Crossing the Line (25 page)

“It’s true, isn’t it? What they say about you. QuickDraw, right? Tell me it’s true and I’ll give you the key.”

It wasn’t. Factually, at least. Not the way it was meant—that I killed three gangbangers in cold blood, then planted guns on them to make it look like I’d been ambushed. But I guessed it was a little bit true, too.
QuickDraw,
meant sarcastically, scoffing, like
Yeah, sure, you drew and shot three men who already had their guns on you. Snicker snicker. Right!
But that part was true. I had done it. It wasn’t quickness, really, but just unbelievable luck. The last I could expect in this life, I’d always joked to myself. The joke now was more bitter than I’d ever imagined.

I had gone into the house wired for sound, with the intention of gathering enough evidence to put the bastards in prison. Failing that, I was going to provoke them into doing something. I’d already been warned that my cover had been burned, so I knew it wouldn’t be too hard. It might sound too cowboy, too suicidal, but the possibility of dying was the last thing on my mind that night. It was anger and anger alone that pushed me through the door.

I nodded at Tom.

He smiled back at me. It was a pitying grin, full of condescension and distaste. But also satisfaction, in that all his suspicions had been confirmed.

“Told you,” he said to Mary.

He dug in his pocket and threw me his ring of keys.

“Okay, we’ll do it. It’s probably illegal as hell, but we’ll do it. We need to wait until the state patrol’s SWAT team gets here. If they’re willing to go in there without any paper, then we can, too.”

Turning and crouching, I plugged a short, thick key into the lock of the top case. The case popped open. There, lying on the shaped foam, was one of the wicked-looking automatic rifles. It appeared more like a pistol, but giant and skeletal. I picked it up and a curved magazine from beside it. Guessing, I slapped the magazine onto the gun where it looked like it ought to go. There was a satisfying click as the magazine snapped home.

“When they get here, you can tell them where to find me.”

Before leaving, I made a phone call. It should have been to Rebecca—the woman I loved, the mother of my child—but it wasn’t. I would pay for that later.

“Christ, Burns, what the hell have you been doing?”

“I went to get my brother.”

McGee could chastise me in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of insulting twists. Surprisingly, though, he didn’t.

“You get him?”

“No.”

“Then where the hell are you now?”

“With the Feds. At the hunting camp outside Potash.”

“With the Feds,” he mimicked, unable to resist making his voice a high-pitched parody of mine. “Both of them, from what I understand, are in some very hot water.”

“Hotter than you think.”

“That’s pretty goddamned hot, then. Where’s your brother?”

“Still in the mine. He’s . . . hurt.”

His voice was unsympathetic.

“What a clusterfuck. Jesus Christ. What do you want to do?”

“Send in the state SWAT guys. Immediately. Have them seal the house, the construction trailers, and the tunnel. Then get them to work their way into the mine with an armored vehicle. There are hostages in there. I’ll be standing by with the Feds to direct them in. Tell them we’ll meet them at the suspension bridge.”

And for once, for the first time in the eight years I’d worked with him, McGee didn’t argue with me.

“All right. You stay the hell out of that place, understand? That’s an order. Leave it to the pros. You and your outlaw friends have already screwed the pooch enough.”

I told him I would.

TWENTY-SIX

I
was lying, of course.

I wasn’t going to wait for them to go in there shouting over a bullhorn,
Police, put your weapons down!
I didn’t think Hidalgo’s men were the type to put their weapons down. Not when there was so much evidence lying around. Not when there were so many live witnesses about. They would have to make a decision at that point, and I had little doubt what their decision would be. They would hold off the state patrol, shooting if they needed to, and neaten things up as best they could.

“Oh my God.”

Tom was on hands and knees before the shaft. He stared down into the blackness.

There’s something about edges that literally brings people to their knees. You think nothing of standing on a curb, don’t even consider stumbling or falling, but when the edge is this high, when its sheer space sucks at you like a gaping mouth, you have to get down on your knees before approaching. That feeling is increased when the abyss leads not over but straight down into the earth.

“How far down did you say it was?”

“Somewhere around a quarter-mile.”

“You sure you want to do this?” he asked, twisting his head around to look up at me.

Like I had a choice. I didn’t bother to give an answer.

