Crossing the Line (3 page)

“If you really knew him, then why were we in such a hurry to get out of there? Why’d we drive over all those fences instead of just going by the house?”

“I didn’t want you to meet him, bro.”

Now it gave me a small thrill, learning that eight years earlier I’d come close to meeting one of the continent’s most brutal drug lords. A man believed responsible for hundreds of torture killings—his way of silencing those whom he suspected of disloyalty. His method was not only to kill the suspected individual, but to also kill every member of his family. Even close friends sometimes. It was a method that assured no one would ever testify against him. Simple and very effective. No one would sentence their entire family to death no matter what kind of protection or reward they were offered. And I felt a different sort of thrill, too, because my brother had been protecting me from him even way back then.

Roberto sat forward, leaning over far enough so that between his legs so that he could gaze down on the Feds, the wolf, and the two trucks parked below.

“I’m surprised they let us do this,” I told him.

“Didn’t have no choice,
che
. Those two want Hidalgo bad. They’ll do whatever I want.”

If they were dealing with my brother in the first place, it had to be true. What I didn’t understand was why he was dealing with them. Putting himself in danger of more time in prison if things didn’t work out, and risking a bad, bad death if they did. And maybe for not just him, although I didn’t want to think about that. Not yet.

“I still don’t get why you’re doing this, ’Berto.”

He shrugged. “Things are changing. I can’t explain it right now.”

I didn’t push him. I’d save it for later.

He glanced over his shoulder at me and then down again.

“Now watch this. I’m gonna freak ’em out.”

He stood and reeled about thirty feet of slack from his harness. Next he made an overhand knot. I didn’t realize right away what he was doing because I was thinking about what he’d said, and trying to guess the reason or reasons he was here.

What was going on with him? Why didn’t he just stay in South America, where Grandpa’s compadres from the bad old days during Argentina’s Dirty War could protect him from extradition? Why hadn’t he knocked Tom Cochran’s teeth down his throat? And why had he apologized?

I didn’t think I’d ever heard him apologize before. Not in thirty-two years of knowing him.

The click of a carabiner’s gate snapping shut startled me out of my thoughts. He had clipped the knot to the bolts. He’d also unclipped his own anchoring knot. He dropped the coil of slack rope next to me on the ledge.

Finally I realized what he was about to do.

“Don’t do it, ’Berto. You’ll ruin my rope.”

“You don’t need a rope, Ant. You’ve got to learn to let go.”

Then, with a scream of utter terror, he spread his bare arms and jumped off the ledge.

Long seconds later the carabiners and knots slammed together with a sound like a whipcrack as his weight hit the end of the rope. I rechecked the bolts then leaned over to see the mouths below gaping even wider. It was as if a flash-bang grenade had exploded over their heads. Mary Chang was frozen in place and seemed to be gasping for air. Tom was swearing loudly.

Swinging free above them, laughing silently, was my brother.

And he was just getting warmed up for really scaring the hell out of all of us.

TWO

I
t was nine o’clock at night when we finally rolled through the town of Potash and neared our destination. Like the epithet QuickDraw, which had been slapped on me, the town’s name was supposed to be sardonic and dismissive.

A couple of decades ago this dry, dusty region had been stampeded by surveyors, roughnecks, and the entrepreneurial leeches who followed them. All were looking to make a fast buck and then get out. Nearly all of them got out, but without the buck. Instead of oil and gas under the rocky soil, what they found was a mineral valuable only as a base component of fertilizer.
Potash
—said like you’re spitting out a mouthful of the area’s alkaline water—was what the town was designated by the few unfortunate souls who stayed—or were left—behind.

There were a couple of boarded-up fast-food joints near where the state highway veered off, and then a mostly deserted main street. The buildings were all made of tan brick. Their sturdy construction signified that, at one time at least, someone had had hopes for this place. That hope appeared to be long dead. Many of the store windows yawned wide and dark, like toothless old ghosts, and the interiors were stocked with only trash and tumbleweeds. Thoroughly graffitied boards covered others. Only a few retailers remained intact and, perhaps, occasionally open for business—three pawnshops, a feed store, and a hardware merchant.

Both ends of the main street were bookended by a pair of bars. It was Friday night, and a lot of pickup trucks were crowded around them. Outside of one bar on the south end of the street two vaqueros were pissing on the hood of an old patrol car emblazoned with the seal of the Potash Town Marshall. They barked and howled at Mungo, whose head was in its usual position, hanging out the window.

“My kind of town,” Roberto said.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Mary Chang responded, in an almost teasing tone that did surprise me. The fact that we would soon be reaching the end of the road, along with the cooling effect of the night, might finally draw her out of her shell.

She’d refused to join our conversations on the long drive north. Refused, pretty much, to speak at all. Not that it was likely she could’ve added much, since we mostly talked about Mom and Dad and mountains. But I’d repeatedly tried to get her to tell me what the plan was, what they wanted my brother for, other than to pick his brain about Jesús Hidalgo. She’d kept saying later, later. So I stopped asking and had gone mute myself.

