Crossing the Line (9 page)

The restaurant was dead quiet now.

The silence was broken by a shrill female voice. It was the waitress, who stood in the hallway by the bathrooms and kitchen. She waved a cordless phone in the air as if it were a club.

“I will call the police!”

Some of the men turned and snickered. Zafado laughed. If I weren’t about to get gutted or worse, I would have laughed, too, imagining the town’s one deputy marshal trying to break up this kind of a brawl. If he was smart, he wouldn’t be answering the phone on a Friday night.

The old man came out from behind the bar, firmly took hold of the phone with one hand and the girl’s arm with the other. He pulled her out of sight into the kitchen.

Shorty began to swing the knife in the air. He made short slashing motions as he grinned at me. The knife was held the right way, coming out between the finger and thumb rather than the heel of his fist. You do a lot more damage slashing than stabbing and he, unfortunately, knew it.

“Cut out his heart,” someone called, laughing.

“Cut off his dick!”

“Show him
la corbata de Jesús
!”

I can dive through the front window,
I thought.
Dive through the window and run for the truck. Even in these boots, I can outrun these guys. There’s no dishonor in running away. Not when there are so many of them. Not when they’re all stone killers.
I was almost crouching to lunge for the sheet of glass when I remembered that the window was barred on the outside.

Shorty danced two steps forward and one step back as he grinned and waved the knife. He did it again, closing the distance between us, and moving with surprising agility for all his bulk. I stood rock-still with both hands upraised. The broken mug palmed in one, the other hand open, and me hoping I’d be fast enough to grab the wrist with the knife. Then I would hit him with the glass.

Shorty danced forward again, flicking the knife just in front of my forearms. I almost went for it, then stopped as he danced back again. I stared at his bright eyes—they glittered with the thrill. I was conscious of how hard I was breathing even though I’d barely moved. The knife flashed at my left side, backhanded now and coming high. I lunged to the right. The blade drew back just as it almost nicked my wrist. If I’d dropped my hand it would have cut my cheek. The flush of hot adrenaline pumped through my veins. The men circled around us cheered.

“Let the cowboy go,” a voice said through the applause.

The voice wasn’t loud, but it was commanding. Commanding enough that Shorty’s leering grin drooped as did his knife arm. It was Zafado who had spoken.

“Let the cowboy go,” he said again to a chorus of disappointed groans.

I didn’t know if it was a trick or not, so I maintained my pose. When the knife came next I wasn’t going to try to grab it this time, but intended instead to smash the jagged end of the mug down onto the arm that held it.

Zafado walked into the circle and showed me all of his stained, broken teeth. He spoke to Shorty and the other men.

“I can’t buy him a drink and then have it come out through his throat. He deserves at least to piss it out.”

Then he looked at me.

“You are very brave, Juan. But very stupid, too. You are very close to tripping over your own balls, my friend. Shorty may not look like he’s good for anything but eating, but he is very good with a knife.”

He laughed and shook his head.

My field of vision widened as the adrenaline was soaked back up by the glands in the small of my back. I could see all the disappointed faces, the bloodlust evident in their expressions but also a casualness about it that was even more frightening. They had seen encounters like this a hundred times. Encounters where someone ended up forever on the ground. They’d seen men hacked to death—or worse, throats slit and the tongues pulled out—so often that it was nothing but a game to them. For me violence had always been about fear and madness. For them it was both work and recreation. That was what made them so scary.

“Where is your rig?” Zafado asked.

“Down the street,” I managed through a very dry mouth.

“Perhaps I should escort you there? See that you get inside in one piece.”

He waved Bruto away from the door. I waited to go for it until Bruto was well out of grabbing range.

“I’ll be all right,” I said, moving for the door faster than my pride wanted me to.

Zafado followed me out and firmly shut the door behind him. It was cold outside—colder than I remembered. I tossed the broken mug into the flowers by the door.

Behind Zafado’s back, behind the big barred window, the
sicarios
and bangers were watching us, their faces pressed close to cut the glare from the inside lights. Shorty was grinning and tapping the tip of his blade on the glass. Another man was grinning, too, and making cutting motions across his throat while sticking out an unusually long tongue. Bruto was just staring.

“I have done you a favor,” Zafado said.

It was true. And, sick as it was, I couldn’t help feeling more than a little grateful. These guys scared me. And this Zafado scared me even more than Bruto or Shorty.

