Crossing the Line (26 page)

“They’ve got Hidalgo,” I said to Mary through the open window.

For some reason I could speak to her, but not Tom. She, at least, had the grace to look guilty. I knew that she had liked Roberto. But not enough, apparently, to want to keep him from risking his life for her ambition and her version of justice.

“I know,” she said softly. “They’re going to turn them all over to us as soon as some U.S. Marshals arrive from Casper to help with the transportation.”

Beside me, Tom punched a fist into his palm. The gesture, the noise it made, was supposed to be the righteous smack of justice. To me it was stupid and hollow. So were his words.

“I’m finally going to get to put that bastard’s head on my wall.”

“At least his mug shot,” Mary corrected her partner, not bothering to try and match his enthusiasm. Then to me she said, “You can sit in when we question him, Anton.”

“No. My brother’s still in there.” I pointed at the mine’s dark entrance.

Mary looked down at my feet.

“We’ve heard that they’ve rounded up six people in the mine. All alive. Hidalgo’s chemists, we think. And—oh, Anton, I hate to tell you this—there are three bodies.”

“Roberto isn’t one of them.”

She looked up, confused.

“Mary, I know about the three bodies. Roberto isn’t one of them.”

“Then they’re still looking?”

I shook my head and felt the ax swing.

“No. They’re pulling out. Until they can figure out a way to search it safely. They think more of Hidalgo’s punks might be down there.”

“And you think Roberto’s still down there?”

“Yeah. I need to find him.”

“Will they let you go in? To look for him?”

“They can do what they want. I’m going back down.”

“How?”

“Get out of my truck, Mary.”

My meaning was clear to both of them.

“Oh, now that’s real smart,” Tom said. “You’re going to disobey these guys who just saved your ass, and maybe get shot again in the process? At least a few of Jesús’s boys are still unaccounted for, you know. They’re probably in there.”

“I’m not getting out, Anton,” Mary said, ignoring Tom. “You get in. You’re in no shape to drive.”

For some reason her words hit me like a punch to the throat. It began to constrict. I felt myself choking up. And I felt moisture welling in my nose and behind my eyes.

“No,” Tom said when I began to walk around to the passenger side. He pointed at Mungo. “You get in the back, Burns. I’m not riding back there with that thing.”

I stopped and glared at him.

“You’ve got your man. Now why don’t you get the fuck out of here?”

Tom brushed past me, saying, “My man’s still in that hole. If you’re going to look for him, then I’m going to help.”

He opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat.

I put my hands on the hot hood for balance. Then my forehead. I’d managed to hold it all in for so long. First by being numb, then enraged. But now, because of Tom Cochran of all frigging people, I started to sob.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
couldn’t hear most of what was shouted at us when Mary crept through all the cars and people and drove us toward the mine. That was all right—it was probably nothing I wanted to hear anyway.

One man—the commander—stepped in front of the Pig with his hand upraised. He jumped back at the last minute when Mary didn’t slow. Through the window, I saw him looking almost comically bewildered that someone would ignore his order to stop. People didn’t do that to a guy like him. In a minute he’d remember to get mad.

Sorry,
I would tell him later.
But, you see, my brother’s still in there.

Mary flipped on the headlights as we ramped down into the big tunnel. It was the first time I’d seen it lit up like this. The walls were as coarse as I remembered, but for some reason it all looked very different. It was less menacing, safer. But then as the daylight receded behind us, it started to feel even more confining. Mary shifted gears and accelerated.

Ten minutes later we saw lights ahead. Another vehicle was coming toward us from the depths. It was the borrowed bank truck. Its high beams were flashing on and off as it rolled closer. Swinging to the left, onto what was our side of the road, then wide to the right again, it rolled to a stop a little bit sideways so that the truck was effectively blocking our path. The driver got out and waved his arms at us. The commander must have radioed from the tunnel mouth. The tunnel was straight enough that the call had gotten through.

“What do I do?” Mary asked, slowing.

“Pull around him to the right.”

“I can’t. There’s all the metal there.”

She meant the rusting frame of the conveyor belt.

