Crossing the Line (11 page)

“Why do we care if everyone knows how corrupt the Mexican government is?”

Tom chuckled at my ignorance. “Because if they were to be exposed, they would stop even pretending to care about drug smuggling into the States. Because they are one of our biggest trading partners. Because without drug money, by far their largest resource, we’d have revolution to the south and a flood of refugees coming north like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

I turned around and looked at him. “Then how come you want to arrest him here?”

Tom took a minute, staring back at me.

“Fuck him. Fuck politics. Fuck Mexico. This guy’s killed a federal agent and he’s going to pay the price.”

Yes, Tom was a believer. I admired that even if I didn’t like him.

I scooted back and gave up the camera. Tom resumed his post at the tripod, a pilot’s notebook Velcroed to one of his thighs. I watched as he began to scribble obsessively in tiny, precise letters. He seemed to be documenting everything.

For a few minutes I amused myself by speculating about what he was writing.
Suspect reads Tijuana paper. Suspect has large mole on the left side of his chest. Suspect needs to cut his nails. Suspect has skinny ankles and an apparently unimpressive package.

“You know this guy as well as anyone, right?” I asked after several minutes that were silent but for the scratching of his pen.

“Yeah,” Tom said, not turning around. Still scribbling. “I’ve been on his ass for almost four years.”

“What do you think he’s going to do when Roberto shows up at his door?”

Tom shrugged, still not turning. But he stopped writing.

“He’ll let him in. If your brother wasn’t bullshitting us about dragging him off that mountain in Argentina. Then he’ll sit on him for a while to give his security guys a chance to sniff around him. Then it’s anybody’s guess. Depends on just how good a bullshitter your brother is. They’ll put him to work or they’ll kill him and we’ll get us a warrant. Either way, he’ll get us in.”

EIGHT

T
o get to the other side of the river, you either had to take the same route Hidalgo’s men used when going home from a fun night out at Señor Garcia’s or you could swim. We were going to stay dry.

From Potash, the land route involved taking a paved county road south twelve miles, then another paved road east to cross the wide, red river on a suspension bridge. On the other side there was a gravel road that ran all the way up to a trailhead in the mountains. There was also a dirt road paralleling the river that ran north and south. The way north was impeded by a cattle guard and a barbed-wire gate. Nailed to the posts that supported the wire were signs reading in English and Spanish, “Keep Out. No Trespassing. Violators Will Be Shot.”

We kept out, staying on the gravel, which wound up through the foothills and then entered pine forests on the way to the high peaks. But as we passed the signs I couldn’t help slowing and staring north, remembering from Tom’s satellite photo the camper that was down that road, just out of sight. Hidalgo surely had a few armed men there, probably some lowly bangers with big guns.

Roberto didn’t comment as we passed the narco’s ten-mile-long driveway. He didn’t even look that way. Instead he doodled away on one of Mary’s legal pads, holding the pad in the crook of his left arm so I couldn’t see what he was doing. The ride so far had been in silence, except for the José Cura disk that Roberto had slipped into the CD player. The spooky tenor’s voice was starting to freak me out.

“You sure you want to do this?” I asked him, turning the music down.

Roberto didn’t answer right away.

Outside the Pig’s open windows was a pine forest. You could see the trees even with your eyes closed because their smell was so strong. Especially after days down in the high desert. Mungo was trembling in the backseat. She was dying to get out and run around in the forest. A small lake on the left reflected snowcapped peaks in the fading light. It was beautiful up here, but the music and our purpose somehow made it a little sinister.

“I’m going to do it,” Roberto finally said. “Relax, bro. It’s gonna be fun.”

I slowed as the pavement turned to gravel. The washboards made the CD skip. Thankfully, I turned it off.

“You don’t have to, you know. You can just take off. What are they going to do? Put out another warrant for your arrest?”

He was shaking his head, putting away the pad of paper by tucking it into the door’s pocket.

He pointed out the windshield. “Is that Gannett?”

He was indicating a spirelike peak shrouded with glaciers.

“No. Gannett’s a long ways north. That’s East Temple Peak.”

He stared at it. “It’ll do.”

I could see what he meant. There was a face that was easily a thousand feet high and, as far as I knew, was virginal, never been climbed. The face looked dangerous. A good part of it looked to be overhanging. The rock was black—maybe rotten—and the glacier on the summit dropped over the top with long daggers of ice.

Instead of asking if that was a good idea, I asked, “Are you going to have time for that?”

He nodded, studying it through the windshield. “I’ll hoof it up to the base tonight, start early, and be down at Jesús’s by midnight tomorrow.”

