“¿sabes qué?” Manny Lopez mumbled. “¿Sabes qué?” He was possibly talking to the young bandits, especially the one who was just about to penetrate Esther Lugo. He didn’t say “Barf!” He said, “FUCK THIS SHIT!”
And then there was lots of screaming and yelling, as a hurricane hit that tunnel. There were pollos and boy bandits flying in all directions. There were people getting slugged and kicked and sapped and punched and pistol-whipped—the right people, the wrong people. There was chaos in the tunnel, and Rosa Lugo ran to her daughter Esther and helped the hysterical little girl dress herself. Rosa Lugo could not even cry. Not at the moment.
Tony Puente was true to his costume designer, Manny Lopez. He was wearing something like Tijuana disco shoes that night. Just like some dumb shit pollo in from the country with his brand-new big-town platforms. And he was so mightily pissed he started chasing one of the boy bandits. He could hear Eddie thumping the head of another with the shotgun as he skidded past them in the darkness and out. He had his two-inch .38 in his hand and he was moving those plastic skates and the highballing boy bandit was screaming, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!”
And Tony Puente was running blindly and screaming back: “I’m gonna kill you, you bastard!”
The three cops were all family men, Tony Puente having been married so young that he even had a child the same age as Esther Lugo. “I’m gonna kill you!” he bellowed at the bandit as he smoked down a street in his disco shoes.
A street?
Suddenly he took a look around. He was running on a street. He was hotfooting by four lanes of traffic. He was taking a jog through the streets of Tijuana, in the country of Mexico, right beside a shantytown full of pals of the guy he was trying to catch.
Tony Puente passed a power station. Funnels and stacks rose up, blowing pollution on a lonely city park nearby. Why didn’t he wear his goddamn glasses? His feet were killing him and he couldn’t run anymore, but he limped very fast back to that big drainage pipe. The thug who disappeared near the brothels of Colonia Coahuila might shoot him down with ease when he crossed the highway. He peered shortsightedly toward the dark shanties. Why didn’t he wear his goddamn glasses?
When Tony Puente got safely back, the melee was over. There were five aliens giving statements to the junior varsity, which had been summoned by Handie-Talkie and was on the scene. Only one of the boy bandits had been caught, but he was the one who had been trying to rape Esther Lugo. He was looking like a train wreck by now and this made Tony Puente very happy. He hoped that the ones who had escaped back to Mexico would also need some suturing and maybe plasma.
Manny’s fists looked like dog meat and there was a most interesting conversation going on, a conversation that Tony Puente and all the cops might remember for the rest of their days.
Manny Lopez was giving his usual twenty orders per second, telling this one to call for transportation, that one to check for the motherfucker he’d busted his knuckles on, another one to get the pollos’ names for statements. And where the hell’s Tony? There he is. Where you been? Where’s Robbie Hurt with the transportation? Why doesn’t nobody listen to me? Are they all dead at communications? And the inevitable “Listen, fucker!”
Manny Lopez was least of all aware of the other half of a conversation that the Barfers were seeing and hearing amidst his litany of profanity and commands. The entire squad, varsity and junior varsity, all of them bloodied, bruised, freezing, were spellbound, because how often do you see a miracle? At least, how often do you see someone who is seeing a miracle?
The child Esther Lugo was still crying, though not so much now. But it was Rosa Lugo they were all looking at. She had attached herself to Manny Lopez. She was on her knees, there in the glass-littered, rock-jutting gully. She was on her knees and Manny was tethered to her and didn’t know it.
Manny Lopez was just doing what he does: motherfucking somebody for incompetence, threatening to open up the would-be rapist’s skull for spiders to crawl into. Manny wasn’t paying much attention to the fact that he was attached to Rosa Lugo.
The woman had him by the hand. His raw, swollen hand was being cradled in both of hers. She probably didn’t hear him cursing and screaming and fussing and fuming. She was on her knees looking up at Manny Lopez and she was apologizing to Him who had sent Manny.
