Lines and shadows (23 page)

It was probably Joe Castillo who fired first, with the shotgun under his coat. He had one thought: Carlos was in his line of fire sitting across the gully. Then he saw Carlos moving file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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to his right. Then he noticed for the first time how vile it smelled in the gully, a dry creek that sometimes carried raw sewage from the Mexican side.

He just stood up, and realizing that the action of the shotgun would probably get jammed by his clothing as it did on the pistol range, realizing that he probably had only one shot, he removed the safety.

"It sounded real
loud
," he said of that little click. He pointed the shotgun at the belly of the bandit holding the pistol and unleashed a fireball.

Then it sounded to him like one long burst. First like an automatic weapon, then like one echoing explosion. And instantly there was the unforgettable smell of gunpowder which jetted in his nose and seemed to burn his brain. He
felt
the gunpowder clear to the base of his skull. And he was being hit in the face by lead fragments and muzzle blasts. One long explosion.

Carlos Chacon emptied a gun. Joe Vasquez emptied a gun. Joe Castillo loosed a shotgun round, and Fred Gil, who was standing closest to the bandit with the pistol—just a microsecond before the first explosion or a microsecond after—went for the bandit. Perhaps it was all the years of martial arts, perhaps not, but Fred Gil could clearly remember wanting to drive the bandit down to the ground. He did it just as the bandit was hit by the tremendous blast. And then Fred Gil was blown clear off the bandit's body during that rattle of explosions and he was lying on the ground and the bandit was lying there on top of him, crumpled between his legs, and Fred Gil kept saying over and over to himself: Be cool be cool be cool be cool. DON'T GO INTO SHOCK!

Because he knew he was shot, but didn't know where.

And during all this they were
still
shooting and Carlos Chacon thought he saw a gun in the hand of the second bandit (you see strange things out there) but they never found one and the second bandit began to run and then he began screaming "Aye! Aye! Ayeeeee!" And through all this someone kept yelling, "
Barf! Barf! Barf
!" and the noise was deafening and then Joe Castillo clearly heard Fred Gil yelling, "I'm hit! I'm hit!" Joe Castillo had tried to grab the bandit after he fired the shotgun blast and he felt a tremendous shock in his wrist when he reached for the bandit. And the first thing he did was kick the bandit who was lying on the ground. And after he kicked him he wanted to cry, not because he felt sorry for the bandit but because he was feeling excruciating pain, and he had to sit down and say, "It hurts! It hurts!"

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And they were
still
firing, and yelling, "
Barf! Barf! Barf
!" And the second bandit was running in total panic by the creek, with Joe Vasquez and Carlos Chacon chasing and firing at him. And Carlos Chacon, clearly the Barfer with the most vivid fantasies, remembers another one at that moment: ducks! Plink the little duck, he told himself. Plink the little duck. And the second bandit, who was younger than the first, cried out, "Aye!

Aye! Ayeeeee!" and fell in the cactus screaming.

Then Carlos was on him, kicking him, and Joe Vasquez was kicking him and he was still screaming. And Joe Castillo was yelling, "It hurts!" and Fred Gil was yelling, "I'm hit! I'm hit!" and Ernie Salgado ran up to Carlos and Joe Vasquez and screamed, "That's enough!" because everyone had lost control, every shred of it.

Joe Castillo was flat on the ground, his wrist shot through and through. The bullet had nicked a nerve that supplies feeling to certain fingers. Those long, graceful, fluttering fingers would never again feel certain sensations. At first Joe Castillo thought he had shot himself. But he wondered how he could have done it with the shotgun. And why wasn't his whole hand blown off if he'd somehow fired with one hand and reached in front of the muzzle? And God, it
hurt!

By now the varsity had found them. Tony Puente came running up, squinting myopicaly without his glasses, dropping compresses all over the putrid, sewer-fouled gully, and Joe Castillo was moaning, "You don't know shit about first aid! Gimme it! Put that surgical pad…"

But suddenly his fingers shot straight out at an angle, all by themselves!, And then they curved into a claw, all by themselves! And he thought for sure he was going to cry, and started yelling, "It hurts! Oooooh, it hurts!"

