Crossing the Line (24 page)

My fear of the shaft dead-ending lessened, too, as I began working higher. There was still no blue dot above, but there was a breeze rising up from underneath us. The shaft was definitely for ventilation. It had to lead outside somewhere. The looseness was the only problem. Stones and sand continued to rain down as Roberto, just above me, scrambled higher.

“Piece of cake,” I heard him say.

It had to be a little harder for him in his bare feet and with his bruised—maybe broken—ribs. But he’d pulled himself in without a problem, so I guessed he could handle it.

“Maybe you ought to let me lead,” I said. “You’re knocking all kinds of stuff down on me.”

My eyes, even though they couldn’t see much in the diffused light around us, were stinging from the salty sand that was raining down.

He laughed. “You’d better hurry up, Ant. I’ve got to take a piss.”

I heard myself laugh, too.

The technique was easy. Supporting your weight with your hands, you set your feet higher. Then you replaced the hands higher still and repeated. The soft, steady wind seemed to be lifting me. It made a gentle, almost inaudible moan. That was the only sound for a few minutes except for the occasional grunt or the soft scuff of our feet. Soon the weak light from the far-off generator was nothing but a dusty pool below.

We were maybe fifty feet up the shaft and a hundred feet off the deck—what would be less than a single pitch if we were using a rope—when we heard the sound of a motor riding up on the wind. Above me, Roberto paused to look down. I did the same, pasting my feet to good edges on opposite walls and trying to shake out the muscles in my chest, shoulders, and arms.

A car of some kind, headlights blazing, drove directly beneath the shaft. Then another. Then a third. And a fourth. Jesús obviously wanted to put on a show. Make a demonstration to scare the young bangers. I was glad we weren’t down there to perform for them.

I looked up at my brother’s barely discernible shape above me. After a few seconds I could make out his smile.

“They’re going to think we’re magicians or something,” I said, almost laughing—but a little wildly. “They’ll be searching the tunnels for days, scratching their heads.”

“C’mon, Ant. Keep climbing.”

We did for less than a minute—maybe gaining another ten or twenty feet—when suddenly the engine noise came back. We froze instinctively, not wanting to send down any stones. I wondered now if any had hit the windshields the first time they passed under.

And then I was literally transfixed by a powerful light. Looking down, I couldn’t see anything but the light. It must have been one of the searchlights I’d seen mounted on some of the Mafia’s trucks, the kind that could be used for spotlighting deer on backcountry roads. I could imagine what they were seeing: Roberto and me lit up, almost spread-eagled, directly over their heads. I could hear them yelling at one another. I could picture guns being pointed.

And at least one gun was.

A single shot shattered the wind moaning through the shaft. I heard it strike rock somewhere well below me, then
zing-zing-zing
as it ricocheted off the rough stone. The men below began shouting louder, like men who’ve just about had their eardrums nearly blown out. I knew how they felt—my ears were still ringing from when Bruto pulled the shotgun’s trigger.

Stupid bastards will have to find something to put in their ears before they shoot again,
I thought.

But I knew they would find something, and that they would start shooting again.

I looked around me. While the walls were full of protruding edges, there weren’t any that stuck out more than a few inches. In the shaft there weren’t any side passages, either. Nothing to get behind. Nowhere to hide. But it would have to be a very straight shot, fired directly overhead, for the bullet not to hit a side and begin ricocheting. And the assault weapons the narcos carried weren’t made for that kind of sniping.

I looked up. I could see a long way in the light so thoughtfully provided from below. Roberto, ten feet above me, wasn’t even in my shadow because of the way the light bounced off the tan walls. Beyond him, I could see nothing but the shaft going on and on. There was no end in sight. It must go for a vertical mile.

“Shit, Ant. Only thing I hate worse than getting beat up,” Roberto grunted, pushing himself higher, “is taking a bullet up the ass.”

“Or getting your wing-wang shot off,” I answered, following him again.

Below us they weren’t yelling anymore. No, now it sounded like they were laughing.

