Crossing the Line (30 page)

An official spokesperson contacted at the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office seemed caught off guard by Mr. Davadou’s accusations. The spokesperson declined to make a comment other than to say, “He said that? I thought the FBI asked for our assistance.”

At a hearing in federal court today, it will be determined whether Mr. Hidalgo-Paez will be transferred to Mexico to face charges there. That country only rarely seeks the extradition of its nationals, and generally refuses to cooperate with U.S. authorities seeking extradition of those captured in Mexico who are charged with narcotics crimes that could carry a life sentence. A source in the U.S. Department of Justice indicated that in this instance it is expected that there will be “full cooperation between the two nations.”

THIRTY-ONE

T
he article in the
Denver Post
four days later hit me like a punch on the chin. I literally saw stars. Nobody had told me it was coming. Not Mary, not Tom, not McGee. Not even Rebecca, who worked at the paper and who had had to know the blow was being thrown.

I read it at a Starbucks around the corner from Rebecca’s loft. Mungo and I were sitting on the patio, where Mungo was receiving both tentative pats and dirty looks from the other patrons. I’d had a thermos filled that I intended to take to the hospital. I expected to find Mary still hovering there, and I thought she seemed like the kind of woman who’d appreciate a little Starbucks instead of coffee out of a vending machine.

After I read the article, I just sat and stared. It finally sank in. Not that the Mexican charges were probably bullshit, and not even that it was likely Hidalgo would walk. What sank in was how I’d been used. How Roberto and I had been used.

A blowtorch fired up in my chest. It felt more like a flamethrower. It seemed that simply by looking around the café, I could set everyone and everything aflame.

I tried to cool down when I dropped Mungo off at the loft, which was empty. McGee had taken to spending the mornings at the
Post
building with Rebecca. According to her, he would by turns harass and charm all the women there, from the senior editors to the editorial assistants. The men he ignored, of course.

Be cool, be cool,
I told myself as I threw on a suit while feeling a sucker’s humiliated fury. I was glad McGee was out. I was too hot for conversation with him. I didn’t want him trying to talk me out of doing anything dumb, or saying anything stupid. I was smart enough, though, to leave the little Beretta in a drawer.

I half walked and half ran to the courthouse.

The security there didn’t like something about the way I looked—maybe it was something in my eyes, or something in the set of my face. More likely it was the heat I could feel radiating off me. I strained for composure—I didn’t want them asking then checking my name. I was afraid that maybe my name and picture were posted somewhere near the screen on their X-ray machine.
Antonio Burns, No. 1 Most Wanted for Stupidity. Believed Armed and Dangerous,
I imagined it saying. I wasn’t armed, but I sure as hell felt dangerous. As dangerous as they’d once believed I was.

The security guards let me through after some suspicious looks and a pat-down with an electric wand.

The daily docket posted by the elevator showed an extradition hearing for Jesús Hidalgo-Paez,
mi amigo,
El Doctor, in Courtroom 6B. A different judge—this one an immigration magistrate—was presiding. The hearing was scheduled for 10:00
A
.
M
., which was a half hour earlier. That didn’t worry me. I knew that these sorts of hearings ran late, especially when they required the attendance of Hidalgo’s half-dozen lawyers, not to mention the press.

I thought I’d made it until I got off the elevator and stepped into the glass, marble, and steel corridor. Two marshals were standing outside Courtroom 6B, looking my way. When they saw me they started coming down the hallway toward me.

I stood smoldering by the bank of elevators. I didn’t know whether to run or fight. The impulse was to fight. To what purpose, I couldn’t say.

One of the elevators behind me chimed. The marshals were twenty or thirty feet away and walking slowly, cautiously, as if I were Mungo, a wolf loose in the corridors of the Alfred A. Arraj Federal Courthouse.

“Anton?”

I looked over my shoulder.

Mary and Tom were getting off the elevator.
They
were the people I’d come to see. Not Davadou, the flunky A.U.S.A. bullshitter. Not even Hidalgo.

“What are you doing here?” Tom demanded. “You’re prohibited from entering the courthouse without a subpoena, Burns.”

Tom was in a crisp blue suit, his reddish hair moussed and blow-dried. Mary had cleaned up, too. She wore a skirt, blouse, and jacket, all in different shades of tan. Both of them looked as purposeful and serious as any archetypal federal agent.

But Mary’s uncertain smile betrayed her as something else. Something more human, but less scrupulous.

“You set me up,” I said.

Then someone grabbed my arm and turned me around. It was one of the two marshals who’d been coming down the hall. Both of them were bland-faced and mustached. And they were very careful. One was holding my arm while the other stood two steps back, his hand on the butt of his holstered weapon.

“Sir, are you Antonio Burns?” the one holding my arm asked.

