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