Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

finish it with the attached railing and capped support posts. Danny meandered over to the corner post on the west side of the porch. He squatted and stared at the marks that neither time nor a change of ownership could wash away.
    Little Danny Cavanaugh was here.
    Three small horizontal impressions marked the post. Danny was thirteen when his dad had decided to take on the porch project, and sinking this post was the very first item on their to-do list. After it was secured in three feet of concrete, his dad told him to stand next to the post so they could measure his growth. Danny had grown five inches during the construction time: two between the first three visits to the cabin, one more before the fourth, and two more inches before the porch was finally finished. As Danny relived those memories, he could feel the rigid post as it hugged his equally straight back. He could feel the weight of the pencil his dad would hold firmly against the crown of his head, as he made his mark into the soft pine. He could feel the anticipation in his gut, as he spun around until he saw the tiny mark that was, in that moment, everything in the world to him.
    As Danny ran his hand over each tiny notch, he realized how much he had changed. In the past, whenever he pictured this post with its marks, he always pictured himself with his own son, mirroring those few good times with his own father and hopefully avoiding the far too many bad ones. He would simultaneously feel both the joy of hopefully being a father himself one day and sorrow at what had been his relationship with his own dad. But this time there was nothing. There were no imagined scenes with Daniel James Cavanaugh Jr. There was no emotion welling in his soul. He was simply staring at a post with three forgotten scars.
    Danny still couldn’t believe the situation he had gotten himself into. Scratch that. The situation that had gotten into him. He was a fugitive, a man without a country. Try as he had for the past seven days, he couldn’t come up with a better solution than the one he was about to take.
    There’s no going back.
    Danny propped the rifle against his thigh and yanked back its bolt. The chambered bullet ejected into his hand. He stood tall against the post and jabbed the bullet’s tip into it at the crown of his head. He turned and examined the mark, rubbing it with his finger.
    Danny Cavanaugh was here once more. But not for long.
    From the corner of his eye, he saw the date on his wristwatch. His birthday was a couple weeks away, on March 30. Thirty-eight years. It was such a long time. A lifetime. Memories of birthdays past reeled through his head. His father’s reserved smiles, handshakes instead of hugs. His mother’s story of his birth; how labor pains initially believed to be indigestion caused a last-minute, mad dash to the hospital. Even those thoughts couldn’t persuade Danny against giving himself this early birthday gift.
    Danny took one last look out over his dad’s favorite setting on earth. He was procrastinating now, examining every bit of the nearly untouched valley before him. The official first day of spring was less than a week away, but many of the plants here in northern Mexico had already begun to bloom. But within the uneven quilt of the budding wilderness, Danny noticed something strange in the lone building that occupied the western edge of the valley. He swore he could see lights on inside the monastery.
    Suddenly, Danny forgot himself and his morbid task. He ducked back inside the cabin and fetched the Browning 10 × 42 hunting binoculars he found during his initial search of the place. Looking through them, Danny confirmed his suspicions. Not only was the power on, but smoke was rising from one of the monastery’s chimneys. There was life inside it, where there shouldn’t be.
    As Danny saw it, there were two possibilities. The Lake Guerrero valley was less than two hundred miles from the U.S. border. The Mexican cartels were continually expanding their networks all over northern Mexico. They often used secluded structures as transition points to smuggle the big three— drugs, guns, and humans—across the border. Danny had to admit there was no better building to house a host of illegal activities.
    On the other hand, the building and surrounding land, which was once and might still be owned by Phoenix Oil, could be occupied by one of the well-heeled groups of American businessmen the Phoenix guys would invite down here