Crossing the Line (15 page)

The
sicarios
and gangbangers seemed overly eager, like junior high school boys. It was almost laughable to see these cold-blooded killers, drug runners, and thieves acting so shy while posing so hard, as if this were their first prom. It was funny. For a little while, at least.

The girls came out en masse from a wide sliding-glass door on the wing opposite where Hidalgo slept. They were wearing swimsuits that were really only small patches of cloth tied together with long, thin strings. Tattoos and flashy jewelry colored their skin. They came out of the house strutting with confidence—they were determined to remain in control. For their sakes, I very much hoped they would.

For the first hour the surface of the pool was unmarred even by the wind. The men clustered in small, tight groups around one or two of the women, pressing drinks upon them while running their eyes over all the too-tan skin.

Hidalgo came quietly out of his bedroom door. He was dressed even better than his men, in a gray Western-cut suit and pimply black ostrich-skin boots. His dark sheath of hair was slicked back but looked as if it had been casually tousled before a mirror.

A few of the bolder girls hurried to him. They fawned and pranced as they greeted their host, each one seeming to vie for his attention. He appeared polite but not affected by their displays. He settled himself onto a lounge chair and casually waved the girls back to his men like a good
patrón.
Someone brought him a drink. He sipped it while watching the show from behind his sunglasses.

Roberto wandered out a few minutes later. From the same door, which we assumed was Hidalgo’s private suite. He was wearing only a pair of blue swim trunks that he must have borrowed from the narco, because they were far too big around the waist. His black hair hung in tangles around his face. He stood to one side and looked at the party. Then he looked toward the ridge where I was watching his face through my binoculars. He grinned, shaking his head a little.

He was definitely high. Stoned out of his mind.

“Something’s wrong with him,” Mary whispered.

His eyes were hidden behind dark lenses, but I recognized the slack smile, the disengaged way he stood so perfectly still as he surveyed the party. Then he stepped forward and I saw him wobble a little.

Everyone—men and women alike—instinctively kept a wary eye on him as he wandered over to the makeshift bar and made himself a drink. No one approached him. That the men would be wary of him was understandable. There was a coiled violence in him, like a spring cranked way down. But I was surprised by the wariness of the painted women. He was no threat to them, and it should have been obvious by the way he ignored them. It was as if they knew he was something far different from what they’d come here for. Maybe it shamed them.

Roberto walked over to where Hidalgo reclined on a lounge chair. He slumped onto a chair next to the narco.

“You’re going to put him in some place with a methadone treatment program, right?” I asked, meaning when the operation was over.

She nodded.

“The written deal only requires a minimum-security country club, but I’ll make sure it’s one with a rehab facility.”

She said this as if Roberto weren’t still a fugitive, as if the Attorney General’s Office would actually honor the deal. Maybe they would. If we brought in Hidalgo.

As time passed and drinks were downed, the men seemed to be losing their shyness. The leering and closeness to the women grew more pronounced.

One was thrown into the pool. She screamed as she went in and the men all laughed. She came up smiling, but the smile looked fake as she patted her ruined hair. The makeup made black streaks down her face. Another woman followed. Soon they all were going in, the later ones having their tops pulled off by the men doing the pushing.

“This is going to get ugly,” I said. “You sure you want to watch this?”

“Do you think I’m too delicate to watch?” Mary asked huffily. “You’re a lot like your brother, you know. You’re chauvinistic. You think women need to be protected. Those women know what they’re doing, and I know what I’m doing.”

“I didn’t know you were a feminist.”

“I’m a federal agent, Anton. I spent six months one time going after the bank accounts of a bunch of child pornographers—I doubt anything I’m going to see here will make me faint.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

The women in the pool got into the spirit of things quickly enough. They were pros, after all, and they didn’t really have any choice. Soon they’d all lost what little clothing they’d started with. They splashed and giggled and squealed while the men cheered them on from around the swimming pool’s edge. Two of the women hugged each other in a tight embrace and began kissing, to much applause. A third woman joined them, pressing her front against another’s back.

