Lines and shadows (6 page)

THE OUTSIDERS

ROBBIE HURT WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, STILL A probationary policeman with less than a year on the department. At first he hadn't known if he'd like it when he was assigned to Southern Division. It was isolated, geographically cut from uptown San Diego file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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by the towns of National City and Chula Vista. On the other hand there were only eight to twelve men on a shift. This meant he wasn't just a badge number, as some of his academy classmates complained of being, those who were assigned uptown at central headquarters. There were certainly no lieutenants like Dick Snider uptown.

"He was very easy to be around if you were a working cop," Robbie Hurt said. "Uptown you didn't talk to supervisors like you could talk to him. And then he asked me to take a little walk with him."

One night before the task force was formed, Robbie Hurt and Dick Snider took off their uniform shirts and Sam Brownes, and with their service revolvers tucked in their belts they took a stroll up to Deadman's Canyon.

Dick Snider was very outspoken, Robbie Hurt remembered. He was opinionated; he was frustrated. The rookie cop stood with his tall lieutenant and watched him gazing off at the Tijuana night lights and listened to him talk about his obsessive dream of ridding the canyons of bandits.

"The aliens have no one in their corner," his lieutenant told him. "Imagine these peaceful people coming through these canyons. They only wanna feed their families. Imagine the fear and the abuse they suffer down there."

It was tremendously flattering for a rookie cop to be spoken to like this, to hear the dream, to be asked his opinion.

Robbie Hurt had lived in Oakland, where he was raised by a grandmother, and he had attended the University of California at Berkeley for one year. He had been in San Diego for four years, working at the North Island Naval Air Station and for the U.S. Post Office. He had gotten married, and one day when career plans seemed tenuous and confused, he applied for the San Diego Police Department.

Robbie found police work to his liking and, since he had studied English at Berkeley, was a good report-writer, but he hadn't had time to distinguish himself in his brief police career when his lieutenant seemed to see something in him. He impressed Dick Snider when he found a discarded wallet on one of those nights while they prowled the perimeter of the canyons. It was later determined to be part of the loot in the murder of an alien. Finally his lieutenant told him what was on his mind.

"I'm thinking about getting a group a guys together to patrol these hills and
handle
this thing," Dick Snider confided as they stood on a hilltop overlooking Deadman Canyon, on a misty summer night when the lanterns glowed murky just across the imaginary line.In the file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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district with grand revolutionary name: Colonia Libertad—home to smugglers, addicts, bandits and the hopeless poor.

"I was thrilled to have a lieutenant confiding in me," Robbie Hurt said. "I was floored when he asked me to join the task force. A plainclothes job while still on probation!"

"That job was the beginning of the end of us," Yolanda Hurt recalled. "It took a while to see how he was affected by it. Not in any way I'd expected. But in other ways. He was more affected by the experience than any of them, including Manny Lopez." Yolie Hurt was a year younger than Robbie and they'd been married five and a half years when Dick Snider's experiment began. "We met when I was eighteen," she said, "and we got married the next year. So we grew up together… or did we
both
grow up?" A tall, slim young woman, rather attractive, and more so the more you were around her. It didn't take the other cop wives long to figure out that she was absolutely genuine, very easy to take, and possibly ten years more mature than her husband. The experiment was exciting for all the wives at first. These were not your cotillion-trained Junior Leaguers with Orthodontic smiles. These were young cop wives, and their husbands, with the exception of Robbie Hurt, were of Mexican descent, several from broken homes, most from relatively poor backgrounds. Yolie Hurt had never in her life been farther than Los Angeles.

She met Robbie when he was in the Navy. Almost instantly her Mexican mother took a liking to him. She called him
mi hijo
even before they married. Yolie didn't like Robbie very much in the beginning, but he was mad about her and told her that repeatedly, and told her mother and sisters and brothers. And he bought her flowers and opened the car door for her. He was a happy, charming young fellow those days, and didn't appear to have a moody side. Robbie was a product of a broken home and she pitied him for not having had the parental love she had always known.Yolie, who was always a hyperactive worker, was only too glad to work all the harder for him after they married. She brought home a good paycheck. She kept an immaculate house, as did the other task force wives. Sparkling homes, clean babies and a steady civil-service paycheck; being a symbolic leg up into the middle class for all these children of the working class. She also managed the money, did the laundry, cooked the meals. She and Robbie remained childless, and he became a kind of surrogate child.

