Crossing the Line (7 page)

For a minute I could picture her as a young girl: very smart, very disciplined, very formal outside of the home to cover up for what I suspected was a deep-seated shyness. An only child, I was willing to bet. Her parents must have been puzzled by her career choice. I wasn’t. What better way to make up for social awkwardness than to carry a badge and a gun?

“There’s more coffee in the lodge. I made a full pot.”

“That was decent of you.”

“Come on, Anton. We’re here to do something important. I know you local guys don’t like the FBI coming into your territory and telling you what to do, but—”

“No. That’s not it. What I don’t like is the way you’re using my brother. Sending him in there like . . . What’s the expression? Like a sacrificial sheep? A sheep to the slaughter?”

“I think it’s a lamb.” She smiled over her cup. “And you can hardly describe Roberto as a lamb.”

You’re wrong,
I thought.

Mungo, who had been hiding behind a bush where she was playing her favorite game of You-can’t-see-me-because-I’m-a-wolf, came out hesitantly and walked toward Mary and me. Her lips were lifted in her nervous grin—she probably sensed my anger and thought I was mad at her. When she hid like that I was supposed to call her name while looking around wildly, confused as to how she’d managed to disappear so completely.

Mary backed away uneasily. Mungo sidestepped around her, giving her plenty of room, and bumped her head against my thigh.

“You aren’t afraid of dogs, are you?” I asked.

“No. Well, yes, I am a little. She’s a lot bigger than what I’m used to. I used to have one but he only weighed five pounds.”

“Are you sure it was a dog?”

This earned me a smile not unlike Mungo’s. I felt myself starting to become a little bit likable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be likable yet. I swung my arms in circles then arched my back to touch my toes. I spoke to my ankles.

“What’s on the agenda for Day One, Agent Chang?”

Like last night, Mary had a mental checklist prepared.

“We’re going to make sure we know everything about Jesús Hidalgo that Roberto can tell us. What he thinks, what his habits are, who he trusts and why. Then we’re going to work up a way for Roberto to explain how come he’ll be knocking on El Doctor’s door after all these years. We already have some ideas about that. Later, we need you to go into town and set up a drop at one of the places where Hidalgo’s men like to go. Someplace inconspicuous where Roberto can leave us a message. We also need to set up some kind of signal, some way Roberto can let us know if he’s in trouble so that we can get him out if we need to. His safety, of course, is our first priority.”

Right.

I stood up and let her read the disbelief on my face. She had the grace to flush but also the intelligence not to try to either convince me otherwise or defend herself.

“Where’s your partner?” I finally asked.

“He’s up on the ridge. It’s where he spent most of the night, I expect.”

“The guy’s a walking hard-on.”

She smiled at the image. I almost smiled myself. It really fit him pretty well.

“He’s not that bad, Anton. I’ve worked with him for two years now, and trust me, he’s a thorough professional. He’s just taken what happened to our colleague in Mexicali very hard. We both have. But Tom especially.”

“Why him especially?”

She hesitated for a moment. The moment became so long that I thought she might have decided not to tell me something personal about her partner. I whistled for Mungo and started to walk back down the hill toward the lodge when her voice stopped me.

“They were close. Tom and the young agent who was killed. And a few months before what happened in Mexicali, Tom’s half sister died of an overdose. She was a heroin addict, and they were estranged. But still, it was very rough on him. He’d been running his own side investigation, you see. Seeing where she got her stuff. Somehow he’d managed to trace it—through its chemical composition—all the way back to a truckload of Hidalgo’s product that had been confiscated by the DEA. Then it was given to an undercover agent in Baltimore, who was working a gang thing there. This undercover agent sold it to some of the people he was trying to get to know and build a case against, and they eventually sold five grams to Tom’s sister. Anyway, it’s likely it all started with Hidalgo, even if, from a legal point of view, the evidence is tenuous at best. But sometimes that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

What she said at the end made me consider her again for a moment. I wondered if there might be more to her than what I’d seen over the last twenty-four hours. It was possible that she wasn’t such a rigid professional after all.