A voice called up.

“Eh, Roberto. What are you doing up there, my friend? Come down and bring your brother. I would like to meet him.”

“That’s Jesús,” Roberto said. “Look out.”

He spat. The blob fell past me, and I hypnotically watched it sway down then disappear into the light.

I tugged on a rock, trying to work it free so that I could drop it and maybe take out that light. Or maybe hit one of them on the head. But the rock held. I tried for another but it was solid, too.

“Keep climbing, Ant.”

And we did. Faster than before. With less caution, too—the thought of falling to my death was suddenly less terrifying than the thought of getting shot and
then
falling. The light remained fixed upward.

A thunderstorm of noise was unleashed from below us. Someone had switched from single shot to full automatic, I guessed before the deafening sound overwhelmed my thoughts. But I could still hear ricochets zinging and chunking into the stone seemingly all around me. I paused for a couple of seconds, then decided that none of the
chunk
-ing sounds had been a bullet
chunk
-ing into my flesh.

“They’d be better off with a rifle,” I panted up to Roberto. “Shoots straighter.”

Roberto made a grunt of acknowledgment. I arched my head up, expecting to see his grin lit up by the spotlight. But for once he wasn’t smiling. While I took in this fact, something hit my face. Something wet. It was coming in spurts. Spilling right out of his stomach.

“’Berto?”

He wasn’t moving. He was very still, spread-eagled just over my head, looking down at me.

“Roberto!”

“Oh, no,” he said.

His voice was strange. A lot softer than usual. His arms and legs were quivering.

“Keep moving, Roberto! We’ve got to keep climbing!”

He shook his head at me, his wild hair swishing around his face like he was trying to shake something off his head. His limbs were starting to quiver, and the quivering became more substantial.

“Can’t,” he said. “Shit.”

“Roberto!”

He managed to croak out, “Look out, Ant. Gonna fuck ’em up for you.”

And then he was falling toward me.

My brother’s weight hit me like a sack of cement. I caught him with my shoulders and head more than my arms. I held him with the pocket of one of my elbows between his legs, the other under one of his arms.
Christ, he’s heavy,
I remember thinking.
All that prison muscle
. I think I was in shock. I’d never seen Roberto like this. Although I’d always feared what would someday happen to him, a part of me had never believed anything but that he was bulletproof.

He began twisting in my grasp. He was getting slippery, too: The blood pumping out of his stomach was running all over me.

“Leggo, Ant,” he grunted.

“No.”

“Let go.”

He said it calmly the second time, without a grunt or any kind of force in his voice. I couldn’t answer. The muscles on the insides of my thighs, tired already from the steady stemming, were screaming with the effort of supporting our combined weight. Three hundred and fifty pounds of it. I wanted to move up with my hands, or at least spread them to take some of the weight off, but that would mean letting go.

Roberto’s cheek was pressed against mine. “Let go, Ant. You can’t hold us both.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

His voice was just a whisper. Soothing and as soft. I felt his lips on my cheek. I felt his breath.

“Let me go.”

My brother contracted in my arms, spasming. Then he was sliding through them. Then he was gone. I stared down and saw nothing but a black shadow growing smaller as it fell into the light.

“’Berto!”

There was shouting from far below. I guessed it was Hidalgo and his men scurrying out of the way.

“’Berto!”

There was a crashing thump and the sound of breaking glass. A sound I knew I would never forget. The light went out, leaving me in complete blackness. I didn’t scream again. I didn’t dive down and try to follow him. I didn’t even weep or fall apart. I just started stemming on up the rock. Not thinking. Not crying. But hearing in my head that thump and crash. Feeling the impact of
my
flesh on glass and metal. Again and again.

TWENTY-FIVE

T
he shaft opened up to a sky touched with orange and pink. Somewhere to the east, way out over the dry plains of the Red Desert, the sun was waking up with a smile for the new day. Birds were calling to one another from the brush and stunted trees around me. The sky would soon be that Wyoming blue I loved so much. The sun would rise, and with it the wind and the temperature, but I knew I would remain locked in the night. In my heart it was pitch-black, cold, and as still as death.

