Back to Blood

9





South Beach Outreach


Nestor was nine years old all over again when he used these German binoculars the Crime Suppression Unit provided, the JenaStrahls. Oh, the childlike wonder this great gadget engendered! The comemierdas he had under surveillance at this moment were on the porch of an Overtown ghetto hovel a good two blocks away. With the JenaStrahls he could count the rhinestones on the rims of their ears all the way from here. The smaller one, the one with the lighter skin, the one sitting down on an old wooden chair, had one… two… three… four… five… six… seven rhinestones on one ear… so close to one another, they touched… two inches of ear pierced seven times… a perforated tear-here line on one tiny ear, it looked like. The other man, a real bull, 250 pounds at least, maybe a lot more, was leaning back against the front wall next to a set of bars over a window… arms folded, making his entwined forearms look the size of a pig in a Hialeah pig roast… he had three rhinestones on the rim of each ear. Both men wore fitted baseball caps—no any-size belt buckles in back!—with the brims still flat as the day they bought them and still bearing the New Era stickers they came with on top. Both wore virgin-white NuKill sneakers untouched by so much as a speck of grime or slime from the streets of Miami. Both the hats and the shoes cried out to all who knew of and would envy such details, “Brand-new! I’m cool!—and I can afford New—every day!”

Hmmmmm… wonder if those little twinkly stones could be the real thing, diamonds… Nahhhhh… This didn’t look even close to being that big an operation. All that jewelry riveted into the flaps of their ears. They might as well have had signs around their necks reading: YO, COPS! STOP AND FRISK ME! This surveillance was the result of a tip from a low-life informer who was fingering every dope dealer in Overtown he had ever heard of in a desperate bid to avoid his third conviction as a dealer himself, which could send him to prison for twenty years.

Without removing his eyes from the two men on the porch, Nestor said, “Sarge, did you notice all the blingbling they got stuck in their ears?”

“Oh, sure,” said the Sergeant. “I was reading about that once. All natives love that shit. It don’t matter if it’s Uganda, Yoruba, Ubangi, or Overtown. What they can tattoo, they tattoo. What they can’t tattoo, they stick all that glitter shit on it.”

Nestor winced… for the Sergeant’s sake. The Sergeant wouldn’t dare say anything like that to anybody but another Cuban cop. The Department had a whole campaign going, insusurro, aimed at improving relations with American blacks. In slums like this one, Overtown, and Liberty City, black people looked upon Cuban cops as foreign invaders who one day dropped from the sky like paratroopers and took over the Police Department and started shoving black people around… black people who had lived in Miami forever. They spoke a foreign language, these invaders. They would do anything to avoid paperwork, since the forms were printed in English. Instead of going to all that trouble, they would just take a black suspect out back of the building and beat him in the kidneys until he was urinating blood and admitting to whatever the invaders wanted him to admit to. Or thus spake Overtown street lore.

Nestor and the Sergeant were parked in an unmarked car, a three-year-old Ford Assist. It was hard to come up with an ugly design for a two-door car, but Ford had pulled it off. The Sergeant, Jorge Hernandez, was behind the wheel, and Nestor was in the passenger seat. The Sergeant was only six or seven years older than Nestor. He knew all about the man on the mast episode and thought Nestor had done great. So Nestor felt at ease with him. He could even joke with him a little. It was nothing like dealing with the americano sergeant, who had to remind you every other second that you were Cuban—and so alien to him he had a cute word, namely Canadian, he could use to talk to other rednecks about you people with impunity.

The side and rear windows of the Assist were tinted black. That wasn’t good enough cover, however, if you were watching suspects through the windshield with binoculars. So they had put one of those big silvery sun reflectors across the entire windshield. They would pull the reflector down ever so slightly where it met the headliner and stick the binocular lenses through the gap.

Both of them were in plainclothes. There was plainclothes, and there was undercover, and in the Crime Suppression Unit—called CST and not CSU, and only God knew why—you usually went on runs in one or the other. Nestor liked that. It made you a detective, although you didn’t really have that rank. In undercover you tried to look like your quarry, which usually meant looking like a comemierda roach with eight days’ worth of stubble, especially from under the chin, back to the neck, and above all a head of hair you hadn’t washed for at least a week. If you went around with clean hair, they’d spot you immediately. Compared to that, plainclothes was formal. Nestor and the Sergeant were wearing jeans, clean ones, with leather belts and blue T-shirts, tucked in… Tucked in!—these days, how much more formal could a young man get? Naturally, Nestor loved the T-shirts. Needless to say, he wore a size too small. On your belt, in the CST, you wore a holster with an evil-looking automatic revolver in it. In plainclothes, CST officers wore fine twisted-steel necklaces from which their golden badges hung down on the T-shirts squarely in the middle of the chest. You couldn’t miss them. The advantage of plainclothes was that you could call in an entire platoon of cops to a particular location in unmarked cars without setting off alarms all over the neighborhood. CST was a special unit, all right, an elite unit, and Nestor was investing his whole life in it. What other life did he have? He had been depressed for months now. His father and his whole family had declared him a non-person… well, not everybody… his mother still called him on the telephone from time to time and probably never even comprehended how profoundly irritated he was by her consolations. In her mind, sweet and tender consolation consisted of saying, in effect, “I know you have committed a terrible sin against your own people, my son, but I forgive you and will never forget you… even though nobody else in Hialeah can forget you fast enough.”

“What are they doing now?” asked the Sergeant.

“Nothing much, Sarge,” said Nestor, eyes still up against the binoculars. “Same old same old. The little guy is rocking on the back legs on his chair. The big guy is standing beside the door, and every now and then the little guy says something, and the big guy goes inside for maybe a minute and comes back out.”

“And you can see their hands?”

“Sure can, Sarge. You know the JenaStrahls”—pronounced YaynaStrahls. Somewhere along the way some learned member of the CST had pointed out that the German J was pronounced Y and the E was pronounced A.

Just saying the name made Nestor acutely aware of how tiring it was to stare steadily through these triumphs of optical engineering. The image you got was so enlarged and at the same time so refined that moving the thing just a quarter of an inch made it feel as if the apparatus were ripping your eyeballs out. The Sergeant couldn’t take it for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and neither could he. They should have had some kind of tripod you could attach to the dashboard.