I carefully flaked out the ropes to clear any knots. I had four sixty-meter ropes of varying ages and degrees of wear, as well as an eight-hundred-foot reel of skinny 5-mm cord. The pink cord had been a gift from a friend at a climbing shop, where it was sent by mistake. A 5-mm diameter is not much thicker than furry yarn, but the numbers printed on the side of the cardboard spool indicated a breaking strength of eight hundred pounds.

Ropes flaked, tied together with double fisherman’s knots, and then tied to the loose end coming off the spool, I began shoving the whole mess in a backpack. I didn’t want the rope hanging down into one of the chambers ahead of me, so I intended to pay it out as I descended the same way you do when rappelling a mountain in a gale. I shimmied into a harness, then shrugged my way into the pack. It weighed at least fifty pounds.

Tom handed me his precious MP5 submachine gun, to which he had thoughtfully attached a strap. I slung the ugly gun around one shoulder and my neck. Tom also provided me with two extra clips that were shaped like large, black bananas. These I shoved into my pockets.

I tied the loose end of the rope around the only thing nearby that looked suitable, which wasn’t very—the base of a twisted juniper. I put my weight on the rope, tugged a few times, then started backing toward the hole.

Tom watched me with a rare grin. He looked pleased.

“You may have the morals of an alley cat, QuickDraw, but you’ve got balls. Happy hunting. You get the fucker.”

I would have liked to think he was referring to my brother. To bringing him out alive. But I knew it was Hidalgo he was talking about. And
alive
probably didn’t describe very accurately what he meant.

Careful not to dislodge any loose stones near the lip, I walked backward over the edge. Into the darkness.

For the first ten feet it felt like I was still a part of this world. But I was leaving it slowly, like a snarling badger backing into his burrow. Every inch of rope sliding through my hand and then the belay tube took me farther and farther from the sun and the wind and whatever order exists out there.

After fifty feet the sky seemed very far away. It was just a distant blue orb, a porthole far out of my reach. And that was good—that was where I wanted it to be.

At two hundred feet the sky was a single bright star.

The knot connecting the first two ropes snagged as I tried to tug it out of the pack. Yanking on it with my free hand, I felt an unreasonable twinge of panic when it didn’t come free. For a minute everything threatened to break loose.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Calm down, Ant.
I’d dealt with knots and jams before, even when dangling thousands of feet above the ground.
But never in a bottomless pit!

Cracking open the stone in my chest again, I let a little of the lava seep out.

I wrapped the short length of trailing rope around one thigh a couple of times to lock the rope through my belay device. Now I could use both hands. I reached behind me for the top of the pack, dug around in what felt like a mass of dead snakes, and found the knot. Gently lifting it out, I unwrapped the rope from my thigh and let it once again start sliding.

Down. Down. Down. Like a venomous spider, I told myself. Going to bite the ones who tried to squash me and my kind.

The second knot and then the third and the fourth passed without snagging. But the 5-mm line was cutting through my hand. I managed to take some of the pressure off by wrapping the line once around my thigh, but it too quickly heated and then began burning as it worked against the nylon. I switched to braking with my left hand to keep my trigger finger intact. That hand soon became wet with blood. I could smell the acrid scent of melting nylon and burning flesh.
Hellfire and brimstone,
I thought.

There was no light below. Not even when I guessed I was two-thirds of the way through the 5 mm. And that was both good and bad. A part of my psyche desperately needed some light, but I wasn’t going to risk turning on my headlamp. But no light below also meant I wasn’t heading into an occupied chamber. And besides, right then I preferred the dark.

Some extra sense told me quite suddenly that I’d dropped out the bottom of the pit. No faint wind was rising up from underneath me. There was just the slightest moan as the expelling air wrapped itself around the pit’s edge on a cavern’s ceiling.

And I could hear distant voices, ringing very lightly off the mine’s walls.

I lowered myself slower now, and felt a magnification of my senses of sound, and, unfortunately, touch, because my left hand was on fire.

Then my feet hit solid ground.

I staggered. My legs were weak from hanging. I began to fall, but caught myself with the rope and managed to lower myself to a sitting position. Popping open the belay device, I released the cord. A sick thought made me want to turn on my headlamp and look at it—it had to be streaked with blood and pieces of flesh—but I managed to suppress the temptation.

I lifted the stays on the pack’s shoulder straps and let the straps slide free, and the pack slid off my back without my needing to take off the gun.

Then I started stalking through the darkness, drawn by the sound of those far-off voices.

