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 fucking 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.