Lines and shadows (10 page)

When the five men who were ringing them on the moon-swept trail began talking to each other in very low voices, Manny Lopez said, "
Sabes que
?"—not a moment too soon as far as his troops were concerned. Two of them saw clearly that one of the "pollos" who had joined them was wearing a
ski mask
. And they were two hours and two months from hard powder and chair lifts.

"Barf!" Manny screamed.

Four snub-nosed revolvers and one shotgun were already showing when Manny yelled

"
Policías
!"

Each cop went for the nearest robber. The man who had accepted one of Eddie's cigarettes began to run. Eddie Cervantes, the smallest and fastest Barfer, started after him. They were only a few yards from the border. The robber was twenty-two years old and could really move. Eddie Cervantes caught up with him at the line and the young man reached for his rear pocket, which contained a bone-handled knife. Eddie Cervantes yelped, "Barf! Barf!

Barf!" and swung his revolver down on the robber's skull and heard the loudest explosion of his life.

The robber screamed in the face of the shocked little Barfer. The bandit's eyes slid back and he said, "Ayeeee! You
killed
me!" And he fell to the ground and was absolutely still. When the junior varsity walking team came stumbling, cursing, falling, through the mesquite and rocks and cactus toward the sound of the gunshot, Renee Camacho found Eddie Cervantes gaping at the bandit corpse. Eddie Cervantes was saying, "Oh, shit! Oh, fuck! I didn't
mean
to kill him. What am I gonna do now? What am I gonna
do
?" Eddie Cervantes' sad down-turned eyes had dropped to his lip. There were a lot of things going through the young cop's head, of course. Technicalities, for one thing. The robbers had never actually demanded money. They had never made an overt attack. Was it only file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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wildcatting, a misdemeanor? Then he didn't even have the
legal
right to shoot him—never mind the moral right!

"What am I gonna do?" the littlest Barfer cried. "Am I gonna go to jail for manslaughter?" The corpse's name was Jose Gutierrez. The corpse moaned. The corpse started getting up.

"He's not dead! You're not dead!" Eddie Cervantes screamed to the bandit. But the crook
thought
he'd been killed. He was more certain than Eddie Cervantes. He sure as hell had a big headache, and a lump on his skull about the size of a tequila glass. After figuring out that he'd been knocked cold and had not died after all, he said to Eddie Cervantes, "I give. I
give!"

They arrested the bandits for wildcatting, since they didn't have the needed elements for a robbery charge. They made a police report to cover the accidental discharge of one department-issued Smith & Wesson two-inch revolver. They didn't bother detailing some damage done to the revolver. It seems that when Eddie Cervantes, using the gun as a club, coldcocked the bandit, he bent the trigger guard into the trigger, causing the gun to fire. No one had been hit by the round and the bandit was glad to be alive and wasn't complaining, especially since they were charged with only the petty crime of wildcatting. A day or two in the city jail and then back to Mexico and taking more care
next
time he robbed some pollos.

The cops had another fine time after work and this time Eddie Cervantes got blitzed. They did lots of Marine reservist/midget jokes: "What do Eddie Cervantes and King Hussein have in common?"

"They're military lions?"

"No, hydrocephalic dwarfs."

Then Eddie, with lots of help from Manny Lopez, would turn on the tallest Barfer, of prominent jaw and crooked teeth, and do their Marfa, Texas, jokes: "Hey, Ernie, I hear a big night in Marfa is when the Coke machine's working."

"Hey, Ernie, were you the champ bottle opener with those teeth?"

"Hey, Ernie, what's armadillo chili taste like?" And so forth. They also made a lot of jokes about the guy in the red ski mask who had gotten away, and who was called "El Loco" by the ones they'd caught. They had found the mask in the brush file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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by the international border. There were plenty of gags about how "Loco" would have to buy a new one when he went to Aspen for the season.

Except that a smile would freeze momentarily as a Barfer would think about this new job soberly. About the mean, lonely, godforsaken canyons, where a shadow might appear in the darkness and be right in your face before you even saw it. A shadow becoming a man smiling, who talked reassuringly. Behind a ski mask.