One of the young bangers was shoved in after them. Soon half of the men had entered the pool to cavort with the prostitutes. The men took off only their boots, shirts or jackets, and pants. Most were still wearing their undershirts and underwear.

Things became more frenzied. Hidalgo sat forward on his chair to watch. Roberto, next to him, never even looked at the pool. Instead his sunglasses stared across the river in our direction.

At one point he took out the pack of the bidis Tom had bought him and shook one out. He smiled at us.
Maybe there’ll be a drop tonight,
I thought.

I noticed that only two of the youngest bangers appeared to be on guard duty. One had been posted by the cars at the front of the house, and another on the cabana facing the river. The one by the cars had come all the way around the side to stare enviously at the action. The one by the river kept his back turned to us and instead drooled in the direction of the pool. When I focused in on him I saw that his hand was moving in his pants. There wasn’t much of a perimeter now. If we had a warrant and a Bureau SWAT team, we could wrap up the bunch of them.

Hidalgo stood and plucked two of the prettier girls from the pool. He led them toward the sliding-glass doors outside his suite. They disappeared inside, giggling at what they probably thought was their good fortune.

With the boss gone, so were whatever remained of the inhibitions. The men began touching the women, and the women, the men. Someone turned the music up. Someone else turned on some outdoor lights because it was getting dark, then shut them off again. A brown paper bag containing more than twenty joints the size of cigars was dumped onto a table. A long line of cocaine was placed on a woman, running from her throat to her pubic region.

It quickly became an orgy. I put down my binoculars. Mary did the same.

“We could get a warrant,” I said. “That stuff’s in plain sight. We could be in there in two hours.”

She pointed at the fancy camera with its long, powerful lens.

“I’m not sure this qualifies as plain sight.”

“This is Wyoming. Not New York or California.”

I meant places where liberal courts give emphasis to such restrictions on law enforcement. But then I thought about it, and knew that in Wyoming the courts often give those kinds of restrictions even
more
emphasis. People here—and the courts—are serious about the rights of the state’s citizens to do whatever the hell they want on their property. Plus Wyomingites tend to be even more suspicious of law enforcement than people on the coasts, not out of bleeding-heart liberalism, but snide, self-righteous conservatism. Especially federal law enforcement, as many federal employees over the years have had the misfortune to discover.

“Besides, you want him on a minor possession charge?” Mary went on. “He’s not even present. And he’d claim he didn’t know the drugs were in his house. We need to get him red-handed on an 841(b)(1)(A) or an 848 violation. We need to catch him with either a ton of narcotics or at least conspiring to import them.”

By 841(b)(1)(A) she was referring to the federal statute about manufacturing or distributing cocaine or heroin. The minimum penalty for really large amounts was ten to twenty years. An 848 was the so-called Kingpin Statute, providing for up to life imprisonment—possibly even the death penalty—for those who procured huge amounts of drugs and had people killed while doing so. The amount of cocaine we’d seen on the woman and the bag of blunts that had been passed out wouldn’t amount to much of a sentence even if we could tie Hidalgo to them.

“But it would get Roberto out of there.”

She shook her head. Reluctantly, I thought.

“He’s safe enough. Hidalgo obviously accepts him. He knows he’s a fugitive after having checked him out on NCIC. Your brother’s safe enough as long as he doesn’t get in any trouble with Hidalgo’s men.”

I glanced back downriver toward the orgy by the swimming pool. As if on cue, I saw my brother getting up from his lounge chair. I grabbed the binoculars.

Roberto was facing toward where the tables were set up—where one of the women had lain on her back as the men snorted cocaine off her bare skin. There now, amid coupling couples and threesomes and foursomes, one girl was getting more than she’d bargained for. She was the smallest of all the women, and also the youngest-looking. She could be anything from thirteen to twenty years old. She was bent over the table, facing the river, and the expression I could see on her face was definitely not contrived rapture. Tears were running down her cheeks and her mouth was opened wide in pain.