The urge to fight was almost overwhelming.
But to what purpose?

I jerked my arm out of his grasp. He jumped back a step, alarmed. Then I stopped, stood very still, and nodded.

“Sir, there’s a court order in effect that restricts you from entering this building.”

Mary said, “It’s okay. We’ll see him out.”

“No, ma’am. I’m afraid we’ll need to take him into custody until we can go and see the judge.”

“The order only prevents him from entering the same courtroom as Mr. Hidalgo. He hasn’t done that, has he?”

The guard frowned. He probably thought she was a lawyer, and he probably felt the same way about lawyers that I did.

“Who are you, ma’am?”

Mary took a badge wallet out of her small white purse and showed him her credentials. To a marshal, the same as to a state cop, being an FBI agent wasn’t much better than being a lawyer. Mary was both. The whole time one marshal studied them, the other’s eyes didn’t leave my hands. He was probably wondering if I’d somehow slipped a weapon past security. I was tempted to slap my thigh and shout “Boo!”

Mary got her credentials back. Without another word, the marshals reluctantly withdrew down the hallway—looking over their shoulders every two steps—and took up positions outside Courtroom 6B.

“You set me up,” I said again, facing Mary and Tom.

Mary frowned at me. Tom smirked.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“You set
us
up,” I said. “Me and Roberto. You knew this would happen all along.”

Mary’s narrow eyes slid off my face. She glanced at Tom, looked at me again, and her gaze dropped to my shoes.

“This isn’t the time or the place, Anton,” she said.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Tom said. But he obviously did.

“We didn’t know this would happen, Anton,” Mary added quietly, looking up then down again.

“You knew it was a possibility.”

“Yes,” Mary admitted. “Not what happened to Roberto, but we knew that extradition was a possibility.”

A trigger was pulled. A steady stream of fire came pouring out of me. I felt myself smiling, the way I did when I was really mad.

“No. You did more than that. You planned it all. Everything. Possibilities and likelihoods and everything. You mapped it all out. You made your calculations.”

Both of them were silent. I kept spewing flame.

“You got your friend—that junior agent, Damon Walker—you got him killed when you pushed him too deep too fast. And that made you guilty and mad. You already knew about Roberto. Even in San Diego you would have been in on that, trying to arrest the Colorado fugitive last fall before he took a plane out of LAX. And you would have known that he’d once been involved with Hidalgo. So after Walker was killed, you remembered Roberto again, and found out that he was in South America. And you got an idea.”

“So what?” Tom said.

Mary’s eyes remained on the floor.

“You read those files. About him, first, then about me. You knew Roberto was a killer. You thought I was a killer, too. And you knew we were close.”

“We were desperate,” Mary said in a very soft voice. “They were shutting us down. No one was doing anything—”

I rode over her.

“You believed everything you read, didn’t you?
QuickDraw,
and all that. Then you set this up. You didn’t think you could lose. Hopefully Roberto would just kill Hidalgo. Execute him. You did your best to brainwash him with all the bad things Hidalgo had done over the years. Or maybe Hidalgo would whack Roberto. It didn’t really matter, because if that happened, you thought from reading about me, then I’d be sure to go in and kill Hidalgo.
QuickDraw,
you thought.
He’s done it before, he’ll do it again. Especially for family.
Tom even pushed me to do it—that night we went in to leave the note for Roberto. If none of those things happened, you figured we’d at least get enough evidence on Hidalgo to arrest him, and then either the Department of Justice would roll the dice on a trial and make you guys heroes, or they’d send him back to Mexico. If he went back to Mexico, the court documents would show that there’d been an informant, and it wouldn’t be hard for Hidalgo to figure out who that was. Then Roberto or I would still have to kill him or else he’d be coming after us and our family.
La corbata,
remember? We’d take all the risks. And one way or another, you’d get what you wanted: Hidalgo preferably dead, or at least in prison.”

“We were risking everything, too,” Mary said very, very quietly.

“Like hell you were. You were risking nothing. Maybe your careers, but you both can go get jobs with a security firm that will pay twice what you’re making now. Spend your days hanging out with CEOs and foreign dignitaries.”

“We didn’t know it would turn out like this. . . . After what happened to Damon—”

“You hoped it would, Mary. You hoped it would.”

“No. I didn’t know Roberto would . . .” But she didn’t say anything more.

Mary Chang, former rising star within the Bureau’s ranks, was starting to cry. Not snuffling and sobbing, the way I’d been doing occasionally over the last few days, but grimly. Tears rolling down over her cheekbones.

“What I don’t understand is, if you wanted him dead this bad, why didn’t you just do it yourselves? Tom could’ve gotten up into the notch with a sniper rifle and taken him out by the pool.”

Neither one of them answered my question. But the answer was plain to me. They were too chickenshit. They wanted somebody to do it for them. They thought they had the perfect guys for the job.