It’s strange that the descent was so memorable. Strange, because what happened next is hard to describe or even recall. Like the night in Cheyenne a couple of years earlier, I have a hard time putting together the pieces. There was silence then incredible noise, darkness then flaring light. If I were to try and describe it, it would start to sound like an action movie’s climax. But this wasn’t a movie. No one was acting.

What I felt is even harder to describe. It’s hard to admit, too. Because for a little while I lost myself completely. All those things I’d once sworn to uphold—rules and laws and civilization itself—climbed into the backseat and shut its eyes. If I were trying to excuse it, I would say that Roberto’s spirit invaded my body. But it wasn’t my brother. It was me. And this version of me would return. Not just in a nightmare, either.

The facts of what happened would haunt me periodically for a long time to come. For the rest of my life probably, I knew. For several months I would have to live with it daily. I was forced to relive it in official interviews, depositions, Internal Affairs Review Committees, as well as other panels, such as those for reviewing officer-involved shootings and those for recommendations of disciplinary action. The questions would be inevitably asked by lawyers whose job it was to destroy me.

I really hate lawyers.

Here’s what you need to know: I found only three of Hidalgo’s men in the mine. But not Hidalgo himself, or Zafado, or even my brother’s body. The three I did find were in the trailer, making up a meal of rice and beans for their prisoners before I shut off the generator. Two of them were kids—gangbangers. One of them was the rapist called Shorty.

I shot them all. And someone shot me.

TWENTY-SEVEN

M
y head felt like it was about to explode. Or like maybe it already had. It was leaking—that was for sure. Running down my neck and soaking my shirt. If I hadn’t seen the muzzle flash from the trailer above me, I would have sworn somebody had snuck up and hit me with an ax. It felt like the blade was still in there, with the weight of the handle causing it to bite and grind into my skull whenever I made the slightest move.

On top of that, the gong of a tremendous bell rang nonstop in my ears. It made it hard to think.

Many large men dressed all in black were sitting on me or crouching around me. They had flashlights mounted on the barrels of their guns and they were swinging the beams all around. These men were bulky from lifting weights and too many steak dinners and all their body armor. In the glare of the headlights coming off some kind of van nearby, I watched them opening and closing their mouths with rapid snaps like goldfish on speed. I knew they were yelling at me, but I had no idea what they were saying.

I tried to talk.

“Where’s my brother? The informant? Have you seen him?”

The man closest to my face winced and drew back. I decided it wasn’t my breath but my volume. I hadn’t been able to hear my own words. He put a finger to his lips and pumped his palm up and down a few times, indicating for me to lower it.

I tried asking again. And he tried answering. His mouth opened and closed less rapidly, but still mutely.

One of the other men finally drew my attention. He pointed at his face with two fingers of one hand. For a minute I thought he was going to very slowly poke himself in the eyes. Then he panned the fingers out at the darkness beyond the beam of the headlights. I understood. They were looking.

“Thank you,” I mouthed.

I was carefully bundled into the back of what turned out to be an armored bank car, not a van. It was lit from a tiny dim bulb on the roof.
Let me stay,
I told them soundlessly.
I can help you find him.
But from what I could tell, they just ignored me. I tried to resist, to get out of the back of the armored car, but there were too many of them, and they were all too big to fight, and I was feeling pretty weak.

I was pushed down onto nylon bags that were stiff with coins. They hadn’t taken the time, when borrowing the truck, to empty out the money. I noticed and appreciated that. But I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be back out in the darkness.

All but one man—who was especially large—jumped out. I felt a sharp pressure in my ears when someone slammed the door. The sensation made me open my mouth. Maybe I screamed, maybe I didn’t. There was no way to tell. For a minute my eyes watered too much to be able to read the remaining man’s face.

A little later some bumping and jostling indicated that we were moving. Turning around, I guessed, judging from the back-and-forth rocking, and then accelerating into the tunnel. The left side of my face was stiff and sticky. A wetness ran down my neck and back and into my pants. I took a weird comfort in all the blood running out of me. My brother had had blood running out of him the last time I saw him.

I’m just like him. Almost.

The man sitting opposite me peeled a large gauze bandage out of its paper wrapper. He put it to the left side of my head then wrapped my head around and around with adhesive tape. It was the same kind of tape Roberto and I used for protecting our hands when climbing fat cracks. His mouth moved as he worked but I couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying.

Again I said,
Thanks.
Again I said that I should be back there, looking for my brother.

I couldn’t tell what he said in return, but the truck didn’t slow or stop. It just vibrated on up the tunnel road toward the real world.