Nestor always had a lot of new ideas about police work, and Magdalena used to like to listen to them… to his ideas and to his tales of the sea or Biscayne Bay at least, when he was in Marine Patrol. Or she acted like she did… which probably meant she actually did. One of the things he had always admired about her was that she was one girl who didn’t try to hide her feelings. Flattery was something she really hated. She treated it as the Eighth Deadly Sin. ::::::Oh, Manena! To this day you probably don’t realize what you did to me! You didn’t come to Yeya’s birthday party that day to see me. You weren’t even curious about what I had gone through. You came to throw me under the bus, and you gave me no warning. You had been a little distant for a couple of weeks, but I eagerly explained that away, didn’t I…. Did I ever tell you how I felt when I lay next to you? I didn’t want to just enter your body… I wanted to enter you so completely that my hide would wrap around yours, and they would become one… my rib cage would contain your rib cage… my pelvis would be conjoined with your pelvis… forever… my lungs would breathe your every breath… Manena! You and I were a universe! That other universe out there revolved about us… We were the sun! It’s pretty stupid of me not to be able to get you out of my mind. I’m sure I’m long gone from yours… me and Hialeah… I’m seeing someone else… From the moment you said that, I knew it was some americano. I’m still convinced of that… We all fooled ourselves in Hialeah, didn’t we—everyone but you. Hialeah is Cuba. It’s surrounded by more Cuba… all of Miami is ours, all of Greater Miami is ours. We occupy it. We’re Singapore or Taiwan or Hong Kong… But somewhere in our hearts we all know we’re really nothing but a sort of Cuban free port. All the real power, all the real money, all the real excitement, all the glamour, is the americanos’… and now I realize that you’ve always wanted in on that… with all that, what was to keep you from—::::::

He was jerked alert by the appearance of a new figure in the eye-ripping JenaStrahl magnification of the world two blocks away.

“Here comes somebody else,” Nestor said in a low voice, as if he were talking to himself. His eyes were pressed against the binoculars. “He’s just come from behind the house, Sarge. He’s heading for the guy in the chair.” Oh, Nestor had learned his lesson that day of the man on the mast. Never again! Never again would he go more than one sentence without throwing in a “Sarge” or a “Lieutenant” or whatever was required. He was one of the great “Sarge”-droppers on the entire force now. “It’s a… Christ, I can’t even tell you what color he is, Sarge, he’s such a mess”… never removing his eyes from the JenaStrahls.

“Can you see his hands?” said the Sergeant in a rather urgent tone.

“Sarge, I can see his hands… Guy looks like a real crackhead… he’s hunched over like he’s eighty years old… Hair looks like he combed it with glue and then slept on it… Christ, it’s filthy… itches all the way from here just looking at it… Guy looks like somebody hocked him up against the wall like a lunger, Sarge, and he’s just oozing down it…”

“Never mind all that,” said the Sergeant. “Just keep your eye on his hands.” It was the Sergeant’s conviction that dope dealers didn’t have minds, especially the ones here in Overtown and the other big black slum, Liberty City. They just had hands. They sold dope, stashed dope, cached dope, smoked dope, snorted dope, fried dope on a sheet of Reynolds wrap so they could inhale the fumes… all with their hands, all with their hands.

“Okay,” said Nestor, “he’s talking to the little guy on the chair.”

The Sergeant was leaning so far toward him from the driver’s seat, Nestor could tell he was dying to take over the JenaStrahls himself. But he also knew he wouldn’t do it. During the handover they might miss something with the dirtbags’ hands.

“He’s reaching in his pocket, Sarge. He’s pulling out… a… that’s a five-dollar bill, Sarge.”

“You sure?”

“I can see Abraham Lincoln’s eyebrows, Sarge. I’m not kidding! Guy’s got one hell of a set of eyebrows… Okay, now he’s handing it to the skinny guy… The skinny guy’s got it balled up in his fist… The big guy’s coming over from the door… he’s a big mean-looking sonofabitch… he’s giving the crackhead the evil eye… Now he’s bending over behind the skinny guy’s chair. The skinny guy’s putting both hands behind his back… and now I can’t see their hands at all.”

“Pick up their goddamned hands, Nestor! Pick ’em up!”

How the f*ck’s he supposed to do that? Thank God, the skinny guy brings both hands around in front of him. “He’s handing the guy something, Sarge—”

“Handing him what?! Handing him what?!”

“He’s handing him this little cube thing, Sarge, wrapped in a little piece a Bounty paper towel. Looks like a rock to me.”

“You sure? What makes you think it’s Bounty?”

“I’m sure, Sarge. It’s the JenaStrahls. I know Bounty. How the hell did americanos ever get along in America before Bounty?”

“F*ck Bounty, Nestor! Where’s the goddamned little thing now?”

“The head’s stuffing it down into his pants pocket… He’s starting to walk away, Sarge. He’s heading back to the rear of the lot. You should see him. He’s got some baaaad locomotor problems.”

“So it’s a buy—right? The whole thing.”

“I saw Abraham Lincoln’s bushy eyebrows, Sarge.”

“All right,” said the Sergeant. “We’re gonna need three cars.”

The Sergeant got on the Department radio and called their CST captain and asked him to dispatch three cars, unmarked, two officers per car, same setup as the Sergeant and Nestor’s in the Ford Assist. One unit would drive by the dope house and park in a driveway between two houses nearby, and more than likely use a sun reflector disguise the same way the Sergeant and Nestor had been doing it. A second unit would drive into the alley behind the house to cover the rear—and see if they could spot the head who walked like he had a stroke and just made a buy at the house. A third unit would pull up on the other side—right behind the Sergeant and Nestor. The Sergeant and Nestor would be leading the raid. They would arrive right in front of the house as near to the porch and the two rhinestone-studded cucarachas as possible. All eight cops would hop out of the cars with the badges gleaming on their chests and the holsters fully visible on their belts in a show of force calculated to dissuade anyone with armed resistance on his mind.

At this point, the cucarachas with the body piercings and jacklegged gaits became less amusing… Nestor would have sworn he could actually feel the adrenaline rising from above his kidneys and revving his heart up into the racing mode. If CST undercovers had spent a few days making buys at the place and scoping it out, a SWAT team would have probably been called in. But this looked like too rinky-dink a dope store to have to crank things up that high. That wasn’t precisely how Nestor looked at it, however, and probably not the Sergeant, either. After all, the Sergeant was no fool. Where there was dope, there was a good chance there were guns… and the two of them would be going in first… At this very moment, Nestor couldn’t help remembering something an astronaut had said in a documentary on TV: “Before every mission I told myself, ‘I’m gonna die doing this. I’m gonna die this time. But I’m dying for something bigger than myself. I’m about to die for my country, for my people, and for a righteous God.’ I always believed—and I still believe—that there is a righteous God and that we, we in America, are part of his righteous plan for the world. And so I, who am about to die, am determined to die honorably, fearing only one thing: not living up to, not dying for, the purpose for which God put me on this earth.” Nestor loved those lines and believed in their wisdom and remembered them in every moment of police work that involved danger… Did you do that before the ever-judging eyes of a righteous God… or was it the eyes of an americano sergeant? Now, be honest.