“So you owe me a favor now.” He handed me a folded scrap of paper. “This is my phone number, okay? Call me in a few days, once my friends in there stop wanting to play their games with you. You must come work for me—I will pay you ten times what you make hauling horses and cleaning up their shit. A hundred times. Maybe a thousand times, for a man with balls like yours. And I will smooth everything out with my aggrieved friend in there. You think about it, okay? Then call me.”

SIX

G
uns lay on one of the picnic tables when I walked into the main cabin. There were two of them, and they were a lot more dangerous-looking than the simple pistols we carried at DCI, or even the shotguns we used when kicking down doors and executing no-knock warrants. These guns were both intricate and nasty, with long banana clips and skeletal collapsing stocks, and they were obviously capable of doing a lot of damage. I’d seen these kinds of weapons before, years ago, when they were slung over the shoulders of the Special Forces Pararescue soldiers my dad had commanded.

Immediately I wished I’d had one of these at Señor Garcia’s. And the second one, too, with Tom or Mary or Roberto holding on to it as they backed me up. For an instant I indulged myself in a fantasy of spraying bullets through the windows of the restaurant and bar. Putting down the animals inside for once and for all—no warrants, no trial, no fuss.

“You’d better have a lot more of those, and a lot more Feds, when you want to go across the river,” I said to Tom, who was cleaning the guns with oil and a toothbrush.

“Don’t worry. We will.”

Tom was wearing one of his too-small T-shirts and a pair of jeans. He spoke without looking at me. He continued to scrub away, seeming to pay more attention to his own flexing triceps than the assault weapon he was working on.

“Did you find a drop?” Mary asked me.

She and Roberto were sitting at the other table, which was cluttered with files, water bottles, legal pads, photographs, and the two laptop computers. My brother looked bored. Mary looked tired and distracted.

“Yeah.”

“You drink a cold one for me?” Roberto asked.

“Yeah. And a shot.”

“Extra credit,” he said, giving me a thumbs-up. “Thanks, bro.”

Mary picked up a legal pad and took a pencil from behind her ear. Her eyes on the pad, she said, “Describe the drop.”

I did. I described the trash can in the men’s room with its swinging lid. Mary made a note, then pushed the pad across to me and had me draw a diagram, showing the interior of the restaurant and bar, and the exact position of the proposed drop. My hand shook a little as I drew. I was still feeling the aftereffects of a near-overdose of adrenaline and fear. I wondered why they couldn’t see how white my skin must look, how wide my eyes must be.

“Did you see any of Hidalgo’s men?” Mary asked after I pushed back the pad.

“Yeah. I had a drink with about ten of them.”

Now she finally looked at me. She jerked her head up from her notes and stared. Tom left cleaning the guns and walked around to stand behind the paper-strewn table. He leaned on it with his fists. Roberto was smiling, nodding his head a little, his blue eyes lit up with amusement.

“Well?” Tom demanded. “What happened?”

I told them, sticking to just the facts and not going into just how much those guys had scared me. Mary began shaking her head almost immediately, saying, “You weren’t authorized to have any kind of contact with them.” I protested that I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of choice. When I went in there, I didn’t know Hidalgo’s men would demand that I have a drink with them. I didn’t know that half of his
sicarios
and bangers would show up and be looking for trouble.

“I’m surprised you didn’t just pull your gun and blast away,” Tom said acidly. “For a guy with your history, that’s showing some admirable restraint.”

“Fuck you,” I told him.

“Bet you didn’t even take your gun. Right?” Roberto asked.

He was probably asking to make a point with Mary and Tom. To show them that there was more to his little brother—or less—than they’d read in their file on me.

Roberto knew that I didn’t like guns. He didn’t like them, either, but they held a kind of fascination for him. He’d once told me that they disrupted the natural order of the world. It was supposed to be about tooth and claw and strength and smarts. Guns made a conflict be only about who cared less about life. All you had to do was point one and twitch your index finger. It was too easy. But I knew that, for that same reason, guns also appealed to him.

“No,” I answered. “I left it in my truck. And it turned out to be a damned good thing. If I’d pulled it in there, I’d be leaking all over the floor.”

Tom snorted but didn’t say anything else. Mary looked at me curiously, as if I’d done something not very smart. Or maybe she thought it was smart. I couldn’t tell. Her hooded eyes were hard to read.

“These guys are dangerous,” she said, as if I didn’t know. “From now on we should all be armed at all times.”

