Lines and Shadows (1984)

by Wambaugh, Jospeh

  Manny and his other six Barfers decided to sit alongside a path one hundred feet north of the international border, a path beaten rock-hard by the feet of the alien armies of the night The path was a wide one that tunneled through thick brush on both sides and ran north toward prosperity. At about ten minutes past ten, with no stars and very little moonlight, the Barfers heard cries of terror and the sound of running and every man was up and had guns drawn and was fanning out as two silhouettes came toward them.

  The Barfers leaped on and grabbed the runners, who thought they were dead and were uttering cries for mercy and begging for their lives and were uncomprehending until they were made to understand that these were San Diego policemen. Then they started pointing behind them in terror.

  These two aliens had been ambushed by three bandits wearing ski masks. One had a gun, another a knife, and the third, quien sabe? The two aliens tried escaping back to Mexico but were cut off by the pursuing bandits and had to veer off in the darkness and run north, right into the Barf squad.

  The Barfers heard the part about the ski masks and gun and got very tense because they figured they had their gang of murderers, and just then they heard some more running footsteps and there wasn't even time to set up a proper ambush because here they came! Right out of the darkness!

  The newest and smallest Barfer, Gil Padillo, had the shotgun. Manny Lopez heard a metallic click and yelled, "They got a gun!"

  When the first two masked bandits charged nearly on top of them, Gil Padillo let go with a shotgun blast. Carlos Chacon fired. Joe Castillo fired two guns. The first bandit stopped and screamed and started shooting back.

  There was another point-blank gunfight in absolute darkness. The muzzle flashes lit up tall silhouettes and ski masks.

  In addition to driving Manny Lopez sane, this shootout drove Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt crazy. For these outsiders fate had saved the worst for last. The cover team was waiting a couple of miles west of a riding stable. There is an escarpment which rises about five hundred feet to a mesa. The border fence south tumbles into nearly impassable terrain at least for a vehicle, and then there is Smuggler's Gulch, five hundred yards across and three hundred feet deep.

  When Ken and Robbie heard the gunfire it sounded distant, like someone breaking concrete with a hammer. They leaped into their vehicles and drove straight through the brush, straight up the escarpment. They skidded and slid and just about lost two police vehicles and stopped.

  Ernie Salgado came on the tactical channel, broken by static, screaming, "WE NEED YOU! WE NEED YOU!"

  And thus began the moment they'd avoided till the very end. Both outsiders went utterly bughouse. Ken had fifteen parachute flares, extra ammunition, a shotgun, first aid kit, bulletproof vests and radio. Robbie had nearly as much equipment. The grade was perhaps forty-five degrees, through nearly impenetrable brush after a rainy season.

  All the outsiders could hear was "Barf barf barf!" being screamed in the distance and the BOP! of gunfire and each other's moans and panting and breathing which very quickly sounded phlegmy. Neither, of the young men had ever worked this hard in his entire life. Within three minutes each was beyond pain and sweat-drenched and Ernie Salgado's voice kept screaming over the radio.

  Just as they started seeing hallucinatory bandits and rattlesnakes, Ernie's voice broke in again, screaming, ".. helicopter!" And that was all they got.

  Ken dropped his bag and shotgun and radio and started losing ammo and Robbie also started dropping things as they hacked through the brush with arms and legs and shotguns. And while Ernie screamed unintelligibly on the goddamn Handie-Talkie, Robbie went into a death rattle and started croaking things to Ken with his last gasp. "This. is. your. god ... damn. FAULT!"

  Ken knew he meant that it was Ken's idea to park where they did. But Ken croaked back, "Aw, go, fu. fu. fu."

  It was no use. His breathing sounded like a rasp on hardwood. He couldn't even gurgle an obscenity, and they both saved their last bit of energy to hack through another tunnel of brush.

  The Barters didn't know if the bandits were hit. After the tall bandits fired back, they vanished. And Barfers were reloading and running and screaming and ducking and doing the usual things and the two aliens were down on their knees praying for the chance to get out of this freaking country and back to Mexico alive. Suddenly two helicopters, Border Patrol and sheriff's department, came roaring in, having heard most of the transmission of Ernie Salgado.