I thought I was going to hate working for the Feds. Little did I know just how much.

On the other side of Potash were sagging trailers on jacks with tattered flags of laundry fluttering in the wind. Blue TV lights flashed from behind the windows. Most every trailer—despite the apparent poverty—was equipped with a satellite dish. We passed the frames of cannibalized cars and appliances and then passed what was officially marked as the town dump, the sign being the only thing that distinguished it from the surrounding landscape. Finally we were beyond civilization, such as it was in this part of the state, and beginning to crunch and bump along a dirt road.

Like most nights in the state, the sky was crystal clear. The ever-present wind off the plains swept it clean.

“Turn off your headlights, please, Agent Burns,” Mary in-structed me.

I flipped them off. The stars provided more than enough light for driving at the crawling speed the condition of the road demanded. Behind us, the Suburban’s lights went out, too. Mary used a penlight to study a map on her lap. She somehow managed to navigate us through the maze of dirt roads that wound among rocky desert knolls.

Whenever we reached the top of a ridge, I would study the eastern horizon for the starless voids that were made by the peaks of the Wind River Range. The foothills to the peaks began only a few miles from us, on the other side of the Roan River. The peaks themselves, rising to just shy of thirteen thousand feet, jutted up six thousand feet off the plain. Their shapes were familiar to me. In the past I’d climbed most of the more vertical edges of shadow. Maybe there would be a chance to get up there again, I thought. Maybe with my brother.

I braked to a stop before a barbed-wire fence that was strung across the road. Sandstone outcroppings stood on either side, preventing me from driving around it.

“This is it, gentlemen. Our headquarters for the next couple of weeks.”

Roberto turned and looked back at her. “I guess the Four Seasons back there in Potash was all booked up.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking that it looked like the back entrance to a prison. Roberto was probably thinking it, too.

Mary got out of the backseat and tried to unhook one side of the fence from where some iron spikes had been driven into the rock. She struggled with it, trying to peel it back in order to clear the road. I watched from behind the steering wheel as she put her shoulder between the barbs on a vertical line of wire.

“Where are your manners, Ant? Girl’s going to ruin her clothes,” Roberto said, opening his door and stepping out. As if eight hours of desert heat, blowing grit, and wolf hair hadn’t ruined the expensive-looking skirt and blouse already.

It was like Roberto to see the girl in her, a person Mary Chang seemed to take pains to hide with her formal clothes and stilted speech. And it was also like Roberto to open a fence for a female federal agent who planned on putting him at great risk by acting on whatever information he provided, and would probably like nothing better than to drop him back in the cell she’d only temporarily sprung him from.

Once they’d scraped the fence back, I pulled forward far enough so that the Suburban could fit through, too. Roberto and Mary closed the fence, reattaching it to the spikes, and climbed back in. After another hundred feet, the dirt track entered into what resembled a great pit or a crater.

It was surrounded on three and a half sides by steep slopes of rock, sage, and chaparral. Stars low overhead threw dim shadows from ribs of sandstone that poked out of the canted earth like the bones of some fossilized monster. Against the crater’s back wall were some dark buildings. I realized then that Mary had planned it this way—that was why she’d allowed my brother the time to “get a little air beneath his heels.” Our arrival was meant to be veiled by the night.

It was once a hunting camp but it had gone bankrupt a few years earlier, Mary explained, elaborating on anything for the first time. The bank that now owned it was unable to sell it so they were willing to lease.

I knew that several years of drought in the region had driven the elk into the mountains, and the only things left to shoot on the alkaline hills were rattlesnakes and a few skinny antelope. Anyone with money and sense would buy a place higher up in the pine forests below the peaks.

“I arranged, through a dummy corporation, and then through a law firm in Denver, to lease it for the fall,” Mary went on. “The bank thinks we’re a B-movie company that’s going to use it for a Western set. Behind that hill”—she indicated the sharp, spiny-looking ridge behind the buildings—“the land drops three hundred feet to the Roan River. Jesús Hidalgo has been staying at a property on the other side, only a half-mile upstream.”

It was bizarre to think of him being so close. Of this legendary bad guy, head of the Mexicali Mafia, being in my state at all. I’d become a Wyoming cop to take down drug dealers, but never imagined I’d get the chance to participate in taking down
the
drug dealer. I didn’t even mind that the Feds would surely take all the credit. If everyone would just loosen up a little, this might even be fun.

Mary added, “According to our intelligence, he’s there right now and intends to stay for a while.”

Her words gave me a charge of anticipation, not unlike what I felt when staring up at a virgin wall. But Mary again refused to give any further information on how we might climb it.

In the starlight I could make out a large cabin that probably served as the camp’s dining room, kitchen, and lounge. Three smaller cabins stood nearby. Off a little ways, against the edge of the crater, there was the black shape of a barn that appeared to be tilted a little to one side. The only trees were some stunted junipers along the slopes and ridge and a few dehydrated cottonwoods near the main cabin.

