Then Carlos Chacon began screaming: “I’m hit!”
While they were kneeling over Carlos Chacon, tearing his bulletproof vest away, the Tijuana patrol car started up and drove away!
They had been looking for the skinny cop, expecting to find him lying in wait by the pipe, or dead. Then the car left. Was there a third one? The skinny one must be hiding in the pipe waiting to ambush them. Did one of the drunks drive the goddamn car away?
They later discovered that Officer Pedro Espindola, suffering four wounds, three in the back and one in the leg, dragged his body through the drainage pipe, up onto the highway, crawled into the patrol car, and escaped.
The Barfers were learning that Mexican cops were as hard to kill as Mexican bandits. There were some very tough people down there.
Carlos Chacon was on the ground screaming, “DON’T MOVE ME!” And Manny Lopez was on his feet trying to quell the pandemonium by yelling orders.
Tony Puente got on the Handie-Talkie and screamed, “Goddamnit! I can’t make it work!”
So Manny Lopez took it and turned it on, allowing Tony to start screaming into it.
Everything was interrupted just then. They heard several sirens approaching. Then they heard dozens of sirens approaching. From the south! The sky was lit for a mile by red and blue siren lights, and the sound of those Tijuana police sirens scared the living hell out of every man.
Then Manny Lopez yelled, “Let’s go!”
But there were two wounded men and somebody was trying to get a dressing on the arm of Carlos Chacon, who was yelling about an artery, and Carlos Chacon remembers thinking: If I’m hit in the artery, I’ll be dead in three minutes!
And Joe Castillo, who hated Carlos Chacon, wounded or not, remembers thinking: Artery? So what? He’s got no blood in his veins, the pussy! I got shot by him and I wasn’t screaming about a goddamn artery. Screaming like a pig!
Then Carlos Chacon yelled, “If I start to go, give me mouth-to-mouth!”
And somebody, probably Joe Castillo, yelled back, “Fuck your mouth-to-mouth, you faggot!”
And then everybody—shooters, wounded, jokers, maniacs, all of them—started trying to truck on out, because those blue and white patrol cars, as well as plainclothes cars of the judiciales, were all over that highway. Suddenly they could see nothing but those pale guayabera shirts out there in the darkness. And they heard the sound of thirty men hitting that cyclone fence and they knew that the judiciales were coming! And somebody might soon be drinking soda pop through his fucking nose if he even lived that long! And then they saw clearly in silhouette that one of the judiciales was carrying a Tommy gun!
A Border Patrol helicopter responding to the chaos on the airwaves swooped in, illuminating the whole pack of them huddling there trying to tend to the wounded, and Manny got on the Handie-Talkie and said, “Tell those border patrolmen to turn off the light or I’ll shoot the fucking chopper down!”
Except that they weren’t going to shoot anything down. They had shot their wad. Everybody had either used up his ammunition or dropped it in the confusion of reloading.
Three Barfers started yelling simultaneously: “I’M OUT A AMMO!”
The wounded were carried, dragged, pushed, pulled, and—with the head of Chuey Hernandez in the painful headlock of Manny Lopez—everyone started running north toward the sound of an ambulance approaching from the substation. Toward Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt, who were careening over the dirt road in two vehicles, each having what he was sure was his third or fourth heart attack of the month.
While all of this was going on, Joe Vasquez, who had the shotgun that night and had finally gotten it unjammed, was staying closest to the fence, covering the retreat. He was fascinated watching all those cars screaming up the Mexican highway, sliding and skidding to a stop near the hole in the fence.
Within seconds the first dozen uniformed cops hit that cyclone fence. Then the judiciales roared up. Then another patrol car. Then another. Then six patrol cars, traveling two abreast and damn the oncoming traffic! Then half a dozen plainclothes cars containing more judiciales. Then Joe Vasquez saw the judicial with the Tommy gun and he thought: That’s it. Time to go.