The drinking picked up considerably after that.

MILAGRO

THE CANYONS WERE QUIET TOWARD YEAR'S END. THE reason was written by Manny Lopez in one of the activity reports: "It was
too cold
for the bandits to be out." But their experiment didn't have much more time to run. The chief of police had promised Dick Snider only ninety days to clean out the bandit gangs. He complained that it wasn't their fault if activity was slow and they hadn't been able to arrest enough bandits to prove that their presence had caused the real drop in reported robberies. They started walking in San Ysidro to build up the stats. Ernie Salgado, the tallest Barfer, and Manny Lopez, his car pool companion, got assaulted by a middle-aged MexicanAmerican who tried to extort some beer money from them and slugged Ernie with a flashlight. Which was at least good for a yuk since he was arrested for
battery
on a police officer. And Joe Castillo was struck on the foot by a rock thrown by someone in the darkness. And one seventeen-year-old San Ysidro street thug tried to muscle a few bucks out of the varsity one night and, after realizing that his pollos were cops, threw a fist at Eddie Cervantes and kicked him in the face before receiving his in return. Eddie Cervantes just seemed to be the natural choice of the real bandits in the canyons as well as the play bandits of San Ysidro. He'd suffered most of the minor injuries to date. At month's end, Manny Lopez wrote disgustedly in his log: "The most exciting part of the evening was when I ripped my pants jumping over a fence."

Which made Manny decide to outfit his ragged band properly. After nearly two months in the hills they were getting ragged and grubby and
wild
looking. Pollos all wore two or three pair of pants. Women often wore two dresses and long pants underneath, since they couldn't depend on being able to carry clothes on their journeys north. When they arrived at their destinations they could peel off one layer of filthy clothes, leaving a layer of cleaner clothes for seeking employment.

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The Barfers didn't shop at Abercrombie & Fitch. They shopped at the Veterans' Thrift Shop. They had fun fighting over coats and pants and shirts, and shoes with platform heels, the kind aliens liked, which would soon be reduced to ragged strips of imitation leather by the cactus and rocks in the hills.

Manny Lopez justified the expenditure of department funds by saying, "They're getting so scroungy I'm afraid the bandits won't
wanna
hit on us. These fuckers look too low-life to have any loot."

The bill for all of their clothes was $26 and some change. The new old clothes helped their morale. But they were going to lose their Border Patrol and Customs officers very soon. Dick Snider was desperately hoping that before the ninety days were up his men could do something spectacular to convince the chief of police and the mayor that the city cops should keep BARF going even after the U.S. officers left. Ninety days just wasn't
enough
. The thing that might save his experiment, he believed, was media coverage. They weren't accomplishing a hell of a lot, because it had simply quieted down out there in the hills. Still, whatever they did the newspapers loved. If they so much as took down a couple of wildcatters, or San Ysidro teeni boppers trying to hustle them for 35 cents, it would make the papers. There were fifteen newspaper stories written about them in a month wherein they did not make one significant bandit arrest. The media were trying to create something, it seemed. What, the Barfers didn't know. And Dick Snider didn't
care
. His experiment was born of publicity and politics, and it might not die if he could somehow manipulate publicity and politicians. He encouraged his sergeant to grant a few requests from service clubs that wanted to hear about this band of cops called BARF. But Manny Lopez didn't need encouraging.

Chief of Police William Kolender was a departure from prior chiefs. He was up from the ranks, a large man with wavy brown hair styled just over his ears. He owned a good speaking voice and looked like the Hart Schaffner & Marx executive models. He was known as the first police chief in San Diego history with progressive ideas. He was skillful enough to be liked by his men, by City Hall,
and
by the media, no mean feat for a police administrator. It was not a secret that he might aspire to political office upon the completion of his police career.