After showering, I locked Mungo in the cabin with my still-sleeping brother. I studied the sky dutifully before heading up for the ridge. There were no planes. Not even any contrails from high-flying cross-country passenger jets. The sky was completely cloudless and Wyoming blue.

The slope leading up to the ridge was about three hundred feet high and angled back at about forty-five degrees. It was interspersed with bands of sandstone similar to the ones I’d been climbing on the other side. There was no path leading up, but I didn’t have any trouble picking out the fresh prints in the dirt. Tom’s pointy-toed boots with their fancy riding heels made out a series of angry exclamation points in the sandy soil. Beside the prints there were two cables snaking upward. He’d kicked dust over them, and sometimes thrown twigs or dead branches, to make them hard to spot from the air.

The exclamation points and the cables angled back and forth as they rose, avoiding the rock bands, bushes, and clumps of cacti. They occasionally slid downhill because of the slick soles on the boots.

I was two-thirds of the way up the slope before I spotted the surveillance point.

As I did, Tom, who had been watching me from above, lifted an arm and called sullenly, “Here.”

He’d set up the telescopic camera and the long-range directional microphone in a deep notch in the ridge. It was a good spot, shaded by junipers, and facing northeast. Looking in that direction I could see the red river below us and the pine-covered foothills to the Wind River Range rising up on the other side. The floor of the notch was relatively flat. A camouflaged pup tent had been erected and then decorated with more branches and a dusting of red sand.

Barely peeking out from the left edge of the notch, the camera and microphone pointed to the north. They were set on tripods and looked state-of-the-art. Both had cords running from them. The camera was apparently digital and sending images down to the computer screens in the lodge. The microphone looked like a Flash Gordon ray gun.

“Nice setup,” I said.

Tom, who had gone back to peering through the camera, grunted, “Yeah.”

“You want some coffee?”

When he turned I handed him the thermos of Mary’s coffee I’d brought with me. I was feeling conflicted about Tom. I sympathized with him about his friend who’d been killed in Mexicali. And about his sister—
Christ, it was the government, his own agency, that sold her the drugs that killed her.
But I also still didn’t like his attitude or the way he was about to take a gamble with my brother’s life.

He unscrewed the thermos lid and sniffed it.

“I didn’t poison it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

He looked back at me, considering. His eyes were tired but his hair was perfect. I guessed he’d been up all night playing with his toys. He probably still wasn’t finished, as the computer screens had been dark when I was down there. After a couple of seconds he nodded thanks and filled the lid.

“Want to take a look?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He moved out of the way. I slid into his position and looked around the corner of rock over the barrel of the camera’s lens. Hidalgo’s mansion was visible. It wasn’t what I’d expected, even after seeing the satellite photos the previous night. It didn’t look like the hideout of a billionaire.

The old ranch house was nestled in a shallow valley that descended down to the bank of the river. It was big, but not enormous. Maybe, when new, it had been impressive. But not anymore. Only one story high, its white paint was peeling from being sandblasted repeatedly by the gusts coming down out of the mountains. Some tiles were missing from the roof. The house formed a U around the swimming pool and the cracked flagstone deck. Both the deck and the pool were littered with tumbleweeds. Due to yesterday’s high winds, there were more deck chairs in the pool than on the deck. The steep lawn that ran down fifty feet to the river’s bank was brown and dry.

The only sign of life near the house was a man who was dragging the weeds and chairs out of the pool. He didn’t look like your usual pool man, if such a thing exists in Wyoming. Gold flashed from his neck, wrists, and fingers, and his head was cleanly shaved. In addition to all the gold, he wore the bottom half of a fancy tracksuit, dark blue with a pair of white vertical stripes. The pants hung low on his hips while his underwear was pulled high. On top he showed off his tattoos and skinny muscles by wearing one of those tight, sleeveless undershirts known as a wife-beater. He didn’t look like he was enjoying his job as he flung a wet tumbleweed onto the lawn then spat after it. The weed rolled down into the brown water.

