Lines and shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

a pueblo in Chihuahua?
    And what of the language of guides and smugglers? Trucha ! (meaning "Be careful!") was not a word many of them had heard, yet it was caló or barrio slang in Los Angeles, referring to a sharp dude who kept his eyes open.
    The living language of the border, a patois of Spanish and English and bilingual slang, leaped whole areas of the California southland, came in and out of vogue, traveled back south prowling the border, crisscrossing as effortlessly as the scabrous mongrel dogs of the frontier. They listened and thought it was sort of interesting, but what the hell did it have to do with a bunch of street cops who were going into those hills to kick ass and take names?
    One old policeman at Southern substation, when he got his first glimpse of the cop commandos, put it this way. "Blackjack Pershing was the fast asshole dumb enough to go chasing Mexican bandits around the hills. And it ended up with Pancho Villa being played by every movie star from Beery to Brynner. What'd Pershing get out of it? A statue of himself in a wino park up in L.A., with a million pigeons shitting on his hat." Nobody wanted to think about it, but the fact was General Pershing and the U.S. Cavalry never came close to catching Pancho Villa.
    "We don't really know what we'll be doing," Renee Camacho told his father as he was getting the last haircut he would have for a while. Renee had a boy-tenor voice, though at twenty-eight he was actually one of the older men on the squad.
    Herbert Camacho was a barber whose shop was located near Thirteenth and Market Streets, only eighteen blocks from the central police station. Renee and other cops often stopped to have a beer with the barber.
    Herbert Camacho thought that the task force would be a good thing. "They're your people," he told his son in reference to the alien victims. "Somebody has to protect them." Renee had been a natural choice for Dick Snider. He was an energetic cop and, like Dick Snider himself, had a ofter side which appealed to the task force lieutenant. Aside not often apparent in policemen, and often decimated when young men do police work on city streets.
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    There was more. Dick Snider had known Renee's father some sixteen years, since Snider was a rookie himself, patrolling Thirteenth and Market Streets.
    The older man had always liked the tall lieutenant and told Renee that Dick Snider was simpatico with the Mexican culture. The barber liked it when Snider would unashamedly offer an embrace and even a kiss, Mexican style. But he had reservations.
    "Do you think it might be very… dangerous out there?" he asked Renee, his only child. And one night while the barber was working at his second job, clerking in a liquor store, Dick Snider happened by to get some beer on his way home. Herbert Camacho surprised Dick Snider by blurting, "You better take care of my boy out there!"
    "I'll take care a him," Dick Snider promised the barber. "I'll take care a them all."
    "None a the guys wear bulletproof vests, goddamnit!" Tony Puente repeated it a thousand times during the formative days of the task force.
    "I'm buying the bulletproof vest," his wife, Dene, insisted.
    "I won't wear it."
    "Are you crazy?"
    "I won't wear it."
    "Do you wanna die?"
    "The other guys might laugh."
    "The other guys might… laugh ?"
    She was "white," but understood machismo as far as the Mexican male was concerned. They may not be real Mexicans in the eyes of those living south of the border, but the concept of machismo is alive and well on both sides of the imaginary line. She insisted. He refused. She bought the vest. He wouldn't wear it. She called his mother—
    "a typical little Mexican spitfire mother," as he described her—and then the yelling and screaming really started.
    "You'll wear the bulletproof vest!" his mother said.
    "I won't wear the goddamn