Crossing the Line (36 page)

I was tempted to laugh. Lydia—damn, she was pretty tough for an innocent little elf.

As I regained a sense of time and place, the white lights went out as the transmission clicked again. The van slowly began pulling forward. Its red taillights began to dance as the van bounced over ruts and rocks, accelerating. In my arms, Jesús Hidalgo—El Doctor, killer of maybe thousands, the great, untouchable drug lord himself—was limp and groaning louder. The van geared down expertly to drop off the ridge. Then it was gone, lurching into the darkness. I never saw it, or any of the desert rats, again.

I pushed Hidalgo off me. He collapsed onto the ground at the rear of the Pig. I retrieved the pump-action shotgun with the pistol grip from under the seat and stepped completely into the night.

The world tore open three times. Three souls disappeared. Maybe four, if you counted my own.

THIRTY-EIGHT

L
ike that night in Cheyenne almost three years before, it wasn’t exactly self-defense. It was close, within a minute or so, but not as close as that night when a blizzard was tearing down out of the Medicine Bow and I pushed through a ranch house’s ramshackle door.

Maybe an argument could be made that would have allowed me to feel somewhat okay about it. After all, it wasn’t done in cold blood. Not entirely. At least it wasn’t the straight-out assassination I’d intended to commit in Hidalgo’s home. And there wasn’t any doubt what they were going to do to me. What Hidalgo was going to do, personally, with that machete, after Zafado incapacitated me with a bullet through the groin.
La corbata.
Their imminent intentions should have provided some philosophical relief.

But they didn’t. I’d clearly stepped over the line.

Murder in the first degree—the most repugnant of all crimes—is the
deliberate and premeditated killing of a human being.
I examined the evidence and built a case against myself. The initial drive to Mexico. The purchase of the vicious little shotgun. The clandestine buying of shells manufactured to knock down large mammals. The reconnaissance of the hacienda from atop Trono Blanco. And finally, the three point-blank blasts of buckshot to already wounded men who were no longer an immediate threat to my well-being.

Self-defense, as defined by the law, didn’t apply. And Leo Tolstoy, who was smarter than me, was probably right about preemptive violence.

I was guilty not just once but three times over.

At first I felt very little. Numb, and that was all. Neither horrified nor triumphant nor vindicated. I collapsed the tents and straightened up the camp. I threw everything but the bodies in the back of the Pig. Then I washed off my blood-encrusted legs and dressed. As light began to gather out over the Sea of Cortés, and the flies began to gather around the campsite, I looked around one last time then fired up the old truck.

The road wasn’t much easier to navigate in the dawn than it had been in the night. I was helped a little by the tracks from the van’s oversized tires. I came to a fancy jacked-up pickup about a half-mile from the camp. It was where the narcos had left it before making their final approach on foot. On the back window of the pickup was one of those little yellow stickers. A happy face with a protruding tongue instead of a curving line for a smile. I stopped, got out, and scraped it off. I put the shredded sticker in my wallet. Next to where my badge should have been.

I wondered what Zafado had done with the gold-and-silver shield. He’d taken it from me in the mine and it had never reappeared. That was all right. I’d given it away in the mine as much as he’d taken it, and I’d given it away here again in Mexico.

The outwardly pleasant village of Colonia de la Tajo was empty except for some roosters on the road and a goat on the baseball field. The town would get a new
patrón
soon. Someone—less or perhaps more brutal—would step in to fill Hidalgo’s shoes. As even Tom Cochran had admitted, the monster always grows a new head. He’d also said that there is more than a little pleasure to be taken in lopping the old one off.

At midmorning I crossed the border back into the United States, the place where the law was supposed to mean something.

The sweating INS agent asked me the purpose of my visit to Mexico.

“Pleasure,” I answered.

I hadn’t found it, though. Not even after having lopped off
the
head and those of the three main
capitáns
.

I saw Mary Chang before she saw me.

She was on the yellow couch in the hospital corridor, reading this time instead of sleeping. Like when I’d confronted her by the elevators in the courthouse—or when, more accurately, she and Tom had confronted me with the ultimate goal of their plan—she was dressed in an expensive-looking suit. The thing she was reading was a slick brochure. As I came closer, I saw it was for a high-priced security firm called Krull and Associates.