Tom was looking over my shoulder.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Dunno. He’s a new one. Probably just some banger they picked up. Hidalgo likes to use them for his shit work—intimidation, not killing or anything serious. He usually keeps a pack of them around. Like pets. Most of them are American citizens. One of his lieutenants recruits them out of the barrios in L.A. and San Diego.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Running around Mexicali and the border? Hundreds. Here, there’s maybe ten. Most of them staying at those construction trailers by the mine entrance.”

I adjusted the camera. About a half-mile back behind the house, up in the hills a little way, there were a pair of long white trailers. A dirt road led from them to the house, intersected halfway there by another, wider road that led off parallel to the river. Yet another dirt track led from the trailers, from this viewpoint, straight into a hill. That must be the mine entrance. There was no one around the trailers, but there were a couple of barbecue grills and a lot of empty beer cans.

“Hidalgo’s lieutenants and his gunmen are probably staying with him in the house. Last night I saw a couple of them head into town with some of the bangers. The
jefes
probably go into town with them to keep those little maniacs in line.”

“It’s like a small army.”

Tom snorted. “This is nothing. You should see what he’s got around him in Baja. That’s an army. Here, he feels safe. No one’s going to come after him here. At least not the people he’s worried about.”

I saw something on one of the deck chairs that wasn’t in the pool. Focusing in, I saw that it was a short, ugly gun. Tom noticed me zeroing in on it.

“It’s an AK-47. Automatic rifle. Bet you that kid has no idea how to use it. But then it doesn’t exactly take a lot of know-how or practice.”

I didn’t like the look of the kid. He looked a lot like the ones I’d killed in Cheyenne. He had similar tattoos on his arms and neck. I liked the gun even less. Despite having carried one for eight years—albeit only a handgun—since I was twenty-four, I’d never been very comfortable with them. I was required to carry my .40 Heckler & Koch, but for almost sixteen nervous months after Cheyenne, I didn’t carry bullets.

The kid sat down on a chair next to the one with the gun on it. He dug way down into a pocket of his pants and came out with a short metal pipe. I watched while he picked a small yellowish crystal out of some aluminum foil and stuffed it into the pipe. He lit the pipe and sucked down the smoke. Although it was just my imagination, I could smell the acrid chemical odor of the methamphetamine. I could almost see it pumping out his veins, shrinking his pupils, and making him feel small and mean.

“Smoke up, son,” Tom said. “Soon the big boys at Florence will be smoking you.”

Florence was the site of the federal government’s new maximum-security prison in Colorado. With luck, that was where he and his bosses would be in a few weeks.

I tried to make myself feel a little of Tom’s excitement. This was
the hunt,
after all. The one I’d been on for eight years, and that—at first, at least—I’d found so much fun. Like climbing, a little risk in an investigation—not too much, just a little—made the adrenal juices flow. But God, sending Roberto in there, that was more risk than I would ever accept on a climb or an investigation. It wasn’t adrenaline that was flowing in my veins, but fear.

“We’re coming after you, and this time you’re going down,” Tom said, talking to himself, or maybe Hidalgo, who was somewhere in the house. “No more busting the little guys and letting the big fellows walk. This time the roof’s going to come down. I’m going to cut off your fucking head.”

“You know the story,” I said after he’d apparently ended his monologue. “Another will grow in its place.”

Tom twisted around so that he was looking at me from over his shoulder. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy, but I could see the passion burning in them.

“But at least I’ll get to mount it on my wall, Burns.”

And I finally managed to feel a little of the old excitement. For a while I even managed to feel a kinship with Tom and put out of my head the thought that we’d be sending Roberto in there.

FIVE

F
rom the little I’d heard of Potash, and from what I’d glimpsed on our dark drive through it the night before, I was able to make an educated guess about the town’s character. It was a sick, dying place, financed by the tight-fisted trickle of dollars from failed mines and hardscrabble sheep ranches, and populated by bitter people hanging on because they had nowhere better to go. Or nowhere else that would have them. Drinking would be the primary entertainment.

