Lines and shadows (8 page)

The fourth member of "the varsity," as they began calling themselves, would vary. Manny Lopez would give the others a rotating shot at walking with the varsity. On this night it was Carlos Chacon, and very soon his extraordinarily expressive eyes would get about three times as big as the muzzle on the sawed-off 12-gauge under his coat. And the slithering question mark of a right eyebrow would be crawling all
over
the balding forehead of Manny Lopez. This, when a Tijuana bandit walked up and introduced himself. At dusk the varsity had begun walking their new foot beat on the top flatland along the international border between the Tijuana airport and Deadman's Canyon. They were about one hundred yards inside the line and were walking west. They were tense, excited, alert, but not very afraid. This was their first night posing as pollos in the canyons but they were already finding enough confidence to talk with parties of real pollos heading north. Manny Lopez bet Eddie Cervantes could fool anyone. Manny did most of the talking. Tony Puente spoke such poor Spanish he was ordered by Manny to keep his mouth shut. Carlos Chacon carried the sawed-off shotgun under the oldest and funkiest jacket he owned. The happening of note on that very first evening occurred in the vicinity of the Tijuana airport. The four cops were walking like a covey of quail, alien style, when just before nightfall they saw a blue and white Tijuana Municiple police car on a dirt road south of the fence. There were no cops inside. The cops were behind them talking through the fence to three girls who had just crossed into the United States. Three Tijuana policemen then file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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stepped over the barbed wire fence onto American soil. One of the cops caught his tan uniform pants on the wire and began to curse.

One Tijuana policeman said, "
Vengan
!" but Manny Lopez and his three men continued walking.

Then all three Tijuana cops, without wasting any more breath, simply drew their automatics, jacked rounds into the chambers and said, "
Vengan, cabrones
!" And the neophyte pollos responded. They said:

"Holy shit!"

"Hey! Hey! HEY!"

"What the fuck!"

And while the Tijuana cops were puzzled by these weird pollos babbling in English, Manny Lopez pulled his badge
and
his gun. Then his three subordinates drew
their
guns. The first evening in the canyons, their first
hours
in the canyons, there were seven cops pointing guns not at bandits but at each other.

"That's what you'd call a
righteous
Mexican standoff." Eddie Cervantes later said. But not at the moment. Nobody was thinking up at the moment. They were all staring down very large barrels and getting very tense.

"
Policfas
!" Manny Lopez warned. "
Somos policfas!"

"Ooooooh!
Policfas
! Well, we thought you were
ditos
. You weren't acting like pollos! We wanted to get back to our side," the cops told them.

But Manny Lopez wasn't buying any of it. There been too many reports of Tijuana policemen robbing aliens.

"Why don't you control the bandits from
your
side. That's where they're from," he told them in Spanish. "Now let's see some identification."

They, being on American soil, reluctantly obeyed, and Eddie Cervantes took the HandieTalkie out of the plastic drawstring "pollo bag" he was carrying and relayed the names of the Tijuana cops to communications.

Then there were many apologies while the Tijuana cops tried to convince Manny Lopez that they, too, were after bandits.

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"Cops and robbers," Manny said disgustedly in English. "These motherfuckers're cops
and
robbers! Take a walk, Jack," he said finally to the senior Tijuana policeman, who understood
that
well enough..

"What the hell kind a job is
this
going to be?" Tony Puente wanted to know as they resumed walking. He thought about Manny drawing down on them while facing their guns. He thought maybe he should start wearing his glasses even if it did blow their cover. Then it got so dark that glasses wouldn't have helped much.

