On the Grind (2009) (26 page)

"We still need a plan," Rocky said. "I don't think we've crossed into Mexico yet, because the truck hasn't made a border stop."

After a minute, I realized I might have a better chance of keeping my stomach down if I was upright. With my hands still cuffed behind me, I tried to scoot across the floor to the far wall of the trailer and push myself up into a sitting position. After four or five pain-filled minutes, I finally made it. Once I was settled, I was able to look across the trailer at Rocky and see him better.

"These guys aren't going to chance a Customs stop" I said. "It would give us too good a chance to call for help."

I took several long breaths and again tried to block out the pain.

"They're also not going to be able to drive this thing into Mexico " I said. "That means we aren't going to be crossing the border in this truck."

"How, then?"

"I don't know. We've got to wait until we can see the layout of the place where they take us. We have to guess at their plan and then do this on the fly. We need to find a way to get these cuffs off. A con I know showed me once how to pick police cuffs wit
h a
nail or a straight pin. Start looking around for something I can >>

use.

Of course, we couldn't move far, so inside the trailer we found nothing.

After another half hour, the truck came to a stop and began backing up. The driver was jackknifing a reverse turn. Finally, I felt the back bumper tap a loading dock. A minute later the rear door was unbolted.

"We'll make this happen, amigo," Rocky said bravely. I wasn't as optimistic.

The trailers rear doors opened and I was surprised to see Manny Avila standing there wearing an expensive leather coat and wraparound shades. The sun was coming up over his shoulder. While we'd been rolling south, night had turned into morning.

"Get em out. lake 'em into the warehouse," Manny ordered.

Two Mexican thugs I'd never seen before moved into the truck and pulled us out. They were young bangers with 18-L tattooed in gang-style lettering across their chests like meatpacking stamps.

Rocky and I were hustled onto a large loading dock where big sliding doors led into a newly constructed concrete tilt-up warehouse.

"Put 'em in the back," Avila ordered. As I was pulled forward, I saw the white Escalade pull into the parking lot.

There were at least twenty more 18th Street Locos inside the warehouse. Some were pushing dollies, others were driving fork
-
lifts loaded with boxes of canned vegetables. They were all wearing wife-beater tees and baggy pants. There was lots of gang ink on display.

It was going to be hard to make a move with this many esse hitters standing around.

We were shoved inside an empty windowless storage room and the metal door was slammed closed and locked. There was nothing to do but wait.

"I think we're pretty close to the border," Rocky said. "I crossed near Mexicali when I was four. You can smell the sulfur and human waste that floats in the Rio Nuevo River. I remember it as a boy--a smell you don't forget."

"We won't get more than one shot at this," I said through broken teeth. "My guess is they aren't going to keep us here long. You gotta help me find something I can use to pick these cuffs."

"If I can, I will," Rocky said, looking around the empty room. "What is this place? What's with all the canned goods?"

"The produce is just cover. If I had to guess, I'd say we're in the Avilas' main transshipping point for all the Russian machine guns, Mexican dope and immigrant labor they're smuggling into L
. A
."

Chapter
52

"Mama brought me across the border about five miles east of here. The coyote was an old man with tangled white hair, who smelled of pigs. He had an empty five-hundred-gallon water truck, and six of us, all members of my family, were jammed inside. He drove us across the desert. It was over a hundred degrees --so hot I didn't think I could live for even a minute longer. Mama held my hand and whispered in my ear. She told me Jesus would protect me, and up till now He has."

Rocky and I were still sitting on the concrete floor of the windowless room waiting to see what our fate would be. It had been over an hour and nobody had opened the door.

"After the old pig farmer let us out, he led us across into the California desert," Rocky went on. "Two of my little cousins and Uncle Pepe died from heat exposure. I was only four years old, but I can still remember every moment of that trip. Sometimes, in the ring, I'd be getting hammered senseless, but in the back of m
y m
ind that little four-year-old kid would be saying, Hey, Juanito, you've been through worse"

Sitting here feeing death on the border, I realized for the first time what the Mexican immigrant experience must be like. Admittedly, I was going the wrong direction, being sneaked into, not out of, Mexico. But still, it gave me some perspective.

In L
. A
., emotions over undocumented immigrants are high and conflicted. Our schools and hospitals have become swamped with non-English-speaking illegals. Liberals want their votes, conservatives want their sweat, but nobody wants them. The situation had already triggered one riot.

Bratano was corrupt but he was born in L
. A
. Rocky was born in Mexico, but was the gold standard. It didn't change any of the state s social or economic problems, but if I survived this, it gave me something new to consider.

"Mama told me that from dark, dank places, beautiful flowers often grow," Rocky continued. "In America, she said we would be flowers. We would add to, not subtract from, the value of life there. She cleaned floors in other people's houses. I had a paper route, sold magazines door to door and worked after school in a market, but we survived. In '81, we both got amnesty. Two years later, I became a citizen. It was the proudest moment of my life."

An hour later, they came and got us. Manny Avila checked both of our cuffs, then spun each of us around and faced us.

He turned and spoke to Rocky. "You have given up everythin
g a
nd gained nothing."

"Despite all you've stolen, it is you who have nothing," Rock
y t
old him.

We w ere inarched to the rear of the warehouse, where a young, tattooed vato on a forklift was moving a stack of heavy pallets piled high with cartons of canned goods. For some reason he was lifting one pallet at a time off the pile, then repositioning it only a few feet away.