“Just drive over it,” I told her.

The Pig’s big bumper hit metal and screeched, lifting a long portion of the conveyor’s frame up and turning it over. The truck bounced and crunched on the section as we stomped over it. Then we passed the waving SWAT driver and were back on the packed dirt. As Mary accelerated again, he showed us his middle finger. It was too tight for the armored truck to turn around, so he couldn’t follow.

It took another ten minutes of driving more than forty miles per hour down into the earth before we reached the first chamber.

It felt like we were in outer space, with the Pig our lunar lander. Mary and Tom and Mungo and I all craned our necks to see around the room. This place had been lit, distantly, by the generator in the far chamber the two times I’d been here. Now the only light came from the Pig’s twin beams.

The atmosphere outside the truck felt thick and oppressive. The two giant mechanical dinosaurs were still frozen in rearing, violent poses. The big saw-blades on the end of the crane were still in the process of taking a bite out of the ceiling.

Beneath it, in the center of the room, the headlights framed a pickup truck. Its windshield was smashed, its hood dented. The roof was partially caved in, too. The light sparkled on the thousands of diamonds that lay on the hood. A lot of them were stained red. And somewhere in the black space over our heads was the ventilation shaft Roberto had fallen from.

“Pull up to the pickup,” I said.

Mary rolled forward through the chamber and stopped twenty feet from the smashed truck. I opened the door and got out. I reached into the back to take a headlamp from a crate of climbing gear. When I turned it on, its light was swallowed by the darkness without even touching any of the walls.

Tom and Mary got out, too, neither of them saying a word. They each had long, black Maglites, which, when they swept them through the darkness, managed to touch the far walls. No one said anything. No one moved more than a step from the Pig. The hazy glow of the dome light held us all like a tether to a spaceship.

Then Mungo began to whine. I’d been standing in front of the open door, blocking her in. Now I turned to her and cupped her head in my hands. I gently massaged the thick, coarse fur behind her ears. I put my mouth close to hers and stared into her yellow eyes.

“Find him, Mungo. Find Roberto.”

Mungo leapt from the truck. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t pause to snuff the air. She didn’t even look to me for further explanation.

She hit the ground running and streaked forward through the blaze of the headlights. Her head turned slightly toward the crushed pickup as she passed it, but she never slowed. Within seconds she was lost in the darkness beyond.

I didn’t hesitate, either. I started running after her. Even though my head seemed to detonate with each stride and the nausea was once again pumping my stomach like a bellows. The headlamp bounced wildly on my forehead, its beam jerking crazily up and down and from side to side. Every now and then I caught the flash of silver fur far ahead of me.

She was heading to the left—not straight ahead into the tunnel that led to the trailer and meth lab. And that was the last direction I knew. My focus on following her, on not vomiting, on not falling down due to the dizziness, on not fainting, pushed every other consideration from my mind. I didn’t even know if Mary and Tom were following me. Only occasionally could I hear one of them shouting in the distance.

We entered a tunnel, then another chamber that may or may not have been as big as the first one. It was impossible to tell—it was a universe of cloying blackness. Then another tunnel. This tunnel was far smaller. Big enough for trucks, but not for the mechanical dinosaurs. Mungo was picking up speed. The flashes of silver I glimpsed were farther and farther away, and timed farther and farther apart. I was attacked by two new fears, adding to all the others. I was going to lose her. I was going to lose myself.

I ran on. Panting and choking on what was crawling up my throat and staggering from the dizziness. The thought nudged at the edge of my focused concentration:
Wrong turn. Somewhere back there I made a wrong turn. I’ve lost Mungo.
I ran for another minute before doubt and the dry heaves forced me to double over. When I stood up, I was crushed by the darkness. The headlamp showed nothing but two walls, a rounded roof, and bookends of solid blackness on each end. Weighted by total silence except for my own ragged breathing.

Panic welled up in me like a tidal wave. Cresting, falling, at a hundred miles an hour toward my head. It was going to wash me away. Crush me. Pulverize me.

Then there came the most extraordinary sound I’d ever heard in my life. It knifed through me, electrified me, and devastated me worse than the darkness and the silence and the panic.

