950s. A stereotypical outlaw machine. And I drove my battered Pig, which was the quintessential climber’s transport.

“You think he’s queer?” my brother asked. “All that repressed rage and macho bullshit? The way the dude looks at me sometimes . . . I swear he’s about to try and suck my face.”

“Maybe,” I said, laughing at the image.

Mary laughed, too. Her laugh—the first I’d heard from her—was a loud “Hah!” that she quickly gained control of. But still grinning, she said, “Come on. You guys stop making fun of him. He’s my partner. And he’s good at what he does.”

“He’s a pain in the ass,” I said.

“You should make me your partner,
chica
. I make you laugh,” Roberto said.

She shook her head and, looking like she was making an effort to be grave, said, “He might not be all that fun, but he is really good at what he does. And he’s a true believer.”

That quieted me down, the part about Tom being a believer. That was something I respected even when I didn’t believe in the same things. Maybe that was why I respected it—because I didn’t believe in anything anymore. Once I’d believed in the law as an instrument of absolute justice, but those days were long in the past. It was impressive that someone could be in law enforcement as long as Tom had and still keep the faith.

“What do you think Miss America here drives?” Roberto asked.

I looked at Mary. Her smile reappeared, but it seemed a little crooked. I don’t think she wanted us prying into her personal life.

“She’s got something sensible. Something, you know, federal and lawyerly. Like a nice, understated sedan. A BMW, or maybe an Audi.”

Now Mary looked embarrassed. I was dead-on. And it was obvious I’d seen too far into her and viewed things that right here, right now, and in the present company, she didn’t want known.

Roberto broke the uncomfortable silence. He said to Mary, with a mischievous grin, “Ask my bro what his fiancée drives.”

Now it was my turn to look embarrassed.
Roberto, you prick.

“You’ve got a fiancée?” she asked. “I didn’t know that.”

But I was glad there was something about me that wasn’t in their file.

“Four months pregnant,” Roberto said. “Just picked up a new car last month, right? C’mon, ask him what she drives.”

“Okay, Anton. What does your pregnant fiancée drive?”

The answer was that she had recently bought a used poor-man’s Porsche, also known as a Boxter. Unhappily, I admitted it.

“Flashy,” Mary said, with her eyebrows raised. “I can’t picture you with a woman like that.”

I defended Rebecca’s choice of automobile. “The pregnancy was unexpected. She says it’s her way of coping with it.”

Roberto laughed and punched my shoulder. “You know how many seats one of those things has? Two. No backseat at all. Where’s Daddy going to sit?”

“There he is,” Tom said, his face close to the camera’s digital screen. I could hear him breathing. “Our boy. Looking sharp.”

Tom had come back from his errand in midafternoon looking extremely pissed. He’d thrown a plastic bag with a dozen packages of bidis inside at Roberto then headed for the ridge without saying a word. He must have gone all the way to Rock Springs. After a few minutes I’d followed him up. I was sick of having nothing to do.

All day I’d been listening to Mary coach Roberto:
Where were you on this particular day? On that? Who did you see? Who saw you? Why did you run from prison? Why did you come back to the States? What are you doing in these mountains? How did you know where to find Hidalgo? Why did you want to work for him again?
She had divided up the last twelve months of my brother’s life into two separate lives, one fact and one fiction. The endless repetition of questions and answers was intended to turn the fiction into fact. Roberto had seemed to mind less than you would expect. He was having fun with Mary, drawing her out of her shell. He’d even gotten her up on the rock that morning, where she’d shown surprising strength as well as a not-so-surprising amount of determination.

“Let me see.”

Reluctantly Tom yielded the camera and scooted backward beneath the canopy of juniper branches. I slid in behind the tripod. The camera was focused on the chairs beside the swimming pool.

Jesús Hidalgo had neither horns nor a forked tail, both of which I’d been expecting despite the photograph I’d already seen. There was no obvious menace in the man’s appearance at this distance. He was certainly no
chupacabra
. He looked neither like a murderer—by whose order or by whose hand hundreds had died—or a billionaire. He was just a fat slob with slicked-back hair, a gold Malverde medallion around his neck, and a tiny swimsuit around an expansive waist.

