Lines and shadows by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online

nine children and think about the one left in Mexico.
    She settled in Brownsville, Texas, close to her native land, and got a job washing and ironing for American G.I.'s. She met and married a man named Chacon. Among her children was Carlos, who always wanted to become a policeman.
    "I was delivered into this world by a cop," he said. "When my father was in jail. I never met my father."
    Carlos Chacon was one of three task force members who spoke good Spanish, growing up as he did with Spanish as the language of life, and dream, and fantasy. His mother took her children and migrated to the San Diego area.
    "I always appreciated the Richard Pryor joke,"—he grins, showing wolfish white incisors—
    "where the kid says, That's my mom you're beating up,' and the man says, 'That's my woman , kid.' "
    His mother lived with a man named Geronimo who used to beat her regularly, and Carlos as well. But the boy inherited some size from the father he never met. Carlos was growing quite large and finally Geronimo found himself outmatched. He was beaten by the boy. When Carlos went to sleep that night, having just successfully conquered a man he so feared, he dreamed of violence. He was awakened in the middle of the night uncertain whether he was still dreaming. The face of Geronimo was grinning at him. Leering, really. Geronimo began wiggling his crooked finger for the boy to come. Geronimo was holding a machete. Carlos leaped screaming from bed and grabbed a metal bar he had lately kept file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009
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    beside his bed for protection. Geronimo was a bully and a coward. He fled cursing, taking his machete with him.
    Geronimo blessedly left their lives for some time and the children settled down a bit, but one day he returned. He tried to resume where he left off, by beating Carlos' mother yet again. But now Carlos was a tenth-grader.
    "This time I beat him up bad ," Carlos Chacon remembered. "I was so big by then I was looking straight down at him. It was in the room where I used to hear my mother screaming."
    They lived in Otai, near Chula Vista. It was a gang-ridden Mexican neighborhood. The people distrusted police, but Carlos did not. "The police came and they sided with me. I beat him bad ."
    The eyes of Carlos Chacon were not something to forget. He had well-shaped expressive brows, a low forehead, wavy black hair parted in the middle. He talked with his hands, a Mexican trait. But the eyes, well, they were so liquid as to be flowing. Perhaps Valentino had eyes like this, Son-of-the-Sheik eyes which can look startled, fiery and more, while he shows the lupine, very white incisors.
    "My mom is the greatest ironer in the world," he liked to brag when he joined the Chula Vista reserve police.
    She did her son's police uniforms just as she had done the uniforms of American G.I.'s many years earlier in, Brownsville, Texas. He had the sharpest military creases of any cop in San Diego County, reserve or regular. He also had a six-inch Colt Python, .357 magnum. He was twenty years old then, and like all the other young police reservists he was trying to master pistol shooting. Dry firing an hour a day was nearly as good as firing a hundred rounds on the target range, they told him. And who could afford a hundred rounds of practice ammo? To dry fire, one simply aims at a spot on the wall, small enough to simulate a bull's-eye at twenty-five yards. It is to condition the eye, mind and hand to a slow, gradual trigger squeeze, and not to jerk involuntarily while anticipating the kick of a handgun during actual firing.
    Carlos had a best friend at that time. The friend's name was Michael Clarence Jackson. He was a high school classmate and they did everything together. Michael was black, but he had a lot in common with Carlos Chacon. For one thing, neither had known a father. Carlos once thought he was going to get to see his father for