Crossing the Line (16 page)

Be something good,
I prayed as I walked back to the Pig.
Be something good enough to get a warrant, to finish this and to get Roberto out of there
. I hurried down a narrow causeway between two dark, abandoned buildings, crunching over beer cans and kicking through old papers.

I was about to step into the street and cross it when something made me stop. I froze on the sidewalk, turning right toward the sound of loud voices. They were very close. Then I saw them.

Five or six young men were coming down the street from the direction of the small park in the center of town. And from the direction of the cowboy bars on the other side. They filled the sidewalk on my side of the street, three of them abreast in front and more of them behind. They weren’t more than thirty feet away from where I’d stepped out from between the two buildings.

“Going to beat some Mexes,” one of them was calling out in a singsong voice.

“Gonna
kill
us some Mexes,” another corrected in a louder voice.

“Fuckers think they can hang in our town.”

“Fuckers think they
own
this place. But they’re gonna learn.”

I had just started to step back between the buildings when they noticed me.

“Hey!”

“Who’s that?”

I hesitated.

There were six of them. Young men—boys, really—in jeans and boots, T-shirts, and tightly curled baseball caps. They gripped beer bottles in their hands. I could smell beer on their collective breath even from ten feet away. One of them, in the second row, held a pool cue. Another held what looked like the pump handle of a car jack.

“Looks like one of them Mexes squirted out of there,” a boy in the lead slurred.

My first thought wasn’t for my own safety, but for what would happen to these boys if they confronted Hidalgo’s men. These were Wyoming boys. Ranch kids. They might know guns inside out, but they fought with only fists or bottles or maybe, like these, with jack handles and pool cues. I would have bet that they weren’t even armed with anything that goes
bang
. I knew, though, that Hidalgo’s men were. And that at least two of them were former Mexican federal police officers who had used the guns that I saw tucked into their waistbands and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again. If these young cowboys went in there, it was likely some of them wouldn’t be coming out. Not even Roberto would be able to stop that.

“What are you doing out here, Mex?” one of them demanded. Two of the others stepped to the left, blocking me from going into the street. Another two stepped to my right.

I almost answered in Spanish, or at least accented English, having just come from talking with Lupe in that language. But I remembered in time to say, in a Western drawl, “Who you calling a Mex, kid?”

No one said anything for a minute as they scrutinized me through bleary, red eyes. It was hard to take these boys seriously even though they were older than the bangers recruited by Hidalgo. They just lived in a completely different world. The kid in front of me, the apparent leader, scratched his ear and took a swig from his bottle.
He’s in high school, probably,
I thought.
He’ll go on to college. Play football. Get married and get a job as an accountant
.

“If you’re looking for trouble with Mexicans,” I continued, “there’re some of them in a bar down there who’ll give it to you. In spades. I’ve never seen so many guys carrying guns.”

“You sure as hell look like a Mex,” one of them slurred.

“They got guns?” a less aggressive voice asked. “Shit. Weren’t ’specting that.”

“Well, if you ain’t a Mex, what the hell are you?”

“You aren’t from around here.”

“Shit, he’s a Mex,” the leader drawled to the others. “And I bet he don’t got no gun. Let’s start by kicking his ass.”

He threw the beer bottle down on the sidewalk. It shattered at my feet. Glass shards and foam pelted my pant leg.

I wanted to yell at them,
I’m a cop!
But there was no way I could. Word would get around. Fast.

I could have pulled my gun and threatened them. Maybe even chased them off. Scared them so they wouldn’t ever again even think of doing something this stupid. But then I remembered that I’d left the gun in the truck—there was no place to conceal it without a jacket and I hated wearing an ankle holster.

Run right through them. But which way?

I hesitated for a second too long.

The big guy, the leader, stepped forward and punched me in the chest. The blow knocked me back two steps and took the air from my lungs. Despite the anger that bloomed in me, there was no real pain, as I’d been hit a lot harder and in a lot more sensitive places. I made up my mind. I would defend myself and fight and probably take a beating from a bunch of kids.

God, how embarrassing.

A voice came from behind me. “Marcus? What are you guys doing?”

The boys froze.

I didn’t turn around. I recognized the voice, but it sounded so different now that it was speaking English. Lupe sounded like just another American teenager.

“Why are you guys, like, messing with him?”

“We’re gonna kick this wetback’s ass,” one said.

Another shoved him from behind. “Don’t say that, dude. Shut up.”

A third said, “Hey, Lupe. We’re, like, uh, gonna get those guys who’ve been hassling your granddad. And this guy, he, like, just stepped out of nowhere.”

She laughed.

“You morons. He’s not one of them. He’s a friend of mine. Leave him alone, okay?”

“What was that all about?” Tom asked when I climbed in the truck.