“You’re all worked up, man,” Tom said, mock-soothingly. “You need to take a vacation or something. Do what you Wyoming guys do on vacations. Go hunting, right? I hear there’s some good hunting down south.”

THIRTY-TWO

T
hat night Rebecca worked late. Not at the
Post,
but in the small second bedroom, which she’d made into an office. Her topic—the toxic chemicals the Shattuck Chemical Company had left behind when they shut down their Denver operations—was one she was worked up about. She’d talked about nothing else through dinner. I suspected, though, that her sudden chattiness had been at least partially intentional.

In the next room McGee snored on the ash-strewn couch. There are few things less pleasant than sharing a house with your obese, drunken, emphysemic, and taciturn boss. But this night I could name one of them: burning yourself up at a rate you know you can’t possibly sustain. But you know you have to.

“How was Roberto?” Rebecca whispered when she came into the bedroom.

I was lying in bed and staring out the window at the lights of Denver. It was after ten. I’d been there alone in the dark for an hour. Even with the balcony window all the way open, the downtown traffic noise and the drunken college boys’ shouts were doing little to smother the sound of McGee in the other room.

“Same,” I said. “They don’t really expect any change.”

I’d gone straight to bed without interrupting her when I got home from the hospital. What I’d said about no change being expected wasn’t entirely true—the doctors were contemplating trying to remove the debris of some of the exploding disks in his spine. I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it.

“Well, that’s better than worse, Ant.”

What she meant by
worse
could only mean dead. I would have considered it a great improvement. But when I’d seen Roberto, he was still hanging by that same proverbial thread. And I still didn’t have the balls to cut it.

Her sandals clacked on the floor as she kicked them off. I heard the hiss of silk as she slid out of her skirt. Then silence as she worked the buttons on her blouse. I turned over so I could watch her. She was down to a bra and panties.

“What do you think you’re looking at?”

Her whisper was suddenly a little more throaty.

I didn’t answer. Instead I wondered about the question. I wondered why she turned me on so much. It wasn’t just how she looked and talked or how smart she was. Or even how she made love—taking as much pleasure from giving it as from receiving. And it wasn’t that she, the city girl, was so different from all the other girls I’d known. All those climbers and kayakers and mountain bikers and trail runners and skiers and backpackers and windsurfers, all the tan, lanky, outdoorsy girls with their skinned shins and elbows. I’d lost interest in them sooner or later because they shared all the same thrills with me. But Rebecca was exotic. She kept me off balance. One minute she wants to marry me, the next she decides I’m inappropriate material for a husband/father. And the minute after that she wants to jump my bones.

“Well, what are you looking at?” she asked again.

The throatiness was still in her voice. It was a tone I’d always liked, but it didn’t sound genuine right now.

She was taking a clip out of her long hair, then shaking her hair out with her fingers. Looking deliberately seductive.

Again I didn’t answer. Instead I lunged for her. And in the process I pulled the sheets and the mattress cover half onto the floor.

She was quick, but I was quicker.
QuickDraw
. I got ahold of her wrist just as she tried to jump away. I dragged her back into the bed. She didn’t fight. Not much, anyway. I caught the knee that was aimed—with only a little bit of malice—between my thighs at the last moment. There were a few minutes of grunts and grips and bites and kisses before I got her out of the bra and underwear. She didn’t stop fighting entirely until she was mounted over me, her hair forming a screen around my head, and tipping one pointed nipple and then the other into my mouth.

Everything was so right for a little while. But I couldn’t completely forget that everything was so
fucking wrong.

It wasn’t until later, when she was breathing hard like a rider who’d just taken a horse over the hurdles, and I was blowing like the horse, that we spoke again.

“You’re coming back to me,” she said.

“We’ll know in a few minutes.”

She tapped my forehead with hers.

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s going to be all right,” I said. I didn’t believe it, but it was easy to say.

“I’m glad. Let me know what I can do to help.”

“What you just did. In about ten more minutes. Then every night for the next fifty years.”

She laughed. Like the seductive voice she’d put on earlier, it sounded artificial to me. And I think she knew it. The passion fled and I felt the sadness coming back over me. We didn’t say anything for a while. We just continued to inhale each other’s breath. It had been a long time since we’d last discussed getting married and taking the step of setting a date. I knew that now was not the time to bring it up. She may have just jumped my bones, but I sensed that she was less sure than ever that she should marry me. And I couldn’t blame her.

“Did anything happen today?” she asked obliquely.

She never mentioned Hidalgo’s name. I knew, though, that she’d looked him up in the paper’s archives. And I knew that he scared her or else she wouldn’t be putting up with McGee and me infringing on her freedom.

“You mean besides your coming in here to seduce me so I’d feel better? Yeah. Hidalgo got himself extradited. He’s going back to Mexico.”

