Crossing the Line (18 page)

One of the young bangers had followed him at a distance with an automatic rifle over his shoulder. He watched Roberto cruise the rock for a while, gaping, and doubtless wondering why anyone would fool around like that ten to twenty feet off the ground. Then he sat down, apparently bored. It was obvious, though, that he’d been told to watch Roberto, as he didn’t go back to the house until my brother was finished.

It sent a clear message: Roberto was an honored guest, allowed to sleep in Hidalgo’s wing of the house, but either Hidalgo himself or his security chiefs wanted him watched. So he was a prisoner, too.

“You Burns boys certainly have a thing for rocks,” Mary said.

“It’s all they’ve got in their heads,” Tom said, managing to be almost witty.

“It’s training,” I told them. “It makes you strong and confident. So that you can do the same moves hundreds of feet off the deck.”

I took the controller from Tom and reversed the tape. I watched my brother walk backward past the guard without a glance or a word. I slowed it, watching him leap fifteen feet straight up onto the rock. I then watched him traversing the upper lip of the long shelf, torquing his fingertips and toes into tiny cracks.

“That’s how we’ll tell him,” I said, pointing at the screen. “We’ll just leave him a note. Right there, where no one else will find it.”

SEVENTEEN

T
om took charge of things. I had to admit that he had a lot more experience than I did with this type of operation.

And being in charge made him—for a little while, at least—less obnoxious than usual. He even began to tell me some stories of surveillances in the Mexican desert and in the Colombian highlands before he realized he was acting out of character. Then he stopped, took a mental look in the mirror, and frowned his way back into the carefully crafted persona of the hard-boiled federal special agent.

From a crate he drew out a cellophane-wrapped pair of gray-and-black-patterned fatigue pants and threw them at my chest. A matching long-sleeved shirt followed a few seconds later. Unlike what you see on TV, these were the kind of FBI-issue clothes that did not have
FBI
stenciled in yellow letters on the back. These were meant to make one invisible at night.

We tested radios—fancy Motorola Sabers—that were far smaller and more advanced than the kind I was used to. A state like Wyoming doesn’t have the budget for equipment that’s not bulky or out-of-date. These were encrypted, and each had an earpiece receiver. The wire you taped to the inside of your collar and then down the inside of your left arm. The transceiver wrapped around your wrist like a watch. The radio itself you clipped to your belt.

I didn’t want to carry any weapons—I didn’t relish the idea of getting caught and possibly charged with armed trespass. But Tom and Mary insisted.

“Getting charged is the last thing you’ll have to worry about if we get caught, QuickDraw,” Tom said, sneering at what he perceived as my wimpiness.

At sunset Tom and I left the camp in the Pig and drove north. I turned off the headlights and left them off once we were on the other side of the river.

We pulled off the road at what I judged to be about five miles from Hidalgo’s ranch. The road was the one that led to the high trailhead, not his private and likely guarded driveway. Murmuring an apology to the landscape, I drove over sage and cactus until we were about a hundred feet off the road and concealed between some boulders and a cottonwood.

Tom took out a tin of charcoal paint and we both smeared some onto our faces. I felt silly, like I was playing soldier, but did it anyway. Tom faced me after he pulled a watch cap over his red hair and asked me to “touch him up.” I managed not to laugh. It was weird to be caressing his face; weirder still when he caressed mine. I thought about the way he’d been treating my brother and me and would have liked to poke him in the eye.

I knelt on the ground next to the Pig and studied a topo map with a penlight. I memorized the hills and valleys, the ravines and ridges, that would take us down to Hidalgo’s property. I memorized the compass headings, too, just in case. For some reason I’ve never had any trouble navigating outdoors. Even at night, even on unfamiliar ground. But in the city I might as well be blind and dumb. It never failed to make Rebecca giggle when I got lost between her loft and the highway less than a mile away—something I’d done a thousand times but still couldn’t get right.

I tried to move like my brother once we got going. I imagined myself as a phantom, gliding a foot above the ground, or as a coyote, tiptoeing over the earth. I expected the hike to be deadly serious, as what we were doing was a little risky, but it turned out to be almost comical.

Tom kept up with me, although he made a lot more noise. It was a little disappointing—I’d hoped to bury him. I’d imagined the pleasure of hearing him gasping behind me, panting to keep up, and finally having to beg for a break. But he did well, stamina-wise, although in another way he was a mess. He’d insisted on wearing his ridiculous cowboy boots—he said he was worried about snakes. Two times early on he caught his pointed toes or riding heels on something and went down face-first. Each time I was there to pick him up, glad the night was dark enough to hide my smile.