  When Ken and Robbie get to the top and collapse, they go into the giddy state wherein they start jabbering nonsense like: "Who's gonna buy the beer tonight if we live?" And, "Nice night to go crazy!" Things like that.

  Then Tony Puente comes on the radio to say that no Barfers are hit but three bandits are hiding somewhere in five acres of brush, and the bandits have at least one handgun.

  Suddenly Ken spots the red and blue lights of the Tijuana police gum-balling down the highway, having also picked up the broadcast. And he starts popping off parachute flares. Only he's so exhausted and suffering something like hyperthymia that he's damn near shooting down the two helicopters with the flares and he can't stop and the goddamn sky over the U. S. and Mexico is totally alight! Robbie sees Ken looking up with a little demented smile, and it's clear that Ken's bewitched by the soaring popping floating flares. And then the sheriff's helicopter comes attacking through the flare pattern, and the chopper's blades are blowing the shit out of the cover team and all their equipment. Ken is so crazy by now, and so is Robbie, that they'd like to pop one right at the freaking helicopter bubble and Ken thinks of how the Italian-made helicopter sounds just like a dago machine as it hovers over top with the whining thumping blades sounding like: GUINEA GUINEA, WOP WOP WOP!

  Ken Kelly starts jabbering that he'll never eat lasagna again-Guinea Guinea, WOP WOP WOP!- but the pilot just waves fraternally and blows the shit out of everything. And now with scorpions and tarantulas and flying skunks soaring through this hurricane, Ken and Robbie are falling off the mesa and picture themselves tumbling into a rattlesnake convention just as they hear PLOOM.

  A bandit made a break for the international fence and someone cranked one off. At least they all thought it was a bandit but they never knew because he made it into Mexico. And though they could see Tijuana police gathering over there, they never saw the man again.

  Ken Kelly spent an hour on the mesa popping off flares, and the search continued until the choppers were running out of fuel and there were Tijuana cops everywhere. And San Diego cops everywhere, And news media from both sides everywhere. And they figured Chano B. Gomez, Jr., was probably over there selling tamales to the mobs watching this nutty carnival.

  Ken Kelly had indeed lost the gear bag with guns and ammo in it and Manny Lopez would soon be chewing him a new one because expensive police equipment is a lot more important than inexpensive bandits, and everyone would have to look for the goddamn gear bag and Ken figured he might as well shoot himself but he couldn't because he'd lost the frigging gun!

  During the search Manny Lopez found a red ski mask and a knife with an eight-inch blade, and finally the Border Patrol chopper lit up a patch of brush and reported a man hiding there. Manny and Joe Vasquez pounced on a tall guy, who put up a hell of a fight before they thumped him into submission. They found a poncho lying nearby and with it a black leather holster, but that was all.

  When the bandit search was discontinued that night, Ken Kelly reported that several reporters down on Monument Road were really pissed off at them because they hadn't killed somebody, or if they had, they let the goddamn body get away.

  Ken Kelly asked, "Why do people wanna play with your dick when you shoot somebody?"

  Two shootings in two nights was a bit much even for the ambivalent brass of the San Diego Police Department. This experiment was finally and forever deemed too dangerous, and within a few days BARF ceased to exist.

  And so said the San Diego newspapers, making it a sad day for the media, for mythmakers, and for l
overs of latter-day Gunslingers.

  One wonders what might have happened to the Barf leader had the experiment been allowed to continue. Manny Lopez had experienced something exceedingly strange out there, something that troubled him and gave him pause and made him lie awake thinking about where this experiment had taken him.

  He had pursued the fleeing bandit immediately after the gunfire. Even the new Barfer-who despised Manny Lopez and hadn't been with them on all those occasions when Manny's conduct had made the others scared of him -had to say, "You don't do that. Nobody does what he did."

