Authors: Clinton McKinzie

Crossing the Line (37 page)

“If you leave this town without speaking to her, I’m going to take you apart with my own hands.”

He flexed his fat, powerful fingers for emphasis.

So my last stop before leaving town was at the
Denver Post
building. I showered and shaved before I went, and even put on my navy going-to-court suit. I was clean on the outside, at least. After security probed at me with an electric wand, I rode the elevator up to Rebecca’s floor. She was in. The receptionist listened to me say my name and nervously told me to go on back.

As I walked passed the cubicles with clicking keyboards and ringing phones, the whole room seemed to pause and stare at me. I didn’t feel so clean now.
That’s the guy,
I imagined each face thinking.
The one they call QuickDraw. He did that terrible thing in Cheyenne a couple of years ago. Killed three young men and planted weapons on them
—
at least that’s what they say. God only knows what else he’s done.

If God were here to tell them, they could add another three black marks to my name. And this time it happened to be true.

Suddenly I was the guy they’d always suspected I was. The killer Mary Chang and Tom Cochran had set up to commit a righteous murder.

Rebecca had written an article about me after the civil suit that followed what had happened in Cheyenne was finally settled. It had been a fair piece, describing the facts of the shooting as well as the suppositions of the dead men’s families and the accusations of their lawyer. The
Denver Post
staff knew when we’d started dating. Rebecca had told me it was the gossip event of the year.
Our own
enfante gâté,
our jewel, running around with a very bad boy.
And I assumed they all knew by now that she was pregnant. Even if she hadn’t told them, she was starting to show.

Their stares made me feel like a freak. Reporters are naturally suspicious of police, and my background certainly didn’t do anything to lessen that suspicion. On the plus side, though, at least I didn’t have to worry about any of her colleagues hitting on her in my presence.

“Hi,” Rebecca said, looking up from her cubicle in the crowded, noisy room.

She was dressed in a sand-colored pair of loose linen pants and a white sleeveless shirt. The shirt was untucked. Her hair was pulled back severely, which always made her look very young and vulnerable. Despite the clamor of the room, Rebecca looked calm.

She didn’t stand to embrace me. The brightness in her voice had nothing to do with what I saw in her eyes.

“Anton. You’re back.”

“Hi.”

“I’ve been worried about you. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Where have you been?”

I tried the line that had silenced McGee.

“Looking for my head.”

She stared at me for too long without speaking. Then, in a very quiet voice, she asked, “Did you find it?”

I nodded. “You don’t have to worry about Jesús Hidalgo or the Mexicali Mafia anymore.”

She pretended not to have heard, just as McGee had pretended.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’ve got Mungo in the truck. Ross says we’re supposed to be in Wyoming to meet with an investigative team tonight.”

“Are you going to be there for a while?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

Now she nodded. “Okay. I think that’s probably for the best.”

THIRTY-NINE

T
wo hours later Mungo was literally leaping up and down in the backseat, bouncing around the inside of the truck like a furry rubber ball. We’d crossed the Wyoming state line, gotten onto I-80 west instead of going straight into Cheyenne, and were coming to the turnoff for Vedauwoo. I’d decided that the misconduct investigation and the deposition I was required to give could wait a couple of hours. The Pig wheeled onto the turnoff, vibrated over the cattle guards, and we were soon on a rutted dirt road among granite towers and beaver ponds.

This was the place where Roberto and I first became addicted to getting high. I was maybe seven, and Roberto a couple of years older, when Mom and Dad brought us here. At the time the family was stationed at the nearby Air Force base in Cheyenne. Dad had finally convinced Mom that his boys were old enough to climb.

I parked in an aspen grove that was near a small stream. Mungo didn’t wait for me to open the door for her—she squirmed out the window and fell to the ground. Finding her feet, she sprinted into the trees.

I followed her to the base of a two-hundred-foot rock that was split by a hand-sized crack. The route was called Friday the Thirteenth; Roberto and I had been so proud to follow Dad up. We were proud to have Mom nervously watching from below, fretting the same way she fretted whenever Dad went off to conquer some Himalayan monster. I felt like a little kid again as I booted up, remembering the oversized climbing boots my brother and I shared back then. I could hear Roberto laughing, nearly levitating in his excitement to get off the ground.

The rock seemed to touch me back when I stroked it. It held my hands with a firm grip when I shoved them into a vertical crack. Nothing had changed. Everything was so familiar. I pulled up and started climbing. There was a long way to go.

I tried not to ask myself if I had changed, or if I’d always been this way. Some questions are better left unanswered. Anyway, I supposed time would tell.

Also by Clinton McKinzie

THE EDGE OF JUSTICE

POINT OF LAW

TRIAL BY ICE AND FIRE

CROSSING THE LINE
A Delacorte Press Book / May 2004

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Visit our website at
www.bantamdell.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McKinzie, Clinton.

Crossing the line / Clinton McKinzie.

p. cm.

1. Government investigators—Fiction. 2. Undercover operations—Fiction.

3. Drug traffic—Fiction. 4. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 5. Brothers—Fiction.

6. Rocky Mountain—Fiction. 7. Wyoming—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3613.C568 C76 2004

813'.6 22