I thought that it had to be a fine line to walk. Give the men what they want, but try to stay in control. Be the whore but also the master, parceling out your favors and remaining in charge. In Mexico City there would be bodyguards and bouncers. Here she was on her own, a long, long way from home.

Behind her was one of the bigger bangers. His expression wasn’t rapturous either, although he was clearly in control. His lips were pulled back in a snarl and a vein throbbed in the side of his shaved head. Both his hands were so hard on the back of her neck that his steroid-pumped triceps were rigid and flexed. He was riding her cruelly. His body was bucking with savage jerks.

“Oh no,” Mary said.

Roberto was walking that way.

“Oh no,” I agreed. But I didn’t mean it.
Yes, ’Berto. Sic ’em.

For once my brother wasn’t smiling. His movements were no longer stoned and uncertain. Instead he walked with the old feral grace that I’d always admired. He took off his sunglasses and dropped them on the flagstone.

Some of the other men and women stopped what they were doing. As if even over the loud music and rampaging hormones, Roberto somehow projected an energy force that grabbed their attention.

He stalked straight up to the big gangbanger. The meaty triangle of muscle on the left side of his back inflated suddenly as he drew back his arm. Then he hooked the banger in the throat with his left fist. The punch was thrown so hard that the guy blew backward. He was lifted right off his feet. Off the girl, too, and then through a glass door.

We heard the glass break all the way up the river. From our viewpoint we could see the banger go sliding backward across what appeared to be a kitchen floor. He hit a counter and stopped, both hands holding his own throat now. Roberto stepped barefoot in the empty doorway amid the shards of broken glass. He stood there with his hands on his hips. He might have been saying something to the crumpled figure who had seconds earlier been brutally violating the young girl.

I had to smile. The banger didn’t look so vicious now.

Catching myself feeling a satisfaction that was premature, I quickly scanned the pool area and saw that the girl had disappeared. The half-naked men were gathering around where my brother stood gazing into the kitchen with his back still turned to them. It looked like some of them were shouting at him. The girls picked up their discarded swimsuits and scattered. One of the banger’s compadres found his pants lying on the flagstone and reached inside the pocket for something.

I focused in on his hand. He was trying to tug a small automatic from the cloth. I wanted to stand up and shout a warning to my brother. Mary was gripping my arm.

The banger got the gun free and began to push his way into the crowd.

Breaking Mary’s hold on me, I jumped over the camera and stood on the very edge of the notch, fully exposed. I drew in a great breath and got ready to shout my brother’s name.

But Zafado beat me to it. He stepped in front of the kid with the gun and grabbed his arms. He was wearing only his black cowboy hat and an undershirt, but he still apparently commanded authority. The boy stopped trying to push in the direction of my brother. Bruto was there, too, grabbing the kid’s shoulder and jerking him away.

Roberto turned and walked back toward Hidalgo’s wing. No one tried to stop him as he picked up his sunglasses, put them on, then disappeared from our view. He left a series of bloody footprints on the flagstone.

“Your brother is something else,” Mary said to me when I got back under the junipers’ cover.

“He’s a sociopath. But he’s good, you know?”

She nodded slowly without looking at me. “I know.”

She was looking across the river through the camera’s viewfinder. She felt my gaze and glanced at me. Our eyes met for a moment before she went back to the camera and adjusted the lens by a fraction.

“He’s in real trouble now,” I told the back of her head. “You know that, too, don’t you?”

THIRTEEN

T
inted windows are a threat to cops. At least for the uniformed type. They are a wall of darkness that a man with a gun can hide behind when you pull a car over late at night on some lonely, high-plains road. For an undercover cop, though, they’re a blessing. They let you sit and watch without being seen. But for me, they were also a pain in the ass. That was because I’d tinted them myself after a friend assured me any idiot could do it.