It was a good ten miles or more cross-country to Hidalgo’s property.

“You’re going to be wasted,” I warned him.

“If I’m late, I’m late.”

“Did you pack enough gear for something like that?”

He just smiled.

We rattled and shook for fifteen more minutes. It had been a half hour since we’d seen the last car going down the other way. The trailhead was a fairly popular, as well as isolated, entry point for the Winds, but it was late Sunday afternoon and the vacationing climbers and campers were heading home. Roberto would have it all to himself.

“What do you do if there’s trouble? What’s the signal?” I asked him.

He smirked at me.

“Mary says I’m to get naked, go out on the lawn by the pool, and do the Macarena while you guys take pictures.”

“C’mon, ’Berto. This is important.”

Now he sighed.

“Stop worrying about me, okay? Everything’s going to be cool. If things are looking bad, I go out on the lawn, put both hands behind my head, and stretch.”

“That’s the official version. What are you really going to do?”

“If I listen to my chickenshit little brother, I’ll head for the hills.”

“Good. Listen to your chickenshit little brother. Screw the Feds. You don’t owe them anything. Especially not your life.”

There were only two cars parked at the trailhead. One had green Colorado plates, the other white Californians. Both looked like they’d been there for a while. It was a wonder they hadn’t had their windows broken. Greenies—Coloradoans—aren’t that popular in Wyoming and Left Coasters are even less so. Too many of them were moving here. Mungo squeezed out the window before I could even open the door for her and sprinted into the trees.

Although it was cool, Roberto pulled his T-shirt up. He didn’t take it all the way off but let the neck stay around his head, above his face, where it would hold back his hair. There had been a picture once in a climbing magazine of him using a shirt just like that. Two-thirds of the way up El Cap, two thousand feet off the deck. No rope. Looking, just like he did now, impossibly strong. It became trendy for a while for young climbers to wear their shirts like that.

Unstoppable,
I told myself.
Remember that. He’s even crazier than the narcos. He’s lighter than air. If gravity can’t touch him, they can’t, either.

I wanted to ask him why the hell he was doing this. But I held my tongue as I had held it the whole ride out and for the last three days. I just prayed that when it was all over, he would still hold his.

Without saying anything at all, we hugged and then he shouldered the pack we’d prepared. It held no transmitters, no cameras, none of the technological junk that Tom had wanted to put in there. Just camping and climbing gear and the packages of bidis Roberto would write us messages on. Mary had said Roberto’s notes would be enough for a warrant, that we couldn’t run the risk of Hidalgo having him searched. Tom had argued bitterly, but, thank God, to no avail. I didn’t want to think what would happen if Hidalgo’s
sicarios
searched the backpack and found a transmitter.

Mungo came back to stand beside me. She looked up at me, cocking her head, wondering why I wasn’t putting on a pack, too.

Roberto bent and thumped her shoulders. Then he hit mine.

“See ya,
che
.”

“Be real careful, ’Berto.”

I had to hold Mungo’s collar as he walked away.

What he’d been doodling on the legal pad was bizarre. I pulled it out of the passenger door’s pocket as soon as he was out of sight, heading for the peaks.

On the first page there was a cartoonish drawing of a laughing wolf’s face. Tongue lolling, lips raised in a happy smile, like Mungo after a run. I thought maybe it was a crude portrait of her, but there was a caption printed beneath it that read, “The Wolf Who Wanted to Be a Little Girl.”

What the fuck?

Below that it said,
“Por mi sobrina, de tu Tío Roberto.”

On the following pages was a strange little story, written in pencil, with a lot crossed out and other parts erased. Crude sketches accompanied each part of the story.

“There once was a wolf who wished she could be a little girl. She watched the kids playing in the meadow and wanted to play with them.”

The drawing on this page was of a wolf peering Mungo-like out of the trees on the edge of a field. Children were playing with balls and climbing around on rocks. I smiled. My brother was no artist, but he’d caught Mungo there, doing her you-can’t-see-me thing.

“She wanted to run on her hind legs, to wear a blue dress, to laugh, and to make the other kids laugh. But she couldn’t do any of these things very well.”

A series of rough sketches showed a wolf trying to walk on her back legs, trying to nose her way into a dress, and, in front of a microphone, trying—I guessed—to tell a joke.

“She thought about it. What makes one a little girl? Two legs instead of four? Round ears instead of pointed? No tail? The wolf thought this might be the one big drawback to being a little girl. How do they warm their noses on a cold night?”

More pictures. Crude, but kind of cute. And definitely perverse, having been drawn by Roberto’s hand.

