Lines and shadows (31 page)

Renee Camacho heard BOP BOP BOP BOP BOP! "AAAAYEEEEEEEEEEE!" file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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Manny's first shot was at the man with the rifle. The next at the bandit with the pistol. Then one into Loco
point-blank
. Then two more at the fourth man, who was holding an unknown object. Then his five-shot revolver was empty.

Eddie Cervantes was out and shooting and Manny was screaming, "
Barf barf barf barf
!" Renee Camacho scrambled out the north end of the pipe, firing the shotgun at a running figure, and Carlos Chacon heard KAPLOOM KAPLOOM! and leaped up in time to see a man on the Mexican side scream and tumble down a hill into a gully. Tony Puente couldn't get out of the goddamn pipe because Renee Camacho was frozen there blocking his exit, still firing the shotgun.

Tony could hear muffled pistol shots and hear Eddie Cervantes screaming, "Get cover! Get cover!"

Then Renee Camacho dropped his shotgun and snapped off five pistol shots: BOP BOP

BOP BOP BOP! and someone kept screaming, "AAAAAYYYEEEEEEEEEEE!" Two things happened later that night. One, a man staggered into a Tijuana hospital with his legs torn apart by #4 buckshot, which consisted of 27 pellets of .25-caliber shot. He was arrested by
judiciales
. Second, a man shot through the chest joined a party uninvited in a little house near the Mexican border. He dampened the festive spirit by crashing through the patio, his chest covered with blood, scaring the hell out of the partygoers, only to stumble out again, never to be found.

Eddie Cervantes had fired one round and raced after a bandit for half a block into Mexico, firing a last round at the fleeing robber before turning and running like hell back toward the border.

Renee was yelling, "Where's Manny? Where's Manny?" and someone was hollering at him over the radio and Carlos was standing by the fence on the north side screaming, "Where's Lopez?"

Then they heard Manny yell, "I got Loco! Gimme some
help!"
Manny Lopez and El Loco were at the bottom of the gully beating the living shit out of each other. Then PLOOM PLOOM PLOOM PLOOM!

Four shots were suddenly fired at the Barfers from the darkness, wanging off the border fence and sending them flying in all directions. Loco fought and resisted all the way back down the fence line to the nearest hole, even though badly wounded, even as Manny pistol

-whipped him and dragged him through. Loco was feeling the shock of
real
pain by now and was screaming curses.

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Tony Puente heard a BOP! and WANG! as another small-caliber slug ricocheted, and overhead the Border Patrol helicopter was roaring in.

Then Carlos Chacon heard four
more
rounds fired in their direction from the darkness south of the border.

When all the pandemonium had subsided a bit and Loco was safely back on the U.S. side and the cover team and junior varsity were rushing into the canyon, they all gathered around the wounded bandit, who was flat on his back feeling the full impact of Manny's bullet, which had broken his thigh and lodged in his hip. Someone shone a flashlight in Loco's face and Manny jerked off the ski mask for them all to take a look. He was dirty and bearded and hairy. He cried out in agony every few seconds. And if it had been a western movie, the victorious Gunslinger might at this point have expressed a little compassion for a fallen adversary. But Manny Lopez wasn't much for westerns except maybe
The Searchers
, where John Wayne
scalped
his fallen foe. Manny Lopez, with all the compassion of a Mafia car-bomber, knelt over the writhing bandit, saying things like: "I hope you die of gangrene. I hope it broke bones. I hope it hurts like cancer."

A few interesting things occurred after they got Loco to the hospital. First, they found out why he always wore a mask. His name was Sanchez and he was a bit shy about being recognized because he was an escapee from the California state prison at Lompoc. He didn't want any trouble with American lawmen looking for fugitives. While Loco was at the hospital, he made a statement to one of the Barfers which everyone thought was unintentionally hilarious. Loco said, "Just because you got me, don't think it's going to stop. Tell Lopez he can't stop it."

The Barfers got to release quite a bit of stress and tension when they heard about
that
one. It was the funniest thing they'd heard lately.

