Crossing the Line (2 page)

“Cut it out, both of you.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Tom said, looking at my brother but talking to her. “Two weeks of this guy bullshitting and giving us nothing but lip. Let’s haul his junkie ass over to Colorado and see how he likes those escape charges they have waiting for him.”

I wondered if they were playing good cop/bad cop. With me, a cop, and Roberto, who had been dealing with cops all his life, it would be a silly game. Roberto apparently decided to bring this fact to their attention.

“Guess that means you don’t want to catch the guy who sliced and diced your buddy down in Mexicali.”

And that jacked up the tension, as my brother knew it would. He’d told me earlier that both the Feds in our little caravan had worked with the narcotics agent whose death in Baja California two months ago had been in all the papers.

The blood drained out of Tom’s face as fast as it rose in Mary’s.

“You scumbag,” Tom said in a lower, harsher voice. His fists were balled and beginning to rise. “Don’t you ever mention that again.”

He stepped so close to Mary that he was looming over her. But I noticed that he didn’t try to step around her. Still, he was playing with fire. They both were.

Roberto was smiling. Mocking.

“What, Mexicali? Or your dumb buddy who got himself cut up?”

“Stop it, ’Berto. Shut up,” I said.

I’d been taking a perverse delight in the confrontation, but I didn’t want to hear a dead narcotics agent derided. Not even a federal agent. Nor did I want my brother to blow his one chance at amnesty.

Mary seemed to be thinking, as if considering just how much they really needed Roberto and his information to do whatever they were intending to do. I took one of my brother’s arms and pulled him back before he could do anything to hurt Mary’s decision or further squeeze Tom’s trigger.

I was surprised that Roberto didn’t resist. He let me lead him a couple of feet closer to my truck.

Belatedly, Mary made her decision. She faced my brother and pointed a finger at him.

“That’s enough, Mr. Burns. We need you, but not enough to put up with any abuse or provocation. If you don’t want to cooperate, then you’ll be turned over to authorities in Colorado tonight.”

She waited for my brother to say something. He didn’t. She glanced at her watch.

“All right then. You have one hour.”

They must need him very badly,
I thought.

Roberto maybe sensed it too, because he jerked his arm out of my hand.
Oh shit
. He stepped forward, back up into Tom’s face. My brother wasn’t as big as the FBI agent—the top of his head came even with Tom’s freckled nose—but there was an obvious menace in Roberto that dwarfed the other man.

I tensed, readying myself to tackle him from behind. Things were on the verge of really getting out of control. Roberto, when he fought, battled like a Norse berserker.

“You’re right,” my brother said quietly. “I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Sorry, man.”

Then he turned away and went back to sorting through the crates of gear.

I stared at my brother’s back.
What’s going on with him?
I’d never seen him back down. Not from anything. Not in his entire life. He’d never cared about the consequences.
Destraillado,
Mom called it. Unleashed. I looked at Tom and saw that his fists were still clenched.

“He should be in handcuffs,” he told his partner. “Hell, they both should be in handcuffs. A lunatic and a renegade cop. I can’t fucking believe we have to deal with these people.”

Noticing me watching him, he spat in the dirt.

“Bite me, Tom,” I said.

“Cool it, all of you. That’s enough.”

Mary swatted at herself, attempting to dust Mungo’s hair from her skirt and blouse, and plucked at where the clothes were pasted by sweat to her skin. Tom couldn’t help but watch her, and I saw that my brother, smiling again with his eyebrows raised slightly behind his sunglasses, was doing the same. The disheveled hair and clothes were undeniably sexy on her. They were such a contrast to her rigid personality. Especially in this testosterone-charged environment.

She must have felt the eyes, because she stopped touching herself and walked stiffly in her heels to the rear of the Suburban. From a cooler there she took out three bottles of water and passed them around. It was a peacemaking gesture.

I joined my brother in examining the rock that was leaning over us. There was a single crack splitting the overhanging wall of the eighty-foot tower. It started out three inches wide at the bottom then contracted to just an inch or so before it reached a cavelike alcove near the top. Above that, the final few moves to the summit were invisible as the sun was right behind it and the indirect radiance made close scrutiny impossible.