She said to the sergeant: “God sent you to us. I dared to demand and in His great mercy He sent you to us!”
And Manny Lopez only became aware of the miracle that had occurred for Rosa Lugo when she continued to enrapture the squad of Barfers by taking the raw and puffy mitt and raising it to her face like a relic.
With tears streaming she kissed the hand of Manny Lopez.
“Hey, cut it out, lady!” Manny said. What is this shit?
She never heard him. She probably heard an angel song. Rosa Lugo had her miracle.
The Barfers thought they were really getting weird out there in those hills. A couple of them actually started talking about it like it was some kind of miracle. And about what’s a miracle anyway? Try telling Rosa Lugo she didn’t get a miracle. Just try.
When they got off duty they knocked back a couple bottles of hard booze. After all, it wasn’t every night you got sent Special Delivery by the Man Himself. And they talked about how twenty men could let themselves be terrorized by a few punks, and be willing to let a little girl be raped. Were they all cowards, these docile aliens? And what was courage? And what was survival? And what was a frigging miracle anyway?
The job was making their heads crazy. They were talking about things cops don’t usually talk about. This wasn’t like police work. A few of them were really glad that the ninety-day moratorium was approaching.
The rescue at the tunnel came to have some significance for Manny Lopez later that night when he had time to discuss it with Dick Snider. A dramatic rescue of a little girl just two days after Christmas? A goddamn, almost bona fide, freaking Christmas miracle? Even the Mexican state judicial police who came to collect the victims and witnesses and suspects were very appreciative, and did not criticize the San Diego cops one iota for entering Mexican territory. They don’t like rapists in religious countries like Mexico. Not one little bit.
And it was clearly possible that Dick Snider had his public relations miracle to show that his squad was doing valuable work. And that the moratorium should be lifted to give them more time to disperse the bandit gangs.
When the story was told and retold, the Barfers would invariably mention the unforgettable sight of the “old woman” kneeling at the feet of Manny Lopez and kissing his hand. It was always “the old woman.”
When asked how old they thought this woman was, they usually answered, “Well, with such a young daughter, she was probably only fifty. But she looked at least sixty. It’s a hard life down there.”
The official police report lists the correct age of Rosa Lugo. She was thirty-one, just slightly older than the “angel” whose hand she kissed. It was indeed a very hard life down there.
PARADISE LOST
EVEN THE MIRACLE COULDN’T SAVE THE TASK FORCE. THE rescue at the tunnel was given some publicity, but only on the south side of the border. It seemed that the department brass wanted this one kept as quiet as possible. It was a good piece of work all right, but they had crossed into Mexican territory to do it. It would be better to leave this one alone.
The border patrolmen and U.S. Customs officers were pulled out by their respective agencies and reassigned. On the last afternoon of the ninety-day experiment, long before sunset, the Barfers observed a group of men standing two hundred yards west of Deadman’s Canyon. They were standing by a pickup truck on the Mexican side of the border. The cops heard a gunshot, and after hitting the ground they watched the group through binoculars. One of them was calmly shooting in their direction. Target practice on the pollos in the canyon? Just then a Border Patrol observation plane flew over. They heard more gunfire. They didn’t know if the men were shooting at the aircraft
or just having a little more fun shooting at aliens. They were probably bandits who owned that section of canyon. They could shoot at anyone they damn well pleased in this no-man’s-land.
The Barfers were pretty disgusted when they hung it up that night. They hadn’t actually accomplished much in ninety days. The freaking bandits still owned a hunk of San Diego.
But they had a whale of a party to celebrate the closing of their show. They had tried in vain to convince one another and the brass that they had been boffo in the canyons. At the party everyone got good and blitzed and all the wives got very well acquainted just as they were about to part company. The U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Customs said that they’d all done a good job and the government agencies took their men back for good. Manny Lopez was a hell of an emcee, and ad-libbed like crazy with a Santa Fe Corona Grande between his teeth and a water tumbler full of Chivas Regal in each hand, because someone told him this might keep him from unconsciously pointing his finger like a gun and saying: “Listen, fucker!”
