Lines and Shadows (1984)

by Wambaugh, Jospeh

  And there was screaming: "Barf barf barf barf!"

  And there was the sound of hissing leather as guns were whipping out.

  PLOOM! BOP BOP BOP BOP!

  Joe Vasquez broke the bear hug long enough to place his two-inch .38 up against the back of the skull of the bandit and.

  It was unquestionably the loudest explosion Tony Puente had ever heard. Louder than all forty-nine rounds fired the night of the international shootout. Louder than any shotgun round in all these months he had walked these canyons.

  The round was fired in his face. His eyes were burned by the muzzle flash and stung by lead shavings. He was blinded. He was shocked.

  At the same second, or a second later, Manny Lopez was screaming something and seeing a bandit lunging at him with a knife as Manny fired.

  The bandit was spun around and started running. Then Manny shot at him one more time. And the man ran. Manny began chasing him.

  Then PLOOM! Carlos Chacon fired the shotgun point-blank into the chest of the third bandit. But the man simply turned nonchalantly and walked away. And this was like the recurring nightmare of policemen. They don't go down! You can't make these bastards go down! You shoot them and they either run away or they just turn nonchalantly as if to say, "Is that the best you can do?" And they stroll off along the edge of Deadman's Canyon.

  Manny Lopez had emptied his five-shot revolver and he was chasing his man over the canyon screaming, "You fucker! Stop or I'll kill you!" But he couldn't kill anybody. His gun was empty. They ran, and ran some more. Then the bandit ran out of gas and slowed nearly to a walk and Manny staggered up and booted him in the stomach and the bandit went down at last. Then Manny booted him twice more in the stomach and Manny went down. They lay side by side gazing at the stars, the bandit moaning in exhaustion and pain and Manny gasping for breath, thinking dizzily that he had to cut down on the booze. And then the bandit started to get up. Manny Lopez slugged him with a hand he'd broken twice. And the bandit groaned and lay back down. Then the bandit started holding his elbow and screaming. One of the shots had hit him after all and the pain had belatedly struck. A Barfer ran up with handcuffs, since Manny didn't have any.

  Carlos Chacon went for a walk toward his strolling bandit, who looked as though he might take a little nap. The bandit lay right down there in the dirt and put his face down sideways with his hands underneath him.

  Carlos Chacon's Rasputin eyes were even more so then, and he was sweating buckets because he had shot the guy point-blank and missed. The bandit was just lying there playing possum, with his hands underneath him. No doubt holding a weapon.

  Carlos was creeping up in the moonlight screaming, "MOVE AND I'M GONNA KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD! MOVE! GO AHEAD!"

  Carlos would creep a few steps closer and say, "TAKE THOSE HANDS OUT FROM UNDER THERE, YOU SON OF A BITCH! YOU HEAR ME?"

  And still nothing. So Carlos got a step closer and said. "ALL RIGHT, I'M GONNA KILL YOU, GODDAMNIT!"

  Carlos was standing over him. And still the guy wouldn't move. So Carlos squatted down ever so slowly and pulled one hand out and knelt on it. The guy didn't respond.

  So Carlos very slowly rolled him over, and as Dick Snider later put it: "There was a hole in his chest you could throw a cat through."

  Carlos hadn't missed. But he learned that, unlike everything he'd been told, people don't always get blown to the ground when you shoot them with a shotgun at point-blank range. Sometimes they just turn nonchalantly and take a little stroll for themselves.

  Carlos did his Bram Stoker number, leering at the dead man and poking his eye which was half open. Carlos ripped open the ragged bloody shirt and saw the, ragged bloody holes oozing.

  Carlos Chacon said, "I remember how I felt. Good. I felt good. I really enjoyed killing that guy. I wanted to do it some more!"

  Just then Manny Lopez came running up, and seeing his youngest cop all bent over the body of a dead bandit, thinking Carlos was going into some kind of remorseful shock, Manny started screaming in Carlos Chacon's ear: "FUCK HIM! HE'S AN ANIMAL! HE DESERVED IT!"

  And Carlos, who wasn't feeling the least bit of fear now that danger had passed, got scared shitless as Manny Lopez screamed in his face: "FUCK HIM! HE'S DEAD! GOOD FOR THE COCKSUCKER!"