  Manny was hot on the tail of a gun-toting bandit. A bandit who could have stopped at any second in the darkness and shot his pursuer to death at point-blank range. Yet Manny continued running all alone through the night toward the sound of fleeing footsteps. And the threat was very real, because the next day during a thorough search with detectives, they found a .22 automatic and empty cartridge cases.

  While Manny was running that night he had this epiphany, the first and last he ever had. Manny Lopez thought: I am invincible. And the wonder of it enveloped him like an impenetrable shield. And he thought: This is my purpose. The why had become clear to the young sergeant. His reason for being was revealed.

  Manny ran faster and faster. A few more steps and he'd fly! But that was nothing. Danger was nothing. Women, power, glory-nothing. Before him was something infinitely more thrilling. An idea. Manny ran toward it as others have, saints and madmen. It lay before him like a line of shadow. Only a step or two and he would cross. The idea was this: I am not mortal.

  But he would never make that dark crossing. He stopped. So suddenly he nearly hurtled on his face. He twisted his head about like a scorpion in a jar. Looking, listening-for what? He didn't care about the bandit now. He saw nothing. He heard nothing but his own desperate breathing and hammering heart, and he thought: This is wrong. I'm thinking wrong things. Wrong!

  Manny Lopez, the man they were all convinced had never known fear, began to feel something like fear. Of himself. He kept thinking about it through the evening and all night and the next day: I am invincible. I am not mortal. It was all wrong!

  Manny had always said that if he ever quit the Barf squad it would only be because he was sick of defending his policies to the brass or to his own men, sick of sniping and jealousy. Though he was devoted to his family, he would never have quit for them. And never for personal safety. But Manny Lopez for the first time wondered if something wrong had happened in his own head.

  Ken Kelly had always said, "Of course we were afraid of him. We're all afraid of psychotics, aren't we? We're terrified of unpredictable lucky psychotics."

  Dick Snider had always claimed, "There was nobody who was crazy enough to do it except Manny Lopez."

  The very last night in the canyons was by far the most terrifying of all. Everyone was secretly certain he would be murdered on the very last night. Still they walked the canyons, sweating it out to the end. Absolutely nothing happened. It was the quietest night of the year.

  Manny Lopez had often said he never wanted it to stop. That in the BASF experiment he had found out who he was. But now things had changed.

  Perhaps the experiment was ended not a moment too soon. Even worse things may have happened to all of them if they'd tried to continue the crazy experiment under a leader who perhaps had been driven sane.

  Chapter TWENTY ONE

  BASTARD CHILDREN

  THE CHIEF OF POLICE TRIED TO REWARD THE BARFERS BY creating a plainclothes gang detail for them. There were a number of adjustments to make as the months passed, while they were doing ordinary sane normal police work. A great deal of dissatisfaction began to set in. Several of them seemed to fall prey to various kinds of disappointment and depression based on they knew not what.

  They felt betrayed in a sense. They had been part of a grand experiment. A bunch of minority cops were going to show the white majority what they could do. But people were criticizing in hindsight many things they had done. Until they became uncertain of what they had done. There was talk that relations between the police on both sides of the border could never be repaired.

  When BARF was discontinued, U. S. government spokesmen said that there was going to be a beefed-up presence of federal officers on the border. The beefed-up presence never materialized. When the experiment had begun, they were sure that the department would be so proud of them that minority cops would finally be numbered proportionately among the investigative squads of the department, but there was still only token representation.

  Even the good intentions of the police chief in creating the gang detail seemed a further segregation of the Barfers instead of integration into choice jobs, as they'd dreamed.

  More than one said, "We felt like bastard children."

  And some of the friends who had started out together would never be friends again. And that troubled them and seemed to fill them with a deeper kind of disappointment.

  Finally, Barfers started drifting away, away from the police department itself. Joe Castillo took his wounded fluttering fingers to the San Diego Marshal's Office. He left the police department for a job wherein he served subpoenas and guarded courtrooms and admitted he was bored, and could talk only about the good old days when he was a Gunslinger.

