Free Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

who eased them onto the ground, scooting them into the empty garage. The truckers were finished in minutes, and Shelby closed the overhead door, sliding an aluminum bolt in place.
    â€œI ain’t gonna run out and buy a new TV or nothin,” the ox said, “if it depends on money from this.”
    â€œSoltero pay us,” Abel said. “Or we come back and keel his dog.”
    â€œHow ’bout him? Shelby said. “ He’s the one we oughtta smoke if we don’t get our money.”
    Abel said, “We take care of Soltero too.”
    Big talk, Shelby thought. If Soltero didn’t pay them, what could they do? This was his town, his country, and he probably had his friends, plenty of them, to deal with the likes of Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate. Shelby knew that if they didn’t get paid, they’d just have to slink back north.
    But maybe they could at least snuff that red-assed dog. Shelby made a mental note to bring some poisoned hamburger when they returned to that big blue house up on rich man’s hill overlooking the Caliente racetrack.
    The haulers parked the truck in the Rio Zone, among other cars and trucks, in a parking lot three blocks from the border. Abel broke the driver’s side window with a crowbar; then the ox used it to pop out the ignition. It took a few minutes to make a theft look plausible to any American insurance agent.
    As they walked to the pedestrian gate at the border, Shelby asked, “Whadda ya think the Mexican cops’ll do with the drums?”
    Abel said, “They leave een truck. Maybe take two, three week before they call San Diego police. They don’ move too fast down here.”
    They walked in silence until they got to the San Ysidro crossing, where all twenty-four lanes of traffic were backed up. On the Mexican side, the huge white arched pedestrian bridge that spanned half a dozen lanes and funneled into eighteen other lanes looked to Shelby Pate like a set of animal ears, with fleas swarming in one ear, crossing the curve of the skull, and swarming out the other one. But these fleas were human beings. People swarmed in this fucking town, Shelby thought.
    On the U.S. side, the building was conventionally modern with a large flat brown roof resembling a Hershey bar. A bite of chocolate didn’t intimidate Shelby Pate like animal ears did.
    As they were going through the entrance to U.S. Customs, they saw a female customs officer and a dope-dog sniffing at the people walking past. Abel turned and said, “Tell me, Buey, why you make me find boy with chicle? Why?”
    â€œCause I was that poor when we lived in Stockton,” Shelby said. “Only I didn’t sell gum, I sold turnips. And when I went to school for the first time they all ran away like I was a goddamn leper. Cause I had ringworm . Now let’s get the fuck back to the United States of America!”
    That night, many in the adult male population of Colonia Libertad were swapping, selling, trading, brand-new, steel-toe, high-top, U.S. Navy shoes.

C HAPTER 6
    T here were eight detectives working at the Southern Division substation, also called Southbay by the cops. One of those detectives subscribed to The Hollywood Reporter , and was trying to read it without much luck. That’s because another detective who worked juvenile—a buxom female named Maya Tevitch—was outraged by a newspaper story concerning a fisherman in San Diego Harbor who had bill-chopped a pelican that stole his catch. That is, he’d cut off the pelican’s bill and then nailed the wounded bird to a derelict sailboat “as a lesson to other pelicans.”
    Maya said she’d like to chop off the fisherman’s nuts and nail them to the downtown fishing pier as a lesson to other bill-choppers. Maya was a tree-cuddler and animal rights vigilante, whose secondary mission in life was to liquidate all gun-toting rednecks who rode dirt bikes in “her” peaceful