“Yeah? Cool. I want one of those things,” Roberto said, pointing at the partially dismantled automatic rifles on the other table.

“I meant all of us who have
not
been convicted of a felony,” Mary corrected herself with a weary smile for my brother. “Providing a firearm to a felon is against the law, Roberto.”

“That’s discrimination,” he said, sounding shocked. “I thought you’d be above that, being a fellow minority and all.”

“I’m not a minority. I’m as American as you. More so, actually. Both my parents became citizens before I was born.”

“Okay, Miss America. What are you carrying, anyway?”

She lifted the hem of her red fleece jacket, displaying a wedge of tan, flat stomach above her shorts, as well as the gun on the paddle holster.

“It’s a Glock 9 mm.”

“Know what a 9 mm is? A .45 set on stun.” Roberto looked at Tom. “You?”

“Glock 29. That’s a 10 mm. I guarantee it’ll do more than stun.”

I’d heard about the Bureau’s vaunted 10 mms. My office had wanted us to use them for a while. Wyoming cops tend to like big guns. But they dumped the idea when they learned that, although the weapons looked impressive, the huge caliber of the bullet tended to be too much for the gun’s subcompact frame.

“Those are yours, too?” Roberto indicated the machine guns on the picnic table.

“They’re the Bureau’s,” Tom corrected him. “Heckler & Koch MP5s. They’re
assigned
to me.”

My brother gave him a pitying look.

“A 10 mm and a couple of machine guns, all for one guy. I’d say that adds up to a very small dick.”

Tom’s mouth opened but he didn’t get anything out right away. Instead he just turned redder. You could see the color rising up from his neck to his forehead.

“Gentlemen,” Mary interrupted before Tom could think up a threat or a comeback, “although this discussion is very interesting, let’s get back to the reason we’re here.”

I finished telling them about the end of the evening at Señor Garcia’s, when Zafado followed me outside with his job offer and the note with his cell-phone number scribbled on it. I handed over the napkin it was written on. Mary bagged it then filed it away.

“I know that guy,” Roberto said. “Bad teeth, skinny-fat?”

“Yeah.” Zafado was skinny-fat. He had narrow shoulders and skinny limbs but also a belly that probably made it hard for him to zip up his expensive leather coat.

“Don’t take him up on it unless the money’s really good,
che
. Dude treats his employees like shit. I know firsthand.”

Prodded by Mary, Roberto explained that back when he knew Hidalgo, almost ten years ago, Zafado had been the
bajador
in charge of organizing overland trafficking into Arizona and California. He was the one who recruited and paid poor illegal immigrants to haul fifty-pound packs of coke through the desert. “Those poor little guys were getting slaughtered. Thirst, or the heat, or rattlers, or, worse, the boys from Juárez looking to make an intercept. Zafado didn’t really give a shit until enough started dying that it was affecting his profits. That was when he hired me to guide them.”

For six months Roberto had led human pack trains through the desert. Finding them water and concealing them from the authorities and other dangers by day, then leading them on fast nighttime hikes. He spray-painted their clothes and packs black and had them tie strips of carpet to the soles of their shoes so they wouldn’t leave tracks.

Mom and Dad would be so proud,
I thought but didn’t say.
Good use of all they taught us about living outdoors, bro.

I often admired my brother. Sometimes I feared him—or at least feared what he might do to himself. But this was the first time I felt embarrassed by him. How could he have worked with those animals? Those men who killed with such abandon? Even though Roberto had been arrested countless times for acts of vandalism or violence, I’d always seen the higher justice—even if only in his own head—in what he’d done. This was the first time I’d heard details of him doing something for profit. But, I reminded myself, he probably thought it was fun. He probably convinced himself he was saving lives, not ruining them.

Mary wanted complete descriptions of each man I’d seen. She went through her files and nearly half the time was able to pull out a picture for me to positively identify. Some of the files were more complete than others. Some of them were unknown to the Feds, or I was unable to describe them sufficiently. Tom pulled up some additional snapshots on his laptop, pictures he’d taken with the telephoto camera throughout the day showing men either outside the house across the river or near the construction trailers. These were printed out and the nicknames or names I’d picked up were written on them and new files were created.

The one who called himself Zafado they knew as Ramón Méndez-Valle. He was a former Mexican federal agent. He’d actually been a member of the Attorney General’s elite and later disgraced FEADS, Mexico’s antidrug force, until two years ago, when their American counterparts insisted he be forced out for failing lie-detector tests and background vetting. Of course he’d been working for Hidalgo the whole time. Getting fired allowed him to make it formal.