It’s hard to look dangerous in a pair of black bikini briefs—maybe that’s why no one respects the French. You see how exposed a man is, how easy it would be to kick him in the nuts. Clogged arteries would kill him as easily as a silver bullet or a wooden stake. Looking down at him through the telescopic lens, I saw that Hidalgo was just a man who drank too much, ate too much, ran a stressful business, and casually adorned people he didn’t like with neckties made of their own tongues.

He was lounging in a chair, wearing dark glasses. He held a newspaper that was flapping in the wind on his hairy belly. The other men had disappeared in order, I supposed, to give El Doctor his privacy.

“What does he do with all his cash?” I asked.

Behind me, Tom snorted. “He’s not spending it on liposuction, I can tell you that. Not after what he had done to Carrillo.”

He was talking about Amado Carrillo-Fuentes, the deceased head of the Juárez cartel, whom Tom had once chased. He chuckled. “You know the story. Rumor is Hidalgo was one of the ‘doctors.’ Wore a surgical mask the whole time so Carrillo’s bodyguards wouldn’t recognize him. That’s really when people began calling him El Doctor. He didn’t even own that chain of pharmacies back then. This was a couple of years ago, when Hidalgo liked to take a personal hand in these things. Anyway, it was nicer than what he did to one of Carrillo’s top lieutenants. See, Hidalgo found out the guy’s trophy wife was vacationing with their kids in San Francisco. So he flew up there and convinced her she’d be better off with him. They raided the lieutenant’s bank accounts—took out something like twenty million. Then he cut off her head and FedExed it to Juárez. Imagine opening that package. Threw the lieutenant’s kids off a bridge, too.”

“If that’s true, why didn’t you get him for the murders on American soil?”

“The Coast Guard fished the kids out of the bay, but there was no evidence linking Hidalgo to it. Just rumor, as always. No one would talk.
La corbata,
remember?”

I stared at the screen, zooming it in on Hidalgo’s face. There was something disturbing about how normal he looked. How pathetic with his longish hair, his fat waist, and the stupid bikini swimsuit. I wanted him to take off his sunglasses so that I could see his eyes. I wanted to see the monster there. That was what was so disturbing—he looked like anyone. Anyone could be a monster. But after eight years of making arrests, I still didn’t understand how one became a monster. Was it greed, or lust for power, or the simple lack of empathy?

“What does he do with all his money?” I repeated.

“A lot of it goes to bribes. The DEA estimates it at over a hundred mil a year from just Hidalgo’s Mexicali Mafia alone, but there’s no way to know for sure. But remember when Presidente Salinas’s big brother Raul was seized by the Swiss? He had well over a hundred million bucks in just his Swiss account. The Brits grabbed another twenty-four million in an account he had there. The DEA thinks the Salinas brothers left office with nearly a billion. El Presidente, by the way, is now living in exile in a castle in Ireland.”

The numbers sounded outlandish. But I knew that narcotics trafficking was Mexico’s number one industry, estimated at thirty-two billion dollars a year. So Hidalgo, who transported about a quarter of all the cocaine, could easily afford to give the police, judges, and politicians there a hundred million a year. The Mexican government must love it. They get all that cash, plus almost another hundred million a year in clean money from the States for supposed antidrug aid.

Tom was still talking. “Hidalgo probably manages to wash a lot of it, but it isn’t easy. He pushes millions through his pharmacies, grocery stores, mining operations, and hotel chains, but even that’s tough to do. We think a lot of it just gets buried. That he makes a big hole in the ground and just stuffs it in.”

I moved the lens up as I wondered about that. Every now and then a state highway patrolman would make a traffic stop and find a car filled with bundled cash. On its way to Mexico. You couldn’t fit more than a few hundred thousand in a standard-sized car. It was less difficult than bringing drugs into the country—there wasn’t any search at the border—but it had to be a pain nonetheless. The lens refocused automatically where I’d aimed it a half-mile back from the house. There were the long construction trailers, then beyond them a wasteland of dirt and debris, and then the entrance to the mine. Men were hanging around outside the trailers. Some of them were loading cardboard boxes onto the back of a pickup truck. The truck was pointed toward the mine.

Tom continued, “The bribes he pays are so big, and paid to people so high up, that he’ll never be arrested in Mexico. And for the same reason a lot of people in our government don’t want him arrested here. If he were to start talking, it would stir up all kinds of trouble for Congress the next time they have to recertify Mexico for foreign aid.”