I guessed she’d lost her job, or was about to lose it. I didn’t feel too bad. She deserved it, just as I now did. She’d been the one who’d started this whole thing when her friend and colleague was murdered by Jesús Hidalgo. Besides, Krull would be happy to pay an attractive female minority agent with both FBI experience and a law degree double or triple her government salary. I knew that Krull even had offices in Denver, if that was where she wanted to be.

Maybe what she felt for Roberto was true, or maybe it was just plain guilt. Or maybe it was simply the need to protect him—something she no longer needed to do. I didn’t ask her motivation and she didn’t tell me. In fact, I refused to speak to her at all.

“Anton! Where have you been?” she asked, slapping down the brochure and jumping to her feet. She knew the answer because where I’d been was where she’d intended for me to go all along. It had been the plan before she’d even met me.

When I didn’t answer, or even acknowledge her presence, she asked with less pretense, “Are you okay? What happened? Did you get him?”

I walked past her into the ICU. I closed the glass door firmly behind me.

Roberto’s position in the bed—still in the Intensive Care Unit—was unchanged, although he had somehow managed to get a new wound on his throat. It was a jagged, scabrous tear sewn shut with wiry black stitches. It ran vertically from just below his chin to the V where his collarbones connected. It crossed the old wound, making an X.

When I first saw it, I thought they had somehow gotten to him. That Hidalgo’s men were still out there, still hunting, and that my crimes had been for nothing. Or that Hidalgo was so evil he had the power to reach out from the grave.

But Roberto’s tongue was still in his mouth, as far as I could tell. And the new wound was vertical, rather than horizontal. Almost choking, I demanded an explanation from the attending nurse. It seemed that there had been some changes in his condition after all. And that they’d been for the worse.

My brother might actually live.

A day earlier he’d begun to breathe on his own. The tube down his throat had been removed. There had also been an indication of electrical activity in his brain. Based on these findings, which the doctors considered positive, they’d performed another surgery. I nearly vomited when a nurse told me the details.

The four-inch incision was made in his throat. His trachea and esophagus were pushed to the side. The root of his tongue, presumably, as well. The fragments of two exploded disks were removed from between three of his vertebrae. The hope was that the vertebrae in his neck would fuse together. Then they’d stitched up the wound, twisted some new screws into his skull, and attached a steel frame that went down to his shoulders. All this so that, if he did ever wake up, he might only be paralyzed from the waist down, below where his spinal cord had been completely severed, instead of from the neck down.

His eyes were half-open but unseeing. I gently touched my forehead to his and looked into them. The famous blue irises were pale and watery. The whites around them were crimson—stained from burst blood vessels in his head.

“It’s up to you, bro. Live or die. Live, and I’ll find a way for us to climb again. I promise. Die, and I’ll think of you every time I’m feeding the Rat.”

I wiped my face on my sleeve then dug out my wallet. For a minute I stared at the empty space where my badge had been Velcroed. I remembered when I’d received it after taking an oath following my academy training in Rock Springs. Roberto had shown up for the ceremony. How he heard about it I never knew. He was traveling constantly at the time, doing his solos in Yosemite and the Black Canyon and down in Patagonia, doing his speedballs, too, and almost always attended by a photographer from one of the climbing magazines.

I’d been so affected by his quiet, amused presence at the ceremony that I couldn’t refuse to follow him to Laramie and a party he knew about. It was all climbers—playing music, demonstrating moves in the air, and smoking pot. I pretended not to see or smell the pot. Then I felt my wallet slide out of my pocket. Roberto ran up to a group passing a pipe, the badge in his palm, screaming, “POLICE! GET DOWN!” He ripped the pipe out of a stunned girl’s hands, sucked it off, and ran off laughing.

From the pocket behind where the badge should have been, I took out the shredded yellow sticker. I pushed it into his palm and closed his fingers around it. Unlike myself, my brother wouldn’t have any qualms about the trophy.

Holding my brother’s fingers closed around the sticker, I thought that maybe Mary would find it there. Then she would know for sure what had happened. And then I would see if she stopped hanging around in the hallway. Or maybe a nurse would notice it first and throw it away. Maybe Roberto would wake up, see it, and grin his mischievous grin.

What I did know was that the murders of Jesús Hidalgo and his two
capitáns
would never be reported or confirmed. The bodies would disappear from the campsite. They were probably already gone. Someone other than the coyotes would clean up what was splashed on the stony ground. The Mexican cartels had a history of covering up the deaths of their leaders. Just like Ramon Arellano-Felix and his rival, Amado Carrillo-Fuentes. They didn’t want to admit that another cartel had succeeded in taking out their leadership. Instead they wanted the uncertainty and legends to grow.