“Which end you want?” Roberto asked, swinging the coiled rope in one hand.

“The sharp end.”

“Okay, little bro. You lead.”

The rope hit my chest. I unwrapped it from where it was tied around itself and began carefully flaking it out on the ground, working out the kinks. Roberto shimmied a harness over his brown canvas pants and dragged off his shirt. The two federal agents watched us as if we were performing some voodoo ritual.

I was pleased to notice that there weren’t any scabby pinprick tracks on the insides of Roberto’s arms. It didn’t mean much—I had known junkies who injected their thighs, scrotums, and even between their toes to escape being marked—but it was a positive sign because my brother had never cared about detection.

He looked good, too. Fit and almost ridiculously strong, although his normally dark skin seemed a little translucent from two weeks confined indoors. He’d even cut his hair, which used to reach halfway down his back. It was still tangled and dirty, but now it only hung far enough to touch the slanting ridges of his trapezius.

After shimmying into my own harness then tying in to one end of the rope, I clipped a handful of cams and hexes onto a sling and put it over my head and one shoulder. My climbing slippers were warm from the sunlight that had been beating down on the truck. They were tight enough to curl my toes but familiar as I squeezed my feet into them and laced up.

I was aware of the Feds watching us, wondering how we were going to climb a wall that overhung more than fifteen degrees and was marred by only that single parallel-sided fissure. Reaching up, I placed my right hand high into the cool crack and made a fist—my folded thumb against one side and the heel of my palm pressed against the other. I placed my left hand just below it in the same way. By clenching my fists and flexing the muscles in my hands, I was able to lock them in. A jam, it’s called. Weird, but it works. I pulled up on the clenched fists and got a foot wedged in a couple of feet farther down by turning it sideways then twisting it in with my knee raised high.

I wriggled up this way, replacing fists and feet always higher, as sweat ran over my skin and my breath grew ragged. The crack narrowed until I was able to hang securely off a single jammed fist. Then a cupped hand, and finally just my torqued fingertips and toes.

“Wow,” I heard Mary say from below me. “Look at that.”

It was the first real sign of life I’d heard from her. And I took an embarrassed pleasure in bringing it out.

“It’s not that hard,” Tom said dismissively. “Takes practice, is all. There’s a trick to it.”

“Then maybe you ought to go next, Tom.”

I smiled to myself but didn’t look down. I didn’t hear if Tom made any response.

Blood began to stain the yellowish stone because I hadn’t bothered to tape up. I was setting my jams far too quickly, showing off a little for my brother and the Feds. Every ten feet or so I slotted a mechanical camming device into the crack and clipped to it the rope trailing from my harness. I could feel the slight weight on the rope from Roberto’s belay.

After ten minutes of grunting and panting I hauled myself over a small ledge and into the hole eighty feet off the ground. In this small alcove were two old bolts someone had long ago drilled into the rock. They felt secure when I tried to shake them, so I clipped a bight from my end of the rope into them.

“I’m off,” I yelled down.

Roberto started climbing before I even had him on belay. I reeled in the rope as fast as I could, my bloodied hands shoving the rope through the belay tube and getting warm from the friction. I couldn’t see him when I craned my neck out over the edge, but I could see the two federal agents in the shade below. They were gaping upward with open mouths. Even Tom wasn’t able to look away. Mungo, too, was watching. Her long snout poked out of a spiny bush behind the agents.

I couldn’t see Roberto, but I was long familiar with the way he climbed. Fast and smooth. My brother was elemental in a way, one with the stone yet untouched by the forces of gravity. He sort of graced his way up the rock without any of my less elegant grunting and gasping and bleeding.

When he planted a palm on the ledge and mantled up on it, I saw that he hadn’t bothered to lace up his rock shoes. I clipped a bight from his end of the rope into the bolts and said, “You’re off.”

“You’re looking strong,” he told me, punching my chest. “Still a wiry little guy, but strong.”

I felt the flush of a little brother’s pride at the words.

“You’re getting slow, ’Berto. Thought you would have been up here a long time ago.”

I don’t think he heard me. He stood on the edge—toes in space—and stared out at the desert landscape without expression. You can see a long way in this state. A lot farther than you can from a prison cell. I hoped he was realizing that.