So I dressed accordingly.

From a crate of old clothes I kept in the back of the truck for just this purpose, I dug out a cheap Western shirt, a pair of tight black jeans, a wide leather belt whose silver buckle was stamped with a golden bull, and a pair of scuffed leather boots. I also found a sweat-stained cowboy hat that I was able to punch back into shape. A gold crucifix on a chain around my neck was the final touch. In my reflection on the Pig’s side window, I looked just like a Mexican hand going to town on a Friday night. Or a mule ready to celebrate a successful delivery.

Mary, who had been talking, went quiet when I strutted into the main cabin. Roberto and Tom looked up from the file-covered table where they were sitting. All three of them stared at me like I was a stranger.

Roberto broke the silence by letting out a low whistle then calling,
“Muy guapo!”

Even Tom, who had dealt in the clandestine world for far longer than I had, was startled into nodding his head approvingly.

“Not bad, QuickDraw. Not bad at all. You look like you’re here to cut the grass.” Then, in broken Spanish, he asked, “You can talk Mexican as good as Argentine?”

I answered with a border accent, making it soft and a little slurred like Roberto’s.

“Better than you,
chabacano
.”

The word I called him meant vulgar and low-class. Not that he’d know. But the insult, as well as my mimicking, made my brother grin.

The disguise probably wasn’t all that necessary for just cruising through town and picking out a drop. But my face had been in the local papers and on the TV news too often in recent years.

The shoot-out in Cheyenne had been a major media event. In a state the size of Wyoming, taking out three citizens in a single night was taking a respectful-sized bite out of the population. And then there’d been that columnist screaming about planted weapons, an ambush, and generally fanning the flames with imaginative epithets like QuickDraw. The whole thing had heated up again a year later when the civil suit was settled, and then once more during the criminal trial of the state’s governor-elect, when his attorney used the Cheyenne incident to try to impeach my credibility. The picture they’d shown on the TV screen—me looking outraged but also furtive as I dodged out of the courthouse—might have been fuzzy to the citizens of Potash over the rims of their beer cans and whiskey glasses, but with my brother’s life at risk I didn’t want to take any chances.

Mary Chang circled all the way around me. Then she examined me head-on, with a slight smile of her own.

“I guess you do know what you’re doing.”

“I’ve been doing this for eight years. I can be whatever you want me to be.”

I wasn’t bragging. All my life it had been easy for me to fit in with whatever clique or group I wanted to. Whatever natural ability I started with was enhanced by growing up on military bases, with a new school each year, and the desperate need to fit in. My mixed heritage—Indio, Spanish, and Anglo—didn’t hurt. I could pass as either a light-skinned Latino or a dark-skinned gringo whenever it suited me. With a Jewish fiancée, my horizons might expand even further.

It wasn’t all pretense, either. I’d become comfortable in these clothes—except for the boots, which hurt like hell—just as I was comfortable wearing a navy suit while testifying in court, or a tweaker’s torn black T-shirt and Doc Martens, or my sandals, hemp shorts, and tie-dyes when hanging out with post-hippies. Working as a DCI agent in Wyoming for so long, I had been thoroughly immersed in the drug cultures of two races.

“Where are you thinking about placing the drop?” she asked.

“In one of the bars. There’s not much else in town. I’ll find out which one of Hidalgo’s
sicarios
frequent and pick a spot or two. I assume whatever Roberto brings out is going to be small.”

“Tom’s idea is for him to communicate with us by placing notes on the inside of cigarette packs then casually discarding them.”

It wasn’t original, but I knew it would be effective. A message could be written on the inside of the foil that lined the pack and then replaced.

“Uh-uh. I roll my own,” Roberto said.

We all looked at him because of the firmness of his voice. It seemed like such a very small thing to need to be firm about. But I guessed he needed something to keep for himself. Smoking that foul Indian tobacco was an act of rebellion for him, something he’d only started when imprisoned in Colorado where it wasn’t allowed. I thought it was probably symbolic.