Nestor still had the binoculars focused on the two black guys with the rhinestone ears. What was it—this place where dirt-bags like them lived? Overtown… trash everywhere. The buildings were small, and many were missing… burned down, demolished, or maybe they just fell down from lack of upkeep… wouldn’t be a surprise. And everywhere there was a vacant lot you had… trash… not piles of trash… after all, piles of trash might suggest that someone was coming back to haul it away… no, these were spills of trash. It looked like some unimaginably big giant had accidentally spilled some unimaginably big bucket of rubbish across Overtown and surveyed the unimaginably big mess and walked away muttering oh the hell with it. The trash was littered, strewn, whither and wherever. Trash accumulated against the fences, and the fences were… everywhere. If there was any honest money to be made in Overtown, it had to be in the cyclone fence business. Owners who had the money enclosed every square inch of their property in cyclone fencing. You had the feeling that if you took a tape measure and actually measured it, there would be a mile of it on every block. All over the place you’d see a bush growing sideways out from under a cyclone fence or through it… not a couple of bushes, not a clump, not a stand, but one bush, some stray left over from a long-gone era of what people used to call shrubbery… now just part of the rubbish strewn against the fences. When you saw rubbish actually stowed in those turd-brown vinyl garbage bags, likely as not they somehow ended up dumped out on the street. The raccoons ripped half of them open. Even here in the car Nestor got whiffs of the stench. Outside, boiling in a tropical sun, it was breathtaking. There were the fences—and there were the iron bars. In Overtown you didn’t see a ground-floor window without bars over it. Nestor could see them right now on the black guys’ hovel. There was trash strewn under the porch and up against the one side of it. After a while, the hovels began to seem like littered rubbish themselves. They were even smaller than casitas and in terrible condition. Almost all were painted white, and the white was by now grimy, cracked, chipped, peeling away.

The Sergeant must have been thinking along the same lines, as they waited for the other units to arrive and get into position, because apropos of nothing, he said, “You know, the problem in Overtown is… Overtown. The f*cking people here—they just don’t do right.”

::::::Oh, Sarge, oh, Sarge! You got nothing to worry about with me, but one day… one day… you’re gonna forget where you are and get yourself thrown off the force.::::::

The radio came alive. The three other units were in the immediate area. The Sergeant gave them their instructions. Nestor could feel his entire nervous system revving up again, revving up revving up revving up.

The Sergeant flipped up his sun visor, which held the big sun reflector in place on his side. “Okay, Nestor, take it off and throw it in the back.” Nestor flipped up the visor on his side and seized the big screen, compressed it into its accordion folds, and put it behind his seat.

The Sergeant looked in his side mirror. “Okay, Nuñez and García are in the car behind us.” Nestor could feel his nervous system revving revving revving revving up to be ready to attack other human beings without hesitation. That wasn’t something you could decide to do when the moment came. You had to be—already decided… He couldn’t have explained that to a living soul.

The Sergeant radioed to Command. Not even thirty seconds passed before Command responded with a Q, L, R. “Off we go, Nestor,” the Sergeant said matter-of-factly, “and we’re out fast. When we get there, the big guy is yours. Me and the little guy don’t exist. All you got to do is immobilize that big cózzucca.”

Sergeant Hernandez drove the Assist slowly and quietly the two blocks to the dope den and the two black crack retailers. He stopped right in front of them, opened the car door suddenly and furiously, and vaulted the dope den’s cyclone fence and landed on his feet in front of the porch and the two black men—did it all so fast, Nestor had the impression that it was a gymnastic stunt he had practiced. ::::::What can I do?! He’s a foot taller than I am! But I must!:::::: There was no decision to make. Decision? Coming out of the passenger door and heading around the front of the car… three and a half, four steps to the fence. He took off the way you would in a sprint, leaped for the top bar—got it—Rodriguez’s gym!—vaulted his five-foot-seven self over the fence—made it. He landed awkwardly but thank God he didn’t fall. Presence was everything in these confrontations. He gave the two black men the Cop Look. The Cop Look had a simple message: I rule… me and the golden badge gleaming against the dark blue of my T-shirt and the revolver in the holster on my belt… check it out… This is our style, the style of we who rule… all the while using the Cop Look like a ray.

The two black men reacted the way small-timers at this, the bottom-most link in the drug chain, the neighborhood retailer, always reacted: If we move, they’ll think we’ve got something to hide. All we have to do is be cool. The skinny one slumped back slightly in his wooden chair, staring all the while at the Sergeant, who was right in front of him, no more than three feet away. The bigger one was still leaning back against the front wall. There was a barred window between him and the front door.

The Sergeant was already talking to the one in the chair: “Whatta you guys doing out here?”

Silence… Then the small man narrowed his eyes in what was no doubt intended as a cool expression in the face of a threat, and said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” said the Sergeant. “You got a job?”

Silence… narrowed eyes… “I got laid off.”

“Laid off from what?”

Silence… still more of a slump back into the chair… narrowed eyes… very cool… “From where I was working.”

The Sergeant cocked his head slightly, stuck his tongue into his cheek for a moment, and indulged in a favorite form of cop mockery, namely, repeating some evasive roach’s own words, deadpan: “You got laid off from working… where you were working.” Now the Sergeant just stared at him with his head still cocked. Then he said, “We received some complaints…” He motioned with his head in a slight arc, as if to suggest the complaints came from the neighborhood. “They say you’re doing some work… here.”

Nestor saw the big one edging ever so slowly toward the barred window, which also meant toward the door, which remained slightly ajar. The Sergeant must have noticed it, too, out of the corner of his eye, because he turned his head slightly toward Nestor and said out of the side of his mouth, “Manténla abierta.”

Those two words instantly lit up an entire network of deductions… and Nestor was expected to comprehend it all instantly. First, every Cuban cop knew that speaking Spanish to each other in front of black people in Overtown or Liberty City made them paranoid… followed by infuriated. In the insusurro campaign, all Latin cops, and especially Cuban, were told not to do it unless it was absolutely necessary. So the Sergeant’s very choice of language was an alarm. Manténla abierta meant keep it open. What was it that was open? Only one thing of any obvious importance: the front door—toward which the big man was edging. And why was that important? Not merely to make it easier to enter the house and search it—but also to make it legal. They had no search warrant. They could enter legally only if one of two situations arose. One was, if they were invited in. This occurred surprisingly often. If a cop said, “Mind if we look around?” the amateur sinner was likely to say to himself, “If I say ‘Yes, I do mind,’ they’ll take that as a sign of guilt.” So the sinner says, “No, I don’t mind,” even when he knows the evidence the cops are looking for is right out in the open. The other legal way was “in hot pursuit.” If a suspect ran through a door into his house to elude the cops, the cops could follow him through the door into the house… in hot pursuit—but only if the door was open. If it was closed, the cops couldn’t force it open, couldn’t break in—without a warrant. “Manténla abierta”—two words only. “Nestor, don’t let that big cózzucca close that front door.” Cózzucca was the way many Latins, even those fluent in English, pronounced “cocksucker.” Cózzucca was the way the Sergeant himself pronounced it. Nestor heard him. He had said it aloud two minutes ago. Cózzucca lit up in the great chain of cop logic.

“So why don’t you tell me what kind of work you do here.”

Silence. All that turned on in the one second before the skinny one said, “I ’unno. Ain’t no work. I’m just sitting here.”

