Free Crossing the Line by Clinton McKinzie

doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
    What she said at the end made me consider her again for a moment. I wondered if there might be more to her than what I’d seen over the last twenty-four hours. It was possible that she wasn’t such a rigid professional after all.
             
    After showering, I locked Mungo in the cabin with my still-sleeping brother. I studied the sky dutifully before heading up for the ridge. There were no planes. Not even any contrails from high-flying cross-country passenger jets. The sky was completely cloudless and Wyoming blue.
    The slope leading up to the ridge was about three hundred feet high and angled back at about forty-five degrees. It was interspersed with bands of sandstone similar to the ones I’d been climbing on the other side. There was no path leading up, but I didn’t have any trouble picking out the fresh prints in the dirt. Tom’s pointy-toed boots with their fancy riding heels made out a series of angry exclamation points in the sandy soil. Beside the prints there were two cables snaking upward. He’d kicked dust over them, and sometimes thrown twigs or dead branches, to make them hard to spot from the air.
    The exclamation points and the cables angled back and forth as they rose, avoiding the rock bands, bushes, and clumps of cacti. They occasionally slid downhill because of the slick soles on the boots.
    I was two-thirds of the way up the slope before I spotted the surveillance point.
    As I did, Tom, who had been watching me from above, lifted an arm and called sullenly, “Here.”
    He’d set up the telescopic camera and the long-range directional microphone in a deep notch in the ridge. It was a good spot, shaded by junipers, and facing northeast. Looking in that direction I could see the red river below us and the pine-covered foothills to the Wind River Range rising up on the other side. The floor of the notch was relatively flat. A camouflaged pup tent had been erected and then decorated with more branches and a dusting of red sand.
    Barely peeking out from the left edge of the notch, the camera and microphone pointed to the north. They were set on tripods and looked state-of-the-art. Both had cords running from them. The camera was apparently digital and sending images down to the computer screens in the lodge. The microphone looked like a Flash Gordon ray gun.
    “Nice setup,” I said.
    Tom, who had gone back to peering through the camera, grunted, “Yeah.”
    “You want some coffee?”
    When he turned I handed him the thermos of Mary’s coffee I’d brought with me. I was feeling conflicted about Tom. I sympathized with him about his friend who’d been killed in Mexicali. And about his sister—
Christ, it was the government, his own agency, that sold her the drugs that killed her.
But I also still didn’t like his attitude or the way he was about to take a gamble with my brother’s life.
    He unscrewed the thermos lid and sniffed it.
    “I didn’t poison it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    He looked back at me, considering. His eyes were tired but his hair was perfect. I guessed he’d been up all night playing with his toys. He probably still wasn’t finished, as the computer screens had been dark when I was down there. After a couple of seconds he nodded thanks and filled the lid.
    “Want to take a look?” he asked.
    “Yeah.”
    He moved out of the way. I slid into his position and looked around the corner of rock over the barrel of the camera’s lens. Hidalgo’s mansion was visible. It wasn’t what I’d expected, even after seeing the satellite photos the previous night. It didn’t look like the hideout of a billionaire.
    The old ranch house was nestled in a shallow valley that descended down to the bank of the river. It was big, but not enormous. Maybe, when new, it had been impressive. But not anymore. Only one story high, its white paint was peeling from being sandblasted repeatedly by the gusts coming down out of the mountains.