“Good. I imagine he belongs in a Mexican jail.”

I didn’t say where I thought he belonged.

Instead I said, “Do you know what Mexican jails are like? It’s only uncomfortable for the poor. If you’ve got money, they’re like fine hotels. You can have whatever you want. A DVD, a personal chef, a water bed, telephones, a computer, AC, whatever. With money, you can even be ‘paroled’ to go to soccer games or discos. They even have conjugal rights as often as you like. Or at least as often as you can pay for them.”

“If you ever go to jail then, Anton, make sure it’s in Mexico.” She failed to add that it was so she could come see me.

I chuckled at her stunted joke. But what I was thinking was that such a thing might not be all that unlikely.

“Not that Hidalgo will ever see the inside of a jail,” I went on. “According to those FBI agents I was working with, he’ll be bailed out the moment he steps off the plane, or he’ll be granted house arrest on his
estancia
in Baja.”

Mary and Tom had also told me that the Mexican charges would likely remain pending against him, but his friends on the Mexican courts would see to it that the case never went to trial. They’d leave the charges hanging out there just to keep the United States government from looking foolish.

“With him out of the country, does McGee still need to stay here?” Rebecca asked. McGee wasn’t snoring anymore from the other room. I wondered if we’d woken him up. “He’s a sweet old guy, and I love him, but he’s making me crazy. Following me around everywhere with his gun, showing it off, and behaving like the dirty old man he is with every woman in the office.”

“For a little while,” I said. “Please.”

We were quiet again. Our breathing slowed. She remained crouched over me and I had a mouthful of her hair. Down on the street someone was yelling about the Rockies. I assumed they meant the baseball team, not the mountains.

“You know I’d do anything for you, Ant.”

I waited for the
but.
It came, but gentler than I expected.

“But I can’t go on for very long like this. You’re so morose—and that’s okay—but if you want to try to make this work, you’ve got to share with me. Tell me what you’re thinking and feeling.”

What I was feeling, even with her lithe weight on top of me, and with me still inside her, was grief and fear and hate and rage. I wasn’t going to share that. Not only to protect her from it, but because it was mine.

“Give me a few days. Maybe I should get out of here for a little while. Get my head back on straight.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

I had the feeling that she was telling off the father of her child in the gentlest way she could. We’d hit a brick wall.

Rebecca was a sound sleeper. With all the noise in downtown Denver, to live where she did you’ve got to be. When I was sure she was deep into her dreams—whether or not they included me—I got up out of the bed and put on my clothes.

“You’re really a sick bastard, Burns,” McGee growled from the couch. “To do that to a man’s goddaughter while he’s in the other room.”

“I’m a lot sicker than you think, Ross.”

“I doubt it. Where do you think you’re going?”

“Out for a little bit, Mom. I’ll be back.”

I hadn’t told either one of them about how the Feds had used Roberto and me. How they were still using us. McGee had had some lurking doubts about me since that night in Cheyenne two and a half years ago. Even though he’d protected me afterward, he’d never been entirely convinced what I’d done was kosher. Why reinforce those doubts? Why give him the chance to stop me?

Mungo got up out of her giant beanbag bed and tried to come with me. I didn’t blame her. Sleeping in the same apartment as McGee was bad enough—being in the same room must have been excruciating for her. She stood in front of the door to the hallway, blocking it. I pushed her away but she just squirmed right back.

“Stay, damn it. I’ll be back, Mungo. I’ll be back.”

When I opened the door a crack she rammed her nose into the space. I let her worm out into the hall. Then, feeling like a treacherous jerk, I grabbed her tail then her collar and shoved her back inside. I tried to ignore the devastated grin she gave me as I shut the door.

Down in the garage, I intended to switch Rebecca’s plates with the Pig’s. I thought Wyoming plates would be automatically suspicious where I was going. Besides, her little two-seater Porsche would look better with Wyoming plates. Kind of like a toy poodle with a spiked collar. But once in the garage, I had a better idea.

There was a Hummer parked diagonally across three spaces in a garage where even a single slot was in high demand. The Hummer had three strikes against it. One was simply that it was an obnoxious car. Two was that it was taking up too much space. And three was that it carried California plates, and there were already far too many Californians coming to the mountain states.

I took off the license plates with a screwdriver. While I was unscrewing them, I noticed that the bumper was entirely free of scratches. The car had never been driven off-road, and probably never would be. I also noticed the green bumper sticker that said, “Doing My Part to Change the Environment . . . Ask Me How!” After getting giddy on too much wine one night, Rebecca had ordered a hundred of them over the Internet. I had to laugh. She must have been putting them to good use. The one she’d put on the Pig had taken me a half hour to scrape off.

Then, all alone, I started driving south.