Someone said, "Did you tell the dumb bastard that Manny Lopez doesn't give a shit if they murder every pollo from here to Yucatan? Did you tell the dumb bastard that Manny's already on the phone with a press release? Did you tell him Manny
never
wants it to end?" A thing they discovered then was that they had been mistaken when they thought that bandits smelled like garbage. It became clear in the substation when Manny was pointing at the ulcerous needle marks and pustules on the arms of a bandit junkie brought in by the junior varsity. This bandit was horrible to look at, with a low feral forehead and mucusfile://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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clogged cavernous nostrils, with mossy scattered teeth and rotting white gum tissue. He had to cough balls of rusty phlegm every few minutes and they could look at the yellow fingernails and drum-tight jaundiced flesh and imagine fly's eggs. He smelled
deathly
. Then Manny accidentally poked one of the flaming needle abscesses and the abscess popped and pus shot all over him. The smell of putrefied gas and decay filled the room.
That's
what bandits smelled like. In that so much of the tissue of their bodies was infected and abscessed, they smelled of putrefaction. Flesh dying or dead. So now there was another little nightmarish notion. As Manny Lopez led them toward the next headline, they could do a little mind fucking with this brand-new idea: Bandits even
smelled
like death. Bandits smelled like
murder
. And there was something else to contend with, something crazy and confusing that night. Manny Lopez was sitting there chatty and cheerful, getting ready for the reporters. Eddie Cervantes, Tony Puente and Renee Camacho were bumping into things, trying to sort out all
kinds
of emotions, having just shot people and nearly been shot after having witnessed the incredible horrifying moment when Manny vanished. In short, they were responding to enormous stress in a normal fashion. But Manny Lopez looked as though he'd just been to a good football game and his team had kicked a field goal, at the gun. His response to all of this wasn't human, they said. And worse than that, they were starting to believe that somehow the bastard was invulnerable. They began to get nightmarish ideas that they were all going to be murdered and there he'd be, chatty and cheerful, like he'd got the date with the homecoming queen.

It was pretty hard for some of them to admit it, given the demands of Mexican
machismo
, but despite claims to the contrary it was latent in every utterance concerning Manny Lopez from that night on. They didn't know why for sure, but they came
to fear
him. Not the way they feared murder, but
real
fear nonetheless.

There was yet another mind bender on the night Manny vanished, something to fry your brain over. The way it looked down there in the Mexican gully. Loco and Manny, the two of them. The same height and weight, born just
days
of each other. Separated in life by an imaginary line. Sanchez and Lopez. Under a Mexican sky: thrashing, moaning, cursing each other in the same language. Looking like twins in the darkness, twin silhouettes. Forcing you to think, what if Sanchez had been born north and Lopez south of a shadowy line. Would it
still
have ended like this? Was a choice made somewhere? Or was it all decreed by the Drawer of Imaginary Lines?

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EXORCISM

ANXIETY DREAMS ARE RAMPANT AMONG POLICE OFFICERS. In the dreams the cop is shooting at a gunman who refuses to die or fall or even drop his gun. The cop keeps firing but the bullets have no effect. However, very few cops have the dream come to life. On the night of Loco's capture, Renee Camacho had fired the shotgun twice at a bandit who was aiming a gun at him. The bandit dropped but got up and pointed it again. Renee fired a third time, and then fired a fourth when the man turned and ran. It was disturbing, but not as disturbing as what Renee Camacho felt when he heard that the man he shot was alive in a Tijuana hospital. He felt profound
disappointment
. Then fear for himself for feeling such disappointment.

"What's happening to me?" he asked his father, friend and confidant, Herbert Camacho.

"Renee, I know you think it's not right for a policeman to have such feelings," his father said as they shared a beer in his little barbershop at Thirteenth and Market Streets.

"I've never
been
in a situation like this, Dad!" Renee Camacho's tenor voice quivered even as he recounted the moment.

