was something the size of a scrap of your little fingernail. You couldn’t see Key Biscayne from here, but you knew where it was in the northeast. Florida City was way over there to the west… and all around, the immense sea was black as night… no, blacker… invisible… the most famous expanse of ocean in the country… vanished. She hadn’t the faintest idea where north was, where west was, no sense at all of where she was. There was no rest of the world—only this flotilla of depraved lunatics. And she was a prisoner here, forced to watch the rot, the pustular oozing of complete freedom. Even the sky consisted of complete darkness and a single beam of light on an immense stretch of canvas upon which filthy body parts oozed and slithered… all that was left of life on Earth, boiled down. Magdalena felt more than depressed. Something about it made her afraid.
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