Roberto.

A chain-link fence surrounded the shaft. To keep dumb animals, unwary hikers, and half-drunk hunters from falling in, I supposed. There was no need to climb it, as a portion of it had collapsed long ago. I walked over it and the links sprang and jingled beneath my feet. Within a few hundred yards I could see three other similar squares of rusty fence. I passed two as I began to run. More ventilation shafts, more lances into the earth. My brother’s dried blood stretched and cracked on my skin.

Roberto.

What became a race through the hills was a blur to me. Sage and willow branches tugged at my pants and tore my shirt as I crashed through the brush. They whipped across my face and arms and then my chest once I’d ripped the sticky shirt off. They scratched and sliced my flesh. Tiny droplets of blood welled up in the thin wounds, mingling with what had poured out of my brother’s stomach. I welcomed the pain. Any sensation. But I barely felt it.

Roberto.

I slid down a steep bank, stumbled onto some gravel, then dove into the river’s ice-cold water. The air left my lungs as if I’d been hit in the chest with a baseball bat. But still I didn’t feel it enough. Not nearly.

I stroked so hard my arms were like windmills spinning in a tornado. Anyone watching would have assumed that I was totally panicked, that I was drowning. And more than anything I wanted to be panicked. Drowning. To feel anything but the solid, black weight lying in my chest like a twenty-pound tumor.

Roberto.

My hands slapped into the soft mud on the far side. I splashed to my feet and slogged toward the high brush that hung far out over the water from the bank. Pushing my way through it—with it shoving me back—all I wanted to do was find an open spot so that I could curl up on the ground. The urge was almost overwhelming. It was as if the earth were dragging down on me with a magnetic force. As if my shivering body were willing itself into a hard, tight little ball. And as if that ball wanted to sink into a grave.

I forced myself to keep moving, to keep pushing. Through the dense brush that lined the bank, then through the wet red earth that clung to my shoes. I started climbing the slope toward the notch in the ridge above me. I made no effort at concealing myself from any sharp eyes down and across the river at Hidalgo’s hacienda. They were surely pouring out of the mine by now, hoping to seal off the shafts. I didn’t care if they saw me—I hoped they did. Saw me running, and wondered whether I would be coming back. But when I stared over my shoulder, there was no one in sight.

Roberto.

The slope steepened until it was almost a cliff. The earth was sandy and loose. I pulled myself upward by grabbing barely anchored rocks and the snakelike roots of eroding shrubs. My feet slid on the soil, sending down little avalanches of stones and gravel. My breath came in high, sharp little gasps.

It got steeper as I got higher. The soil became more solid. It brought me no joy, no little thrill, to be on the open rock where I usually felt the most comfortable. I scaled upward without bothering to look very hard for hand- and footholds. I was ascending like I was a part of the rock itself, like a geologic thing, a creature made of stone. Moving as a part of it. The way my brother did.

This is what our bodies are made of, I told myself. Minerals and cells and water. They form up just right and then we walk and breathe. When we die, they come apart—an unbonding, that’s all it is—and those that aren’t eaten or inhaled by other creatures—from the microscopic to the mammals—fall back to become a part of the soil and rock. A part of the earth. This is what we are. All we are.

Roberto.

A thin, strong hand grabbed my wrist. It seemed to come right out of the rock. I looked at it in a sort of panting stupor. The hand was tan, like my skin, but a different shade. A lighter, more translucent brown. Different kind of cells, but the same, too. My brother probably had some of his cells still inside her.

“My God, Anton! You look like you’ve been flayed!” Mary said as she tried to pull me into the notch.

I didn’t need the help, but she grasped and tugged at me anyway, her fingers slick on my body. I was still dripping with blood and sweat and the river.

“What happened, Anton? Is Roberto okay?”

Her words came fast. She was breathing as hard as I was.