  Carlos was baffled for an instant. He thought Manny was mad at him, and he was confused and frightened. Then he figured it out and said, "Manny! I don't need reassurance! I loved it!"

  During the moment or so in which all this took place, the greatest shock of all was experienced by Tony Puente. After having been in the three-way bear hug-the death hug, three panting silent young men in a death-dance polka -one of the embracers suddenly let go and the world's most gigantic explosion went off in the face of Tony Puente, and his polka partner dropped his head on Tony's shoulder like a sophomore at a prom, and his brain fluid started gumming up and welling down his neck and Tony was still embracing him, dancing, and saying, "Oh no oh no oh no!"

  Tony Puente laid his dancing partner on the ground and saw it all leaking then, behind the ear: fluid, blood, brain matter itself, and Tony started yelling at Joe Vasquez:

  "JOE, YOU FUCKED UP! YOU KILLED THE GUY! HE WASN'T HURTING ME, JOE!"

  But Big Ugly was already hauling ass after Manny and his bandit, so he didn't hear Tony's yelling.

  When Joe Vasquez came running back he said, "Are you okay, Tony?"

  "Why did you shoot him?" Tony cried.

  Big Ugly said, "Tony! He was trying to stab you!"

  "I didn't see any knife," Tony said.

  Joe Vasquez pointed down under the body of the bandit, who was moaning and gagging. And there it was. A long blade with the handle wrapped in tape. A stabbing knife.

  The Border Patrol came flying in with a helicopter after the calls went out. They landed thirty feet from the crime scene and blew everything into Deadman's Canyon, and Manny Lopez said, "Aw fuck it!" and they started dragging the two living bandits out.

  Ken Kelly was enjoying his night off by trying to get things back together with his wife. In fact they were on the floor watching television and making love when he heard something that the wives had heard for fifteen months now. "Border shooting! Film at eleven!"

  That was the end of the lovemaking. Especially when the announcer added, "At least one dead!" He didn't say who.

  Ken Kelly sped down 1-5, crying. He lived twelve minutes from the station. He made it in five. He found Carlos Chacon at the station looking like a homerun hitter doing a high five. He decided that Carlos was more psycho than Manny Lopez. He saw Joe Vasquez looking like trouble. Manny Lopez asked Ken to go to the hospital and report back on the head-shot bandit.

  Ken Kelly had to force his way into the intensive care unit after a lot of arguing. He was there for four hours. He had never actually seen anyone die before. After a time he and a starched nurse of the old school were left alone with the patient.

  Ken Kelly became interested in all of it. The bandit had a wrapping around his entire head. Only his face showed. He was a good looking guy about Ken's age. His arms were covered with tattoos and heroin tracks. Both this bandit and the other even had neck tracks. But he was powerful looking. Ken stared and thought, I wouldn't want to fight him.

  The bandit was breathing and moaning from time to time. He was hooked to a machine that gave digital readouts: blood pressure, pulse, respiration. The nurse was sucking brain matter out of his throat because he was leaking.

  It was interesting to watch the pulse and blood pressure and respiration building. The patient's system was taking over and fighting to live.

  "His blood pressure's super," Ken observed. But his pulse was 180 and climbing. Then Ken said, "Isn't there something we can do for him?" Ken Kelly was pulling for the bandit.

  The patient was wearing a cross and it got to Ken, who was Lutheran enough not to like women who worshiped devils. He was mightily disturbed by this young man's dying.

  The nurse said, "Don't get upset just because a doctor's not here.
He's had irrevocable brain damage. The only use he has to the world now is that he's got a good heart and lungs. If we had permission we'd take his organs. He's young and strong."

  And Ken got mad and sad at the same time, and thought: The stupid bastard. Barf hadn't even planned to go out that night which is why Ken had the night off. The stupid bad-luck bastard.

  And then Ken thought: He's got a good heart and lungs. It's the nicest thing anybody can think of to say about this dying young guy.

  In the next hour his blood pressure, pulse and respiration started to drop. Then it jumped a little and then it dropped. Then up a notch and down a few more. His vital signs were way down and then his pulse got down to forty-six. Ken Kelly would never forget the number. Because then the little humming noise started.

