Joseph Wambaugh - Lines and Shadows

BARF

DICK SNIDER LURKED ON THE FRINGE. HE WAS STILL A Southern Division watch commander and still the godfather of the Barf squad. Sometimes he'd have a beer with the boys, and after a few, one of them might start hinting that Manny was having them do something that the department might not approve of.

But as Ken Kelly put it: "Lieutenant Snider would tell us that he'd have a talk with Manny. But he didn't really wanna hear bad things about Manny Lopez. He knew that nobody else coulda made BARF what it was, the biggest publicity machine the department ever had and the only protection the aliens had. And maybe Manny was another side a Burl Snider's fantasy life? Maybe Burl Snider was the superego and Manny was the id? Maybe." Ken Kelly often spoke in psychiatric terms. He probably learned them firsthand. He was soon to have his head shrunk.

"I just never felt much purpose," Ken Kelly would say. "Neither did Robbie Hurt. There we'd be, sitting in the brush for hours, listening to rabbits and coyotes and skunks and rattlers crawling around us. Sometimes having people just appear out a nowhere, scaring the shit out a both of us. And they'd look at us ragpicking bozos and wonder if we were waiting for scorpion stings or what."

"The sound a gunfire used to make us psycho because we never knew anything till after the fact. When we got scared there was never a payoff. We just felt useless. No wonder poor Robbie became an alcoholic."

And what did Ken Kelly become, living with this frustration of being, and not being, part of the Barf squad? These two young men, one black and one white, who could not be part of it because of their color, were, as he put it, like a double shot of nitroglycerine. This was just after the San Diego district attorney's investigator had a little conversation with the homicide leader of the judieiales in Tijuana. It seems that the judieiales were handling their own investigation of the shooting of the Tijuana cops. And the Mexican homicide leader told the district attorney's man that if their findings were such that the Mexican government decided to issue arrest warrants for Manny Lopez and his men, well, it would be the judieiales job to serve those warrants.

Of course the Mexican lawman knew that he couldn't just stroll into the San Diego Police Department and throw handcuffs on Manny and the boys, and take them back to Mexico for trial. Yet there were ominous implications in what he said. The judieiales were working file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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along the international border now, trying to arrest robbers on their side, the homicide leader said. And they might just run into the Barf squad.

When the district attorney's man asked if judieiales would really consider coming across into the canyons to kidnap the Barfers, the homicide leader said they would do what was required.

The Barf squad received the information but it changed nothing. Manny Lopez still had them walking south of the line. So there were cracks made about the judiciales hanging Manny by his heels like Mussolini and other such jokes that no one found funny. And, there were more Barfers pandering a last will and testament.

"This job just ain't dangerous enough," Ken Kelly said to Manny at lineup. "Why don't we milk rattlesnakes or jerk off tarantulas on our lunch break?" One night the Barfers were walking in the drainage ditch near Monument Road and Dairy Mart Road, near the place where they had shot down Chuey Hernandez and his partner. The ditch comes across the border and during the rainy season spills runoff into a cow pasture near Stewart's Barn, often used as a resting place for illegal aliens on their nightly crossings.

Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt were discussing the exact location of the Barfers in the drainage ditch. The others were possibly on the wrong side of the line, since the fence was damn close to being the actual boundary. But of course a few feet didn't matter if a squad of judieiales prowling the darkness suddenly ambushed them after figuring that real pollos wouldn't be hanging around that fence for so long, a fact that Chuey Hernandez found strange on the night he went to investigate.

Just then a U.S. Border Patrol chopper came roaring in out of nowhere and spotted the Barfers hiding in the ditch. The chopper hovered above them and lit them with a spotlight. The pilot started issuing Spanish commands over his loudspeaker. He started ordering this little group of bogus pollos to get their asses back to Mexico.

But Manny Lopez told his men to stay put, and he tried to raise someone on the HandieTalkie which never worked properly out there beyond the pale. So, much like the Tijuana policemen, the border patrolmen in the helicopter started getting a little testy because this group of pollos

there by the fence wouldn't run away and wouldn't obey. They were just staying put, which was very strange.

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Meanwhile, Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt were going bonzo because the Border Patrol helicopter was making such a commotion that cars were starting to stop there on the Mexican highway, and what if one of them was a Tijuana police car?

Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt were doing their damnedest to get through on their own radios with no success, and finally the Border Patrol pilot had enough of this shit and he started blasting his siren and swooping down a little lower.

Ken Kelly was nearly in tears and was screaming all kinds of things that the F.C.C. wouldn't approve of over the radio, but nobody heard him and by now the pilot was getting just about as mad as Chuey, Hernandez got the night he was shot down. And he dived!

Ken Kelly stopped breathing because he was sure the chopper was going right in on top of the Barfers in a fireball, but this pilot was a hot dog, and good. He was also good and mad. He stopped his dive a few yards from the ground and blew up a cyclone of sand and brush and flying tarantulas, and the Barfers were all on their bellies protecting their eyes and faces and weapons and balls or whatever, and Ken Kelly started screaming hopelessly,

"They're trying to cut our dicks off!"

And just then they saw a car slam to a stop on the highway and Ken Kelly was seeing phantoms and was positive it must be the judiciales. With Tommy guns!

Well, even the Barfers weren't yet crazy enough to shoot down a Border Patrol helicopter, and finally the pilot either figured out who these lunatic pollos must be, or he was called out of the area. He took off very suddenly.

Ken Kelly said, "I was absolutely sure that if it had been judieiales on the highway our guys woulda been executed on the spot. They woulda just disavowed all knowledge, like they say on Mission Impossible."

When it was over, his troops told Manny that it was time, definitely time, to "chase the elusive southern burglar."

There was always a burglary series somewhere, and to justify coming in from the canyons they would write in their daily activity report that they were working on a burglar, which meant they would jump into plalnclothers cars and drive straight to a fast-food joint or, on a night like this, straight to The Anchor Inn for a drink. And nobody was drinking beer this night; they needed tequila shooters.

Renee Camacho was livid and Tony Puente couldn't stop swearing. Manny Lopez, who had gone to the substation, was the object of just about every obscenity ever invented in English or Spanish. They decided that it was time to