“Just sitting here?” asked the Sergeant. “What if I told you some cózzucca just gave you five dollars for a little package.” He put his forefinger near his thumb to show how small it was. “Whattaya call that? You don’t call that work?”

The moment the big man saw the Sergeant’s finger charade of the drug sale, he began moving crabwise in front of the bars on the window, toward the door. Nestor moved with him from three feet away. The moment the Sergeant said the words “call that work,” the big man bolted for the door. Nestor sprang onto the porch after him, yelling, “STOP!” ¡Manténla abierta! The big man reached the door before Nestor could stop him. But he was so big, he had to open the door another two feet just to get through it. Nestor lunges for the doorjamb… manages to get his foot between the frame and the door just as the big man tries to slam it shut. Hurts like hell!… not wearing good cop shoes with a leather sole but CST sneakers. The big man kicks at Nestor’s toe, then tries to stomp on it. An adrenal wave sweeps through Nestor’s body. Nestor has the willpower the willpower the willpower the willpower, and he gains about three inches—just enough to use his lungs to yell, “Miami Police! Show me your hands! Show me your hands!” All at once the resistance on the other side of the door—no longer exists! Nestor finds himself hurtling forward—the eyes!—he sees all these eyes!—in the dark and tubercular blue glow of a TV set in the millisecond before he lands sprawling on the floor. ::::::Where’s the big guy? I’m inside the house, completely vulnerable. In the time it takes me to get back on my feet, if the big guy has a gun—what is this?—can’t see a goddamn thing!… It’s these $29.95 CVS Cuban cop supremo darkest shades with the gold bar… plunged from the sun outside to here in the dark—they’ve covered the windows so nobody can see in—damned Cuban cop shades! I’m in and I still can’t see; I’m practically blind.:::::: He starts scrambling to his feet… The moment lengthens lengthens l e n g t h e n s for an eternity, but his motor responses are paralyzed paralyzed p a r a l y z e d… all he can see are eyes eyes eyes e y e s… and the tubercular glow! He’s on his feet—the eyes—what the hell is that? Jesus Christ! It’s a white face! Not just a light-skinned black woman but pure white!… holding a black child she is… ::::::what the hell is this place?::::::

—and all of that rushed through his head in the less than two seconds since he came hurtling through the contested doorway—and he still can’t find that black hulk he was after—::::::I’m nothing but a big fat target now… no shield but my authority… I am a cop:::::: starts bellowing, “MIAMI POLICE! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS! SHOW ME”

—four seconds—

“YOUR HANDS!”… Babies start crying—Jesus Christ! Babies!… Off to one side, four or five feet away: a tan-faced boy and girl, six or seven years old ::::::I can’t see them:::::: scared to death, holding the palms of their hands up before him… obediently! WE SHOW YOU OUR HANDS!… Babies crying! Almost directly ahead a big momma holding a bawling baby… a momma?—a bawling baby?—in a dope den? Look at her!—sitting down holding the baby, but that doesn’t obscure her bulging belly… too much for the too-tight jeans she should have never even looked at… gray hair frizzed out in some kind of wannabe-young ’do… big jowls, deep lines in her face… belligerent: “Whatchoo trying to do to my son? You people—he ain’t done nothing! He ain’t never spent a day in jail, and you—”

—six seconds—

“come in here—” She begins shaking her head in disgust… Jesus Christ, this ain’t a dope den, it’s a goddamned nursery! A small room it is, a hovel of a room, filthy… no light… the windows are blocked… two plates on the floor, bits of food left on them, abandoned… a girl about ten squatting over another plate… Jesus, they eat on the floor… got next to no furniture… one small couch against the back wall with a fat boy cowering on it with wide eyes… an old wooden table in the back and a TV set somewhere over here glowing like it’s radioactive… Shit! Nestor hears a low voice saying, “F*ck the cops… ram the bastards… your call,”

—eight seconds—

“dude… He whack you… or you whack him, the motherf*cker”… followed by the squeal of tires and a loud crash… broken glass tinkling on the pavement… “Take that, pigs”… all the words in a low voice, however… Nestor swings his head toward that part of the room… the tubercular blue glare of a television set… two boys, eleven or twelve years old, maybe thirteen or fourteen… Nestor advances toward them… “MIAMI POLICE! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!”… Wait a minute, brickhead! The two black kids aren’t even intimidated… the blue glow of the TV screen lights up their young faces in the sickliest conceivable way… The low voice again, like somebody having a conversation in the background… “Up yours, you”

—eleven seconds—

“fatass cops! Gon’ come out through your f*cking nose!” Nestor gets a look at the screen… a title comes up: “Grand Theft Auto Overtown”… “Grand Theft Auto Overtown?”… heard of Grand Theft Auto, video game… but what the f*ck? This is Overtown!… There is this f*cking world in which Overtown has heroes!—brave hell-driving men who don’t give a shit about you cops and all your so-called authority! F*ck you, Officer! Up yours, Officer! And these two children—they’re ready! Some Cuban cop comes in with a badge hanging around his neck and his supremo darkest shades and a holster on his belt, screaming, “Miami Police! Show me your hands!” and so what are they supposed to do—cringe?—grovel?—beg for mercy? Hell, no. They’re going right back to Grand Theft Auto Overtown. Some people recognize Overtown for what it is… a place where dudes got heart… and tell the f*cking foreign invaders to go f*ck themselves. Whoever made this game knew that much. They say right there on the screen when we show we got heart, you f*cking Spanishit motherf*ckers! Grand Theft Auto Overtown!

—fourteen seconds—

Another momma! She’s sitting on the floor with a terrified little girl… looks too old to still be sucking her thumb, but she’s sucking it for all she’s worth… This momma’s not fat at all. She looks broad-shouldered and rangy… gray hair pulled back on the sides… but she hates the occupying forces… What is this place?… Who the f*ck ever raided a drug den that’s all women and children?… and crying babies!… and resentful children so contemptuous of you and your authority, they’re playing Grand Theft Auto Overtown F*ck the Cops right in your face… eyes and eyes and eyes—and over there—the pure white face again—a young woman—afraid—

—eighteen seconds—

Voice behind him back at the door yelling, “MIAMI POLICE! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!” It’s Sergeant Hernandez, charging into the hovel behind him as backup… Must have turned the skinny light-skinned kid over to Nuñez… Sergeant Hernandez shouts, “Nestor, ¿tienes el grueso? ¿Localizaste al grueso?” (Did you find the heavyset one?)

“¡No!” said Nestor. “¡Mira a detrás de la casa, Sargento!” (Keep an eye on the back of the house, Sergeant!)

“Speak English, damn you!” It’s the big momma. She’s on her feet, still holding the baby, which is bawling its head off. She’s built like an oil burner, the big woman. She’s had enough. She’s not gonna put up with your army of occupation any longer. “You don’t come in my house jabbering like a bunch a baboons!”

“This is your house?” roared the Sergeant.