The first bubbles and cracks appeared two weeks after I’d applied the sheets of dark tint to the Pig’s windows. Over the years Wyoming’s wildly fluctuating temperatures had continued to spiderweb the smoky tape, then turned it into a fractal collage of white and black. At least it matched the rest of the truck, with the dents and dings and flaking holes of rust. Now the bubbles and cracks trapped against the windshield’s glass floated huge in the binoculars’ lenses, obscuring my view into Señor Garcia’s Mexican Restaurant and Bar.

I couldn’t see in, but at least we were equally invisible to those inside. I’d parked the Pig a little ways down Potash’s main drag, where we were shaded from the stars and moonlight by a cottonwood’s dense canopy. Tom sat next to me gnawing on a PowerBar I’d given him. I was trying to be extra nice, belatedly hoping to make him want to do everything he could to protect my brother. Mungo’s ax-shaped head drooled between us.

“See anything?” Tom asked.

“It’s like looking through beer bottles,” I told him, handing the surveillance expert the binoculars so that he could try his luck.

Almost all of Hidalgo’s men had driven to the restaurant shortly after sunset. We’d watched them from the notch in the ridge as they’d piled into only four vehicles—lowriders and pickups with crew cabs. Like circus clowns, five or six men staggered into each vehicle, and then a few squealing prostitutes were shoved in through the open windows. It seemed impossible that so many people could fit into so little space.

Hidalgo stayed behind again, probably still cozied up with the two girls he’d plucked from the pool. Only two of the younger shaved-heads remained to stand guard. Just two—Hidalgo was feeling very safe in my state, which was something that now pissed me off more than ever. The banger Roberto had punched in the throat was either dead or convalescing. Neither Tom, nor Mary, nor I really wanted to know which it was.

After the fight, I didn’t believe Roberto would join the men and women heading out for a night on the town. But he had, walking out alone from the house and squeezing in just before the last car pulled away. I could almost feel the unwelcome response he must have received when he slid in.

We’d waited an hour before following them into Potash. We figured it would take them at least a half hour longer to reach it, as they would have to drive all the way south to the suspension bridge before they could turn west and north on the road to town.

So they had already been inside for a while when Tom and I pulled up. I was a little worried they might have gone all the way to Casper with its better nightlife, but we found the four cars with their Baja California plates parked haphazardly in front of Señor Garcia’s. They were probably too drunk and drugged to drive any farther.

“Nothing,” Tom said, dropping the binoculars in my lap. “We can ease up in front, or maybe across the street, but they might spot your truck.”

Zafado and Bruto would be in there. Of course they’d come along to keep the more reckless young narcos from causing too much trouble. I didn’t think anyone had seen my truck on my previous visit to Señor Garcia’s—I’d parked it more than a block away and was pretty sure I hadn’t been followed—but I was reluctant to take the chance. Any chance. And I didn’t even want to pull up in front of the restaurant, as one of the men inside might notice it and wonder why no one was getting out.

“Or we can wait till morning to see if he’s making a drop,” Tom said. “I just hope they don’t take out the goddamn trash at night. I’m not going to go crawling around in some filthy Dumpster.”

Meaning I’d have to do it. But I didn’t want to wait for the morning, either. I wanted to know what my brother had to say right now.

“I can’t go in there. Some of them don’t like me too much,” I said, thinking of Shorty. “Besides, they think I work on a horse ranch up near Pinedale. If I walked in again tonight, it might seem like too much of a coincidence.”

“Then I’ll go,” Tom said. “Ask if I can use the toilet or something.”

I didn’t think that was a good idea. Tom was too conspicuous in his New Jersey cowboy getup. And he was too much of an asshole. There was no one else in the bar but the
sicarios,
the gangbangers, and the prostitutes, and I remembered the fun they’d tried to have with the backpacker girls who’d come in for a meal. I didn’t want Tom going in there looking like a white, well-fed, obnoxious tourist in search of a bathroom. I had to admit, though, once again, that he had balls. Even if he lacked brains.

