Lines and shadows (38 page)

And the chief of police changed the subject by saying, "Who're
you
?" Then he smiled and added, "You are one of the most
ominous
people I've ever seen in my life!" The Barfers were all tickled by that because Ken Kelly
did
look pretty loony, all right. They were flattered as hell that the chief had stroked them, whether or not charges were dropped on Chuey Hernandez.

The chief ended it by saying of the Tijuana lawman: "He paid some pretty heavy dues, you know."

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The one thing that the chief also said during that meeting which filled the Barfers with
all
kinds of conflicting emotions was this: "I have to be honest about something else. It's been a miracle that nobody's been killed yet. I'm awfully worried about you guys. I've had many second thoughts about letting it continue. If someone'd get killed, well, I just don't want to go to police funerals. I'd stop it then."

The Barfers did
lots
of soul-searching over this one. If one of them gets killed BARF is stopped? Then why not stop it now, because the way it's going it's a sure bet! There seemed to be a bunch of things wrong with the philosophy behind a statement that their job was worth getting shot over, but not
fatally
.

It seemed like a warning. As soon as one of them died, the rest would be getting new jobs. Don't die if you like your job. Die if you
don't
like it! Oh, their brains were parboiled by
this
one. The chief sort of absolved himself, it seemed. He
said
he wanted to stop it. He'd warned them: Don't die or you'll lose your job. Was he saying that he was blameless if one of them got smoked?

Suddenly the chief of police looked exactly like Pontius Pilate in a Hart Schaffner & Marx.

PHANTOMS

THE BARF SQUAD HAD DONE A NUMBER ON THE BANDITS. They'd really knocked down the alien robberies on the streets of San Ysidro. Street thugs couldn't miss the publicity generated by the Barfers. Even though all of the shootings had taken place in the canyons, there had been some pretty good thumpings administered in San Ysidro, so there were easier ways to make a dishonest buck, the hoodlums decided.

As to the canyons where the real bandits plied their trade, even they were not unaware of the Barfers' celebrity. Not that the bandits were ever going to stop being bandits, but no one wanted to get shot to death by these canyon-crawling San Diego cops who were maniacal enough to burn down Tijuana Municipal Police if they got in the way. At least that was the word filtering back through the alien grapevine.

The real bandits from the south were survivors though. They began to alter their tactics and rob aliens right
at
the line. This was riskier because
the judiciales
didn't like crimes taking place on Mexican soil. Still, the Barf squad was making them do it, at least for now. The robberies began occurring within a few feet of the tumbledown cyclone fence—where the fence even existed. And where it did not exist, which was in most areas patrolled by BARF, the bandits became acutely aware of such things as concrete monuments and other man-made markers which defined an imaginary line.

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As dangerous as it was to commit what the
judiciales
considered an enormous crime, namely armed robbery on the soil of Mexico, the bandits had decided that it was safer for now to risk the wrath of the Mexican lawmen than to encounter the Barf squad. So the Barfers found they were working themselves out of a job. The number of significant bandit arrests after the shooting of the Tijuana policemen plunged. And actually, there were a few Barfers giving silent thanks for this turn of events. But Manny Lopez was going bonkers.

The Loco shootout, followed within days by the international shootout, had been powerful stuff and had produced even more changes in Manny Lopez: "I felt I could do
anything
out there."

There was much
more
driving him than the publicity, which the Barfers believed was his sole motivation. Manny Lopez was starting to feel some seductive and overpowering emotions that many a man before him had felt down through history: Alexander, Bonaparte, Hitler, Dustin Hoffman. Manny Lopez was beginning to feel omnipotent. Since the mountain wouldn't come to Mahomet, Manny was going
south
. When he made the matter-of-fact announcement in the tiny little Barf squad room one night in later summer, several Barfers said that it was like the captain of a jumbo jet announcing that the next sound you hear will be the bomb exploding in the cockpit. Or maybe getting a call from Lana Banana saying, "Gee, fellas, I've started getting these little sores and the doctor says I should call every one a my friends and…"

It was
that
kind of announcement. People wanted to speak right up, but nobody could even talk at the moment. People wanted to say a whole lot of things to Manny Lopez but everyone was waiting for someone else to begin. There was a certain amount of
machismo
required just to be a cop, of course. And there was about eighty-seven times as much required to be a Barfer nowadays. And even by being of Mexican blood, thereby culturally programmed with enough
machismo
to get yourself in all sorts of trouble all your life, there are certain things you do
not
do. Not for duty, not for glory, not to prove God knows what to God knows whom. And one of the things you don't do is go
south
, What Manny Lopez was telling them was that since they couldn't catch any bandits on American soil these days, maybe they should, you know, just fudge a little? Just trip on down past that imaginary line or, where that beat-up little old fence is standing, just slip on through one of the holes and walk on the
south
side. Only
a few
paces, you understand. Therein fooling the shit out of these smartass bandits who were frustrating them with their new tactic. And just think how many good bandit busts they could make before the robbers got the word. A regular blitzkreig! Can you dig it, fuckers?

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Manny was showing his impish grin when he said it. His gap-toothed boyish smile was just full of fun and his eyebrow had squiggled and locked into the question mark as he envisioned shocking the crap out of some robbers right down there on the dirt belonging to the Republic of Mexico.

There were so many things wrong with this idea that everyone was dumbstruck. Not the least wrong was that word had already come back from pretty reliable sources that some
judiciales
and Tijuana police wanted
revenge
. There were even rumors that Mexican lawmen had put together a few pesos and promises. That it would be given to anyone who returned a favor.
Bring me the head of Manny Lopez
! And by implication, his men. There were all sorts of rumors of this kind flying around. And whether or not the rumor of a price on Manny's head was true, just common sense told them that if they were caught by some Tijuana lawmen on the Mexican side after what they'd done to Chuey Hernandez and Pedro Espindola, well…

When they left the briefing that night—and everyone looked like a bat had sucked his blood, and not a word was spoken, not a
peep
—Ken Kelly made a remark that absolutely no one found funny. He said maybe they should start carrying cyanide capsules in their teeth.