“But the wolf was smart enough to know that it’s not two legs, or hands with thumbs, or even round ears, that makes one a little girl. Those are only the outer manifestations of girlhood. What makes one a girl is when you are there for your friends, when you make them laugh, and laugh with them.

“The wolf ran out of the forest and tried to join the children. At first they ran away. They screamed and called for their mothers and fathers. They were very afraid. But the wolf began running in circles, chasing her tail. The children stopped running. The wolf pulled up her lips and began walking around on just her hind legs. The children laughed. The wolf lay on her back and kicked her legs like she was riding a bicycle. The children came to her. They stroked her and petted her. She licked them and gave them rides on her back. And they laughed with her. And she with them. She never hurt any of them. She was their best friend, standing up for them when she needed to, chasing off the bad kids who wanted to hurt them. She became a little girl in all the important ways.”

I mumbled one more
What the fuck?
The wolf looked like Mungo, but using the maybe true/maybe bullshit powers about interpreting symbolism that I’d learned in college literature classes, I was betting that the wolf was Roberto. And he didn’t want to be a little girl, but he wanted to be one of us. One of the kids. Playing our games, yeah, but also chasing off the bad kids—like Hidalgo.

Holding the notebook propped against the steering wheel with my thighs, I rubbed my face while looking down at it. My throat felt a little tight. My eyes got a little wet.
Roberto. You are a trip, bro.

NINE

I
nterstate 25, running from Wyoming to Denver, is straight, flat, and all downhill. Traffic was light going south in the dark, and my gold-plated badge allowed my foot to lie heavy on the accelerator. Mungo leapt and spun around in the backseat of the Pig after testing the air. She realized where we were going. And who we were going to see.

I waited until I was past the stench of the cattle yards outside Greeley, Colorado, before I picked up my cell phone and speed-dialed Rebecca’s number. She answered on the first ring.

“It’s me,” I told her, trying to rein in the excitement that I, too, was feeling. “I’m about an hour out.”

“Good. I’m cooking.”

She was a lousy cook, but that didn’t put a brake on my anticipation. She only knew two dishes—one a sort of tofu goulash, the other a quiche—but I didn’t care. In fact, I would gratefully lap up anything she put before me because I knew what could come later. Maybe even before. I didn’t know if I could wait to feel her naked skin. To be engulfed by it. To run my hands over her belly and see if I could finally detect the swell of my growing child.

“I’ve got a surprise for you, Ant.”

“Tell me.”

“I guess you didn’t hear me. I said it’s a surprise.”

“At least give me a hint, smart-ass. Is it something you’re wearing?”

She laughed. “No. It’s most definitely not something I’m wearing.”

My heart rate picked up. My foot pressed a little harder on the accelerator. Rebecca always ran hot and cold when it came to me, and tonight it appeared I would be in luck. It definitely seemed to be hot.

“I need another hint. Some graphic description, maybe.”

“No more hints. Hurry home. Drive safe.”

Home.
That sounded good. Almost as good as the bare flesh I was picturing in my head, the thick brown hair that hung in tangles to below her breasts and provided such dazzling contrast against her white skin. For the next twenty-four hours, I didn’t intend to think about my brother or murderous drug lords or uptight FBI agents.

I found a parking space for the Pig near Speer Boulevard, only two blocks from Rebecca’s loft in Denver’s LoDo district. The early-evening crowd was everywhere on the streets, coming and going out of trendy restaurants and bars and, after getting a few dirty looks, I snapped a leash on Mungo’s collar. No one but Roberto and me wants to see a wolf running loose on the streets of Denver.

I poked the elevator button in the lobby while Mungo tap-danced with her long nails on the marble floor. The elevator didn’t come. I poked a few more times, Mungo danced some more, and still the elevator didn’t come. So I hit the stairwell door and started climbing with Mungo lunging at my heels.

We burst out onto the sixth-floor hallway and barely missed knocking down a small child that belonged to the other loft on the floor. She was pulling a wagon full of stuffed bears, moose, and wolves.

“Sorry, honey,” I yelled as we ran past.

The little girl stared at Mungo with huge eyes and a dreamy smile.

“Mun-GO!” she shouted.

The real wolf, trailing her leash, slicked back the girl’s hair with her tongue as she galloped after me.

At Rebecca’s door I took a moment to compose myself, trying to control my heavy breathing. I meant to take longer than I did—but picturing Rebecca somewhere behind the door had my knuckles beating on the metal after only two inhalations. I didn’t use my key because I wanted her to be there, letting me in.

The door swung open before my hand was back down at my side. What stood before me was not my naked fiancée. Instead it was someone ugly and misshapen, someone looking malevolent and slightly obscene. His name was Ross McGee. He resembled Santa’s evil twin, but instead of a red hat and a fur-fringed coat, he wore a pin-striped suit.