I looked at her for what seemed the first time. She was so small and fragile, standing before me under the low branches of the junipers. She held her palms toward me, as if she were incapable of letting them rest at her sides. The whiter skin there was stained with my blood. She was trembling, too. Her eyes were wide and scared and . . . guilty.

My focus spread, taking in the camouflaged tarps and the camera on its tripod and the Flash Gordon listening antennae.
The last time I was here I watched him make love with her,
I thought. The last time I was here I’d seen him happy. It was a place of possibility for all of us—from this place I’d seen the wolf in him take a big step out of the forest. A step toward joining the rest of us children.

I tried to say something but it came out garbled. I tried again and this time nothing at all came out. My teeth were locked down tight.

I managed to shake my head. Then I pushed past her and started running and sliding toward the cabins in the crater.

Halfway down, Mungo hit me hard enough to make me stagger. She buried the flat top of her head into my belly and almost took me to the ground. She was making whimpering noises, maybe reprimanding me for leaving her behind yet again. Maybe she sensed something else. Her feet were dancing and scratching in the dirt. I allowed myself to pause for a moment, holding on to the ruff of her neck and holding her head against the flayed skin of my stomach. Then I pushed her away and kept running down the hill toward the lodge.

Tom stood on the porch. He’d seen me coming and opened the door, letting Mungo out.

“What’s going on?” he demanded as I headed toward him. “What happened? Is Hidalgo dead?”

When I didn’t reply, he barked, “What the hell were you thinking, anyway, Burns, going in there last night? We’ve been freaking out here! You’ve blown the whole goddamn operation! Now tell me! What is going on? Is Hidalgo dead or not?”

You let me go,
I thought.
You sent my brother in there.

I pushed by him, too, and then through the blanket that covered the doorway. He followed me. As did Mary and Mungo. I headed straight for where Mary’s satellite phone sat on the picnic table. I picked it up and started stabbing the buttons.

“Who are you calling?” Tom demanded.

I didn’t answer.

“If it’s your boss, we called him last night.”

I looked at the phone shaking in my hand and hesitated with my index finger on the
SEND
button. I put the phone down.

“You called McGee?”

My voice was surprisingly steady. Surprisingly calm.

“I called him on his twenty-four-hour pager after we figured out where you’d gone,” Mary answered.

She paused, seeing something in my face and taking it for anger, I guess. It wasn’t. It was instead a faint, fierce kind of thrill.
McGee, the old warrior,
I was thinking.
Maybe he can make it right.

“I’m sorry, Ant. We had no one in the federal government we could call, so we called him.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That we thought you were in danger. That you’d gone to get your brother out of the mine.”

“What did he say?”

Here she almost smiled. I could imagine what my boss would say upon hearing that I’d gone alone into a mine, armed and trespassing on private property, and amid south-of-the-border killers. I could imagine the colorful obscenities he’d summon up—far stronger words than
impulsive
or
stupid.

“He cursed a lot,” she confirmed. “He called you some names. Then he said to give you until eight o’clock this morning. That in the meantime, he was going to call the state patrol’s SWAT team in Rock Springs and put them on standby.”

I checked my watch and tried not to think of the fact that there was a similar watch on Roberto’s wrist. It was seven-thirty. McGee was always in the office by seven. Too old and sick to even sleep properly, he had nothing else to do with his life but hound me, harass my fiancée on the phone, and work.

I started to pick up the phone again then stopped. I needed to put off calling him for a few minutes. I wanted the SWAT team wheeling this way in a half hour. I didn’t want McGee rethinking things because I was out and my brother, the worthless felon, was not.

“Is Hidalgo dead?” Tom demanded again.

I shook my head. Tom let out an angry sound.

My attention turned to focus on the two metal cases on the otherwise empty picnic table. Guns. Big guns. The padlocks were still in place.

The sight of the cases, and knowing what was inside them, made a tiny crack appear in the stone that sat heavily in my chest. Desperate to feel something, anything, I put a crowbar to it. The stone opened up. What spilled out was molten lava.

