Read The Devils Highway: A True Story for Free Online

Wofford, they say, will give you the shirt off his back; the station chief will lend you his cherry SUV if you have special business.
    Like the other old boys of Wellton Station, you love your country, you love your job, and though you would never admit it, you love your fellow officers. Civilians? They’ll just call you jack-booted thugs, say you’re doing a bad job, confuse you with INS border guards. You’re not a border guard, you’re a beat cop. Your station chief urges you not to hang out in small-town restaurants, not to frequent bars. Don’t go out in uniform. Don’t cross the border. Don’t flash your badge. Don’t speed, and if you do and get tagged for a ticket, don’t use your badge to try to get out of it. Don’t talk to strangers. In hamlets like Naco, San Luis, Nogales, civilians often won’t make eye contact. Chicanos don’t like you. Liberals don’t like you. Conservatives mock and insult you. And politicians … politicians are the enemy.
    There’s always someone working in the office, early or late, every day and every night of every year. They’re guarding the cells, monitoring the radios, writing reports. Sometimes, you can’t sleep. You can always come in to the clubhouse and find someone to talk to. Somebody who votes like you, talks like you. Believes in Christ or the Raiders like you. You can make coffee for the illegals in the cage, flirt with the señoritas—though with all the sexual assault and rape charges that dog the entire border, you probably don’t. Human rights groups are constantly lodging complaints, so you watch yourself. The tonks supposedly have phones in their holding pens so they can call lawyers to come slaughter you if you do anything wicked. You pull up one of the rolling office chairs, turn your back to them, and sit at a radio and listen to the ghostly voices of your partners out in the desert night, another American evening passing by.
    But that’s later. Now you get your assignment and you head out. You’re usually alone. You pick up your vehicle from the yard. The station has its own gas pump, so you use your government card and fill the tank. You have a thermal jug of cool water. Sometimes you have a military map tube with topo maps. You have a GPS unit, and a radio on your belt. You have cuffs, pepper spray, and a baton. You carry a .40 caliber sidearm in a holster at your hip. It has a clip loaded with hollow-point rounds. “You shoot a guy to kill him, not to hurt him.” That’s the mantra. You carry extra clips.
    The Explorers are nice. You go out there four-wheeling in an SUV that has been retrofitted by felons in a Texas prison. (Ain’t that rich. The only thing you think would be richer would be if illegals in some Ford plant in Ohio fitted out your rig.) The Explorer has a cage behind the back seat, and a mounted radio down between the front seats, and a shotgun rack behind your seat, but separated from the wets by heavy mesh. An upright pump is usually clipped into the rack. They designed the truck without asking you. For a while there, they put radios in the trucks with the mike on the opposite side from the driver. You had to lean over the whole unit and feel around on the passenger’s side. And some genius has designed the shotgun rack to go on the far side of the back seat, over by the door, so by the time you’ve bent back and struggled with it, the bad guy has busted caps in you. As it is, the mike on the radio is now exactly level with your right knee, so if you’re not careful, you’ll lean into it and punch the button and either jam the entire channel or transmit your own singing, farting, talking to yourself. The trucks weigh ten thousand pounds, so even in four wheel drive you can hit a sand pit and sink. You come out of that little crisis covered in dust like flour, looking like a ghost, and the assholes back at the station just about fall down laughing.
    If they’d just let the beat cops run the asylum, you think, a lot of