Bill Kolender had in his office two flags, one of Ireland and one of Israel, a private joke made public at every first meeting. The chief invariably let a reporter, interviewer, community leader, know that he was at heart an Irish cop, but in reality a Jew, the first ever to attain such an office in this city. And he'd let you make of that what you would. Until of late he had been the object of just about any speaking request made of the police department. He was good. But now there was somebody better. Chief Kolender and all the file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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department brass had to pay attention because Manny Lopez could wow them. A natural storyteller, Manny was in his element up there, say before a Kiwanis luncheon, pointing his finger like a gun, eyebrow crawling and squiggling like crazy whenever any female caught his evil little eye. His hands flying all over the place as he dramatized how they handled this band of cutthroats in Deadman's Canyon or that band of killers in Smuggler's Gulch. And if they had another Chivas Regal handy, yes, he'd have one. Manny knew how to live: a Chivas in one hand, a Santa Fe Corona Grande in his mouth, dressed for these occasions like John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
. This police sergeant, not yet thirty years old, was a smash on the local lecture circuit. And for at least fifteen minutes after he got to the station in the afternoons he would, while sobering up, regale his scruffy, ragtag;-flea-bitten, cactus-stuck squad about the scotch they practically
poured
down his golden throat at the luncheon. And of how the ladies
loved
his performance. And the Barfers would maybe get a little envious, but they admired him. Some of the younger ones like Joe Castillo and Carlos Chacon admitted that they worshiped him. The chief of police and other department brass
had
to notice that this Mexican-American sergeant wasn't hurting the department image, not a bit. Maybe this experiment might turn into something halfway decent after all.

Right around Christmas 1976 they met the border version of the Artful Dodger. One night the varsity—Manny Lopez, Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes—were not in the canyons but walking in San Ysidro when an eight-year-old yellow Ford pulled up beside them. The car stopped and the occupants looked at the pollos, drove off, circled, parked on a side street and waited.

The Mexican woman behind the wheel studied Manny Lopez, who wore against the cold his alien field jacket, a woolen cap pulled down over his balding head, two pairs of shiny dress pants, and plastic platforms which were breaking his freaking ankles. She said, in Spanish, "Do you know where Enero Street is?"

"Oh, no," Manny Lopez told her. "We're not from here." She smiled and said, "Where do you come from?"

Pointing south, he said, "We've just come north."

"Do you have a ride?" she asked.

"No, no ride," Manny Lopez answered.

"My mother will take you to Los Angeles," the driver's companion offered.

"Get in," the driver said quickly. "
La migra
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The three cops jumped shivering into the Ford and she drove the residential streets of San Ysidro for several minutes, explaining to them that she was looking for two women and one man from El Salvador whom she had transported from Tijuana to the vicinity of the borderline at the Tijuana airport, where a guide was to bring them through the canyons. The woman had a forged passport which allowed her to cross legally. They were not able to connect with the Salvadorans. They drove instead to a home in San Ysidro where she had to make certain arrangements preparatory to taking them on to Los Angeles. She went into a modest house, leaving her daughter Olivia in the car with the three passengers. Olivia was articulate and spunky. When Manny Lopez asked her if she wasn't afraid to be left alone with three strangers, she smiled prettily. Obviously she was not.

She told them her life story. They had been smuggling aliens for about five years. She often rode with her mother around Tijuana during alien pickups. Olivia was a third-generation smuggler whose father and grandmother were still at it. Her father was living in Texas on parole for smuggling. Her grandmother was on probation, having been caught with a load of two dozen aliens. And alas, even her mother, now in the house exchanging money with other smugglers, had been the driver in that particular operation and was also caught.

"Mama must be very careful," she informed them. "The hardest part of the journey to Los Angeles is the San Clemente checkpoint."

Manny Lopez, Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes nodded soberly at this revelation and even more so at the next when she revealed more smuggler lore: "
La migra
and the San Diego police are on constant watch and they beat up prisoners!" She also informed the cops that the resident of the safe house had gotten rich by smuggling and had bought a restaurant, but had squandered his fortune in that business. Lousy restaurateur, good smuggler.