Weak light began to seep in through the tiny bulletproof windows. Then, suddenly, it became bright sunlight.
Back in the real world.
The doors at the back of the armored car swung open and even more light flooded in. Blinding light. There were more people here. A lot more. There were something like twenty police officers in uniform, and twenty more in jeans and flannel shirts.

Maybe my eardrums hadn’t been blown out. My head was still ringing unbelievably, but I could now hear faint voices. I was helped out of the van and led to the passenger side of a patrol car. The rear door was opened and I was seated inside. I wondered why I hadn’t been put in the front.

Am I being arrested? For what I did down there? No, they would have handcuffed me. They must not want to get blood in the front seat.

There was a lot of activity. More cars pulled up into the wide area at the tunnel’s mouth. People stood around in little groups, individuals peeling off to walk a little way then stand in other groups. No one tried to talk to me. Everyone, though, glanced my way every few minutes. I watched the armored truck turn around again and speed back into the mine.

Finally an ambulance came down the road.

“Can you hear me?” a paramedic said into my face, but from very far away. I could feel the vibration of her words more than I could hear them.

“Yes.”

She drew back from my affirmation—I must have been shouting again. She smiled, though, pleased. She was a Nordic princess. Blond hair, blue eyes, a little heavy, but definitely an angel.

She touched my neck with fingertips encased in a latex glove and stared at her watch for a little while. Counting the beats of my heart.
I didn’t know I still had one.
Then she put her cheek next to my mouth as if waiting to receive a brotherly kiss. Counting my respirations, I realized.

“What’s your name?”

“Antonio Burns.”

“Where are you?”

“In Sublette County, Wyoming. At a mine entrance. About a mile west of the Roan River.”

She smiled again, pleased so far. I was doing well on the test to gauge my orientation, my mental state.

“What day is it?”

I had to think about that. I honestly didn’t know. I tried to surreptitiously glance at my watch but she caught me. She frowned.

“The last couple of days have been pretty hairy,” I explained. “I don’t think I’m concussed, though.”

She gave me a look that said she’d be the judge of that. But I managed to pass the rest of the test.

I knew she was trying to be gentle, but my head burned and my eyes watered when she pulled away the tape. She stared at the wound for a moment then sprayed it with a saline solution and studied it again. She probed it lightly with the tips of her fingers. Her fingertips came away smeared with my blood.

“Looks like it was just a graze, Antonio, but we’ll need an X-ray to be sure. It’s already starting to clot. You’re lucky.”

Right.

She began to bandage it back up.

I was oddly disappointed. It didn’t feel like just a graze. It felt like that ax was still hanging off the side of my head. She smeared some goop on my burned palm and bandaged it, too.

A few police officers came over to check on me. There was true concern on their faces. Not the sarcasm, or the distaste, or even the misplaced envy for my reputation that I’d become so used to. By looking at their uniforms, I saw that they’d come from all over the central part of the state when they’d heard there was an officer in trouble. Driven fast, at high speeds, I knew. I wanted to cry.

“Okay, Antonio. Let me help you to the ambulance. We’re going to put you on a stretcher and take you in for those X-rays.”

It was my blond angel. The words came from maybe only a hundred feet away instead of miles. My hearing was returning.

“No. I’m staying here. Thanks, though.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got to come with me. We need to get a better look at your head.”

“I’m afraid not.”

She argued for another minute, the smile fading, trying to look stern. Then she spun and stalked off toward the ambulance. Tearing off her gloves and throwing them onto the dirt. Washing her hands of me, I guessed.

I got up from the backseat of the patrol car. Then I stooped, braced myself on the trunk with one hand, and vomited by the rear tire. Nothing came up but bile. I waited for the nausea and dizziness to pass. When I stood, more or less upright this time, I nearly vomited again when I saw my reflection in the car’s window.

I wobbled and swayed over to a small group of uniformed state-patrol officers. High-level, judging from the ribbons and brass on their shoulders and chests. Those who saw me coming turned to gape. The others noticed and turned, too. One of them was a gray-haired man they’d all been anchored around. I recognized him as the commander of the state patrol.

“Antonio Burns, right?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you for coming out and bringing your men.”

He nodded reluctantly. McGee had ordered him to send in the SWAT team. This guy didn’t really have a choice, although he didn’t have to come in person.

“What’s the situation, Commander?”