“Kids.” I shook my head.

Was I ever that stupid and innocent? I knew the answer: an emphatic yes. I didn’t thank Tom for getting out and trying to help. It was something he hadn’t done.

“Well? Did you get it?” he demanded.

I took the crumpled pack out of my pocket and turned on the overhead light.

Carefully, I removed the cellophane. The packet came apart with a slight tug. Written on the white paper inside was dense, neat script.

Don’t know if you caught it on TV, but shithead had me searched and knocked around. Then took me inside and offered me some blow. Everything’s cool now.

Yeah, right,
I thought.
A guy’s either very sick or very dead because of you, and I bet his buddies aren’t too happy about that.

Saw a bunch of the stuff, maybe a quarter of a kilo. Said he has more. Not buying from Colombians anymore—getting out of that business. Said something new was up, kept talking about ‘new opportunities,’ and a bunch of crap about how the old days were done. Global warming, he said. No more snow. Said the future was X, high-quality Nazi meth, and roofies. Said it could be made right here in El Norte, no more worries about crossing over. I said stuff’s cheap, so how do you make money on it? He said quantity. Big quantity. Claims he can make up fifty pounds in a single cook. Underground, no chance of getting caught. Trick, he said, is gettung it on the road. But he said that problem was almost fixed. Later he said he’d show me something in a couple of days maybe. I asked some of the boys about it but they won’t talk to me. Hidalgo trusts me, but his dogs told the others not to talk.

I turned and looked at Tom. He was smiling back at me. Not his usual unpleasant smirk, but a big, toothy grin. A vengeful grin.

“We’ve got him!” he said. “We’ve got the bastard. He’s cooking meth in the mine.”

FOURTEEN

T
om Cochran was still smacking a fist against a palm when we walked into the main cabin.

“We’ve got him,” he said. “We’ve got him!”

Mary Chang looked off into space after reading the note. A slight smile came onto her thin lips. Other than that, there was no celebration. No hand-shaking or high fives or champagne. But there was an air of righteous victory in the main cabin.

It seemed like an astonishing thing. One little slip of paper and Hidalgo was gone. Vanquished. Blown away. This would not just be a legal love tap of simple possession, but a grand slam with the club of the Kingpin Statute. Things were looking better than any of us had imagined. Some of the prostitutes were surely underage, too. We’d hit him with some state and federal charges for that. Procurement. Minors across state lines for immoral purposes. Some of the weapons possessed by his men were definitely illegal. We’d hit him for that, too. But it was the mine that was going to be our El Dorado.

And Roberto would not only get out, but he would no longer be a fugitive from justice. The sweet deal the U.S. Attorneys had originally offered him would surely be honored—they wouldn’t have a choice in the face of the risks he’d taken. They would send him to the equivalent of a Club Fed in Colorado where he would be close to Rebecca and me, and where he would receive some kind of treatment for his addiction.

The tension that had been present in my muscles and joints for the last couple of days was released.
The wolf’s going to come out of the woods.
I cuffed Mungo’s shoulders, then stooped to touch my forehead to hers. She rasped her sandpaper tongue against my throat.

With Hidalgo locked up, along with his top lieutenants, the drug lord would be as good as dead. His remaining compatriots in Mexicali would be too busy fighting over the pieces of the cartel to worry about avenging their onetime
jefe.
I would be safe. We all would. And Mary, Tom, and I would have a trophy we could brag about in our old age.
We struck a real blow.

I smiled into the wolf’s golden eyes. She lifted her lips and showed me some teeth, giving me her hesitant grin. The desire to call Rebecca and tell her that everything—
everything!
—was going to be all right was almost overwhelming.

It was too good to be true. And I should have known it then. Good luck will drop into your lap like a warm kitten, but the karmic payback is always a bitch.

The first hint that the world wasn’t completely golden came when we began jointly writing up the application for a no-knock search warrant. Mary sat before a computer terminal and called up the template. It surprised me when the template she pulled up was not headed by the words “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” but by my own outfit, “Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation.”

“What’s that?” I asked, even though I knew what it was. I’d written up scores of them over my eight years as a state cop.

Mary didn’t turn around to look at me. She just kept typing, filling in the spaces. Tom didn’t even take the opportunity to ride me by saying something like
It’s called a search warrant, QuickDraw.

My question hung there over Mary’s clicking fingertips until she finally said, “Tom and I think it might be better if the original warrant came from the state.”

She turned slowly to me when I didn’t respond.

“You see, all warrants by federal agents must be approved through the Hoover Building. Through the Deputy Assistant Director in charge of the Criminal Investigative Division, specifically. If we ask for permission, there’s still a chance we might get shut down. Remember? Take no chances? So this needs to be a fait accompli, Anton. You guys don’t have the same kind of bureaucracy.”