It reminded me of a good time with Roberto. Long ago, when we were very young, we’d gone camping in Yellowstone with Dad and a bunch of other kids from the Warren Air Force Base. Each night we played a game called Bear with a Flashlight, which was a little like tag in the dark.

During the day Roberto and I found a place where a small sapling had fallen and lay across a trail. We raised its tip up a foot and a half by placing some rocks under it and wedged it between the trunks of two other trees. Then we went back to the campfire for dinner before the game was to begin. Probably ten times that night we led the Bear—one of the fathers—to the trap, running like hell, leaping at the last minute and running on, then trying not to suffocate with laughter when we heard the crash behind us.

Wham!
Tom went down again, and this time a chuckle escaped my mouth. I tried to turn it into a cough. He ripped his arm from my grasp when I tried to lift him up.

After that he wore his night-vision goggles. I’d refused the pair he’d offered me. In Wyoming, in open country, the stars are all you need. At least if you’re smart enough to wear something other than cowboy boots on your feet.

Until we got within a mile of the house, the only things I was really concerned about were rattlesnakes. It was about the time they would be most actively hunting mice. But all we came across were a couple of skinny deer that went pounding away from us into the brush. I wasn’t particularly worried about Hidalgo’s men—from what we could tell, they weren’t vigilant enough to post guards out in the country around the house. But I was a little worried that Tom, seething as he slipped around on his slick soles right behind me, would put a bullet in my back.

I checked my topo one more time when I judged we were getting close. I was lightly sweating and feeling loose and good. As we descended into one last valley before rising up onto the final one that dropped away to Hidalgo’s, I began to move slower, taking greater care in placing my feet.

Tom thought I was moving too slow. He tailgated me just like he had when he’d first followed the Pig into Wyoming from Salt Lake. Not using the radio yet, he hissed for me to pick it up. But I wouldn’t hurry. I was the one who was going to have to slither down the slope above Hidalgo’s house. And there I would be within sight of the guard posted by the front door and within easy rifle range as well.

On the crest of the hill was a well-worn path. We paused on it to study the house below.

I decided I was glad that Tom had brought the night-vision goggles. Using them, he was able to clearly see the guard on duty at the front of the house. To me he was just a gray shape, features discernible only when he lit the occasional cigarette. Tom, though, could see everything he was doing and even which direction he was facing. He whispered this information into the radio when I began descending the slope.

Unfortunately, Tom was also able to see who had drawn the predawn posting. I’d assumed it would be one of the young shaved-head bangers, who seemed to get all the scut work around Hidalgo’s place. I wouldn’t have worried too much even if it were Bruto or Zafado, or anyone at all who might have had the brains to investigate a snapping twig before pulling a trigger. But it wasn’t anyone I suspected had even the tiniest bit of brains. It was Shorty, the most unhinged of all Hidalgo’s men. He was the kind of drooling idiot who would happily shoot at a random noise in the night. He was too dumb to consider that he might wake up one of his
jefes
. Tom informed me that he had what appeared to be an AK-47 on a strap over his shoulder.

I went down the slope on my hands and knees. Heavy leather rappelling gloves protected my palms as I gingerly groped my way through a prickly pear cactus that was too spread out for me to go around. My knees, though, felt each short, red-hot spine that pierced through the canvas fatigue pants. They ground into my skin each time I placed my weight. I longed to go for the tweezers in the hip pack that was tight against my belly. But it would have to wait.

Initially it was easy. Shorty was lolling on his feet, probably half stoned and exhausted from having spent most of the previous day and night with the imported girls. He would face one direction while he smoked a cigarette. When he’d burned it down to his fingers, he’d throw it on the ground and walk in a small, staggering circle for a couple of minutes. Then he would stop, face a new direction, and light a fresh smoke. Tom buzzed in my ear like a mosquito, telling me to
“Go”
or to
“Stop.”

Midway down the slope was the protruding shelf of rock that I’d seen Roberto working out on. I wanted to go around it, to get underneath the overhang and find a likely spot to hide my message, but that would take too long. Tom’s stumbling around in the sage had taken up too much time. The first rays of the sun would be curving over the earth in less than a half hour.

So I waited behind a bush for a
“Go”
from Tom. Then I crawled a few feet farther and lay chest-down on top of the rock. I took off the gloves and reached over the edge. At first I couldn’t find any holes or cracks. But I knew they were there—I’d seen Roberto swinging along on them.