The picture they showed me of Zafado had him in a braided uniform, grinning through his crooked teeth. Tom said he was believed to have been responsible for the murder of eighteen men, women, and children in Ensenada in 1998. They were thought to be the family members of a low-level Hidalgo
bajador
who had been selling information to Hidalgo’s rivals in the Arellano-Felix cartel.

“Tom was at the scene,” Mary said. “He saw the bodies.”

“
La corbata
?” I asked before I could stop myself. I didn’t really want to know.

“Just the men,” Tom said quietly. “The women and children were forced to lie down. Each was shot once in the head. And then the bodies were raked with an AK-47.”

There was a moment of silence. While it lasted I was reminded that Tom was not such a bad guy. At least he was fighting the good fight. My brother, on the other hand, had worked with these guys.

“If I’d known he was going to do shit like that, I would have killed him myself,” Roberto said softly, no smile on his face now.

“You damn well should have,” Tom growled at him. “Or, better yet, killed Hidalgo, who ordered it done. Instead all we’re going to be able to do is arrest them, spend a lot of years and money trying them, and then put them in a cell for a few years. But hell, maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe they’ll resist.”

“Tom,” Mary said warningly.

I knew what she meant. FBI agents needed to tread lightly—there’d been too many scandals lately where agents had crossed the line. Ruby Ridge, missing evidence about Oklahoma City, Whitey Bulger, the crime-lab debacle. They couldn’t even insinuate things like that.

Tom lit a cigarette with a hard snap of his lighter.

To me Mary said, “Go on. Describe the others.”

Big, bad, silent Bruto was Juan David Navas-Rodriguez. He was still a cop; his name remained on the roll of Baja state-police officers, where he was ranked a sergeant. His pumpkin face was partially hidden beneath a white cowboy hat in most of the surveillance photos they had of him. But the goatee, as well as his wide, powerful shoulders and self-contained manner, were distinctive. He was seen in the same Mexicali bar that the FBI agent—Mary and Tom’s colleague—had disappeared from. Roberto didn’t know him. He’d probably come into Hidalgo’s full-time employ in only the last year or two.

Together Zafado and Bruto were believed to be the heads of Hidalgo’s security detail. The fact that they were together at Señor Garcia’s, a half hour or more away from the man they were paid to protect, indicated that Hidalgo wasn’t worried about much in Wyoming. I pointed this out, and Mary nodded.

“That’s true. He really has very little to fear here. We’ve been unable to indict him in the U.S. despite a decade of trying. He’s too protected by the layers of lieutenants he uses. And, of course, by the threat of overwhelming retaliation. It’s in Mexico that he’s in danger. Not from the government, but from the rival cartels in Juárez and the Gulf.”

Tom added, “The other cartels are too chickenshit to confront him north of the border. They’re scared of riling us up, too.” He meant the American authorities.

If it wasn’t genius, at least it was impressive cunning. Hidalgo and the other narcos knew they were relatively safe in Mexico from their own government as long as they continued to pay the price and offer up the occasional token trafficker or load. Allow the
federales
to make the periodic bust, so that they could brag to their sponsor in the north that they were doing something about the War on Drugs. As long as the U.S. continued to supply the Mexican government with tens of millions of dollars in aid money each year, the cartels could transport drugs and kill one another with abandon while the politicians grew rich with them. But if they moved the violence north along with the drugs, the American authorities might be given a reason to finally react. Maybe even to demand that Mexico really do something to smother the cartels, like allowing American law enforcement to operate in Mexico with their weapons, or to extradite Mexican nationals indicted by U.S. courts on drug charges—something the Mexican government only rarely allowed. The narcos knew they couldn’t afford to stir up that kind of trouble, so the north side of the border was a safe zone.

Killing Mary and Tom’s colleague, even though it was done in Mexico, was a big risk. That was another supposed rule—
You don’t mess with U.S. cops.
Mexican cops, of course, were fair game as long as they weren’t in the employ of your friends. Hidalgo had made a mistake in ordering the murder of the FBI agent. Arrogance had turned to hubris. Tom and Mary were obviously serious about making him pay for it. But this still seemed like a very small, freewheeling operation for one that should have the full weight of the federal government behind it. It was strange that Mary and Tom would be given this much independence. But I wasn’t given time to pursue the thought.