Still, the oldest Barfer had not budged. Because he
couldn't
. The bandit was lying across Fred Gil's legs and he felt something like paralysis in his lower body. Fred Gil didn't want to look at himself to see how badly he was hit but he couldn't help looking at the body lying across him. The bandit was in pieces. His fingers were blown away and Fred Gil could see the glistening splinters of bone. Shards glinting in the moonlight. In addition to this, the bandit had suffered bullet wounds to the right shoulder, left lower chest, left side of the back, upper spine, left elbow, and two over the right clavicle. He was motionless and his clouded eyes stared at Fred Gil.

Unlike Joe Castillo, Fred Gil was not in much pain. He was numb. He thought maybe he was hit in the thigh, but still he would not look. Actually, the wound was much higher—in the hip, as it turned out. He was only feeling extraordinarily weak and he kept talking talking talking. He hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about. Then something happened that astounded Fred Gil. At first he thought he was slipping into shock and hallucinating. He saw Carlos Chacon come close. After assuring himself file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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that Fred was not vitally wounded, Carlos leaned over the bandit. Fred Gil looked at the face of Carlos Chacon in the moonlight, at this young man only twenty-two years old. At those astonishingly expressive eyes. Eyes of a young man with a violent childhood and violent dreams.

Carlos leaned over the torn and bloody and ragged body of the bandit and began to grin. Fred Gil couldn't take his eyes off Carlos. The very white lupine incisors glistened in the moonlight. Carlos Chacon reached slowly down and poked his finger in the open eye of the bandit. Still grinning wolfishly, he poked the eyeball a second time with the tip of his index finger. Then he looked up at Fred Gil like a character from Bram Stoker and said,

"He's deeeeeeeead!"

When Carlos got up and walked away, the bandit gurgled and a little foam spewed out his mouth. Carlos, assuming it was a death rattle, turned disgustedly to say, "What a pussy!

Can't even die like a bandit!"

Then it was definitely time to get the hell
out
, because people were pouring from the shacks in Colonia Libertad and someone was setting fire to the old tires on the hillside and rolling them down on their heads.

Manny Lopez arrived, yelling, "Barf Barf Barf!" to keep from getting shot as he ran headlong into the pandemonium. The sheriff's helicopter was also zooming in with its props going WOP WOP WOP and blowing dust and debris all over them. By now the second bandit was handcuffed and lying face down on the ground. He'd been shot through and through the left side of his neck, causing minor damage. He had what the Barfers thought was an interesting leg wound. A bullet had entered through the
bottom
of his shoe while he was running and traveled up the leg and out the shin-bone. He was also shot in the other leg. The neck wound was from a shotgun pellet, and Manny Lopez, who looked about as rabid as one of the dogs that prowled the canyons, shone a light and saw the pellet protruding from the flesh of his neck. So he
stood
on the neck and said, "You shot my guys, you motherfucker!"

And while Manny was trying to see how loud the wounded bandit could scream, another miracle occurred in Deadman's Canyon. The bandit who was lying across Fred Gil, a bandit literally, blown to bits, spoke. He said, "Heeeeelp me!" They couldn't believe it. Carlos Chacon said, "He's alive! You can't kill them!" When the sheriff's helicopter, which looked like the old military bubble-tops, finally got landed on suitable ground, Manny Lopez was ministering to this bandit, trying to talk him into dying before they loaded him up. Manny was saying things like, "Fucker, you shot my guys! You cocksucker, you're dying! You got a million holes in you! You're bleeding to file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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death!" Then Manny would look over his shoulder at the approaching sheriff's deputies and slap the bandit, who couldn't have felt a hammer blow, saying, "Listen to me, asshole!

You're dying! Goddamnit, hurry up!"