"I spoiled Robbie
bad
," she says. "When I look back I just don't know how I
did
that to him." Yolie had gone to the same high school as Robbie's police academy classmate and fellow squad member, Carlos Chacon. When the experiment began, she and Robbie spent many hours talking about it. She learned of terrible things the bandits did to aliens, and how this squad of cops was going to do something that had never been attempted before. There was file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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something else, something that Yolie was uniquely equipped to understand: Robbie Hurt, almost from the beginning, was feeling like an outsider.

"The jokes they tell in Spanish," Robbie complained to her. "I never know if they're about me. Then I have to have them explained."

"That's a little thing," she'd tell him.

"It's not so little," he'd answer.

And as the days passed, the others, some of whom at first spoke very poor Spanish, began boning up. They had to learn how the Tijuana
cholos
talked. It was to become critical that they learn.

"I'm sure that talking Spanish makes them feel… closer," Yolie Hurt told her husband. "It's kind of…
endearing
for them."

The wives of Tony Puente, Renee Camacho, Fred Gill and Manny Lopez were white. Carlos Chacon's wife was of Filipino descent. The wives of Eddie Cervantes, Ernie Salgado and Joe Castillo were the only ones of Mexican descent, Yolie Hurt was from mixed parentage: her mother was Mexican her father black, and physically she was a blend of both. She understood culture clash and how it feels not to precisely belong among whites, blacks or Mexicans… Robbie was proud of the fact that he was a good writer.

"At least I can do the best reports," he said to her. "They come to
me
for help with their reports."

"Those Mexican cops haven't had much in their lives," Yolie told him. "You got to be patient. This is
real
exciting for them." Robbie Hurt's young wife had no idea as yet how exciting it was going to get.

Except for Dick Snider, Robbie was the only one of the original officers on the task force whom they called an Q.T.M., which was how the U.S. Border Patrol labeled aliens who were "other than Mexican." He was the only one not to understand Spanish, since Dick Snider did speak the language. There were forty black cops on the department. There were eight black sergeants and one lieutenant, so the blacks were only slightly better represented than the Mexican-Americans.

"How can any rookie say no to this job?" he asked his wife, "Especially a black rookie?" This black rookie didn't say no. He
leaped
at the offer. file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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They called him King Kelly. "Guys that ride bikes get handles like
King
," he said. "And a biker always gets a rep, a jacket. Even a cop biker. Me, I had a cock jacket. They thought every broad that rode my bike, with the exception a my mother, got laid. Like I had a cock bike with a trick seat on it! I'm a married man with three children. Just because I'm a biker I get a cock jacket and a handle:
King
Kelly."

There was a gaggle of waitresses at a certain restaurant near Southern substation. The cops had handles for
them
: Fat Mindy -Thin Mindy-Lana Banana. Two or more waitresses were always ready to party after work, to go to The Wing, a nearby park named in honor of early glider flights wherein daredevils soared fifty feet above the earth. The cops and waitresses would drink beer at The Wing and commiserate about their respective jobs and about how unappreciative the public is, and pretty soon they'd be soaring at five thousand feet without benefit of glider.

One night King Kelly went for a run on his screaming 550 Honda with a blood alcohol reading of about .18, he believes, and his passenger, Lana Banana, was even drunker. Everyone loved that Honda and the bright-orange snowmobile suit that went with it. It was fun to see how fast the Honda would roar by the base of Otai Mountain. King Kelly found out how fast it would go while he was breathing 18 blood alcohol: exactly 105 miles per hour. It only works if you're without goggles and without a helmet and you're blowing about .18.