“QuickDraw,” he rasped, the words followed by a familiar odor of whiskey and cheap cigars. “Is that your gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

I stared at my boss, saying nothing. All the excitement drained away. Beside me Mungo began to rumble.

Ross McGee grinned at the wolf for a moment, exposing his own large teeth, then held out his meaty hand for her to sniff. He held it in a peculiar manner, with his middle finger extended toward the dog’s snout.

Mungo must have understood the gesture, because she refused to sniff. She backed away a step, growling louder, and slipped behind me.

“Ross,” I heard myself growl. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“A man can’t visit his goddaughter? Can’t check up on his most troublesome employee? The same bastard who had the unbelievable audacity to impregnate her?”

I’d used up all my luck that night in Cheyenne two and a half years ago. Since then the karmic payback had been an unrelenting bitch. An investigation into my conduct, a lawsuit, the media condemnation, and the nickname . . . all that on top of what was going on with my brother. But the worst of it, at that moment, seemed to be that I’d fallen for the daughter of my boss’s old comrade in arms from their army days together. Even if I were to finally quit my job with DCI, Ross McGee would still be around to haunt me.

“Surprise!” came a voice from behind Ross. I could hear a bit of irony in the exclamation.

Mungo stopped growling and darted past McGee. Although I tried, I couldn’t help but smile as the wolf planted her paws on Rebecca’s shoulders and bowled her onto the big velvet couch in the center of the room. There Mungo licked her cheeks and throat ecstatically, the way I would have liked to but couldn’t in present company.

“Great surprise, ’Becca,” I said, sliding around my boss. “All my Christmases have come at once.”

I dragged Mungo off Rebecca then quickly bent and kissed my often-reluctant fiancée. Even though she’d played this dirty trick on me, I couldn’t help but light up at the sight of her and the touch of her lips. Even though she was clothed.

She looked spectacular. She wore a sleeveless black blouse and a green silk skirt, both of which I was aching to lift off her. Her rich tangle of hair was pulled back loosely and her feet and legs were bare.

In a crowded room or at a party, Rebecca Hersh might not immediately draw a man’s attention. That usually went to the loud bleached blondes with their fake tans, revealing clothes, and carefully applied makeup. But Rebecca would draw a second look, and then some talk if you were brave enough. And from that point on you’d be like me—absolutely hooked. Her brown eyes, when viewed up close, were a kaleidoscope of color. Slivers of gold, orange, and green danced within her irises.

“Hi, Ant,” she said, giving me the full, up-close effect of the eyes.

McGee, who’d followed behind me, raised his cane sharply between my legs, making me jump.

“That’s enough of that, Burns. You’re going to make me sick. It’s like watching an alley cat try and hump a Persian.”

Rebecca got McGee and me seated across from each other over a silver bowl of crackers and a bottle of wine. She worked in the open kitchen, all the way across the big living room. She’d refused to let me help—not that I would have been able to do anything, but I would have liked to at least try instead of sitting across from my boss.

“What’s happening in Podunk?” McGee demanded.

He meant Potash, which I’d heard him describe as Wyoming’s rural ghetto.

I shrugged. I didn’t want to think about it. Not here, not now. I looked around the room and tried to make myself feel at home in these modern surroundings. The big windows, the recessed lights, the bright art, the traffic noise below, and even the woman herself made me feel foreign. Even after more than a year of visiting her here. None of it was like anything I’d ever known or pursued. It was all exotic to me, a whole other world. Past girlfriends had been climbers, skiers, kayakers—all nature freaks. Their ideal homes had mostly been trucks and tents.

“Surveillance. Setting up a confidential informant. Nothing much,” I said.

“Oh? Is that why you haven’t reported in? You’ve been too busy?”

He was staring at me, leaning forward on the couch as if the weight of his gut were dragging him toward the floor. His blue irises were bright and hard even though they swam in wet, yellowish orbs. The long white beard was bristling, as were his wiry eyebrows.

“I’m attached to the Feds for six weeks, Ross. I don’t work for you right now.”

“Bullshit,” McGee said. “Who signs your paychecks, ingrate?”

“The Wyoming Attorney General. Not you.”

“You think he’d be signing them if I wasn’t covering your ass? No, lad, you’d get an official pat on the back, an unofficial kick in the nuts, and a letter of termination so fast you wouldn’t know whether to puke or cry. Now give it up.”

He was right, of course. I was holding back only because of the subject matter, the place and time, and the churlishness that characterized our relationship.