A group of 18th Street Locos stood around watching. After the last one was moved, I finally saw the reason. The pallets had covered a framed, four-foot-square hole in the poured concrete floor. Inside the opening I could see a staircase that led down into a tunnel below the building. It was lit by fluorescent tubes that ran along the east side of the ceiling.

Manny Avila pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and spoke softly. "Or ale ahora, esse."

A few minutes later a heavy wooden box was handed up out of the tunnel and passed to the waiting 18th Street Locos. It was placed on a fresh wooden pallet. Seven more boxes followed. They were each about four feet long by three feet high and were made of reinforced pine nailed together with heavy two-by-four side braces. Russian writing covered the sides of each box. More of the AK-100 machine guns that Agent Love had been tracking.

Eight boxes came out of the tunnel and were loaded onto the pallet. I estimated from their size that they contained six submachine guns each. Then four men I hadn't seen before came up the stairs. I wondered how they had carried the heavy crates.

"Inside," Manny Avila said, and pulled Rocky up from the box he'd been leaning against.

I was pushed forward, with Rocky directly behind me. We were led down a short wooden staircase, which descended about twenty feet. Once we reached the bottom, we were standing on the floor of a long, well-lit tunnel. Sitting before us was a small trolley, which ran on half-gauge tracks. Question answered.

"Walk," Manny ordered.

With two gangsters in front of us and two in back, we started down the tunnel, leaving Manny Avila near the staircase, watching us.

The tunnel narrowed and descended on a ten
-
to fifteen-degree slant. After descending for about a quarter mile, I estimated we were another twenty feet down, leaving Calexico behind, heading toward Mexicali, where we were undoubtedly going to be murdered.

Chapter
53

The tunnel became damp, collecting ground moisture the farther down we went. At its deepest spot we were forced to slog through almost an inch of blackish brown water before making the slow climb back up on the Mexican side.

Somewhere well past the halfway point Rocky stumbled and fell into me, knocking me into the vato guard in front. The man spun and in the next few seconds it got very busy. He started raining blows onto me. I ducked and dodged, with my hands cuffed helplessly behind my back. He ended the short, vicious routine with a right hook, which caught me high in the forehead, the part of the skull where the bone is the thickest. I heard one of his knuckles break as the punch landed. He screamed in pain. Rocky was being wrestled to the ground a few feet to my right. For the next couple of seconds we were back to back, sprawled across the narrow-gauge tracks on the tunnel floor.

Then I felt something sharp poking me in the kidney. I move
d m
y cuffed hands up to the middle of my hack to try to stop it and got jabbed again, this time in my left palm. Why the hell was Rocky stabbing me?

I finally figured it out. He had somehow gotten his hands on a sharp piece of metal. He jabbed it out again and this time I caught it in my right hand and wrapped my fingers around it. It was a four-inch nail, which he'd probably pulled out of that gun crate he'd been leaning against in the Calexico warehouse.

Just then I was snatched back up to my feet. The punk with the busted knuckle was standing in front of me, cradling his hand and glowering angrily. He finally pulled out his gun with his good hand, then slammed me in the head with the flat side of the automatic.

"Carechimba hijueputa ," he shouted, then hit me with it again. I went down on one knee, and struggled to retain consciousness. As I teetered there, half out of it, I fought to get my head to stop spinning.

"Flaquito ," he screamed and spit on me.

Rocky and I were then pulled up to our feet and pushed roughly through the dimly lit tunnel. I managed to slowly collect myself during the next few minutes.

The air was damp and fetid, despite the ventilation tubes punched into the tunnels ceiling every fifteen feet or so. Whoever designed this thing knew what they were doing.

I'd been through a few captured drug tunnels in the past and they usually looked like fun house exhibits where the floors and walls serpentined all over the place. Somewhere around the middle of the passage there would be a hard left or right to accommodate the fact that the diggers tunneling in one direction had to make a sharp course correction to meet up with the ones coming the other way. This tunnel was straight and true. It had been carefully engineered, attesting to the organization behind this smuggling operation.

We finally reached the far end, where another staircase waited. Rocky and I were stopped. The celador in front of me snatched up a phone mounted to the wall at the base of the staircase.

"Es Ramon. Tengo los prisoneros."

Ramon listened for a moment, hung up, then climbed the stairs and opened a reinforced wooden door.

We were led up into a carpeted basement hallway. Halfway down the corridor Ramon opened another door and flipped a light switch. Then we were pushed inside what looked like a very large laundry area containing several commercial-sized washers and dryers. There were two long folding tables in the center of the room attached to the floor with metal brackets. Along one wall were several porcelain sinks.

While his partner pointed an automatic pistol at me, Ramon removed my handcuffs and recuffed my wrists in front of me through a wrought-iron wall brace that supported a huge metal drying rack that contained half a dozen small, three-foot-square Mexican blankets. Rocky was cuffed to a similar rack on the opposite side of the room.

The four guards started patting us down, stealing everything we had in our pockets. One of them saw my belt, which had a silver buckle. He undid it and pulled it off, taking the satellite transmitter with him. Then they left, closing and locking the door behind them. I was pretty sure they were just outside waiting, so I kept my voice low.

"I thought you were trying to kill me in that tunnel," I whispered.

"You said you wanted a nail. Now get going and pick these cuffs, homes."

I shifted the nail carefully between my index finger and thumb, making sure I didn't drop it. Then I went to work on the new Hook
-
fast stainless steel handcuffs that were securing my wrists to the thick metal bracket.

Chapter
54

It only took me two minutes to pop my handcuffs open. Once I was loose I moved across the laundry room and freed Rocky. We both started looking around for anything we could use as a weapon. Almost everything in the room was bolted down.