He turned around and yelled, “That’s it! Time to …”
He was talking to himself. They had gone. When the chopper was hovering overhead, lighting them like quail, the noise had obscured all the frantic commands. The rest of them, carrying and dragging Carlos Chacon and Chuey Hernandez, had simply gone.
Big Ugly was left behind. He was all alone. The guaya-bera shirts were running ahead of the uniformed cops. They were running in his direction with flashlight beams criss-crossing the brush.
There was a surprised border patrolman parked in a jeep on the mesa that night who saw a fierce-looking pollo screaming toward him at a pace that would qualify for the police Olympics.
Joe Vasquez found the Border Patrol on the high point and started waving his badge in the lights, yelling, “Get me out a here!”
The Mexican police began firing, probably at some poor pollos caught in the brush. They were on the radio to the San Diego sheriff’s helicopter saying, “Help us. Some bandits shot our men!”
Pedro Espindola never knew until later that Manny and his men were cops. He made it to the hospital still conscious. He survived his four wounds and eventually returned to duty.
Chuey Hernandez suffered two bullet wounds that night. One lodged in the abdominal area; the other passed through his arm. The San Diego crime lab determined that he had been shot by Carlos Chacon. Chuey Hernandez was in the hospital in San Diego for fifteen days. When his wife, Miki, came to see him, she couldn’t stop crying. The two of them talked with San Diego police detectives but at first neither could understand why Chuey had been shot. Within a few days she no longer had access to her husband because of rules pertaining to prisoners. She was allowed to visit him during prisoners’ visiting hours after he was officially charged with criminal assault. Chuey Hernandez never wanted his mother to know, because she had a serious heart condition. Even though she lived with him, the whole family kept the secret scrupulously. The old woman was told that her son was taken to a San Diego hospital for a hernia operation.
Chuey Hernandez was lucky. His wife was a nurse and could help him when he was released from the hospital. Of course she had to take a leave from her nursing job to tend to her husband during his recuperation at home. Chuey Hernandez also needed a criminal lawyer to defend him against the charges in San Diego. The lawyer required $1,500 for his services, but Chuey Hernandez earned only about $45 a week. They were able to borrow the money against their house. According to the banker, the house was worth $3,000. The medical bills and lawyer’s fees finally proved overwhelming and Chuey Hernandez lost his house and had to live in a rented house from that day on. With the children and his mother.
Miki Hernandez had to nurse her husband for two months during the time that their world was crumbling. She had considerable hatred for the San Diego police after that.
Chuey Hernandez returned to duty with the Tijuana Municipal Police and had lots more to worry about than whether his lip would fall asleep.
“I always admired the policemen of San Diego so much,” he said. “I always wished I could be one. Of course that was only a dream.”
It was touch and go for Manuel Smith, the San Diego police liaison officer to Mexico. Upon being called in to conduct the negotiations between the police departments of San Diego and Tijuana, he was shocked to learn that the wounded Tijuana cop was Chuey Hernandez, whom he had known casually from his many dealings with the Mexican police. And with so many relatives all over the Baja Peninsula he was doubly shocked to discover that Chuey’s wife, Miki, was a distant cousin of the Smiths’.
Of course it wouldn’t be pleasant for any San Diego cop whose job it was to maintain liaison with the Mexican police. The first thing heard publicly was Manny Lopez being interviewed on television to the effect that the Tijuana cops had tried to rob the
m. And whether Chuey Hernandez was shot six feet north or six feet south of the imaginary line, or whether he jerked the trigger out of reflex when Manny Lopez brought a gun up in his face, or whether the left side of his brain should have understood the sound ¡Policías! coming from Manny Lopez’ lips, or whether the sound did indeed come from Manny Lopez’ lips, would be relevant to men and women who manipulate the most ponderous legal machinery on the face of the earth. But none of it was very relevant to the Mexican police, who, like Chuey Hernandez, simply could not begin to fathom any of it.