We don’t look that much alike. His face shows more of our mother’s mestizo heritage than mine. His cheekbones are higher, his nose slightly hooked. But like me, he has our father’s square Scots jaw. Our eyes are the greatest difference between us. Mine are coffee brown; his are a brilliant blue, the color you see looking down into the deepest part of a crevasse. I also carry a long white scar on my left cheek from a rockfall—a reminder of my own mortality. Roberto has no such scar.

His chest, shoulders, and back still held the taut slabs of prison muscle from the time before his escape ten months earlier. Since then he’d been on high peaks in South America, and the exertion and deprivation had carved distinct lines through the bulk.
Honed
was the word that best described him. He looked like he’d been carved out of stone.

“How is it that you know this narco Hidalgo?” I asked him when he slumped down beside me. It was the first time all day that we’d been alone.

“Dude used to think he was a mountaineer. I saved his shit on Aconcagua ’bout ten years back.” Then he shrugged. “After that, I did some muling for him and his buddies. They call themselves the Mexicali Mafia.”

I remembered the story, but I hadn’t realized that the man Roberto rescued was the notorious drug lord. Roberto had come across three men dressed in designer mountain wear—the kind of clothes made for anything but mountain climbing. Puffy jackets by Ralph Lauren and leather boots that had never been treated to repel snow and water because it might ruin the finish. The three were in bad shape, weak and suffering from cold, altitude, and hunger, near the summit of the twenty-three-thousand-foot peak. Roberto tied them all into a rope and more or less dragged them down. When I’d first heard about it, he only described them as a trio of rich guys from Mexico City.

“You’ve met him, too,” he added now, turning and grinning at me.

“Bullshit.”

“Well, almost. Remember that time we were down in Baja . . .”

He reminded me of a trip we’d taken eight years ago, when I was in grad school at Boulder. Dad and Mom were in Saudi Arabia, leaving the two of us on our own for Christmas break. It had been a cold early winter, so we headed south when I picked him up from where he was living in Durango. We drove the Pig all the way down to the Sea of Cortés. For one week we kayaked and dove, sleeping on deserted beaches, spearing fish to cook on yucca fires, mellowing at night on Tecate and lime (me) and tequila and hashish (him). The next week we climbed pristine desert walls in the Sierra Juárez.

Roberto had heard about a particular one—supposedly virgin, unclimbed—but never seen it. He knew how to get there, though, and we cut through then retied a barbed-wire fence on the way. On this particular wall—a twelve-hundred-footer—we’d been caught by a freak rainstorm then darkness when we were high up on it. The water sluicing down the wall made it impossible to finish the climb and hike off, and we hadn’t brought enough gear to rig all the rappels necessary to bail. So we spent a long, wet night on an edge not much wider than a bookshelf.

Waking up hadn’t been pleasant—it was a bullet striking the rock near my head that brought me out of my shivering stupor. Splinters of quartz had cut into one of my ears.

Two men and a battered Jeep were parked near my truck at the base of the wall. One of the men was aiming up through a rifle’s sight for a second shot while the other was bent over like he might be laughing.

Roberto shouted down at them in Spanish—words I didn’t think at the time would help our situation: “Motherfuckers! You shoot again and I’ll cut your throats!”

The one with the gun yelled, “You’re trespassing. Our boss doesn’t like trespassers. Put them back on the ground, he told us.”

“I’m invited, you dumb animals. Go tell him it’s Roberto Burns. Before I come down there and stick that rifle up your ass.”

The men laughed some more and the one with the gun pointed it. But there was an uncertainty in both their gestures. The rifle didn’t fire a second time.

“You really know the guy who owns this place?” I’d asked him as I frantically readied the soggy ropes for a sprint to the summit.

The men got into the Jeep and drove away to check with their boss.

“Sort of. You wouldn’t like him.” He laughed. “Trust me. We need to get out of here,
che
. Fast.”

And we did. Driving out a different way and over another barbed-wire fence before the men returned.

“That was Hidalgo’s land,” Roberto said now. “His inland
estancia
. He told me about that wall after I pulled him off Aconcagua. Said I ought to come down sometime and give it a shot.”