I rolled to the side and reached down again. Nothing. I rolled a third and a fourth time along the shelf. Still nothing. Maybe I was rolling the wrong way. Maybe I was all mixed up. Maybe I was on the wrong rock. Maybe I would have to drop down after all to figure it out. The sky was turning to steel gray beyond the mountains.

Then, on the fifth roll-and-reach, I found it. My fingertips brushed an edge that disappeared. I felt it with both hands. It was a crack, a very narrow one that would only allow my fingertips. I got the tiny note from my pocket and leaned out again.

“Stop!”

Tom’s warning was an electric slap to my ear. I looked up in time to see the glowing cigarette bursting in a tiny orange explosion from where Shorty had flicked it away from him. He was moving, beginning to turn in another staggering circle.

I made the decision to go for it. In another few minutes it would be too light. With the folded paper pinched between my index and middle fingers, I stabbed it deep into the crevice. My cheek was on the cold stone as I reached and strained, my eyes fixed on Shorty’s silhouette. He stopped walking. He was staring right at me.

For a long, long, moment it was like our eyes were fixed on each other’s, staring in alarm and surprise and recognition. His hands began to rise.

But the automatic rifle wasn’t in them. I saw his hands going to rub his eyes just as Tom hissed
“Go!”
far too loudly in my ear.

I lunged back into the moon-shade of a bush. The leaves rattled like cellophane as I scurried among them. When I looked again, Shorty was still peering at me.

“Stay. Stay. Stay. Motherfucking stay,”
Tom was saying.

It was hard to believe that Shorty couldn’t hear him.

The
sicario
took out a flashlight. It wasn’t one of the big, long, black Maglites like cops carry, but a cheap aluminum one. I could see the moon reflecting on its shiny length. He switched it on and shone it right at me. The distance diffused the weak light, but it didn’t diffuse it enough.

Shorty looked for a long time. He stared and stared and stared, swinging the light back and forth over the bush I was crouching in. I held my breath, but I was starting to shake. He was going to call someone. He was going to shoot. Even if he didn’t hit me—even if I managed to sprint over the ridge crest and into the valley beyond—they’d know someone had been there. They’d look for signs and find the note. Then they’d kill my brother.

But then Shorty began to turn. He clicked the light off. I took my first breath in minutes. Then he whirled back, snapping the light back on. But I knew now that he couldn’t see me. Still, I didn’t move. Except to lift my middle finger in an invisible salute.

I waited five minutes to calm down before I began crawling back up the slope. Shorty had lost interest in anything but smoking and walking in circles to stay awake. It wouldn’t take much of a noise, though, to get him whipping around and shining his light again. So I moved very, very slowly, the gloves still off, testing the ground above and ahead for twigs, dried leaves, or anything at all that could make a sound.

I moved slowly despite the way the yet-unseen sun was brightening the east. I knew that even if it got light enough for me to be viewed with the naked eye, Tom’s radioed instructions about which direction Shorty was facing would keep me safe.

I was only halfway up the slope when I heard a noise behind and below me. It was a lock turning. A door opening. Then there were voices.

Tom buzzed in my ear,
“Wait.”

Turning my head with the speed of an iguana, I looked behind me.

The front door to the house was open, spilling soft light out onto the flagstone driveway. Two men were coming out, walking toward Shorty. One was Hidalgo, dressed in a sweatsuit with reflective stripes running down the arms and the legs. The other was one of the young bangers. Carrying an automatic rifle like Shorty’s.

The kid trailing behind, Hidalgo walked rapidly up to Shorty. I couldn’t hear their distinct words, but it sounded like small talk. The kid was rubbing his eyes irritably, obviously unhappy to be awake at this hour.

I wondered what the hell Hidalgo was doing up at five-thirty in the morning. On the tapes, he’d never appeared outside before at least ten o’clock. But the tracksuit, and the way he began waving his arms in circles then trying to touch his toes, explained it. Maybe Roberto and his overwhelming physicality had sparked an envy in the narco king. Maybe one of the girls had teased him about his gut. It was a noble, and probably doomed, objective, but now—when I was still fifteen feet from the top of the slope—was definitely not a good time.

I crawled a little higher when Hidalgo began jogging down the driveway. Shorty was watching him, and probably chuckling, because El Doctor only made it about a hundred feet before he slowed to a walk. The kid had slung the short, blunt assault rifle over his back and was straining to keep up.