It had been a long day for him. For all of us. It had been spent indoors, pulling out everything he knew about Hidalgo from his past, as well as cramming into him everything he’d need to know about El Doctor for his future. Roberto was feeling the tug of the leash around his neck. He fingered it now, touching the turquoise stone.

Tom glared at him, saying, “You’re a Marlboro Man now.”

“The fuck I am.”

“Okay, okay. We’ll work something out,” Mary said, wisely giving in on this.

A brief argument followed because Roberto refused to smoke those “toxic rods.” He seemed to think his pure tobacco was healthy. At least it was healthier than the needle and his preferred blend of cocaine and heroin. Mary finally agreed to get some bidis, all-natural Indian cigarettes. It was a better idea, really. Roberto could deposit them in a seldom-emptied trash bin and the exotic packaging would be easy to pick out later.

Mary gave me a long look before I left.

“Be careful, Anton,” she said. “That town looked pretty tough, like something out of an Old West movie. Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself. And don’t go anywhere near Hidalgo or his men. Remember: Don’t take any chances.”

“Yeah, that’s my job,” my brother said.

Then he smiled. “Have a cold one for me,
che
.”

I was happy to be going, but Mungo wasn’t happy at being left behind. She leapt in the truck while I was removing the license plates and then I had to drag her out by the collar. After that she loped after the Pig when I drove up the dirt track toward the gate. She seemed a little frantic in her desire to accompany me, but I was too excited at getting out to think much about it. I didn’t yet know her well enough to understand that she could smell trouble. I let her in the truck, then drove her back to the camp.

She stood on my cot at the cabin’s window after I locked her in. I could feel her yellow eyes on me until I was out of the hollow and through the barbed-wire gate.

I’d been tempted to take her, but I figured that she might draw too much attention. People in this part of the country have a thing about wolves. They think they slaughter cattle for sport and will run off with small children if given half a chance. The federal reintroduction of wolves had some ranchers calling for armed secession. And last month Mungo hadn’t exactly done her part for the species’ PR by biting an arsonist who died moments later falling off a cliff. Even though her role in the accident had never become public, the surprising autopsy results sparked a belief among many that the man had leapt off the cliff to escape an onslaught of wild wolves.

So I drove alone in the rattling Pig on the dirt roads west to Potash. In the rearview mirror the sun was red-faced and looking scared as it floated down onto the sharp spires of the Winds.

I came out of the hills and into town just as it was getting dark. I saw no people or moving cars until I hit the first bars.

There were two of them anchoring the north end of the main street. The one on my left was called Wild Willy’s. The one on the right didn’t appear to have a name, and, unlike Willy’s, it didn’t appear to have much business. Both were squat one-story brick structures illuminated by only the neon beer signs in the windows.

Big dusty pickups and a couple of American-brand SUVs were parked all around Wild Willy’s. A group of five Anglo men stood outside the door, wearing boots and Carhartt work clothes and baseball caps. They might have been talking, but as I drove slowly past they stopped and stared my way. I rode on, feeling suspicion and maybe a little menace in their gazes.

They once might have worried me, but I’d been in Wyoming long enough to know that the redneck attitude was mostly a pose. They might look xenophobic, but, on an individual level, people in Wyoming are pretty accepting. In Riverton, they’d put placards in their windows saying “Not Welcome Here” when the World Church of the Creator moved to town to espouse white-supremacist views. In Casper, they’d surrounded the church during Matthew Shepard’s funeral and stared down the gay-haters from Kansas who came to celebrate the young man’s murder.

The main drag was again empty of both people and cars. Its entire two-block length was lit by only a couple of scattered streetlights. The shops with their empty or boarded windows lined the street. Only a couple of pawnshops with heavily barred windows seemed to have much merchandise to offer—mostly guns and electronics. The largest building in town was an old theater, but its marquee was empty, and I noticed a piece of plywood nailed over the door.