“Yeah, it’s my house—and it’s—”

“What’s your name?”

“—these people’s house.” She swung her hand about as if to include everybody in the room. “It’s the co-mmunity’s—”

—thirty seconds—

“What’s your name?” said the Sergeant. He was boring his most intensive Cop Look squarely between her eyes.

But the big momma played it tough. “What business ’at s’pose be a yo’s?”

“S’pose a be you and yo’ big mouth, Momma, are under arrest! Everybody in this room is under arrest! You’re selling drugs outta here!”

“Selling druuuuuugs,” said the big momma with ultimate mockery. “This is a co-mmunity center, man”—and the baby in her arms went off on another wailing jag.

From behind: “MIAMI POLICE! NOBODY MOVES!” and “Miami Police! Nobody moves!” sounded out in a curious atonal harmony. It was Nuñez and García, coming in through the front door. Two more babies started wailing, making three in all. It was damned disorienting. Here was stern Sergeant Jorge Hernandez’s big baritone voice saying, “You’re under arrest! You’re selling drugs!” And a choral response of wailing babies, sometimes three, sometimes two… when one of the trio goes into a terrifying paroxysmal silence—seconds go by—will she ever come out of it or will her little lungs burst?… and then she comes out of it—fully recharged—screaming bloody infanticide… How do you deal with an opera like this? How do you snap everybody to cop-style attention in a dark little room full of big-mouth mommas cradling tiny howling tantrums in their arms?

Whuhhh—Nestor sees the table in the back of the room rising up four or five inches on one side… ping a ping a ping ping, knives and forks and spoons, sliding off onto the floor… The Sergeant sees it, too… springs toward it… Nestor springs toward it from the other side… Bursting out from underneath it—it’s that big sonofabitch rising up like a monster… “Police! FREEZE, YOU PIECE A SHIT!” bellows the Sergeant… The hulk hesitates an instant to size up the threat… he’s seeing red… makes a move toward the Sergeant… to squeeze him like a bug… the Sergeant unsnaps the flap over his holster with his forefinger—No, Sarge!—too late! The giant’s on top of him, going for his throat… the gun—useless—the Sergeant’s clawing with both hands trying to pry loose the huge fingers around his neck. Nestor hurls himself WHOMP onto the giant’s back. The man is huge, he’s powerful, he outweighs Nestor by close to a hundred pounds… Nestor wraps his legs around the giant’s abdomen and locks his ankles together… He must feel like a little amok monkey to the giant, who lifts his arms to reach behind his shoulders and swat this nuisance away… frees the Sergeant from being throttled just long enough to begin drawing the gun from the holster… “No, Sarge!” says Nestor—thrusts both his arms under the brute’s armpits and clasps his hands together at the base of his skull… Oh, Nestor remembers very well!… in high school wrestling this was known as a “full nelson”… illegal because if you pressed down on the base of the skull, you might break your opponent’s neck… Oh, does he remember!… the leg lock was known as a “figure four”… the nelson and the figure four—ride him!—ride that sonofabitch until he can’t move anymore!… force the bastard’s head and neck down until he wants to beg for mercy—but can’t get words out because of his constricted throat… “Unnnnggggh… unnnnggggghh”… trying desperately to pry Nestor’s hands off the back of his head… getting nowhere… Nestor and his Rodriguez’s Gym rope-climbing arms. The giant can’t stand the pain… Unnnnggggghhhheeeee!… Unnnnnngggggghhhhhheeeeeee!… Nestor feels himself going over backward… the giant’s propelling himself backward to bodyslam his little tormentor… crush him by making him hit the floor under all that weight… they’re both keeling over… Nestor uses his leg lock to torque the giant’s body… they crash to the floor… not the big one on top of the little one but side by side. The giant rolls over, trying to flatten Nestor with his great weight crackle but every time he rolls over crackle Nestor still has a leg lock on him. The giant rolls and rolls crackle crackle, he crackles every time he rolls facedown on his abdomen… rolls over onto his belly crackle with the little monkey on top, the little monkey stays locked upon his back and ’bout like to break his neck—“Sarge, no!” Sergeant Hernandez is free and on his feet, gun drawn, trying to get a clean shot at the giant… too much rolling and writhing. ::::::Which one is he gonna end up hitting?:::::: “No, Sarge, don’t! I’ve got him!”… The full nelson has the giant’s head keeled over toward his chest… His moans are escalating into screams uuunnngohohohohOGHOHHHH!… one last strangled scream and all at once he’s just a great sack of fat—he’s struggling… the giant is gasping… trying to suck air… starts thrashing his legs… tries to launch his great thighs, as if that’s going to break the grip of Nestor’s figure four leg lock. Big mistake… used up every last pocket of air in his lungs… rasping sounds, rasping sounds… pathetic heaves and whimpers… struggling for oxygen… Nestor’s able to force the great bull’s skull down as far as his own arms will go… The giant’s eyes are glassy, his mouth is wide open… he sounds like a huge dying creature… Good! “Let’s roll, motherf*cker!” he shouts into the brute’s ear and presses down even harder on his neck… the bull attempts to roll once more to get some kind of relief… Nestor lets him roll crackle until his already bloody face is mashed once more into the floor… and he gives up all hope—slummmp—all muscular contraction is gone from his body. He goes slack… he’s finished… he can’t do anything but lie on the floor with his lungs forcing dying sounds up from his gullet in their struggle for air.

“Okay, you uhhh stu-pid uhhh uhhh uhhh,” says Nestor, who is out of breath himself. Oh, how ardently he wanted to say p-ssy!—to announce to the entire room his male elation over turning a 250-pound man into a helpless p-ssy!… He stops himself on the very edge of the cliff—but then takes the plunge: “You stupid p-ssy! If I uhhh let you uhhh up uhhh you gon’ be uhhh good uhhh uhhh uhhh—good boy?”

The giant grunts. He can no longer make a sound. Nestor releases his clasped hands from behind the man’s skull and looks about for the first time. The Sergeant is standing over him, smiling… but with a smile that says, “That’s great—and I think maybe you’ve lost your mind.” That was how Nestor read it. He struggled to sound calm and speak in a low, slow voice. “Sarge… unhh… tell Hector to get me some uhhh wrist ties… I uhhh… I don’t uhh believe uhh this uhhh uhhh uhhh uhhh bastard will keep his word.”

Hector Nuñez came in with the wrist ties, and they bound the giant’s wrists together behind his back… He just lay there… He didn’t move at all, aside from his chest heaving as his lungs struggled to replenish their oxygen supply… Nestor was now on his feet. He, Nuñez, and the Sergeant stood over their great beached whale.

“Sarge, let’s roll him over,” said Nestor. “Did you hear that kind of crackling sound every time he rolled?” He hadn’t. “I heard it every time we rolled over and he was on the bottom, Sarge. It was like he had something on his belly or chest and it made this crackling noise.”