“We’ve secured the house and trailer, where eleven men were taken into custody. Most of them were either armed with illegal weapons or were trying to hide them. One of them speaks some English, and he’s demanding his lawyer, of course. Says his name is Jesús Hidalgo.”

I felt a little something—a small rush of relief.

Good. The motherfucker’s in custody. But it would have been so much better if he’d been down in the mine.

“The SWAT, as you know, is still in the mine,” the commander went on. “They’ve got six more people in custody down there. Unarmed. Three or four of them are in pretty bad shape, in filthy clothes and looking half-starved. Probably those hostages we were warned about, but right now we aren’t taking any chances.”

“Are any of them wounded?”

“No. Not that I’ve heard about. But there’s three bodies down there, too. In a camper or something. I’m told it looks like you were the shooter. And the shootee. There’s some people who are going to be wanting to have a lot of long talks with you, Burns.”

I nodded. I knew the drill. I knew it far too well. Cheyenne was going to come back and haunt me all over again.

“Only the three bodies?” I asked.

He looked at me strangely.

“You shoot anyone else down there, agent? Never mind—I don’t want to know. Those three in the camper are the only bodies I know about.”

No Roberto. No Bruto.

“Now if you don’t mind, Burns, I have a crime scene to maintain.”

“Wait. I need to get back in there. Into the mine.”

He shook his head.

“No. We’re pulling our officers out, along with the suspects we have in custody. We’re leaving the bodies. It’s too dangerous to continue searching in there right now. There could be booby traps. Or cave-ins. Or more armed suspects running around in the dark. We’re going to back out and put together a plan to safely search the area. Get some thermal or infrared sensors, or something like that. Night-vision goggles apparently don’t work.”

“I know. Just give me a ride back down. Or lend me a car.”

He looked at me, openly annoyed now.

“Something wrong with your hearing, Burns? I said no. We’re pulling everyone out and we’re sealing the mine for the time being.”

“My brother’s in there.”

“My
men
are in there. And I’m not putting any police officers at further risk. They were risking enough by going down to bring you out.”

“I know. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. But I need—”

He turned on his heel and walked away from me.

I staggered back to the rear of the empty patrol car and gingerly lowered myself onto the seat. I wondered if I could steal it. But there were no keys, either in the ignition or on the seat. I could steal another car—surely one of the ten or fifteen parked around me had keys in the ignition. But several of the commander’s men were watching me closely. Maybe expecting just such a rash act from a blood-covered guy who’d done something very dark and ugly a quarter-mile under the earth.

I could feel my muscles getting chewed up by the mixture of worry, rage, grief, and adrenaline that was still flowing through my veins in the place of all the lost blood. I was stiff and sore and I hurt all over.

I sat, trying to think with my bruised and ringing brain, while the activity around me started to increase. More people were coming in. A second ambulance arrived, whose crew joined the two from the first in the hope of finding someone else in need of medical attention. I saw the angel frowning in my direction, as if I’d deprived her of something. A search-and-rescue truck from another county arrived. Then more patrol cars. Then an old station wagon listing to one side that said Señor Garcia’s Mexican Restaurant on the side. Lupe Garcia was behind the wheel and one of the boys who’d tried to assault me a few nights ago for being Mexican-looking sat next to her. She either didn’t see me or didn’t recognize me with all the dried blood and bandages on my head. I overheard a cop say that the restaurant had offered to bring free food for the officers involved in the raid.

Soon the broad dirt area in front of the mine had an almost festival atmosphere. People stood in groups everywhere. Talking. Eating. Sometimes even laughing. The commander was surrounded by his men, and they studied a map on the hood of a car. I decided to go talk to him again. To plead, if necessary. And to scope out the arriving cars for keys left behind.

I only managed to stand up and combat a new wave of nausea when another car came rumbling down the dirt road past the construction trailer.

It was my car. The old Pig lumbered along, looking big and aggressive with its front-mounted winch and its dark windows. But it also looked a little silly, because Mungo’s long face hung out one window and her tongue was flapping in the wind.

The battered Land Cruiser braked to a halt alongside me. It leapt up and down in either expectation or, more likely, from some inexperienced driver lifting his foot off the clutch too soon. The engine died. Mungo licked at me from two feet away, whining frantically.

I patted her cheek and moved closer so that the wolf could smell me, and could be sure I was all right. She started licking at the blood on my throat. The driver’s window came down and it was Mary at the wheel. Tom sat beside her. Then he got out and walked around to get a good look at me. Mary just stared.