A one-story sandstone courthouse faced the street. It had some graffiti prominently scrawled across the front to one side of the double doors. On the far side of the courthouse there was a separate entrance and a small lamp lighting a sign that said “Town Marshal.” A patrol car was parked by the door. I knew that the town currently employed only one part-time peace officer. He had to single-handedly deal with the bar brawls and drunk drivers until the state highway patrol could arrive from Pinedale or Lander—both almost a hundred miles away—to back him up. From the vibe I was getting from this town, if I were him I’d just lock myself in there.

Under normal circumstances, I would have checked in with the marshal to get the lay of the land as well as to alert him that an operation was being conducted in his jurisdiction. But these weren’t normal circumstances, not with the Feds involved and not with Mary Chang’s mantra of
Take no chances
. I didn’t know the man anyway—for all I knew he could be on a first-name basis with Señor Hidalgo.

There were two more bars at the other end of town, closer to the highway.

One was the place where the previous night we’d seen the vaqueros pissing on the hood of the marshal’s patrol car. It was a tiny cubelike structure of dented brown stucco with Corona and Tecate signs flashing in the only window. At this early hour its dirt parking lot was empty but for crushed cans, cigarette butts, and a sleeping dog. Across the street, though, things were a little more active.

There a neon sign read “Señor Garcia’s.” The building was big and well-lit and painted white, with broad windows facing the street and allowing me to see into a place that was a restaurant as well as a bar. Despite the barred windows, it looked a lot friendlier than the Anglo places on the other side of town. There were some battered straw hats like mine inside and a lot of dark-skinned faces. Outside the front door were some planters that held bright flowers.

Among the trucks and cars in the lot was a slouching Oldsmobile sedan with Baja California plates. On its back window was a little sticker that caught my attention. It was a yellow smiley face, but instead of a smile there was the outline of a tongue hanging down beneath the two dots for eyes. Mary and Tom had mentioned that this was a sort of logo for the Mexicali Mafia—lots of the young bangers working for the cartel had it tattooed on their arms or chests.

I guessed that this was where Hidalgo’s men would start an evening on the town. Across the street was probably where they would finish it. They wouldn’t want to mess with the Anglo place on the other side of town, not if they were halfway smart. They would be looking for fun, not trouble. I hoped I was right, because I was going to go in there despite Mary’s injunction of staying away from them. I wanted to get just a little whiff of what Roberto was getting himself into.

I drove back down the street a block and left the Pig there. I put my gun butt-out under the driver’s seat, tapped it for luck—it had once brought me more than my fair share of good as well as bad—and set the alarm.

There were a lot of people in the restaurant. Couples and families for the most part, with a few kids darting around. A brown tile floor magnified the sound of voices talking in Spanish. It would have seemed welcoming if it weren’t for the way everyone paused and looked at me. Even the kids slunk closer to their parents. When the talking resumed after a minute it was slightly more subdued.

I stood shifting in my too-tight boots until a girl came out of the kitchen in the back. She looked me over without smiling and motioned me toward the rear of the restaurant. I saw that there was a small bar there—six or more stools before a rail and a couple of high tables. Two men were sitting at the rail. Both looked like hard cases, and they were staring back at me. I was sure it was their car with the Baja plates and the little yellow sticker.

“I have come to eat, not drink,” I told the girl in Spanish.

“You do not want to sit with your
compañeros
?”

“I am a stranger here. I know no one.”

She shrugged and led me to a small table against one wall. I didn’t look toward the bar area again but I could feel the two men’s eyes on me. A lot of other eyes, too. She set the menu before a chair with its back to most of the restaurant and the bar. I sat in the opposite chair and pulled the menu across to me. She walked away without a word.

I studied the menu for a long time, trying to sit as still as possible and not look around. Slowly the families at the tables nearby began to relax as they grew used to me. But I still sensed a wariness among them. I eavesdropped as they talked about upcoming weddings, Miguel’s new truck, a horse that something was wrong with but no one knew what, and whether the snow this year would be heavy. The whole time I could feel the gaze of the two men by the bar—the rest of the restaurant seemed aware of it as well. When I glanced that way, looking around for the girl to take my order, they both had their backs to the rail and were watching me.