When the sun dropped, the huddled masses unhuddled to begin the nightly crossing ritual. One of them was a twenty-five-year-old
campesino
named Lino Ariza. Lino Ariza was of course very frightened to begin with, and even Sipore so when he and his party were instructed by their
coyote
to remain near the international border until their guide came for them. Lino was from Durango, as was one of his companions, Luis Rodrigues. A third man, who had introduced them to the
coyote
in Tijuana, was from Jalisco. There were also three women in this crossing party whom Lino did not know. There was so much for Lino to fear waiting there—just seventy-five yards inside the line, yet so close to the lamps and noises of Colonia Libertad—that he had to relieve himself repeatedly, making many trips down the trail to disappear behind the bushes for a few moments. After his journey, and the money he had already been forced to pay, Litio had only 24 U.S. dollars left, and a

$15 wristwatch, his most prized possession, and a leather cowboy belt with a big metal buckle. That and the clothes on his back. Yet Lino Ariza was by far the richest in his party that night. And somehow these border people, the
coyotes
and guides and criminals, seemed to sense it. Or so Lino imagined.

At 10:00 P.M. they were standing on the rim of Dead-man's Canyon with their backs to the flickering lamps of Colonia Libertad. They crouched when a blue and white Tijuana police car drove slowly past the fenceless invisible line and flashed a perfunctory beam of light toward some children playing with an old truck tire.

Then the party of trembling aliens saw three shadows approaching slowly in the darkness. It was so dark the shadows were only a few yards away when they materialized. Lino immediately suspected the worst because the three men were dressed slightly better than the pollos. They wore tight jeans and warm Pendleton shirts. All had long hair past their collars and two had bandannas tied around their heads in the manner of movie pirates. And they didn't walk like pollos. They strode boldly toward them so that Lino and his party instinctively crouched down to show their submissiveness.

Lino wasn't sure who saw the knives first, but one of the women stood up screaming and began running back toward the border. It probably prevented a multiple rape, because the file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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other women panicked and followed her, leaving the bandits to deal with the squatting men.

The bandits were of course more than a bit angry at having lost the women, but there were lots more where those came from. The leader, who wore a scraggly goatee, suddenly stepped behind Lino's friend Luis and placed the blade of his knife against the throat of the terrified unprotesting alien. Lino saw a trickle of blood and when Luis began to cry, another bandit smashed him in the face with a huge rock. Luis fell to the ground whimpering and pleading.

The bandits never said anything except "
Danos tu feria"
the whole time they searched them. Only that slang demand for money. And only once. They were efficient. They didn't waste movements or breath. They got the $24 from Lino and his treasured watch and his leather belt. Luis Rodrigues, happy to be alive, gladly surrendered the only thing of value he had left, a cowboy belt with a big metal buckle. It had cost him
5
American dollars in Tijuana when he first arrived.

The cops all wore the oldest grubbies they owned and the rattiest tennis shoes, but still were not quite properly costumed. Manny Lopez was thinking of making a Salvation Army or Goodwill run to outfit his troops like proper aliens. As they got to the rim of Deadman's Canyon, they were startled by three shapes squatting in the manner of pollos. Manny Lopez, who was getting the docile inflection down pat, simply said "
Buenos noches"
very respectfully as they passed. The squatting men did not reply respectfully, nor at all. The three were wearing jeans and had collar-length hair and two wore bandannas tied around their heads.

One of the squatting men stood up. He had a scraggly goatee that fluttered in the wind. He told them in Spanish to watch out for
la migra
. And when they saw a pair of headlights in the distance which could not have been Border Patrol, he told them to duck. And then, sick and tired of the charade, and more than satisfied that these pollos were pluckable, one of the bandits walked up to Eddie Cervantes and introduced himself in a manner that the cop had never before experienced.

Eddie Cervantes had sad eyes that turned down at the Corners. He was short enough to be the brunt of all the munchkin jokes, and his gung-ho Marine haircut was boyish. He looked perhaps the easiest for the bandits to intimidate. The bandit merely smiled and brought a blade straight up, glinting in the moonlight. Without warning he grabbed Eddie Cervantes by the throat and whispered in his face, "
Hórale, cabróne
." That quickly. To be grabbed by the throat. To be staring at a blade. No by-your-leave. No how-about-a-cigarette? No foreplay.

