Triple Crossing Read Online Free Page A

shadows, trying to figure out if the supervisor really intended on going through with
     it or was just messing with him. Both scenarios pissed him off. Garrison looked down at him as if he were about to swat a
     bug.
    “Valentine. These people break the law every day. They spit at you. They rock you. And it’s all a big joke to them. This is
     the worst punishment they’ll ever get. So don’t you wussy out on me now. Get with the program.”
    Coming up next to Garrison, Dillard made an exasperated noise. “Come on, Valentine, nobody’s gonna hurt your girlfriends.”
    “Who asked you?” Pescatore retorted. “Take a giant step back outta my face.”
    “Fuck you.” Dillard’s thin lips tightened. “I don’t understand a word you say in the first place, you crazy Chicago asshole.”
    Partly because he was getting angry and partly to stall Garrison, Pescatore decided to respond as ignorantly as possible.
     He stepped close to Dillard and cocked his head. He felt a buzzing sensation in his face and hands.
    “You gotta problem with the way I talk, you hayseed redneck punk bitch?”
    Dillard’s face contorted. Pescatore blocked his shove, backpedaling. Dillard started after him and Pescatore crouched and
     slammed him with a gut punch. Garrison got between them. Dillard was flushed and wild, a hand on his belly.
    “Now, Larry, you sure you can take Valentine?” Garrison chortled. “He’s not big, but he’s pretty mean.”
    Garrison had a loglike arm extended at each of them, without urgency, like a referee about to resume the action. He’s not
     gonna stop us, Pescatore realized. He loves it: the brawling, those poor bastards in the vehicle, the crazy bullshit all night.
    They were interrupted by a commotion. Suddenly the Wrangler disgorged its cargo, prisoners bolting in every direction. The
     agents spun around, yelling.
    Pescatore focused on a man who crouched by a door, pullingaliens to freedom. A bowlegged man holding a pair of wire cutters, his head wrapped in a red bandanna. A man who had sneaked
     out of the bushes behind four PAs and sprung a vehicleful of prisoners.
    Pulpo.
    Pescatore lunged forward, pushing someone aside. Pulpo reappeared, closer, grimacing with effort. The wire cutters came whipping
     around at Pescatore. He snapped aside his head, reducing the force of the blow, but it staggered him. The smuggler ran into
     the brush.
    “I got him,” Pescatore said, unsheathing his baton.
    Pescatore pounded through the brush and down a ravine. He ran at an incredible, exhilarating, foolish speed. His head and
     ankle throbbed. It’s all your fault, Valentine, he muttered, they got away and it’s all your fault. He ran faster, ripping
     through curtains of fog. He gripped the baton like a sprinter. He noticed liquid trickling down his forehead onto his face.
     He tasted it: blood.
    “I got him,” he said into the radio clipped to his lapel.
    At the bottom of the hill, the border fence loomed up out of the mist. Pulpo made for a spot where floodwaters had washed
     out dirt between two boulders and created a gap beneath the fence. Pulpo scuttled through the opening and disappeared. Pescatore
     dropped, rolled and came back up on the other side of the fence.
    He saw Pulpo glance back over his shoulder in disbelief, then plunge into the traffic on Calle Internacional, the highway
     that paralleled the international boundary on the Tijuana side. An orange-and-brown station wagon–taxi, elaborate script decorating
     its side, swerved and fishtailed and almost flattened Pulpo. A bedraggled pink bus braked and honked, the croak of a prehistoric
     animal. Pulpo reached the center median, which was waist high and as wide as a sidewalk. He stumbled, but kept going as Pescatore
     closed the gap. A truck left Pescatore a lungful of pestilential exhaust.
    A group of migrants trudging single file along the median stopped and stared at the agent and the smuggler pelting by.
    “I got him,” Pescatore told