He was so shot up that a slug fell from his blasted body onto the hospital bed. But he didn't die. He walked into court looking like utter catastrophe. He was in a body cast from the waist up and his shattered arm was raised and casted, with fingers gone, left there in Deadman's Canyon for the dogs. He eventually got sentenced to a couple of years in jail and Carlos Chacon tried to get him to pose for a scrapbook picture. The detectives weren't thrilled about getting called out to these godforsaken canyons where they rarely had to venture before Dick Snider dreamed up this stupid BARF idea. They were heard that night to mumble things like: "You guys are more trouble than you're worth."

And who could blame them? What with trying to protect the scene and recover evidence while a bunch of kids from Colonia Libertad were having a great old time trying to set the gringos on fire with burning tires. And yelling things in English like: "Motherfuck you!" The detectives' investigation proved two things of interest that night: first, the bandit Morales did not have a real gun. His weapon was a starter's pistol, and other bandits would notice that it was getting mighty risky to pull robberies with play guns these days. And secondly, it was probably Carlos Chacon shooting across the gully who wounded both Joe Castillo and Fred Gil. The wound of Joe Castillo was through and through with no slug found. The slug in Fred Gil was better left alone according to the surgeons, so they never recovered it. But everything indicated that the shooter was Carlos Chacon. Fred Gil would shrug and jokingly began to call Carlos "Cop Killer." And Carlos would call him "Ironsides" or "Lead Bottom." But Joe Castillo wasn't making jokes. He said that Carlos Chacon was trigger-happy and dangerous. His right hand would never be the same and Joe Castillo began to
hate
Carlos Chacon for shooting him.

Something that
all
the Barfers would begin to hate was about to happen that night. The San Diego newscasters would interrupt regular programming to make a breathless announcement: "Border shooting! Film at eleven!"

And of course ten wives went totally ape-shit and the phones at Southern substation were ringing off the hook and nobody could even tell them anything until everyone got in from the canyons. How the BARF wives would come to hate it, and come to hear it in their nightmares: "Border shooting! Film at eleven!"

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The patrol cop driving the ambulance that night was Ken Kelly. They could hear the hoot of the siren and see the flash of lights far off in the darkness from where Ken had to park. When he finally ran down to the arroyo and into Deadman's Canyon he found them lying everywhere. Manny Lopez was screaming up at the kids who were rolling the flaming tires, threatening to kill them all and cursing all the crooked lowlife scum-sucking Mexican cops who weren't there to stop the kids.

Ken Kelly could plainly see that his BARF transfer was imminent.. Manny Lopez had a couple of things on his mind about then, like calling the wives of Fred Gil and Joe Castillo. Jan Gil was easy. She had a tongue as sharp as Manny's and they had been a good match for each other at the off-duty Barf soirees.

When she answered the phone he said, "Hey, Jan, it's Manny!" And she said what
everyone
says at such moments. She said, "Is he dead?" Then Manny Lopez said, "No no, he's not dead! He got hurt is all. He's okay!" And then Manny Lopez tried to think of jokes, and pretty soon Jan Gil was laughing in relief as Manny was saying things like, "Goddamn, he's heavy! How do you handle it?

Does he get on top?"

And Jan Gil said, "I just do my best, Manny."

Calling Joe Castillo's wife, Dorothy, was another story. She was a shy little Mexican girl, the prettiest of the BARF wives. He had to be very straight with her. Then Manny had someone else to talk to. Aside from Fred Gil, the only Barfer not to shoot was Ernie Salgado. Manny Lopez didn't waste time. He confronted the tallest Barfer in front of the squad, and said, "Goddamnit, why didn't you shoot?"

"There were people in my line of fire!" Ernie Salgado said?

"I think that's bullshit," Manny Lopez said. "I think anybody that works this squad better have the balls to shoot or he better work someplace
else
." So, in addition to
very
bad feelings between Carlos Chacon and Joe Castillo, there was something bad developing here between Ernie Salgado and Manny Lopez, the car-pool partners.

Fred Gil had many vivid memories about that night in March. He remembered how they did everything wrong when they tried to get four wounded men out of those canyons. file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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First, they put Joe Castillo on a gurney. Then they put Fred Gil on top of him. And that hurt.

Then they couldn't carry the gurney up those rocky slippery trails, so they tried to carry Fred Gil by the belt. And
that
hurt.