It was a wolf’s howl. It reverberated off the walls and through the earth. More than mournful—more than frightening—it was some kind of primitive, fluid sob from the very depths of a wild thing’s soul. Fresh tears leapt out on my cheeks.

I staggered in the rough direction of the sound, back the way I had come. Pulled by the howl, I looked left and noticed a black hole I hadn’t noticed before. It was, I assumed, an exploratory shaft. It cut down at a sharp angle and was barely larger than an upright man. The floor was a litter of uncleared rocks. The sound was ripping out of there.

The narrow walls, like all the other surfaces down there, were a light tan in the crazily jerking beam of my light. I noticed a brown smear on both sides at shoulder height. The smear glinted a little. It was wet and fresh. Something or someone had recently been carried through this passage at shoulder level.

The walls narrowed and the ceiling dropped. Soon I was running half-stooped, and with one shoulder pointing forward and the other pointing back. The smears were bigger here. Wider and darker. The howling was far louder. It cut right through me.

I went down hard. Not from pain or exhaustion, but because I tripped over something large that had been dumped there. I got up on my hands and knees and twisted my head to shine the light behind me. It fixed on Bruto’s thick body, and then on his dented skull. I looked away.

There was a flash of silver ahead. Mungo. Tail no longer waving like a wind-torn flag, but tucked between her legs. She turned and stared at me, yellow eyes glowing green in the light, her black lips making an O and that unearthly sound coming from them. Beyond her the passage ended in a wall of jagged rock. Something pale was curled there.

I pushed Mungo out of the way—grabbed her and shoved her behind me. Then I focused the Cyclops beam on the paleness. And the tears started to run down my cheeks. My breathing made a pumping sound in the hole—I couldn’t seem to fill my chest. My knees hit the stony floor but I didn’t feel the bite of the sharp edges.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

Roberto was curled into a fetal position. His skin was striped and smeared with blood. The long black hair covered most of his face. But I could see the brilliant blue of his eyes. Staring somewhere far beyond me. There was a faint smile on his lips. Or was it a snarl?

My brother—my mad, beautiful brother—was unleashed at last.

Alleged Drug Kingpin In U.S. Custody

CASPER, Wy., August 23—Federal agents, assisted by officers of the Wyoming State Police, yesterday arrested Jesús Hidalgo-Paez, who is believed by some law-enforcement officials to be the head of a multibillion-dollar narcotics empire. He is expected to be charged with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute methamphetamine.

The FBI announced the arrest following a raid on an isolated estate in Wyoming’s Wind River region. Four men were killed there in the clash with police, and one Wyoming officer was wounded. Property records indicate that the estate is owned by a Mexico City attorney named Paul Olivas.

Twenty-two additional Mexican nationals were taken into custody along with Mr. Hidalgo-Paez, six of whom were hospitalized for malnutrition. Another man, of dual Argentinean/American citizenship, is in critical condition after receiving a gunshot wound and other injuries. He is not expected to survive.

Mr. Hidalgo-Paez has strong ties with key officials in Mexico’s government. He served as a campaign chairman for the Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI, from 1996 to 1999. A party spokesperson called the arrest “extremely unfortunate and erroneous, as Mr. Hidalgo has no ties to any illegal activities. We anticipate his imminent release.”

Yet Mr. Hidalgo-Paez has long been suspected by some American authorities of heading one of Mexico’s most notorious drug-smuggling cartels. A source at the Justice Department alleges that Mr. Hidalgo-Paez is responsible for possibly hundreds of murders in Mexico. He is also believed to have ordered the slaying earlier this year of an undercover FBI agent in Mexicali.

According to an FBI spokesman, the raid on the Wyoming estate included some arrests made in an abandoned mine on the property. Evidence was found there of a large-scale methamphetamine laboratory. It was in this underground location that the gunfight occurred, during which the four suspects were killed and the police officer wounded.

Mr. Hidalgo will be arraigned Monday in federal court in Denver, Colorado. Warrants for his arrest have also been issued in Mexico.