He called little Eddie Cervantes to the head table and gave him a pair of baby shoes with platform heels. He gave Renee Camacho and his pal Joe Castillo a pair of his-and-her champagne glasses. He gave Robbie Hurt an old Chevy hubcap, a ratty pair of huaraches and a switchblade knife, making him an honorary Mexican. Manny had something in his bag of tricks for everybody.
Dick Snider proved to be an excellent sport and dressed up as an Arab sheik, letting a hired belly dancer wiggle her gluteus all around him. Actually, Dick Snider was a most unhappy man. His grand experiment had not been given a chance, not as he saw it. They could have damaged the bandit gangs, given more time. He expected that now, with milder weather, the bandits would renew their attacks with a vengeance. And in fact they did.
Very shortly after the Barfers returned to ordinary sane police duty a couple of crazy things happened. It was as though the madness in the canyons was following them.
Junior varsity member Ernie Salgado was thrust into a moment of violence never experienced before nor after in his police career. He remembered watching a television interview wherein the most decorated police officer in San Diego was being given an award for lifesaving. The policeman had fatally shot a bank robber. The irony of the moment was not lost on that policeman, who commented to the interviewer: “Here I am getting an award for lifesaving. I only had to kill to get it.”
Ernie Salgado, like almost all policemen, had never fired a weapon at a human being, not since Vietnam. If it were to happen, he figured it should have happened in the canyons. Outside of the accidental shot fired by Eddie Cervantes when he used his revolver as a club, nobody had popped a single cap in the canyons.
He was sent to Northern Division and was assigned to SWAT. It was a typical San Diego Sunday morning, which meant fair weather and a quiet city. He was ordered to accompany a detective and another uniformed cop to a house where an escapee from the juvenile detention center was supposed to be hiding. He was along for this ride because the teenager was supposed to have a shotgun in his possession. Cops are, from the first day in the academy, admonished that juveniles must not be shot unless in dire emergency, but there was no sense taking any chances. And though everyone knew that escaping from a juvenile detention center was a “crime” punishable by loss of bubble gum for the week, you never knew about squirrelly kids.
Ernie Salgado’s gun was loaded first with a .54-caliber rifle slug. The next rounds were buckshot, the SWAT theory being that in a confrontation with a barricaded suspect the slug would be of some value, since officers would be at a distance. If it was a situation where a suspect was in normal shooting range, ten feet or less, the buckshot would be much more useful.
Ernie Salgado was supposed to be covering the house from the outside when they announced their presence—hence the rifle slug. Two of the people in the house came out and met the cops, who were told that the kid inside did have a shotgun. The detective wanted Ernie and his shotgun right next to him that Sunday morning.
They entered through the back door into the kitchen. The last resident to leave the house told them that the boy was in the bedroom. “The one on the right,” he said.
They crept toward that bedroom. It was getting extraordinarily warm in the house. It was oppressive, in fact. Then they saw that another bedroom door was ajar. It was the wrong bedroom. Ernie didn’t like the wrong bedroom door being ajar. Neither did the detective, and he was going to push it wide open just to feel a little better about it when … WHAM! the door slammed in his face.
Several things happened superfast for Ernie Salgado. The detective jumped to the side of the door and yelled at the kid to come out. Ernie stood in front of the door with his shotgun at the ready. The detective pushed the door open and Ernie was face to face with the kid.
It was every cop’s nightmare. The kid was standing on the bed. He was looking down at Ernie in the doorway. The boy had an over-and-under .410 shotgun of his own, and he was bringing it up to the face of the cop.
Ernie Salgado only heard one explosion. One long explosion. The longest explosion he’d ever heard outside of Nam.
