Lines and shadows by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online Page B

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
    dummy1
    Page 28 of 256
    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."