“Let’s do a drive-by. See what’s going on,” I suggested.

I started the engine and drove down the street. Señor Garcia’s was on the left, and there were only the narcos’ cars in front. One big, sagging Oldsmobile, an equally aged Cadillac, and two pickups, one whose frame had been lowered to within inches of the ground for some dumb reason I’ve never been able to understand.

I braked a little in front of the restaurant, putting on my left blinker and easing around the corner. We were able to get a good view through the large, barred windows on two sides of the restaurant.

The narcos had pushed aside some tables in the dining area and made a sort of small dance floor. It looked like all of them, or almost all of them, were seated in a loose semicircle around it. Two of the prostitutes were dancing—embracing, really—in the open space. Two others appeared to be grinding on men’s laps. I didn’t see Roberto at first, but then spotted him all the way in back. He was at the bar, talking to the old man.

As we passed around to the backside, I saw a tiny orange glow emanating from the darkness behind the kitchen. Staring hard and driving slower, I began to make out the shape of a girl—the waitress. The one who’d been kind to me. Who’d warned me to get out of there a few nights earlier.

“I’ve got an idea,” I told Tom.

We circled the block and went back to our old parking space under the cottonwood. Leaving Tom and Mungo there, I hopped out and walked a block north, so that I would approach the bar from the rear.

She was there. Sitting hunched forward on a broken concrete step in front of a screen door that led to the kitchen, still smoking.

I purposely made some noise when I was twenty feet from her, kicking some gravel. She jerked her head up and stared at me in alarm. She looked as if she might run. It was dark where I stood, the only light coming out through the door from the small kitchen. I moved closer while holding up my hands.

“Hey. It’s okay.”

I said it in Spanish, and softly, even though, with the loud music that was also coming through the screen door along with the dim light, there wasn’t any chance we could be overheard.

“Remember me? I was in here last week. You told me not to mess with those guys inside.”

She stared at me for several heartbeats, her expression something like a startled deer’s. I could see she was twitching to turn tail and run. But then I was standing within the dim circle of light and the jumpiness left her.

She gave me a small smile as her hand touched her chest.

“Hey. Yeah, I remember. You didn’t listen to me. You messed with them anyway.”

I gave her a smile of my own and put down my hands.

“How come you aren’t inside? Are you taking a break?”

“
Sí.
A long one. Papa doesn’t like me working when those foul goats from across the river come here.”

“Smart. Why don’t you just go home?”

She frowned, shaking her head. “You think I’m going to leave him alone in there? Out here, if they start messing around with him, I’ll run down to the marshal’s office and get help.”

Like the one-man police force in Potash would be able to do any good.

“You’re going to be here all night,” I told her.

She shrugged.

Brave girl. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. At that age most girls only think of themselves. But there she was, sitting out alone in the dark, keeping an eye on her grandfather when she must have had a thousand things she’d rather be doing.

“So what are you doing back here? You afraid to go in because of those guys?” she asked.

“Yeah. They didn’t like me too much last time.”

She giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. Before she did I noticed that her teeth were bucked and crooked. Other than that she was very pretty. Or she could easily have been if her bangs weren’t ironed a half-foot into the air. Like the lowered trucks, crotch-grabbing, and body piercing, this was another youthful style in the state that I didn’t understand. It made me feel old.

“My name’s Antonio.”

“I’m Lupe. Are you hauling another horse? I overheard that last time. If you are, I’d like to see him. Someday I’m going to buy a horse.”

“No horse tonight. Listen, Lupe, can I get you to do me a favor? Something you’ve got to keep secret?”

Raising her eyebrows, she now gave me what might have been a teenager’s idea of a seductive gaze. She lowered her hand from her mouth and looked at me through her lashes, her smile now slight but willing. Her voice became throatier.

“Sure, Antonio. You’re a good guy. I saw that the other night. Anything you say.”

“Okay. I need you to take out the trash. From the men’s bathroom only.”