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The cops would learn about bandit styles. The style of this trio was to intimidate through violence, not just the threat of violence. The goateed bandit swung the heavily buckled belt he'd just stolen from Lino Ariza at the face of Manny Lopez.

The bandits could not have been more surprised. There was a hell of a lot of yelling and screaming when Manny whipped out his two-inch revolver, and as it later said in the arrest report, his bandit "suffered a slight injury to his forehead as he struggled for the weapon." Which, translated into regular English, meant that Manny Lopez smacked him right between the freaking eyes.

Eddie Cervantes did not use his weapon. It happened instantly. The flash of steel, the hand at his throat. Manny yelled something, the gun cracking the bandit between the horns. Eddie Cervantes had his gun in his hand but instinctively grabbed for the knife. He kicked his bandit's balls, clear up around his head rag.

The arrest report would also say, "Only the force necessary to effect the arrests was used by the arresting officers."

But these three bandits got a
whole
lot of lumps. They were the first real bandits the cops had encountered. And they had scared the living shit out of Eddie Cervantes. And people who are scared often play catch-up.

The fact is that after Eddie Cervantes threw a shoulder into his bandit and knocked him flat and pounced on him and beat the living crap out of him, he was still very tense and very mad. He shoved his snub-nosed revolver into the teeth of the bandit and said, "I could
kill
you right now!"

And it dawned on him. He could! Out in these canyons, in the darkness, with the others still handcuffing and wrestling and beating the hell out of the other two, he
could
kill this bandit right now. His hands were shaking. He had never fired his gun outside of target practice.

"I could kill you right
now!"
he repeated, bumping the bandit's teeth with his gun muzzle.

"Don't kill me, '
mano!"
the bandit pleaded. "Don't kill me!"

"I could, you son of a bitch!" Eddie Cervantes said. "I
could!"
But he didn't.

"We were afraid to use our guns at first," he would later say. "We were still
normal
policemen."

At about the time that Eddie Cervantes was flossing the bandit's teeth with his gun muzzle, the other teams found a brace of dazed and bewildered pollos not a hundred file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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yards away in the darkness. One of them had a knife wound on his throat and a contusion on his forehead where he had been smashed by a rock. Lino Ariza and his party were driven to the substation, where they identified the bandits who had robbed them. Lino Ariza told the cops that he would give one leg and one arm if he could just make enough money to survive in Durango. He didn't see how a person could ever be happy in such a violent country as America.

When Tony Puente got home that night from the beer party to celebrate the bandit bust, he was hoping that his wife, Dene, would be awake. When he wanted something badly enough, he'd
hope
for it. He never prayed for anything since he had stopped being a Catholic. And anyway his wife—who had plunged into tract-dispensing, Bible-reading, self-denigrating Fundamentalism with a vengeance— was praying enough for both of them. . "Maybe I coulda stopped it in the beginning," he would say over and over to his comrades during the months to come. When he'd been drinking enough. Sometimes he wondered if he should have married a Mexican girl. Would it still have happened? She was, after fourteen years of marriage, not yet thirty years old. She was slender and still looked to him like the child he had married. The fact is, Tony Puente was mad about her and would remain so even when her plunge into religion would come to dominate not only her life but his. When in fact her faith would become the single most important force in
his
life.

She was not awake. It was just as well. He was drunk. But she looked so young. He didn't go to sleep. He went unconscious. The next day he couldn't remember driving home. For a while, he couldn't find his glasses.

During the last week of October 1976 there would be no less than seven newspaper stories dealing with rather routine arrests made
by the new Border Crime Task Force.
The wives and the cops themselves began searching the department stores for suitable scrapbooks. They all knew that Manny Lopez was a friend of the San Diego Police Department's press relations man, Bill Robinson. Manny called Robinson, and a good account was released to the newspapers about their first
real
bandit arrest.