  One day BARF attorney Ray Wood, on his way to court, was startled to see a citizen being jammed up and choked out by a marshal in a courtroom corridor. The marshal was Joe Castillo. Some Barf habits died hard, it seemed. And as more time passed, Joe Castillo quit the marshal's office and joined the sheriff's department. But still there was this restlessness. In 1983 he left his wife and filed for divorce.

  Renee Camacho lived through his worst time. He watched his father die from a colon cancer that went right to the bone. The boy tenor was devastated. Very few young men were so close to a father, and Renee found that he didn't care about anything, least of all the work he was doing in the Child Abuse Unit, dealing with people who beat and burned and tortured and sodomized their children.

  This only child of Herbert Camacho was unable to deal with any of it anymore. He came to work and put his case load away and went through the motions. Finally he left police work entirely and moved to Los Angeles, taking a job in a photo-developing store.

  About the BARF experiment, Renee said, "I was confused about all of it from the day the chief said he wanted to stop us because somebody was gonna get killed. I thought of course somebody's gonna get killed. And if this job isn't worth that, we shouldn't be doing it. From that moment on none of it made sense and I guess my heart was gone out of it."

  In 1983, Renee Camacho, having gone through something very much like a youthful version of mid-life crisis, moved back to his world in San Diego and tried to return to the police department. It was noted that he had not been diligent in his last days as a cop. During the time that his father was dying. Police administrators are also products of a profession that sees not only the worst of people, but ordinary people at their worst. And anyway, bureaucrats have never been known for sentimentality. Renee was considered unfit for rehiring. He was accepted by the sheriff's department.

  When asked what he got from the BARF experiment, he could only say, "Well, I got a chance to make my dad proud of me. I was brave. For my dad."

  After killing the bandit, Big Ugly discovered that he wanted a child more than ever. Joe Vasquez and his wife, Vilma, adopted a baby, a white baby. And then, as so often happens, soon had a baby of their own, a Mexican baby. Big Ugly got himself two beautiful children.

  Tony Puente found it more and more difficult to fight with his wife over her religion as each Christmas came and went. He also discovered that, despite himself, he came to buy smaller and smaller Christmas trees each year. Finally, instead of its being so big he needed to truck it in, the Christmas tree was so tiny and scraggly he could practically carry it in his back pocket.

  He hoped he wouldn't one day find himself disseminating religious tracts on a street corner, bu
t he was clearly admiring of the faith his wife had. He hoped he would never become one of them.

  Ernie Salgado and Eddie Cervantes still had difficulty concealing very strong negative feelings about the BARF sergeant. They remembered his humiliating insults as though it were only yesterday.

  Old Fred Gil, after all the hard luck, after nearly being killed by a body bag, with a bullet still in his hip, after spending a lifetime trying to prove to an absent father that he wasn't a mama's boy, found a compatible mate and a new life.

  His second wife, Judith, had a good job as an office manager, was a slim, attractive blonde, didn't smoke and seldom took a drink and like Fred, might never say anything worse than "goldang." He did ordinary sane normal police work, and in their spare time they raised show-quality Maltese dogs and entered them in competition. Old Fred Gil finally got a break.

  As to the experiment he could say only: "Maybe the answer was in Washington and Mexico City? I don't know. I just don't think ten guys out there was ever an answer."

  Of all the Barfers, there was one who stated immediately and unequivocally that he would gladly return to the canyons and do it again. Carlos Chacon felt that they had better jobs with the police department than they would have had without BARF, and he was right. Carlos said that they all "prospered" as a result of the experiment, and he was perhaps not so right. He still had eyes which could show joy, grief, anger, fear in ordinary conversation. Carlos Chacon still had violent dreams.

  The only other who said that he would return to the canyons was the boss Gunslinger himself, Manny Lopez. A funny thing happened to Manny when he went back to ordinary duty First, he was named a police officer of the year by Parade magazine and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. He was flown to New York for the award and rode in the airplane with his chief, William Kolender. "Americans are fickle about their myths and legends, and pretty soon, when there were no more stories about fabled Gunslingers, people started forgetting all about Manny's exploits. Other cops said Manny doesn't want much from life, only a ticker-tape parade every Friday."