"You're doing a very different kind of police work,
mi hijo,"
the barber told Renee, his only child except for an orphaned nephew the Camachos had raised as their own. "But I was
sorry
he lived!" Renee said. "Next thing you know, I'll
kill
a bandit who's only reaching to scratch an itch!"

Herbert Camacho, who was perhaps already aware of a cancer which would kill him, said,

"If these feelings make you shoot too soon, I'd rather have it that way. I'd rather have you kill someone and be wrong than hesitate and
be
killed." Distilled to cop language:
Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six
. Renee had always been a lad quick to smile and be happy, but throughout the many troubled conversations he had with his father, there was seldom mentioned the alternative. The alternative was so simple and so complicated that not a Barfer could manage it. The alternative was to walk up to Manny Lopez and say, "I quit. I've had enough. I want to go back to uniformed patrol." Period.

It was sacrilege, a breach of the
machismo
code of both cops and Mexicans, and in this way they were very close to being
real
Mexicans.

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But there was someone who might have been thinking of it before any of them, that is, thinking of a way to deal with it before it happened. Manny Lopez began badmouthing the young cop who had left the squad after the ninety-day moratorium, which now seemed a generation ago. He said that cop was a quitter. He told them that anyone who quit BARF

would quit anything, any challenge for the rest of his life. He told them how they'd hate themselves and never be worth a damn if they quit.

There was not as yet much talk among themselves about fear. Only about those fears that it was possible to discuss, those that didn't violate the code. For instance, Eddie Cervantes often talked about the rampant disease among bandits: hepatitis, venereal disease, tuberculosis, the overwhelming smell of decaying flesh and what it implied.

"I'm scared," he would say. But then would quickly add: "I mean, I'm scared to go home and kiss my kids."

Other little things were happening. When they'd go to the range to practice with the shotgun, Barfers who had previously been good shots began to experience difficulties with accuracy and loading. They would line up in a semicircle and fire on multiple targets with shotguns and revolvers, and the lead shavings would jump from the cylinders right into the next shooter's face and the gunpowder would surge into the nostrils as Manny Lopez yelled target numbers to shoot.

Robbie Hurt, who was right-handed, had a dominant left eye and they belatedly discovered that he could hardly shoot a shotgun at all, which wasn't comforting. Ernie Salgado, who could, kept screwing up, and Manny Lopez started yelling at him. Renee Camacho by this time could hardly move, he had so many bullets stashed all over his goddamn body. He was nearly as much of a walking armory as Joe Castillo. And Joe had a dark secret he was not sharing with any human being. It was the same secret that Renee Camacho and Ernie Salgado and Eddie Cervantes and Fred Gil were also keeping to themselves. The secret was that they couldn't shake a feeling of doom. Each one had it and thought he was the only one who did.

They needed a murder hospice:
We're here to prepare you for a man who will appear in the
darkness like a ghost. He will smell like death
…

Renee Camacho by now was always looking at his wife's pregnant stomach and wondering what their child would look like. He'd break into a sweat when a hot shiver swept over him. Then things started to happen: the sky
did
look bluer. Grass
did
look greener!

Joe Castillo kept having a similar feeling. I want to enjoy life. I want to be
alive
. And because he wanted it so badly, he began drinking and carousing all the more and treating himself more shabbily. "I walked around not giving a
shit,"
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They all started to have that feeling. I don't give a damn. Who cares? What's any of it worth? They
all
began feeling like a minority within a minority within a minority. They didn't want any part of ordinary police chores. When they were assigned to a policing detail for a Mexican holiday, they, resented it. "Why us? Why do
we
have to do it?" Manny Lopez said, "Because you're Mexicans, you dumb fuckers!" They felt so isolated, so elite
(We who are about to die )
that they isolated themselves and
acted
elite. Whether or not the patrol cops resented the way they looked, dressed, behaved, their
perception
was that they were objects of resentment and jealousy. The homicide detectives clearly resented them, since homicide detectives quite understandably didn't care to spend their nights in those hills because these vigilantes were shooting the canyons to pieces. Almost a law unto themselves, they remained the darlings and pets of the media and politicians—The Last of The Gunslingers.