I started to park the Pig in front of the main cabin, when Mary ordered me to drive to the barn.

“He has a plane,” she said by way of explanation. “It flies up from Mexico City or Mexicali every couple of weeks. We don’t want to take any chances.”

I thought they were being overly cautious. But then I didn’t yet know their plan.

The two swinging doors leading into the partially collapsed barn were open. The darkness beyond them resembled a black hole. Mary got out again and shone her little flashlight’s beam around the interior. The narrow cone of light revealed a cracked and heaving concrete floor, piles of rotting timber, and some corroded farm implements.

I pulled to one side, letting the Suburban drive in first. When I wanted to leave I didn’t want to have to ask Tom to move his car.

Without being told, we were quiet as we got out of the trucks. Doors were bumped shut with hips rather than slammed. Mungo stayed so close to my side that she was leaning against my thigh. Overhead, the barn’s roof creaked and groaned in the wind. I doubted that if the inevitable occurred it would do much damage to my rusty iron truck. But it would sure play hell with the fancy paint on the Suburban. The taxpayers, of course, would foot the bill to keep the Feds looking sharp.

We walked as a group over packed dirt and through weeds to get to the main cabin. Tom walked behind Roberto, staring hard at my brother’s back. Just three hours earlier he’d seen him come screaming out of the sky. Now Tom acted as if he expected him to be jerked back up into the air.

Mary knelt on the porch before the door and again used her flashlight to work the combination on the padlock. The door stuttered open. She shone the light inside.

“Welcome to our new home, gentlemen.”

Sand was sprinkled liberally over the plank floor from where it had blown in through chinks in the log walls. Spirals of dust floated in the flashlight’s beam. Mouse turds lay among the sand and dirt. There was a kitchen area along one wall, with a stove and sink, and two wooden picnic tables with benches that were the only furniture in the large room. The interior doorway to an added-on bathroom was open but a brief glimpse of what was beyond wasn’t welcoming even after hours on the road.

Following Mary and Tom inside, I swept my hand through cobwebs next to the doorjamb, and felt a light switch.

“Don’t,” Mary said, turning suddenly and pointing the beam at my hand. “The electricity’s supposed to be on, but first I want to cover the windows.”

There was a retching sound from the kitchen wall. Tom had turned on the tap and brown water was beginning to cough out of it.

“Water works,” he reported. “At least I think it’s water. Good thing we brought our own to drink, but I’m not looking forward to showering with this mud.”

Roberto alone remained outside. After two weeks locked indoors I understood that he had no desire for walls. Not that he ever really did. I was like him in that way, more comfortable in a tent than in a house. It probably had something to do with growing up as a military brat, with a different house on a different base each year. For him it was worse, the result of too many additional years in prison. The closest thing to a permanent home either of us had known was our grandfather’s ranch on the Argentine altiplano.

After examining the lodge, I walked back out onto the porch and found him sitting on a step. He was putting the finishing touches on a hand-rolled cigarette, licking an edge of the paper. At least I hoped it was a cigarette. He struck a match against the sole of a motorcycle boot, and I was relieved a moment later when I smelled some kind of scented tobacco. But I wasn’t at all relieved by the way his hands seemed to be shaking.

“You okay?” I asked him, not really sure what, if anything, was the matter.

He smirked at me and blew smoke out of his nose.

After a minute, he asked, “Your girlfriend, that Rebecca, she still packin’?” Meaning, I assumed, had she gotten the abortion that had been an unspoken possibility for a while.

“Yeah. She’s due in February, Tío ’Berto.”

The smirk was now a genuine grin and I returned it. I knew he didn’t like Rebecca, or at least he knew she didn’t like him, but he seemed pleased. He looked down at his boots but didn’t say anything else.

A little later Mary removed the padlocks from the doors of the three smaller cabins. They were identical, empty but for metal cots and bare, dusty mattresses. Roberto and I were told to share one, which fit with my understanding of my role here—to serve as my brother’s babysitter. Mary and Tom would each have their own.

I assisted the two federal agents in humping duffel bags, metal suitcases, ice chests, and heavy rolls of black construction paper from the Suburban into the main cabin. It wasn’t because I was all that eager to help, but because I was anxious to know just how their task force planned to use my brother’s information to take down Jesús Hidalgo.

Mary armed herself with a bucket of bleach, took a deep breath, and headed for the bathroom. Using rubber mallets, Tom and I hammered sheets of tar paper over the windows and the places where we could feel the wind blowing through the log walls. We worked in silence, the two of us wordlessly agreeing that silence was probably the only way not to antagonize each other. When we were done Mary turned on the lights—three bare bulbs hung from rafters—and revealed a room that looked a little cozier, if dirtier, than it had in the dark. We swept the room and wiped the surfaces. As a final touch a heavy blanket was hung over the front door.

Now, even at night, there would be no sign that anybody was using the old hunting camp. We were going to be like ghosts.