It was during these weeks of walking south of the imaginary line, more fearful of Tijuana lawmen than they were of bandits who smelled like murder, that they began to talk among themselves, and with wives, and best friends. After being properly lubricated, of course, because hardball macho Gunslingers don't talk about such things while sober. It was about this time that they began talking about
Fear
.

And any discussion of Fear necessarily included a discussion of Manny Lopez. Not as to whether each man feared him; that was
absolutely
against the code of
machismo
to discuss openly, although it is virtually certain that they did, with the possible exception of Big Ugly. The reason being that Joe Vasquez respected and admired and even liked Manny Lopez too much to fear him as the others did.

Big Ugly put it this way: "Maybe we should a got more credit out there, but the thing is I always knew Manny wouldn't make us do nothing he wouldn't do. And I knew that whatever it was, he could probably do it better than any of us. Thing is, Manny was born to lead. I never came to hate him like some a the other guys." Fred Gil said, "Manny gave you the feeling that you wouldn't want to cross him and
not
have him on your side."

Ernie Salgado said, "I worked for a lot a sergeants and lieutenants when I was in Nam. I saw them come and go and die. But I never met a leader like him. The nearest thing I can file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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say is I started to feel like I felt toward my D.I. when I was a Marine recruit." And that could be interpreted easily enough.

The outsiders like Robbie Hurt and Ken Kelly, who were not raised under the cultural code of
machismo
, were more direct.

"We were
scared
of him. Period," Robbie Hurt said. "Whatever it was Manny felt, that
he
called fear, it wasn't what I felt, what I called fear."

It no longer did them any good at all to know that Manny Lopez would never ask them to do something he wouldn't do. That was the
trouble.
They
knew
he'd do it, whatever he asked! Manny was a family man with bright handsome children, yet each Barfer came to the inescapable conclusion that Manny Lopez simply did not know self-preserving fear. And that knowledge became the most frightening thing of all.

"It's like the way you're scared of psychotics," Ken Kelly said of their fear of Manny.

"Unpredictable, dangerous,
lucky
psychotics."

Manny had them always looking over their shoulders: Is he just a spot on the horizon, or is he about to land on my head like a falling safe?

"I knew they were scared a me," Manny Lopez was quoted as saying. "It had to be that way. We weren't doing
regular
police work."

Regular police work? Not even close. When Eddie Cervantes got back from his vacation in Fresno, having heard the news of the international shootout on television, he was surprised to feel no ambivalence about the most publicized shooting yet. He thought he'd be envious not to have been there. He thought he might feel left out when the others talked about it because he had been the most vocal about Manny Lopez hogging the headlines. Strangely enough, he wasn't jealous at all. He couldn't escape the notion that it was a miracle one of them hadn't died that night. And if he had been there, fifteen pounds bloated from all the drinking he had done as a Barfer, he might have just filled up that one little pocket of empty air which forty-plus police bullets whizzed through harmlessly. He just might have been the one who
died
out there that night. He had been thinking a lot about little pockets of empty air with bullets whizzing through, and about near misses to a human artery when knives flashed past, and all kinds of other mind-diddling games like that. And every man had to laugh that year when, in the baseball playoffs, an announcer uttered the inevitable cliché: "Baseball is a game of inches."
They
could tell the dumb shit about a game of
inches
. Eddie Cervantes, with his sad down-turned eyes and Tex-Mex cadence, had enough
machismo
and anger in him to confront Manny Lopez, and he started doing it without file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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letup. About everything. He used the word
okay
excessively, and it would sound like this:

"Okay, Manny, you know I ain't afraid to do nothing okay and since I'm the smallest guy everyone out in those hills picks on me okay and I had my share a shit out there okay but there ain't no sense doing stupid things out there okay cause there ain't no sense
dying
for this since nobody appreciates it anyways. Okay?"

And Manny Lopez would say to Eddie Cervantes, "What's the matter? You chickenshit?"

"You think so?" Eddie Cervantes would say, getting madder and madder. "Just because you're a sergeant okay I don't need to take that shit okay. I think you're fucked! Okay?"

"Well, I think you're a pussy if you don't wanna do your job," Manny Lopez would answer.

"Well, you want a piece a my ass, I ain't afraid," Eddie Cervantes would say. And then everybody would jump in and break it up, because if someone actually hit Manny, it might be like hitting the Pope or something, and they'd all die on the spot. Then Manny Lopez would say, "If someone's a pussy or a
puto
, then stay in the station! I'm going out there and kick ass and Eddie Cervantes, whose balls are big as Carlos Chacon's ass, is gonna be
right
beside me!"

And Eddie Cervantes' sad down-turned eyes would drop a foot lower and he'd say, "We're gonna go out okay and kick ass. Okay."

"You fuckin
Aries
." Manny Lopez would grin with an arm around the shortest Barfer because Eddie was born on April 4th and Manny Lopez on April 3rd, two years earlier. "I
knew
you wouldn't quit."

And out they'd go for another fun-filled night walking south of the imaginary line. One night when the junior varsity was on just such a fishing expedition they heard an eerie voice from the shacks on a hill in Colonia Libertad. It sounded like La Llorona, the weeping woman from ancient Mexican legend who roams the land at night looking for her children. Or maybe they figured it was Chano B. Gomez, Jr., yelling from the upper soccer field.