Ross McGee had been a pain in my ass since I started with DCI—I nearly quit the first day I met him. The last two years he’d become an even greater pain since sparing me a political prosecution for what had happened that night in Cheyenne. He owned me now—there was no getting around it. The pain of his mentorship had magnified into almost agony since I began sleeping with his goddaughter. He was loathed by our superiors for the way he forced them to toe the line, was admired but avoided by his subordinates for his perpetual orneriness and off-color remarks, and, next to my brother, was probably the best friend I’ve ever had.

He’d once been a legendary trial attorney but age, ill health, and ever-increasing vulgarity had made him no longer effective in front of a jury. So he was relegated by the senior suits at the AG’s office to riding herd over the twenty-six special agents. It was a saddle they hoped he’d soon die in.

I put it off for a moment longer by calling out to Rebecca, “I can’t believe you told him I was coming down here.”

“He called and asked if I’d heard from you. What was I supposed to say?”

“You should have lied. I thought you were more loyal than that. Bad fiancée.”

McGee grinned at me. “You know what Chauncey Depew said? ‘A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are.’ ”

“Who the hell is Chauncey Depew? Is he that skunk in the cartoons?”

McGee let out a wounded groan and muttered something profane about my ignorance.

I got up and went over to where Rebecca’s small Bose stereo was installed on a built-in bookcase. Trumpety jazz came on when I hit the CD button. I turned it up high enough that I didn’t think she could hear us across the wide-open space that stood between the chairs and sofa and the kitchen area. After looking out the floor-to-ceiling window for a moment toward the Front Range, I sat down again facing McGee.

I quietly told him about the mine purportedly owned by a Mexican City attorney, Jesús Hidalgo’s residence there, and my brother going in as the Feds’ confidential informant. Until now he’d known only what I’d known before arriving in Potash—that Roberto had turned himself in and they wanted my help in controlling him while they pumped him for information.

Listening, McGee looked even more appalled than usual.

“Jesus Christ!” came coughing out of his emphysemic lungs. “Putting in a murdering nutcase like your brother to act as a CI? An escaped felon and a drug addict to boot? They think anything he gives them is going to convince a judge to grant them a warrant? Who the hell’s running this goatfuck?”

I hadn’t really thought about that. Some judges—particularly federal judges who crossed their
t
’s and dotted their
i
’s—might have a problem with accepting the testimony of Roberto as McGee had described him. With CIs you had to give the deciding judge an opinion as to the informant’s reliability. Some background regarding credibility. But I assumed Mary and Tom had thought about that, that they’d have some other evidence to back him up.

“An FBI agent named Mary Chang,” I told him.

“Who’s behind her?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because when my boss, our beloved Attorney General, asked where you are and why you hadn’t been causing any trouble lately, he nearly had a shitfit. He’d just been at a meeting in Washington with the director of the FBI, where he’d been told that there were no current federal operations in the state other than the usual bank robberies and insurance fraud. With something this big, either the director was lying or he didn’t know about it.”

I was confused. I didn’t understand why McGee was so worked up about this part of it. The director of the FBI couldn’t keep tabs on every case his office was investigating. Not in these post-9/11 days when the Bureau was under such heavy fire. But this was, obviously, a potentially very big case.

“Who came to you to get me assigned in the first place?” I asked.

McGee had ordered me to meet the Feds in Salt Lake and work with them without explaining who had requested me to do so. I hadn’t asked. I’d known it was about my brother.

“The same Mary Chang. After the Attorney General came back yesterday, I checked up on her. She’s assigned to the San Diego office. I called there. They said she was taking some personal leave.”

What the hell? Maybe it was a cover.

“Did you tell them who you are?” I asked.

“Of course I did. That didn’t change their answer, except to tell me that a colleague of hers had been murdered. She’s not on assignment, secret or otherwise. She’s freelancing. And dragging you into it. Christ! I’m going to make some calls and shut her down.”

“Don’t,” I told him, my voice sharp.

It explained all those things I’d been wondering about. Why they didn’t have more guys. Why Mary and Tom didn’t seem to need to report to anyone, not even with a case this big. It wasn’t right. I felt sick. And it might be too late to stop Roberto.

Rebecca called out, sounding just like Mary but smiling, “Eat, gentlemen.”

The portions on the table were small, and the smell wasn’t particularly pleasant, but I didn’t comment and McGee only asked for hot sauce. This, something called Kick Yo Ass that Rebecca kept around just for him, he dumped all over the contents of his bowl. It wasn’t long before beads of sweat were rolling down his freckled scalp and he was noisily snorting into one of my fiancée’s linen napkins. I did my best to swallow the goulash and with it my rising panic.