So they rolled the man over until he was on his back. The guy was so massive and at the same time so out of it, it took all three of them to do it. It was like trying to roll a 300-pound sack of cement over. His eyes opened once, and he looked at them blearily. His face was absolutely expressionless. The only part of it that worked was his mouth. He kept it open under orders from his lungs. He made a sawing sound somewhere deep in his throat.

“You see something weird?” said the Sergeant.

“What, Sarge?”

“He’s got his T-shirt tucked in. Look at him. That’s the first dirtbag I’ve seen in Overtown with his shirt tucked in in five years, maybe ten.”

“There’s something under it,” said Nuñez. “It’s like sort of… lumps or something.”

Nuñez and Nestor leaned over the man and began pulling the T-shirt out of his pants. His belly was so big and his chest was heaving so much, and his T-shirt was tucked so far down his pants—pulling it out was a job and a half. The man was finally coming around. His breathing had calmed down from mortal panic to mere frantic fear.

“Muhhfuggghh,” he kept saying, “you muhhfugghh.” He looked up at Nestor out of the corner of his eye. With that one cocked eye he fired some death rays and began muttering. “One day caughtchoo… oughta… slaughter… torture…” was the way Nestor heard it. Nestor felt himself consumed by something he had never felt before… the urge to kill… kill… He sank to his knees by the brute’s head and looked into his red-mad eyes and said in a low voice, “Say what, bitch? Say what?” With that, he pressed his forearm and elbow down on the brute’s jawbone and kept increasing the pressure until he felt the brute’s teeth cutting into the cheek that enclosed them. “Say what, you filthy little bitch? Gon’ do what?”—bearing down until the man began to contort his face in pain—

A hand shook his shoulder. “Nestor! For Christ’s sake, that’s enough!” It was the Sergeant.

A wave of guilt… Nestor realized for the first time that he could find exhilaration in inflicting pain. No such feeling had ever possessed him before.

When they finally got the shirt out, they saw fragments of something. Nestor’s immediate thought was that the brute had a cheap piece of yellowish chinaware under his T-shirt… and it had shattered and crumbled… but why innanameagod would he have hidden that? On closer inspection, it looked more like a big sheet of peanut brittle that had begun to crack and crumble.

“I’ll be damned,” said the Sergeant. He gave a weary chuckle. “I never saw anybody try to hide it on his belly. You guys know what that is?” Nestor and Nuñez looked at the crumbling whatever it was and then at the Sergeant. “That’s a sheet of crack… yeah… The supplier mixes the shit into some kind of a, like, batter… and rolls it into a sheet like that and bakes it, kind of like pastry or something. They sell it to meatheads like the ones we got here. They cut them into rocks they call ’em, and sell ’em for ten dollars apiece. So that big dipshit’s got maybe thirty thousand dollars’ worth a crack lying there on his belly. They could sell all those bits and pieces where it broke, too. Hell, they could sell those little crumbs. By the time a crackhead needs another rock, he ain’t very discriminating.”

“But why would he stash it on his belly, Sarge, under a T-shirt?”

“Don’t you see what happened?” said the Sergeant. “He’s out on the porch, and all of a sudden here come the cops. So he makes a run for it. He wants to grab that sheet a crack and hide it or just get rid of it. It was probably lying right out in the open on that table back there, the one we saw moving. He’s grabbed the sheet a crack and hidden under the table and stuck the crack under the T-shirt and stuffed the front of the T-shirt down his jeans. The first chance he has, he’s gonna make a run for it out the back door and get rid a the crack any way he can, so even if he gets caught he won’t get caught with the stuff on him. But he’s a hothead, this jigaboo is, and he’s a big dick who ain’t gonna take no shit off nobody. So when I call him a piece a shit, the big dick in him’s bigger than his common sense, assuming he has any, and all he wants to do is tear my arms off and shove ’em up my ass. I was on the way to ventilating him when Nestor here jumped on his back.”

“How the hell did you do that?” said Nuñez. “This side a beef is twice your size.”

Music music MUSIC to Nestor’s ears! “I didn’t do anything,” said this paragon of masculinity with becoming nonchalance. “All I had to do was, you know, neutralize him for thirty seconds, and he’d do the rest himself.”

The heaving, sawing noise was still coming out of his throat… Bloody murder was oozing out of his eyeballs… His hatred of the Cuban invaders was now cold-cast forever in concrete. His mind would never change on that score. He had been humiliated by a Cuban cop half his size… and then this Cuban cop and another one rub it in by calling him a piece of shit and variations of a piece of shit.

“Where’s the other f*cker, Sarge, the skinny one with the mustache?” said Nestor.

The Sergeant looked back at the door from the porch, the door they had all come in. “García’s got him. He’s right back there in the doorway, him and Ramirez. Ramirez caught the piece a shit who made the buy, the crackhead.”

“He did? Where?”

“Found him lying in the alley, wriggling around in the trash trying to dig the rock out of his pocket.”

Nestor could now see that six CST cops were here inside the hovel, making sure all witnesses and possible perpetrators stayed put. The three babies were still wailing away… The white face… Nestor sought her out in the dimness of the room… and found her with his eyes… her white face and the black baby in her arms… squalling away… He couldn’t see her very well, but he could make out her big, wide-open—frightened?—eyes set in a white face that didn’t belong here… in a trash-littered bottom-dog dope den in Overtown… It was a dope den, all right, a retail outlet for the crack cocaine trade. It was hard to take that seriously, with all the women and children and bawling babies, but maybe his great victory, demolishing the monster, looked just as unreal and lightweight to them, to her, the one with the white face…

Now began the usual procedure… talking to the prisoners and the witnesses… by themselves, one-on-one, beyond the hearing of the others. A lucky, or canny, CST officer could get good, usable information that way. But you were also looking for inconsistencies in their stories… Why are you here? Where did you come here from? How did you get here? Do you know anybody else in the room? Do you know the two guys in the white baseball caps? No? Well, do you know what they do here? No? Then whose house do you think this is? No idea? Is that so? You mean you just like to drop in on houses-you-don’t-know-who-the-owner-is, you don’t know what goes on there, you don’t know any of the other visitors there? Then Heaven sent you? Or you heard voices? An unseen hand guided you? It’s all genetic?… and so forth.

Two cops positioned themselves outside, one in front and one in back, in case some upset denizen of the dope den managed to slip out of the hovel and make a run for it.

Then the questioning began. The Sergeant and Nuñez removed the sheet of crack and its fragments from the giant’s belly. His full weight was on his arms, which were bound together at the wrists. He started to complain, and the Sergeant said to him, “Shut your filthy mouth, p-ssy. You’re nothing. You’re my p-ssy. You wanted to kill me, p-ssy? You wanted to choke me to death? We gonna see about who chokes who. Let’s shove shit up yo’ ass until it’s coming outcho mouth. You p-ssy faggot. He wants to kill a cop—and he’s a three-hundred-pound sack a shit-filled faggot.”

