Crossing the Line Read Online Free Page A

coil of slack rope next to me on the ledge.
    Finally I realized what he was about to do.
    “Don’t do it, ’Berto. You’ll ruin my rope.”
    “You don’t need a rope, Ant. You’ve got to learn to let go.”
    Then, with a scream of utter terror, he spread his bare arms and jumped off the ledge.
    Long seconds later the carabiners and knots slammed together with a sound like a whipcrack as his weight hit the end of the rope. I rechecked the bolts then leaned over to see the mouths below gaping even wider. It was as if a flash-bang grenade had exploded over their heads. Mary Chang was frozen in place and seemed to be gasping for air. Tom was swearing loudly.
    Swinging free above them, laughing silently, was my brother.
    And he was just getting warmed up for really scaring the hell out of all of us.

TWO
    I t was nine o’clock at night when we finally rolled through the town of Potash and neared our destination. Like the epithet QuickDraw, which had been slapped on me, the town’s name was supposed to be sardonic and dismissive.
    A couple of decades ago this dry, dusty region had been stampeded by surveyors, roughnecks, and the entrepreneurial leeches who followed them. All were looking to make a fast buck and then get out. Nearly all of them got out, but without the buck. Instead of oil and gas under the rocky soil, what they found was a mineral valuable only as a base component of fertilizer.
Potash
—said like you’re spitting out a mouthful of the area’s alkaline water—was what the town was designated by the few unfortunate souls who stayed—or were left—behind.
    There were a couple of boarded-up fast-food joints near where the state highway veered off, and then a mostly deserted main street. The buildings were all made of tan brick. Their sturdy construction signified that, at one time at least, someone had had hopes for this place. That hope appeared to be long dead. Many of the store windows yawned wide and dark, like toothless old ghosts, and the interiors were stocked with only trash and tumbleweeds. Thoroughly graffitied boards covered others. Only a few retailers remained intact and, perhaps, occasionally open for business—three pawnshops, a feed store, and a hardware merchant.
    Both ends of the main street were bookended by a pair of bars. It was Friday night, and a lot of pickup trucks were crowded around them. Outside of one bar on the south end of the street two vaqueros were pissing on the hood of an old patrol car emblazoned with the seal of the Potash Town Marshall. They barked and howled at Mungo, whose head was in its usual position, hanging out the window.
    “My kind of town,” Roberto said.
    “That doesn’t surprise me,” Mary Chang responded, in an almost teasing tone that did surprise me. The fact that we would soon be reaching the end of the road, along with the cooling effect of the night, might finally draw her out of her shell.
    She’d refused to join our conversations on the long drive north. Refused, pretty much, to speak at all. Not that it was likely she could’ve added much, since we mostly talked about Mom and Dad and mountains. But I’d repeatedly tried to get her to tell me what the plan was, what they wanted my brother for, other than to pick his brain about Jesús Hidalgo. She’d kept saying later, later. So I stopped asking and had gone mute myself.
    I thought I was going to hate working for the Feds. Little did I know just how much.
    On the other side of Potash were sagging trailers on jacks with tattered flags of laundry fluttering in the wind. Blue TV lights flashed from behind the windows. Most every trailer—despite the apparent poverty—was equipped with a satellite dish. We passed the frames of cannibalized cars and appliances and then passed what was officially marked as the town dump, the sign being the only thing that distinguished it from the surrounding landscape. Finally we were beyond civilization, such as it was in this part of the state, and