“We need Hidalgo in a cage before we make that move,” Tom said, almost too quickly. “And with state charges already pending, the government won’t be able to hold back or cut a deal. Don’t worry—aren’t you state guys always complaining about how the U.S. Attorneys swoop in on all your big cases?” He then grinned at me as he repeated his and Mary’s other mantra: “Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, right? You’re going to look like a big guy, Burns. You and DCI are going to get all the initial credit for taking him down. And guess what else? We’re even going to let you be in on the bust.”

“Thanks, Tom. That’s real generous of you.”

This wasn’t right. He was too smug. And the Feds are never that generous. I understood and appreciated Mary’s take-no-chances posture, but surely the federal government could and would take things from here. They would never try to screw around with a case this solid. And were Mary and Tom really so unambitious, so selfless, that they were willing to step aside at this point and let DCI make the biggest of busts? I knew them better than that, or thought I did. They were serious about avenging their friend and colleague, but they were equally serious about advancing their own careers in the Bureau.

Something stank.

The Bureau has always been famous for snatching credit. It was a skill they’d been perfecting ever since the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Anytime we, the yokels in Wyoming, happened to stop the right car on Interstate 80 and make a major bust, the Feds would more often than not swoop in within hours to take control. And to take credit. Their PR flacks would trumpet the arrest, the charges, and eventually the conviction, without ever mentioning the state officers responsible for the whole thing. Not that we minded all that much—federal mandatory-sentencing guidelines for drug crimes made our own laws look like a mild spanking. But it could be demoralizing—not even getting credit for the initial hook.

The only time I’d seen the Feds turn down a major case was when I caught a guy flying into the Cheyenne airport with a kilo of heroin in his gut. He’d managed to swallow it all in tied-off condoms—almost two and a half pounds of the stuff—and I’d learned of his impending arrival through six months of undercover work. It was the largest heroin bust in the state at the time. The U.S. Attorneys were begrudgingly notified as usual as soon as I had him in the jail, where I gave in to his begging and bought him a carton of Ex-Lax. I expected the Feds to be down at the jail, as usual, in minutes from their office across the street. But they declined. I couldn’t believe it. It meant that I had to babysit the mule for six hours as he hunched, groaned, and cried over a toilet I’d had to dismantle so that it wouldn’t flush.

It wasn’t until the ordeal was over, the filthy evidence bagged and cleaned, that the Feds changed their minds. Only then did they come across the street to take him.

I didn’t say much more while the affidavit was typed. Tom and Mary argued about wording. Mary scanned Roberto’s note, printed out a copy, and attached it to the document. I read through the whole thing before signing it and found one flaw. The affidavit is supposed to contain all the relevant information for the judge to consider, exculpatory as well as incriminating. Roberto, described for his—and my parents’ future safety—only as a Confidential Informant or CI, just in case, was described as a felon working in conjunction with state and federal police in return for consideration upon sentencing. The deal was outlined. No mention was made of his ongoing drug use. I argued for full disclosure of my brother’s name and addiction. After all, Hidalgo in the bag wasn’t a threat anymore, right? But I was overruled by Tom and Mary.

“We don’t know for sure that he’s still using,” Mary said.

“Why confuse the judge? The judges in this state just rubber-stamp these things anyway,” Tom said. “Hell, I doubt if they can even read.”

He spoke with the arrogance that has become a part of the FBI’s image. It was exactly the kind of statement that gets the Bureau in so much trouble every couple of years.

Tom went on, “Besides, I know you cowboys up here have a thing about property rights, but Hidalgo isn’t even a voter. And he’s a Mexican, anyway. The judge is just gonna give it a glance and sign off.”

It was four in the morning by the time we were finished. Mary already knew the name and the number of a district-court judge—the only one—in Pinedale, the county seat. She picked up the phone and handed it to me.

“Let’s wait a couple of hours,” I suggested, still trying to identify what it was that reeked so badly. “Let the judge have his sleep. Let’s not risk pissing him off. Besides, we aren’t going to storm right on in there, are we? The narcos have us outnumbered almost ten to one. Even with those things over there”—I pointed to Tom’s H&K MP5s—“we’ll get our asses kicked.”

And Roberto very well might get killed.

“You need to call in your Fed SWAT team or whoever does this kind of thing.”

As I should have expected, Mary and Tom already had a plan mapped out for this, too.

“Tom said you were going to get the credit. Your office. As soon as we get the warrant signed, you can call your boss. He can send over whoever he wants to make the bust. His agents, deputy sheriffs, state patrol, whoever. You guys will be in charge. Until Hidalgo’s locked up, we’re just along for the ride, okay? Let’s get this warrant signed first.”