With groans of exertion, Nuñez and the Sergeant lifted the huge man up into a sitting position. “I didn’t know sacks a shit weighed this much,” said the Sergeant. “Okay, what’s your name?”

The man looked the Sergeant in the eye with molten hatred for a half a second, then lowered his head and said nothing.

“Look, I know you got shit for brains. You were born stupid. Face it. You were going ooonga ooonga ooonga!” The Sergeant lifted his shoulders and curled his fingers up under his armpits in a semaphore for an ape. “But you learned a thing or two since then, ain’tcha? By now you’ve grown up into a real sub-moron. That’s a big improvement, but you’re so goddamned dumb, you wouldn’t know what a moron is, let alone a sub-moron. Right?” The giant had his eyes closed and his chin hung down over his collarbone. “From now on, every time you get up in the morning, I want you to go to the mirror—you know what a mirror is? Or do you have mirrors in the jungle?—I want you to go to the mirror and say, ‘Good morning, Shit-Faced A*shole.’ You know what morning means? You got any f*cking idea—about anything?—any f*cking thing at all, dumb ass? You know what dumb means? You look at me, stupid! I’m asking you a question! What’s your f*cking name? Do you have a name? Or are you so dumb, dummy, that you can’t f*cking remember? You’re in deep shit, shitfabrains. We found enough crack on your big fat belly to put you away for three consecutive life terms. You’re gonna spend the rest of your f*cking life with subhumans as dumb as you are. Some’um got no brains at all. But I think you got one, or half a one. Count to ten for me.” The prisoner remained as dejected and slumped over as before. “Okay, I’ll give you a hint. It starts with one. Okay, then, count to three. You know about three, don’t you? It comes after one and two. Now count to three for me. You don’ wanna cooperate? Then rot, you f*cking animal!”

“Sarge,” said Nuñez. “Let me talk to him, okay? Take a break, Sarge. Go chill. Okay?”

The Sergeant shook his head wearily. “Okay. But remember one thing. This a*shole tried to kill me.” Then he walked away.

Nestor headed straight for the white girl… ¡Coño!—it was dark in this room, with all the windows blocked the way they were. But the girl’s face was so white, she stood out in the gloom like an angel. He was absolutely intrigued—which made him conscious of how sopping wet with sweat he was. He tried to clear the sweat from his face with his hand. All that did was give him a sweat-wet palm, too. The worst of it was his T-shirt. It was drenched… and being too tight to begin with, it clung to his skin and made his whole torso look wet, which, in fact, it was. Could the girl stand being close enough to him to converse?—a concern that had next to nothing to do with the interrogation he was supposed to carry out. As he drew closer—that pure white face! She was as beautiful as Magdalena but in an entirely different way. Around men, Magdalena wore an expression that as much as said, “I know exactly what you’re thinking. So let’s start from there, okay?” This girl looked absolutely innocent and guileless, a clueless white madonna come to Overtown. She still had the black child—a girl, as it turned out—in her arms. The child was staring at Nestor with what?—wariness?—simple curiosity? At least she wasn’t crying. She was a pretty thing—even while sucking on the nipple of a pacifier with a swee-oooop glug swee-oooop glug earnestness. Nestor gave her a smile that was supposed to say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for I am here on a friendly mission.”

“I’m Officer Camacho,” he said to the white-white madonna. “Sorry to be so…” He couldn’t think of an acceptable adjective to indicate he knew what a sweaty mess he must look like. Even “wet” would sound… like, crude. So he lifted his hands chest high and turned his fingers inward toward his torso and added a helpless shrug. “… but we have to ask everyone who saw what happened a few questions. Why don’t we go out on the porch?”

The girl began blinking a lot but said nothing. She nodded a tepid yes and followed Nestor out to the front porch, still holding the child.

Out here on the porch he saw her in the light for the first time. ::::::¡Dios mío! She’s so exótica!:::::: He couldn’t stop staring. He looked her up and down far faster than it takes to say so. Her skin was as white and smooth as a china plate—but her hair was black as black could be… well, straight, thick, shimmering, streaming down to her shoulders as luxuriantly as any cubana’s but black as black could be… and her eyes… staring at him wide-open with fright—and all the more gorgeous for that—and black as black could be… but in a china-white face. Her lips were delicate and curved in a certain mysterious way that Nestor thought of—for no good reason—as “French”—French perhaps but not red, more of an aubergine… no lipstick… she’s totally innocent of makeup—but hold on! That’s not really true, is it! He has just noticed the eye shadow. ::::::She’s got the rims of her lower lids coated with it!—really makes her big eyes pop out! And don’t tell me she’s not aware of that… and hey, don’t tell me she’s not aware of how short her skirt is—or does it just happen to show off her lovely long legs, the kind they call lissome… what other white americana would dare turn up at a raggedy dope den in Overtown showing off a pair of lissomely alluring legs like that?::::::… She doesn’t look very daring at this moment, however. She keeps blinking blinking blinking blinking… She keeps her lips parted, because she’s breathing fast… and with that her breasts rise and fall. They’re beneath a shirt, Oxford cloth, which has a coarse weave, button-down, only the top button open on the shirtfront, which amounts to not even trying to be sensual—even hidden this well they look to Nestor like perfection, those breasts… and somehow, her obvious fear really moves the heart of Nestor… Nestor the Protector… He immediately felt toward her the way he had felt toward Magdalena the day he first met her on Calle Ocho. He was a cop and she was a damsel. He was a chivalrous cop—but still 100 percent cop in his core. Not that Magdalena had looked frightened for a second. Nevertheless, the feeling of being the strong chivalrous warrior overseeing the damsel was the same.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Ghislaine.”

“Jee-len… how you spell that?”

“G, h, i, s, l, a, i, n, e.”

“G, H?”

Ghislaine, with an H, nodded yes, and Nestor cast his eyes down, as if looking at the notes he had just taken, screwed his lips up, and shook his head in an ancient cop mannerism that says, “Life is hard already. So why do you tontos go to so much trouble to make it harder?”

At this point, to some punk he would have said, “You got a last name?” But in her case, the exotic Ghislaine’s, he just said, “What’s your last name?”

“Lon-te-ay,” she said, or that was the way it sounded to him. She shielded her face from the sun with her hand.

“How do you spell that?”

Sweee-ooooop glug sweee-ooooop glug—rubber-suckled the child in her arms.

“L, a, n, t, i, e, r. It’s French, like Bouvier.”

::::::What’s a bouvier? With my luck it’ll be something todo el mundo was supposed to know about.::::::

But before he could ask that or anything else, this Ghislaine with the snow-white face said, “Am I… under arrest?” Her voice broke when she got to the “under arrest.” Her lips trembled. She looked as if she might start crying.

Ahhh, the warrior felt very chivalrous now… a bit noble, even. “No, not at all,” he said rather grandly. “It all depends on why you’re here. That’s what I need you to tell me. And let me tell you one thing: It’s going to be better for you if you tell me the complete truth.”