Despite any personal turmoil within, Manuel Smith had to bite the bullet and back his own police department all the way. And he did. He interviewed Chuey Hernandez in the hospital and elicited a statement from the wounded Mexican cop that he had heard the word ¡Policías! come from Manny Lopez a fraction of a second before the shooting, but that it didn’t make any difference because he would never have believed these were any kind of cops.
“Why would I try to shoot seven policemen if I knew they were policemen?” Chuey Hernandez cried out in anguish. “I don’t understand!”
And when Manuel Smith attempted to elicit a statement tending to verify the BARF allegation that they were about to be robbed by bandit cops, Chuey Hernandez began to sob.
“No one would have thought they were pollos,” he said. “Pollos would run away or obey me. No pollo ever acted like these. I thought they were robbers!”
Then Manuel Smith went south try to explain it to the Tijuana police, and judiciales. To people who were his friends and who were never less than good to him. He found Deputy Chief Verber of the Tijuana Municipal Police. The man was weeping.
He said to Manuel Smith, “Seven of your men? With bulletproof vests and shotguns? And my two officers in full uniform in a police car? Now they’re saying my men were bandits? They’re saying we’re all crooks? I don’t understand!”
But from that night on, the only thing that seemed important to the U.S. authorities, at least as far as the Mexicans were concerned, was whether Chuey Hernandez was standing a body length north of an imaginary line or a body length south of it. And which pad of flesh on the index finger of which armed policeman was flattened against a metal rod with or without a willful signal from the left side of the brain. And whether or not the unsolicited line from Manny Lopez—“We don’t have any money”—was designed to lure and entice Chuey Hernandez or to verify an evil intent to rob already preexisting in the mind of Chuey Hernandez. Or whether it just insulted the hell out of an already angry cop who was being defied by some baffling behavior.
But if one did not hold a degree in jurisprudence and was not concerned with logistical matters involving imaginary lines, or with neurological signals, or coded laws of entrapment, or cultural considerations of mordida, then one might, like Joe Castillo, crystallize it all rather succinctly: “It was just like on Gunsmoke!”
So there it was. Manny Lopez had braced the bad cops. He had by now drawn against guns numerous times, something very few lawmen outside of movies have done even once. Something police training has always warned against. He had been publicly glorified for epitomizing a chunk of American myth that may never have existed outside of celluloid: the hardball gunslinging lawman who, when facing the guns of the wicked, will draw. And the fastest gun is not only right; the fastest gun wins the hearts of the West.
There was no point counting the stories written on this one. The Barfers might as well have weighed their press notices. Suffice it to say that the mayor of Tijuana finally had to go public and beg the media of both sides to try to forget the border shooting. But the Barfers wouldn’t forget it. They were filled with troubled dreams and mixed emotions. They wondered if someone was going to name an airport for Manny Lopez.
There were a few very unforgettable memories for Ken Kelly that night. First, there was the heart attack he and Robbie Hurt were sure they were experiencing when once again they heard gunfire in the night. This time sounding like war. And then to hear the static-broken screaming on the radio, and for a minute or a year not to know what was happening or where, and finally to hurtle toward the echo of explosions. The cover team of Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt, the outsiders, never, but never had experienced the release which action provided for the others.
One thing that Ken Kelly took from that evening was the astonishing moment when he was driving away from the hordes of Mexican police flowing through the fence eager to kill the bandits who shot their men. Manny Lopez and Tony Puente were in his vehicle. Tony Puente was trying to talk, with about as much success as a stroke victim. He was hyper-ventilating slightly and was trying to calm himself by taking deeper breaths, which was exactly wrong, and then he finally sensed or understood the problem and settled back and stopped sighing, panting, sighing. Ken Kelly thought that Tony might just break down and cry, and why the hell not? He was entitled.
Finally, Tony Puente was able to utter things in monosyllables. He said, “God …” and after a pause of five seconds: “… damn!”
Tony Puente was reacting and behaving pretty much like all the others. In fact, when they got to the substation, more than one had to go to the bathroom and walked into a closed door without opening it.