"If you lose it at one-oh-five," he said, "you go down in a tumble a sparks and you don't have to worry about comas and IV's and paralysis and irreversible brain damage." It made perfect sense at the time. The night wind was frosty and Lana Banana put her icy hands inside the orange snowmobile suit just as a rabbit ran out and froze in the beam of light.

Ken Kelly's last thought was: We're gonna hit a rabbit at one-oh-five. My wife's gonna be mad because even though I'm innocent they're probably gonna find us with her hand inside my pants, wrapped around my balls. The rear wheel's gonna slip out and we're gonna die now. Good-bye.

Except that he reflexively swerved just enough to go into a deadly high-speed wobble.

"More! Do it more!" Lana Banana screamed, later describing the wobble as something akin to straddling the world's
biggest
vibrator.

And thanks to the volume of alcohol in his body, his reactions were so
slow
that they rode out of the deadly wobble which would have killed a sober man. Lana Banana said it was a hell of a sexy ride, a 550cc Japanese
dildo
, is what it was. And that Ken Kelly was a prince!

No, a King!

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He was a sturdy blond with lank straight hair combed back flat but always falling over his ears. After a few drinks he loved to take both palms and pull his hair back tight on his head and leer, with darting pale-blue eyes. His Jack Nicholson impersonation. But actor Jack Nicholson
never
looked as deranged as Ken Kelly, not in his most eccentric performance, not when Ken Kelly let go with his demented scream: "Sex! Drugs! Rock 'n roll!"

He was known as a talented cop. He was smart and gutsy and spoke in colorful, profane, grammatical English. Ken Kelly wanted to join the new task force badly. He was twentyeight years old with plenty of police experience, having been a cop for nearly six years, and he knew the canyons better than anyone. From the time he was a boy until he joined the San Diego Police Department, Ken Kelly had hunted doves in Spring Canyon, and north of Airport Mesa, and even in Deadman's Canyon and Smuggler's Gulch. He knew he could find his way around those hills night or day.

The task force was another chance, he felt. He had tried dozens of times without success to get to Vietnam while in the Air Force. He always wanted to do something
significant
and fate was denying him.

"If you
ever
decide to give a white boy a break," Ken Kelly pleaded to Manny Lopez, "I know one loony enough to go out in those canyons." Then he'd do a Gunga Din and say,

"I'll carry water, sahib. Take me
with
you!"

Ken Kelly was not one of the original San Diego cops selected for the experiment, but he wasn't about to give up. He could be found leaping out of police corridors at any hour of the night crying out to Manny Lopez, "Take me with you, bwana. I'll be your gun bearer. If you don't, I'll go bad, I swear. Sex! Drugs! Rock 'n roll!" He never gave up. He figured: Who knows what might happen out there in those canyons? Somebody might get stung by a scorpion and they'd need to send in a bench warmer.

Manny Lopez couldn't go to the John without a voice Tom the next stall whispering, "If you don't take me, I'll go wrong. I'll wear a blindfold and a garter belt and star in stag movies. Take me
with
you!"

Manny Lopez would giggle and promise Ken Kelly that if there was ever an opening…

EXODUS

IT WAS THE FIRST WEEK OF OCTOBER WHEN THEY FINALLY got to do it. There were jokes and chatter and excitement during the briefing that afternoon. There were lots of file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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cracks from the other patrol cops as the task force gathered shotguns, revolvers, flares, first aid kits, goggles, flashlights, binoculars, ammo, radios, handcuffs. As sunset approached, Eddie Cervantes, the Marine reservist, said, "Time to saddle up," and someone pissed him off by noting that in
The Sands Iwo Jima
that was John Wayne's line.

Then Dick Snider—who was as big as John Wayne, with more lines eroding his dust-bowl kisser—said, "Let's go out and put some crooks in jail." It didn't sound right coming from someone dressed in camouflage fatigues and a black woolen watch cap and combat boots, and armed to the teeth. It sounded like
cop
talk just when they were starting to think of themselves as some kind of commando raiders, ready to outswat SWAT.