Rumor has it that both narcos are still around, still running things. Jesús Hidalgo, too. That’s what the
narcocorridos
are singing about, anyway. The disciples of Saint Malverde are still out there. In vengeful spirit if not in fact.

“Where the hell have you been, QuickDraw?” McGee growled when I opened the door to Rebecca’s loft.

Then Mungo hit me like a freight train, bowling me backward into the hallway.

It seemed that with the wolf, at least, all would be forgiven. She planted her paws on my chest and half licked and half gnawed at my throat. Somebody still liked me. I didn’t think there were too many others.

Once I got out from under a hundred pounds of hair and bone and slobber, McGee barked his question a second time.

He was slumped on the couch that lately had been serving as his bed. As usual, there was ash and food in his beard and a suspicious glare in his bloodshot eyes. His old .45 automatic lay on the table in front of him.

I made my voice cheery.

“Looking for my head, boss. Trying to get it on straight. Where’s Rebecca?”

He waited a beat.

“Where do you think?”

I didn’t answer. He knew that I knew she’d be at work. And he knew that was why I’d come here instead of going there. I gave up on the false good humor.

“You can put that away,” I said, pointing to the gun. “Rebecca’s safe now. Thanks for keeping an eye on her.”

It was his turn not to say anything. He didn’t speak for a long, long time. But his silence spoke volumes. As did his eyes. He picked up the big, blunt gun and dropped it into his briefcase without looking away from me. Closed the lid, spun the combination locks. When he finally spoke, it was as if he hadn’t heard what I’d said.

“Christ, Burns. You’ve been gone three days without telling anyone where the hell you were going. The office is going out of their minds. The AG wants an interstate BOLO put out on you.” A BOLO—Be-On-the-Look-Out—is what used to be known as an APB, an All Points Bulletin. “An investigative team’s been formed to decide whether or not to press charges or take disciplinary action for you going into that mine without a warrant.”

“What’s going to happen with that?”

As head of the Division of Criminal Investigation, McGee would oversee the investigation. And, after consulting with the governor and the Attorney General, determine the outcome.

“Disciplinary, you undeserving bastard. A mere lowering of grade and pay. The Feds want the whole thing kept quiet. They threatened to cut the Department of Justice grant money if the Attorney General doesn’t do what they want. So there’s going to be no charges, no trial.”

I smirked. Of course they wanted it kept quiet. They didn’t want their rogue agents’ actions becoming public. They wanted it to look like some big screwup by the hick Wyoming police.
Those cowboys were too dumb to know they needed a warrant.
And my pay couldn’t get much lower, anyway. But whatever it was would be enough. It’s not hard to get by when you’re happiest sleeping on the ground. And that was where I intended to do my sleeping for the foreseeable future.

“And a special assignment,” he added, showing me an evil grin. “Seems the governor is all worked up about some supposed gay-sex ring going on late at night in one of the Cheyenne city parks. Wants it cleaned up, pronto. So we’re going to put you in leather pants and run a little sting. You have no idea, QuickDraw, just how far you’ve got to go before there’s enough evidence to arrest. I hope you can still touch your toes when it’s all over, and that you can pucker your lips without ChapStick. I’m going to want a dozen arrests before you get another assignment.”

I had no doubt he would make me go through with it. Just as I had no doubt that any charges I reluctantly filed would be pled out. A similar sting had been run two years earlier at the governor’s insistence, and conducted by another DCI agent deep in the doghouse. McGee, who lacked the governor’s homophobia, had reduced all Public Indecency charges down to Following Too Close—a two-point traffic infraction and a twenty-dollar fine.

I’d take my punishment. It was probably a lot less severe than I deserved.

“I want you in Cheyenne tonight. You’re to report to the office, and to the investigative team. You are not to go anywhere or do anything until their investigation’s complete. You understand me, boy?”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

I nodded. Then I asked, “How about Rebecca? How is she?”

The evil grin he’d worn when describing my next assignment completely disappeared. It was replaced by a frown and a glare that were even harsher than when I’d first come in the door. He might be able to forgive—or at least justify to some degree—my forays into the dark side of the law. But this was clearly something that was inexcusable.