But in the car alongside Tony Puente was his leader, Manny Lopez. And Manny was saying, “I guess if all those dudes caught us we’d be righteously dead by now. Only thing bothers me, I was sure I got hit. I must be losing my fucking mind. Oh, well.”
Oh, well. Then he stopped talking and asked Ken Kelly what time it was and Ken figured Manny was wondering whether he should maybe handle the first batch of reporters all by himself, and could he get to the saloon before it closed what with all the paperwork and television interviews?
Ken Kelly started getting a headache. Manny Lopez looked only about as annoyed as he got when Ken Kelly ran away from home. Ken was sure that Manny was going to ask if he’d heard the baseball score.
What scared the living crap out of Ken Kelly is that he suddenly got a whole new fix on Manny Lopez: This bastard’s crazy! This bastard would draw on The Holy Ghost!
Carlos Chacon was not hit in an artery. He was treated for a bullet in the upper arm, and was released from the hospital that night only to get seriously infected and be off duty for three months.
On the night of the international shootout there happened to be a police graduation class throwing a big bash at the pistol range. When the alarm went off, the Southern substation was full of brass from that party. They would come up to each Barfer saying things like, “How ya doing, son?”
There were several interviews given to the press by ranking officers who, the Barfers said, would visit the canyons about as soon as an iguana grew eyebrows. The kind, the street cops say, who make command decisions only if the astrological signs, biorhythmic charts and sunspots are correct. Or when the tea leaves tell them.
Very late that night Manny Lopez finally showed some emotion. He pulled off his jacket, went to a mirror to check himself out and cried happily, “See! I knew I was hit!”
The first round fired by Chuey Hernandez had gone through the collar of his flak jacket and creased the strap on the way out.
Manny said, “I was starting to think I was nuts!”
Which caused Ken Kelly to look around at the other Barfers staring into space.
The BARF experiment had now resulted in the shooting of six lawmen, three from each side of the imaginary line. And all by other lawmen.
PILATE
IF THERE WAS EVER ANY DOUBT, IT HAD VANISHED AFTER the shooting of the Tijuana policemen. Manny said it: “Dick Snider had the idea, but I formed and directed and shaped it. BARF was my thing.”
And indeed it was. Barfers like Ernie Salgado and Eddie Cervantes, who were by now overtly critical of their leader’s celebrity, might not like it, but everyone else knew: Manny Lopez was the Barf squad.
He was adored by the media. As far as other cops were concerned, some felt like asking for his autograph and some felt he should
work for another city, say Havana, Cuba. There were lots of opinions about Manny Lopez but one thing was certain: Chief of Police William Kolender supported the BARF leader. Very much, in fact.
On the night of the big shootout, the little Southern substation was awash with all kinds of people: department brass, detectives, officials of the Mexican police. And more reporters than San Diego had seen since Patricia Hearst was confined in the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
It was tough enough under ordinary circumstances for detectives to separate witnesses and participants in police shootings, let alone under these conditions. During the course of the evening when the Barfers were sitting in a squadroom, ordered by homicide detectives not to talk to one another about the case, a couple of them held a short conversation in Spanish.
The homicide detectives got very mad. The Barfers claimed they were only asking each other who was going to buy the beer and where they were going to drink it. The homicide detectives said that was bullshit. After they’d been ordered not to communicate, it was funny that a little small talk about beer had to be done in Spanish.
The Barfers said they liked to talk Spanish. The detectives said it was an awfully long conversation just to say who was going to get the beer. The Barfers said that it takes longer to say things in Spanish than it does in English.
And so forth. As if Barfers and homicide detectives weren’t getting on one another’s nerves enough these days, there had to arise a squabble about this. No one seemed to have considered that such problems might never arise if it were not that in a police department with fifteen detectives working Homicide, there was only one Mexican-American. The San Diego Police Department just didn’t seem to know where it lived.
In any case, language conflicts or not, the Barfers were beginning to feel the noose tightening ever more snugly. They became convinced that homicide detectives were natural enemies of their mission.
Lines and Shadows Page 26