She looked up into his eyes with her big eyes and said, “I’m from South Beach Outreach.”

South Beach Outreach… “What’s South Beach Outreach?” he said.

“We’re volunteers,” she said. “We work with Children’s Services. We try to help families in poor neighborhoods, especially children.”

“Families?” said Nestor, in a tone of cop street wisdom. “This is a crack house. I see a lot a crackheads”—even as the words left his lips, he knew it was a gross exaggeration, said solely to impress this snow-white young thing—“and crackheads don’t have families. They have habits, and they don’t even think beyond that. Families?”

“Well, sir, you know more about this than I do, but I think—this isn’t the first time I’ve been here, and I know they have children, some of them, and they do care about them.”

Nestor never got as far as the “than I do.” He didn’t hear a thing after “sir.” Sir? He didn’t want her calling him a sir. Sir meant she thought of him as remote and unapproachable and stuffy, the same way she would if he were a lot older than she was. But he couldn’t very well tell her to call him Nestor, could he… “Officer” would be better than “sir,” but how did you instruct her—or anybody—on that score without sounding like a protocol nut.

So he had to settle for “If that’s a family, where’s the mother?”

Tremulously: “Her mother’s been in a drug-treatment facility at Easter Rock ever since she”—she looked down at the baby—“was born. You know Easter Rock?”

“Oh, yes,” said Nestor. He knew it, and he was surprised. Easter Rock was an upscale rehab facility for upscale people. “How did she rate Easter Rock?”

“We—South Beach Outreach, I mean—intervened. They were getting ready to put her in a correctional facility for addicts.”

“Whattaya mean, ‘intervened’?”

“Mainly it was our president, Isabella de la Cruz. She knows a lot of people, I guess.”

Even Nestor had heard of Isabella de la Cruz. Her husband, Paolo, had a big shipping business. Isabella de la Cruz was always popping up in the newspaper in those group pictures where everybody is lined up in a row grinning for what reason nobody knows.

“So where do you fit into all this?” said Nestor.

“I’m a volunteer,” said Ghislaine Lantier. “We’re assigned to… sort of… watch over children from uhhh… troubled families. I hate the word dysfunctional. A lot of the times the child, as in this case”—she glanced down at her little ward again—“is staying with a relative, usually a grandmother, but it could also be a foster home. She’s with her grandmother, whom you’ve already met.”

“You don’t mean the big woman who kept telling the Sergeant he could shove—kept giving him a hard time…”

Ghislaine’s tremulous lips wavered into half a smile. “I’m afraid so.”

Nestor glanced into the dim dope den. There she was, about ten feet inside the door, the bigmouthed momma. In that gloom Nestor picked her out first by her Big Momma bulk. García was interrogating her… supposedly. You could tell she was doing all the talking. ::::::What’s that thing she has in her hands? A f*cking iPhone! This is supposed to be the most impoverished part of Miami—but everybody’s got an iPhone.:::::: He turned back again.

“But Ghislaine, you’re the one holding her, not the grandmomma with the mouth.”

“Oh, I was just giving her a break. She also has two children of one of her daughters to look after. That makes five in all. My job is to check up a couple of times a week to make sure they’re being taken care of, in different ways—supervision, attention, affection, compassion… you know…”

No, he didn’t know. Nestor was intimidated by this Ghislaine’s command of language. She could reel off words like supervision, attention, and whatever the rest of it was as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Magdalena was smart, but she couldn’t talk like that. This girl also had little mannerisms in talking that intimidated Nestor because they sounded more proper than the way he would have said the same thing. She said “the child, as in this case,” instead of “like this one here.” Or she said “whom.” Who the hell said “whom” in Overtown? “With her grandmother, whom you’ve already met,” she said, instead of “who you met.”

“Okay, you’re a volunteer for South Beach Outreach. Do you live in South Beach?”

“I just happened to hear about it. I live in a dorm at the University of Miami.”

“You’re a student there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m going to need an actual address and a phone number, in case we have to get hold of you.”

“Hold of me?” She looked as frightened as she had at first.

“This is a serious case,” said Nestor. “We’ve already got three dirtbags under arrest in there.” He motioned toward the interior of the hovel.

Ghislaine just stared at him… long pause… then, very timidly, “They’re young. Maybe there’s hope.”

“You know what they were doing in there?”

Now she compressed her lips so hard you could no longer see them. All of her body language indicated that, yes, she had known what they were doing. So did the long pause… “We don’t inquire about anything other than the children’s needs and conditions. We don’t pass judgment about anything else. If we did, we’d never—”

“Needs and conditions?!” said Nestor. He shot out a stiff arm and pointed to the interior of the hovel. “That’s a crack house, for chrissake!”

“At least this way they’re with their own flesh and blood. I think that’s so important!” For the first time she had allowed her voice to rise. “Her grandmother”—she glanced down again at the child in her arms—“is in there, bad as the environment may be. Half brothers of hers are in there. Her father is in there, even though I’ll admit he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her.”

“Her father?”

Ghislaine looked more frightened than ever. Once more tremulously: “Yes… You just had a… a fight with him.”

Nestor was speechless. “You—that piece a—flesh and blood?—you think—these—not a drop of morals in his body!—‘totally lacking in affect,’ as the DAs say—he’s a goddamned crack dealer, Ghislaine! He’d just as soon yank her head off for the fun of it”—Nestor flicked a glance at the child—“as look at her! He’s an animal! Holy Christ!”

Ghislaine lowered her head and began staring at the floor of the porch. She started swallowing her words and half-muttering. “I know… He’s horrible… He’s proud to be the progenitor of children, but he won’t have anything to do with them… That’s what women—he’s so gross—he’s a big huge—” She looked up at Nestor and said, “I couldn’t believe it when you beat him—and so fast.”

Music… did Nestor hear a strum of music?… the thrum of an overture? “These idiots may be ‘huge,’ but they’re sub-morons,” he said, quoting the Sergeant without attribution. “Only a sub-moron tries to roll in the dirt with a Miami cop,” he said, modestly sprinkling praise over the entire force, not hogging it for himself. “We don’t beat them. We let them beat themselves.”

“Still—he must be twice your size.”

Nestor studied her face. She was apparently utterly sincere. And she made music… she made music… Here is what he’d say! Sometime, when this is all over, I’d like to sit down with you and talk about this whole Children’s Services business. Take a chance! Don’t hold back your emotions! I can’t believe anybody would let a big dirtbag like that anywhere near a child…

… He’d say, Why don’t we go get a cup of coffee? And she’d say, That’s a good idea… At South Beach Outreach we never have a chance to look at things from the Police Department’s point of view. I’ve learned something important today. Criminology is one thing. But actually confronting crime where the rubber meets the road is very different. Subduing a man as big and strong as the one you just subdued—all the criminology in the world doesn’t help at that point. At that point you either have it or you don’t!

Or something like that… and the music would build slowly, like an organ’s to that chord at the crescendo that makes your rib cage vibrate.