  The nurse looked at her watch and said, "Well, I don't have to suction him out anymore."

  Ken was left all alone with the bandit and he thought: This is amazing! This is an amazing fucking thing! This guy's really dead!

  And Ken simply couldn't help himself and he was afraid someone would see him and think he was some kind of pussy or wimp or something but he couldn't help himself. He put his hand on the bandaged head and whispered, "God bless you."

  Ken Kelly telephoned the Southern substation and reported the bandit's death to Ernie Salgado. Then he asked to speak to Joe Vasquez.

  When Big Ugly got on the phone Ken said, "Joe, I wanted you to know that the guy just died. I was here with him the whole time and I just wanted you to know."

  Ken heard a strange voice that was nothing like his friend, smiling uncomplaining Joe Vasquez, who rarely went out partying with the guys, and called his wife his best friend, and talked about adopting a baby because they couldn't seem to have any.

  The voice Ken heard, which was Joe but wasn't Joe, said, "I don't give a shit! Fuck him!"

  "Well," Ken Kelly said, "I just wanted you to know I blessed him for you. I just wanted you to know."

  But Joe Vasquez didn't reply. And he never talked about it to Ken Kelly or any of the other Barfers.

  Big Ugly always talked in a sincere, halting fashion. He smiled easily and genuinely. When he finally talked about that night he said, "It's a weird thing. People more or less congratulate you cause you killed somebody. Ernie was on the phone and he came in and shook my hand and said, 'Congratulations. You got your first one'"

  "Thanks," Joe Vasquez said to Ernie. But then he thought: This isn't a good thing. He didn't like the feeling.

  Joe Vasquez had to deal with questions. People would say, "What was the guy like you killed?"

  And Joe Vasquez would say, "I don't know. I don't remember. I don't even know his name. He was just some Mexican. Just some hype. I don't care to know his name."

  Joe Vasquez, the most stoic and private of any of them, spoke about it briefly to his wife and once to his parents. Everyone told him that he'd saved Tony Puente's life and he decided that further comment was pointless.

  Joe Vasquez would only say, "I had to deal with it for quite a while. Like, for a long time I was saying things like: 'Yeah, I shot the guy and the guy died.' Like, he died of his injuries. He died, I never could say I killed him. That I killed the guy. It took me awhile to say I killed the guy."

  Before that night, Joe Vasquez had been experiencing a burgeoning kind of excitement out in the canyons. It had grown to an unbearable intensity. And then it literally all blew up in his face.

  "I guess that was my last hurrah," Joe Vasquez said, And some things were never the same for him after that.

  Joe Vasquez usually talked in drug terms, a "quarter" being .25 gram of heroin, worth $25. The final thing he would say on the subject was: "They robbed us to get drugs. The one that lived told that to the detectives. I used to think that if I'da known that this guy needed a fix that bad I'da went and scored a quarter for him, you know, rather than take his life. I felt that strong about it for a long time. It's something that's gonna, you know, be there the rest a my life."

  About the bandit Carlos Chacon killed, Joe Vasquez said, "Carlos is weird. He's a weird person. He gets excited about weird things."

  Carlos Chacon said he wanted the nine .32-caliber shotgun pellets they dug out of his bandit's chest. For a necklace. Carlos was joking, maybe. But he did order autopsy shots of the dead bandits from the coroner. Some Barfer scrapbooks contained more memorabilia than others.

  The next day they all went out to the canyon with homicide detectives to reenact the shooting and they found something startling. The chopper had blown everything that attested to the shooting right off into Deadman's Canyon, and yet, in the exact spot that Carlos Chacon and Joe Vasquez had killed the bandits, the people of Colonia Libertad had placed markers. There on the ground were two crosses formed by rocks. The people of Mexico believed in marking the fall of a sparrow and other creatures of the canyon.