“Give me the key.”

“Why?” Tom said. “You tell us what’s going on. Tell it—now!”

My first impulse was to go for him. Beat the shit out of him and
take
the keys. All he cared about was Hidalgo. But I closed my eyes and breathed. I tried to keep the lava bottled. I tried to center myself the way Rebecca had taught me in her morning yoga sessions. But that was another life. That was another person who had been laughing with her.

“The mine,” I said, looking at Tom because it was easier than looking at Mary’s guilty face. Then, working to get the words out, “They’ve got maybe nine people in there. Prisoners. Hostages. Slaves, I don’t know. They’ve got them cooking high-grade meth.”

“Is Hidalgo in there?” Tom asked.

I nodded.

“Where’s the camera?”

“I don’t know. But I saw everything.”

Tom shook his head.

“No good, Burns. You were on Hidalgo’s property without a warrant. Without consent. You’re a peace officer and you know that’s no good. Where’s your brother?”

You mean, Where is his body.

For the first time I made myself consider the question. Could Roberto have survived his fall? Thinking about it made me suddenly feel very sick. How far had he fallen? Maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet. Had he smacked into the walls of the shaft, slowing his descent? The part of his fall I could see before he was engulfed by the light was free. Had the roof of the car acted as a cushion or had it speared him with metal struts? There was no way to know.

I asked myself again: Could he have survived that fall? No, almost certainly not—and I wanted to retch. But maybe he did. My brother was a tough motherfucker. There was a chance—A chance in ten? A chance in a hundred? A thousand?—that the roof of the car I’d heard him hit had broken the fall. But it would have broken him, too.

What I could do is not place a bet on that chance, whatever it was. Any chance. What if he was alive? Dying slowly from his wounds? What if he was there, right now, right this second, still breathing and being tortured by Hidalgo and his men? Or, just as bad, what if he was dead—what would they be doing to his body to make an example for the troops?

The lava burned through my veins.

“He’s hurt. Probably dead. They’ve got him, okay? Now give me the key.”

“No,” Tom said firmly. “There’s a SWAT team on standby. If anyone is going in there, it’s going to be them.”

Five heartbeats of silence. The heat and pressure climbed and climbed and climbed.

Then, “Give him the key, Tom.”

Mary’s voice was very steady. We both looked at her.

“Give him the key,” she repeated.

Tom shook his head again. When he spoke his voice was flat, for once not the demanding bray.

“Listen. We need to think about this first. Roberto went in there with Hidalgo’s consent. You didn’t have that, Burns. Or a warrant. You went in there on a hunch. Nothing you saw or heard will be admissible in court. What’s our basis for going in now?”

“The emergency exception,” Mary said. “We know our informant’s in trouble. We have no time to chase down a warrant. Give him the key.”

Tom was shaking his head vigorously.

“If we go in there, anything we see is inadmissible. Because you”—he pointed at my chest—“created the emergency, didn’t you? Therefore whatever happens afterward, whatever you see and whatever we find, will be thrown out of court.”

What I should have felt was shame.
I created the emergency
. But some internal filter channeled it into rage.

“Just give me the fucking key, Tom.”

I held myself very still. I wanted to go for him, to take him—to take anything—apart, but I held it. The menace, though, the closeness of the edge, was clear in either my voice or my expression, because Tom took a step back. When I didn’t jump for him, he sidestepped around the picnic table with the computers on it and put the table between us.

Mary spoke. She sounded mechanical, either numbed or almost like what she was saying had been rehearsed.

“It’s uncharted territory, as far as I know. I don’t remember any case law on point. But this isn’t about cutting off heads anymore, Tom. We’ll go in on the emergency, get our informant out, make the arrests, and let the Assistant U.S. Attorneys sort it out.”

“Don’t worry about not getting your heads, Tom,” I told him. “They’re going to resist.”

He stared at me for a long moment. He glanced at Mary, and then at me again.