She looked at me straight again, grimacing. Her voice became suspicious.

“Are you kidding me? The trash? You want me to take out the trash?”

“Yeah. I think I accidentally threw something away.”

It was a weak, half-assed effort, but I didn’t really think there was anything I could say that she’d believe. And I was right.

“You weren’t here earlier today. I would have seen you. And if it was from before, you should know we take out the trash every night.”

“Just do it for me, okay? A favor. Do it when no one’s in there. I’ll watch through the door and tell you when it’s clear.”

She watched me for several seconds. Studying me closely, from my head to my feet and then back up again.

Then she said, “You’re that cop, aren’t you? The one who was in all the papers two or three years ago?”

Shit
. I was burnt by a teenage girl—I wasn’t going to last much longer in this job. I had to admire her acumen, though. What fifteen-year-old kid in a ghost town like Potash reads the papers? I wished I’d worn the cowboy hat and the too-tight boots.

“Hey, are you going to do me that favor or not?” I asked, smiling and not answering her question.

She didn’t need an answer.

“It’s the scar,” she said, laying a finger on her own cheek. “I recognize it, because I cut out your picture from the time when it was in the paper. You’re that policeman that got everyone so upset. But I thought you were cute. I was fifteen years old back then.”

I didn’t say anything.

She went on smiling, too, then frowning a little. “Papa didn’t like it when I put it on the wall. He said you were a killer. That you murdered three Hispanic boys in Cheyenne for no reason. I didn’t think it was true. It’s not, is it?”

“No. It’s not.”

Whatever her reason for not believing it, I was truly grateful all the same. Everyone else in the world just assumed it was true. Even the FBI.

“I thought so. Papa’s kind of an activist. He used to organize the local miners, you know. He thinks everyone’s out to get the brown man. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about joining the police somewhere when I get out of school. You think I should?”

I told her I would give her a card when I was done with what I was doing in Potash. That I would stop by and talk to her and her papa about it, but that I couldn’t do that right now.

“So why didn’t you just shoot that bastard when he pulled that knife on you? You’re a cop—you got a gun, right? What that guy did to those two Anglo women . . . that was really gross.”

“It doesn’t work like that. . . . I’m sorry, Lupe, but I’m in a big hurry,” I told her. “We’ll talk about it later. Another time. I promise. Will you do me that favor?”

“Yeah, Antonio—if that’s your name. I’ll do it.” She gave me a seductive look again. “But you keep that promise, okay?”

She flipped the cigarette away into the alley. Brushing her hands on her jeans, she stood up.

“Hang on a sec.”

I could see that the bathroom was empty because its little beveled window faced us. It was lit from the inside. I wouldn’t have been able to make out the identity of anyone in there, but I would be able to tell if someone was moving around. I checked it again. Then I looked through the screen door. Beyond the kitchen was a hallway with the bathroom doors and then the bar. I worried that someone would notice the girl in the hallway, going into the bathroom marked
“Toros,”
and follow her. I’d seen how the narcos treated girls. And if anything happened, and if I then had to go in there after her, all hell would surely break loose. Roberto would then do something, and everything would come apart.

“Okay. Go.”

She looked at me funny and went.

Nothing happened. No evil luck or bad timing occurred. The girl, Lupe, simply ducked in, grabbed the trash can, and strolled back out. Not even her grandfather, presumably behind the bar, noticed.

She wrinkled her nose when I used a stick to push aside some damp paper towels and a filthy condom—used—to get down to where a bright, crumpled pack of bidis rested in a nest of more towels. I plucked it out and stuck it in my pocket.

“Glamorous, huh?” I said to her. “You sure you want to be a cop?”

“That’s all you wanted?”

I nodded.

I emptied the trash for her into a Dumpster and handed back the dented metal can.

“Wait until they’re gone before you take it back in. Your papa’s right—believe me, you don’t want those guys even catching sight of you. You’re a pretty girl, Lupe. Smart, too. Thank you for your help.”