But it wasn’t one long explosion. There were three rapid explosions. The boy fired both barrels. One blasted out the doorjamb just above the tall cop’s head. The other took out part of the wall and ceiling. Ernie fired once. The .54-caliber rifle slug, seven-eighths of an ounce of lead, hit the boy full in the chest and blew a hole clear through him.
There was also a visual explosion. The huge slug, which might knock down an elephant at that range, hit an aorta. The boy exploded in blood.
He died within seconds. When asked later how he felt about it, Ernie said he felt indifferent about it. He said that shortly thereafter he made a promise to himself and kept it. He said he wanted never to think about it and never did.
The violent episode experienced by Ernie Salgado during their return to ordinary sane police duty was perhaps not nearly so bizarre as an encounter by varsity member Tony Puente, whose wife was overjoyed now that the ninety-day experiment in the hills had come to an end. Maybe their life could return to normal. Maybe he’d stop coming home in the middle of the night smelling like an alien—smelling like a drunk more often than not.
It was the thing to do after they got off duty. After all, they were part of a unique police experiment and a guy needed a taste or two when he’d been stumbling around for hours out there in the black of night with strange people all around him in the darkness. How could she understand the canyons? Even he couldn’t understand the goddamn canyons.
Part of him was glad it was over. They had never, any of them, admitted how scary it was out there in no-man’s-land. Some of them hinted at unpleasant dreams. But they were baaaaad-ass cops. Way too macho to talk about it. He wondered if some of the others were relieved that it was over, no matter how much they complained about not having a fair chance to take those bandits down.
He was not glad to be back doing dreary, boring uniformed patrol, but he could always hope that some plainclothes job would open up for a Mexican. When Tony Puente had joined the San Diego Police Department eight years earlier, only 4 percent of the department had Spanish surnames. In one of America’s ten largest cities, on the very border of Mexico, the gateway to all of Latin America.
Even under the new chief there was only one Mexican out of twenty men in Homicide, one in Burglary, one in Narcotics. The Mexican cops hoped that Chief Kolender could institute some changes in the department. He had come up through the ranks. He was smart and he was no redneck. But America’s Finest City, and the police force that protected it, were very slow to change. This was a prosperous, isolated, provincial corner of America.
So if he wanted a plainclothes job, he’d better find one that was presently held by a Mexican. And he’d better wait until that Mexican got promoted, moved out, or died. Traditionally, the only chance for a Mexican was to replace another Mexican. He’d hoped that the experiment might prove something to the rest of them: that a bunch o
f Mexicans could go out there in those hills and do a job.
And that was another odd thing about those hills: dressing, talking, smelling like an alien was very very strange. Really, trying to think like someone else for the first time in his life. It made you understand that you are not a real Mexican, not even close. And yet the white majority thought of you as one. It was very hard out in those hills for some of them. It produced a culture clash in their heads.
And then on top of it he was having to cope with a religious crisis at home that was driving him goofy.
When as a boy Marine he married his child bride, his new father-in-law wouldn’t even speak to him. Bad enough the premature wedding, but to be marrying one of them? The man was eventually won over by young Tony Puente, who understood that it might not be easy for a West Virginia hillbilly to accept the prospect of “half-breed” grandchildren. Tony won him over not by being more “white” but by being more Mexican. Though his Spanish was lousy he spoke it as often as possible for his new father-in-law in those days, and the old boy was delighted by the sound of it in Tony’s soft, crackling, quiet way of talking.
And after he’d become a cop it was apparent that he was going to be a good husband to Dene and a good father to his children. Everything was going along fine for Tony Puente until she took the plunge into the all-consuming, tract-disseminating, Bible-thumping, Fundamental religion. It was mildly annoying at first, but what the hell, she’d been such a young wife and mother. He had police work and was gone much of the night, but what did she have?
But then he started reading the tenets of this religion. Only the missionary position? Wives shouldn’t undress in front of husbands? Unnecessary provocation? BULLSHIT!
Lines and Shadows Page 9