  Chapter TWENTY

  DARK CROSSING

  SO FINALLY THE BARF SQUAD HAD MANAGED TO KILL A couple of people. It had been getting eerie what with all the people being shot down out there and nobody dying. It had been too much like the policeman's recurring nightmare of the killer who won't die no matter how many times you shoot him. Now that two bandits had died there was a secret wave of relief sweeping over some of them who hadn't forgotten that the chief of police had said that if someone died out there he would discontinue the experiment.

  In their heart of hearts some of them were praying that the chief would let the death of two bandits satisfy the requirement and stop this Thing before it killed them all.

  In fact, he did. And the next couple of months were like being reborn. Of course there were adjustments to make for people who hadn't done ordinary sane normal police work for so long. Manny Lopez warned the brass that they couldn't expect his people not to overreact now that they were to return to regular duty.

  This was now the time of Confession. And there is no one in the world, not anyone in history, not Saint Augustine, not Paul after being coldcocked by a bandit, or whoever it was, on the road to Damascus, nobody in the Vatican itself, who has ever had the need to confess like your average faith-shaken, stress-ridden American cop. They are the all-time world champ Confessors. Once you get them going they can't stop confessing. They'll start spilling and singing ten times louder and longer than the most eager confessor at a judiciales soda pop interrogation.

  Everyone who has been a police department's Internal Affairs headhunter, or a district attorney's hatchet man, or part of one of the million or so "crime commissions" which purportedly uncover malfeasance, marvels at the confessor mentality of police officers. It's part of their makeup and it's what makes them such terrific victims, especially since they're usually too macho even to know they're victims. That's why the early conversation at police reunions and retirement parties usually entails discovering how many of the old classmates have seen whatever it is they see deep in the darkness of their own gun muzzles just before they smoke it.

  In any case, the Barfers started confessing. There were Barf wives weeping all over town as the boys told them about the waitresses and the nurses and the schoolteachers and all the goddamn blood drinkers and geriatric titillaters, all those who ran amok amongst them, obsessed with the myths and legends of America. And how they didn't want to be the last of the Gunslingers anymore and just wanted to settle down to being ordinary sane normal cops and husbands and fathers. Mea culpa, mea culpa.

  So there was weeping and confessing and forgiving, and some of the more unstable Barfers were trying to pull themselves together and there were lots of promises about how things would be different and how they were going to cut out the booze and how they would never look at another woman as long as they lived. Mea maxima culpa.

  And then, right around April Fool's Day 1978, the Barf wives read some very ominous headlines in the San Diego newspapers. Such as: BORDER BANDIT ACTIVITY ON THE RISE.

  On April 5th a boy pollo was summarily shot to death by a bandit gang operating on
the west side.

  By the 12th of April the Gunslingers were right back in the hills slinging like crazy.

  By 7:40 P. M. that night, the Barfers had already been confronted by three knife-wielding bandits who, just before Manny could say "Sabes " were scared off by a Border Patrol helicopter which came swooping in and screwing up the Barfers' timing.

  Manny Lopez chased one toward the border fence and fired a round at the crook as soon as he was nearly close enough to get stabbed. The shot missed but the terrified bandit hit the deck and knocked himself out anyway.

  And before the department brass even had time to reassess the wisdom of reactivating this dangerous experiment, in fact on the very next night, there was another shootout with a deadlier gang. And this time Manny Lopez had an epiphany. It was such an awesome moment in the life of the thirty-one-year-old Barf sergeant that some people claimed it actually drove him sane.

  The murder that had occurred on April 5th was in the canyon two miles west of the port of entry. The entire Barf squad went out there now, with the cover team of Robbie Hurt and Ken Kelly parking some distance away from the walking teams. As it turned out, too far away.

  The early evening was a drag. Robbie and Ken talked about the probationary sentence and fine the court had given Ken for hitting the citizen with a flashlight, which sent Ken back to the credit union for anothe, loan to keep from wearing stripes. Then they bitched about Ernie Salgado being on the radio this night because he yelled. And they especially hated it when Carlos Chacon was the radio man, because his excitement level made communication almost impossible.

  Ken Kelly explained: "When they're upset it's like trying to convince your wife that lipstick stains are all part a the job. You just can't, especially when you have so many priors. It's no good saying, 'Unless you got pictures, it wasn't me!'"

  In short, you couldn't calm them down when they were on the air during hot times.