Crossing the Line Read Online Free Page B

beginning to crunch and bump along a dirt road.
    Like most nights in the state, the sky was crystal clear. The ever-present wind off the plains swept it clean.
    “Turn off your headlights, please, Agent Burns,” Mary in-structed me.
    I flipped them off. The stars provided more than enough light for driving at the crawling speed the condition of the road demanded. Behind us, the Suburban’s lights went out, too. Mary used a penlight to study a map on her lap. She somehow managed to navigate us through the maze of dirt roads that wound among rocky desert knolls.
    Whenever we reached the top of a ridge, I would study the eastern horizon for the starless voids that were made by the peaks of the Wind River Range. The foothills to the peaks began only a few miles from us, on the other side of the Roan River. The peaks themselves, rising to just shy of thirteen thousand feet, jutted up six thousand feet off the plain. Their shapes were familiar to me. In the past I’d climbed most of the more vertical edges of shadow. Maybe there would be a chance to get up there again, I thought. Maybe with my brother.
    I braked to a stop before a barbed-wire fence that was strung across the road. Sandstone outcroppings stood on either side, preventing me from driving around it.
    “This is it, gentlemen. Our headquarters for the next couple of weeks.”
    Roberto turned and looked back at her. “I guess the Four Seasons back there in Potash was all booked up.”
    I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking that it looked like the back entrance to a prison. Roberto was probably thinking it, too.
    Mary got out of the backseat and tried to unhook one side of the fence from where some iron spikes had been driven into the rock. She struggled with it, trying to peel it back in order to clear the road. I watched from behind the steering wheel as she put her shoulder between the barbs on a vertical line of wire.
    “Where are your manners, Ant? Girl’s going to ruin her clothes,” Roberto said, opening his door and stepping out. As if eight hours of desert heat, blowing grit, and wolf hair hadn’t ruined the expensive-looking skirt and blouse already.
    It was like Roberto to see the girl in her, a person Mary Chang seemed to take pains to hide with her formal clothes and stilted speech. And it was also like Roberto to open a fence for a female federal agent who planned on putting him at great risk by acting on whatever information he provided, and would probably like nothing better than to drop him back in the cell she’d only temporarily sprung him from.
    Once they’d scraped the fence back, I pulled forward far enough so that the Suburban could fit through, too. Roberto and Mary closed the fence, reattaching it to the spikes, and climbed back in. After another hundred feet, the dirt track entered into what resembled a great pit or a crater.
    It was surrounded on three and a half sides by steep slopes of rock, sage, and chaparral. Stars low overhead threw dim shadows from ribs of sandstone that poked out of the canted earth like the bones of some fossilized monster. Against the crater’s back wall were some dark buildings. I realized then that Mary had planned it this way—that was why she’d allowed my brother the time to “get a little air beneath his heels.” Our arrival was meant to be veiled by the night.
    It was once a hunting camp but it had gone bankrupt a few years earlier, Mary explained, elaborating on anything for the first time. The bank that now owned it was unable to sell it so they were willing to lease.
    I knew that several years of drought in the region had driven the elk into the mountains, and the only things left to shoot on the alkaline hills were rattlesnakes and a few skinny antelope. Anyone with money and sense would buy a place higher up in the pine forests below the peaks.
    “I arranged, through a dummy corporation, and then through a law firm in Denver, to lease it for the fall,” Mary went on. “The bank